Skip to content

Tokyo Subway What to see

What to see

Find temples, gardens, museums and city views near a station.

79 stations Sources

Find your interest

What you’re looking at, explained

Today’s note

Skytree borrowed the pagoda's spine

Skytree borrowed the pagoda's spine 心柱

The counterweight that steadies Tokyo Skytree is a stairwell. A reinforced-concrete cylinder carrying the emergency stairs runs up the core, structurally divorced from the outer steel tower; its upper length swings out of time with the tower and cancels about forty percent of response shear in a major quake. Skytree named it after the pagoda's central pillar — using a staircase as that weight was a world first.

Sights on this site come mostly from Tokyo’s official visitor guide; the stations we researched ourselves say so on their own pages. Sources