akatsuki park

"'Look at those crappy Western buildings with their red-slate roofs...You know the rich people living over there? They’re all stockholders and board members of the company we work for. Understand? Those rich people with the brick houses, they don’t even think of us as human beings. They have no qualms about working us half to death.'"

– The Memoirs of Oizumi Kokuseki, 1919

In the Tsukiji neighborhood of Chuo Ward, there’s a historic district full of a particular genre of historical monument. They commemorate hassho no chi, or “birthplaces.” The most prominent one sits on the outskirts of Akatsuki Park, along “Settlement Street.” This marks the heart of a 19th century enclave for people from Europe and North America.

For thirty years, from 1869 to 1899, this neighborhood hosted many of Tokyo’s first embassies, churches, and Christian colleges. But to grasp the origins of the Tsukiji area, we have to go back two hundred years before the foreign settlement, to 1657, when an enormous fire wiped out much of Tokyo, which was then known as Edo.

The fire destroyed a major temple in Asakusa, called Hongan-ji. New land was created in the shallows of the Sumida River for rebuilding the temple. It was called “Tsukiji,” which means “artificial land.” With time, a family of temples grew up around the new Tsukiji Hongan-ji. Several regional lords built second homes in the area. One of those homes became a hub for early studies of Western medicine and philosophy. In the 1770s, one o f those scholars produced the first Japanese translation of a European book: a Dutch anatomy textbook. About a century later, in 1858, a low-ranking samurai named Fukuzawa Yukichi opened a school for Western studies nearby. It later became Keio University, one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

The same year Fukuzawa opened his school, Japan’s government signed a pivotal treaty with the United States. The 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce allowed U.S. citizens to reside in Japan, but only in isolated enclaves in a few cities. The treaty gave U.S. citizens a status called “extraterritoriality,” which exempted them from the jurisdiction of Japanese law. Similar treaties followed with Russia, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These agreements became known as “the unequal treaties.”

The foreign settlement in Tokyo was small and isolated. It was surrounded by water on three sides, and guards were stationed at every entrance. Its first major hub was the Tsukiji Hotel. With the war’s end, several countries moved their consulates to small buildings around the hotel. The U.S. moved its embassy to Settlement Street.

The second wave of settlers were Christian missionaries, who filled the area with churches and schools. A Presbyterian from Virginia, Julia Carothers, built the city’s first boarding school for girls. Another Virginian named Channing Williams began an Anglican private school in his home. Rikkyo University grew into a campus of brick buildings, designed by a New York architecture firm. In the early 1900s, the university moved to Ikebukuro, where it remains today.

In 1899, the promulgation of the Japanese Constitution nullified the unequal treaties and extraterritoriality. For the first time, foreign residents were allowed to live anywhere in the city. By the time the foreign settlement closed, three-quarters of its land was occupied by churches, mission houses, or schools, representing 13 different Christian denominations.

And so, Tsukiji remained a hub for North Americans and Europeans for years. It transitioned into a posh neighborhood favored by the city’s elite. It struck a stark contrast with the smelters, factories, and shipyards of Tsukishima–the artificial island just across the river. The writer Oizumi Kokuseki worked in the Tsukishima factories around the turn of the century. His memoir recalls a fellow worker’s disdain for the neighborhood across the river:

“Look at those crappy western buildings with their red-slate roofs...You know the rich people living over there–they’re all stockholders and board members at the company we work for. You got that? Those workers who stare out across the river from the windows of their tenement houses...they’ve got no self-respect. Those rich people with the brick houses, they don’t even think of us as human beings. They have no problem with working us half-way to death.”

In 1902, a U.S. physician named Rudolf Teusler founded St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tsukiji. It remains one of Tokyo’s leading hospitals. St. Luke’s is one of the few remnants of when Tsukiji was a hub for foreigners. The 1923 Kanto Earthquake destroyed most of the schools, churches, and homes that came out of the foreign settlement.

One of the few survivors was the city’s first Catholic church: the Cathedral of St. Joseph. Even the building that started it all, Tsukiji Hongan-ji, collapsed in the quake. The temple was rebuilt in 1934, this time incorporating Indian and Burmese influences. But the rebuilding split Tsukiji in half. After the quake, city planners expanded Tokyo’s road network. One of their centerpieces was Harumi Avenue, which ate up half of what once was the inner sanctum of Tsukiji Hongan-ji.

The area south of the new roadway became the city’s new central market. The area north of Harumi Avenue, where the foreign settlement had been, was rebuilt into something much sleepier, and far less posh than the old neighborhood. In the decades after World War II, even the canals that once hemmed in the settlement were filled in. The canal where the Tsukiji River meets the Sumida was filled in in the late sixties.

In its place arose Akatsuki Park, which opened on November 3, 1971. The Tsukiji area is like a patch quilt. Every generation stitches new pieces into the fabric, and tears out others. The “birthplace monuments” around Akatsuki Park make me think of the little space of trauma between the swatch that gets ripped out and the neighboring ones that get left behind.

The monuments are Tsukiji’s seamlines. They embody the people and places that used to be, as well as the neighborhood’s reluctance to say goodbye. The latest incision in the quilt came in 2018, when Tsukiji Market was relocated to make way for new development.

Thankfully, the neighborhood of restaurants and vendors that flourished for over 90 years just outside the market will remain. And so, the name “Outer Market” has itself become a kind of seam line: at once a mark of what used to be, and a mark of resistance against the politicians and developers who forced out their neighbors in the first place.