Let me start this with an aside: if you ask a Tokyo resident about the Imperial Palace you’re likely to be met with a blank look and an answer along the lines of ‘what is that?’. Turns out it seems most Tokyoites don’t know that’s the name for the Kokyo, more likely if their English isn’t so good as well. I’ve tried it with about twenty people so far, and only one didn’t return a look of consternation at me.
Anyways we went to the Imperial Palace the other day. Located near Tokyo station (that always gets tourists too it seems), it’s the proverbial jewel in the Imperial family’s crown. I’ve got to admit though, it’s pretty average as far as jewels go. Don’t get your hopes up too high should you come to visit, and I’d even say you shouldn’t make it too high a priority on your list either. Kyoto has a lot more to offer on that front.
Imperial, royal and other -al ending adjectives related to god like classes and associated with a building generally mean something pretty imposing and interesting. Thing is with Tokyo’s Imperial Palace is that you can’t actually see the Palace itself - it’s off bounds, apart from two days a year. Bit of a bugger that really. Not that I wanted to see every angle of it, but it’d be nice, what with the name and everything. What you can see is a bit of the building from far off, the moats and some of the gardens. Which is nice, but again a bit of a downer. I’ve seen a few royal lodgings in my time (ho hi hon [pronounced in a snotty French accent]) and this one is by far the most uninteresting. Hell even Buckingham Palace was more interesting.
The moats and gardens are nice, but pretty quickly seen and taken in really. I actually found the surrounding skylines and streets more interesting than most of the Imperial Palace. Ah well. On the plus side we did stumble upon what seemed to be a huge gathering of Goth fans on our way out of the area - and I mean huge, with thousands of black clad, boots wearing, pasty faced teens meandering down the street towards a concert arena. Actually the stereotypical Goth image doesn’t really do these guys justice. There was enough of them to provide us with a veritable kadeiloscope of variations on the whole Goth theme. Which was interesting, culturally I mean :lol: Seriously though walking through the hordes of fans was a pretty surreal experience, which more than made up for my missing the cosplay days at the Tokyo Game Show.
While we didn’t stop to immortalise the moment when we were amidst said hordes, we did decide to stop and snap some of them on their way out of the nearby station. So as usual there’s a bunch of pics on Flickr you can check out, as well as some pics from that Imperial thingymajig.
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October 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
You can book up to go on a guided tour inside, actually- or at least you could 3 years ago. A very keen friend of mine sent lots of faxes of lots of documents to some imperial office and we went on a free tour (Japanese only). I can only remember the story about how they cut the bushes now, and that only because I impressed everyone by knowing the Japanese word for bush. So, not a particularly memorable highlight of Japan…
November 12th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I werent that impressed with the palace either.
I liked the moats and those sloped walls, and the wierd juxtaposition of old and new made some good photos, but it was just loads of gravel and those wierd trees mostly.
Like you, i found the view of the city more intresting. It was so far away, the cars looked like glimmering water, and the noise pollution was none existent - it was quite a surreal moment to be in a place like that in the center of a huge city.
Met a friendly chap who spoke english - he showed us the way to the Yasukuni shrine, which was nice of him as it was miles away from where we thought it would be.