koishikawa korakuen garden

"When I’m strolling about the city...I notice that the mansions of the most prominent feudal lords have, more often than not, become military sites. The Satake mansion in Shitaya is now a training ground for the Army. We see today that the estates of the Owari Domain...not to mention the Mito family’s mansion in Koishikawa, have all fallen under the control of the Army, which has slowly trampled their legendary gardens into ruin."

– Fairweather Sandals, 1916

In Fairweather Sandals, the classic 1914 chronicle of Tokyo’s cityscape, Nagai Kafu muses time and again about the villainy of the Japanese military, which he saw as one of the great threats to his city’s heritage and beauty.

He wrote:

When I’m strolling about the city...I notice that the mansions of the most prominent feudal lords have, more often than not, become military sites. The Satake mansion in Shitaya is now a training ground for the Army. We see today that the estates of the Owari Domain...not to mention the Mito family’s mansion in Koishikawa, have all fallen under the control of the Army, which has slowly trampled their legendary gardens into ruin.

The Yokuon-en Garden...in Teppozu, was once counted alongside the Koraku-en Garden in Koishikawa as among the most beautiful in Edo. But today, it’s become a club where the Naval Ministry’s rowdy sailors meet up to get drunk. Anyone who looks at a map of Tokyo after seeing one of Edo might find themselves reflecting on the history of the French Revolution. In some ways, we find ourselves immersed in even greater depths of sorrow than the French. After all, they didn’t use their revolution as a pretense for wantonly destroying Versaille, the Louvre, and other great architectural achievements of their nation.

Word has it that the modern Japanese bureaucracy esteems the teachings of Confucius and preaches the ways of loyalty and duty. Yet, whenever I pass through Ochanomizu, I look upon the front gate of the Confucian temple there–the one with a sign that says “Aspire Greatly”–and see nothing but fallen roof tiles and unkempt weeds, left to the ravages of the wind and rain. What is even more astounding is that the public sees nothing wrong with this...

If you told Kafu that the Koishikawa Korakuen would still be around over a century later, he probably wouldn’t believe you. Kafu grew up in Koishikawa, and the garden had been military property for his entire life. Nowadays, we take for granted big public green spaces like Hibiya, Aoyama, Toyama, and Yoyogi.

But in Kafu’s time, those parks were all military installations too. For him, the military was a stain on the cityscape. It destroyed beautiful gardens and forests to make way for noxious firing ranges and parade grounds. On the other hand, the military’s presence in the city did have an unexpected upside: It saved large expanses of land from private development. This is a big reason why the Korakuen is still with us today. But that’s not to say that the military’s presence came without a price. In some ways, Korakuen is still paying it.

The garden’s official name is Koishikawa Korakuen. It is among the city’s oldest green spaces, with roots going back almost 400 years. Korakuen was built in 1629, by the Mito family, which ruled the domain just north of Tokyo (then called Edo). In the 1670s, the head of the Mito family granted asylum to a Confucian scholar named Zhu Zhiyu, a refugee of the collapsing Ming dynasty.

The Chinese influences seen in Korakuen, such as the Engetsu Bridge, trace to him. So does the name “Korakuen.” The name comes from a Chinese aphorism, which says that a ruler should only rest after they’ve secured the well-being of their subjects. Over the centuries, Korakuen remained one of the most celebrated gardens in the city, until the overthrow of Japan’s feudal government in 1868. The Tokyo gardens of the country’s feudal lords were, to quote Kafu, “left to the ravages of the wind and rain.”

The Yokuon-en Garden in Tsukiji caught the worst of it. The garden was seized by the new government and turned over to the navy. It became the site of the Naval Ministry, Naval Academy, and Naval Arsenal, among other navy facilities. Korakuen was relatively lucky. The Army decided to turn the Mito estate into an arsenal. They began by demolishing the northern end of the garden, where they built brick factories for making guns and artillery.

Meanwhile, what remained of the garden fell into disrepair. Plans were drawn up to demolish the rest for conversion into more weapons factories. Those plans would have gone through if not for the fact that the head of the Army, Yamagata Aritomo, was also a talented garden designer. He intervened to stop any further re-development of Korakuen.

Instead, the Army committed to restoring and maintaining the gardens as part of the arsenal complex. In 1874, it re-opened Korakuen to the public. In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed the arsenal at Korakuen. Fires from the munitions factories spread to the garden, causing massive damage. Rather than rebuild, the Army decided to relocate to Fukuoka, where it would have more room to grow. The move was hastened by the Army’s invasion of northeastern China in 1931, which supercharged its demand for weapons.

Before the move was done, the lieutenant-general in charge of the arsenal, Uemura Haruhiko, arranged for a memorial stone to be installed inside Korakuen. But Uemura’s name was scratched off the stone in 1937. Most likely because he was convicted of accepting bribes from private weapons dealers. Meanwhile, the former site of the arsenal was used to build the city’s premiere baseball field: Korakuen Stadium.

In 1938, the garden reopened to the public. But by then, Japan’s war in China was in full swing. Before long, the Army would be back at the gates of Korakuen Garden, barking orders as if it still ran the place. In 1943, the military ordered the garden to catalog all usable lumber in the garden, just in case the military needed to requisition it for the war effort.

Long-range artillery, machine guns, and several military divisions were stationed around the Korakuen Garden and inside the stadium. As Japan’s losses mounted, the military requisitioned the stadium to house artillerymen. It then turned the baseball field into a patch for growing potatoes, pumpkin, cucumbers, and corn. The war’s end brought the demise of the Army. But, as with many places in Tokyo, if you look closely, the ghosts of the military are still everywhere to see.

In 1964, the city built a small park using a piece of the old arsenal site. It contains a memorial to Tokyo’s war dead, as well as remnants of a weapons factory and shooting range. For some, baseball matches in places like the nearby Korakuen Stadium suggested that the shadow of the military reached even beyond these physical remnants. In his 1967 book High School Baseball and Fanaticism, the famous sociologist Sakuta Keiichi draws a throughline from prewar militarism to the culture of the Japanese sports world. Win or lose, it was common in Japanese baseball for players to cry together on the field after losing a game. This elicited tears from the crowd too. Sakuta writes that the sight of it all left him both deeply moved and deeply disturbed. On the one hand, he admired the passion of the players. He felt himself moved to tears, along with the rest of the crowd.

On the other hand, he hated the idea of letting himself get swept up in a display of mass emotion. For him, that felt like giving into the same mass fanaticism that the military promoted before and during the war. All this crying, in Sakuta’s view, demonstrated the extreme pressure that society put on athletes to win–for the glory of their schools, their hometowns, and, in the case of the Olympics, their nation. The soldiers and guns disappeared from Korakuen after the war, but their legacy lived on.

Another cycle of redevelopment began in 1988, with the construction of the Tokyo Dome. “The Big Egg,” as locals called it, jutted right into the stands of Korakuen Stadium, which was demolished shortly thereafter. The shift from “Korakuen Stadium” to “Tokyo Dome” said something about the newly “global” ethos of the city–or, at least, of its real estate developers. It was no longer acceptable for a major landmark to be so locally rooted–for its name to come from something as parochial as the old garden it was built on.

Since the Tokyo Dome’s arrival, a slew of high-rises have been built in the neighborhood, damaging the scenic atmosphere of the garden. This led, in 2002, to the formation of the non-profit Koishikawa Korakuen Preservation Society, which has organized symposia and petition drives to stop further high-rise construction.

Over a hundred years ago, the Japanese Army converted a piece of the Korakuen into an arsenal. The arsenal made way for Korakuen Stadium, which, decades later, made way for the Tokyo Dome. And into the breach created by the Tokyo Dome ran the high-rise development we see today. There’s no arguing that we wouldn’t have what remains of the Korakuen if the Army hadn’t stepped in to care for it.

But it’s fascinating how the Army’s choice to develop even one piece of the garden over a hundred years ago continues to have such huge repercussions all these years later, long after the Army itself is dead and gone.