Resurrecting a prince's home with a dark wartime past

It was a Sunday when the prince decided to end it all.

Fumimaro Konoe, 54, scion of one of Japan’s most noble families and three-time prime minister, stood in the study of his stately Tokyo villa, with its broad Japanese garden and pond. Perhaps he contemplated the past few years and the disaster of the war.

It was Dec. 16, 1945, the day Konoe was due to report to Allied Occupation authorities to answer charges of war crimes. He took out a capsule of potassium cyanide he had prepared and ingested the poison. He was dead in minutes.

Konoe, whose title of kōshaku was officially rendered as “prince,” led Japan from 1937 to 1939 and from 1940 to 1941, periods when the country invaded China, allied with fascist Germany and Italy, and formulated plans to attack American, British, Dutch and French territories.

While he tried to resist militarists and encourage the emperor to end the war, Konoe also initiated social changes that transformed Japan into a totalitarian state and committed society to a war that ultimately resulted in millions of casualties in Japan and overseas.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that Suginami Ward in Tokyo is now quietly rebuilding his villa as a tourist attraction, with taxpayers footing the bill.

Fit for a prince

Named Tekigaiso, the villa is a heritage building in a neighborhood south of Ogikubo Station. Today, you could walk by it without any visible hint whatsoever that it was the starting point for some of the most significant events in Asian history. A century ago, it commanded views of Mount Fuji as well as the nearby Zenpukuji River and surrounding daikon fields. From the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the neighborhood's pastoral quality attracted the elite of Tokyo seeking to escape the bustle of the growing metropolis; they included music critic Motoo Otaguro (1893–1979), whose property is now a park.

Tekigaiso was built as a two-story home in 1927 for Tatsukichi Irisawa (1865–1938), a prominent physician and professor of medicine at Tokyo Imperial University who treated Emperor Showa’s father, Emperor Taisho. The villa’s designer was Chuta Ito (1867–1954), a famous architect of imperial Japan. Ito is known for grandiose works such as Tsukiji Honganji Temple near the capital’s Ginza neighborhood, and the Tokyo Memorial Hall dedicated to the victims of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.

For Tekigaiso, Chuta chose the sukiya-zukuri style of traditional Japanese residential construction, although he made allowances for Irisawa’s tastes. A disciple of Erwin Balz (1849–1914), who helped introduce Western medicine to Japan, the doctor had studied in Germany and preferred chairs to sitting on tatami mats — that may be one reason why the home’s ceilings are higher than usual. With its grand entrance, splendid tiled roof and many rooms, the elegant home was perfect for Konoe, who bought it in 1937, the year he became prime minister.

Konoe was a conflicted, unconventional character with a flair for the unusual. Born in 1891 into one of the great branches of the Fujiwara family, he became the protege of Prince Kinmochi Saionji (1849–1940), an elder statesman who had fought shogunal forces in the run-up to the Meiji Restoration. While Konoe railed against racist anti-Japanese policies in the United States, he also admired Adolf Hitler and dressed up as the Nazi dictator at a costume party in 1937.

Saionji had doubts about the younger prince, but recommended him to the emperor as prime minister. A month after assuming office, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred, signaling the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Konoe began to use Tekigaiso as his unofficial residence, setting a precedent for other Japanese leaders who used buildings outside of Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki government district to conduct affairs of state. In July 1940, three days before he took office for his second term, Konoe convened a landmark gathering at Tekigaiso dubbed the Ogikubo Conference, which involved Gen. Hideki Tojo, Vice Adm. Yoshida Zengo and candidate for foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka, famous for storming out of the League of Nations in 1933.

A photo shows the four men reclining in the Tekigaiso parlor. They discussed forming stronger ties with Germany and Italy, pursuing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and expanding Japan’s Asia push to Southeast Asia.

The gathering quickly proved momentous. In August 1940, Matsuoka announced the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the area of Japanese influence and colonization. In September, Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact. In October, Konoe used Tekigaiso to publicize the formation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, a national movement that effectively turned Japan into a one-party state and established the tonarigumi network of neighborhood groups that enforced civil defense, rationing, firefighting, propaganda and other duties for all civilians. The nation had been placed on a total war footing.

A year later, Konoe had another important meeting at Tekigaiso. Now Japan found itself in the midst of a U.S. oil and gas embargo while bilateral negotiations were going nowhere. At a conference in September, the Cabinet committed to war with the U.S., Britain and the Netherlands if talks failed. But Konoe was not the decisive leader needed to survive a national crisis. He struggled to navigate the rivalries between his office, the military and the Imperial Household Department. At the Tekigaiso meeting, navy minister Adm. Koshiro Okawa stated that the decision to go to war lay with the prime minister, but did not make it clear that the Imperial Japanese Navy could not last against a foe as industrially powerful as the United States. Tojo used this position to push for Konoe’s ouster, and he soon took over as prime minister. With Konoe as one of the main players, Tekigaiso thus served as a central stage in the political drama that placed Japan on the road to ruin.

“Konoe was a thoroughly contradictory and ambivalent character who legitimized his failed leadership along those very lines of self-victimization and self-pity,” says Eri Hotta, the author of “Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy.”

“Even though he was in a position of power, he ultimately felt cornered by the circumstances and his own lack of courage to avert the war that he knew Japan could ill afford.”

The war room

Nearly 40% of Tokyo was destroyed in air raids during the war, but Ogikubo was largely spared, and Tekigaiso survived intact. Postwar Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, a friend of Konoe, lived in the villa, reportedly remarking that he decided to sleep there in the hopes that Konoe would appear to him.

Around 1960, about half the home was purchased by the Tenrikyo religious group. The entrance building and a reception room where Konoe had held meetings were moved to Komagome in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward, where they were used as an office for Tenrikyo teachers, and later as a preachers’ accommodation. A current representative could not determine why the building was acquired.

In 2008, the government designated Tekigaiso a National Historic Site as a location of important political meetings. The Konoe family continued to live in the remainder of Tekigaiso until 2012, when it was sold to Suginami Ward. About 10 groups of local residents had called on the ward to preserve the property for its historic role.

“It was Japan's modern era that gave birth to lush suburban residential areas, and it was also Japan's modern era that pushed the country toward the Pacific War,” says Kazuo Matsui, a board member with the Ogikubo Higashi neighborhood association. “It would be ideal if the reopening could be a place where people could feel and think about such things in a comprehensive manner.”

"Tekigaiso is a valuable legacy of Showa Era history,” agrees Masayasu Hosaka, a writer specializing in 20th century history, referring to the 1926-89 period. “It was the stage for deciding on war or diplomatic negotiations. This private residence was also used for Konoe's efforts to end the war. Tekigaiso has a number of overlapping facets of the Showa Era."

The ward decided to conserve Tekigaiso and turned part of the property into a park with a large grassy lawn, and named a nearby road Tekigaiso-dori. Suginami Ward later purchased the other half of the villa from Tenrikyo and began moving it back to Ogikubo in 2019.

The ward is spending about ¥4.7 billion yen ($33.5 million) on returning the villa to its former glory with a full refurbishment. Of that total, some ¥41 million is from private donations. Apart from questions about the cost, there has been little discussion about the restoration project, according to a ward official, and the project has raised eyebrows among some historians.

“Honoring such a feckless leader may be in tune with revisionists who are eager to rewrite and burnish Japan's wartime history, but at the risk of making Japan appear in shameless denial about its shared history with Asia and the suffering it inflicted,” says Jeff Kingston, a professor of history at Temple University who lives in Suginami Ward.

“I think Konoe’s ultimate legacy is that even in his death he continues to enable the obfuscation of the war responsibility debate in Japan, and perpetuates the general feeling that Japan was more a victim of circumstances than an active aggressor in the Asia-Pacific War,” says Hotta. “Now that Japan is becoming more and more reliant on international tourism, potential tourist sites including the rebuilt Tekigaiso would have to be able to explain their historical (and not just architectural) importance to the outside world.”

Suginami Mayor Satoko Kishimoto says that although she personally regrets the way Japan has dealt with its wartime legacy and the nations it invaded, the Tekigaiso project is about conserving local heritage.

“Suginami and I, as mayor, are not evaluating Konoe or his actions. What he did had enormous consequences in the world, and everybody will have a different evaluation of them,” Kishimoto says. “This is quite separate from the motivation to preserve important architecture and commemorate its history.”

Kunio Takamizawa, another supporter of the project, is an 80-year-old emeritus professor of urban planning at Tokyo Metropolitan University who grew up in the Ogikubo area. He notes that many people were involved in Japan’s wartime decisions and doesn’t think the project should focus on Konoe alone.

“I’d like visitors from Japan and abroad, especially young people, to recognize once again that there was such a war in Japan, China and the Pacific,” he says. “I believe that the opening of Tekigaiso is significant as a starting point to think about that war.”

When it opens to the public in December 2024, Tekigaiso will feature in tourism campaigns for Suginami Ward. There is talk of bringing visitors in by minibus, and they will be able to buy Tekigaiso merchandise from a gift shop. There will be NHK archival footage displayed in the house, but limited descriptions of Konoe’s tenure and his conferences will be relegated to a new pavilion with a cafe across the street. The ward has not decided on the text yet.

The pavilion will be designed by architect Kuma Kengo and Associates and will also house explanations about how Tekigaiso fits into the overall oeuvre of Ito, its architect. A panel that stood in Tekigaiso Park before it was closed for the rebuilding only outlined the Ogikubo Conference, stating the basic facts.

The limited number of war-related sites in Japan present a version of history that informs visitors young and old. Also designed by Ito, the Yushukan Museum at Yasukuni Shrine has a revanchist, unapologetic narrative of Japan’s actions during the war, and the A-Bomb Dome and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum emphasize nuclear devastation, civilian suffering and disarmament. Whether visitors to the former prime minister’s home will see it as an architectural gem or the incubator of military aggression will depend on how it is explained.

In early 1945, Konoe had appealed to the emperor to begin peace talks, warning of a communist revolution in Japan. After the surrender, Konoe tried to reinvent himself as a constitutional revisionist. As a member of the Higashikuni Cabinet, he held meetings in October 1945 with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When they discussed the future of the nation, Konoe blamed Marxists for the rise of the militarists. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces is said to have told him, “You are still young. Stand resolutely at the head of leadership. If you were to gather liberalist elements and present the nation with a proposal for revising the constitution, the Diet would follow your lead.”

But Konoe’s star had already fallen. He lost his position when the Cabinet resigned the following day, and The New York Times later said he was unsuited for drafting a new constitution.

On Nov. 1, the Allied Occupation’s General Headquarters broke its relations with him, saying it had nothing to do with his efforts to draft a new supreme law. On Dec. 6, GHQ issued a warrant for his arrest in relation to war crimes. For the prince, a public trial was anathema. Ten days later, he lay dead in his study.