When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, his reign had carried Japan from a closed feudal order through the Meiji Restoration into an industrial and constitutional state, and the government moved quickly to memorialize him with a shrine inside the capital. The site chosen was a former imperial estate near Yoyogi, and what rose there over the following eight years was two things at once: a shrine to the deified emperor and empress, and an entirely artificial forest meant to look as though it had never been planted.
The forest is the more unusual achievement. Foresters rejected a formal garden in favor of a self sustaining woodland, drawing on donations of roughly one hundred thousand trees of many species sent from across Japan and abroad, arranged so faster growing species would shelter slower growing ones until the stand matured into old growth forest on its own. A century later the plan has succeeded well enough that visitors often assume the trees predate the shrine.
The shrine's title carries its own history. Jingu is an honorific historically held by a small number of the most venerable shrines with a direct imperial connection, foremost among them Ise, home to the imperial ancestral deity Amaterasu. Meiji Jingu, dedicated in 1920, joined that select company rather than extending a title that had belonged to Ise alone.
American bombing destroyed the original buildings in 1945, and postwar reconstruction, funded by public donation under Japan's new constitutional separation of religion and government, reopened the shrine in 1958. Meiji Jingu withdrew from the national Association of Shinto Shrines in 2004 over questions of autonomy and rejoined in 2010, one of several prominent shrines to have tested that relationship in recent decades.