Ikebukuro

Ikebukuro breaks into two classical Japanese words: ike (池), meaning pond or pool, and fukuro (袋), meaning bag or pouch. The second element undergoes rendaku, sequential voicing, turning fukuro into bukuro when it follows ike in compound. Together they describe a pond shaped like a drawstring bag, a natural depression in the landscape north of Edo that collected water and held it in a roughly oval hollow. The pond was real, documented in Edo-period cadastral surveys of Musashino, the upland plateau west of the old city.

The name appears in Edo records from the early seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa shogunate was mapping and naming every village and topographic feature in the Kanto Plain. Toshima County, the administrative unit covering the area, filed Ikebukuro as a hamlet name. The pond at the center was not large, but it was distinctive enough that travelers on the old road to Kawa-Goye used it as a waypoint. By the mid-Edo period the name had attached firmly to the settlement, not just the water.

The pond disappeared gradually over the nineteenth century as the village grew and drainage altered the local water table. When the Tobu Railway opened Ikebukuro Station in 1914, the founding engineers recorded the name without knowing, or perhaps without caring, that the thing the name described was already gone. The station became a junction, then one of Japan's busiest interchanges. Today Ikebukuro handles roughly two and a half million passengers daily, more than most European cities hold as residents.

The kanji 池袋 still appear on every train map in Tokyo. Anyone who can read them encounters, twice a day, a description of a bag-shaped pond that drained away over a century ago. The word has outlived its referent by about two hundred years, which is a common fate for place names: the land changes, the name stays.