The bleak winter sun is struggling to melt the ice on the ground. A sick-sounding crow lets out a rasping call. Welcome to the tomb of General Tojo Hideki - Japan's war-time leader and its most notorious war criminal.
The stone Shinto grave sits in the Zoshigaya graveyard in a Tokyo suburb. At least some of Tojo's ashes are thought to be inside. Tojo was cremated following his execution by hanging, after he was sentenced to death by a US-backed tribunal in 1948.
It is little bigger than many of the neighbouring plots in one of three major public graveyards in Tokyo. Two bunches of flowers lie wilting at its side. The only hint of something unusual is a stone receptacle for visitor's cards. Few people are thought to drop by, outside of family and Japanese right-wingers bent on rewriting history by portraying Tojo as a man who defended his country against foreign aggressors.
Greater attention is instead given to the more imposing Yasukuni Shrine near the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo, the current flashpoint of Sino-Japanese relations. Tojo's name is among 14 Class-A Japanese war criminals enshrined on parchments at Yasukuni, together with those of 2.5 million other war dead, beneath billowing banners of mourning white in the inner shrine. And that, according to one senior Japanese diplomat, is the point - Tojo's remains are not even at Yasukuni.
'I'm very concerned that many Chinese people think that the actual physical remains of General Tojo and other war criminals are at Yasukuni,' said the diplomat who directed me towards the grave. 'Many reports say so and they get very angry about this, but it's simply not the case. Tojo's remains are elsewhere.'
From the outside, the message serves to highlight an unusual strand of Japanese diplomacy. Put crudely, it's hard to imagine German envoys including a visit to Hitler's bunker in their itineraries today.