The Burning of Shiba Park

Every week, I pick up trash at Shiba Park. I was six the first time I visited. My mom took me – we lived by a military base in neighboring Kanagawa Prefecture, and made a special trip to see Tokyo Tower. Over twenty years later, my wife and I spent a few weeks living in a short-term lease just outside the park.

As a morning jogger, the fragmentation of the place perplexed me. It seemed less like a coherent park and more like green islands scattered in the meager gaps between highways and high rises. But as a park volunteer, I learned that I had it backwards. The bits of green were not filler, but remnants of a much larger park that existed around Zojoji Temple between 1873 and 1945. I learned that Seibu Holdings, a hotel developer, began inundating the northern and southern reaches of the park with buildings and parking in the 1950s. The green islands are what survived the flood.

One historian of Tokyo's parks has written that Shiba has the most complex history of any park in the city. The decades following the Pacific War were especially dizzying, as complex dealings between the Japanese government, the Tokyo metropolitan government, Zojoji Temple, Seibu Holdings, and the Tokugawa family put the park through immense upheaval. The result was a flood of development that submerged much of the old park beneath hotels and parking lots.

However, I was surprised to learn that this upheaval was, in fact, sparked by Boeing bombers and Standard Oil napalm. That history is burned into a gingko tree in Lot 4, the northernmost of Shiba Park's green islands. The "War-Damage Gingko" (sensai icho) is a survivor of the Tokyo Air Raids – firebombing raids waged against the city by the United States in the final months of the war. In the seventy-six years since it was torched, the War-Damage Gingko has regenerated a new healthy trunk atop its old burnt one. It sits in a lonely corner of the park, far from any playgrounds or benches; and so, every week, I set down my trash bag of beer cans and cigarette butts, and keep it company for a few minutes.

In this essay, I lay out what goes through my mind in those moments by the War-Damage Gingko. I think not only about the historical record, but also about what responsibilities we American visitors have to Shiba Park, and to other places in the city affected by the U.S. firebombings. To be sure, the loss of some park pales in comparison to the other losses engendered by those attacks – a single raid on March 10, 1945 displaced a million people and killed at least 100,000 in a matter of hours. (1) Even so, perhaps places like Shiba Park can become sites of study and care – and, hopefully, of acknowledgement and accountability – for we Americans who visit and live in this city.

"Borderlands Adjoining the Realm of Death"

Originally established by government decree in 1873, Shiba Park was once a vast green space centered on Zojoji Temple. Gradually, it was outfitted with benches and play equipment and, in 1905, several scenic zones were curated by pioneering landscape architect Nagaoka Yasuhei.

But Shiba Park inherited its greatest treasures from Zojoji, the former mortuary temple of the Tokugawa family. The Tokugawa sat at the top of Japan's central government from the early fifteenth century until 1868. The temple grounds hosted ornate tombs honoring several generations of Tokugawa rulers, going back to the 1630s. The tombs were situated in two zones – one to the north of Zojoji’s main hall, and another to the south. The southern graveyard was home to the tombs of Hidetada (the second Tokugawa shogun) and his wife Oeyo, as well as a shrine commemorating Hidetada's father, Ieyasu. The northern graveyard housed the tombs of five more Tokugawa rulers, as well as the grave of Kazunomiya, an imperial princess who married into the family in the 19th century. (2)

Incredibly, Hidetada’s tomb went up next to an even older tomb, known today as the Shiba Maruyama Tumulus. Scholars believe the tumulus was constructed sometime in the fifth century for a powerful regional family. The archeologist Nakazawa Shinichi suggests that it was Shiba's geography that recommended it as a gravesite down through the centuries:

Thousands of years ago, during the Jomon Period, the earth was warmer than it is now, and the glaciers then covering the earth had begun to melt. Tokyo Bay extended much further inland than it does now. Back then the Shiba area was a vast and magnificent peninsula jutting out into the wide expanse of Tokyo Bay.

The Shiba peninsula was known to the people who lived there as an important holy place called “Sa.” The sound “sa” was an ancient term used in special situations to signify a border. When a person’s consciousness (mind) encountered a place beyond its comprehension, these ancient humans perceived “sa” as having manifested there. “Sa” was a concept tied to nature, used to indicate where things human made contact with things beyond the human – a place of contact and collapse. This is where the ancient Japanese words misaki (cape) and sakai (border) come from. It represents a transcendental realm – the borderlands adjoining the realm of death…

The Shiba peninsula was one of many such "misaki" in Tokyo. As such, for thousands of years, key holy places for burying the dead have been built there. Down through the ages, the perception was not lost that this was a zone of contact with the world of the dead. Ruling families competed to build huge burial mounds in Shiba’s highlands. From there, the tombs commanded a panoramic view of the vast ocean, and one could stretch their arms out to the sea – where the spirits of the dead were thought to reside. (3)

Even now, there is something truly transcendental about the summit of the Maruyama Tumulus. Today it consists of a bumpy path stretching north to a wide oval opening. Zelkovas ring the oval and their canopies gently converge toward the center, like pillars in a cathedral enclosing a sanctuary.

The Tokugawa tombs fascinated the famed early-twentieth century writer Nagai Kafu (1879–1959). In his essay Mausoleum (霊廟), Kafu describes himself climbing a hill overlooking Hidetada’s tomb – possibly the Maruyama Tumulus – on a snowy night in 1911. He admires the tomb complex from above:

In the branches of an old tree, weaving a pattern against the darkly luminous sky, an owl was hooting. The moonlight turned the several roofs of the mortuary chapel into sheets of silver and the colors under the eaves info elfin fires. Beyond the roofs the level ground before the chapel was indescribably quiet and smooth, like the surface of a lake. The two and three rectangular fences enclosing it, the sharply erect lines of stone lanterns, and the stone pillars of the two purification fonts balancing each other to the left and right – all of these floated up sharply as if carved out by the mysterious light of the moon, and, if I may be permitted a slight exaggeration, it seemed to me that all of the symmetrical lines before me combined to give forth music. But it was of a nature wholly different from the forms of Wagner, the rules of Debussy. Rather, it was a whisper of a peculiar art transmitted in secrecy by the shapes of the land, audible only to the hearts of those born in the land.

After a stint living in the United States and Europe, Kafu came to see the Tokugawa tombs in Shiba Park as one of the last precious vestiges of the old city, before the incursion of Western-style architecture, transit, and industry:

It is nearly a half century since a political revolution of sorts...In the culture that has since been built in our capital, there have been trains and streetcars and factories, but that art of the people known as architecture has been quite destroyed. And with every moment that passes, our land takes on more completely the appearance of an Anglo-Saxon colony. The old and beautiful are disappearing before our eyes, and the new and good have not yet begun to send out shoots. If, wandering through a city as if wandering through huts put up on a burned-over waste, we may yet hope to come upon a corner where there remains a shade of past glory, where is that corner if not by these abandoned tombs?” (4)

At the start of the essay Kafu notes that Zojoji’s main hall had been destroyed by anti-Buddhist arsonists just a year earlier, in 1910. He compares Hidetada’s tomb to “the tired visage of a beautiful noblewoman, whose life hangs by a thread each passing day.”

"In the Night there Was a Raid..."

Every week, my walk through Shiba begins at the Maruyama Tumulus. Passing through a grove of plum blossoms, I head up a flight of stone steps. After stopping to pray at the small shrine halfway up the mound, I head up to the cathedral of zelkovas. I sit for a few minutes at the northern end of the summit, probably not far from where Kafu sat over a century ago. But Kafu would not recognize the view from there today. Where he once saw Hidetada’s tomb, now looms the Seibu Group’s Prince Park Tower Hotel. Where he once might’ve glimpsed the northern graveyard, there is a huge parking lot for another Seibu property, the Tokyo Prince Hotel.

Maybe he would recognize the gates that still survive on the outskirts of the parking lot: the Nitenmon (on the east side, recently restored) and the Onarimon (on the north, in rougher shape). Nearby placards proclaim that these gates are "Important Cultural Properties," yet fail to explain how they ended up a stone’s throw from parking meters.

But the placards do name a culprit: the U.S. firebombing raids of 1945. Kafu recounts the March 10 raid in his diary, including the loss of his own home in the hills neighboring Shiba Park:

In the night there was a raid. At four in the morning my [home] was burned down...I was startled by the light at the window and the shouting next door, no ordinary sort of shouting, and I took up the briefcase that contained my diary and manuscripts and went out into the garden...Whipped by the wind, sparks were landing in the garden. I saw that disaster was inevitable, and started out toward the main street through clouds of smoke that already hung over the neighborhood...I went a few steps up a side alley, and saw that the oaks by the foreign house next door and the big tree in my own garden were masses of flame. The wind blew great vortices of black smoke at me. I could not get near enough to see the house itself go. I could only watch the flames mount higher into the sky. And in that moment I knew that my [home] and my ten thousand volumes were gone.

The next day, he records the destruction of the park itself:

The fires last night virtually reduced [the city] to ashes, from Senju in the north to Shiba in the south. The Asakusa Kannon and its pagoda, the Yoshiwara, the temples and mortuary shrines in Shiba Park, were all laid waste... (5)

Contrary to Kafu's account, the March raid only destroyed partially destroyed the Shiba precinct. The rest – in particular, the southern graveyard – was destroyed in another air raid on May 25th. (6) At any rate, the metaphorical “burned-over waste” Kafu imagined decades prior became a reality. Only this time, the arsonists were American. (7)

For over a decade after the firebombings, Shiba Park still had the look of a warzone. The extent of the ruin is visible in Moonlight Mask, a superhero TV show aired in 1958. A scene plays out in Lot 1, near the former approach to Hidetada’s tomb. In the background loom the haggard remains of the So-mon Gate (which still survives, though it has been moved closer to Hibiya Avenue) and the Chokugakumon Gate (since relocated by the Seibu Group to Saitama Prefecture). Unkempt weeds and ramshackle fencing fill out the rest of the frame, along with a partially-built Tokyo Tower. (8)

Photos of Tokyo Tower's ascent are invaluable resources for understanding the state of the park in the years after the firebombing. The photographer Iwanaga Tatsuo opens and closes his 2005 collection When Tokyo Tower Stood Up: Us 50 Years Ago with shots of the partially-completed tower framed by the wreckage of the southern graveyard. (9)

For the archeologist Nakazawa Shinichi, the proximity made Tokyo Tower a "tower of thanatos":

At first, there was talk of building the world’s tallest broadcast tower at Ueno Park, but ultimately it was decided that it would be built at Shiba Park. For we earth-divers, that fact carries hints of destiny...toward the end of World War II, heavy bombing by the U.S. military completely transformed Shiba into a burned ruin. It remained a barren wasteland for a decade after the war...

[Tokyo Tower] was built on a desolate wasteland surrounded by the fresh ruins of the Tokyo Air Raids...amidst the exposed ruins of a kingdom of death...[it] ascends to the heavens on the shoulders of the dead." (10)

"One Less Lawless Zone to Worry About..."

In the ruins of Shiba Park, the mega developer Tsutsumi Yasujiro recognized a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. His company Seibu Group was, and remains, a huge conglomerate with stakes in rail and bus transit, hotels, department stores, and construction. (11) Toward the end of the U.S. Occupation, Tsutsumi directed his attorney Nakajima Chuzaburo to buy up the graveyards and ready them for redevelopment.

It sounds preposterous. How could a private developer snatch a historic site from within a public park? How could a company buy hallowed ground maintained by one of Japan’s most powerful temples on behalf of a prominent family that had ruled the entire country less than a century prior?

But three factors cleared the way for Tsutsumi, two of which trace back to the firebombings. First, obviously, was the destruction of the Tokugawa tombs themselves. The national government declared Hidetada’s tomb complex an important cultural property in 1930 (12), meaning developers were barred from touching the site. This changed in 1949, when the government officially rescinded the designation because the tomb no longer existed. (13)

Second, dozens of Tokyoites left homeless by the firebombings found refuge inside Shiba Park. Nakajima recalls about fifty shelters, some even outfitted with power lines. Nakajima portrays the shantytown as a "lawless zone" where even the police refused to tread – in his telling, city officials hoped Seibu would drive out the refugees. Their presence, Nakajima suggests, dissuaded competing bids for the graveyards, which meant that Seibu could buy the land on the cheap. (14) An official history published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Parks Association argues that the city could, in theory, have mounted a competing bid, but was too cash-strapped at the time to do so. Instead, Tokyo officials opted to let the graveyards fall into corporate hands, and then try to convince the new owner to include some semblance of publicly-accessible park space in their redevelopment plans. (15)

Finally, the U.S. Occupation levied new wealth and inheritance taxes that left the Tokugawa family in dire financial straits. The family chose to sell the graveyards inside Shiba Park to make ends meet. So, the convergence of U.S. bombs and Occupation tax policy left the Tokugawa graveyard ruins vulnerable to real estate developers. (16)

Between 1950 and 1952, Seibu purchased the two graveyards – mainly, Lot 1 (the southern graveyard) and Lot 3 (the northern) in six installments. Meanwhile, Nakajima set about evicting squatters throughout the park. He recalls the task in his memoir:

I requested cooperation from the city and the police, but they were in no rush to oblige. On the contrary, their people came back asking us to handle [the evictions]. After thinking a bit, I asked the city to furnish a single document to Seibu Railway. The document read: “Given that the area of the Tokugawa family’s former land holdings have fallen into disrepair, we desire your cooperation in cleaning them up.” Fortunately, the city agreed to my request. Of course, for our part, we sent them a memo stating that we would not bill the government for clean-up costs...Parts of the illegally occupied area were owned by Zojoji and the central government, but we cleared those areas just as we did our own. Now that city officials had one less lawless zone to worry about, they were extremely grateful to us. (17)

Tsutsumi’s plans faced some temporary roadblocks – including boundary disputes with Zojoji, a local preservation ordinance on Lot 3, plans for highway expansion near Lot 1 – but most were resolved by the early 1960s. By then, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were close at hand. The city wanted more lodging for overseas visitors, and Seibu obliged with the twelve-story Tokyo Prince Hotel, which went up on Lot 3. (18) Tsutsumi died on April 26, 1964, mere months before the hotel opened. (19)

Decades later, in 2005, Tsutsumi’s son Yoshiaki opened the Prince Park Tower Hotel on Seibu’s Lot 1 holdings (which had served as a driving range in the meantime). The journalist Kiriyama Hideki tells the tower’s story in his 2005 book The Prince’s Tombstone. He notes that, aside from resembling a tombstone, the tower also stands directly on top of what was once Hidetada’s tomb – the complex so admired by Nagai Kafu.

In Kiriyama’s telling, the Prince Park Tower represents a kind of death for the Seibu Group as well. Just one month after the hotel opened, Yoshiaki was arrested on charges that he had falsified shareholder records and engaged in insider trading. While at the helm of his father’s company, Yoshiaki amassed $16 billion USD – making him, at the time, among the wealthiest people on earth. After his arrest he lost much of that fortune, and Seibu was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange for nearly a decade. Police apprehended Yoshiaki at the Tokyo Prince Hotel, on the grounds of the former northern graveyard. (20)

Did the Tsutsumi family curse itself by building on the Tokugawa graveyards? “Nowadays, people tell me that we never should’ve built a hotel there,” one former Seibu employee admits to Kiriyama. “Even when we were building it, there were voices inside Seibu who were critical of the project.” Indeed, a worker at the Prince Park Tower reports that the water in the hotel’s natural hot spring comes out tinged a light red color. (21)

To be sure, Seibu was not the only force that re-shaped Shiba Park after the war. In 1952, the Japanese government returned ownership of the Zojoji precinct to the temple. As a result, Shiba Park Lot 2 became Zojoji's property, and a legal dispute broke out between the temple and Seibu over ownership of parts of Lots 1 and 3. (22) Furthermore, a small area east of the Maruyama Tumulus was later partitioned from the city park and given to Minato Ward, which refashioned it into a separate park in 2006 (confusingly, it is also called "Shiba Park"). (23)

Still, if we ask today why there are towers where there were tombs; walls where there were walkways; grass where there were gates; parking where there was parkland, all answers point in the same direction: to the 1945 firebombings, and the redevelopment thereafter by Seibu. The U.S. air raids played a significant role in transforming Shiba from a coherent urban park – a precious, historic remnant of the old Tokugawa city – into a loose, hollowed-out circle of green spots.

"Care is the Antidote to Violence"

I grew up inside the military that burned Shiba Park. I attended DoD base schools (including one in Zama, just outside Tokyo), learned to swim in MWR pools, and packed uniforms for the Navy Exchange when I was in high school. My grandfather, father, step-father, sister, aunts, uncles – all went to work for the same military that burned Shiba Park. When I was finishing grad school and unsure what to do next, I figured I’d end up going the same route. I think about that every week when I sit with the War-Damage Tree. Setting down my trash bag, I gently touch my palm to the charcoaled bark, and bring it back to my heart.

In the United States, we are taught to understand our bombing of Japanese cities as a trolley problem: terror bombing civilians forced the Japanese government to surrender; a land invasion would have killed even more civilians; and so on. I am reminded of this when I look at the War-Damage Tree. The outer trunk shoots out branches that split into twos and threes and fours, like the many disparate chains of counterfactuality we've conjured to soothe our consciences. This thick canopy of hypotheticals obscures the charred tree trunk beneath, wherein resides what the Japanese essayist Hotta Yoshie once called “terror of the irreversibility, the irrevocability, of that which we call history.” (24)

Avoiding that terror has not simply led us into delusion; it has also short-circuited accountability. To be sure, claiming accountability, however it is to be done, will not be soothing – for us, or for our Japanese neighbors. Mariame Kaba teaches that accountability is not healing, but rather an unavoidable first step toward it. (25) And the countless civilians left dead worldwide by U.S. air strikes in the seventy-six years since the burning of Shiba Park attest: the longer we avoid accountability, the more monstrous we will become.

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent best-seller The Bomber Mafia shows the degree to which the American consensus on the bombing of Japanese cities remains accountability-averse. Gladwell’s book frames those assaults as the result of a last-minute apostasy from precision bombing among a few Army Air Force leaders in the final months of the war. As David Fedman and Cary Karacas explain in their review, this omits extensive evidence to the contrary: that the U.S. government had, in fact, spent years planning and preparing to torch Japanese cities. Even as he posits the moral superiority of precision bombing, Gladwell still invokes the consensus defense of the U.S. air raids on Japan: that they "brought everyone – Americans and Japanese – back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible.” One of the few Japanese voices in the book belongs to an unnamed academic: “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.”

It is discouraging that someone as widely-read as Gladwell would perpetuate these ideas. But thankfully, there exists a growing body of countervailing English-language scholarship. Aaron William Moore – author of Bombing the City, which compiles the testimonies of Japanese air raid survivors – co-wrote a response to Gladwell with Ran Zwigenberg. Paper City, a feature length documentary about air raid survivors and their campaign for government recognition, is set to premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2021. JapanAirRaids.org, a bilingual archive spearheaded by Fedman and Karacas, is another invaluable resource.

We Americans living in and around Tokyo, both on the bases and off, can – must – help build upon their work. This should entail not only delving into the excellent resources above, but also studying the impacts of the firebombings on our own neighborhoods —and, sharing what we learn with our families and friends back home. We must also engage with the work of our Japanese neighbors. Despite negligence and even outright antagonism from the national and metropolitan governments, survivors have spent decades organizing to memorialize the firebombings. Chief among them is the Center for the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, organized by local survivors after the city built an air raid memorial inside Yokoamicho Park against their wishes (detailed by Karacas here).

Of course, study is not simply a matter of reading books and visiting museums. For me, the work of picking up trash in Shiba Park has been the most energizing form of study. It not only connects me with the affected place, but also propels me toward further reading, and then onto further on-site observation — and then, even, to prayer. Throughout the city, especially east of the Sumida, there are open-air memorial stones to the victims, usually next to canal bridges. Anyone may visit them. Anyone may pay their respects.

Every December, Americans converge on Shiba Park from across the Tokyo area. For several weeks Lot 4, the northernmost section of the park, transforms into the Tokyo Christmas Market. Visitors enter via a long red carpet lined with small shacks selling Christmas ornaments. A German Christmas pyramid greets them in the beer garden. Food stalls and picnic tables fill out the oval-shaped sports ground. Before covid, drunken karaoke echoed through the park.

So, if you find yourself in Shiba Park for the Christmas Market this year, consider taking a detour off the red carpet. Head up the Maruyama Tumulus and admire the city, as Nagai Kafu once did, from its cathedral of zelkovas. Stroll through the Shiba Prince Park – the flat Seibu-owned expanse where Hidetada’s tomb once stood. Venture out to the old gates at the edge of the Tokyo Prince Hotel parking lot. Then, take a moment to reflect under the War-Damage Tree. Look past the canopy of hypotheticals and take account of the burns beneath. How can we support one another in taking accountability? Let’s take our cue from the scholar Saidiya Hartman: “care is the antidote to violence.” (26)