Why you should experience Hinokicho Park in Tokyo, Japan.
Hinokicho Park is a patrician garden where Akasaka's daimyo inheritance, secluded beauty, military history and twenty-first-century design culture converge around a pond descended from one of Edo's celebrated private landscapes.
Set along Tokyo Midtown near Gaien Higashi-dori and just steps from 21_21 Design Sight, the park occupies part of the former Azabu lower residence of the MΕri family, lords of the ChΕshΕ« Domain, whose grounds became renowned for their abundant hinoki cypress. The estate garden was called Shimizu-en, pairing a large pond with elevated terrain that commanded views across Edo and earned a reputation among the city's daimyo gardens. Its landscape survived successive changes as the MΕri estate became an Imperial Japanese Army installation, postwar housing for American military officers and the Hinokicho headquarters of Japan's Defense Agency before Tokyo Midtown reshaped the surrounding site. The result is a park where an Edo daimyo garden remains legible inside contemporary Roppongi, allowing water, topography and inherited greenery to carry four centuries of restricted land into one of Central Tokyo's most accessible cultural landscapes.
What you should know about Hinokicho Park.
Hinokicho Park is best known for preserving the garden lineage of the MΕri family's Azabu lower residence, whose profusion of hinoki cypress produced the nickname Hinoki-yashiki and whose celebrated Shimizu-en garden occupied part of the present 16,369.88-square-meter park. The ChΕshΕ« MΕri estate formed part of a wider daimyo landscape before the Meiji era brought an Imperial Japanese Army garrison onto the property, beginning a long conversion from elite residential ground into military territory. American officers occupied the site after World War II, followed by Japan's Defense Agency at its Hinokicho headquarters until the ministry's predecessor moved its principal functions to Ichigaya in 2000 and released the surrounding land for redevelopment. Tokyo Midtown subsequently incorporated Hinokicho Park into a larger green system whose park retains a circuit garden organized around a pond occupying roughly half of its 1.4-hectare landscape, reconnecting the former MΕri terrain with public Roppongi.
Issey Miyake introduced another chapter to the surrounding landscape after arguing publicly for a Japanese design museum in a 2003 Asahi Shimbun essay, extending conversations he had pursued with Isamu Noguchi, Ikko Tanaka, Shiro Kuramata and Tadao Ando. Mitsui Fudosan supported that ambition within Tokyo Midtown, where 21_21 Design Sight opened in March 2007 under Miyake, Taku Satoh and Naoto Fukasawa with Noriko Kawakami as associate director. Tadao Ando translated Miyake's A-POC concept into a predominantly subterranean building whose folded steel roof evokes a single piece of cloth and whose glazing incorporated what the institution describes as Japan's longest sheet of double-glazed glass. Issey Miyake, Tadao Ando and 21_21 Design Sight extended Hinokicho Park's inherited relationship between landscape and private patronage into contemporary design culture, placing a new creative institution within the green continuum descending from the MΕri estate.
How to fold Hinokicho Park into your trip.
Hinokicho Park works as the green anchor for an afternoon tracing contemporary art, Meiji memory and design experimentation through the cultural institutions clustered across Akasaka and Roppongi.
Begin at The National Art Center, Tokyo, where architect Kisho Kurokawa created a major exhibition institution that opened in 2007 without a permanent collection, making changing exhibitions and curatorial programs the foundation of its cultural identity. Continue to Nogi Shrine, established in 1923 for General Nogi Maresuke and Nogi Shizuko after Tokyo mayor Baron Yoshio Sakatani organized the movement to create a shrine associated with their former residence following their deaths in 1912. Conclude at 21_21 Design Sight, where Issey Miyake's decades-long campaign for a Japanese design institution culminated in a 2007 Tadao Ando building whose folded steel roof translates Miyake's A-POC philosophy into architecture beside Hinokicho Park. The progression moves from Kisho Kurokawa's platform for changing exhibitions through the memorial world of Nogi Maresuke into Miyake and Ando's synthesis of design and architecture, revealing the cultural reinventions surrounding Hinokicho Park.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
