In November 2019, unsettling news broke that the bones of 187 human bodies had been excavated between 2013 and 2015 from the construction site of Tokyo’s new Olympic stadium. It turned out the area where the venue was being built was an Edo Period (1603-1868) cemetery.
While the discovery wasn’t particularly surprising — old burial sites are frequently unearthed during large-scale infrastructure projects — it was enough to revive an urban legend: the Tokugawa curse.
Around 330,000 square meters of land in present-day Sendagaya in Shibuya Ward, near where Olympic facilities such as the new stadium stands, once belonged to the main lineage of the Tokugawa family, descendants of the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled feudal Japan.