Yushima: The Quiet Hill
Between Ueno and Akihabara

Where Yushima actually is

Yushima sits in Bunkyo ward, on high ground. Ueno Park is fifteen minutes away on foot. Akihabara is also fifteen minutes, in the opposite direction, downhill past a shrine. Tokyo Station is about twenty minutes by train.

What makes it unusual is not what it has, but what it does not have. There are no souvenir shops, no crowds photographing a gate, no queue outside a famous restaurant. It is a residential district of short, steep streets where people live. You walk to the sights, and then you come back to somewhere quiet.

For a first visit to Tokyo, that combination is worth more than it sounds. Most travellers underestimate how tiring the city is until about day three.

The street is named after a homecoming in 1616

The slope our inn stands on has a name: Mikumi-zaka, meaning "the slope of the three groups." The name comes from a specific year.

In 1616, Tokugawa Ieyasu died in Sunpu, the city now called Shizuoka. Ieyasu had founded the shogunate that would rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries, and when he died, the retainers who had served him there were called back to Edo, the old name for Tokyo.

Three specific groups came: the chugen, the kobito, and the kagokata, roughly attendants, footmen, and palanquin bearers. They were granted land here. Because they had returned from Suruga province, local people called the area Suruga-cho.

Eighty years later, in 1696, the district was formally renamed Mikumi-cho, "the town of the three groups," specifically so that the reason those men were given the land would not be forgotten. The slope took its name from the town.

A shrine nine hundred years older than the god it is known for

Five minutes downhill is Yushima Tenjin, one of Tokyo's shrines to the god of learning. In February and March, students come here before university entrance exams and tie their wishes to the racks by the thousand. The plum trees flower at the same time, which is not a coincidence.

The god of learning in question is Sugawara no Michizane, a ninth-century scholar and court official who was exiled after political intrigue, died in disgrace, and was subsequently deified after a series of disasters in the capital were attributed to his angry spirit. He is now the patron of examinations. Japan is like that sometimes.

Here is the part most guidebooks leave out. Michizane was not the shrine's original god. By its own tradition, the shrine was founded in 458 AD, by imperial command, to enshrine Ame-no-Tajikarao, the god of physical strength who pulled open the cave that hid the sun goddess. Michizane was enshrined alongside him in 1355, nearly nine centuries later.

So the ground has been sacred for roughly sixteen hundred years, and famous for learning for only the last seven hundred. It is a useful thing to know while standing in it.

A British architect built a mansion here in 1896

Ten minutes from the inn is Kyu-Iwasaki-tei Gardens, and it is the single most underrated building in this part of Tokyo.

It was built in 1896 as the residence of Iwasaki Hisaya, third president of Mitsubishi and son of the founder. The architect was Josiah Conder, an Englishman who came to Japan in 1877 to teach architecture and ended up designing much of the country's early Western-style civic architecture, including the Rokumeikan.

The estate originally covered about fifty thousand square metres and held more than twenty buildings. Three survive: the Western house, the billiard room, and the Japanese-style great hall.

What makes it worth the entry fee is the detail that was never meant for the public. Minton tiles from England on the ground-floor veranda. Restored kinkarakami, an embossed decorative paper, upstairs. And a billiard room in Swiss chalet style, connected to the main house by an underground passage, so that the family could go and play without going outside.

The Western house and billiard room were designated Important Cultural Properties in 1961, the Japanese hall in 1969, and the grounds as a whole in 1999.

Everything within walking distance

Walking times below are approximate; allow more time depending on your route and pace.

What staying on a hill means, practically

Two things, and they cut in opposite directions.

The good one. It is quiet at night. Very few cars come through, because the streets are narrow and go nowhere in particular. After a day in Ueno or Asakusa, that difference is larger than you would expect.

The other one. The last stretch from the station is uphill. It is about five minutes from Yushima Station on the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line, but with heavy luggage on a hot day, some guests take a taxi from the station rather than walk. We would rather tell you now than have you discover it while dragging a suitcase.

And on the sixth floor of the building, above the hill, there is an open-air bath. That is where the walking is supposed to end.