hey all,
So getting to Edo Palace was actually as easy as it looked. It only cost 540 yen, and there was one train change at Ueno. Very easy, and the trains were all close to being on time (at the change there is only about 2-3 minutes to make it from one train to another, so this matters).
The palace is not really there any more, as mentioned earlier. However, I was able to find the place where Lord Ako was insulted by Yoshinaka, as this was marked by a plaque. This caused Ako to either draw his sword, or actually cut Yoshinaka on the face with it: since this was inside the Imperial palace, Ako was sentenced to commit seppuku, ritualized suicide. Any violence was seen as violence potentially aimed at the Shogun. Ako's family line was to be disbanded, and his samurai made into ronin, masterless samurai, forced to find any kind of work where ever they could. 47 of them made a plan to avenge their lord by killing Yoshinaka: they would disperse and appear to move on with their lives, while secretly waiting for the signal to converge on Edo and kill Yoshinaka. They waited for a year, then executed their plan. Since they were defying the Shogunate, they were ordered to commit seppuku, just as their lord had been earilier. At the time, and even today, the 47 ronin are commonly looked upon as the embodiment of bushido, the warrior's code.
The other thing that really struck me was the shear size of the place. The grounds are at least 10km in circumference, and this means that the moat had to be dug who knows how deep, and maybe 50m wide the whole way around the palace. On top of that, the palace walls are lined with huge chunks of stone that had to be carted in from all over Japan. The labor and materials to build Edo palace formed part of the taxes the Shogunate levied on the daimyo (fedual lords) each year. The authors of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series emphasize again and again how tyrannical and absolute the control that the Shogunate held over Japan was, and you can feel how terrible it must have been to be anyone other than the Shogun.
Aside from those two kinda dark things, it was really very pretty. The sakura trees are starting to bloom despite the cold, and the sun started to come out around 12:30.
