by Anna Sherman
Inside, an arbor: panels painted with grapes and berries. Silk roses and hydrangeas, and bowls full of plastic grapes. A grape vine with green silk leaves and plastic fruit twined itself around the ceiling lamp and its electric cable. Among all the silks and ceramic toys were model aircraft: a Flying Fortress, and a smaller, more delicate model that might have been a Mitsubishi Ki-67. At the family altar was a black-and-white memorial photograph of Yamamoto’s mother, who rang Ueno’s Bell of Time for almost forty years.
He gestured for me to sit at the table.
‘You like collecting model planes?’
‘I like building them.’
‘How long have you been ringing the bell?’
‘For fifty years. I first rang it around the time when Tokyo held the Olympics. My grandfather had been ringing it since 1947.’ Yamamoto paused. ‘The bell stopped ringing during the war. There was no able-bodied person around then who could sound it.’
‘Were your family priests…? Is that why your grandfather was chosen?’
‘No. Because the bell rang the hours like a clock, not for religious ceremonies, anybody was eligible. My family were townspeople. My grandfather, who was the first in our family to ring the bell, had been a painter of bird and flower scenes before the war.’ And his father made the thick shironuri powder that could make a woman’s face glow like the moon reflected in water. Yamamoto smiled a crooked smile. ‘They weren’t priests.’
I asked if Yamamoto could show me one of his grandfather’s sketches.
He shook his head. ‘No. He sold every single piece he made, and later on he developed palsy. His hand shook so much that he had to give up painting. He was the one who taught me how to ring the bell. I first rang it when I was ten years old. He would say, “Do what I do.”’
‘Is it possible to ring it the wrong way?’
‘You can forget a stroke. Then you say, “Ah! I was one short!”’
‘But no one ever complains when you make a mistake.’
‘No one ever complains.’
‘Did you want to be a bell-ringer when you were growing up?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Yamamoto said, somber. ‘I wanted what everyone wants. I wanted the life other people had. When you are the bell-ringer, you can never go away on holiday. You can never take time off to be sick. You have to ring it once, twice, three times, every day. Those restrictions made it hard to have a family.’
I wondered about whether his children would follow him and ring the bell, but his face seemed to anticipate that question and warn me against asking it.
‘And your wife, how does she feel about the bell?’
‘She…’ He hesitated. ‘She doesn’t like it. She wants me to retire. But I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would be wrong to quit. Not while I can still keep on going. I’ll be the last of my family to ring it.’
At five minutes to noon, Yamamoto started to become uneasy. He kept craning around to look at a clock mounted on the wall behind him. It was round and framed in blond wood, with the white silhouette of a cityscape at night; near the 11.00 mark a tiny witch flew on her broomstick through a haze of stars.
‘We still have a little longer.’
‘How can you tell when it’s time to ring the bell?’ I asked.
‘The mobile phone tells me.’
‘… And before there were mobile phones?’
‘The television.’
‘And before the TV?’
‘The radio.’
Yamamoto stood up and I followed. He opened a narrow door and we climbed up a flight of wooden stairs to a door that opened out into the bell tower. Above us the bell’s green bronze dome shone with reflected sunlight.
‘So, before the radio, how would people know it was 6 a.m.?’
‘Sono goro de ii,’ Yamamoto mused, climbing upward and skirting the huge bell. He stood beside an octagonal column that had once held up Kanei-ji itself, but which now, lying horizontal, was used to strike the bell. The column was suspended from two metal chains. Yamamoto placed his palm on the beam.
‘In those days, they weren’t so strict about minutes and seconds. But now we live in the Digital Age. And everything is different.’
Some Japanese never forgave the foreigners who abandoned the country after the Fukushima reactors exploded. I heard of a woman who told her British boyfriend: Don’t call me. Ever. I never want to see you again. He was gone only a few days, but he might as well not have come back.
When I called my Japanese teacher to tell her that I was returning – after almost a month waiting in Hong Kong to see what would happen – I asked how she was. I didn’t understand her answer. I had to ask her to repeat the words.
‘“Unaltered”,’ she translated. ‘I’m unaltered. The situation is normal.’
An Austrian institute had just tested for radioactive particles in the air. Iodine-131 was already 73% of amounts released after Chernobyl. Cesium-137 was 60%. The foreign newspapers were full of horror stories: contaminated rice, contaminated tea, contaminated water. Bean sprouts, cabbage, broccoli. Certain things – like fish – no one ate at all.
After the earthquake, Japan had shifted five meters closer to North America. The seabed off Sendai had risen as much as ten meters and had moved fifty meters southeast.
Unaltered. The situation is normal.
‘… Can I bring you back anything?’ I asked, after a silence.
‘I need nothing,’ she said, formal in a way that she had never been before. ‘Thank you for your kind concern.’
I had known my teacher for ten years. If she was so offended, what, I wondered, would Daibo be like?
I walked into the cafe and sat down at the counter. Daibo was laughing with a few customers. He turned away from them to face me. He said nothing, just looked at me. I slid a little package – a Chinese ink stick, wrapped in paper – across the counter. It was a miyage, a present from abroad.
Daibo took the block, glanced at it, glanced back at me. ‘… You ran away?’
‘I ran away.’
He laughed. Then he thanked me for the ink. That was the last time we spoke about how I had left. If Daibo remembered, he never said.
鹿
鳴
館
‘Rokumeikan’
The Japanese have their eyes fixed on the future, and are impatient when a word is said of their past. The cultured among them are actually ashamed of it. When I asked one man about Japanese history, he answered bluntly: ‘We have no history. Our history begins today.’
Erwin Bälz,
personal physician to the Meiji emperor
The Rokumeikan: The Meiji Restoration
A doll’s house in a glass display box, with a tiny plaque that read: ROKUMEIKAN. A mansard roof, a white colonnade; balconies and a portico. Chimneys and window panes; all perfect, all to scale. A Renaissance villa on the Pacific.
The Rokumeikan itself was built in 1883, a pretentious building financed by the Japanese government. It included a large dining room complete with a French chef; salons, parlors, games rooms with billiard tables, ballrooms and ‘a corridor for promenading’. Its bars sold American cocktails and German beer and English cigarettes. Newspapers published warnings about correct behavior, for the benefit of those who were to attend events and functions there: ‘Do nothing to make the foreigners laugh at us.’
The Rokumeikan gave its name to Japan’s ‘enlightenment era’, and came to symbolize decadence and subservience to the West. In 1890, the Foreign Office sold the structure off to private investors, who turned it into a club for the nobility.
Rokumeikan means ‘Deer Cry Pavilion’. The name was taken from one of China’s most ancient collection of poems, The Book of Songs. It is a convivial ode to drinking and toasting foreign guests:
The deer call to one another,
Eating the southernwood of the fields.
I have here admirable guests;
Whose virtuous fame is grandl
y brilliant.
They show the people not to be mean.
I have good wine,
Which my admirable guests drink, enjoying themselves.
The Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru hoped that if Japan copied Western culture – its canapés and polkas, its waltzes and card games – the imperialist powers might revisit the hated Unequal Treaties forced on the country in the 1850s when it first opened its ports to foreign ships. In this regard, the Rokumeikan was a failure. European visitors sneered at the design, at the dancers. The French author Pierre Loti attended a ball there, and dismissed it as ‘hardly elegant … built in the European style, all fresh, white and new, it resembled a casino in one of our second-rate resort towns.’
Ultimately revision of the treaties came only in 1899, after the Japanese armies had defeated China, prizing away Korea, Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula as spoils of war. What dancing with diplomats failed to achieve, big guns did. Berlin, Washington, Paris and London all signed new treaties with the imperial government in Tokyo; this time, the diplomatic agreements were established between equals.
* * *
The poet Arthur Waley translated part of the Rokumeikan ode this way: Here is a man that loves me/ And will teach me the ways of Zhou.
The ‘ways of Zhou’ meant how things are done in foreign places.
The optimism and naiveté of the Meiji Era is contained in those two lines.
* * *
From the 1930s onward, the Rokumeikan was destroyed piecemeal. In 1941, the wartime government ordered it razed altogether, embarrassed and resentful of the Meiji Era’s wholesale embrace of what was foreign. And when the Rokumeikan disappeared, nostalgia enfolded its memory: the marble and magnificence of Meiji, and the beginning of Japan’s short-lived empire.
Mishima Yukio, writing about the Rokumeikan with his usual combination of nostalgic romanticism and rage, wrote: ‘The Age of the Rokumeikan, according to contemporary paintings and poems, was truly ridiculous and grotesque, a kind of monkey’s theatre for enlightenment, in which buck-toothed midget Japanese men wearing ill-suited swallowtails bobbed their heads to foreigners.’
In Mishima’s play Rokumeikan, a grand ball is planned to entertain foreign visitors. A government official – Kageyama – and his wife, an elegant former geisha called Asako, host the reception. Asako has abandoned her Japanese robes for a ruched bustle, crinolines, and a corset. She cries in humiliation, thinking of her loss of identity, of concessions that are expensive but meaningless.
KAGEYAMA: Look. The people old enough to know better are slowly coming toward us, feeling bitter about the absurdity of it all. They’re dancing. Rokumeikan. These deceptions are what slowly make the Japanese wiser, you see.
ASAKO: We have to put up with it only a while longer. Fake smiles and fake balls won’t last that long.
KAGEYAMA: We must hide our true feelings. We must dupe them – the foreigners, the whole world.
ASAKO: Nowhere in the rest of the world should such a faked, shameless waltz exist.
KAGEYAMA: Still, I’ll continue to dance it for the rest of my life.
The Rokumeikan’s successor was the Tokyo Kaikan, where I was standing. Inside and out, its looks were unremarkable. I had never heard of the club, but when I had asked one of the receptionists in its building, she exclaimed, ‘But it’s a fantastic place! Sometimes the emperor himself is entertained there!’
I was waiting for Tokugawa Tsunenari, head of the main Tokugawa family, eighteenth in a line that had begun in the seventeenth century with the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu. I stood in the foyer of the Kaikan, which was empty except for a scattering of chairs and low tables, and – of course – the little Rokumeikan model in its vitrine.
I knew Tokugawa Tsunenari only from his book The Edo Inheritance: in the little author’s photograph on the dust jacket’s back flap, he is beaming like a schoolboy. It is not a dignified portrait. I was surprised, then, when the real Tokugawa Tsunenari entered the room. He was stately. He glided forward almost like a Noh actor, stopping at the Rokumeikan in its glass box.
As I bowed, I thought of the first Tokugawa shogun: in creating Edo, Ieyasu had flattened mountains, reclaimed land from the sea, moved rivers. He and his successors built the city on a spiral aligned with the cosmos: illustrating the direct equation between Tokugawa rule and the order of the universe.
Lord Tokugawa was smiling. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the condition of your stomach?’
‘Sorry?’
‘… Are you hungry?’
A maître d’ materialized – out of the air, it seemed – and ushered us into the Gold Room, where he seated us by one of the plate-glass windows. On the opposite wall near the kitchens, staff craned their necks to see Lord Tokugawa. Passing waiters watched him from the corner of their eyes.
‘All year I’ve been visiting places with the Tokugawa crest: temples and graves. It’s a nice change to meet a Tokugawa who’s still alive.’
Lord Tokugawa laughed. ‘Temples and shrines are all very well. But what’s heartbreaking is the loss of the core city. Shitamachi: the downtown where people lived and loved and laughed. That’s all gone.’
‘So when you look at modern Tokyo, you feel that Shitamachi is the great loss?’
Lord Tokugawa waved his hand, as if batting a flying insect away. ‘It’s just simple nostalgia.’ He looked at me, level. ‘I don’t know how you can write a book about Tokyo, because in this city everywhere changes so fast. It’s not like London. When I first came to the Kaikan in the mid-sixties, this was the tallest building around, but now look—’ Outside the window, the skyline stretched away, blank with gray buildings, without any horizon. South and north, east and west, every direction looked the same. ‘I’m always asking people, why the hell do you want to go up so high? And all these glass buildings get so hot in the summer!’
‘You’re right about Tokyo,’ I said. ‘It’s a surprise, when I read about things and then find that they still exist. So much has gone.’
* * *
The waiters brought coq au vin served from silver domes and a silver saucière. While we ate, Tokugawa talked about studying in England during the early 1960s, visiting Confucius’ tomb (‘It’s like a film set – new but looks old’), environmentalism, the proper way to eat soba (‘You must always slurp’), woodblock prints, and the pendulum clocks in his grandparents’ house. One was Swiss, the other English. His grandparents did not own any old Japanese timepieces. ‘Those disappeared when Western mechanical clocks came in. They were very difficult to maintain.’
‘When did you become aware of time?’
‘When I was small, very small. It would have been the o-yatsu, the little snack I ate at 3 p.m., between lunch and supper. Sometimes my mother and our maid were very busy, and they would forget. But I didn’t forget. I had to claim my little sweet.’
Lord Tokugawa was born into the Matsudaira family, raised, he said, in a frugal household staffed with servants from Aizu, the northern province that had suffered immensely during the brief but bloody Boshin War of the 1860s, when supporters of the shogunate fought supporters of the emperor.
Tokugawa’s memoirs are full of the Confucian texts he copied as a child, the samurai sayings (‘What a man shouldn’t do, he must not do’) he learned in the Aizu dialect, as well as popular comic books that treated the Tokugawa as villains. When he was a child, his mother’s father – Tokugawa Iemasa, the seventeenth head of the Tokugawa’s main branch – adopted him. Tokugawa Iemasa’s only son had died, and he wanted a male heir. The line would otherwise have become extinct.
‘When I was five or six or seven – I can’t remember exactly – I met a very old gentleman, a friend of my grandfather’s. He might have been ninety or so. And he’d actually lived through the Boshin War … the Meiji Restoration War…’
‘Your civil war…’
‘Our civil war, yes. And he picked me up and he held me. He’d been drinking with my grandfather, and he smelled horrible – not j
ust him, but the entire corridor stank of sake. And if I hold my grandchildren, and tell them the story, there’s a line, a continuum, of stories and memories.
‘I know what World War Two was like. I know what Tokyo looked like in 1945 because I saw it. I was six years old. Most houses had burned to the ground and people were living in small nests that they’d built in the ashes. Everything was razed, and I could stand in Roppongi and see all the way to Tokyo Bay and the sea. We could see the sun rise and the sun set on that black plain. It was our playground. You’d be surprised at what’s left after great fires. There were lots of metal rings made out of melted electric sockets and doorplates and – what’s that called? When you open the door?’
‘The “knob”?’
‘… The children would dig through the ashes and there were so many things that came out. Hundreds of different rings, all different sizes. We’d play, whose ring could run the longest? Children can get into so many places. We played hide and seek, everywhere.
‘Say I tell my grandson or my granddaughter about Tokyo after the war. They’ll always remember, and then they can tell the story to their grandchildren. Time jumps … and jumps … like this—’ Here Tokugawa sketched a graph. For people, he drew circles; for the movement of time, arrows. And stories and memories were arcs joining one circle to another.
‘When that old gentleman held me, reeking as he did of sake, the abstraction of time became real.’
‘Your grandfathers must have remembered a very beautiful city. Before the 1923 earthquake and before the war. Lord Matsudaira and Lord Tokugawa. Did they ever speak about Tokyo before the war? Or talk about what was lost?’