Hi, this is Mandali, and I'm here to create the first post on this new site dedicated to the fight to preserve Hanezawa Garden and the last of Tokyo's primeval virgin forest.
Hanezawa Garden was the stately home of Tokyo's governor in the early 1900s, and was built on a raised section in downtown Tokyo, in a small parcel of Tokyo's primeval virgin forest. The place was rented out later as a luxury restaurant for a number of years in the 1990s, with the overwhelming support and return clientele, including myself. No-one could believe that there could be some place in the middle of Tokyo, untouched for hundreds of years, where you could breathe in the pictoresque surroundings, enjoy the best in traditional Japanese food or have beer parties in the summer, all in the shade of the imposing wooden stately home. It was magical, full stop. I cannot think of anywhere in Tokyo more majestic and imposing, yet tranquil and unassuming.
After a series of apparently bad profit figures, the place shut down abruptly two years ago and is now about to be demolished completely to make way for cookie-cutter upscale apartment blocks in glass and concrete like you can find in any upper-middle suburb anywhere. We need to stop this development immediately and find a way to conserve the building, the forestry and wildlife around it, and the heritage of the Hiroo area, one of the last traditional areas of downtown Tokyo. Secretly slipping in to view the place, I watched the home change from empty stately home to weed-infested gardens, to smashed pottery and disheveled stone lanterns in what used to be the main driveway into the home.
By the way, I live about 5 minutes' walk from the place, and this place is the soul of Hiroo as most people in the area will acknowledge. Hiroo is not only a living place for the older Japanese generations, it is a lively community of foreign embassies and their embassy staff, non-Japanese that have favored living in the Hiroo area, expecting mothers and their partners that visit the reknowned Red Cross Hospital a few minutes away, businessmen frequenting the Ebisu Prime Square - one of the busines landmarks of this area - or university students that frequent the University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, a branch of Rome's christian university of the same name.
Like-minded souls have created an informal resistance group, the Hanezawa Garden Preservation Group, but it is time to get the word out! There will be posts here in Japanese and in English, so if you can't read it: use Google Translate, Babelfish or other web translation software, or drag that Japanese acquaintance you've never really talked to and get him/her to translate!
More soon...
