6 Best Sights in Akihabara, Tokyo

Located upstairs from cosplay mecca, Cospatio, this store houses more than 450 mini vending or "gachapon" machines. Insert a coin and a figurine pops out. The thousands of prizes include everything from underpants for your phone to sexy Statue of Liberty figurines. Quirky, cheap, and addictively fun.

This shrine is said to have been founded in AD 730 in a village called Shibasaki, where the Otemachi financial district stands today. The shrine itself was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the present buildings reproduce in concrete the style of 1616. Next door is the Edo Culture Complex, where you check in for your visit and can see cultural displays on the era when Samurai flourished.

You will never be able to see every shrine in the city, and the ones in Akihabara are of minor interest unless you are around for the Kanda Festival—one of Tokyo's three great blowouts—in mid-May. (The other two are the Sanno Festival of Hie Jinja in Nagata-cho and the Sanja Festival of Asakusa Shrine.) Some of the smaller buildings you see as you come up the steps and walk around the Main Hall contain the mikoshi—the portable shrines that are featured during the festival.

Built in the 1600s as part of a feudal lord’s residence, Koishikawa Korakuen is one of Tokyo’s oldest gardens. Design wise, this stroll garden attempts to reproduce famous Japanese and Chinese landscapes in miniature, using rocks, water features, carefully tended trees, and manmade hills. Like other classic Japanese gardens, it also changes its appearance seasonally, with highlights including pink cherry blossoms in spring and the reds, oranges, and yellows of maple and gingko trees in fall.

You may be surprised to see a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Tokyo's Electric Town, but the church came long before electronics were ever invented, much less sold here. Formally, this is the Holy Resurrection Cathedral, derived from its founder, St. Nikolai Kassatkin (1836–1912), a Russian missionary who came to Japan in 1861 and spent the rest of his life here. The building, planned by a Russian engineer and executed by a British architect, was completed in 1891. Heavily damaged in the earthquake of 1923, the cathedral was restored with a dome much more modest than the original. Even so, the cathedral endows this otherwise featureless part of the city with unexpected charm.

Billing itself as an "urban entertainment zone" the Tokyo Dome City complex hosts a small amusement park, restaurants, shops, a hot spring and spa, as well as Tokyo Dome itself. The outside amusement park has a selection of rides for children, though the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster is a thrill at any age. The Spa LaQua hot spring makes for a relaxing end to a day of sightseeing, offering a selection of baths and saunas. Tokyo Dome itself is home to the Tokyo Giants baseball team and frequently holds concerts and other events.

The origins of this shrine date to a hall, founded in 1632, for the study of the Chinese Confucian classics. Its headmaster was Hayashi Razan, the official Confucian scholar to the Tokugawa government. Moved to its present site in 1691 (and destroyed by fire and rebuilt six times), the hall became an academy for the ruling elite. In a sense, nothing has changed: in 1872 the new Meiji government established the country's first teacher-training institute here, and that, in turn, evolved into Tokyo University—the graduates of which still make up much of the ruling elite. The hall looks like nothing else you're likely to see in Japan: painted black, weathered, and somber, it could almost be in China.