Description
Although renamed over 72 years ago, the cemetery is still often called with its old official name, Yanaka Bochi (谷中墓地, Yanaka Graveyard?), and not Yanaka Reien. It has an area of over 100 thousand square meters and hosts about 7 thousand graves. The cemetery has its own police station and a section dedicated to the Tokugawa clan, family of the 15 Tokugawa shoguns of Japan, which however is closed to the public and must be peeked at from above the surrounding walls. The last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, also known as Keiki, rests here.
The cemetery used to be part of a Buddhist temple called Tennō-ji ( 天王寺?), and its central street used to be the road (sandō) approaching it. At about the middle point of the central street are the ruins of the five-storied pagoda that became the model for Kōda Rohan's novel The Five-Storied Pagoda. The pagoda had been a donation made in 1908 by Tenno-ji itself. The five-storied pagoda was burned one summer night in 1957 in the Yanaka Five-Storied Pagoda Double-Suicide Arson Case and was later declared a historical landmark by the city authorities.
Read more about this topic: Yanaka Cemetery
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“It is possible—indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic—to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)