The Meiji Jingu Museum sits quietly within the forested grounds of Tokyo's most visited Shinto shrine, holding personal belongings of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken: the carriages they rode, the clothes they wore, the brushwork they left behind. It opened in 2019, designed by Kengo Kuma, whose copper-roofed building settles into the trees as if it grew there.

The objects inside are a direct thread to one of history's stranger transformations. When Emperor Meiji ascended in 1867, Japan was a feudal state sealed off from the world. By his death in 1912, it had railways, a constitution and a navy. The museum holds artefacts from the man at the centre of that upheaval.

VoiceMap's tours trace this transformation on foot, using the shrine's cypress-and-copper architecture and its sacred approach path to explain how a nation reinvented itself, and why millions still come here to honour the emperor who presided over it.