STATION TO PALACE

Chiyoda

Chiyoda is Tokyo's front door. Tatsuno Kingo's red-brick Tokyo Station opened in 1914. It lost its domes and most of its third floor to a May 1945 air raid and the rushed repair that followed, and got both back in a restoration completed in 2012. Step out on the Marunouchi side and a granite plaza points you toward the Imperial Palace. Around it, the office towers of Marunouchi are softened by tree-lined Naka-dori and by KITTE's free rooftop garden, which looks down across the station. About ten minutes on foot, the Imperial Palace East Gardens open inside the stone walls of Edo Castle (closed Mondays and Fridays): free, quiet, and on the ground where the shoguns lived. Further out, the same ward holds Jimbocho's secondhand bookshops, Akihabara and the cherry-lined moat of Chidorigafuchi.