Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery

About this stop

Why fans visit Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery

A long museum facade fans pair with the Suga Shrine route when building a fuller Your Name afternoon across Yotsuya and the outer gardens.

From Kokuritsu-kyogijo Station, allow about 8 minutes on foot to reach Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. Check the map for the final block because small slopes, one-way streets, or shrine paths can change the last approach. A long museum facade fans pair with the Suga Shrine route when building a fuller Your Name afternoon across Yotsuya and the outer gardens. Keep the visit short if the area is residential or commercially busy.

Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery is a visual-match stop for Your Name travelers fans. A long museum facade fans pair with the Suga Shrine route when building a fuller Your Name afternoon across Yotsuya and the outer gardens.

Do not enter private property, school grounds, or staff-only areas even if a view looks closer from inside.

Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (聖徳記念絵画館, Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) is a gallery commemorating the "imperial virtues" of Japan's Meiji Emperor, installed on his funeral site in the Gaien or outer precinct of Meiji Shrine in Tōkyō. The gallery is one of the earliest museum buildings in Japan and itself an Important Cultural Property. On display in the gallery are eighty large paintings, forty in "Japanese style" (Nihonga) and forty in "Western style" (Yōga), that depict, in chronological order, scenes from the Emperor's life and times. The gallery opened to the public in 1926, with the final paintings completed and installed ten years later. The selection and investigation of suitable topics for the paintings was overseen by Kaneko Kentarō, who also served as head of the editorial boards of Dai-Nihon Ishin Shiryō and Meiji Tennōki, major contemporary historiographic undertakings respectiv...

Last updated: May 2026. Quiet Tokyo neighborhood stairs, residential areas like Yotsuya hide famous anime locations In 2016, Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name” ( Kimi no Na wa / 君の名は。) became the highest-grossing anime film of its time and introduced millions of international viewers to the concept of anime pilgrimage . Nearly a decade later, the stairs at Suga Shrine in Shinjuku’s Yotsuya neighborhood still draw fans from around the world — smartphones held up to match the exact angle of the film’s final, devastating scene. But the film’s real-life locations extend far beyond that one famous staircase. Shinkai and his team reproduced every Tokyo location with obsessive accuracy, the handrails, the surrounding buildings, the precise angle of afternoon light. Visiting these locations in sequence creates a walking route that takes you through parts of Tokyo that most tourists never see, and that hits differently once you’ve watched the film. This is seichi junrei (聖地巡礼): “holy land pilgrimage.” The practice of visiting real places that inspired anime scenes. And “Your Name” remains one of the most rewarding anime to do it with.