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There are no maps to indicate precise locations, but if you know where to look in the multi-layered topography of this city, there are countless ventilation holes, places to withdraw and breath. Impregnated with a dreamy, narcotic calm Hakusan, a quiet, well-to-do residential district firmly within the sought-after enclave of the Yamanote, is one such place. The area’s main traffic conduit, busy Hakusan-dori, even seems to conduct what little noise there is away to other parts of the city.
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In order to keep Edo’s potentially insurgent daimyos and their families captive, their treasuries permanently bled, they were obliged to maintain costly and expansive estates within the cyclopean eye of Edo Castle. Many of the great mansions that once stood within the domain of present-day Hakusan have been reduced, quite literally, to mere names. Goten-zaka, the slope you exit onto from the station, is named after a palace (goten) which served as one of the residencies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi in the days before he became the fifth shogun. Several of Tokyo’s finest gardens, including the Koishikawa Botanical Garden, a short, well signposted walk from Hakusan station, represent what remains of this patchy legacy.
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A quiet, water corner of the Koishikawa botanical garden
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Once in the garden, behind its canopy of trees and the domes of its old greenhouses, the visitor experiences the pleasant illusion of having escaped the audible city, the ring of sound that hums and clangs ad infinitum beneath the Tokyo sky. One of the first things you’ll notice is a tree with the odd name Newton no ringo. Grown from a cutting, a graft, from the actual tree Isaac Newton sat under when the apocryphal apple fell, it’s one of the garden’s main attractions although, in the end, like many sights in Tokyo which are revered for their associations, it’s just an apple tree, and a rather ordinary one at that. |
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| The men that oversaw the grim Tokugawa police state were not completely without compassion, even charity. Tsunayoshi, transformed the estate into a herbal garden devoted to medicinal research. A later shogun, Yoshimune, established a hospital for the destitute on the same grounds. Near a clump of pine trees you will see a signboard declaring Kyu-yojosho no ido, or “The Former Recuperation Facility’s Well.” A charity hospital, providing free treatment to the sick and needy, was built here in 1722. One of the few places in the district with potable water in the days after the great 1923 earthquake, the site became known among locals as the “savior well.” |
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Abandoned mysteriously in a car lot, an ownerless french car from the sixties
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This green and pleasant campus for research and studies was fully inducted into the bower of academia when the grounds passed into the hands of the Tokyo University faculty in 1877. Botanical studies are still conducted and over 100 species of herbs grown here. Unlike more formal gardens, this one is only casually tended, allowing nature a fuller, wilder expression. Even in the spacious Japanese section of the grounds, with its lily pond, rainbow bridges and Sunday painters, an obvious lack of funds has precluded the mandatory army of gardeners seen elsewhere. Although you are not allowed to go inside, the main
building of the old Tokyo Medical School, dating from 1876, stands at a slightly lower elevation near the pond. The building is an immaculately preserved
European-style structure which, with its pink and white plaster facade and gleaming red portico, looks more like a gay Italian musical academy, or the deformed fantasy of a love hotel architect than a medical institute.
In an area associated with botany, herbs and medicine it’s no surprise to find in
a nearby temple called Nensoku-ji, the grave of a women called Mikiko — her family name appears to have been lost in time — the first person in Japan to voluntarily donate her body to medical science. In one of those poignant, heart-rending stories of the floating world that are also historically telling, it seems that Mikiko, a prostitute in one of the pleasure quarters of Edo, decided to offer her body for an autopsy at the nearby medical school after she contracted what was then an incurable dose of syphilis. The characters for “Miki” are the only ones that can be read on her gravestone, but the expressions of gratitude from the doctors concerned, inscribed on the back of the marker, are clearly visible.
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An empty, casually tended path rises into a cops of trees in the botanical garden
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Compounding the silence and serenity of Hakusan are several more temples and shrines. The compact Shinju-in has a tidy frontage of gravel and stone, and a cluster of well polished Kannon and Jizo statues. Nearby Denzu-in, has a number of Tokugawa clan tombs and, in the far corner of its crowded cemetery, jumbles of what appear to be auction lots of old stone Jizos and Bodhisatvas, tendrils of plant and weed adding to the effect. Near the entrance to the grounds, you’ll find a curious sculpture mounted on a plinth, called Yubizuku (“Finger Mound”). The work, in the form of two strong-looking hands, turns out to have been commissioned by the Japan Shiatsu Association as a tribute to the long departed masters who taught and practiced at the school and treatment center in front of the temple. |
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| Down the hill from here, in the middle of a narrow back street, is an old tree said to be visited by an Inari fox deity. Locals have made sure that the town planners have kept away from it. Overlooking this sacred spot is the former house of the well-known Taisho-era author Rohan Koda. According to Tae Moriyama, author of the book Tokyo Adventures, the writer’s daughter Aya, a respected novelist herself, still lives there. The tree is a signpost indicating the presence just a few steps away of a fox shrine called Takuzosu-Inari, one of the spookiest spots in the district. Shoehorned into the pinched precincts of the shrine are rows of torii gates, more Jizo and Kannon statues and fierce-looking fox messengers. This is not a place to venture into much after twilight. |
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A flight of stone steps descends under blackened trees that seem permanently wet, to an eerie spirit cave called the Oana, its dank rock-face the home it is believed, of the resident white fox. Credence is lent to its existence in an account by the Tokyo author Nagai Kafu who, in his novel Kitsune (“The Fox”), relates how his father spotted the bushy-tailed messenger here one afternoon. If the mood spooks you, or you feel that the area is having an hallucinogenic effect on you, avoid Bansei, a nearby, 400-year-old restaurant, better known as the “Inari Soba Shop,” which is associated with various local fox stories.
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| The names of the people who have donated funds to a local temple are inscriped on blocks in the wall of this Hakusan temple |
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| If, by the end of the day, groping your way back to the station, you feel drugged by pollen, scented flowers and the hypnotic dream-stare of stone Buddhas and squinting foxes, you will not be the first. |
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