TOKYO, March 13 — We are looking for the final resting place of the face on the 5,000 Japanese yen banknote.
This sounds morbid but it’s no different from literary enthusiasts making pilgrimages to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to visit Oscar Wilde’s tomb or to Santiago, Chile where Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was buried.
Yes, this is a thing — locating and visiting the graves of poets and writers. (And if it sounds strange, visiting the graves of complete strangers, remember that the words of these strangers may move more hearts than family and friends.)
The face on the 5,000 yen banknote is that of Meiji era writer and poet Ichiyo Higuchi. This was a pen name for the author Natsu Higuchi, only the third woman to appear on a Japanese banknote. And she was buried here in the Yanaka Cemetery over a century ago.
Yanaka is no ordinary cemetery. Besides Ichiyo Higuchi, it is also home to other Japanese luminaries such as the last shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Yoshinobu. There are more than 7,000 graves here, which makes it a bit of a labyrinth.
Besides the prestige of its venerable occupants, Yanaka is also beloved for its serene cherry blossom viewing ambience every spring.
Yes, here in Japan, it’s perfectly fine to pair the solemn activity of paying your respects to the dearly departed as well as engaging in some appreciative hanami (cherry blossom viewing).
We have been here once before, shown around by our Tokyo friend Satomi. We had already braved the crowds at Ueno Park and Shinjuku Gyoen but she wanted us to experience something different.
Getting there was easy, especially with a local guide. The cemetery was a short stroll from the train station. And the walk itself was far from unpleasant, considering we were traipsing through a particularly old neighbourhood of Tokyo.
Now we return once again, albeit without our friend. We can remember her instructions and, surprisingly, much of our conversation that first visit. Perhaps you can’t escape the pull of the past, the raison d’être of cemeteries everywhere: to recall and to commemorate.
Memory is our way of giving thanks to what has come before and what we have now.
Quiet and stately, Yanaka still retains much of the pre-war charm. We make our way between rows of old machiya shophouses. There is daily trade here but without any of the manic bustle of the city centre. No loudspeaker exhortations to buy the latest gadget in a stream of foreign languages.
Here, we only hear Japanese voices. There is commerce, but it doesn’t feel commercial. Gratefully, we take in this traditional Shitamachi atmosphere, so rare in the capital.
Upon reaching the cemetery, we enter the main street. It is fondly called the Cherry-blossom Avenue (or Sakura-dori) given how it is lined on both sides with cherry blossom trees. These trees are very mature, and their branches stretch out over us, offering shade and creating a canopy of sakura.
It is simply magical.
Covering an area of over 100,000 square metres, the cemetery is enormous. (It has its own police station!) You can take hours to explore it, and we do. At a most leisurely pace, the only way to enjoy this most unlikely Eden of cherry blossoms.
Some visitors are here to clean family graves, to replace dried bouquets with fresh flowers. Others are enjoying the view and the walk, as we are. The ones with small children make sure their little ones don’t make too much noise (though we notice this to be the case with Japanese kids anyway; they’re amazingly well-behaved).
We pass by the ruins of the Five-Storied Pagoda that caught fire in 1957. The pagoda had been a gift from a Buddhist temple called Tenno-ji. The cemetery, we learn, used to be part of the temple.
Faith suffuses this sacred space with a sense of calm, of reverence.
We are here on a weekday so the cemetery has relatively few visitors. It is always tranquil but on weekends, that tranquillity is tinged with a welcomed vibrancy.
When we first visited Yanaka with Satomi years ago, it was on such a weekend. Besides families cleaning the graves of their departed loved ones, there was also a decidedly more bohemian presence of artists, writers and photographers.
Poets sit beneath trees, looking for inspiration. We recall stumbling upon a painting in progress beneath the cherry trees by Sosuke Kimura, the acclaimed Japanese calligrapher. Copying lines from a book of poetry, he painted on long rolls of parchment flattened on the pavement.
Such a public performance was meant to invite everyone to share in the enjoyment of art, but also to take advantage of the short-lived season. With petals drifting down gently from above our heads, the practised dance of the artist’s brushwork hypnotised.
There are no painters today but what we lack in human art, we gain in the spectacle of Nature’s own. They are just trees, we tell ourselves, these are just flowers. But we don’t believe that.
What we believe, what we experience, is the transcendent ebb and flow of life itself. Everything, given enough distance and time, is fleeting but that impermanence, that very brevity, is what makes it so beautiful.
By the time we return to the train station, after passing through the gates of the cemetery again, we realise we had forgotten all about Ichiyo Higuchi’s grave. We will have to return again, another day, another year.
No regrets, however; the splendour of sakura here has made sure of that.
Yanaka Cemetery
Yanaka Reien, Yanaka 7-chome, Taito, Tokyo, Japan
Open daily (except New Year’s Day). The cemetery is a one-minute walk from JR Nippori Station (Yamanote line). Enter via the west exit.
