Yanaka (谷中)

Yanaka is a district in northeastern Tokyo, occupying the slope between Ueno Park and Nippori Station within present-day Taito Ward. The neighborhood originated as a temple town established along the western edge of Edo in the seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa shogunate concentrated a large number of Buddhist temples in the area as part of the broader policy of organizing religious institutions on the outer rings of the city and creating buffer zones of low fire-risk wooden temple architecture between dense urban districts. The result is one of the densest concentrations of historic temple architecture in central Tokyo, with more than seventy temples within a small radius, including Tennoji at the center of the district, the extensive Yanaka cemetery on the elevated ground above the Yamanote railway, the Jomyoin, the Kannon-ji, and a scattering of smaller institutions distributed along the narrow lanes. The Yanaka cemetery, originally part of the Tennoji grounds before being secularized in 1874, is the burial ground of the last Tokugawa shogun Yoshinobu, the painter Yokoyama Taikan, the novelist Natsume Soseki's family, and many other Meiji-period cultural figures. Because Yanaka largely escaped both the fires of the late Edo period and the destruction of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the firebombing of 1944-1945, it preserves more of the low-rise wooden urban fabric of pre-war Tokyo than almost any other district in the city, with traditional shotengai (covered shopping streets), wooden houses, sento bathhouses, and small temple gardens distributed across the area. For Japanese printmaking, Yanaka appears in late Edo-period meisho-e of the temple precincts and the cherry trees of Tennoji, with Utagawa Hiroshige treating the area in his Famous Places in the Eastern Capital and one of his Edo views, and Hokusai depicting Tennoji in passages of his minor Edo prints. The district appears more prominently in the work of shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga artists during the twentieth century. Kawase Hasui produced winter and twilight views of the district within his Tokyo sets, and Onchi Koshiro and other members of the Tokyo creative-print circle treated the neighborhood as part of their engagement with the surviving older quarters of the modernizing capital. Hiratsuka Un'ichi, a long-time resident of the surrounding Negishi area, treated temple architecture from Yanaka and the surrounding Negishi and Sendagi neighborhoods across his career, and the postwar Tokyo sosaku-hanga circle including Sekino Junichiro and Saito Kiyoshi treated Yanaka subjects in their cityscape practice. The visual character of Yanaka in prints is built on temple roofs and pagoda silhouettes against the sky, gravestones, narrow lanes, wooden houses, the bell tower of Tennoji, blooming cherry and plum trees in the cemetery, persimmon trees in small gardens, and the slope down toward the Yanaka Ginza shotengai. The neighborhood is associated in modern Japanese cultural memory with the surviving register of shitamachi (low-city) artisan and middle-class neighborhood life that has otherwise been largely effaced from central Tokyo. Contemporary visitors find Yanaka still legible as an Edo and early-Tokyo neighborhood, with the temple-and-cemetery district remaining one of the principal historical walking areas in central Tokyo, reached most directly from JR Nippori Station or the Sendagi station of the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line, and with the SCAI The Bathhouse contemporary art gallery occupying a converted Edo-period sento that signals the district's distinctive integration of historical fabric with present-day cultural use.