Hama-rikyu was the private garden of the Tokugawa shoguns, and the towers of Shiodome now ring it. The shogunal house built it as a daimyo garden and used it for about 160 years as the Hama-goten; today it is designated both a Special Place of Scenic Beauty and a Special Historic Site. Inside the wall lie still water and pine shadows, where shoguns took in the view, flew hawks and received their guests. Few places in this city let a visitor walk into Edo time.
The tidal pond is what makes it singular. Seawater comes in from Tokyo Bay, so the level and the surface shift through the day, and mullet and sea bass arrive with it; this is the only garden pond in Tokyo fed by seawater to survive from the Edo period. The Nakajima tea house appears to float on the water, and guests take a bowl of matcha there with a namagashi confection, so an hour of networking opens quietly over the same water a shogun looked at over tea. Nearby stands a black pine of about three hundred years, held by tradition to have been planted when the sixth shogun, Tokugawa Ienobu, remodeled the garden. It is the largest in Tokyo, and one tree carries three centuries of the garden's depth.
Hama-rikyu answers a demanding question: the stillness of Edo for international guests within walking distance of central Tokyo, instead of another banquet room. A furoshiki workshop, a walk through the garden, matcha and networking at the water's edge all sit quietly inside this shogunal inheritance. Nothing is raised, and guests still grasp what they have been brought into—the garden the shoguns kept for themselves.