Foreign cemeteries in Japan

The

Kobe

Kobe originally had two foreign cemeteries. One, Onohama, located in the

In the early 1950s, the Kobe City Government began relocating all foreigners' graves to a new Foreigners' Cemetery, the Kobe Municipal Foreign Cemetery (神戸市立外国人墓地), in Futatabi Park in the hills high above the city. This was completed in 1962.^{[citation needed]}

Mount Futatabi, in a woodland location, has the graves of many long-term residents, including Alexander Cameron Sim. James Joseph Enslie a long serving British Consular Officer in Kobe has a large grave in the cemetery.

Nagasaki

There is a foreign cemetery in Naha, Okinawa. The earliest graves are of Chinese sailors. Several contemporaries of Matthew C. Perry are buried there.^{[citation needed]}

Shimoda

Four members of American Commodore Matthew Perry's flotilla are buried in the cemetery of the small Buddhist temple of Gyokusen-ji that served as the first America consulate in Japan. Another American and three Russians were also buried there in the 1850s.^{[citation needed]}

Tokyo

The Tokyo foreign cemetery is a section of the Aoyama Cemetery in Aoyama, Tokyo. By 2005 it was under threat from the city's bureaucracy, which threatened to remove graves for which fees had not been paid by families of the deceased. The Foreign Section Trust^[2] was formed to campaign to preserve the foreign part of the cemetery. Eventually the situation was rectified and the foreign section is now a protected monument, commemorating the men and women who helped build Japan in the late 19th century.^[3]

These are the graves of expatriates from the

Famous non-Japanese buried there include the

The Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, located in

First used as a burial ground for non native Japanese in February 1854, when American Marine, Private Robert Williams was interred after a short Christian burial service conducted by Rev. George Jones. The cemetery was formally dedicated by Bishop Charles Alford on Advent Sunday, 29 November 1868.^[4]

The current cemetery consists of 22 sections in an area of 18,500 square meters. In 1864, a memorandum for the foreign settlement at Yokohama was signed by the

Nanjing Cemetery

Yokohama also has a Chinese cemetery near Negishi Park, called "Nanjing Cemetery". It was used to store the remains of Chinese from China town before being sent back to the mainland.

See also

• o-yatoi gaikokujin
• Heads of the United Kingdom Mission in Japan
• Anglo-Japanese relations
• Franco-Japanese relations
• Japanese cemeteries and cenotaphs in overseas

References