A woman was walking her dog on a pedestrian bridge over Sotobori Street, where Tameike Pond used to be

Woman walking her dog in Akasaka — Pedestrian bridge over Sotobori-Dori Street

Sotobori-Dori Street, which runs between the hotel and the electronics retail store, was once an outer moat. In 1606, Yukinaga Asano, the first feudal lord of the Kii Wakayama domain, transformed the low marshy land between plateaus into a man-made pond called Tameike, and made it part of the outer moat. The pond is no longer visible to the public, but it is said to have been larger than Shinobazu Pond in Ueno.

Looking at an old map, you can see that Tameike pond goes on and on. The pond once dipped down around Toranomon, but it continued to grow as a narrow moat, and when it changed direction near today's Shimbashi Station, it connected to the inner moat via Hibiya moat. In the old days, the moat was connected from Benkei Moat to the inner moat.

If the reservoirs and other moats were still filled with water as they were in the past, it would have been possible to take a rented boat from the Benkei Moat boat ramp to the reservoirs and go around Hibiya Moat and Babasaki Moat to circle the Imperial Palace. It is a pity that the moat has been filled in. A boat trip around the center of Tokyo, the city of water, sounds like a lot of fun. You can even temporarily disembark the boat in Ginza on the way.

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