Quick answer
Ueno Park is a public park in the Taito ward of Tokyo, created in 1873 on the site of the 1868 Battle of Ueno, and now home to five national museums, a zoo and Tokyo''s most famous cherry blossom viewing spot. A free audio sample is available at the top of the page.
Full transcript
INTRO
You are standing in Ueno Park, home to five national museums, a zoo, a shrine, and Tokyo's most famous cherry blossom viewing spot. But this park exists because of a battle. In 1868, the last samurai loyal to the Tokugawa shogun made their final stand here, on these slopes. They fought the new Meiji government's imperial troops for a single day. They lost. The bodies were buried where they fell. A shrine to the fallen — the Ueno Toshogu — stands at the north end of the park. The Meiji government deliberately turned the battlefield into a public park, filled it with museums, and planted thousands of cherry trees. It is hard to imagine a more effective act of historical rebranding: a site of civil war became a site of culture and leisure, and within a generation, nobody remembered the blood.
SECTION: The museums
The Tokyo National Museum, directly ahead, is the oldest and largest museum in Japan. Its collection of over 110,000 objects spans Japanese art from prehistoric Jomon pottery to Edo-period screens. The National Museum of Western Art, next door, was designed by Le Corbusier and houses the best collection of European art in Asia. The National Museum of Nature and Science has a full-size blue whale model in the lobby. Three of the world's great museums, within five minutes of each other, built on the site of a battle. Shinobazu Pond, the large lake at the south end, was once part of the Kaneiji Temple grounds — a vast Buddhist complex that was burned to the ground in the 1868 battle. The temple building you see today is a reconstruction. The lotus plants covering the pond in summer are descendants of plants that were here before the battle. They do not know the history. They just keep growing.
CLOSE
A battlefield that became a museum district. A temple burned to ash and rebuilt. Lotus flowers that predate the war. Ueno Park is a place where the past has been deliberately, carefully covered — but if you know where to look, the bones are still showing. Find your way.