collection illustrate an art form that was popular from the 1600s through the 1800s, and these prints are complemented by Zen paintings and fine examples of calligraphy. An additional room holds the varied and very large collection of ceramic shards from Persia to southeast and eastern Asia. Chinese and Japanese lacquerware of the most excellent quality is also on view. Happily, the labels in the exhibition cases are in both English and Japanese. Since 1972 the museum has branched into another area of art, with the acquisition of more than 400 works by the French painter Georges Rouault. Besides its artistic attractions, the location of the museum on the ninth floor of the Kokusai Building provides an excellent view of the Imperial Palace Outer Garden. In addition, a coffee shop offers a place for relaxation among the artistry of the Asian ages
Guard tower on the Imperial Palace’s outer moats
Continuing south on Hibiya-dori, across the street from the Kokusai Building is the Dai Ichi Insurance Building, encompassing the full frontage of the street on which it sits facing the palace grounds. Built in 1938 to the design of Watanabe Matsumoto in what was the modern International Style, one particularly favored by authoritarian governments of the day, it had ten huge columns on its façade supporting two upper floors. One of the modern, fireproof buildings of pre–World War II Tokyo, it managed to survive the bombings and firestorms of the war years. Today the façade of the building has been covered over with a bland end-of-the-20th-century facing, while a new tower of 21 stories, designed by the American architect Kevin Roche, rises behind the original structure. Whatever character the front of the building once had, it has now been effaced. Here in the original building, from September 15, 1945, until April 11, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur, the “Blue-eyed Shogun” as the Japanese then called him (it was a Japanese folk belief that all Occidental gaijin had blue eyes) had his headquarters as the military and civilian representative of the victorious Allied forces at the end of World War II. His sixth-floor, walnut-paneled office was simply furnished with a conference table and a green leather armchair. In many ways, the general’s office virtually became a museum after his departure, and now it is used by the head of the Dai Ichi Mutual Insurance Company.
3 THE IMPERIAL PALACE OUTER GARDEN
Crossing the street from the Dai Ichi Insurance Building and following the moat north on Hibiya-dori about a hundred yards, you reach a bridge leading into the Imperial Palace Outer Garden (Kokyo Gaien). In the Outer Gardens, which lie in front of the walls of the palace grounds, one can enjoy one of the few open spaces within this crowded city. This portion of Tokyo has seen many transformations in the 550 years since Ota Dokan in 1457 first built his fortified mansion and two other fortresses on the heights above today’s garden. Then there was no garden, for Hibiya Inlet stretched this far inland, providing a natural moat before the fortified hill. The tiny town that Ota Dokan began below his hillside fortress received its name of Edo from its location, the word signifying “waterfront” or “mouth of the river.” The town was to grow, but in the unpredictable politics of his day, Ota Dokan was assassinated at his lord’s behest in 1486, and his fortified mansion and stronghold became derelict. One hundred years had to pass before a more massive castle would arise on the site and before Edo would see a renewal of its growth to become a major city.
This present parkland was created when Tokugawa Ieyasu moved his headquarters from Shizuoka to the site of Ota Dokan’s castle in the 1590s. Ieyasu had Hibiya Inlet filled in with land from the hills of Kanda to the north, and the newly created land became the site of the mansions of the inside lords, the fudai daimyo, who were his closest allies. After 1868, with the fall of the Tokugawas, the Meiji government established its offices in the area in which the daimyo had lived. These offices were relocated from Kyoto into former daimyo buildings in Tokyo, a not too satisfactory arrangement. Relocation of the offices into more practical quarters was inevitable, and in the period after 1889 Marunouchi, as described above, was sold to the Mitsubishi family in order to raise funds for the proper housing of governmental functions. In 1889 the government offices were removed from that portion of what is now the Outer Gardens, pine trees were planted, and the land in front of the palace became a public park.
In 1897 a bronze equestrian statue of Kusunoki Masashige, given to the nation by the wealthy Sumitomo family of Osaka, was cast by Takamura Koun and placed within the Outer Garden. The creation of this statue by order of the Meiji government was part of its attempt to establish new heroes whose actions in the past showed devotion to the Imperial House and to the emperor. Such public images were meant to enhance the government’s new creed of loyalty to the emperor and the need to be ready to sacrifice oneself for emperor and nation. These two virtues were evident in Kusunoki’s life, first when he had defended Emperor Go-Daigo and his imperial prerogatives in the 1300s and then when he committed seppuku, or ceremonial suicide, after his defense of the emperor against Ashikaga Takauji’s usurpation of power failed in 1336. Reverence to the god-emperor reached such ideological heights in the late 19th and early 20h centuries that at one time passengers in the trams that went by the palace were expected to rise from their seats and bow to the palace and the emperor within its walls. The fact that the Meiji defenders of imperial rule were themselves governing in the name of a powerless emperor, whose image they were using, was completely overlooked.
Kusunoki Masashige, samurai from the 14th century
A much lighter element was added to the northeast portion of the Outer Gardens in the 1960s, when a large fountain within a pool (Wadakura Fountain) was created to celebrate the wedding of the then crown prince (now Emperor Heisei). At the far end of the Outer Garden from Hibiya-dori, another moat separates the palace walls from the public park; these various moats encircle the 250 acres (100 hectares) of the palace grounds. The Imperial Palace today is located in the Nishi-no-maru, the Western Fortified Area, which was one portion of the shoguns’ castle confines. The raised ground of the palace is faced with walls of huge stones brought by boat in the early 1600s from the Izu Peninsula some 60 miles (96 kilometers) to the southwest of Tokyo. These massive stones were dragged by teams of laborers supplied by the daimyo along paths covered with seaweed to ease the movement of the heavily loaded sledges from the bay to the castle grounds. Such fortified walls, before the development of modern gunpowder and explosives, could be breached only by treachery from within, by natural forces such as earthquakes, or through a siege that might starve a defending force into surrendering. In the more than 260 years of the enforced Tokugawa peace that followed 1603, these walls were neither breached nor attacked.
Most of the shogun’s buildings in the Tokugawa castle were destroyed by fire in the years prior to the arrival of the Emperor Meiji to his new capital. His sojourn in the castle grounds was briefer than anticipated, since in 1873 the last of the Tokugawa buildings were destroyed by fire, and the emperor and empress were forced to move to the Akasaka Palace grounds, where they lived in a former mansion of a branch of the Tokugawa family until 1889, when a new palace was completed. This 1889 palace was destroyed in the air raids of early 1945.
When facing the palace grounds from the Outer Garden, to the right is the Fujimi Yagura (Mt. Fuji Viewing Tower) while to the left stands the Fushimi Yagura; these comprise two of the three remaining fortified towers of the Tokugawa castle. Toward the south end of the Outer Garden (to the left) the Nijubashi (Double Bridge) of 1888 comes into view along with the Fushimi Yagura, both of them rising out of the imperial moat. In the militaristic era of the 1930s and 1940s, the bridge, the Fushimi Tower, and the walls of the palace grounds became a symbol of mystical patriotism for the Japanese. So mystical or mythical became the palace site where the god-emperor resided that when Emperor Hirohito at the end of World War II announced the capitulation of Japan, the more fanatical of imperial army officers performed the previously mentioned ceremonial suicide before the palace enclave as atonement for the loss of Japanese military honor.
The Imperial Palace (Kokyo) grounds are generally not open to the public except on two occasions: on the emperor’s birthday on December 23 (from 9:30 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.) and at the start of the New Year on January 2nd (from 9:00 a.m. to 2:10 p.m.). On December 23 the emperor greets the public from the balcony of the Kyuden (Hall of State), while at the New Year holiday the imperial family receives