I may be jumping the gun a bit on fall colors, but early October's glorious weather has got me craving some autumnal arboreality. So, at Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station on the Oedo subway line, I take Exit A3, a mere stone's throw from the Kiyosumi Teien garden east of Tokyo's Sumida River.

Plonking down ¥150, I enter the light-dappled grounds of a classic kaiyu-shiki niwa (literally, "many pleasures garden"), arranged so that visitors behold a variety of miniature landscapes as they stroll around the central, rainwater-fed pond.

Believed to have first graced the residence of the bon vivant mikan (mandarin orange) merchant Bunzaemon Kinokuniya (1669-1734), in the early 1700s the grounds came into the possession of Kuze Yamato-no-kami, the lord of Sekijuku Castle, a strategic stronghold to the northeast of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in what is now Chiba Prefecture.