The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  It should be clearly understood that it is practically impossible, Satow wrote, when travelling in most parts of the interior, to obtain anything in the way of foreign food, and ‘those who cannot eat the native fare should therefore take with them their own supplies … As a rule, the innkeepers object to their kitchen utensils being used for cooking foreign food. A frying-pan, and perhaps a gridiron also, will therefore be found extremely useful.’ A finicky foreigner should therefore pack copious stores of Liebig’s Extract of Beef, German Pea-soup Sausage, Chicago Corned Beef, Tinned Milk, Biscuits, Jam, Cheese, Salt and Mustard, Bacon, Tea, Sugar, and Worcestershire Sauce. Do not forget your corkscrew and a tin-opener.

  After listing the locations of telegraph offices found throughout Japan, details of the best insect powder (‘Keating’s is indispensable’) and instructions on how to take a bath (‘No foreigner should remain more than five minutes in a bath of 110° and upward’) Satow opened with a description of Tokyo itself: ‘Owing to the shape and the vast extent of the city, it is impossible to combine all the chief sights in a single round.’ He offered a perfunctory description of the emperor’s palace gardens, of Yasukuni jinja, newly built to worship the spirits of those who had died fighting for the emperor during the recent civil war, and a brief sketch of several government offices (‘A day may be profitably spent in making a thorough inspection of the various departments’). Then Satow turned to Shiba. The description is almost half as long as his account of the rest of Tokyo combined. It would have been tactless to have begun a guidebook with praise of the old regime, recently overthrown; so Satow diplomatically began with the emperor’s palace, and the bureaucrats’ offices. But then he turned to the city’s real glories: these go-reiya, or tombs, he wrote, are among the chief marvels of Japanese art. No one should leave Tokyo without seeing them. Or, as another European diplomat said: ‘We will see the Shiba temples undazzled, sober still, if possible, but we shall want no more sights, afterward.’

  We shall want no more sights, afterward. Because in all of Tokyo, there was nothing finer to see.

  When Satow wrote his guidebook, only fifteen years had passed since the last shogun departed into exile, and the temple was surrounded by black scaffolding to keep out thieves, who ‘are gradually stripping the exterior of all the Buddhist buildings of Tokio of some of their handsome metal ornaments, and even mutilating the bronze lanterns.’

  Zōjō-ji’s association with the Tokugawa made the temple a special target: before the Battle of Sekigahara, when the first Tokugawa shogun cemented his authority over Japan, he asked that Zon’ō, the head of Zōjō-ji, curse the opposing side. The Tokugawa did not just bury their dead at Zōjō-ji, but credited it with the founding of and then upholding their power. The new authorities therefore made an example of the temple to underscore the defeat of the old regime.

  All figures of Buddha were removed from the main hall of the temple. The final appearance was bizarre: statues to Amaterasu Ōmikami and other Shinto gods appeared in the main hall, and a large torii was placed in front of the main gate. At the opening ceremony, Shinto priests sat on one side of the hall in their tall black hats; facing them was a line of bald-headed Buddhist priests in their flowing robes. The Buddhist priests who had become national priests had to wear Shinto ceremonial hats, make offerings to the Shinto gods and preach from the Three Doctrines.

  Arsonists burned down the main temple on New Year’s Day, 1874; the shoguns’ mausolea, and the courtyards, survived. A new building, smaller and much less beautiful, replaced the temple, but it looked out of place behind the grandeur of the Sanmon gate.

  After the Meiji emperor displaced the last shogun, the Tokugawa tombs were converted into public gardens. For twenty-four sen – which at the time could have bought about a kilo of rice – a priest would guide visitors up a red and black lacquered gallery into the tombs of the seventh and ninth shoguns and the temples that held their wooden images, though the images themselves were never shown. A traveler would find his gaze swimming in golden arabesques, which on a clear day were almost too bright to look at directly.

  By the main altar, bamboo blinds tempered the brilliant red and gold colonnades and their menageries of carved birds and flowers. Beyond was the Gate of the Heavenly Spirits and then the Middle Court crowded with two hundred old bronze lanterns. Out through the Gate of the Tablet, with its pillars famous for their carved red dragons. Stare hard at each dragon, and it would change under your eyes. Or glance away, and then look back; the dragon would have shifted in its place. Beyond the dragons stood the Outer Court and its two hundred huge stone lanterns.

  Here stood the Oshi-kiri Mon, the beautiful Dividing Gate, which led into another court of lanterns inside a colonnade ‘whose soft red colouring charmingly contrasts with the deep green of the trees that surround it…’ The monument over each grave was of simple stone, in marked contrast with the lavish temples.

  Retrace your steps, Satow wrote, and see the tombs of the twelfth, the sixth and the fourteenth shogun. Beneath the coffered ceiling and its golden dragon, flying against a midnight-blue sky, were wooden peacocks and pines, wild ducks and chrysanthemum floating on water, white lilies and tree-peonies. And under rainbow phoenixes, the burial places of the second, sixth, eleventh and thirteenth shogun: gilded gates, gilded walls, gilded paneling, huge gilded pillars – everything sparkled with gold.

  Before the court of the second shogun stood the bell that ‘boomed out the hours all over Shiba, but whose sound was spoilt by the New Year’s fire of 1874.’ There were gilt brass lotuses, a bronze incense burner cast in 1635. In the wood at the back was the Hakkaku-dō, the Octagonal Hall. ‘It is the most magnificent gold lacquer to be seen in Japan, and one which no tourist should fail to visit,’ Satow wrote. The tomb was painted with scenes of the Eight Views of Xiao-Xiang and Lake Biwa. With lions, with peonies. Underneath the pavement lay the second shogun Hidetada, buried in a mixture of vermilion and charcoal powder to preserve his body from corruption.

  Outside the tomb stood two stones, dating from 1644: on one, five-and-twenty bodhisattvas welcomed the souls of the dead. On the other was carved a scene from the Buddha’s entry into Paradise.

  On the night of 24–25 May 1945, American B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped their M-69 loads over Shinagawa, Gotanda and Hamamatsu, near Zōjō-ji. Dropped in ‘amiable clusters’ of thirty-eight, or loose clusters of fourteen, every pipe was packed with gasoline jelly, which would afterward be called ‘napalm’, each finless oil-bomb exploded by a time fuse four or five seconds after landing. A 1945 article published in Time magazine described what happened next:

  The M-69s become miniature flamethrowers that hurl cheesecloth socks full of furiously flaming goo for a hundred yards. Anything these socks hit is enveloped by clinging, fiery pancakes, each spreading to more than a yard in diameter. Individually, these can be extinguished as easily as a magnesium bomb. But a single oil-bomb cluster produces so many fiery pancakes that the problem for firefighters, like that of a mother whose child has got loose in the jam pot, is where to begin.

  During those hours, 8,500 tons of incendiaries were dropped: more than 2.5 million bombs.

  The walls and roof tiles of Zōjō-ji catch fire. The Main Hall on its granite foundations burns down; the colonnades, the dragons, the Tang-style gates of gold and red. The second shogun’s gold lacquered tomb. The Octagonal Hall. The Temple of Benten blazes at the center of the lake of lotuses.

  After the war, Kawase Hasui created few new prints, mostly reissuing images from his sketchbooks of the 1920s and 1930s: art its critics dismissed as ‘emotionally vapid, creatively stunted.’ Hasui’s prints were sold wholesale to the Occupation authorities and then retailed at US Army base post exchanges for a few dollars: Hasui had reinvented the politically charged places of Japan as charming tourist spots. American soldiers brought Hasui’s woodblocks home, and in this way late Meiji Japan survived in the foreign imagination, years after the landmarks themselves had disappeared fro
m the capital.

  In 1953, after a day traveling around Tokyo, searching for a new subject to sketch, Hasui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up, where his father had once owned the thread shop; where his two houses had once stood before they burned. In his diary, Hasui writes that he had wanted to sketch the tram stop in front of Zōjō-ji, but that heavy rain stopped him, so he went back to his old notebooks, and drew the gate from those, and from his memories. Rain became snow.

  In Zōjō-ji no yuki, an image of the temple’s Triple Gate in a snowstorm, Hasui transcended the trite prettiness that had limited his earlier work. Here he created an elegy for his neighborhood, and for all who lived and worked and died there. Beyond the incalculable human losses remembered, is an elegy for the era. The Sanmon looms over the print’s three figures as they wait ‘for a tram that never seems to come’. Electric wires and the tram tracks divide the print into asymmetric slices: Hibiya dori, the tram platform, the hipped gables of the Triple Gate, the trees. Only the sky escapes those black lines; snow falls angling downward, giving the print a sense of depth, of movement within stillness. The great red gate, with its promise of release from anger, stupidity and greed, towers above the commuters. A Tokyoite of 1953 would have looked at that print and known that nothing but rubble and emptiness lay beyond the Gate.

  The human figures look away.

  Daibo’s wife worried about him. Something was missing. She looked in her dictionary, and I scrolled through the Kotoba dictionary app on my iPhone. At last we found the word she wanted: serenity. Daibo had no serenity anymore, she said. It had always been a part of him, even when he was young, but with the shop’s disappearance, that thing, whatever it was, had gone.

  I said to Mrs. Daibo that if her husband were suffering, she must be, too. ‘“When one weeps, the other tastes salt.” It’s an Arab saying.’

  ‘Will you write that down for me?’

  Mrs. Daibo understood the English words; I translated the phrase roughly, but I promised her something better, something artful. I had a friend, I said, who was a professional translator. He would write something brilliant.

  I met Arthur in Asakusa’s Crown Cafe, and asked if he would turn the little phrase into Japanese. If he could read the classical language of The Tale of Genji, I thought, a single line couldn’t be that hard.

  But I was wrong. Arthur looked at the words and frowned. He held the paper away as if he needed glasses. ‘This saying doesn’t work in Japanese. It’s something that would make sense in a very dry climate…’

  ‘… Where water is precious,’ I finished. ‘I can’t imagine “licking tears” in Japanese. People here would think it unhygienic.’ I was frowning, too, but at the coffee, which was bitter battery acid. I wished, devoutly, that we had gone to Starbucks, where I could have drunk an espresso.

  ‘In classical Japanese, you would talk about “wetting sleeves”.’

  ‘What, you ducked your head so no one would see you crying?’

  Arthur ignored me, and scrawled a sentence in red ink, and then crossed it out. He wrote another, shorter one; then crossed that out, too. I laughed.

  ‘Japanese is such a hard language,’ I said. ‘When I first came to Tokyo, I always thought I could learn it. That if I really tried, it wouldn’t be impossible. But I did try, and now I know I’ll always be at the level of like for like, point for point. Like those toys that we grew up with in the 1970s, the ones with an electric bulb in a box behind a plastic grid. You’d put construction paper over the grid and then stick clear plastic pegs inside and you’d make a picture. That’s what Japanese is like for me. But you, you really live in the language.’

  ‘You’ll get there.’

  ‘No. I won’t. I think in English. I dream in English. And with Japanese, it’s like, I’m playing on a beach and then bam! The land drops away. You fall off the continental shelf, into the deep sea—’

  ‘And it’s dark down there—’

  ‘– No lights at all—’

  ‘– And the fish are bigger—’

  ‘What fish? There’s nothing. Just the floor of the sea.’

  Arthur finally wrote –

  相手が涙

  を流すと

  その塩味が

  こちらのしたに

  伝わる

  He read it out to me. I shook my head. ‘It has too many syllables – too many words.’

  ‘I know.’ He slid the foolscap across the table and drained his cup of bitter coffee. ‘I give up.’

  サ

  マ

  │

  タ

  イ

  ム

  ‘Daylight Savings Time’

  The sun is simultaneously at noon and declining.

  Hui Shi

  ‘The Sorting That Evens Things Out’

  Translated by A. C. Graham

  Daylight Savings Time: The Occupation

  During the seven-year Allied Occupation of Japan, Tokyo was recast as an American city. The Tokugawa shogunate had constructed Edo as a labyrinth, a place that would confound insiders and invaders alike. The Americans tried to impose order on that anarchy of unnamed streets and cul-de-sacs, and to that end renamed whatever had survived the air raids.

  Avenues radiated around the Imperial Palace, running from A to Z counterclockwise, while streets numbered one through sixty rippled outward in concentric rings. There were new landmarks in the sea of ashes: the Ernie Pyle cinema, the Nile Kinnick stadium, and the Washington Heights housing complex. US Eighth Army cartographers created a map for the Occupation’s soldiers, a map that detailed the city’s essentials: typewriter shops, motor pools, ice plants. The Supreme Allied Command Headquarters.

  Language, too, reflected the new order. Reformers wanted to replace Japan’s complex syllabaries and Chinese characters with Roman letters. Pointing to the blackened ruins of Tokyo, one writer said: This catastrophe happened because the Japanese people lacked the words to criticize the military government. Language must now underpin democracy: the new constitution, and all laws, would be written not with the archaic grammar and vocabulary of classical Japanese but in a simple vernacular that an ordinary citizen might read and understand. Difficult and obsolete kanji were struck off the list that schoolchildren were required to learn: old-fashioned characters – for words like palanquin, inkstone, and desire – were no longer deemed necessary. And with the Occupation came a new vocabulary, English loan-words written in the katakana alphabet: Quiz. Body-building. Leisure. OK.

  But some imported ideas were rejected outright. In 1948, the Japanese, still recovering from the war and the lingering exhaustion that followed years of starvation and despair, held noisy protests against American-style Daylight Savings Time. The Occupation authorities were surprised: bringing the clocks forward an hour had seemed a minor innovation, when more drastic ones – granting suffrage to women, abolishing the hereditary rights of the nobility – drew fewer and less vehement complaints.

  Daylight Savings Time became sanmah ta-imu (‘summer time’) in what the historian John Dower has termed ‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment’. The Japanese felt summer time drew out the difficulty of their daily lives, and when the Occupation ended, it was one of the first things to be scrapped.

  People wanted darkness to come earlier.

  During midsummer in Tokyo, the sun rises at 3 a.m. By 4 a.m., the day is already present, as if night never were, as if it never had been, as if darkness and shadows were fairy tales not even the smallest child could believe in. Some people tape black bin liners over their windows, and everyone buys what the Japanese called ‘sunlight cut’ curtains. It doesn’t matter. The beams seep through every barrier.

  Early summer mornings are as bright as if the clock has already struck noon. Noon arrested; noon not ticking over, but noon forever.

  Daibo Coffee still exists, but on a screen as small as my palm. We were in Daibo’s apartment, in a corner that he’d converted into a coffee room, with
the old pine counter cut to fit the space along his wall. We were watching a documentary (A Film About Coffee) on Daibo’s portable DVD player.

  ‘In the land of Japan, is a master of coffee…’

  A stringed koto plays in the background. One string is plucked, and then another, as Daibo pours roasted beans onto his scales; checks the weight and reconsiders. He puts a few beans back in the jar.

  When Daibo lets the water fall, one droplet at a time, over the grounds, the koto goes crazy, twanging wildly.

  ‘… Do you like this kind of music?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I guess the producers wanted to play something so foreigners would know we were in Tokyo.’

  Daibo’s hair was now silver, and he had grown it out. It shone over his skull. His merriment had almost vanished. He watched with detachment as another self made coffee.

  ‘When was this filmed?’ On the little screen, Daibo’s hair is still cropped like a Zen monk’s, and mostly black.

  ‘About five years ago.’

  I looked at the DVD player, and remembered the coffee shop’s light, its bamboo blinds, the cigarette smoke, Fukutani complaining, the yellow glass globes enclosing old-fashioned electric bulbs. One globe shattered and Daibo could never find a replacement.

  Daibo was looking away from the screen. ‘Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, and I think, There’s no such thing as time, and I feel at peace. But then the next morning when I wake up, and it’s day, and everything is the same as it ever was. Then I feel such despair … We’re only lost when we think about time in terms of planets, and stars. If you count it out in heartbeats, an elephant’s is different from a mouse’s. Each living creature has its own time.’