Former Imperial Guard Division Headquarters Building

Former Imperial Guards Headquarters Building

An octagonal tower rises over the central entrance of a red-brick building on the western edge of Kitanomaru Park, a few minutes' walk from the Imperial Palace moat. Completed in 1910, this was the command office of the Konoe Division, the army units charged with guarding the emperor and the palace. The two-story structure covers about 929 square meters and is handled in a restrained Gothic manner: pointed window heads, a steep slate roof, and brickwork left largely without ornament.

The army engineer Tamura Yasushi is generally credited with the design, though the attribution rests on circumstantial record rather than a signed plan. Brick government buildings of this kind were once common across central Tokyo. Most were lost in the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake or the air raids of the Second World War, which makes the few survivors—this building, the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station, the old Ministry of Justice—unusually valuable to anyone tracing how the Meiji state chose to present itself in stone and brick.

A command post, and the scene of a single decisive night

The Konoe, or Imperial Guards, were the senior formation of the Meiji army, raised in the 1870s and given the duty of protecting the throne. For thirty-five years their divisional staff worked from this building. Officers reported here, orders went out from here, and the second-floor commander's office sat at the center of it all.

That office became the setting for the building's most consequential hours. In the early morning of August 15, 1945, before Emperor Hirohito's recorded surrender announcement could be broadcast, a group of army officers tried to stop it. They came to the divisional commander, Lieutenant General Mori Takeshi, and pressed him to join their plan to seize the palace and the recordings. He refused. He was shot and killed in his office, and the conspirators forged divisional orders to set the coup in motion. The wider army did not follow, and the attempt fell apart within hours. The episode, known as the Kyūjō Incident, was later retold in the book and films titled Japan's Longest Day.

After the war the building passed to the Imperial Guard Police, who used it as staff housing. It emptied out around 1963, and in 1966 the cabinet approved tearing it down as the Kitanomaru grounds were being turned into a public park.

Saved from the wrecking crew

The demolition plan drew objection. The architect Taniguchi Yoshirō, with backing from the Architectural Institute of Japan and others, argued that the headquarters was a clear example of Meiji Western-style brickwork and one of the last pieces of government architecture from the period still standing in the capital. The argument carried. In October 1972 the building was designated an Important Cultural Property and earmarked for reuse as an annex of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Taniguchi went on to design the conversion. A reinforced-concrete frame was built inside the brick walls to bring the structure up to modern standards, and the roof, which had been re-laid with pantiles after the 1923 earthquake, was returned to its original slate. The designation protects the exterior and the entrance hall; the rest of the interior was reworked for gallery use. In November 1977 the building reopened as the Crafts Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art.

What to look for

The octagonal turret above the porch is the feature most people remember, and it reads differently through the day as light moves around its eight faces. Below it, the entrance hall is the one interior space kept close to its original character, with twin staircases sweeping up to the second floor on heavy timber and iron rails.

Look along the facade and the Gothic vocabulary is consistent but quiet: shallow pointed arches, modest string courses, brick laid in long even runs rather than decorative patterns. This is restraint by design. A guards headquarters was meant to look orderly and permanent, not showy. The setting does much of the work in any case. Cherry trees flank the building in spring, and the deep green of the surrounding park in summer sets off the warm red of the brick.

The grounds and the neighborhood

Kitanomaru Park occupies the former northern enclosure of Edo Castle, and the Imperial Guards' barracks once stood across these grounds. The building sits near the park's western boundary, an easy loop to combine with the other things clustered here.

A short walk away are the Nippon Budokan, the main building of the National Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives of Japan, and the Science Museum. The Tayasumon and Kitahanebashimon gates—original Edo Castle structures—mark the park's edges, and the cherry-lined moat of Chidorigafuchi runs along the western side, one of the best blossom-viewing spots in central Tokyo.