Tokyo Imperial Palace

Listen first. Gravel crunches under your shoes, a dry sound that carries across the open plaza. Somewhere nearby, a runner's footsteps pass in a steady rhythm. Dark green pines lean at low angles over the lawn, and beyond them the water of a wide moat lies almost still. Then the walls rise out of that water. They are made of huge grey stones, fitted tightly together and sloping gently inward. This is the edge of the Tokyo Imperial Palace, home of Japan's emperor, in the middle of one of the largest cities on Earth.

What you are looking at is older than the palace itself. These moats and walls once belonged to Edo Castle. Edo was the old name for Tokyo. From the early seventeenth century, this castle was the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns. The shoguns were military rulers who governed Japan in the emperor's name for more than two and a half centuries. The emperor, for all that time, lived far away in Kyoto. So the fortress that now shelters the imperial family was built for a very different kind of power.

In its prime, Edo Castle was enormous. Rings of moats spiralled outward from the centre, and the city grew along them. Feudal lords from across Japan were required to help build and maintain the defences. They sent stone, labour and money. This was not only construction. It was also a way for the shogun to keep powerful rivals busy and spending their wealth, so they had less to spend on armies. The walls in front of you are, in a sense, a record of political control.

Here is a detail most visitors walk straight past. On some of the stones, especially inside the East Gardens, you can find small carved marks. They look like circles, triangles, crests or simple symbols. Historians believe many of these marks identified which lord's workers had cut or delivered each stone. Some may have helped teams keep track of their quota. Once you notice one, you will start to see others. It is a quiet signature left by labourers several centuries ago.

The great change came in 1868. That year, the Meiji Restoration ended the rule of the shoguns and returned power to the emperor. The young Emperor Meiji moved from Kyoto to this castle, and the city of Edo became Tokyo, which means eastern capital. The castle became the imperial residence. Over the following decades, new palace buildings replaced many of the older wooden structures. Japan was changing fast, and the old fortress was given a new role at the centre of a modern state.

Much of that palace did not survive. During the air raids of 1945, near the end of the Second World War, the main palace buildings were destroyed by fire. The palace you can glimpse today was rebuilt in the decades after the war and completed in the 1960s. Its long, low roofs and clean lines follow a restrained modern style. So within these old stone walls, you have postwar architecture designed to feel calm rather than grand.

Most of the inner grounds remain private, because the imperial family still lives here. But the best view for most visitors is right here in the outer garden. Look toward the moat and you will see two bridges, one behind the other. The nearer one is a graceful stone bridge with double arches. The farther one is the main gate bridge, leading into the palace. Many people call this view Nijubashi, meaning double bridge. Behind them, a white turret with a curved roof stands above the walls.

That turret is known as the Fushimi Turret. It is one of the few original castle structures still standing. Tradition says it was moved here from Fushimi Castle near Kyoto, which gave it its name. Historians treat that story with some caution, so think of it as a long-held tradition rather than certain fact. Either way, the turret's white plaster walls and dark roof tiles give you a real sense of how the castle once looked from the moat.

Now for a story Tokyo residents still like to repeat. During Japan's economic bubble in the late 1980s, land prices in central Tokyo rose to extraordinary levels. A popular claim went around that the land of the Imperial Palace was worth more than all the real estate in California. Nobody could ever truly sell this land, so the number was only a thought experiment. But the story shows how strange that era felt, and how valuable this patch of green had become.

If you want to walk inside the old castle grounds, head for the East Gardens. You usually enter through Otemon, which was once the main gate of Edo Castle. Inside, the path climbs past old guardhouses where samurai once checked everyone who came through. One long wooden building, the Hundred Man Guardhouse, is said to have been staffed in shifts by about one hundred guards. The gardens themselves mix wide lawns, seasonal flowers and a traditional pond garden with stepping stones.

At the top of the East Gardens, you reach a broad, flat platform of stone. This is the base of the castle's main keep, the tall central tower. The keep burned in the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, a disaster that destroyed much of the city. The shogunate chose not to rebuild it. The money went instead to repairing Edo itself. Climb onto the platform and you stand where the tallest building in old Edo once rose. Today there is only open sky above you.

The palace is not only a place of the past. A few times a year, the gates open for public greetings. The best known is held just after New Year, when crowds gather to see the emperor and his family wave from behind glass. Around the outer moat, meanwhile, ordinary life goes on. The road around the palace is one of Tokyo's favourite running routes, a loop of roughly five kilometres. Office workers jog here at lunch, and in spring the moat banks fill with cherry blossoms.

Before you move on, look once more at the water. Notice how the stone walls reflect in it, and how the skyscrapers of Marunouchi stand just behind the pines. Old Edo and modern Tokyo sit side by side here, separated only by a moat. As you walk away, listen again for the gravel under your feet. It is the same sound people have heard on this ground for centuries, at the quiet centre of a very loud city.