The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  See also Joseph De Becker’s The Nightless City: Or, the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, by an English Student of Sociology (Z. P. Maruya, 1899). De Becker writes of the old Yoshiwara: ‘when one glances down the avenue at night, after the place is lighted up with thousands of brilliantly colored lanterns and flashing electric lamps, the whole quarter appears as if smothered in flowers…’

  De Becker adds that the Yoshiwara’s ‘day’ was from noon until 3 p.m., and its ‘night’ from 5 to 10 p.m.: ‘Apparently finding that 10 o’clock PM was too early to close up the “shops,” some genius hit on the pleasant fiction of causing the watchmen to strike their hyōshigi (wooden clappers) announcing the hour as 10 when in reality the temple bell was striking midnight: This originated the terms “real 10 o’clock” and “nominal 10 o’clock…”’ (The Nightless City, pages 287–8).

  De Becker further cites the seventeenth-century Yoshiwara Ō-kagami (Mirror of the Yoshiwara): closing hours were ‘fixed at ten o’clock, but afterwards this was considered too early and no clapping of hyōshigi … was made at that hour. The great gate Ō-mon was shut at 10 o’clock but the kuguri-do (a small low door cut in a gate) was left so as to permit ingress and egress. When the hour of midnight struck (then called kokonotsu-doki) the hyōshigi were clapped together four times, and the place was finally closed up’ (page 246).

  Mejiro: A Failed Coup

  The city plan of Edo was orientated Naito Akira, Edo no toshi no kenchiku (‘The Architecture of the City of Edo’, Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1972), pages 16–19. Quoted in ‘Metaphors of the Metropolis: Architectural and Artistic Representations of the Identity of Edo’, in Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power & Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo (Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley, editors, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), page 130.

  By the steps before the old gate stood Fudō: He Who Shall Not Be Moved, most powerful of the Wisdom Kings Fudō’s name literally means ‘the immovable’. He is the ‘central and paramount figure in the group of divinities known as the Godai Myōō, or Five Great Bright Kings, who in esoteric Buddhism stand as emanations or modes of activity of the Buddha. Where the Buddha exists static and immovable, withdrawn from activity, the five Myōō act as his agents and messengers … Fudō’s right hand grasps a sword and his left a rope, and he stands not on a lotus or an animal mount as do many Buddhist deities, but on an immovable rock, which rises sometimes from curling waves. Always he is ringed with fire … This is the deity whom the great majority of ascetics look upon as their guardian, who appears to them in dreams, who directs their austerities, who endues them with vitality and confers upon them their powers.’ (Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow, Routledge, 1999, pages 175–6.) See also Mareile Flitsch’s Tokens of the Path: Japanese Devotional and Pilgrimage Images: The Wilfried Spinner Collection (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2014). ‘He has a muddy green-blue color, which is said to have been adopted while wading through the “swamp” of worldliness…’ (page 152).

  See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil Lafcadio Hearn wrote: ‘Kōshin, Lord of Roads, is indeed yet with us; but he has changed his name and become a Shinto deity; he is now Saruda-hiko-no-mikoto; and his presence is revealed only by the statues of the Three Mystic Apes which are his servants – Mizaru, who sees no evil, covering his eyes with his hands, Kikazaru, who hears no evil, covering his ears with his hands, Iwazaru, who speaks no evil, covering his mouth with his hands.’ (Lafcadio Hearn, Japan’s Great Interpreter: A New Anthology of His Writings: 1894–1904, Louis Allen and Jean Wilson, editors, Japan Library, 1992, page 133.)

  Figurines and charms featuring the Mystic Apes are still sold ‘in the belief that they will maintain the buyer’s health: if one does not see, hear, or speak about the weaknesses of others and evil in the world, one can maintain both peace of mind and physical health.’ Writing in the late 1980s, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney claimed ‘a charred monkey’s head, pounded into powder, is taken as medicine for illnesses of the brain, including mental illnesses, mental retardation, and headaches, although this particular use was, no doubt, far more prevalent in the past.’ (The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual, Princeton University Press, 1987, pages 50 and 69.)

  the rebel samurai Marubashi Chūya For Keian Taiheiki, see Mokuami’s collected works, Kawatake Mokuami shū (Tokyo Sōgen Shinsha, 1968). In this play, the Bell of Time is almost a character in its own right.

  For furtive dissemination of the story under the Tokugawa shoguns, see Peter Kornicki, ‘Manuscript, Not Print: Scribal Culture in the Edo Period’ (Journal of Japanese Studies, 32:1 (2006)), pages 41–3: ‘The threat to the bakufu [Tokugawa shogunate] had been real, and the reverberations lasted some years.’ So long as the Tokugawa were in power, the story of Marubashi’s attempted coup could circulate only in handwritten manuscripts later discovered throughout the Japanese peninsula. ‘The successful transmission of this text shows that the story had an abiding appeal,’ Kornicki writes. ‘As soon as there was no longer anything to prevent publication, numerous printed editions appeared from the early Meiji era onward.’

  the citadel was clad in gleaming white tiles made of lead. It was ‘delicately sculpturesque in appearance … William H. Coaldrake’s Architecture and Authority in Japan (Routledge, 1996), pages 134ff. Coaldrake discusses the three castle towers (tenshu) built during the seventeenth century, ‘each representing a separate era in the creation and consolidation of authority … Each castle was an expression of a particular moment within a period of rule by control of the built as well as the political environment. Each castle, too, was a direct index to the political circumstances of its time … and was destroyed once those circumstances had changed…’ (page 137).

  For descriptions of Edo Castle, see Henry Smith II’s articles, especially ‘Tokyo and London: Comparative Conceptions of the City’ in Albert M. Craig, editor, Japan: A Comparative View (Princeton University Press, 1979). Smith’s Columbia University webpage includes pdf links for all his publications, which is useful because print copies are rare. Henry Smith II’s ‘World Without Walls’ and Naito Akira’s Edo, The City That Became Tokyo: An Illustrated History (H. Mack Horton, translator, Kodansha International, 2003), especially pages 34–63, are excellent accounts of a place that is known primarily through inconsistent renderings on a six-panel screen painted about fifty years after the citadel burned in the Meireki fire of 1657. Also, Morton S. Schmorleitz’s Castles in Japan (Tuttle, 1974).

  Smith writes that Edo was built according to the highly centered design of ancient Chinese cities like Ch’ang-an: ‘reaching out through axial roads and gates to the entire empire, and upward through a hierarchical series of enclosures to the imperial palace, the point of contact with Heaven. The entire city was an expression of the power and cosmology of the imperial order, perhaps the purest example of princely urbanity the world has ever known.’

  Edo itself, however, was constructed ‘not as a national capital, but merely as the private castle town of a powerful feudal lord. It was not until Ieyasu’s emergence as national hegemon after 1600 and the gradual institution of the sankin kotai system, by which provincial lords (daimyo) were required to spend alternate years in residence in Edo, that the city took on a truly national character. And even then, it was never the miyako: that ancient courtly concept remained with Kyoto, where the politically impotent emperor and imperial courtiers continued to reside …

  ‘Militarily, the concern was not for the defence of the city as a whole, much less for that of the nation, but purely for the security of the shogun and his immediate retainers. There was no enclosing wall around the city, which blended imperceptibly with the countryside, but merely around the shogunal castle, which sat in the centre …

  ‘Edo shared with the Chinese city the character of “planned ephemerality” through construction in short-lived materials, and when the donjon was destroyed in the Meireki fire less than two decades later, it was never rebuilt. In time, the many trees in and around Edo
Castle came to lend it a hidden and private aspect.’ ‘Tokyo and London: Comparative Conceptions of the City’, page 64.

  And a clock room, which set the official time for the entire city Tsukuda Taisaburō, Wadokei (Tōhō shoin, 1960), pages 24–34, especially 33–4. Also Dylan McGee, ‘Turrets of Time: Clocks and Early Configurations of Chronometric Time in Edo Fiction (1780–96)’ (Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, volume 19 (2011), pages 44–57):

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, Edo Castle had become a veritable bastion of punctuality. Major functions of the castle, such as the opening of the gates at six o’clock in the morning, the call to the daimyō to enter the castle at four o’clock in the morning, and the closing of the gates at six in the evening, were conducted in time with a large clock housed in the tokei no ma, (土圭の間), or the clock chamber. Accuracy was safeguarded through the marshalling of numerous auxiliary clocks throughout the castle and various back-up methods of keeping time, like candles and incense …

  Within the castle, there developed a sophisticated – and indeed, labour-intensive – system of time notification whereby staff would sound drums at various points throughout the castle to notify inhabitants and daimyō living nearby of important times. All in all, the Tokugawa fascination with clocks may be characterized as a concerted effort to calibrate shogunal rule, with mechanical precision, to the rhythms of the cosmos. This enthusiastic adoption of technology was not without its drawbacks, however. In fact, the costs of procuring and maintaining the clocks, not to mention employing qualified staff to attend to these matters, placed a great strain on resources.

  In 1701, fifty employees who attended to the clocks in the tokei no ma were dismissed, ‘in an effort to reduce the castle’s operating budget’ (‘Turrets of Time’, pages 47–8).

  The castle evolved in a whirlpool design ‘Apart from the castle, Edo was laid out in a highly defensive manner, not from concern with external invaders, as in most cities, but rather with an eye to internal threats either from the resident daimyō or from commoner mobs. The principle was one of strict segregation of classes by residential area. The overall form of Edo was therefore not an ideal geometrical form with cosmic referents, but rather an irregular spiral leading clockwise outward from the castle in a pattern of descent down through the social ladder, passing through the residences of the great lords, into the area occupied by the hatamoto retainers of the shogun, finally through the central area of the machi-chi at Nihonbashi, and out the Tokaido which served as the main approach to the city…’ (Henry Smith II, ‘Tokyo and London’, pages 65–6). See also Roman Cybriwsky, Tokyo: The Shogun’s City at the Twenty-First Century (John Wiley, 1998), page 53.

  Beyond the citadel, Edo itself was also laid out to confound invaders

  This spiral, which seems to have been unique to Edo and was probably not an intellectually conceived design, was defined not by roads but by the wide moats and canals which served for defence and as the primary means of the transport of goods in the city. Defence planning was carried out within each of the residential areas as well. The commoner machi-chi was laid out … in a regular grid plan with barriers at every major intersection for close and efficient control. In the samurai buke-chi as well, barriers and checkpoints were frequent, with most streets intersecting in T’s rather than in crosses so as to deny through access to any rebellious forces. This remains true of Tokyo today; one ambitious urban geographer has counted all of Tokyo’s street intersections (total 155,767) and found that there are twice as many T-intersections as crossroads …

  (See Henry Smith II in ‘Tokyo and London’, page 66 note 28.)

  his life was preserved so he could be tortured and crucified In Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton University Press, 2007), Botsman writes:

  Punishments such as crucifixions and burning at the stake formed an extension of the system of signs, for although the executions themselves were not generally conducted in front of large crowds, the results, in the form of mutilated corpses strung up on crosses and stakes, were left on display for all to see. Next to these bodies-as-signs were conventional signposts that used the written word to make known the identity of the executed person, the offense committed, and the punishment that had been carried out …

  One important corollary of this approach was that creating a horrifying spectacle (a memorable sign) was just as important as inflicting pain on the individual being executed – consequently, death was no limit to punishment. When a person who had been sentenced to crucifixion died before the punishment could be carried out, for example, the dead body was often pickled in salt and then crucified as if he or she was still alive … Death did not mark the end of the punishment, [which only ended with] a grotesque stump of humanity for the explicit purpose of display (pages 19–20).

  It was never rebuilt See Coaldrake, Architecture and Authority, page 137. ‘The shogunate flirted briefly, once more, with the idea of rebuilding the tenshu in the reign of Ienobu (1709–1713). Once the projected cost had been ascertained, the idea progressed as far as the drawing up of detailed plans but the construction process was soon abandoned. The tenshu had become a political anachronism.’

  keigo, the formal Japanese used for extremely important people My favorite account of keigo gone wrong appears in Donald Richie’s Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (Tuttle, 2006), and his description of a TV interview with one of his idols, the actress Yamada Isuzu, who played Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

  The Kanda River flowed past See Youtube for versions of this song. 1970s nostalgia.

  Nezu: Tokugawa Timepieces

  Those who watched never knew exactly how the clock’s pieces worked Timon Screech, ‘Clock Metaphors in Edo Period Japan’ (Japan Quarterly, 43.4 (Oct.–Dec. 1996), page 66).

  The most common word for ‘time’ in modern Japanese (jikan 時間) first appeared in a late-nineteenth-century elementary school reader. The first character jikan has two elements: the left part signifies the sun, and the right part the temple. The character originally meant ‘to change’, and originally referred to the cycle of seasons. The concepts of minute and second were only introduced in the early nineteenth century, with the translations of Western books on astronomy. (Nishimoto Ikuko, ‘The “Civilization” of Time’, Time & Society, volume 6 #2–3 (July 1997), pages 237–59.)

  A Japanese dictionary has claimed that the character 時 ji in jikan (which can also be pronounced ‘toki’) derives ‘perhaps from the very old Japanese verb toku, “to melt” or “to dissolve”’. (Ono Suzumi, Nihongo o sakanoboru (Tracing the Origins of the Japanese Language) (Iwanami Shisho, 1974), Chapter 2; quoted in Gunter Nitschke, From Shinto to Ando: Studies in Architectural Anthropology in Japan (John Wiley & Sons, 1993), page 53 note 9.)

  For the hours, see Yulia Frumer’s Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018). ‘For most of the Tokugawa period 時 (toki/ ji), 刻 (koku), 剋 (toki, koku), and 辰 (toki/ koku, shin) were used interchangeably. A separate system was sometimes used for the nighttime hours, in which they were referred to as kō (更), and each kō was divided into five equal ten (点). Bell keepers would have a special conversion table that showed them at what hour (時) the beginning of each kō should be marked’ (page 220 note 1).

  The British diplomat Ernest Satow noted that in late-nineteenth-century Tokyo, when he first arrived, ‘neither clocks nor punctuality were common. If you were invited for two o’clock, you most often went at one or three, or perhaps later. In fact, as the Japanese hour altered in length every fortnight, it was difficult to be certain about the time of day, except at sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight…’ (A Diplomat in Japan, Cambridge University Press, 2015), page 229.)

  Then, in 1872, the Emperor Meiji abolished the old clock See Donald Keene’s Emperor Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (Columbia University Press, 2005), especially page 221: ‘On December 10, the ceremony of changing
the calendar was performed preparatory to adopting the solar in place of the lunar calendar. At ten that morning, after worshiping the Ise Shrine from afar, the emperor announced that the third day of the twelfth month would be January 1, 1873. The emperor reported this change to the spirits of his ancestors.’

  The emperor then set out reasons for the change in an imperial rescript:

  First, the emperor mentioned the inconvenience of the lunar calendar, which required the insertion every two or three years of an intercalary month in order to match the solar year. The solar calendar was far more accurate, requiring only one extra day every four years; it would not be off by a single day for 7,000 years. The emperor decided to adopt the solar calendar because of its superior accuracy.

  But the emperor did not mention, Keene notes, what may have been the chief reason for adopting the solar calendar. ‘If the lunar calendar were followed, it would become necessary to pay salaries thirteen times every time a year had an intercalary month – obviously undesirable to any government.’

  Nothing is the way it should be Direct quote from Stefan Tanaka’s lyrical account of timekeeping after the Tokugawa shogunate fell, when the solar calendar was introduced: New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton University Press, 2004). Tanaka quotes a newspaper article published just a few days after the old timekeeping systems were abandoned in the early Meiji era: ‘Will one not lose reality when the moon is rising at the end of the month?’ And: ‘Why did the government suddenly decide to abolish it? The whole thing is disagreeable. The old system fitted in with the seasons, the weather, and the movement of the tides. One could plan one’s work or one’s clothing or virtually anything else by it. Since the revision … nothing is the way it should be.’ (Ogawa Tameji, Kaika Mondō (‘Questions & Answers on Civilization & Enlightenment’), quoted by Tanaka in New Times, pages 7–8.)