Yanaka Cemetery

The last shogun of Japan is buried here, and you would walk right past his grave without knowing it. Tokugawa Yoshinobu — the fifteenth and final Tokugawa shogun, the man who ended seven centuries of military rule by surrendering power to the emperor in eighteen sixty-seven — rests under a surprisingly modest stone. It is about a metre wide and resembles an overturned pot. No grand mausoleum, no elaborate carvings. Just a simple cobblestone marker for the man who closed the book on feudal Japan.

Yanaka Cemetery holds roughly seven thousand graves across over a hundred thousand square metres. Buried here are painters, authors, actors, politicians, and sumo wrestlers from the Meiji era and beyond. It is an open-air museum of Japanese history, if you know how to read the stones.

The central avenue through the cemetery is called Cherry Blossom Avenue, and in April it becomes one of Tokyo's most beautiful and least crowded hanami spots. The trees form a canopy over the path, petals drifting down onto the gravestones. It is simultaneously cheerful and sobering. The cemetery was created in eighteen seventy-two when Meiji authorities confiscated part of Tenno-ji temple for public use.

There used to be a famous five-storied pagoda on the grounds, the subject of a celebrated novel by the writer Koda Rohan. In nineteen fifty-seven, it was destroyed in an arson connected to a double suicide. A couple set fire to the pagoda and died inside it. The pagoda was never rebuilt, and only a small marker indicates where it once stood. Yanaka Cemetery is full of these layers — beauty and death, fame and obscurity, cherry blossoms and ash, all occupying the same quiet ground.