Tokyo a Cultural Guide. John H. Martin
in the shitamachi when fires broke out. Unfortunately, not even the firefighters of the daimyo were always successful, and in the Long Sleeves Fire of 1657 the shogun's castle was engulfed in flames and destroyed. The shogunal fire detachment can lay claim to fame even today on one score, however, for here at the location of the Meiji Life Insurance Building a son was born to one of the shogun's firefighters. He forsook his father's profession, and Ando Hiroshige chose to make his name through his woodblock prints instead.
One full street along Hibiya-dori beyond the bridge over the Babasaki Moat is the Kokusai Building. Within it is the Imperial Theater, which opened in 1911. It was the first major Western-style theater in Tokyo, and it was highly decorated with a generous use of marble. Splendid tapestries hung in it as well, reminiscent of the richness of the Paris Opera House. This 1,900-seat theater was initially intended for concerts and recitals as well as for Kabuki, but it proved unsuitable for this latter art form. In more recent years, after a 1966 renovation when the stage and its equipment were updated and a restrained decor pervaded the hall of the playhouse, it has been home to many popular contemporary American musicals. The theater occupies the first three floors of the Kokusai Building.
The main entrance to the Kokusai Building is found on its south side. Here are elevators which may be taken to the ninth floor to the Idemitsu Art Museum, a museum containing one of the finest collections of Asian art in Japan. (The museum is open from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. NO admission after 4:30. It is closed Mondays, but open on Monday if a national holiday and then closed the next day. Also closed over the New Year holidays. Entry fee.) Created by the president of the Idemitsu Oil Company, it has four large rooms which provide space for the display of the riches of the collection. The main room presents objects from the museum's fine collection of Chinese ceramics, which range from prehistoric times through to the eighteenth century. Japanese ceramics are also well represented with examples of Imari, Kutani, Seto, Nabeshima, and Kakiemon wares.
Another room shows selections from sixteenth and seventeenth century screens depicting episodes in The Tale of Genji as well as prints with scenes of Kyoto and Edo before 1868. The ukiyo-e woodblock prints in the 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 a varied and very large collection of ceramic shards representing a range of countries from Iran (Persia) to southeast and eastern Asia. Chinese and Japanese lacquerware of excellent quality are also on view. The labels in the exhibition cases are in English and Japanese. Since 1972 the museum has branched into another area of art with the acquisition of more than four hundred works by the French painter Georges Roualt.
Along with 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 to relax among the Asian works of art.
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 a modern international style, particularly one favored by authoritarian governments of the day, ten huge columns of its facade supported two upper floors. One of the modern, fireproof buildings of pre-Second World War Tokyo, it managed to survive the bombings and firestorms of the war years. Today the facade of the building has been covered over with a bland end-of-the-twentieth-century facing while a new tower of twenty-one stories, designed by the American architect Kevin Roche, rises behind the original structure. Whatever character the front of the building once had has now been effaced.
Here in the original building, from September 15,1945, until April 11, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur had his headquarters as the military and civilian representative of the victorious Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. His sixth-floor, walnut-paneled office was simply furnished with a conference table and a green leather armchair. 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. The room is preserved, and requests may be made to the Dai-Ichi Insurance public relations office to view the room.
Crossing the street to the Imperial Outer Garden, which lies in front of the walls of the palace, 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 height above today's garden. At that time there was no garden, for the Hibiya Inlet, an extension of Tokyo Bay, once 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 (Water Front or Moudi of the River) from its location. 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 begin to grow into 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 the 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, who were his closest allies. After 1868, with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji government established its government offices in the area in which the daimyo had lived. These offices were relocated from Kyoto into former daimyo buildings in Tokyo, a not very satisfactory arrangement. Relocation of the offices into more practical quarters was inevitable, and in the period after 1889 the Marunouchi area, as described above, was sold to the Iwasaki family in order to raise funds for the proper housing of governmental functions. In 1889 that portion of what is now the Outer Gardens had the government offices removed. Pine trees were planted there, 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 the emperor and nation. These two virtues were evident in Kusunoki's life and exemplified by the way he defended Emperor Go-Daigo and his imperial prerogatives in the 1300s and then committed seppuku when 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 nineteenth and early twentieth century that at one time passengers in the trams that went by the palace were expected to rise from their seats and bow to 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. A much lighter element was added to the northeast portion of the Outer Gardens in the 1960s when a large fountain within a pool was created to celebrate the wedding of the then crown prince (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 encircling the 250 acres of the palace grounds. The Imperial Palace today is located in the Nishi-no-Maru (Western Fortified Area) in what was one portion of the shoguns' castle confines. The raised ground of the palace, beyond the Outer Garden and moats, is faced with walls of huge stones brought by boat in the early 1600s from the Izu Peninsula some sixty miles 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 only be breached by treachery from within, by natural forces such as earthquakes, or through a siege which 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.
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