Tokyo
The Tokyo foreign cemetery is a section of the Aoyama Reien municipal cemetery in Aoyama, Tokyo. By 2005 it was under threat from the city's bureaucracy, planning to make a park on the site and posted Kanpo notices in front of endangered graves for which fees have not been paid by families of the deceased. These notices expired at the end of September 2005—after which the graves may be removed and reburied elsewhere.
According to the cemetery's rules, if a plot's 590 yen per square metre annual fee is unpaid for five years, a notice goes up and the plot will be razed one year later. 78 plots in Aoyama Reien were flagged on October 1, 2004 and many of them are in the foreign section. They were therefore at risk of removal after September 30, 2005.
These are the graves of expatriates from the Meiji era, men and women who promoted Western ideas and practices in Japan—doctors, educators, missionaries, and artists. Many of them were o-yatoi gaikokujin.
Famous non-Japanese buried at Aoyama Reien include the British minister plenipotentiary Hugh Fraser who died in the post in 1894, Captain Francis Brinkley, Guido Verbeck, Henry Spencer Palmer, Edoardo Chiossone, Joseph Heco, Edwin Dun, Mary True and several others.
The Foreign Section Trust has recently been formed to campaign to preserve the foreign part of the cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Foreign Cemeteries In Japan
Famous quotes containing the word tokyo:
“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)