Family-Friendly Hotels in Meiji Jingu: A Forest in Central Tokyo

When you start looking for a family hotel near Meiji Jingu, it is hard to know what to judge by. Central Tokyo has so many hotels that "close to a station" narrows nothing down. Can you borrow a crib? Can you eat without worrying about what is on the plate? If your child melts down, can the evening still work inside the room? Until you can see those details, every listing looks the same.

Meiji Jingu is widely known as a Shinto shrine wrapped in a forest so large it hardly feels like the middle of a capital city. The approach path is spread with gravel and shaded by trees, so you can walk it slowly while pushing a stroller, which matters a lot with young children. Walk a little farther to the neighboring Yoyogi Park and you get lawns where children can simply run. Harajuku, Omotesando, and Shibuya sit right next door, so you can fold grown-up shopping and outdoor play for the children into one day without strain. That combination is particular to this area.

The hotels themselves, though, are not clustered right at the shrine gates. They spread across the surrounding hubs: Shinjuku, Shibuya, Akasaka and Roppongi, and the wider Minato ward, and the 23 properties covered on this page are scattered through that range. Tokyo also has Shinagawa, Odaiba, Roppongi, and Shinjuku as bases, and the strength of the city center is that everything feels one or two train stops away. Put the other way around, instead of hunting for the single closest hotel to Meiji Jingu, you will do better choosing a hotel that fits your family's daily rhythm and traveling in from there.

On facilities, crib rentals are available at 16 hotels, so families with infants have plenty of choice. For the age when falling out of bed is the worry, 6 hotels lend bed guards, and for families who would rather lay futons side by side, 5 hotels have Japanese-style or Japanese-Western rooms. For meals, 8 hotels serve in the room, 6 accommodate food allergies, and 4 offer toddler menus. There are 6 hotels with a kitchenette where you can cook, 5 with a shallow kids pool, and 6 with childcare or babysitting, a depth of service that is typical of city-center hotels.

To give concrete examples, the Keio Plaza Hotel Tokyo in Shinjuku lists crib and bed guard rentals plus Japanese-style and Japanese-Western rooms, and on top of that baby bath rentals, a kettle for making formula, and bottle sterilizing. The Prince Park Tower Tokyo has in-room dining, private and semi-private dining rooms, and allergy support, while the Tokyo Prince Hotel has a nursing room with a formula preparation space.