The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  The new calendar, Tanaka concludes, fitted a political rhetoric, ‘that of legitimizing the new regime as compared to the previous, Tokugawa rule. The message transmitted by the solar calendar was that the lunar calendar, which had guided people, was arbitrary, connected to ignorance and backwardness, and an impediment to the achievement of wisdom.’ However, as Donald Keene notes in his biography of the Emperor Meiji (cited below), although officially abolished, the lunar calendar was and still is used for religious ceremonies.

  The new calendar was taken from the British naval almanac. See Jessica Kennett Cork’s MA thesis, The Lunisolar Calendar: A Sociology of Japanese Time (University of Sheffield, 2010), pages 49ff. Cork cites Watanabe Toshio’s Nihon no Koyomi: this first calendar had a preface that explained the differences between the old and the new methods of calculating time. But because of ‘very complex terminology (“equatorial latitude” and “apparent radius of the sun”)’ the preface and calendar were ‘utterly incomprehensible to the average user.’

  Dylan McGee’s ‘Turrets of Time’, cited above, provides a good survey of the literature, with fine illustrations. Cecilia Segawa Seigle’s A Courtesan’s Day: Hour by Hour (Hotei, 2004) sets out what time meant, and how it was measured, for those who lived in the Yoshiwara, Edo’s brothel district. See also Nishimoto Ikuko’s ‘Teaching Punctuality: Inside and Outside the Primary School’ (Japan Review, 14 (2002), pages 121–33).

  For the wadokei themselves, see N. H. N. Mody’s Japanese Clocks (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1967) a photographic record of Mody’s vast collection of timepieces, bought with the proceeds from his family’s opium business. Also J. Drummond Robertson, The Evolution of Clockwork: With a Special Section on the Clocks of Japan (Cassell, 1931).

  There were riots over the changes See Jessica Kennett Cork’s The Lunisolar Calendar, page 57: ‘Rioters in Fukui, Tottori, Kyoto, and Fukuoka prefectures listed the reinstatement of the lunisolar calendar as one of their demands.’ Cork is quoting Okada Yoshirō’s Meiji Kaireki: ‘toki’ no bunmei kaika (Meiji Calendar Reform: The Cultural Enlightenment of ‘Time’) (Taishūkan Shoten, 1994), pages 244–5.

  an island of old clocks See Yulia Frumer’s Making Time for the different characters once used to write the word ‘clock’, words associated with shadows and stars. ‘The modern-day characters for this word are 時計, meaning “time/hour” and “gauge/measure.”’ Before the twentieth century, however, 時計 was just one of the possible ways to write the word tokei. ‘Other character combinations reveal associations with numerous non-mechanical means of gauging the passage of time. Examining Tokugawa-period sources, one sees combinations such as 土景 – “earth-shadow,” – 斗計 “measuring the Big Dipper,” and 土卦 “earth trigram”’ (Making Time, page 40).

  On old Japanese clocks the hours were counted backwards See Kenneth Ullyett, In Quest of Clocks (Littlehampton Book Service, 1950), page 235.

  The clocks have no number greater than nine See Jessica Kennett Cork, cited above, page 38: ‘The bells rang nine times each at midnight and noon, as nine is the epitome of the yang essence, then eight times during the following dual-hour, then seven, then on down to four, after which the cycle was repeated.’ Cork cites Nagata Hisashi, Nenjū gyōji o ‘kagaku’ suru: koyomi no naka bunka to chie (‘Making Annual Events “Scientific”: Culture and Knowledge in Calendars’) (Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1989), page 179, and Akio Gotō, ‘Jikokuhō’ (‘Time-Keeping Methods’), in Koyomi o shiru jiten, Okada Yoshirō et al., editors (Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 2006), page 174.

  See also Yulia Frumer’s Making Time: ‘Wondering, “Why do we count the hours the way we do?” several early eighteenth-century [Tokugawa] scholars investigated classical Chinese texts, and concluded that the origins of this double sequence could be found in the ancient Classic of Changes (the Yi Jing). They came to believe that the system was supposed to represent correspondences between the twelve hours, the twelve months, and the annual cycle of birth and decay…’ (pages 20–1 and 193).

  we humans are slaves These extracts come from Guro’s biographical sketch, courtesy of the Daimyo Dokei Museum in Yanaka. In Japanese.

  The Myriad Year Clock See ‘A Close Relationship between Japanese Art and Science with Roots in the Edo Period: Exploring the Man-nen Dokei, Western Timekeeping and the Japanese Flow of Time’, exhibition catalogue, Toshiba International Foundation, 2014. This printing includes an excellent diagram of the clock’s inner workings.

  See also Yulia Frumer’s Making Time for an analysis of the clock as representing ‘the optimistic – and somewhat naïve – belief that there could and should be a universal device that would keep time correctly for eternity’ (pages 169–74).

  pendulum and cogs and escapement wheels See Yulia Frumer’s Making Time for the enchanting technical vocabulary of clockmaking: the ‘snowflake’ gear (a six-toothed gear regulating the alarm’s strikes), the ‘sumo referee’ gear (the clock’s crown wheel), and the foliot, which was called the ‘Seat of Heavens’ (pages 41 and 223, notes 10–15).

  Ueno: The Last Shogun

  The Flower Ornament Scripture Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra – page 66. Thomas Cleary, translator (Shambhala Press, 1993), page 1498.

  When the shogunate collapsed, samurai rallied first in Asakusa See Conrad Totman’s The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868 (University of Hawii Press, 1980). ‘During those days of disaster, Edo leaders proceeded unaware of the tumultuous events occurring to the west … The regime died in battle before its leaders at Edo even knew the question of life and death had at last been confronted … As the defeated army straggled into town, hospital facilities filled with wounded and sick survivors, and infantrymen and others fresh out of employment began to plunder and cause trouble’ (pages 437ff.).

  Katsu Kaishū planned to burn Edo, block by block, if his negotiations with the emperor’s generals failed. (See Katsu’s diaries, KKZ xi 358–9, Kodansha, 1982.) The best account of the shōgitai and their last stand comes in Yoshimura Akira’s Tengu sōran; shōgitai; bakufu gunkan kaiten shimatsu (Iwanami Shoten, 2009), taken from the memoirs of the young monk who accompanied the abbot as he fled the burning temples.

  My sources here are M. William Steele, ‘Against the Restoration: Katsu Kaishū’s Attempt to Reinstate the Tokugawa Family’, Monumenta Nipponica, volume 36 #3 (Autumn 1981), pages 299–316. By the same author, ‘Katsu Kaishū and the Limits of Bakumatsu Nationalism’, in Asian Cultural Studies #10 (1978), pages 65–76. See also Mark Ravina’s The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori (John Wiley and Sons, 2004), especially chapter five, ‘To Tear Asunder the Clouds’. For a technical description of Edo Castle’s surrender, see Haraguchi Kiyoshi, Meiji Zenki Chihō Seiji-shi Kenkyū (Hanawa shōbo, 1972). Also, Najita Tetsuo and J. Victor Koschmann, editors, Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition (Cornell University Press, 2005).

  For Tokugawa Yoshinobu’s departure from Edo, Shiba Ryōtarō’s The Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Juliet Winters Carpenter, translator, Kodansha, 1967) is a readable, though hardly rigorous, account. In The Tokugawa Inheritance (International House of Japan, 2009), Tokugawa Tsunenari describes how his branch of the Tokugawa family acclimated to politics in the twentieth century. The book is his attempt to rehabilitate the shogunal legacy. Takie Sugiyama Lebra’s Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility (University of California Press, 1993) is an anthropological survey of Japan’s aristocrats and their vanishing culture.

  After Tokugawa Yoshinobu left Edo, Henry Smith II estimated that the city’s population (which he calculates to have been more than a million) dropped by half over the next seven years (‘The Edo–Tokyo Transition’ in Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, editors, Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, Princeton University Press, 1986, page 347).

  The policymakers of early Meiji even considered abandoning the city. According to the Japan Times’ Overland Mail, on 5 September 1868: ‘The mint and
arsenal have both been transported to Osaka, the greater part of the palaces of the daimyo are dismantled, the hinges and heavy bronze ornaments torn off the doors, and in many cases the inner houses pulled down and their stone and timber sold to builders. A landslip has occurred at an important point in the second wall of the castle, where a breach now of some forty or fifty rods in width, the debris from which has fallen down and shallowed the moat. No attempt is being made to repair this…’ (from M. William Steele, ‘Edo in 1868: The View From Below’ in Monumenta Nipponica 45:2, page 148).

  See also J. H. Gubbins’ The Progress of Japan: 1853–1871 (Clarendon Press, 1911): ‘In the twinkling of an eye, the flourishing city of Edo became like a desert … And so the prestige of the Tokugawa family, which had endured for three hundred years … fell to ruin in the space of one morning’ (page 142).

  An English newspaper reported The London and China Telegraph, 7 September 1868.

  Edo was now Tokyo ‘A sense of the transition is also manifested in the way in which the city was named. In the period approximately between 1868 and 1889, the same Chinese characters which today are pronounced “Tokyo” were read “Tokei.” The city was no longer Edo but not quite Tokyo yet’ (Iwatake Mikako, ‘From a Shogunal City to a Life City: Tokyo Between Two Fin-de-Siècles’, in Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo, Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley, editors, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, page 253 note 3).

  See also Henry Smith II, commenting on the proposed imperialist name ‘Teito’ as a ‘pretentious sinicism … Visually, Tokyo never lived up to the grand ring of Teito’ (‘Tokyo and London: Comparative Conceptions of the City’, in Japan: A Comparative View, Albert M. Craig, editor, Princeton University Press, 1979).

  A single atom The Flower Ornament Scripture: Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, cited above, pages 783 and 796.

  Tsuno Daishi ‘His power was legendary and he was venerated for his mastery of exorcism during his lifetime. The belief surrounding his ability to dispel evil gained cult status after his death. According to one myth, a plague once haunted the temple where the monk resided. He fought the affliction by changing into the shape of a powerful demon and requested that his demonic form be painted and kept for future generations in order to be able to dispel the plague should it haunt anyone again…’ See Mareile Flitsch, editor, Tokens of the Path: Japanese Devotional and Pilgrimage Images: The Wilfried Spinner Collection (1854–1918) (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2014), pages 86–7.

  One sounded a note of rest On the three bells, see S. Katsumata, Gleams from Japan (Routledge, 2011), page 342. Katsumata (a pseudonym) is quoting from Yoshida Kenkō’s thirteenth-century text, Essays in Idleness. (See Meredith McKinney’s translation (Penguin Classics, 2013), pages 127–8 and page 182 notes 388–9.) ‘A temple bell should be pitched to the ōshiki, a tone that resonates with a sense of impermanence or mujō.’ McKinney notes that the ōshiki mode or scale is ‘roughly equivalent to the C minor scale of Western music.’

  See also Katsumata’s note on how a bell’s sound ‘does not remain uniform throughout the four seasons: it is modified by atmospheric conditions and the density of the bell itself. To hear bells at their best … it is important to know the right time and place…’ (page 335).

  rough ishigaki stone walls See the Japanese Architecture and Art website JAANUS for a discussion of these dry stone walls, their properties and uses. Stones were often named according to their shapes (‘chestnut’) or the way they were cut (‘tortoiseshell’).

  Tsunayoshi’s … ‘Laws of Compassion’ In The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, Beatrice Bodart-Bailey argues, ‘The issue at stake was not the protection of dogs. Like all other policies differentiating Tsunayoshi’s government from those before and after him, the issue was the prerogatives of the samurai. Did the samurai have the right to set free unwanted dogs outside their walled compounds and let them hunt for food in areas of the city where commoners lived in cramped quarters, without the protection of such walls?’ (University of Hawaii Press, 2006, page 153).

  Ueno should be one of the most attractive places in the city From Paul Waley’s classic Tokyo Now & Then: An Explorer’s Guide (John Weatherhill, 1984), page 159.

  Ishikawa Jun’s short story, translated by William Tyler, appears in Modern Japanese Literature volume 2 (Columbia University Press, 2007; J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, editors), pages 149–167.

  For a comic description of the transformation of Ueno, see Thomas Raucat’s The Honorable Picnic (Bodley Head, 1928): ‘Tokio, Saturday, June 10, 1922, three o’clock in the afternoon. After the torrential downpour of the night, an ardent sun is blazing. In the public park of Ueno the Universal Peace Exposition hums its merriest. A multicolored crowd throngs about strange edifices which combine all styles of architecture and house the most diverse wares. But for the public, the chief attraction is to be found on the pond of Ueno. Last summer this was still a tranquil marsh covered with pale pink lotuses. On an island stood a little hushed temple. Today the pond is cut in two by a great concrete bridge. Jets of water spurt from the lake and at night the lanterns shine into its depths. All day long two noisy machines go spluttering back and forth across it while the crowd stares in amazement; these are the hydroplanes…’

  I met a man who recites medieval Buddhist sermons See Matsuda Norio’s Youtube pages for his performances, which include the passages ‘There is a green willow tree’ and ‘The wind from Heaven…’

  Yamamoto’s mother, who rang Ueno’s Bell of Time For women who rang bells, see Gleams from Japan, S. Katsumata, page 341: ‘In 1921, a “Correct Time” propaganda was carried out in Japan under the sponsorship of the Education Department, and some eighty bell-ringers were rewarded for their long and faithful service. The recipients … included two women, one of whom was named Matsu Obata, aged 82. For fifty years she had struck the bell twenty-four times a day, and she had been admired for her accuracy in the execution of her duty, one requiring a great deal of watchfulness…’

  How can you tell when it’s time to ring the bell? J. J. Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre (Leiden, 1877): ‘The practice at Yedo was: first a single stroke given to the bell, then at an interval of about a minute a second blow, followed quickly by a third. There was then another long pause, and finally the number of strokes corresponding with the hour was sounded, with an interval of about ten seconds between each stroke, except the last two, the final stroke following rapidly, to indicate the full number was completed.’ Quoted in J. Robertson, The Evolution of Clockwork, page 200 note 1.

  For an earlier outsider’s account of one Bell of Time, see Yulia Frumer’s Making Time, which cites a nineteenth-century Russian captain: ‘First they strike the bell once, then after about a minute and a half they strike twice, one strike right after the other; those three strikes announce that the hours are about to be struck, as if they were saying: listen! Then, after another minute and a half, they start to strike the hours, strike after strike in intervals of some fifteen seconds, but the last two they strike quickly one after the other, as if to indicate: enough counting!’ (page 33).

  An Austrian institute had just tested for radioactive particles The Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in New Scientist, 24 March 2011.

  The foreign newspapers were full of horror stories For a lyrical evocation of the post-Fukushima atmosphere of anxiety, see Andrew Fitzsimons’ collection of haiku: A Fire in the Head (Isobar Press, 2014). Also Richard Lloyd Parry’s ‘Ghosts of the Tsunami’ in London Review of Books, 6 February 2014.

  For a visual evocation, see In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11, Anne E. Havinga and Anne Nishimura Morse, curators, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, 2015).

  The Rokumeikan: The Meiji Restoration

  The Japanese have their eyes fixed on the future Erwin Bälz, Awakening Japan: the Diary of a German Doctor, Toku Baelz, editor; Eden and Cedar Paul, translators (Indiana University Pre
ss, 1974), page 17. Quoted in George Macklin Wilson, ‘Time and History in Japan’, American Historical Review 85 #3 (1980), page 570. Bälz may have misunderstood his interlocutor’s meaning.

  ‘Do nothing to make the foreigners laugh at us.’ Ellen P. Conant, Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), page 231.

  The deer call to one another This translation of Ode 183 is by the nineteenth-century Scottish missionary James Legge (The Chinese Classics: with a Translation, Critical & Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena & Copious Indexes, volume 4, Oxford University Press, 1893–5, page 246). For radically different versions of the same poem, see Arthur Waley (‘Yu, yu, cry the deer/ nibbling the black southernwood…’) and Ezra Pound (‘“Salt/ lick!” Deer on waste sing…’).

  Mishima’s play Rokumeikan In My Friend Hitler and Other Plays (Columbia University Press, 2002), Sato Hiroaki translates.

  Perhaps the best description of the Rokumeikan building itself is Dallas Finn’s. ‘A lighthearted structure that bears a lot of weight,’ the Rokumeikan became ‘the scarlet woman of Meiji architecture: ambiguous and glamorous … The lost structure has become a legend.’ (Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan, Weatherhill, 1995, pages 95–6.)

  Pat Barr sets the building in its cultural context: The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan 1868–1905 (Penguin, 1988). For the structure itself, see Ellen Conant’s Challenging Past and Present. For the European reaction to Japan’s Palladian villa on the Pacific, see Christopher Reed’s translation, The Pink Notebooks of Madame Chrysanthème and Other Documents of French Japonisme (University of Hawaii Press, 2010). For the Japanese response to Pierre Loti (the author of Madame Chrysanthème), see Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story ‘The Ball’, and David Rosenfeld’s ‘Counter-Orientalism and Textual Play in Akutagawa’s “The Ball”,’ Japan Forum, volume 12 #1 (2000), pages 53–63.