Sunshine 60, the 240-metre skyscraper in Higashi-Ikebukuro completed in 1978, sits directly on the site of Sugamo Prison — the Imperial Japanese high-security detention facility operated by the Home Ministry from 1895 to 1945 and subsequently, under American occupation, as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) prison. It was at Sugamo that General Hideki Tōjō and six other Class A war criminals were hanged on December 23, 1948, and where an additional 53 Class BC war criminals were executed in subsequent years. The prison was demolished in 1971 for the Ikebukuro redevelopment, and Sunshine 60 — at completion the tallest building in Asia — was erected over the execution yard.
The Sunshine 60 tower has been the source of a persistent paranormal tradition since its opening. Cleaners and overnight security personnel report pressure sensations, women's voices in Japanese and Chinese from empty corridors, and the smell of burned hemp rope in the lower observation-floor vestibule — said to be near the coordinates of the 1948 execution site. The Sunshine City complex's Ikebukuro Shrine at ground level is explicitly a memorial to the Sugamo executed, with a small stone marker reading 'tear of sorrow' dedicated in 1980 by the Tōjō family. Japanese paranormal literature since the 1990s has consistently included Sunshine 60 on lists of Tokyo's most-haunted modern buildings.
In 1993, an office worker on the 58th floor reported a full-body apparition of a man in a Class A military uniform standing at the window; when she looked again he was gone. In 2009, during a paranormal investigation for a Nippon TV special, low-frequency audio recordings near the ground-floor memorial stone produced what investigators identified as the voice of a man reciting what sounded like the Sugamo death-row register numbers. The building's management acknowledges the site's history and maintains a small interpretive plaque. Sunshine 60 remains a central case in modern Japanese urban-haunting research: a trauma site overlaid by one of Tokyo's most-visited commercial towers.