outer moat were filled in, and thus Sotobori-dori now varies between being a ground-level roadway and, in part, an elevated and then underground roadway. In the northeast portion of the Marunouchi area, between today’s Tokyo Station and the palace grounds, lay the mansions and dependencies of the Matsudaira lords in former times. To the south, in front of today’s Imperial Palace Plaza, were the mansions of the Honda, the Sakai, and other favored daimyo.
For some 260 years, the most powerful military leaders of Japan occupied these lands. By the 1860s, however, the political and military power of the last two shoguns had gradually dissipated. The rule of sankin kotai (alternate attendance), which, after 1635, required both the inside and outside daimyo to spend two years in Edo alternating with two years on their own lands, was to come to an end. Then in 1868, with the victory of the adherents of Emperor Meiji over the Tokugawa shoguns, the mansions of all the daimyo were abandoned as the former provincial lords returned to their home provinces. By 1871, the deserted buildings were either used for government offices when these offices were moved to Tokyo from Kyoto, or were cleared for military drill grounds for a growing and ever more militaristic government.
By 1890, within 20 years of the imperial takeover of Edo, now Tokyo, the Meiji government and the military authorities required funds for the development of new establishments for their growing needs. Thus the land “within the moats” was put up for sale. The Imperial Household did not have the funds to purchase the land, so the Mitsubishi, a leading mercantile and growing industrial family, were prevailed upon to acquire the vacant Marunouchi area in front of the palace grounds. Known derisively as Mitsubishi Meadow or the Gambler’s Meadow by those who did not have the foresight to buy the land, the Marunouchi was intended by the Mitsubishi for a Western-style complex of buildings in anticipation of the industrial and commercial growth they foresaw for the nation. To this end, they hired Josiah Condor, an English architect who came to live in Japan in 1877 and who worked not only as an architect but as an instructor of architecture at the College of Technology (later to become Tokyo University). There he trained the first generation of Japanese architects in the technicalities of Western practice.
The three-story buildings that Condor designed for the Mitsubishi were redbrick structures with white stone quoins and windows and doors outlined in white stone. The new Western-style district he created was known as London Town. Its streets were lined with trees and the newest of modern appurtenances, poles to support above-ground electric wires. London Town, with its Queen Anne–style architecture extending to the not-too-distant Ginza area, with newly paved streets and brick-built structures, was the pride of the Meiji era. The sponsors of London Town hoped that it would quickly become the new commercial and financial center of Tokyo. The first building was completed in 1894, but unfortunately the Stock Exchange, the Bank of Japan, and other financial and commercial establishments remained in Nihombashi to the east. Success for London Town had to await the arrival of the railroad in central Tokyo.
The extension of the railroad from Shimbashi, south of the Ginza area, into Marunouchi finally became a reality in 1914. Dr. Tatsuno Kingo, a student of Josiah Condor, was named as the architect of the new Tokyo Station (where this walking tour begins), which opened in 1914. The thousand-foot-long redbrick Renaissance-style station was modeled after Amsterdam’s Zentraal Station and faced east, toward London Town and the Imperial Palace. The plan to have an entrance on the eastern side of the station was stymied for years because the Sotobori moat still ran parallel to the railroad right-of-way on that side, and the Nihombashi and Kyobashi officials each wanted a bridge over the moat to go to their district. The dispute was not resolved and an eastern entrance to the station created until 1929. When the high-speed Shinkansen Line with its bullet trains came into being in the 1960s, this entrance was greatly enhanced, and a whole new, modern terminal structure was built behind the existing station, along with the Daimaru Department Store as a tenant facing the Yaesu Plaza, which covers the area of a portion of the former Sotobori moat.
The old entrance to Tokyo Station in Marunouchi
Tokyo Station was meant as a memorial for Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and its main entrance was reserved for use solely by royalty. The station remained central in name only, for it was the terminus for trains from the south while the station at Ueno (to the north) was the terminus for trains from the north and east. Not until after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 could the two stations be linked, a possibility brought about by the earthquake’s destruction of buildings between the two termini. The completion in 1925 of the elevated Yamanote Line, which circles a major portion of central Tokyo, finally achieved this linkage.
The early future of Marunouchi looked brighter when the Tokyo city and Tokyo prefectural governments agreed to share a new building in the former daimyo quarter. The redbrick, Western-style structure was to arise in Marunouchi with the prefectural offices to the right while the city offices were to the left. Each had the image of its patron before its portion of the structure: Ota Dokan, the founder of an earlier Edo Castle in the mid-1400s, was placed before the city sector of the building. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the second founder of Edo in the 1590s stood before the prefectural offices. (A new, modern city hall was erected on the site in 1957 under the direction of the noted Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. As with its predecessor, it was to be razed after 1991 when the city hall moved further west to Shinjuku.)
The new station became the front door to the city, and gradually office buildings in Marunouchi, as London Town came to be known again, filled the Mitsubishi Meadows between the railroad and the Imperial Palace over the next 25 years. The life of modern buildings is frequently all too short, and Condor’s buildings were gradually replaced from 1930 on by newer and larger buildings. The last remnant of London Town, Mitsubishi Building #1, disappeared in 1967 in the post– World War II construction boom. The height limit of seven-to-eight floors (100 feet, or 45 meters) for the buildings in Marunouchi—out of respect to the adjacent Imperial Palace, which it would not be proper to overshadow—was to go the way of many such traditions after the 1950s, and today the financial and commercial headquarters of Japanese and international firms tower over the Imperial Palace grounds. Other traditions, such as the placing of an image of the Buddha under the roof of a building as protection against lightning, are no longer recognized.
1 TOKYO STATION
This tour of Marunouchi and Yurakucho begins at the western side of Tokyo Station, a bustling center whose daily train traffic could not have been envisioned by its original planners. Some 20 platforms above and below ground receive 3,000 train arrivals a day. A small park graces the area before the station, with the Tokyo Central Post Office on the left and a bus terminal to the right. A broad street leading from the plaza in front of the station to Hibiya-dori and the park before the Imperial Palace was created in 1926. The skyscraper that dominates the beginning of this boulevard is the Shin-marunouchi Building, completed in 2007 to replace the previous 1953 building of that name that occupied the same site. At 650 feet (198 meters) in height, this 38-story building, designed by British architect Sir Michael Hopkins, is currently the tallest structure in Chiyoda ward. It stands across the street from another skyscraper, the 2002, 37-story Marunouchi Building (often called Maru Biru), which was built to replace the grand old 1923 building of the same name, an eight-story building that survived both the 1923 earthquake and the bombing of 1945 but was unable to survive Tokyo’s 21st-century modernization. The two new Marunouchi buildings are packed with chic restaurants, fashionable shops, and high-end offices, and both represent the most modern face of Tokyo, as may seem fitting for one of the city’s financial districts.
Two streets along the boulevard bring one to Hibiya-dori as well as to the Babasakibori (Moat in Front of the Horse Grounds) and the beginning of the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens. (The moat’s strange name derives from a 1635 display of horsemanship presented before the shogun by a delegation from the then dependent kingdom of Korea.) When the capital was moved to Tokyo in
