Arisugawa Park Has Lost its Magic
Arisugawa Park
And the special places we share
I’d heard about Arisugawa Park before I ever saw it. Prior to our 2020 move, my husband and I had researched Tokyo preschools online; he visited them while in the city on business. To me they all looked and sounded like enchanted spaces where children were nurtured among fairies and flowers in “art ateliers,” engaging in sensory play and other wholesome activities. At one such preschool, the one we eventually picked, the children walked to Arisugawa Park every day for fresh air and exercise.
“The school is next to this amazing park,” my husband reported, and we put that in the plus column when it came to choosing a school. Then, what felt like a lifetime passed (actually several months plus a two-week quarantine) before my daughter and I made an introductory visit to the preschool. After the orientation, we went to Arisugawa Park and enjoyed the beautiful day. It was mid-November, but the temperature was mild and most of the trees had yet to lose their leaves. I snapped a shot of one particular tree, ablaze in yellow.
Soon after, the park became a major fixture of our life in Tokyo. My daughter went every weekday with her class, and most days we went there together after school ended at two o’clock, sometimes staying until five in the evening, all through the winter. I would often get cold standing around, but my daughter never did, as she was constantly in motion. It was amazing that she had so much outdoor time in an urban center, and it often felt like one of the only safe places we could be. Our trips to Arisugawa began in November 2020, approximately eight months before vaccines became widely available in Japan to all adults.
Arisugawa became my office of sorts, where I did the hard work of raising a child every day. By that point I had been unemployed for eight months and the rigors of an academic job felt like another life entirely. Childcare is labor, and many of the other adults at the park with me were being paid for their time. They were nannies, or “helpers” in the local parlance, whose job it was to care for the kids until at least five o’clock, which meant keeping them outside and busy until then. Some of the helpers handled childcare only; others would often call to the kids before the five o’clock chime, letting them know it was time to leave because they had to start dinner.
My daughter’s best friend at the time was E—, a bright, sweet girl from France who took S— under her wing and called her “little sister.”
“Come over here darling,” she’d say, enveloping my daughter in a hug. I felt the warmth of those hugs, of seeing my daughter being welcomed to a new school, a new country. The park was where I saw her easing into her new life. E—’s helper J— became a friend; she was the one I called when my father died, and our family needed help while I went home for the funeral. Both J— and E—’s mother stepped up to help my husband care for my daughter, an act of kindness I’ll never forget.
Of course, other parents went to the park too, and I got to know many of them as well as their kids. K— was my first friend in Tokyo; she introduced herself at school drop off when she recognized I was new. I chatted with her one night as Arisugawa grew dark. It was cold and I needed to get home to start dinner, but I didn’t leave because it was nice to get to know someone again. And it turned out K— was the best someone to know; it often seemed that she had a connection to everyone in our Tokyo bubble, and others besides. Her Japanese was good, but she downplayed it; she knew the best places to shop, eat, and vacation.
An interruption: “Did you write about my favorite spot?” my daughter asks as I am in the middle of drafting this piece. I say not yet, but what should I say about her favorite place in Arisugawa?
She says: It’s very nice. It’s very hard to walk to. I like it because I can do boats with flowers. It’s pretty close to one of the exits.
To explain “boats with flowers”: There is a small creek that runs through the park, a small waterfall, and a large pond. The first time we met M— and her daughter J—, we walked through the park to where the creek originates. The girls began playing a game many of us have when we were young: placing twigs and leaves in the current and having a race to see whose item made it to a particular point the fastest. That day, S— fell into the creek on her bottom, and discovered that camellia flowers (their bright pink blooms plentiful all over Tokyo, even during the winter months) made for good boats. S— would later take her father to this spot, and then her grandma. Desmond (the dog) likes the spot, and has spent a lot of time traversing Arisugawa with my husband.
Arisugawa has many parts: a tiny playground at one end, a larger one in the middle. Tennis courts. A grassy picnic area surrounded by an asphalt path, around which kids raced scooters or rode bikes. A fountain (which children played in, despite signs telling them not to), a dirt square that hosts exercise classes, soccer practice, and other activities. Small gardens with benches, the aforementioned pond where kids trap tadpoles and turtles, or feed birds and giant gray koi (despite the signs telling them not to).
We could never pass through the park without seeing at least one person we knew. It was a place to meet, cultivate friendships, and hear where people spent holidays, which kindergartens everyone applied to, and who was leaving and when. Sure, juicy gossip was exchanged here too, but I rarely trafficked in it as I was barely familiar with the text, let alone the subtext.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, which is why I don’t eschew all gossip; I just prefer when it’s about people I don’t know and will never meet: the con artists who (years before my arrival) fooled everyone at an expensive school for nearly a year and skipped town without paying tuition. The story of the outlandish home on the edge of the park, built by a racist Tokyo billionaire. And I’ll never forget the thrill when another mom, a New Jersey native, sidled up to me to ask if I’d seen the shocking doc about Erika Jayne and her fraud-committing husband. (Housewives is my international love language.)
But once my daughter moved to kindergarten, Arisugawa began to lose its appeal for her. Her new school sits closer to a different park, and it is where all the children gather after school—when they aren’t being shuttled to ballet or Mandarin or violin classes. And S— didn’t want to meet her friends at the park anymore; she wanted them to come to her house and play. A home playdate was a novelty after the lockdown days, and because we have to send our monster dog away to make those dates possible. S— once told me she didn’t like Arisugawa anymore.
Her waning interest likely had to do with people as much as place. E— is older and moved to big school a year ahead of S—, and had many activities (plus homework) that took her away from free play at the park. K— and her family moved away, and so did M— and J—. We began to recognize fewer people as we passed through Arisugawa.
Then I received an email alert: a suspicious man had been hanging around the park, being inappropriate with children. The warnings were written in the vague Japanese style, but I believe he had exposed himself in at least one instance. It was a reminder that complete safety is as much a fantasy as the perfect school, or a country that has it all figured out.
A few months later the fences went up. Due to an improvement project at the pond, ugly barriers encircled the area for several weeks. Around that same time, Arisugawa began to feel as if it were shrinking, the victim of a common sensation: a place that had seemed grand feeling smaller once it became familiar.
Finally, in the lead-up to this year’s sakura (cherry blossom) season, crews descended on the park and began chopping. Dozens of grand, shady trees lining the southern edge of the park, trees that had taken decades to reach their current size, were felled in a matter of days. It’s certainly in preparation for something, and hopefully it will be a good something (like new bathrooms, which the park sorely needs), but I still felt a pang when I saw it. And it gave S— another reason to avoid the park. “The pollution!” she said, as she’s begun learning about the role of trees in converting carbon dioxide.
This past month, we were all struck with a nasty cold, the kids developing brief but uncomfortable fevers. Sadly, that meant three-quarters of us could not travel back to the US for a family wedding. And so it was I found myself on a 70 degree sunny Saturday at the end of sakura season with two kids, no husband, and no plans. We were all recovered by that point, minus some lingering sniffles, likely thanks in part to a record allergy season.
I was resolute we’d spend the day outside (allergies be damned) and so we packed up the stroller and the shade tent and headed to Arisugawa. For the first time in three years, hanami (picknicking under the cherry blossoms) was allowed again, and the grassy area was full of people enjoying the season. Granted, the scene was a little less beautiful this year: with the trees gone, the blossoms were set against the backdrop of apartment buildings instead of green foliage.
S— complained of boredom at first, but then we connected with friends we had not seen in a while. The kids played, the parents chatted, and even if it wasn’t a magical afternoon, it certainly was a pleasant one.
