Takenotsuka · Adachi · northern Tokyo
A tree was struck by lightning in 1849. It is still standing — as part of a building.
Most of Tokyo's history is a story of things burning down. Takenotsuka, at the far north end of the Tobu line, is the opposite: nothing here was destroyed, and almost nothing survives either. Things changed form instead. A burial mound became a place name. A grove of bamboo became two written characters. A pine tree became timber.
Takenotsuka (竹の塚) is a commuter suburb. There is a shopping street outside the station, a lot of apartment blocks, and no reason at all for a visitor to get off the train. Nothing here is on any list of things to see in Tokyo.
That is precisely why it is interesting. In central Tokyo, the question is always how did this survive the fire? — the 1868 civil war, the 1923 earthquake, the 1945 firebombing. Out here, past the Arakawa river, there was mostly farmland, and the question is different. Nothing was destroyed. And yet almost nothing old is standing.
What happened instead is stranger and, I think, more Japanese: things kept existing by becoming something else.
Five minutes from the east exit of Takenotsuka Station, behind the shopping street, there is a small shrine. It is not impressive. You could walk past it in fifteen seconds.
Its own record says it was founded in the Tengen era — somewhere between 978 and 982 — by inviting the deity of Ise. In 1056, according to the same record, the warrior Minamoto no Yoriyoshi camped here on his way north to fight the Abe clan, and planted a pine.
Take that as what it is: what the shrine says about itself, not documented history. Shrines all over eastern Japan claim Yoriyoshi camped there. The interesting part comes eight centuries later, and it is written down with a date.
Read that again, because the coincidence is doing the work. The tree did not fall over and rot. It was struck, it died, and in the same season the building it stood next to needed wood. So the tree stopped being a tree and started being a building.
That is not preservation. Nobody set out to save it. It is closer to recycling, done by people who had a dead eight-hundred-year-old tree and a construction project at the same moment.
Here is the honest situation. The lightning, the date, and the reuse of the wood are all in the shrine's account of itself. What is not anywhere — not in English, not in Japanese as far as I can find — is the answer to the obvious next question:
Is that wood still in the building?
The rebuilding happened 177 years ago. Shrine halls get replaced. If the current building went up after the war, the pine is gone and has been for decades. If it did not, then a tree that was already old when Tokyo was called Edo is holding up a roof five minutes from a commuter station, and nobody has bothered to mention it.
I do not know which. Neither does the internet. You can find out by asking, and the asking takes about thirty seconds of Japanese.
There may be nobody at the office. Small neighbourhood shrines are often unattended on weekdays. That is part of the deal.
Twelve minutes from the west exit is the other half of the story. Shirahatazuka is a round burial mound from the 5th or 6th century — twelve metres across, two and a half metres high. It is a designated historic site of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, sitting in a small public park that opened in 1987.
It is the only mound left in an area that was once full of them. The rest were flattened by farming and then by housing. The neighbourhood is named after mounds that no longer exist, and this is the last one.
The name comes from the same warrior family: in 1062, Yoriyoshi and his son are said to have won a narrow victory here and raised a white flag — shirahata — on the mound. And the six cedars that stood on top of it died and were replaced with pines around 1935. Even the trees on the mound are stand-ins.
Eight minutes further on is a small museum built over an excavated settlement, with a reconstructed pit dwelling in the park and a room of what was dug up. It is free, it is small, and on a weekday you will likely be the only person in it.
Go in the order the ground was laid down: the mound, then this. The objects here are what the people buried in mounds like Shirahatazuka left behind.
There is very little to look at. The shrine is small and unremarkable and takes four minutes. The mound is a bump of earth twelve metres across with a fence around it. The museum is one room. If you need a view or a photograph, this is the wrong trip entirely.
Nothing here is signed in English. Nobody at the shrine is waiting to explain anything, and there may be nobody at all. Takenotsuka is not set up for visitors because visitors do not come, which is the only reason it is still like this.
And the central question of this piece may have a boring answer. You may ask about the pine and be told the hall was rebuilt in 1978 and the old timber is long gone. That is a real possibility and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Go anyway — a dead end you found by asking a question in Japanese in a suburb no guidebook covers is worth more than a confirmed fact somebody handed you.
If you want to add something well known on the way back, Nishiarai Daishi (西新井大師) is a few stops south — but be aware that its main hall burned down in 1966 and what you photograph there is concrete from 1971. The oldest thing on that site is the small three-storey hall in the corner that almost nobody looks at.