About half-an-hour stroll up the Sumida River from Eitaibashi, is a small and unassuming park where citizens walk their dogs, children play on swings, neighborhood festivals are held, and a few homeless men lay claim to a bench or two.
It's called Yokoami park, and it's across the street from the apartment of the last student I taught privately this evening. I pass through this park fairly regularly on the way to this student's home, but today I didn't get through it as quickly as I usually do. That, of course, is because the cherry blossoms are out.
What distinguishes Yokoami from the other municipal parks in this city, however, is its dark history. The Yokoami park and memorial hall were designated in 1930 to commemorate the victims of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, 40,000 of whom were instantly incinerated upon that very plot of land when their presumed shelter was struck by fire cyclones.
And as if these 5 hectares of land weren't burdened with enough traumatic memories, some decades later Yokoami came to double as the final resting place for the cremated remains of 105,000 civilian victims of the 1945 Tokyo air raids. The small park also houses a peace memorial and a small museum to remember the Great Kanto Earthquake.
What strikes me most about this little park is how easy it is to rush through it on one's way to work or wherever, and not even realize the horrors that took place here. Tokyo is a city of busy people, and busy people don't tend to stop and read the signs. As well, on one side of the park there is an arrangement of melted metal artifacts from the earthquake. There, I've seen children playing on a melted car on more than one occasion. It seemed odd to me.
But at the same time, I feel like the sheer quantity of loss in this park's memory is completely unfathomable, and is therefore just as incomprehensible to those of us who've read entire books about what happened here. So maybe it's just as well to let the kids play.
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