The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  It is difficult to understand why the monks were so complacent. The shōgitai not only lacked modern guns, they lacked strategists and any vision beyond ‘dying for one’s lord’. To that extent, they succeeded in their aim. In contrast, the imperial troops had excellent generals and statesmen who knew that control of Edo meant control of the entire nation. A victory in Ueno would mean that the Meiji Restoration would become more than just a palace coup.

  An English newspaper reported that after the battle, the emperor’s armies were ‘so completely masters of the situation that men are even afraid to bury the dead Tokugawa men, whose bodies are allowed to lie, the prey of the wild dogs and the fowls of the air, in the sacred precincts of one of the holiest places of the defeated clan. The Tokugawa men are literally swept out of Edo and no man dare harbor one on pain of death.’

  At Kanei-ji today, a letter from the abbot is preserved. He is writing to friends in the northern city of Sendai. A few months have passed since the battle. ‘I am coming, but plan nothing grand for me. I am no longer the abbot.’

  The letter contains one of the earliest mentions of the city’s new name.

  Edo was now Tokyo.

  * * *

  Kobayashi slid back a wooden door depicting a baby in colored robes reaching up toward a sage and we went into one of the temple’s inner rooms. The air smelled like wet tatami matting, the humidity all that remained of a typhoon that had clipped but not hit Tokyo the week before.

  The door’s inner panel was painted with egrets standing in a lotus pond.

  ‘From another temple,’ Kobayashi said.

  We crossed the room and Kobayashi slid back another door, this one painted with peonies, waves, rocks and a green dragon whose body flowed and turned like a waterfall.

  ‘These doors aren’t from the original Kanei-ji, either,’ Kobayashi said. ‘I don’t know where they came from.’

  * * *

  Every year, on 15 May, nineteen of Kanei-ji’s most senior monks hold a requiem service for the spirits of the shōgitai. Passages from the Lotus Sutra are read aloud. The ceremony lasts about half an hour. No outsider may witness it.

  In an antechamber, the senior monk was waiting. He was wearing dark blue robes and a surplice embroidered with golden chrysanthemums. Unlike Kobayashi, who looked fragile, like a mayfly, Takahashi was built like a kendo champion: hard shoulders and arms. A warrior monk.

  Kobayashi bowed and left us.

  Takahashi spread a map of Ueno on the table and traced out with a red pen all of Kanei-ji’s former precincts. West, far beyond Shinobazu Pond. Around the statue of the general whose forces crushed the shōgitai. East, far beyond the huge train station. North, past what has become the thriving love-hotel district of Uguisudani.

  I looked away from the new map to a woodblock print that Takahashi had brought out. It was a bird’s eye view of Kanei-ji before 1868: its famous drum bridge arched between two temples. The Bell of Time. The Great Buddha and a scattering of pagodas. Ancient pine trees and wild cherry trees. Willows. Groves and gardens and golden mists.

  But I couldn’t see the precinct’s heart, the central temple.

  ‘… Where was the Main Hall?’

  Takahashi tapped the National Museum of Art on the modern map. ‘It was here. The abbot was always the son of an emperor. So no artist could show the Main Hall. It would have been disrespectful.’

  ‘Does the Battle of Ueno still matter? Does it have any real meaning to modern Japanese?’

  Takahashi shrugged. ‘If anyone thinks about the Battle of Ueno at all, it’s as a New Year’s drama on television. No one really remembers what it was.’

  ‘Even the great-grandchildren of these fighters wouldn’t be alive now. Will you ever stop holding the memorial ceremony?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because of –’ I thought of the concept that Daibo always said was necessary for being fully human ‘– gimu? “Duty”?’

  ‘That word is close, but it’s not quite right,’ Takahashi said. ‘We recite the prayers because it’s our job. And because the connection between Kanei-ji and the shōgitai, and Kanei-ji and the shoguns buried here, is very clear. Even if there were no shōgitai descendants, we’ll keep saying those prayers. For as long as Kanei-ji exists.’

  Behind Takahashi’s head, in vast letters, a scroll read

  * * *

  I asked Takahashi what the words meant. I could only read the first character, ‘one’.

  ‘Ichimijin,’ he said. ‘“A single atom”.’

  The phrase comes from the Flower Ornament Sutra: In a single atom, there can be untold worlds. The sutra describes the entire cosmos and its many billions of universes through the eyes of the Buddha after he has attained enlightenment. It is an ideal universe, a perfect one.

  ‘A single atom’ was an appropriate epigraph for Kanei-ji, which is now a fragment of what it had once been. But for the writers of that sutra, nothing substantial had changed. Reducing a land to atoms,/ These atoms are measureless, untold./ Boundless lands, as many as these atoms/ are gathered on a single hair.

  ‘For Buddhists, the past, the future, and this moment: everything flows at the same pace,’ Takahashi said. ‘Every second is equal. The past and the future and what’s happening now, aren’t separate.

  ‘You can say a lot about time: but time is also things that don’t happen. I grew up in Hokkaido. On my route to school there was a crossroads and at the crossroads was a stop light. It was such a quiet place that my younger brother and I used to blast right through on our bikes without stopping. But one day, for some reason, I did stop. And a car whipped around the bend and zoomed through the crossing. If I hadn’t held back a few moments before, I would have died. Right in front of my younger brother.

  ‘Afterward I thought everything had happened in slow motion. For my brother, the moment went by like a flash. But time has the same flow: everywhere and always. How we think of it must just be a function of our brains. That sense is just the way we process our fear of death.

  ‘Because no one comes back to tell us what happens after we stop breathing, we’re scared of death. Time is the framework, the scaffolding, for how we experience that terror. Time lets us look away from fear. You might think of time as the life we have left.’

  ‘And the dead?’ I asked. ‘What about the dead?’

  Takahashi shrugged. ‘The dead have slipped out of the framework.’

  * * *

  Kobayashi returned and led me to the temple’s front entrance. Then, by a small votive tablet, I stopped so abruptly that Kobayashi crashed into me.

  ‘What is that?’

  Painted on the wood was a monster: with an amphibian’s legs and arms and deer antlers and ribs picked out like a skeleton’s; its eyes were pinwheel whorls.

  Kobayashi smiled. ‘Tsuno Daishi. He dispels bad luck.’

  ‘Dispels it?’ I asked. The thing looked like a demon.

  ‘He was a monk called Ryōgen but during his training he took on the appearance of Evil, all the better to fight it.’

  We stepped outside into the courtyard. Even in the sunlight I still saw Tsuno Daishi: those ribs, the antlers, the flipper-arms.

  ‘Kobayashi san,’ I asked, abrupt. ‘What makes you think of time?’

  He smiled, easy. The little tablet didn’t bother him: he saw it every day. ‘Waking and sleeping. When I close my eyes, everything stops. When I open them, everything is born.’

  We walked in silence to what remained of the shogunal burial grounds. When someone in the Tokugawa family died, three bells would once ring from Ueno: not just the Bell of Time, but two others. One sounded a note of rest; the second of sadness; and the Bell of Time itself, a note of transcendence.

  A train passed; the Yamanote Line’s tracks ran below the bluff where we stood. Kobayashi gestured toward the rough ishigaki stone walls. ‘Can you see how uneven they are? Not at all the standard you would expect. They’re not like the ones around Edo Castle. Katsu Kaishū ordered them
thrown up very quickly, because he was worried about robbers plundering the shoguns’ graves.’

  It was Katsu Kaishū who negotiated Edo’s surrender to the emperor’s troops when the shogun gave up power; who persuaded the emperor’s generals to let the shogun live rather than commit ritual suicide. It was thanks to Katsu that only Ueno, and not the entire city, burned. If the shōgitai had listened to Katsu, Kanei-ji itself would probably have been saved. ‘One sturdy pillar cannot support a decaying house,’ Katsu wrote in his diaries, bitter but resigned. ‘The wicked monks refused to negotiate with my emissary. All my efforts were in vain.’

  The cemetery’s outer ring was now crowded with other graves, like an ordinary graveyard anywhere in the city. We passed new granite and marble markers with sotoba, the long thin wooden boards with protective phrases written in Sanskrit. If these memorials are forgotten, the dead can become hungry ghosts: wandering, unappeased.

  ‘The Tokugawa family supported this temple until 1946,’ Kobayashi said, ‘when the nobility was abolished. Then the family sold plots to help pay for the temple’s upkeep.’

  Kobayashi began pointing out the buildings that had disappeared. He gestured to the air in front of us and said, ‘This was the Daiji-in. The feudal lords who came here to pay their respects to the grave of Tsunayoshi, the Fifth Shogun, would change their clothes in that place.’

  I followed Kobayashi’s gaze and looked toward a battered red bridge under a weathered bronze roof: nothing else was there. Kobayashi was looking calmly ahead, as if between us and the bridge were a bright procession of nobles. He walked on through the huge bronze gate’s doors, smiling at a groundskeeper, who bowed. We passed a vermilion chōzubashi, the stone basin where worshippers, before entering a sacred space, purify their mouths and right hands. Then we passed through a gate set between the high stone walls.

  Kobayashi again stretched his palm out into the air in front of us – pointing, of course, would be bad luck and bad manners – toward enormous stone lanterns covered in moss that had turned an almost fluorescent green after the rains. ‘And here is the pavilion where the Tokugawa would have moon-viewing parties. The shogun’s tomb – it would originally have been enclosed inside a wooden building.’

  I looked, but couldn’t see what Kobayashi saw.

  Kobayashi moved toward the eighteenth-century tomb of Tsunayoshi, the ‘Dog Shogun’. Tsunayoshi became infamous for his edicts that penalized anyone who mistreated animals, especially dogs. ‘For the sake of a single bird or beast, the death penalty was inflicted. Even relatives were given capital punishment or deported and exiled…’ one contemporary account complained, after Tsunayoshi’s death, and his so-called ‘Laws of Compassion’ were rescinded.

  The weathered bronze of Tsunayoshi’s tomb is the best preserved among Ueno’s six shogunal tombs, though it is somewhat battered. Decorated with phoenixes, with dragon-horses and clouds, the stupa tomb soared over the river stones at its base, over Kobayashi, over me.

  ‘The shogunate was rich when this was built,’ Kobayashi said, nodding at the detailing. ‘This tomb would have cost quite a lot of money. On the other side, in a place that only the abbot is permitted to go, is a tableau of the Western Paradise. You can’t see it; but it’s there.’

  * * *

  The writer Paul Waley once complained that although Ueno should be one of the most attractive places in the city, it isn’t. ‘It’s a jumble of assorted buildings … all interspersed with promenades and dirty clumps of vegetation behind which one half-suspects some sort of lurking presence.’

  There’s a baseball diamond wedged among Ueno’s art museums, and the district is ringed by pachinko parlors and love hotels. The zoo and the concert hall and the lusterless restaurants do not cohere; they are fragments that never make up a whole.

  However luminous its great promenades with their cherry trees, however sublime the lights and shadows in the Hōryū-ji Treasure Gallery, Ueno feels disjointed, like a bone wrenched out of its socket. During the Battle of Ueno, Kanei-ji’s vast temple complex almost entirely burned down. Photographs taken a few weeks afterward record a scorched plain without trees, and with almost no grasses; a place scraped down to the foundation stones and naked earth.

  With the old regime’s defeat so complete, the Meiji authorities were free to reinvent the shoguns’ temple district however they wanted. They made it a showcase for everything new-fangled: electric lights, a trolley line, Japan’s first zoo, and even a horse-racing track that circled Shinobazu Pond. It was the opposite of what had existed before.

  And always, the sense of something lost. Ishikawa Jun caught this atmosphere, which was at its most intense in the years immediately after World War Two, in his short story ‘The Jesus of the Ruins’. In it, Ishikawa describes how New Japan mauls Old Japan and gets away with the crime.

  The story begins with a brutal sketch of the Ameyoko black market, which flourished right by Ueno’s train station until 31 July 1946, when the occupying American authorities shut it down.

  This is Tokyo’s Ueno, the most pugnacious part of town, where tempers and nostrils flare, and every inch of territory – even the space under a train trestle – is guarded jealously: a city in ruins, the burnt-out shell of a metropolis. Its creatures have hatched out of the debris, and now they survive by the sheer tenacity with which they came into the world and by which they cling to life.

  * * *

  Everything is contraband and nothing is legitimate; money is devalued, too. Ishikawa records the ugliness of this world; of the market’s hawkers and the spoiled food they are selling.

  Into the post-apocalyptic landscape comes an urchin, a young boy who incarnates the new order. He was ‘black as the sludge in a ditch, and it was impossible to tell at a glance where the ragged edge of his clothes ended and the flesh underneath began. He was so caked in dirt and filth, he looked as if he were covered in scales.’ Even the hawkers (‘and surely they had never been known to flinch at the thought of handling anything foul or rotten’) shy away from the boy, who is covered in crusted boils. He brings back unwelcome memories the city wants to forget.

  Now that Tokyo’s people had lost their way in a land ravaged by war and fire, and wandered into the labyrinth of the marketplace that grew out of the ruins, what need did they have to think of the past, anyway? It was as if no one had survived from the last century and, no, there had never been an era in the history of modern Japan when people had paraded about smugly wearing the look of His Majesty’s loyal subjects. No, not a soul from that day and age appeared to be alive. They had all vanished – down to every last man, woman, and child.

  What remains, Ishikawa wrote, are errant seeds. ‘They had sprouted out of the ground, and with the force of a weed that reaches maturity overnight.’ The boy himself is ‘the Jesus of the Burnt-Out Shell of Japan’, since ‘he is to be the leader of a new breed of humankind that dwells in the place of ruin and sends out its tendrils to the earth.’

  The boy follows a man as he leaves the market, and attacks him near the shrine to the first Tokugawa shogun. No longer the progenitor of a new race, he becomes ‘the sole survivor of a generation of swine who, possessed by the devil, flung themselves over a precipice and perished in the waters below.’

  The boy steals the man’s food rations and his wallet, and then disappears.

  * * *

  When Tokyo dreams, Ueno never appears with a single face.

  Inside Ueno Station an old man was squatting outside a Danish bakery chanting, in grindingly enunciated English, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday!… Monday, Tuesday, Thursday…’

  A wadded rectangle of thick cotton was taped against his jaw.

  Out through the great pillars that support the Japan Rail tracks; past the caverns beneath them, with their clothes made in China, their dried fish. Up the stairs that lead into the Park itself. A chainsaw ground away somewhere in the trees. The slope was thick with Sunday crowds, with mime artists carrying lace umbrellas, acrobats dangl
ing from steel hoops and magicians playing card tricks. A troupe of musicians from the Andes were playing pan pipes of various sizes. Wind stirred the cherry trees until their leaves sounded like water flowing over stones. And behind all these noises, was silence.

  Some relics of Edo remain.

  I once saw Zen musicians – komusō, ‘monks of nothingness’ – playing their shakuhachi bamboo flutes near Shinobazu Pond. The monks wore enormous, tight-woven wicker barrels over their heads, hats that symbolize the death of the ego. When the Tokugawa fell, the emperor’s new government outlawed komusō, because they had often acted as spies for the Tokugawa. After 1868, komusō temples were burned, and much of the sect’s musical repertoire lost: notes that imitated the crying of cranes, or the beating of their wings; wind; petals falling; a bell. The Meiji authorities appropriated the beehive-shaped hat for convicts, who wore them into court. What had symbolized the ascetic’s ascension toward the sublime became stigmatized, an object of shame.

  On another visit I met a man who recites medieval Buddhist sermons for a fee. One begins, There is a green willow tree in this world, and under it a gatekeeper, who beckons you to go one way, or the other. And: The wind from Heaven comes from the West. You can catch the wind, though it be cold, in your own sleeves.

  But there is something ersatz, something false, about these acts. They lack a connection with the present, the twenty-first-century city. The link between tradition and memory has been broken, and can’t be spliced back together.

  * * *

  A brushwood barrier hid the bell-ringer’s house from the street; the building was attached to the Bell of Time’s stone tower. Yamamoto Makoto was waiting for me outside his door, smoking. He wore a Calvin Klein sweatshirt and pale jeans. We bowed. He gave me his name-card. I gave him mine. He opened the door to his house, which stood at the base of the bell tower.