KYU FURUKAWA GARDENS

"...I saw the miners and their families press themselves against the iron front gate, clamoring to present their petition to me directly...Until then, I hadn’t paid much attention to their struggles. I felt a boundless wave of sympathy well up inside me. And so, I was left with no choice but to take a hard look at my lifestyle, and take serious strides toward repentance…"

– The Autobiography of Furukawa Toranosuke, 1953

If you drive about an hour and a half north of Tokyo, you’ll find a heart-shaped basin at the end of the Watarase River, nestled into the intersection of the borders of Saitama, Gunma, and Tochigi. The basin sits downriver from a copper mining town called Ashio. The mines closed in the 1970s. But at the turn of the 20th century, Ashio produced 40% of all Japanese copper. Back then, Japan was desperate for copper. The national government in Tokyo launched a campaign of rapid industrialization in the 1870s. Electric lights, industrial machinery, and communication systems all depended on copper.

A businessman named Furukawa Ichibei bought the Ashio mines in 1877. With financial backing from Tokyo banks, the Furukawa Mining Company introduced modern mining tech to Ashio. Furukawa quickly became one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country–the "Copper King" of Japan. Yet, the most enduring symbol of the wealth that came out of the mines of Ashio is not in Ashio. It’s in the northern reaches of Tokyo: a beautiful city park called the Kyu-Furukawa Gardens.

Alongside the Watarase River Basin, the Gardens embody the following maxim of environmental historian Brett Walker:

“[The Ashio Mines] created civilization for some Japanese; it destroyed worlds for others.”

The villages along the Watarase River sounded the alarm early. In the 1880s, they noticed a spike in infant mortality. Paddie farmers were getting red rashes on their feet and hands. Fish were turning up dead in the water. The mines were to blame. Slag heaps were seeping copper into the Watarase River. The Furukawa smelters spewed toxic fumes that turned into acid rain, which further poisoned the river and the communities who depended on it. The farmers were hit especially hard. They counted on the annual flooding of the Watarase to enrich their fields. But by the 1890s, the floods of copper-laced river water had contaminated nearly 400 square miles of farmland. Farmers began calling the Watarase the “River of Death.”

Around the turn of the century, they organized five marches on Tokyo to protest the pollution. In 1900, a team of riot police were dispatched to beat them back at the Tone River. The national government and Furukawa took some measures to address the pollution. But ultimately, its preferred solution was to stop the flooding, not the copper mining. The Home Ministry, newly led by former Furukawa vice president Hara Kei, decided to create a river basin near the terminus of the Watarase. Hara oversaw the destruction of three villages to make way for the new Watarase Basin: Kawabe, Toshima, and Yanaka.

Meanwhile, back in Tokyo, big changes were afoot for the Furukawa company. Furukawa Ichibei had died in 1903. The company passed into the hands of Ichibei’s adopted son, Junkichi, but he died just two years later. Control then passed to Ichibei’s other son: Furukawa Toranosuke. When Junkichi died, Toranosuke was in New York City, studying at Columbia University. He returned to Tokyo to take over his father’s company. The same year, he married Saigo Fujiko–a daughter of a powerful political dynasty. Toranosuke’s tenure coincided with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The war created a spike in foreign demand for copper. The Ashio mines made the Furukawa family even more absurdly wealthy. In 1918, as the war drew to a close, Toranosuke used this vast wealth to break into the banking business. He built an empire of companies, or “zaibatsu,” centered on the mining business and his newly-minted Furukawa Bank. Meanwhile, Hara Kei, the Furukawas’ greatest political asset, became prime minister.

That same year, construction finished on the Furukawa family’s lavish new estate in Nishigahara. The estate boasted a Western-style rose garden, a Japanese lake garden, and a mansion designed by the British architect Josiah Conder. For the Furukawa family, the estate symbolized the peak of their wealth and power. But for the communities along the Watarase River, it was a symbol of plunder: house built on exploitation and cruelty. Shortly after Toranosuke moved into his new mansion, miners from Ashio staged a protest outside its gates.

As the country slipped into recession after World War I, the miners began a strike for better wages. Many years later, Toranosuke recalled that day in his autobiography:

...I saw the miners and their families press themselves against the iron front gate, clamoring to present their petition to me directly. The incident was photographed and sensationalized in the press, and became quite a big point of social concern at the time. Having witnessed the scene first hand and having heard the miners’ pointed cries with my own ears, I can say that, until then, I hadn’t paid much attention to their struggles.

Setting aside questions of what measures we should take as a company or other such grandiose gestures, I felt a boundless wave of sympathy for them well up inside me. And so, I was left with no choice but to take a hard look at my current lifestyle, and take serious strides toward repentance…

Toranosuke’s remorse at his extravagant “lifestyle” was colored by a chain of hardships that consumed the years he spent in the Furukawa mansion. By 1921, the recession had left Furukawa Bank insolvent. It was bought out by a competitor. That same year, Hara Kei, Toranosuke’s greatest political patron, was assassinated at Tokyo Station. And before the year was out, Toranosuke and Fujiko’s six-year-old son had died of a sudden illness. Toranosuke drank heavily and developed severe insomnia. In 1922, he had a mental breakdown, and left the company to recuperate in Hawaii. He recovered and resumed company control in 1923, just months before the massive Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo. Toranosuke opened the Furukawa estate to refugees, and turned over the mansion for use as a field hospital. 86 units of barrack housing went up in the Furukawa gardens, housing 524 people. By the time it was all over, Toranosuke had had enough of the manor life. For him, the Furukawa mansion had brought nothing but misery. In 1926, he and Fujiko abandoned the estate for a small house in Ushigome. Toranosuke lived there until his death in 1940, at the age of 54. After Toranosuke’s departure, the Furukawa estate changed hands countless times. First, it was used for hosting Furukawa business guests. Toward the end of World War II, it became officer housing for the Japanese army.

After the war, the Furukawa conglomerate was dissolved by the Occupation government. The Furukawa holding company was eliminated, and the Finance Ministry re-possessed the Furukawa mansion and gardens in 1947. After the Occupation, the Furukawa family began negotiations with the Finance Ministry to recover the property. But after talks broke down, the ministry decided to lease the Furukawa Gardens to Tokyo for conversion into a public park, which opened in 1956. The Furukawa mansion was left out of the lease. It was neglected for decades, turning into an ivy-encrusted haunted house. Finally, in 1982, the city declared the mansion a landmark of scenic beauty and set about restoring it. Seven years later, the restored mansion reopened to the public under the management of the Otani Art Museum. Few places in Tokyo embody the capital’s toxic relationship with the provinces as clearly as the Furukawa Gardens.

The rose garden, the serene lake, the copper lining on the mansion’s roof–we cannot admire them without thinking of the Watarase River Basin. Today, only a few monuments along the Watarase's shores bear witness to the communities lost beneath its waters.