Tour Report : East Garden of Imperial Palace on February 17th, 2024

Thank you for choosing our tour at the East Garden of the Imperial Palace on 17^th February. We welcomed 3 guests from Australia.  It wasn’t so cold we expected. I hope all of you enjoyed and shared interesting conversations with us during the tour. As promised, group photos and snap shots are attached to remember the fun times we had.

Next Thursday is our Emperor’s birthday and national holiday. Imperial Household Agency takes place in the Visit of public to the Imperial Palace for His Majesty’s birthday. Anyone can meet the Imperial family at the Imperial Palace. If you stay in Tokyo on that day, let’s try.　Before going to the Imperial Palace, please visit their website.

After the celebration, you can also enjoy plum flowers in the East Garden of the Imperial palace.

Speaking of the plum flowers, they have been deeply related to Tenjin-shrine. Tenjin-shrine and Tenmangu are dedicated to Sugawara Michizane who was a higher-class legendary scholar of thousand years ago. He was so smart that he promoted faster than others.

As the result he was jealous and demoted to Kyushu Dazaifu far away from Kyoto. He could never return to Kyoto and finally died at Dazaifu. He loved plum flowers and made many Japanese poems about plum flowers throughout his lifetime. For this reason, plum flowers turned important flowers for Tenjin-shrine and Tenmangu.

There used to  be a Tenjin-shrine around bailinzaka “ Plum flowers slope” in East Garden of the Imperial palace. Plum flowers in there ware planted by previous owner of Edo castle before the Tokugawa Shogunate. At Edo period it moved to another place and changed as Hirakawa Tenjmangu. If you go to one of the Tenjin-shrine or Tenmangu in Japan, you can see the plum flowers at this season.

By the way TFWT was published in a free magazine. You can get it at Tokyo Station. It’s only available in Japanese, but please check it out!

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For more information about our tour, please visit our web site at https://tfwt.jp/top/asakusa/,  https://tfwt.jp/top/meiji-shrine-and-harajuku/, https://tfwt.jp/top/ueno/, https://www.facebook.com/TokyoFWT or Tokyo Free Walking Tour at https://www.tripadvisor.jp/ .

Posted by Yumi H.