A Saturday Walk in Ueno

Ameyoko Market and Yabu Soba

Ameyoko Market, 3/29/25/Photos by Hope Anderson

I’m writing from Tokyo, but not the hilly western district where I grew up. Instead, I’m staying across town in Ueno, famous for the vast, eponymous park that contains—among other attractions—five museums, a concert hall, twelve hundred cherry trees and Japan’s oldest zoo. Ueno is part of Shitamachi, the “low town” that in the 17th century grew from a series of villages to form Edo, the original Tokyo. As a child I hardly knew it except for the aforementioned zoo, which I had visited on a school field trip and hated. Although it has been modernized and now features pandas, Ueno Zoo during my childhood was a sad Victorian-style animal prison, complete with a lonely elephant in an iron cage.