Uncovering the History of Suginami City
Kōenji, having resisted redevelopment plans for years now, retains a retro feel to those exploring its backstreets.
Photograph by author
When I first arrived in Tokyo, I was barely aware of Suginami City. The Suginami Appeal, a massive anti-nuclear citizens’ campaign in the 1950s, would certainly have rung a bell, but the name Suginami itself meant nothing to me. Indeed, of Tokyo’s 23 Wards – each its own administrative unit – only a few have captured international imaginations, particularly the tourist and expat hotspots of Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Chiyoda. We tend to think of Tokyo’s history in these terms as well, focusing on the political centre near the Imperial Palace or the elite cultures of, say, Ginza. Even such central Wards as Nakano tend to get overlooked or, when they are mentioned, boiled down to a single area or characteristic. In Suginami’s case, my impression is that only Kōenji, a hub for alternative travellers, gets much recognition in English.
Six months into my stay in Tokyo, I not only call Suginami my home – I also believe it to be one of the most varied and interesting spots in the entire metropolis. It’s difficult to fight the urge to generalise some of the more famous Wards – Suginami, meanwhile, really does present harsh contrasts between the sleepy suburbia of Ogikubo, Asagaya’s vibrant music scene, and the retro, edgy texture of Kōenji. It is also, I now understand, home to a long and fascinating history. Some of Japan’s most skilled artists and poets have called Suginami home, and, especially exciting to me, the Ward has long been a bastion of progressive politics.
What follows is scarcely my own research – my Japanese is far from sufficient to waltz into the municipal archives – nor an attempt to say anything new about Suginami or create a comprehensive local history. More simply, I hope to relay some of the historical titbits I’ve picked up during my stay, in the hopes that more visitors to Tokyo will consider exploring outside the usual destinations. Aside from articles on a few famous Suginami residents, I have not found much academic material on the city. Thus, this post is largely based on a few independent magazines, occasional namedrops in books, and the excellent work of the Suginami Local History Museum.
Premodern Suginami
Located on the Musashi Plateau, humans have been attracted to Suginami’s groundwater and lived in the area for at least 30,000 years. As elsewhere, Musashi’s inhabitants produced early forms of art and pottery during the Jōmon Period, but as late as 1290, when a Samurai government was already consolidating power in nearby Kamakura, records attest that Suginami was still largely devoid of habitation, consisting of little more than grass and reeds. Several of the area’s placenames pay homage to its natural environment, including Ogikubo (‘Hollow of Reeds’) and Asagaya (‘Shallow Marsh’), and local artists have long admired its plant and insect life. The city mascot Namisuke is apparently a mythical dragon/fairy, but I always thought he was some sort of caterpillar, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was intentional.
The Suginami Local History Museum has preserved a wooden family home from premodern times, with elements retained from several different periods.
Photograph by author
Only from the end of the Heian Period (794-1185) did a Samurai clan appear in the Musashi Plateau, and the area seemed to finally warrant attention from nearby powers. The Edo Clan began to consolidate power over the region, and Yoriyoshi of the powerful Minamoto Clan is said to have paid a visit on his path home from a northern expedition. He founded the Omiya Hachiman Shrine, nowadays just around the corner from the local history museum.
Since Ogikubo is today a major railway station, it’s fitting that the area just above it, Amanuma, was once supposedly home to a highway post station. In premodern Japan, long-distance transport relied on a series of important highways, along which grew rest stations where one could get a hot meal, somewhere to sleep, and somewhere for one’s horse to rest (hence the appearance of the kanji for horse in the modern kanji for station). That modern-day Suginami once hosted such a station suggests that by the 13th century it was experiencing increasing traffic as a stopover between today’s Tokyo and Kanagawa. If other Japanese cities are anything to go by, this may have been central to Suginami’s growth. It wasn’t long before the area had become a feud of the Edo Clan, and evidence suggests that modern Asagaya was once a Samurai base and a symbol of Edo power.
When Toyotomi Hideyoshi reorganised Japan’s fiefdoms into one unified system of domains, the villages of the Musashi Plateau become directly incorporated into the Shogunal domain centred in Edo, now Tokyo. Villages in the area become a full part of Shogunal trade, sending eggplants, wheat, melons, and peas to the capital. Administratively, the villages – which included Kōenji, Asagaya, and Ogikubo – were part of the Nakano district, and the entire region was often used as falconry grounds by Samurai and Lords living in Edo. At this time, regional wealth was calculated in rice yield, and since the Musashi Plateau produced more wheat than rice, it was not considered considerably wealthy. To improve local rice production, irrigation systems were built in the 18th century by a local Samurai family. The area remained a transport hub, and various religious sites were built in this period and became popular travel destinations.
The reeds for which Ogikubo is named.
Photograph by author
Myohoji, today located near Suginami’s eastern border, developed into a bustling temple complex surrounded by popular teahouses and shops. The Tokugawa Shoguns Ienari and Ieyoshi are said to have visited regularly, and Ukiyo-e popular prints depict the temple and its visitors. As Edo had expanded, Suginami appears to have no longer been a periphery but rather an active part of the capital’s cultural life. While Suginami’s irrigation had been developed by a peripheral Samurai family early in the period, when village leaders sought the construction of more channels later to divert floodwater, they went directly to Shogunal authorities instead. We only have a patchwork image of the development of Suginami from ancient times, but it’s clear that by the end of the Edo Period, the 20 villages in the area had become intertwined with the history of what would soon be renamed Tokyo.
Myohoji Temple today.
Image Source: Experience Suginami
Suginami and Modernity
Suginami today is right on the border between the major 23 Wards of Tokyo and the wider Tokyo Metropolitan Area, so it’s unsurprising that immediately post-Meiji Restoration, whether Suginami was or was not part of Tokyo was unclear, and it was governed in turn by Shinagawa and Kanagawa before finally becoming part of Tokyo Prefecture. To streamline administration, the area was reorganised into four large villages – Suginami, Takaido, Iogi, and Wadahoriuchi. Though today reorganised into one Ward, locals still distinguish between them, and Suginami’s history enthusiasts often focus on the history of one or another village.
As always, Suginami was a major part of transporting goods to Tokyo, particularly lumber from Tama and Yamanashi. It was also a tempting site for a new railway, as much of the area was still very rural and sparsely populated, allowing transport companies to avoid the local opposition faced in other proposed sites for new tracks. Thus, in 1889 Ogikubo Station was opened as part of the Kobu Railway between Tokyo and Tachikawa, the route now known as Japan Railways’ Chuo Line. Ogikubo would eventually become the terminus for the Marunouchi Line, and many travellers today will have either changed at or ridden through Ogikubo Station on their way to the Studio Ghibli attractions in neighbouring Musashino Ward. Asagaya, Kōenji, and Nishi-Ogikubo stations would not be opened until 1922.
‘Night Rain at Asagaya’ by Takahashi Hiroaki, 1924.
Image Source: Ukiyo-e.org
Despite being part of Tokyo Prefecture, and despite a steady growth of urban areas along the Chuo Line, Suginami remained largely rural, and despite the opening of new schools in the 1870s, many children stayed home to work in the fields. This changed in 1923, as the Great Kanto Earthquake forced thousands of Japanese to relocate from the ruins of central Tokyo. Many ended up in Suginami, fuelling steady urbanisation and the creation of new suburban areas either side of the Chuo Line.
Many of Tokyo’s literati also had to relocate, and the Suginami Local History Museum claims that many settled in Suginami in search of a ‘quiet place to write.’ Indeed, Suginami was still very rural, and poetry and art produced by its residents in the 1920s often focused on plants and insects. However, Ibuse Masuji, writer of a noted literary work on Ogikubo, and later Black Rain, a postwar work about his native Hiroshima, offers another reason – the laidback nature of Suginami ensured that, while the ‘first-rate’ artists and writers settled elsewhere, there was somewhere for the less noted figures to spend their days without judgement.
In 1925, Iogi Village was still so rural that its mayor undertook a major land readjustment project, that is, a partnership between public and private authorities to develop urban areas. In 10 years, 880 hectares had been readjusted, an enormous feat. Mayor Uchida also spearheaded the implementation of electric lighting, waterworks, and the opening of new train stations.
Like the rest of the country, Suginami experienced mass mobilisation during wartime. Its children were evacuated, its men conscripted, and its women either drafted to work at the Nakajima Aircraft factory in Ogikubo or entrusted to maintain discipline through Neighbourhood Associations. One of its highest-ranking residents was Heihachi Yanai, who served as an army engineer for 32 years, including as part of the colonial government of Taiwan, and built the residences of various officers before retiring during the war.
This 1946 map of wartime destruction shows that Suginami experienced relatively little damage, concentrated on the border with Nakano.
Image Source: Boston Rare Maps
In terms of deaths during air raids, Suginami suffered a relatively low number – 181, as well as 611 injuries. Deaths in central Tokyo, by comparison, exceeded 100,000. However, Suginami did experience massive infrastructural damage, with 11,840 houses burned down and up to 43,000 people displaced. A map of the damage kept at the Suginami Local History Museum shows that much of that damage was along the border with Nakano, suggesting that fires may have spread across the administrative boundary from more central areas, but destruction along the Chuo Line and around the Nakajima Factory shows that the Ward was also specifically targeted.
Immediately following the war, bereaved families of killed servicemen began to feel that they were owed greater compensation, particularly as wartime social welfare dried up and the transition to a new, American-run welfare system proved slow. In 1947 large associations of bereaved women would famously begin to agitate outside official buildings and launch signature campaigns, but the first of these associations was actually established by Suginami housewives in 1946. This legacy is complicated because, while at their core these groups were pushing for social welfare, they would also come to push a nationalist ideology wherein their husbands or sons had died gloriously in a righteous war, and, ironically, by framing themselves and already dead soldiers as the primary sufferers of the war they helped to push wounded veterans themselves into obscurity. Suginami would soon be home to much leftist grassroots organising, yet in the first year of the postwar, its citizens’ most notable activist effort was one that, for better or worse, would inspire decades of revisionism.
Postwar Suginami and Progressive Politics
It’s unclear why Suginami in particular has been home to such committed anti-war activism throughout its modern history. The origins may sit with the literary ‘Asagaya Group’ of the prewar years; bohemian figures were often progressive in their politics. What is certain is that one of Suginami’s residents was among the most famous anti-war writers in modern Japanese history – Yosano Akiko (1878-1942). Her prevalence at the local museum and commemoration at Yosano Park suggests that Suginami’s municipal authorities are proud that their city played host to the poet in her later years, or, more cynically, that Yosano’s peaceful politics help to displace Suginami’s wartime involvement and create an uninterrupted history of peace activism.
Yosano’s poems on display at Yosano Park.
Photograph by author
Yosano and her husband moved to Suginami in 1927, long after Yosano had become noted for her vocal opposition to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. She had published a poem, addressed to her brother, in 1904 which described the bloody assault on Port Arthur as a fruitless suicide charge. Yosano continued her critique of militarism in 1911 in a piece featured in the pioneering feminist journal Bluestocking which railed against the ’ruling and military class.’ However, it was while living in Suginami that Yosano turned sharply towards militarism and came to support Japan’s seizure of Manchuria and its resources. She died at the height of the Asia-Pacific War, before Suginami ever suffered from destructive American bombing raids.
Nevertheless, Yosano’s earlier poems – oft studied in schools in the 1950s – and her feminist reappropriation of motherhood may have influenced Suginami’s postwar housewives, who have become famous internationally for their activism. In 1954, a Japanese vessel and her crew were irradiated by American nuclear testing in the Pacific, prompting middle-class housewives in Suginami to launch a signature campaign to ban hydrogen bombs. The so-called Suginami Appeal had attracted 32 million signatures – a third of the national population – as of 1955, alarming politicians in both Japan and the US. It wasn’t only housewives who were involved – Suginami in the 1950s and 60s appears to have hosted progressive campaigns of various stripes, including early efforts to protect the environment published in grassroots newspapers after the Tokyo Olympics caused an uptick in traffic and pollution. Another resident of Suginami, the writer Kaikō Takeshi, was also a founder of Beheiren, the famous anti-Vietnam War group who assisted and smuggled US military personnel based in Japan who wished to desert.
Organisers of the Suginami Appeal, gathered at the Suginami Community Centre in 1954.
Image Source: Hiroshima Peace Media Centre
Asagaya and Kōenji in particular became known as bohemian hangouts in the 50s, awash with trendy venues and home to several famous musicians. Alternative and countercultural clientele continued to gather in both areas and, by the 1970s, Asagaya had become a small hub for jazz cafes, and Kōenji, for alternative music genres such as punk rock (Ogikubo, for its part, is famous for classical music and home to several concert halls). Kōenji today retains a countercultural character, and the plaza north of its train station is a popular drinking spot for local punks. It is also home to some of the most outspoken Pro-Palestine activism in Tokyo, with many citywide protests being coordinated by groups in Kōenji. Multicultural residents might gather to organise at Queer and leftist bars and community spaces; currently, Palestine-themed posters can be spotted everywhere from recycle shops, to plazas, to a small bar that houses an enormous collection of Palestinian memorabilia. A notable anarchist community space recently relocated to the neighbourhood, and as recently as 2022 shopkeepers, activists, punks and hippies alike took part in a jovial protest against redevelopment plans. While a proper history of Kōenji’s activists remains to be written, these present-day groups clearly belong to a long tradition.
Yosano Akiko.
Image Source: Wikipedia
Suginami Today
There are four stops on the Chuo Line in Suginami, and these areas are certainly the ones with the most vibrant and visible local culture. Beyond its alternative character, Kōenji is also a hub for vintage shopping and all sorts of live music. Asagaya retains its jazz bars, but now also hosts a beautiful shopping street. Ogikubo is something of a shopping hub itself, with luxury shops spread across two major department stores around the station, as well as an animation museum honouring many animation companies located in Suginami today, while Nishi-Ogikubo feels more retro, home to plenty of old bars and eateries. Beyond the Chuo Line, Suginami is largely suburban. However, the housewives behind the Suginami Appeal show that even ‘ordinary’ people make history, and that these unremarkable residential areas are in fact equally important. Suginami’s government retains an activist character; its mayor is one of the only women in Tokyo to hold such a position, and a vocal opponent of privatisation. The city has done well to retain large sections of green space in the name of environmental protection, particularly around the meandering Zenpukuji River.
Participants at a summer festival in Ogikubo taking a break.
Photograph by author
Kōenji Festival, with attractions ranging from traditional dance to wrestling, attracts thousands to the area every year.
Photograph by author
