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.
Most of the shogunal buildings in the Tokugawa castle were destroyed by fire in the years before Emperor Meiji arrived in 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 on the palace grounds. This 1889 palace was destroyed in the air raids of early 1945.
When facing the palace grounds from the Outer Garden, one sees on the right the Fujimi Yagura (Mount Fuji Viewing Tower), while to the left stands the Fushimi Yagura (Fushimi Tower), two of the three remaining fortified towers of the Tokugawa castle. Toward the south end of the Outer Garden (to the left), Nijubashi (Double Bridge) comes into view along with the Fushimi Tower, both of them rising out of the Imperial moat. In the militaristic era of the 1930s and 40s, 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 the Second World War announced the capitulation of Japan, the more fanatical of Imperial Army officers performed ceremonial suicide before the palace enclave as atonement for the loss of Japanese military honor.
The Imperial Palace grounds are not open to the public except on two occasions: on the emperor's birthday on December 23 (from 8:30 A.M. to 11:00 A.M.) and at the start of the New Year on January 2 (from 9:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.). On December 23 the emperor greets the public from the balcony of the Kyukaden (The Hall of State), while at the New Year holiday the imperial family receives the public from the same balcony. The "Hall of State" is a 1968 ferroconcrete, earthquake-resistant and fireproof structure which serves as a reception and banqueting hall for official imperial events. The Kyukaden consists of three buildings: the Seiden, in which is the Pine Tree Hall (Matsu-no-ma) where the imperial family receives greetings from the prime minister and his cabinet in the annual New Year reception; the Homeiden where formal dinners are held for foreign dignitaries; and the Chowaden, which has the imperial balcony for imperial public greetings. The imperial private residence is in the Fukiage Palace in the western portion of the grounds, a structure which was constructed (1991-93) to replace the unit built after the Second World War. (In Tokugawa times this twenty-eight-acre sector
