Forget the cherry blossoms and the flashy Tokyo hotels, because starting this April, for the first time ever, it’s possible to rent out an Edo period castle in the heart of Japan—and get the ...

What's done is done. But what if a historic negotiation over the surrender of Edo Castle between Saigo Takamori, who led the Imperial forces during the fall of Edo, and Katsu Kaishu, the shogunate's ...

Naotake Odake, former managing director of the Japan Tourist Bureau (JTB) and once director of the Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau, spent years of his professional life traveling to cities across ...

The Zen temple Zenshōan in the Yanaka district of Tokyo has long been a place of reflection for the political elite, including several prime ministers. The second installment of this two-part series ...

For more than two hundred years there was a megacity in Japan that almost no one from outside the country had ever seen. Edo, capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, began as a minor castle town around 1600 ...

TOKYO -- Stone walls from the Edo Castle thought to date back about 400 years, the oldest still existing from the structure, have been discovered at the renovation site of a museum at the Imperial ...

Four centuries ago, Tokyo was a small village perched on a narrow strip of land bordering an inlet from the bay. The city has been nearly wiped out several times only to revive with greater vigor than ...

Tokyo is built on the site of the old city of Edo. There are few traces of the old city, but the street pattern of Tokyo is much the same, so the old city lives on in the new as a kind of ghostly ...

Tokyo may be a futuristic metropolis, but its roots run deep in the 17th century when the city was known as Edo—then one of the world’s largest urban centers that flourished with commerce, ...

With November drawing to a close, I head to the East Garden of the Imperial Palace and the adjacent Kitanomaru Koen park, hoping for fall colors and a mental breather before the season goes ...