Ueno: Museums on the Hill and a Market Beneath the Tracks
Ueno is built in two storeys, and the storeys do not resemble one another. Above, on a hill, a temple precinct became a park and the park filled with the institutions by which a modern state remembers itself: a national museum, a zoo and a Western art museum in a building by Le Corbusier. Below, along the railway viaduct, a market grew from the scarcity that followed a war and has never wholly stopped selling. This chapter belongs to The Tokyo Atlas: A Reader’s Guide to the Capital and Its Counterpoint and reads the two halves in turn.
A Temple Remade as a Park
Kan’ei-ji was founded in 1625. A few of its buildings survive from the early years: the Kiyomizu Kannon-do dates from 1631, the five-storey pagoda from 1639 and the Toshogu shrine from 1651. Most of the rest was destroyed in the Battle of Ueno on 4 July 1868, according to Wikipedia. The ground did not stay empty. Ueno Park was created on 19 October 1873, and it received the name Ueno Onshi Koen in 1924. The sequence, from temple precinct to battlefield to park, is a model of the way the city keeps its ground in use.
A Row of Museums
The Tokyo National Museum was founded in 1872, the year before the park. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum opened in 1926 and the Shitamachi Museum in 1980. The National Museum of Western Art was founded in 1959 in a building by Le Corbusier, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016 as one of 17 sites in seven countries that together represent his work. The pages we checked do not describe the collections in detail, and we do not either; the point for a reader of this atlas is the density. A hill with a pond and a pagoda holds, within a short walk, the institutions that decide what a country treats as its heritage.
Pond, Blossom and Crowds
Shinobazu Pond covers about 16 hectares. The park has about 800 cherry trees, or 1,200 counting the nearby grounds, and Wikipedia describes the park as drawing more than ten million visitors a year. Ueno Zoo opened on 20 March 1882 and is described as Japan’s oldest; it covers 14.3 hectares. Wikipedia records the pandas Ri Ri and Shin Shin, who arrived in February 2011, and their daughter Xiang Xiang, born on 12 June 2017 and, according to the same page, returned to China in January 2026. We give those dates as the page states them. The zoo’s monorail closed permanently on 27 December 2023.
The Market Beneath the Tracks
Ameyoko runs between Ueno and Okachimachi along and beneath the elevated railway tracks, and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism gives its name two ways. One is ameya, candy shops, from the sweets sold on the black market. The other is “America Yokocho”, America alley, from American goods such as Hershey’s chocolate, Zippo lighters and blue jeans that reached the market from diverted military supplies. The merchants’ association was formed in 1949, and the Korean War in 1950 increased demand. Over the years the goods shifted from candy to canned food to fresh fish, which is the kind of change that happens to a market that sells whatever the neighbourhood currently needs. Wikipedia counts over two hundred and fifty shops; we do not use higher figures that circulate elsewhere.
For a reader of the Fashionista Bible, Ameyoko’s second name is the interesting one. In our reading, it is an early, informal chapter of the exchange that The History of Amekaji describes at length: American clothing and goods entering Japan through a side door, being studied, and eventually being reinterpreted. Popular Amekaji Brands follows that exchange to the labels. See also our military flight jacket and amekaji rooms.
Over the Back Fence: Yanaka
Yanaka is reached usually from Nippori Station. A Tokyo tourism guide says the neighbourhood largely escaped the 1923 earthquake and the wartime firebombing, so that its wooden houses, lanes and temples remain. It is part of Yanesen, with Nezu and Sendagi. Yanaka Ginza is about 170 to 200 metres long with about sixty independent shops, and the cemetery, open daily from 8:30 to 17:00 and free to enter, has around 7,000 graves, among them that of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun. About seventy temples stand in the district. The same page mentions SCAI The Bathhouse, a contemporary art gallery in a former public bathhouse roughly 200 years old. For the kissaten that stands at Yanaka’s eastern entrance, see Old Tokyo East: Kayaba, Koguma and the Engawa Café.
Reading the Neighbourhood
- The hill: the park, the museums, the pond and the zoo.
- The viaduct: Ameyoko, between Ueno and Okachimachi stations.
- Beyond the hill: Yanaka, from Nippori Station (JR Yamanote, Keihin-Tohoku and Joban lines, Keisei line and the Nippori-Toneri Liner) or from Sendagi and Nezu on the Chiyoda line.
- Check before you go: museum opening days and exhibitions change; the pages do not give them.
Our Reading: Institutions Above, Appetite Below
Ueno is the atlas’s clearest case of a city telling two stories about the same ground at once. On the hill, a state with a project, a park, a national museum and a zoo, assembled the public record. Under the tracks, ordinary people with a need and a stock of goods assembled something else, a record of what they wanted. In our reading, both are collections, and they differ mainly in who was allowed to choose the items. For a collector, the pairing is useful: the hill shows what a society preserves on purpose, the market what survives by being traded, and between them the history of an object can usually be placed. Our own rooms for the first kind are the woodblock print and ukiyo-e archive and the arts and antiques room; for the second, the retro machines and toy archives.
After a print, an antique or a piece of postwar Americana from this part of Tokyo? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.
Questions and answers
When was Ueno Park created?
On 19 October 1873, on land that had belonged to the Kan’ei-ji temple, most of whose buildings were destroyed in 1868.
Where does Ameyoko’s name come from?
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism gives two origins: ameya, meaning candy shops, and America Yokocho, from American goods such as Hershey’s, Zippo lighters and blue jeans.
Which stations serve Ameyoko?
It runs between Ueno and Okachimachi along and beneath the elevated tracks.
How do I reach Yanaka?
Nippori Station is the usual gate, served by the JR Yamanote, Keihin-Tohoku and Joban lines, the Keisei line and the Nippori-Toneri Liner. Sendagi and Nezu stations on the Chiyoda line also serve the district.
References
Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.
Continue reading
- The Tokyo Atlas: A Reader’s Guide to the Capital and Its Counterpoint
- Harajuku: A Forest, a Station and the Invention of Youth
- Shimokitazawa: The Town That Kept Its Small Theatres
- Koenji: Punk, Patchwork and the Long Dance of August
- Nakano Broadway: A Luxury Mall That Became a Library of Obsessions
- Shinsaibashi and Amerikamura: Osaka’s Bridge and Its American Village
- Five Walks Through Tokyo and One Beyond It
- The History of Amekaji
- Popular Amekaji Brands
- The Japonista Universe
- Collector Guides
- The Japonista Thesis
Index terms: ueno · ueno park · ameyoko · ameya-yokocho · kan’ei-ji · tokyo national museum · national museum of western art · shinobazu pond · ueno zoo · yanaka · nippori · shitamachi · tokyo postwar markets · american goods japan