上野

Tokyo's most famous hill means 'upper field'. Why? The shogunate's own geographers wrote that the name is not certain — then called the story they found a stretch, invented backwards out of the characters.

The shogunate's own gazetteer, the Gofunai Bikō, states plainly that the meaning of the name is not certain. It quotes the story carried by the Ono-Terusaki shrine's founding record — the poet Ono no Takamura lodged here and was called Lord Ueno — and dismisses it: a stretch, invented backwards out of the characters. Under a separate heading the gazetteer lines up guesses. One: in ancient times this was open field, so people fell into calling it the upper field. That same entry files this ground under another name, Shinobugaoka, and records that as its true one.

Taitō Ward explains its own name from this ground: the 'tai' is Ueno's high plateau, the 'tō' is Asakusa, which lies east of it.