Abstract
During intense earthquake activity and subsequent fires, urban parks become natural areas of shelter. Shortly after the great Kanto earthquake in 1923 , many parks and some residential gardens in the Tokyo area were described and assessed for fire damage by Kawada & Yanagida (1923) and Tanaka (1923). They assessed the areas as to their relative safty and the fire resistance of tree species which was indicated by the leaf susceptibility to fire. In this study, ten of these parks were selected as presentative and compared to data that was published 65 years ago by Kawada & Yanagida (1923) and Tanaka (1923). Within each park, the distribution of all tree and shrub species and the structure of forest zones were surveyed in detail. From this initial survey, Hibiya park was studied in depth. Data were collected in both summer and winter in order to determine the differentiation of seasonal fire resistance. Fire resistance map was drawn for Hibiya park. This map was used to assess the safety and general susceptibility of this park to fire.
