Early Edo Gardens

As you travel through Tokyo near the Imperial Palace grounds, you may be mystified by the frequent watercourses and sudden embankments along the train tracks and roads. All across central Tokyo, you come across these reminders of old castle defenses.

The gardens and parks of present day central Tokyo hint of the open spaces that once surrounded the area until Japan started to modernize in the 19th century. Looking at a map, you can get a good impression of what the city must have looked like in the early days.  But today, the only place you can really see what Tokyo was like when it was still called Edo is in the East Garden of the Imperial Palace. It's one of two gardens you should visit if you really want a glimpse of old-time Edo.

Imperial Palace – East Gardens

When Tokugawa Ieyasu decided make the small castle town of Edo (the name for Tokyo before 1868) Japan's center of political power, he started constructing what would be the largest castle in Japan. When it was completed in 1638, it was the tallest building in the country, and its white roof tiles were made to rival Mount Fuji. But shortly after, in 1657, the castle burned down in a fire and was never rebuilt. The foundations are still there, open to the public at the East Gardens.

A wide lawn surrounds the foundations of the central tower, and barracks and gates remain to show visitors what old castle life was like. The area has been turned into a pleasant park with large trees climbing over the winding paths, which were actually part of the castle's system of defense. It's harder for an invading enemy if he does not have a straight line of attack.

Today, this is a favorite spot for Tokyoites who want to enjoy the autumn foliage, and for tourists looking for a window into history. There is no sitting on the lawn and you have to keep dogs on leashes (there are wild waterfowl in the thickets). The Imperial household also maintains the rules, so it is much quieter and more orderly than an ordinary Japanese public park. There are several buildings associated with the Imperial household in the garden area, and also the small but interesting Museum of Imperial Collections.

Hama-Rikyu Gardens

After Tokyo became the capital, the emperor maintained some of the playgrounds of the shoguns. Some of them were hunting grounds – the central Tokyo of today was then at the edge of the old city. The falcon-hunting grounds, where the shogun made day-long expeditions with trained birds in what was then a lush forest surrounded by rice paddies, is now a very ordinary a public park in Nerima (around the Ekoda-no-Mori Hospital). The duck hunting grounds on the waterfront of Tokyo Bay are more interesting. They have became the Hama-Rikyu gardens.

The area became a garden already in 1654, when the younger brother of the fourth of the Tokugawa shoguns (later the fifth shogun himself) used it for a residence. It became a detached villa of the shoguns, and eventually of the Emperor.

Surrounded by a saltwater moat, these gardens today show little that you can associate with duck hunting, except the large pond that serves as the center of the garden. Two duck-hunting sites remain, consisting of narrow watercourses with duck blinds, where hunters could shoot the sitting ducks. Near them, there is a small mound was built to console the spirits of the ducks killed over the centuries.

The duck hunting sites are features of the pond that rises and falls with the tide, the last remaining saltwater pond in central Tokyo. But the garden today is more famous for its 1,000 peonies and the 310-year old pines that surround the waterscape.