Ote-mon Gate

On December eleventh, eighteen sixty-one, Kazunomiya, the younger sister of Emperor Kōmei, entered Edo Castle through Ote-mon Gate. She had arrived from Kyoto to become the wife of Tokugawa Iemochi—the fourteenth shogun, the country’s military ruler. An archival diagram marks her route to the gate with a red line. This ceremonial entrance was chosen for such an arrival: “Ote-mon” means “main gate.”

Kazunomiya had not sought this marriage. Since childhood, she had been engaged to Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and refused to go to Edo. But after Japan’s ports were opened to foreign trade, the shogunate’s position was shaken. Its officials decided to bind the court in Kyoto and the Tokugawa clan through the marriage of an imperial daughter to the shogun. Emperor Kōmei agreed when the shogunate promised to seek the country’s return to isolation. Kazunomiya’s previous engagement was dissolved, and she left the court whose customs had shaped her.

Beyond the first gate, her palanquin had to turn at a right angle. Ote-mon Gate consists of two gates with an enclosed courtyard between them. This arrangement was called a masugata: those who burst inside lost speed and found themselves before the second gate, beneath the upper level of the guard tower. In peacetime, the same turn made it possible to inspect people one at a time. Daimyo—princes required to appear before the shogun—usually left their horses and palanquins before the bridge, reduced their entourages, and passed through here under the supervision of the Tokugawa’s hereditary vassals.

Two months after arriving, Kazunomiya married Iemochi. Both were sixteen years old. Their marriage lasted a little more than four years: Iemochi died at twenty-one. Kazunomiya shaved her hair, took the Buddhist name Seikan'in-no-miya, and remained in the castle, no longer as an imperial bride but as the shogun’s widow.

Two more years later, the army of the new imperial government approached Edo. It was commanded by Prince Arisugawa Taruhito—the very prince whose engagement to Kazunomiya had been canceled for the sake of the Tokugawa clan. The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, asked Iemochi’s widow to intercede for his clan. Kazunomiya sent her lady-in-waiting Tsuchimikado Fujiko to Kyoto with a petition to remove the stigma of enemies of the court from the Tokugawa and preserve the family. At the same time, representatives of both sides were negotiating an agreement to forgo an assault. On April eleventh, eighteen sixty-eight, the castle was handed over without a fight, the Tokugawa clan was preserved, and Arisugawa entered Edo at the head of the victorious troops.

The first gate, facing the bridge, has stood since sixteen fifty-nine: Kazunomiya truly passed through it. The large tower behind the rectangular courtyard burned down in an air raid in nineteen forty-five; it was restored in nineteen sixty-seven. Visitors now enter the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace through the old outer gate leaf and the postwar inner one.