Amongst the country's first public parks, it was founded following the Western example as part of the borrowing and assimilation of international practices that characterizes the early Meiji period.

[2] Ueno Park occupies land once belonging to Kan'ei-ji, founded in 1625 in the "demon gate", the unlucky direction to the northeast of Edo Castle.

[3] Most of the temple buildings were destroyed in the Battle of Ueno in 1868 during the Boshin War, when the forces of the Tokugawa shogunate were defeated by those aiming at the restoration of imperial rule.

[2][4][5][6] Various proposals were put forward for the use of the site as a medical school or hospital, but Dutch doctor Bauduin urged instead that the area be turned into a park.

[7] In January 1873 the Dajō-kan issued a notice providing for the establishment of public parks, noting that "in prefectures including Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, there are places of historic interest, scenic beauty, and recreation and relaxation where people can visit and enjoy themselves, for example Sensō-ji and Kan'ei-ji..."[8][9] This was the year after the foundation of Yellowstone, the world's first national park.

[13] After the Pacific War the pond was drained and used for the cultivation of cereals and subsequently there were plans to turn the site into a baseball stadium or multi-storey carpark.

The very words in Japanese for museum as well as for art were coined in the Meiji period (from 1868) to capture Western concepts after the Iwakura Mission and other early visits to North America and Europe.

[27][28] The Tokyo Bunka Kaikan opened in 1961 as a venue for opera and ballet, in celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the city of Edo.

In April 1989, an “Association for the Flame of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Lit at Ueno Toshogu” was founded and tens of thousands of people took part in the fundraising for over one year.

[11] As well as the first art museum in Japan, the park had the first zoo, first tram, first May Day celebrations (in 1920), and staged a number of industrial expositions.

[8] Ueno Park and its surroundings figure prominently in Japanese fiction, including The Wild Geese by Mori Ōgai.

Both lanterns stood at the park until the governor of Tokyo gifted one of them in 1954 to the city of Washington, D.C. to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's signing of the 1854 Japan-US Treaty of Amity and Friendship.

Found among the park's treelines and wooded areas, homeless camps border on the size of small villages, with an internal structure, culture, and support system.