way to the castle grounds. Ii Naosuke was one of the more important advisors to the shogun, and he had signed the unequal treaties with the West, treaties opposed by the emperor in Kyoto, his courtiers, and even some branches of the Tokugawa clan. Assassins from the Mito branch of the Tokugawas, opposed to the agreements with the Western barbarians, fell upon Ii and his guards, leaving their bodies in the bloodied snow.
Ironically, walking through the Sakuradamon Gate and crossing the Gaien Hibiya moat today and then Harumi-dori, one is faced by the white-tiled exterior of the 1980 18-story Metropolitan Police Department headquarters to the right, and the 1895 Ministry of Justice building to the left. The present police headquarters stands on the site of a pre–World War II jail, where the captured fliers of General Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo were held in 1942 before being taken to Sugamo Prison to be executed. The Ministry of Justice building was designed by two architects from Germany. They wished to combine the best of traditional Japanese and Western architecture in this new structure, but in the press for modernization in the 1890s, government officials insisted on a more Western style to the architecture. The original roof of the building was damaged in the 1945 air raids and was replaced with a flat roof that would have caused the architects even further unhappiness. It is one of the few Meiji period brick buildings still standing, and it and its grounds underwent extensive restoration in the 1990s.
Hibiya Park in bloom. The park makes for a lovely place to stop with a packed lunch during the walk.
4 HIBIYA PARK
Turning to the left along Harumi-dori, the northwest corner of Hibiya Park (Hibiya Koen) is at hand. Halfway down the street there is a path that leads through this 41-acre (16.4-hectare) park, which before 1868 held daimyo residences. Whereas Ieyasu’s most dependable allies had their mansions in front of the castle gate in the Marunouchi area, the outside lords (tozama daimyo), who were not among Ieyasu’s allies prior to 1603, were permitted to lease lands at a further remove from the castle main gate. In what is today’s Hibiya Park area, they were close enough for the shogun’s spies to keep an eye on them, but they were not so close to the shogun and his retinue that they could act upon treacherous intentions. Here, beyond the outer ramparts of the castle, were the residences of the powerful Nabeshima clan of Saga on the island of Kyushu and of the Mori clan of Choshu in western Japan. (Sixty percent of the land in Edo belonged to the daimyo and their followers, who represented less than half the population of Edo, while 20 percent was occupied by commoners and another 20 percent was given over to temples and shrines.) The daimyo had to Express their status by their show of splendor, and thus they built their residences in the extravagant, highly decorated Momoyama architectural style popular just before the turn of the 1600s. The original Momoyama mansions were destroyed in the Long Sleeves Fire of 1657, and the replacement structures were, of necessity, in a simpler style. New sumptuary laws together with the alternate attendance requirement—which entailed the expenses of a full entou-rage traveling to and from the home provinces and as well as the maintenance of mansions there as well as in Edo—were a crippling burden for the daimyo.
By 1871 the land once occupied by both the inside and the outside lords had been confiscated by the new Meiji government, and the land was cleared, leaving but a vestige of the past in the northeast corner of Hibiya Park, where a portion of the original wall of the Hibiya Gate of the former moat remains. What in 1903 was to become Hibiya Park was in the 1870s a dusty, military parade ground, and here in 1872 Emperor Meiji reviewed his troops. With the military wishing to create permanent Tokyo headquarters, their parade ground was moved to the then edge of the city in the 1890s. Plans were drawn for the building of Western-style government offices on the former military parade grounds. The subsoil was found to be too soft to support modern brick and stone structures, however, and, given the engineering of the day and the fact that this had once been an arm of Edo Bay before it was filled in, construction of modern buildings was out of the question.
Plans were therefore made to establish a park on the site, and it was opened to the public in June 1903. It was one of the first Western-style parks in Japan. Through the years, the park has accrued a number of amenities: the Felice Garden Hibiya on its Harumi-dori side; the Hibiya Public Hall of 1929 with its Art Nouveau touches on its southern side for concerts, lectures, meetings, and other cultural activities; a public library adjacent to the Hall; a café; two restaurants; a lake, ponds, lawns, flower gardens, and tennis courts; and a tier-seated, outdoor music area where today jazz, folk, and other popular music attracts young music lovers. In 1961 a large fountain was added to the park; it can be illuminated with seven colors at night. There is even a small museum devoted to the history of the park (open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. except on Mondays). The park is noted for its cherry tree blossoms in April, for its wisteria and azalea blooms in May, and for its magnificent display of chrysanthemums in November, this latter a festive event that draws many visitors. The park also contains a number of dogwood trees that were a gift from the United States in appreciation of the Japanese cherry trees that were given by Tokyo to Washington, D.C. In the unhappy days of the 1930s and 1940s, the park became an artillery battery, the lawns were replaced by vegetable plots, and, after the first American air raid by General Doolittle in 1942, anti-aircraft guns were put into place.
Mention has been made of the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens as a center for public dissent in the past. In 1905 some 30,000 protesters gathered at Hibiya Park to object to the terms of the peace treaty at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and, as a result of the violence that ensued, martial law was declared by the government. In the 1950s and 1960s, protests were centered here against the Japanese government’s relations with the United States. Hibiya Public Hall, which has served as the site of political party meetings, has had its unhappy incidents as well, the most notable occurring in 1960 when Asanuma Inejiro, the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was killed at the podium by a sword-wielding student.
5 THE IMPERIAL HOTEL
If Hibiya Park represented an early Western-style influence, there was an even earlier attempt at Westernization across Hibiya-dori on lands once held by the outside lords of Satsuma. After the nation opened its doors to the world in the 1860s, Japan was forced by the Western nations to grant certain extraterritorial rights to Western governments. These restrictions obviously bothered the members of the Japanese government, and numerous attempts were made to remove these limitations on Japanese sovereignty so as to permit Japan to assume its status as an equal with the European nations and the United States. One of the more futile of these attempts occurred in 1881 when Inoue Kaoru, the then foreign minister of Japan, had the Rokumeikan erected to the south of where the Imperial Hotel now stands. This Western-style, two-story, brick and stucco structure, designed by Josiah Condor, the British architect whose influence was so strong in Meiji Japan, was a potpourri of Western architectural styles. As Paul Waley describes it, it had Mediterranean arcades on both floors, being of a Tuscan nature on the ground floor and of a vaguely Moorish nature on the second floor. Verandas ran the length of the building, and the mix of styles was then topped with a roof that had overtones of France’s Belle Epoque. A model of the Rokumeikan can be seen in the Edo-Tokyo Museum under one of the glassed floor panels.
The Rokumeikan was meant to be a social gathering place where foreigners and the cream of Japanese society (in Western attire) could meet and dance the popular Viennese waltzes that were the ultimate in modern social life of polite society, a place where each could enjoy the others’ company. All the appurtenances of modern civilization were present: a ballroom, a reading room, a billiards lounge, and a music room. Other innovations of a Western nature occurred in these modern halls: invitations to gatherings were addressed to both husbands and wives in the European manner; there were garden parties and evening receptions. There was even a charity bazaar in 1884 that ran for three days. Surely this must have indicated to the Europeans and Americans (whom some Japanese still referred to as “red-haired barbarians”) that Japan was now an equal to the West and should be treated as an equal.
The building was also intended to serve as a state guesthouse, since the former guest-house
