Tokyo Imperial Palace: East Garden

Last Wednesday, I had another free afternoon and since it was neither Monday nor Friday, I took another trip to the Imperial Palace to visit the East Gardens. It was rainy, but open so I finally got to see it (unlike last time). In addition, the rain meant that instead of being crowded, it was pretty sparsely populated, which made it especially nice.


I entered the garden by the Ōtemon (大手門 or おおてもん), where a sign reminded me that admission is free and indicated that I would have to pick up a ticket and return it upon exiting. I'm not sure why this system exists exactly (possibly to keep track of the number of visitors), but it's better than having to pay to get in somewhere.
 

This was a giant
magnolia tree.

It was raining fairly hard as I approached, so there were many people taking shelter under the gate and when I got in, there were more people taking shelter under trees. I took shelter under a tree with a map and then went to the rest area indicated on the map because trees do not actually provide very good shelter from the rain.

Random tree.

At the rest station, I found a free map (they were available in a few languages) and made the acquaintance of a physics grad student who happened to be in town doing some post-conference tourism (and who it turns out knows much more about plants than I do). When the weather cleared up a little, we set out to explore the garden.

The entire area is fairly large and includes a number of flowering trees, most of which weren't blooming at the time. If I'd known about the cherry trees here during March and April, I probably would have come here for hanami.

There were also a few things I overlooked because I didn't actually check the map too much to identify them at the time. For instance, the tea garden just looks like some lines of shrubs, but knowing that they were tea plants makes them more interesting than thinking they're just lines of shrubs.

I probably would have also checked out the Mount Fuji lookout if I'd noticed it while I was there. Granted, given my experience of trying to see Mount Fuji at the Tokyo Metropolitan building, the odds of actually seeing the mountain from there in weather that isn't optimal are probably not especially high.

One of the many
dragonflies.

One thing that was rather interesting about the East Garden of the Imperial Palace is that in the midst of all the perfectly groomed trees and lawns, there was a moat which seem to have gone a little wild. 

A number of red dragonflies seem to have made their home at the edge of the moat among the reeds and clover. Luckily, one of them stayed still long enough for a photo. (Incidentally, while trying to identify the dragonfly species, I found out that an old name for Japan is the dragonfly islands, which is kinda neat.)

There was also some kind of bird in the moat, but it was being shy and hiding in the corner.

There were a lot of trees, including some nice wooded areas one could walk through and one spot where they have the official trees for each of Japan's 47 prefectures planted. I couldn't find Saitama's because I forgot the kanji for "Saitama" (it turns out that it's 埼玉) and the location map for all the trees was all in kanji. I did recognize a few prefectures, but not very many. I was also not at all surprised to learn that Toyko's tree is the ginkgo tree.

An overview of the
ninomaru garden.

I think my favourite part was the Ninomaru (二の丸) garden. There was a pond with a bridge and a lot of fairly large koi fish as well as a very happy-looking duck. There was a small waterfall flowing into the pond and a path leading to both the top and bottom of the waterfall so one can get a good view of the whole garden.

There was also an orchid garden in a fairly shallow, muddy pond (no wonder they're difficult to keep in pots), which was pretty nice, although they weren't all blooming. I'm not sure if there's a better time of year to visit them or if they just all bloom at different times so one never gets to see them all.

Giant caterpillar!

Finally, there was this little guy, quietly munching on the leaves of an ume tree. Well, "little" might not be the right word. I'm not sure what kind of caterpillar he is and I didn't have much luck with Google, but he's pretty big.

In general, the trip was pretty worthwhile. The first time I tried to drop by, the weather was definitely nicer and I wouldn't have had to carry my umbrella, but I would probably also have had to dodge a lot of tourists and wait for other people to move for photos, so this worked out pretty well in the end.