Last year, I met an architect whose name is Tetsuo. Maybe you’ve seen his most recent achievement: a newly constructed building on the Waseda University campus. He showed me a brochure of the building, something akin to the Death Star, all black-shiny metal and concrete. He was so proud. I’m sure it will serve the faculty and students well.
He told me about his school days. How he often went to old buildings to study their construction and design. One story in particular stands out in my mind. He had traveled to Tokyo station, the Marunouchi side, to examine what used to be the Emperor’s entrance to the train.

The Emperor’s entrance, I assume, is the center section of the Marunouchi exit. Somewhere around this point, either Tetsuo’s English or my memory of the conversation begins to fail. From my recollection, he was looking at the entrance when he noticed a small, unmarked door next to the men’s room. He went to the station manager’s office to ask about it and was offered a peek inside.
Behind the door was a long hallway lit intermittently by a string of light bulbs nailed to the ceiling. The hall was lined with elevators that traveled up to the train platforms of the station. Water dripped into large pools under the elevators. Rust and mold everywhere.
The station master giving my friend the tour said this was, at one time, wheelchair access to the trains but was discontinued after the stairs of the station were retrofitted with wheelchair lifts.
It has been suggested to me since by other people that Tetsuo’s account, or at least my memory of it, is dubious. And this hall of rusted elevators was, in fact, the Emperor’s entrance to Tokyo station.
Trying to corroborate one of the two stories I started asking other people about the Tetsuo’s hall or the Emperor’s entrance and got a third story: The Emperor’s entrance was not the rusty hallway near the men’s room or the center section of the Marunouchi exit but was, until recently, a secret underground passageway that was established, I assume, sometime after the Prime Minister Hara Takashi was assassinated at the south gates in 1921.
Several people I’ve talked to remember the current Emperor announcing a few years ago that the secret passageway would be closed, as it was now safe to walk amongst common people. One person I spoke to felt the idea of there being a secret tunnel that shuffled the Emperor to and fro under the feet of common people seemed distasteful. She found it hard to believe such a system would exist but nevertheless remembered the announcement.
After all these stories, I went to Tokyo station to see some of these spots mentioned above with my own eyes to discover that the entire area is currently under construction and looks like it wont be completed for some time. But I fear Tetsuo’s hallway, at least, will not survive the renovation and fade into the forgotten city.