The Search for General Nogi’s Grave (Rylee)

My task for this scavenger hunt is to find the grave of the general who committed ritual suicide following Emperor Meiji’s death. This at first did not seem too difficult since I have learned about this event in a Japanese history class. It was General Nogi Maresuke and it was quite surprising to have someone highly regarded commit ritual suicide – an act that was a rare occurrence even a century ago when medieval traditions were long gone.

So, I searched some sources on the internet to refresh my memory and luckily the Rikkyo library had the same books in their collection that I used in my history class. When it came down to finding the exact location of the headstone most of my research was sourced from Google maps, a postcard collectors’ website, and findagrave.com which helped immensely me in identifying the gravestones of Nogi and his wife who also committed ritual suicide.

I set off to what I learned to be the location of Nogi’s headstone – Aoyama cemetery. It was actually very close to the Nogi shrine and his residence, so finding the approximate location was not difficult. However, finding the gravestone in the massive cemetery was the most difficult aspect of the scavenger hunt. All I had to base my search on is what the two headstones of him and his wife looked like, and it wasn’t terribly difficult in retrospect since they are big boulders in a sea of polished and cut headstones.

Aoyama Cemetery

After a half hour of walking around the cemetery I managed to come across a little gated in area in the northeast corner of the cemetery where the two headstones reside. Even though I was the only person in sight and there was no lock on the gate itself, I decided not to create a fuss and try to figure out how the gate worked, so I just stuck my camera in-between the metal bars to take some photos.

The gated area of the two headstones.

The stones did match up with the pictures I have seen previously, and I did recognize the kanji for Nogi Maresuke’s name, so I am certain this is the spot I am looking for. There was a lot of other headstones in the gated area, much of which I have no idea about other than them being family members. In general, my understanding of Japanese cemeteries and the post-death process is extremely limited. I assume everyone is cremated and their ashes are placed in these stones which makes me doubt using the term ‘headstone’, but I could be wrong. It is something I want to look into further and would enjoy learning about Japanese religion in general.

The two headstones

In the end I did not end up making it to the Nogi shrine and residence to further my understanding due to my exhaustion at the end of my search of the grave. I hear I just missed the day when they open Nogi’s house to the public on the day of his death – September 13 when I just went to the cemetery on the 19th. Much of what I learned through the process about Nogi himself and the end of the Meiji period was my research conducted through rereading some parts of Donald Keene’s Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his world and Japan a Documentary History by David J. Lu. The death of Nogi Maresuke was a controversial one and casted many doubts on Japan’s future direction. It affected many citizen’s lives and jogged my memory on Natsume Soseki’s mentioning of the impact of Nogi’s and Meiji’s death. With his death being reacted to by many people it raises the impact I witnessed in my research and definitely is an event not to overlook. In general, it created a bleak outlook for Japan after the death of the popular emperor Meiji and the following event of Nogi’s ritual suicide.