this very valuable piece of property. The shrine that honored Masakado’s spirit, however, was another question. Ieyasu had the shrine removed to the Kanda Myojin Shrine not too far to the north, where Masakado can be honored today. There at Kanda Myojin, Masakado’s spirit remains, albeit the story does not end there, for the Meiji government also foresaw a threat from this wayward spirit—but that tale has to wait until Walk 10 to be told. The small area of the Hill of Masakado’s Head is enclosed by traditional Japanese walls as well as modern office buildings on three sides, but the slightly raised unit with memorial stones to the right at the rear of the plot remains a place of reverence. Offerings of flowers and the burning of incense occur a millennium after this intrepid warrior’s death. Greenery throughout the small plot make the site a park, with ceramic frogs on either side of the memorial providing a lighter touch to so solemn a spot.
2 STATUE OF KIYOMARO
While warriors of the distant past still need to be placated, there is another side to the coin where noble statesmen are concerned. In the year 769, Wake-no-Kiyomaro, a member of Empress Shotoku’s court, was sent on a mission. Her senior advisor (and lover), the Buddhist monk Dokyo, had designs on the throne for himself and hoped to succeed his royal mistress as the next emperor. The empress sent Kiyomaro, a trusted member of the imperial court, to the Hachiman Shrine in Kyushu to see if the gods favored Dokyo’s accession to the throne. Despite dire threats from the monk, Kiyomaro brought back the deity’s pronouncement that only those descended from the imperial gods could sit on the throne. Kiyomaro suffered disfigurement at Dokyo’s orders for bringing so untoward an answer from the gods. Sent into exile while monk Dokyo lived, he was returned to imperial favor by the legitimate successor to the empress upon her death.
This diversion into ancient history is relevant, for the large bronze Statue of Kiyomaro, which stands to the north in a small plot of greenery at the edge of the Otebori Moat, celebrates this eighth-century defender of the Imperial House. In 1854 Emperor Komei raised Kiyomaro quite post-humously to the first rank of the nobility and named him Go-o-myojin, a spirit to be honored. This was a powerless emperor’s slap at the Tokugawa shogun of his day, his only way of showing his displeasure in those who ruled without consulting him. After Komei’s death, his son became Emperor Meiji, who would see his advisors and supporters bring an end to the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. The new emperor’s advisors saw a similar value in the figure of Kiyomaro. Thus, on March 18, 1898, the noble and the divine status of Kiyomaro were once more confirmed by imperial edict. In 1940, almost 90 years after Kiyomaro’s elevation, his bronze image was raised at the edge of the Imperial Palace grounds by a later set of concerned advisors to Emperor Hirohito. In the 700s, this scholar had saved the throne. In 1940, the militaristic government sought to forestall any new threat to the throne. As a result, the statue of Kiyomaro still stands guard over imperial affairs at the edge of the Otebori Moat to the castle grounds.
The statue of Kiyomaro near the Otebori Moat
3 THE IMPERIAL PALACE EAST GARDEN
The placement of buildings in Japan traditionally has to honor esoteric rules for the auspicious location of structures, lest they be built or oriented in a direction not favorable for their successful existence. In the case of Edo and the shogun’s castle, this was a problem, since the castle site did not have the proper geographical orientation according to the rules of Chinese geomancy that were observed in Japan. Ieyasu, if nothing else, was decisive in matters like this. He decreed that Mt. Fuji to the west of his intended castle was truly to the north, and thus the castle site was properly oriented. Nonetheless, temples were built in Ueno to the true northeast (from which evil could flow, according to Chinese geomancy) as well as to the true southeast in the Shiba area as additional protection for the castle.
Walking back along the Otebori Moat to Eitai-dori, you come to a bridge that crosses the moat to the Ote-mon gateway and the shogun’s former castle grounds, the site where Tokyo had its beginnings. The story of Edo Castle begins with Ota Dokan (1432– 1486), who is credited with founding Edo. The top of the natural hill that overlooked the great bay of Edo and its inlets rose 65 feet (19.5 meters) above the water and thus provided a natural site for the largely earthen fortifications that Dokan created. Similar fortifications had been erected some two centuries before Ota Dokan made his stronghold here, but they had been of little consequence. Dokan’s fortification did not have too long a life either, for his brutal murder in 1486, instigated by his feudal overlord of the Hojo clan of Odawara, led in time to the disintegration of his fort. By 1590, when Tokugawa Ieyasu chose the site for his headquarters, three small fishing villages and a few scattered farms at the foot of the future castle hill were all that comprised the village of Edo. The naturally defensive nature of the hillside was obvious to Ieyasu when he entered Edo on August 1, 1590, and here he determined to build the strongest castle with the most intricate defensive system that Japan had ever seen.
The defensive stronghold that Ieyasu began in 1590 was not completed for another 50 years. By 1603 he had conquered all the contestants for civil power in Japan, and the work on the castle and its defenses could now be pursued with vigor, since the daimyo, the feudal lords of Japan who were subservient to him, were forced to supply labor, materials, and funds to create the castle that would keep them in fiscal serfdom. The dimensions of the stronghold beggar description, for they encompassed a 10-mile (16-kilometer) circle that stretched from the waterfront of the present Shimbashi area in the south to the hills of Kanda to the north. The outer fortifications that protected the area comprised some 110 entry gates, 30 bridges, an inner and an outer moat, and canals to serve as further barricades. The innermost moat was faced with stone walls 16 feet (4.8 meters) thick to protect the citadel where the shogun and his inner court resided. As was the case in European cities, the 19h century was to see the dismantling of the fortified walls of the city as it expanded and traffic increased. Thus, the outer walls and gates of the palace began to be dismantled in 1873.
The castle grounds themselves were always a protected and private area to which the public had no entry. However, in 1968, to celebrate the construction of the new Imperial Palace, which replaced the imperial buildings bombed in wartime, the inner grounds of the former castle complex were opened to the public as the Imperial Palace East Garden (Kokyo Higashi Gyoen). The inner walls of the complex divided the fortified hill into four areas called maru or citadels. The East Garden includes the Hon-maru (Central Keep), the Nino-maru (Second Keep), and the San–no-maru (Third Keep). The fourth fortified area consisted of the Nishi-no-maru (West Keep), which today forms the Imperial Palace grounds and is not open to the public.
The Imperial Palace East Garden, the former castle site, is primarily a garden complex today, since the various buildings and fortifications of the shogun’s castle have long since been destroyed by fire. The Long Sleeves Fire of 1657 was particularly disastrous for the castle, while the last major fire, of 1872, wiped out the remaining Tokugawa structures. The East Garden can be entered through several gates (mon), the Ote-mon, the Hirakawa-mon, and the Kita Hanebashi-mon, and these various gates can be reached from the Otemachi or Takebashi subway stations. (The garden is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in March through October and from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. from November through February. The gardens are not open on Mondays and Fridays and are closed from December 28 to January 3 for the New Year holiday. Admission is free.) This tour of the garden begins at the Ote-mon Gate, since that was the main entrance to the castle in the days of its glory, and it provides an example of the type of defensive architecture employed in the 1600s. It is difficult today to envision the magnitude of the castle structures, for there were 99 gates—of which 36 were in the outer defensive wall that enclosed the 450-acre (180-hectare) heart of the shogun’s castle. There were within this complex 21 large watch towers (yagura), and 28 munitions storehouses (tamon), aside from the residential buildings and ancillary castle structures.
The Imperial Palace East Garden offers relief from the busy streets of central Tokyo.