Cemetery Sunset
Comments: 6
Another picture from Aoyama Cemetery around sunset. Strolling around, I was struck by how routine it was that people died young, expiring in their forties and fifties (from things, I imagined, like ague and scarlet fever and acute ennui).
A lot of foreigners are buried in Aoyama Cemetery and I like the foreign gravestones because you’re more likely to be given a bit of a story about how people met their ends. One unfortunate pastor come to convert the heathens didn’t just die, he was “killed 1860.” The headstone didn’t elaborate further, which is probably wise as your thoughts keep his ghost company longer when you don’t have the whole story.
It’s the last thing the dead have going for them, the withholding of details, and some of them are very good at it.
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Posted to Photographs • 2004.02.01 (Sun) • 17:58
Comments
Posted by jon 2004.02.01, 19:42
Captured beautifully.
Posted by Curmudgeon 2004.02.01, 23:55
You should check out the Foreigners’ Cemetery near Yamashita Park in Yokohama. Several of the tombstones there bear the date of death as being 1 September 1923- the day the Great Kanto Earthquake struck.
Posted by jh 2004.02.02, 00:09
I’ll have a chance to visit Yokohama soon, I hope, for just that reason. That day in 1923 must have been … quite something. Difficult to comprehend.
Posted by Massimo Fiorentino 2004.02.02, 04:17
Beautiful picture. Nice! Very soothing in a way… (^_^)
Posted by Chris Vincent 2004.02.02, 07:10
Beautiful pictures, thought-provoking prose.
Posted by seraph 2004.02.03, 11:47
Love your site. Wonderful photography and brilliant observations. :)
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