Yanaka Cemetery: The Cherry Avenue and the Last Shogun's Tomb

Why is it significant?

Walk down the grand central boulevard of Yanaka Cemetery, where a majestic tunnel of hundred-year-old cherry blossom trees arches overhead. Covering ten hectares with more than seven thousand graves, Yanaka Cemetery is one of Tokyo's most celebrated historic necropolises.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk down the grand central boulevard of Yanaka Cemetery, where a majestic tunnel of hundred-year-old cherry blossom trees arches overhead. Covering ten hectares with more than seven thousand graves, Yanaka Cemetery is one of Tokyo's most celebrated historic necropolises. Unlike crowded municipal graveyards, Yanaka is maintained like an open botanical park, where neighborhood residents jog, artists sketch weathered stone stupas, and visitors pay respects to the statesmen, writers, and artists who shaped modern Japan during the Meiji awakening.

Follow the directional signs to the secluded, fenced enclosure containing the tomb of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the fifteenth and final shogun of Japan. In eighteen sixty-seven, Yoshinobu performed the Taisei Hokan, voluntarily resigning his military dictatorship and surrendering power to the young Emperor Meiji, thereby sparing Edo from a bloody civil war of annihilation. He lived out his retirement peacefully in Shizuoka pursuing photography, cycling, oil painting, and hunting, having willingly renounced imperial ambitions to prevent national ruin. The wide grave avenues are shaded by ancient ginkgos and weeping willows, providing an oasis of quiet contemplation in the heart of Tokyo. The wide grave avenues are shaded by ancient ginkgos and weeping willows, providing an oasis of quiet contemplation in the heart of Tokyo.

Look closely at Yoshinobu's tomb: unlike the elaborate Buddhist mausoleums of previous shoguns at Nikko and Zojoji, Yoshinobu chose a remarkably simple, round Shinto-style gravel burial mound, or enpun. Having surrendered the military shogunate, he wished to be buried as a humble subject of the Emperor, loyal in death as in life, resting quietly beneath the whispering evergreen pines. The delicate sound of wooden wind chimes and rustling bamboo leaves creates a tranquil environment for remembrance and historical reflection. The delicate sound of wooden wind chimes and rustling bamboo leaves creates a tranquil environment for remembrance and historical reflection.

Yanaka Cemetery is also the final resting place of celebrated cultural figures including painter Yokoyama Taikan, botanist Makino Tomitaro, and Ichiyo Higuchi, the pioneering female novelist featured on Japan's five-thousand-yen banknote.

Exit the south gate of the cemetery onto the tree-shaded residential street, pausing before the historic wooden corner of Kayaba Coffee.