This study explored the Tama Cemetery(Tamareien), the first modern park cemetery in Japan, diachronically, focusing on the historical background and reasons of its birth, its public uses, and its degeneration during the war time.<BR> According to the results of this study, the Tama Cemetery was born in response to the increasing need of public cemeteries for replacing temple cemeteries according to the Meiji government’s policies suppressing Buddhism and for meeting the demand of burial ground rising along with rapid urbanization. Inoshita Kiyoshi, who was one of those in charge of works related to burial ground in the Park Department, planned the first park cemetery in Japan as a huge single park for both beautiful scenery and resting by combining Japanese traditions and Western memorial parks, and opened part of it first in April, 1923. As the Great Kanto Earthquake occurred 5 months after, the Tama Cemetery was expanded in order to accommodate a great number of earthquake victims and, at the same time, for Tokyo City’s long harbored policy to remove temple cemeteries outside the city by force.<BR> Different from traditional graveyards that were usually private or community spaces, the municipal Tama Cemetery was used as a more public space. First, it operated a temporary charnel house and provided burial grounds for unclaimed deaths. Second, it buried famous people including Togo Heihachiro (東?平八?), the hero of the Japanese Navy, and therefore was used as a space for public commemoration of them. Tamareien (多磨?園) was occasionally advertised as a space of assimilatory reconciliation or conversion, and some people chose it as a place for taking their lives by themselves.<BR> With the outbreak of the Sino Japanese War in 1937, however, the Tama Cemetery was provided free to the war dead and their families, and even it was used to grow crops. As fallen famous generals were buried in succession just before the defeat, the cemetery was degenerated into a space for commemorating them, encouraging a fighting spirit, and renewing the pledge of loyalty and patriotism. In addition, Inoshita, who had been trying to implement the idea of park cemeteries, participated in the process of degeneration actively as the head of the Park Section of Tokyo City, and this represents the irony of modern Japanese history symbolically.