When the shogunate was overthrown in 1868 the capital, along with the Imperial Residence, moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, and over the next twenty years a new Imperial Palace was completed. That version went up in flames on the night of 25 May 1945 in a firebombing raid, but it wasn’t the first time structures on the site had been razed,
Previous fires had destroyed the area containing the old donjon and the night of 5 May 1873 saw the Nishinomaru Palace (the former shogun's residence) reduced to ashes. The new imperial Palace, a wooden construction incorporating a traditional Japanese exterior with a fusion of Japanese and European elements on the inside, went up on the same site.
Wartime destruction meant a new main palace and residences were constructed on the western portion of the site while the eastern part was renamed East Garden and turned into a public park in 1968. The current Palace has a number of interconnected steel-framed reinforced concrete structures structures, completed in 1968, with two storeys above ground level and one below.
