Having just enjoyed a stroll through the Imperial East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, Ryan and I decided that perhaps it was time to exit Tokyo for the day and make our way back to Yokohama – and to do this we decided that we needed to use the iconic Tokyo Station!
To get there, we would need to walk through Marunouchi, Chiyoda, one of Japan’s most prestigious business districts.
During the Edo Period, this area was located within the outer moats of Edo Castle and contained the residences of some of Japan’s most powerful feudal lords and together with neighboring Otemachi, Marunouchi is now home to the headquarters of many of Japan’s most powerful companies, particularly from the financial sector.
Mitsubishi Estate owns a lot of the land in this district, and over the last decade has driven a major facelift of Marounouchi, replacing pretty much all the older office buildings with towering, modern skyscrapers – a cityscape that completely awed us two Capetonians walking underneath their shadows!
Eventually, we spotted the iconic red brick facade of Tokyo Station, one of Japan’s busiest railway stations (in terms of number of trains per day – over 3,000) and terminal of multiple shinkansen (bullet train) lines!
The impressive red brick building (on the Marunouchi side of this sprawling train station complex) dates from the Meiji Period and truly is an amazing (and busy!) structure to behold.
(Amazingly, despite the immense underground warren of levels, lines and passages, Ryan and I did actually manage to find a train and make our way back to Yokohama, our base of operations for this first leg of our Japan 2014 trip!)
Related Link: Tokyo Station | Marunouchi