Slipping out of Palaceside Building for a stroll. In this heat one avoids concrete and one’s feet go, despite oneself, toward green Edo Castle (the Imperial Palace).
This time from Hirakawa Gate into the East Gardens toward Naka-no-mon, past “prefectural trees” on the left; as you reach Hakucho-bori, in a corner of the copse on the left, lamps of an obviously old-fashioned air come into view.
The sign in front says “Former decorative lamps of the Imperial Palace Main Gate Stone Bridge.” In close-up, below, a lion or shishi? The feet too have large claws of that kind — photo at upper left. Looking up, just under the lamp is the chrysanthemum crest — photo at lower left, red circle.
The “Imperial Palace Main Gate Stone Bridge” leads from the plaza in front of the palace into the palace; by station it is in front of Chiyoda Line Nijubashimae, straight ahead of the Kusunoki Masashige statue in the Outer Gardens. In the Edo period a wooden “Nishinomaru Ote-bashi”
is said to have stood there; when the palace was built in the Meiji era this stone bridge replaced the wood.
Started March
1886 (Meiji 19)
,
finished December 1887, the bridge is Okayama granite, 35.3 meters long and 12.8 wide. The piers, to keep the form balanced, are two
circular arches side by
side, a megane-bashi (photo below).
The bridge has been opened for the general greeting since 1948 (Showa 23); until then only the Emperor, Em-
press, imperial family, or foreign guests and ambassadors and ministers could pass.
The bridge note grew long; now the decorative lamps. On each side of the bridge is a 1.14-meter stone rail; between them six 1.74-meter otoko-bashira, three a side, each with a bronze-cast decorative lamp — six in all. In the palace works more than 900 lamps were set inside and out; gas was planned, but on a German engineer’s advice electric lamps were chosen for brightness and safety.
The six lamps on this stone bridge were replaced in September 1986 with new casts from molds. So lamps of the same design still sit on the stone-bridge rail (photo at right).
One of those removed is in the East Gardens. Another sits in a corner of Meiji-mura (Inuyama, Aichi).