Thank you very much. The clearest view of the Emperor of Japan is from the upper stories of one of the many high-rise office buildings that line the avenues of Tokyo's government and business districts overlooking the moats of the Imperial Palace. From there, even more starkly than on a map,

the strangeness of the city structure becomes clear.

Compared to a Versailles or a Buckingham Palace

or even the older royal residences in Kyoto,

there is nothing palatial about the imperial home.

It is a park, a shaggy forest of ponds and mixed trees,

with a handful of modestly elegant modern buildings,

an administrative block,

and a few roads faintly visible in between.

There used to be a nine-hole golf course there, built in the 1920s by the then-crown prince Hirohito,

who took to the sport during a visit to Britain.

But years later, so the story goes,

the biologist emperor spotted a rare flower growing there

and decreed that the links should be allowed to return to their natural state.

The palace grounds occupy the core of the largest city in history.

Even after three decades of stagnation, this is among the most valuable land in the world.

At Japan's economic peak, during the 1980s, it was said that the 280 acres were worth as much as the entire state of California.

The comparison is meaningless, of course, for this land can never be sold, developed, or by most people even walked upon.

It's tempting to see in this priceless nothingness an image of its inhabitant.

The Imperial Palace is a space rather than a place, just as Japan's emperor is in constitutional

terms the symbol of the state, gilded of pre-war divinity and power.

But like him, the palace grounds wield an influence far beyond their functional insignificance.

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