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Yanaka Cemetery

Cemetery

Summary

Cemetery

Field	Value
name	Yanaka Cemetery
native_name	谷中霊園
native_name_lang	jp
image	Yanaka cemetery.jpg
caption	Cherry blossoms at Yanaka Cemetery, with the Police Station at left.
established	1872
country	Japan
location	Taito, Tokyo
coordinates
type	Public
style	Secular
size	10 ha
graves	7,000
website

Yanaka Cemetery is a large cemetery located north of Ueno in Yanaka 7-chome, Taito, Tokyo, Japan. The Yanaka sector of Taito is one of the few Tokyo neighborhoods in which the old Shitamachi atmosphere can still be felt. The cemetery is famous for its beautiful cherry blossoms in April that completely cover its paths, and for that reason that its central street is often called Cherry-blossom Avenue. Covering an area of 102,537 square meters, the site contains approximately 7,000 graves.

Description

Although renamed over 85 years ago, the cemetery is still often called by its old official name, Yanaka Bochi, and not Yanaka Reien. It has an area of over 100 thousand square meters and hosts about 7 thousand graves. The cemetery has its own police station and a small walled enclosure dedicated to the Tokugawa clan, family of the 15 Tokugawa shōguns of Japan, which however is closed to the public and must be peeked at through double barred gates. The last shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, also known as Keiki, rests here.

The cemetery used to be part of a Buddhist temple called Tennō-ji, and its central street used to be the road (sandō) approaching it. At about the middle point of the central street are the ruins of the five-storied pagoda that became the model for Kōda Rohan's novel The Five-Storied Pagoda. The pagoda had been a donation made in 1908 by Tenno-ji itself. The five-storied pagoda was burned one summer night in 1957 in the Yanaka Five-Storied Pagoda Double-Suicide Arson Case and was later declared a historical landmark by the city authorities.

History

After the Meiji Restoration, the government pursued a policy of separation of Buddhism and Shinto (Shinbutsu bunri), and Shinto funerals became more common. This posed however a problem because until then most cemeteries had been property of Buddhist temples. The solution adopted was the opening of public burial grounds. In 1872, Meiji authorities confiscated a portion of Tennō-ji and declared it a public Tokyo cemetery, the largest in the country at the time. In 1935 the name was changed from Yanaka Bochi to the present (Yanaka Reien).

Notable burials

Arisaka Nariakira
Baba Tatsui
Ichirō Hatoyama
Ichiyo Higuchi
Momoko Kochi
Oden Takahashi
Shibusawa Eiichi
Murata Tsuneyoshi
Tokugawa Yoshinobu
Nicholas of Japan
Jōno Saigiku
Ichijō Mikako

Access

The cemetery lies 1 minute from JR's Nippori Station and 5 minutes from JR's Nishi-Nippori Station and Uguisudani Station.

Gallery

File:Yanaka inviting doorway.jpg File:Yanaka grave.jpg File:Yanaka Cemetery - spring - 2021 March 29.ogg File:Yanaka gravemarker.jpg File:Yanaka gravemarker2.jpg File:Yanaka gravemarker3.jpg File:MurataTsuneyoshi20121006.jpg File:Yanaka_Cemetery_grave_(Dec_2019).jpg File:Yanaka Cemetery graves (Dec 2019).jpg File:Yanaka cemetery- Dec 30 2020 various 23 16 25 305000.jpeg

References

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

parks-and-gardens-in-tokyo neighborhoods-of-tokyo cemeteries-in-japan hanami-spots-of-japan taitō

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