In the Jomon period, thousands of years ago, Shinobazu was not a pond at all but a shallow cove of Tokyo Bay. As the sea gradually retreated, it left behind marshlands that blanketed much of old Shitamachi, the low-lying merchant districts of what would become Edo. The pond is the last surviving fragment of those marshes. By the 15th century, locals already knew it as Shinobazu -- a name whose origin remains debated. One theory ties it to bamboo grass that once grew nearby. Another, more romantic explanation holds that young men and women used to meet here in secret. In 1625, the Tokugawa shogunate built the great temple of Kan'ei-ji on the heights above the pond as a spiritual counterpart to Enryakuji on Mount Hiei near Kyoto. The temple's founder, the monk Tenkai, admired Lake Biwa so deeply that he had an artificial island constructed in the pond's center, modeled after Chikubushima, and crowned it with a temple to Benzaiten, the goddess of water, music, and eloquent speech. That island -- Benten-do -- still stands at the pond's heart today.

For most of the Edo period, Shinobazu spread much wider than it does now, fed by the Aizomegawa stream from the north. The modern shape dates to 1884, when a horse-racing company filled in large sections of the northern shore to lay a track. The first race drew the Emperor himself that November, and spring and summer meets continued through 1892. By 1907, a promenade built for the Tokyo Industrial Fair cut across the water, and further work in 1929 carved the pond into four distinct basins. Boat rentals launched in 1939 -- a business that still operates today. Then came the war. Authorities drained the pond and divided it into rice paddies, part of a desperate wartime food-production push. When peace returned, proposals to build a baseball diamond on the drained lakebed circulated through city offices. In 1949, however, officials chose to restore the pond to its earlier form. The subway accident of 1967 was one more indignity, but the pond refilled, and between 1990 and 1994, water purification equipment was installed to keep it clean.

Every summer, the entire surface of Lotus Pond -- one of the three sections into which Shinobazu is divided -- vanishes beneath a dense carpet of lotus plants. The broad leaves and pink blossoms hide the water so completely that the pond looks like a solid meadow, a startling sight surrounded by train stations and high-rises. The other two sections serve different purposes: Boat Pond, where visitors can rent swan-shaped pedal boats and row among the water birds, and Cormorant Pond, which lies within the grounds of Ueno Zoo and takes its name from the waterbirds that nest there. Over 10,000 birds settle on the pond during migration season, including tufted ducks, pochards, and northern pintails. Not all the pond's residents are welcome, though -- in 2006, authorities discovered alligator snapping turtles, a non-native species with no natural predators in Japan, breeding in the water. Warning signs now line the banks.

Shinobazu has cast a long shadow across Japanese literature and art. The great ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige depicted the pond and the Benten-do temple in woodblock prints during the Edo period, capturing it as a place of contemplation amid the bustle of the capital. Novelist Mori Ogai set key scenes of his 1911 work Gan (The Wild Geese) along the pond's shores, weaving its atmosphere of quiet melancholy into a story of unrequited love. Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata referenced the pond in his fiction, and more recently, Korean-Japanese author Miri Yu made Ueno Park and its surroundings the emotional landscape of her novel Tokyo Ueno Station, a meditation on homelessness and displacement that won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020. The pond's ability to absorb centuries of human drama -- and reflect it back -- has made it one of Tokyo's most enduring literary settings.

From the air, Shinobazu Pond reads as a green comma in the gray grid of Taito ward, its lotus-covered surface unmistakable against the surrounding density of buildings and rail lines. Benten-do's vermilion temple sits at dead center, connected to the shore by a straight causeway. The promenades that divide the pond into its three sections are clearly visible, as is the boundary where Cormorant Pond meets the tree-lined enclosures of Ueno Zoo. To the east, the tracks leading into Keisei Ueno Station run close enough to the water that commuters see the lotus from their train windows every morning. The pond has no grand cliffs or dramatic vistas -- its power lies in the improbability of its survival. It has outlasted shoguns, wars, subway tunnels, and urban planners, remaining a piece of ancient Tokyo Bay marooned in the middle of a city of 14 million.