warriors of the distant past still need to be placated, noble statesmen are also not forgotten. In the year 769 Wake-no-Kiyomaro, a member of the Empress Shotoku's court, was sent on a mission. Her senior advisor (and lover), the Buddhist monk Dokyo, had designs on the throne, hoping to succeed his royal mistress as the next emperor. Shotoku 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 the 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 which stands in a small plot of greenery at the edge of the Otebori moat to the north celebrates this eighth-century defender of the Imperial House. In 1854 the Emperor Komei raised Kiyomaro quite posthumously to the first rank of the nobility and named him Go-o-myojin as a spirit to be honored. This was a powerless emperor's attempt at a slap at the Tokugawa shogun of his day, for it was his only way of showing his displeasure with those who ruled without consulting him. After Komei's death, his son became Emperor Meiji, who, on succeeding his father, saw his advisors and supporters bring to an end the two and one-half centuries of Tokugawa rule. The new emperor's advisors were not taking any chances as to a threat to the throne from either the living or the dead. Thus on March 18, 1898, the noble and divine status of Kiyomaro was once more confirmed by imperial edict.
Almost ninety years later, in 1940, this bronze image of Kiyomaro was raised at the edge of the Imperial Palace grounds by a later set of concerned advisors to Emperor Hirohito. In the 600s, this eighth-century scholar had saved the throne. In 1940 the militaristic government was taking no chances with any new threat to the throne. As a result, a statue of Kiyomaro was created, and it still stands guard over imperial affairs at the edge of the Otebori moat to the castle grounds.
In Japan, the placement of buildings should always honor the rules for auspicious location of structures lest they be built or oriented in a direction which is not favorable to their successful existence. In the case of Edo and the shogun's castle, this was a particular problem since the castle site did not have the proper geographical orientation, given the rules of Chinese geomancy which were observed in Japan. Shogun Ieyasu, if nothing else, was decisive in matters like this. He decreed that Mount 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.
Back along the Otebori moat to Eitai-dori, a bridge crosses the moat to the Ote-mon gateway and the shogunal castle grounds, the site where Tokyo had its beginnings. The story of Edo Castle begins with Ota Dokan (1432-86), who is credited with founding Edo. The top of the natural hill which overlooked the great bay of Edo and its inlets rose sixty-five feet above the water, providing a natural site for the largely earthen fortifications that Dokan created. Such fortifications had been erected some two centuries before Ota Dokan raised his stronghold here, but they had been of litle consequence. Dokan's fortification did not have too long a life either, for his brutal murder in 1486, instigated by the 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 composed the village of Edo. The naturally defensive nature of the hillside was obvious to Shogun 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 Shogun Ieyasu began in 1590 was not completed for another fifty 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 who were subservient to him were forced to supply labor, materials, and funds to create the castle which would keep them in thralldom. The dimensions of the stronghold beggar description, for they encompassed a ten-mile circle which stretched from the Shimbashi area waterfront in the south to the hills of Kanda to the north. The outer protected area involved 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 sixteen-feet thick to protect the citadel where the shogun and his inner court resided. As has been the case in European cities, the nineteenth century in Tokyo was to see the dismantling of fortified walls as the city 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 bombed imperial buildings, the inner grounds of the former castle complex were opened to the public as the East Imperial Garden (Kokyo Higashi Gyoen). (The inner walls of the complex divided the fortified hill into four areas called maru.) The East Imperial Garden includes the Hon-maru (the Central Keep), the Ni-no-maru (the Second Keep), and the San-no-maru (the Third Keep). The fourth fortified area consisted of the Nishi-no-maru (the West Keep) which today forms the Imperial Palace grounds and thus this sector 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 shogunal castle have long since been destroyed by fires. 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 Imperial Garden can be entered through several gates (mori): Ote-mon, Hirakawa-mon, and Kita Hanebashi-mon, and these various gates can be reached from the Otemachi or Takebashi subways stations. This tour begins at the Ote-mon gate since it was the main entrance to the castle in its days of glory, and it provides an example of the type of defensive architecture which was employed in the 1600s. It is difficult today to envision the magnitude of the castle structures, for there were ninety-nine gates to the castle of which thirty-six were in the outer defensive wall which enclosed the 450-acre heart of the shogunate's power. There were within this complex twenty-one large watch towers (yagura), and twenty-eight munitions storehouses (tamori) aside from the residential buildings and ancillary structures.
To enter the castle grounds one crosses the moat before Otemon, one of three such waterways about the castle which varied in size but were generally 230 feet wide and between 4 to 10 feet deep. On entering the Ote-mon gate, the visitor is given a small token. Return it when leaving the compound by any of its gates. (There is no charge for visiting the castle grounds.) The grounds may be entered between 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. every day but Monday and Friday; the castle grounds are closed from December 25 through January 5. The grounds are closed at 4:00 P.M., at which time all visitors must leave.
The construction of the original Ote-mon gate was the responsibility of Date Masamune, the daimyo of Sendai, and it was in two parts: the first or smaller gate was known as Koraimon, the Korean Gate, while the larger of the two gates lay beyond a narrow courtyard. The inner Ote-mon gate was destroyed during the air raids of the spring of 1945, but it was rebuilt in 1967. Otemon was a masugata gateway. That is, the outer and inner gateways formed a "box." If an enemy was able to storm the outer Ote-mon, he then found himself in a walled, box-like courtyard with a second larger gatehouse before him. Here he was under attack from more than one side since slits in the gatehouse permitted the raining of arrows on the attackers. The chances of survival for attackers were slim. The roof tiles of these gates as well as other buildings often were topped with images of the mythical dolphin which would protect the structure against fire.
Beyond Ote-mon were four maru, keeps or fortresses. At the foot of the hill beyond Ote-mon was Ni-no-maru, the Second Fortress or Keep, while above it was Hon-maru, the Central Keep. San-no-maru, the Third Keep, and the Kita-no-maru, the North Keep, lay below Ni-no-maru. In Tokugawa days, Kanjosho, the main office
