Although renamed over 85 years ago, the cemetery is still often called by its old official name, , and not
Yanaka Reien. It has an area of over 100 thousand square meters and hosts about 7 thousand graves. The cemetery has its own police station and a small walled enclosure dedicated to the
Tokugawa clan, family of the 15 Tokugawa
shōguns of Japan, which however is closed to the public and must be peeked at through double barred gates. The last
shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, also known as Keiki, rests here. The cemetery used to be part of a Buddhist temple called , and its central street used to be the road (
sandō) approaching it. At about the middle point of the central street are the ruins of the five-storied pagoda that became the model for
Kōda Rohan's novel
The Five-Storied Pagoda. The pagoda had been a donation made in 1908 by Tenno-ji itself. The five-storied pagoda was burned one summer night in 1957 in the
Yanaka Five-Storied Pagoda Double-Suicide Arson Case and was later declared a historical landmark by the city authorities. ==History==