I had no idea until yesterday, but for years I have been living quite close to Totoro, a Shinto kami made globally famous through Hayao Miyazaki‘s utterly delightful 1988 animated movie, My Neighbor Totoro.
OK, so it’s not the real forest-protecting spirit as depicted by STUDIO GHIBLI, but the topiary sculpture is wonderful.
It’s a work that I’m pretty sure is unauthorized by Suzaki, a gardening company in the Tokyo suburb of Kokubunji.
A cycling buddy posted photos of Totoro on social media yesterday, and with only a couple of pre-dawn hours available for anything today due to home requirements, I looked up the location and decided to make a quick trip.
Suzaki looked like a delightful little operation, quaint yet kitschy (in a manner that immediately reminded me of Anakie Fairy Park back in Australia (which seems to have lifted its game, based on the website)). Thoughts immediately turned to how much it would cost to get a concrete kangaroo made.
Aspects of the area where the company is located also resembled a satoyama, which is a tiny strip of forest land left to run pretty much wild amid residential areas, and often a lovely oasis amid the McHomes of the suburbs.
There were lots of winding, twists and turns required to get to the Totoro topiary, and this time it got me to thinking about one of Japan’s most fascinating unsolved crimes, the Three Hundred Million Yen Incident of 1968.
In the case, a thief disguised as a motorcycle police officer stopped the payroll clerks from Toshiba Corp.’s nearby Fuchu complex and made off with the then-gigantic (and now still gigantic) sum of 300 million yen in cash (equivalent to about 1.2 billion yen in 2024 yen). The thief made a successful getaway by escaping through the maze-like backstreets of Kokubunji.
The area is fairly built-up now and I bet little resembles what would have been a semi-rural atmosphere back when the crime occurred, but as I was riding through the myriad tiny lanes and alleys, it was easy to see why a crook would choose the area to try and evade the cops, and how simply that could be done if they had geographical knowledge. All in all, it was a busy morning ahead of a day that will largely require me to be inside all day.
