Shiba Park

(Above:) Cherry Blossom at Shiba Park. The park in spring bloom ca. 1910, draped with cherry blossoms. The grounds had not changed much between the Tokugawa and Meiji periods.

Shiba-koen [Park] was one of the first five public parks opened by the Meiji government after the Restoration. Now in the shadow of Tokyo Tower, the 30-acre Shiba Park was laid out in 1873 on land appropriated by the government from daimyo estate property. Immediately adjacent to the park district were the grounds of Zozyo-ji [Temple], of unknown age but claimed by the Tokugawa clan as a family temple in 1590. (The masoleums of the several Tokugawa Shogun [General] are located there.) The temple, damaged during the fighting that led to the Restoration, was completely destroyed in a 1909 fire leaving behind only the San-Mon [Tower gate]. Inside the San-Mon enclosure was a pine tree planted in 1879 when visiting ex-U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant was popularly welcomed to Japan.

A noted participant behind Japan's modernization, Scottish trader Thomas Blake Glover, was residenced at Shiba Park at the time of his death in 1911. Glover built Japan's first Western-style house in Nagasaki in the 1860s while acting as an arms merchant for the Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa clans responsible for the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Glover also developed Japan's first coal mine, at Takashima, and would later help found the Japan Brewing Company (now the Kirin Brewing Co.) and the shipbuilding company that would later become incorporated as Mitsubishi Shokai [Company] in 1870.