Quick answer
The Imperial Palace is the primary residence of Japan''s emperor, occupying the site of Edo Castle where the Tokugawa shogunate ruled for 250 years. The East Gardens are open to the public without charge. A free audio sample is available at the top of the page.
Full transcript
INTRO
You are standing at the edge of the most valuable piece of real estate on Earth — by one estimate, worth more than all the real estate in California combined. But the Imperial Palace is not a palace in the European sense. It is a fortress that happened to become a home. Edo Castle stood here for 250 years before the emperor moved in. The moats you see are the outer ring of a defensive system that once stretched for 16 kilometers. The inner palace is closed to the public — it opens only twice a year, on January 2nd and February 23rd, the emperor's birthday. But the East Gardens, which you can walk through, were once the inner keep — the honmaru — of the castle. The donjon, the main tower, burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt. The shogunate decided it was unnecessary. A strange decision, given that the castle had just burned.
SECTION: The bubble and the ground
During the Japanese asset price bubble of the 1980s, real estate speculators calculated that the Imperial Palace grounds — 3.4 square kilometers of central Tokyo — were worth approximately the same as the entire state of California. The number is probably exaggerated, but the underlying truth is not: in a city with some of the highest land prices in the world, the emperor's garden is an unthinkable luxury. The palace grounds contain some of the only original Edo-period stone walls in Tokyo. The rest were destroyed in the 1923 earthquake, the 1945 firebombing, and the subsequent reconstruction. Standing here, you are standing on one of the few pieces of Tokyo that still looks the way it did 400 years ago — minus the samurai, plus the joggers.
CLOSE
Walk the East Gardens. Look at the stones — the different sizes, the precise fitting, the way they have held together for centuries with no mortar. Edo stonemasons built walls designed to withstand earthquakes by being slightly loose — each stone can shift independently without the wall collapsing. A 400-year-old earthquake-proofing technique, still working. Find your way.