Tokyo: 29 Walks in the World's Most Exciting City. John H. Martin

      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.