Why you should experience Ginkgo Avenue in Tokyo, Japan.
Ginkgo Avenue is a stately urban promenade where Kita-Aoyama 2-chome's planned greenery, Taisho-era landscape design, century-old trees and axial composition preserve one of Tokyo's most deliberate exercises in metropolitan scenery.
Set along Aoyama-dori near Gaien Nishi-dori and just steps from Aoyama-itchome Station, the avenue advances 300 meters toward Meiji Jingu Gaien through four rows containing 146 ginkgo trees spaced nine meters apart. The trees rise in carefully graduated heights along the route, producing a controlled perspective whose scale changes as the promenade approaches the outer precinct. Mature specimens now reach 28 meters, with trunk circumferences approaching 2.9 meters among the largest trees. The result is a living architectural corridor whose extraordinary visual order comes from a century of managed growth embedded within the original landscape composition.
What you should know about Ginkgo Avenue.
Ginkgo Avenue is best known for originating with landscape architect Yoshinobu Orishimo's long-term cultivation of trees intended specifically for the new Meiji Jingu Gaien. Orishimo collected ginkgo seeds from an existing tree at Shinjuku Gyoen in 1908 during his tenure with the Imperial Household Ministry. The seeds were planted in a nursery within the Minami-Toshima Imperial Estate, part of the ground later incorporated into Meiji Jingu. Approximately 1,600 trees grew there during the following fifteen years. Orishimo and his team repeatedly pruned the developing trees to control their forms before selecting 146 specimens six meters tall for the avenue. Planting was completed in 1923, with individual trees arranged according to height to strengthen the intended perspective. The project placed horticultural preparation years ahead of final installation, making the mature avenue the product of a landscape process initiated during the final years of the Meiji era.
The avenue formed one component of the much larger national effort to construct Meiji Jingu Gaien on the former Aoyama Drill Ground after Emperor Meiji's death in 1912. The drill ground had hosted the emperor's state funeral on September 13 of that year, giving the site direct commemorative significance before planning for the outer precinct began. Preparatory organizations for the project emerged in 1914, and the formal groundbreaking ceremony took place on June 1, 1918. Donations of trees and money arrived from across Japan, supplemented by voluntary labor from youth organizations participating in construction of the grounds. The Great Kanto Earthquake interrupted construction on September 1, 1923, and unfinished portions of the precinct were opened to displaced residents as relief facilities. Temporary structures erected on the grounds accommodated 6,400 people during the emergency. Work resumed in 1924, and the completed outer precinct was formally dedicated to Meiji Jingu on October 22, 1926. The ginkgo rows consequently survive as one of the earliest completed elements of a commemorative landscape whose construction intersected imperial ceremony, nationwide civic participation and one of modern Tokyo's greatest disasters.
How to fold Ginkgo Avenue into your trip.
Ginkgo Avenue works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Japan's principal rugby ground, a museum devoted to the country's Olympic movement and a private contemporary-art institution designed by one of Switzerland's major late-twentieth-century architects.
Begin at Prince Chichibu Memorial Rugby Stadium, completed in 1947 on the former site of the Girls' Gakushuin as Tokyo Rugby Ground. The venue received its present name in 1953 to commemorate Prince Chichibu, who had served as honorary president of the Japan Rugby Football Union and supported the sport's development in Japan. Control transferred to the National Stadium organization in 1962, and the ground hosted football during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics before becoming a central stage for international rugby, university competition and later League One. Continue to Japan Olympic Museum, established by the Japanese Olympic Committee beside the national stadium complex as an institutional home for the history and culture of the Olympic movement. Exhibits connect Japanese participation in successive Games with athletes, equipment and objects associated with Olympic competition, accompanied outside by the Olympic symbol installed during the Tokyo 2020 era. Conclude at WATARI-UM, The Watarium Art Museum, which opened in September 1990 after Shizuko Watari spent sixteen years introducing international contemporary artists through Gallery Watari. Her earlier programs brought Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt to Japanese audiences, and works acquired through those activities became foundations of the museum collection. Swiss architect Mario Botta received the commission in 1985 and spent five years developing his first museum building for the triangular Jingumae parcel, producing a granite-and-concrete striped façade over a compact private institution. The progression moves from postwar rugby culture through Japan's institutional preservation of Olympic history into Shizuko Watari and Mario Botta's independently conceived center for international contemporary art, extending the avenue outward through sport, national cultural memory and private artistic patronage.
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