The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  the direct equation between Tokugawa rule and the order of the universe Quote from Naito Akira in William Coaldrake’s essay, ‘Metaphors of the Metropolis’, in Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo (Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley, editors, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pages 130–1. See also Coaldrake’s Architecture and Authority in Japan Routledge, 1996), page 137: ‘The castle was far more than the result of technological determinism: it stood on the boundary of the secular and the sacred, expressing the aspirations toward the eternal and the divine of those who were so bold as to reach towards the heavens with their earthly abodes.’

  For changes the first Tokugawa shogun made to Edo and its landscape of mountains, hills, and rivers, see A. L. Sadler’s classic The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (Tuttle, 1978), especially pages 163–75 (which describe Edo as the tiny village that Tokugawa Ieyasu was granted in 1590), and pages 224–32 (which give an overview of the changes Ieyasu made to the landscape). And Roman Cybriwsky’s Tokyo: The Shogun’s City at the Twenty-First Century (John Wiley, 1998), page 53.

  Boshin War ‘The surrender of Edo castle concluded the first phase of what Japanese historians call the Boshin War: bo (earth) and shin (dragon) were the Chinese zodiac signs for the year 1868’, Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), page 157.

  Tsukiji: The Japanese Empire

  Tsukiji regulars call the marketplace the uoichiba Theodore C. Bestor, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004), page 21.

  Matsudaira’s garden Timon Screech’s The Shogun’s Painted Culture: Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760–1829 (Reaktion Books, 2000), especially pages 24–5 and pages 210–16.

  Peter Constantine’s Japanese Slang: Uncensored (Yen Books, 1994) includes a wonderful section on the fish market’s specialized argot, impenetrable to outsiders, which is still influenced by the Buddhist vocabulary of the almost eighty temples located in early eighteenth-century Tsukiji. See also Bestor, Tsukiji, pages 85–6: ‘Market conversations are often enlivened with brief flurries of beranme, the extravagant shitamachi dialect in which even the most polite request can be issued (and received) as a bold challenge…’ Also, Bestor page 335 note 4: ‘Wordplay is central to the slang. Shari means rice to a sushi chef, but originally it was a religious term for Buddha’s white bones…’ And when a live fish dies, the fishmonger might cry, ‘Agatta!’: ‘Its soul has risen!’

  For the Bauhaus architecture of Tsukiji market, ‘an almost perfect architectural mandala of a market’s idealized physical functions: bulking and breaking’, see Bestor, Tsukiji, above, page 70. Reading Bestor’s book is almost – almost! – as good as visiting the old market itself.

  Hongan-ji See Richard Jaffe, ‘Buddhist Material Culture, “Indianism” and the Construction of the Pan-Asian Buddhism in Pre-War Japan’ (Material Religion 23/3 (2006), pages 266–93; Cherie Wendelken, ‘The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period’, Art Journal 55 (3) (Autumn 1996); also Paride Stortini, ‘East and West of the Tsukiji Honganji’ (published on-line), for the realism of Tsukiji’s elephants and lions, for the influence of Britain’s Indo-Saracenic colonial style, and for ‘travel’ being the key to understanding Honganji: its Indian influence reflected the desire to achieve a meaning as close as possible to the original message of the historical Buddha. It was, Stortini writes, ‘an inverted Orientalism’ that reflected ‘the search for a modern identity’, one that stressed the role of Buddhism as a shared cultural element among contemporary Asian countries under the rule of imperial Japan.

  For the elephant as an avatar of Japanese imperialism, see Ian Jared Miller’s The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013). The elephants lived in Ueno Park, which during Meiji became ‘a new kind of space designed to call forth a national public in the service of the state – [Ueno] was a stage for the enactment of a new relationship between the people and the government, Japan and the world’ (page 37). Both the zoo and the museum were built ‘with an eye to shaping the minds and behavior of the populace’ (page 38).

  Miller’s chapter ‘The Great Zoo Massacre’ is essential reading. In it, he details the systematic slaughter of the zoo’s most famous and valuable animals in the summer of 1943: the event was ‘an early rip in the fraying fabric of wartime official culture, a culture that would, within two short years, call all imperial subjects to be ready to sacrifice themselves and their families in a Manichean struggle against the overwhelming power of the American military’ (page 130).

  Miller argues that Tokyo’s governor general Ōdachi Shigeo used the zoo killings ‘as a way to address one of the great taboos of official speech in Japan at the time: defeat. The public spectacle of men, women, and children processing into the zoo to mourn “animal martyrs” that had to be sacrificed because of the deteriorating war situation was the beginning of the governor general’s campaign … to inure the people of Tokyo to the demands of a failing empire … It might also be seen as a small but important step toward the tragic mass suicides and hopeless unarmed charges that brought the war to a gory crescendo in 1945’ (page 128). ‘No longer would the cult of martyrs be limited to the soldiers on the frontlines.’

  A Memorial Service for Martyred Animals ‘transformed the dead victims, and especially the popular elephants, into fellow sufferers with the Japanese citizenry, willing to lay down their lives for the greater national good … preparing themselves to share in the traumatic national experience of defeat … The slaughtered elephants were enshrined in children’s literature, and ultimately in national mythology, as representatives of the Japanese people, who were thus equally defined simply as victims of war, not as parties to it’ (Harriet Ritvo, Preface, page xix).

  ‘hide’ For the culture around the singer hide (pronounced ‘hee-day’), see Hashimoto Miyuki, ‘Visual Kei Otaku Identity – An Intercultural Analysis’ (Intercultural Communication Studies XVI: 1 (2007), pages 87–99).

  the metallurgical formulae for casting a temple bell were kept as a secret S. Katsumata, Gleams from Japan, a collection of articles written under a pseudonym for the Japanese Tourist Bureau. First published in 1937, but reprinted by Routledge in 2011; pages 330–42.

  ‘Katsumata’ writes: ‘The boom of a temple bell with a string of velvety tone[s] in its wake is perhaps the greatest of sedatives in a big city jarred with a bewildering confusion of noises proceeding from hooting automobiles, clanging streetcars, and loquacious and ubiquitous radios. The note is redolent of the romantic past and has the opposite of a Lethean influence on city dwellers: it enables them to forget the ugly present and live in the dreamy past. To the inhabitants of busy American cities, who are suffering from the madding [sic] din of civic life, I throw out the suggestion that the simplest and yet the most effective way of relief is the introduction into their midst of some Buddhist temple bells with their magically soothing note[s] … this plan [would rescue] tens of thousands of Americans from intellectual bankruptcy’ (pages 334–5).

  a vanished bridge Tokyo remained a city of canals and rivers until the 1950s.

  Roderick Ike Wilson, who specializes in the environmental history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan, wrote me: ‘I think it would be correct to say a nineteenth-century Edokko would hardly recognize the transformation of the riverbank and harbor after the Asia-Pacific War, let alone today.’

  See Wilson’s ‘Placing Edomae: The Changing Environmental Relations of Tokyo’s Early Modern Fisheries’ in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, volume 3 (2016), pages 242–89.

  ‘Edomae’, Wilson writes of a district near Tsukiji, was ‘one of many “seas”, all clearly divided by capes, spits, and poles and together facing out onto the deep waters of the Naikai, “Inner Sea”.

  ‘Twice daily at low tide, the bay r
eceded to create a landscape of shoals, shallow salty pools, and cooler freshwater streams … Across this surface of mud and sand, the constant flow of water carved out shoals which twice daily emerged as chimera-like islands. Some shoals appeared regularly enough to earn themselves names: “Appearing”, “Front”, “Offing”.’

  For the vertigo of wandering through the reclaimed land along the Sumida River, see Mishima Yukio’s spiteful little story ‘Seven Bridges’. In it, four geishas crisscross the Tsukiji district one night under a full moon, following a superstition: any wish would be granted to a believer who could cross seven bridges without speaking a single word. (Donald Keene, translator, Death in Midsummer & Other Stories, New Directions, 1966, pages 76–92.)

  Yokokawa-Honjo: East of the River

  Of all Edo’s beauties, the river is paramount From Andrew Markus’ translation of An Account of the Prosperity of Edo in An Episodic festschrift for Howard Hibbett (Highmoonoon Press, 2000).

  For Yokokawa-Honjo, see Andrew Markus’ The Willow in Autumn: Ryūtei Tanehiko, 1783–1842 (Harvard Yenching-Institute, 1993), especially pages 8–11: Yokokawa-Honjo, the north–south Transverse Canal, became celebrated in the eighteenth century for its Bell of Time and its kiri-mise, ‘low class brothels that charged on an hourly basis, and for its brazenly independent streetwalkers. These women – frequently superannuated castoffs from the Fukagawa pleasure quarter – had a reputation for desperate aggressiveness.’ The preserve of petty samurai and minor functionaries, marshy Honjo ‘enjoyed the dubious reputation of excelling in one thing only – a superabundance of mosquitoes.’

  Markus cites a 1774 book called The Carriage of Beautiful Ladies, Lavender Dappling, and its depiction of Yokokawa-Honjo: ‘No sooner does anyone pass by than he is pounced upon and seized; not even the mightiest thunderclap will make the women release their victims. It is a dreadful place. From here come the “hourly girls.”’

  Alan S. Woodhull’s unpublished 1978 Stanford dissertation Romantic Edo Fiction: A Study of the Ninjōbon and Complete Translation of Shunshoku Umegoyomi is also a good source; Woodhull includes many details about the lost worlds of Fuka-gawa and Edogawa on the Sumida’s eastern bank. He writes about the ‘square net and torch illuminated fishing boats … a familiar spectacle along the Sumida in winter or early spring, as the whitebait moved upstream to spawn’; the vast plum tree orchards of Kameido; the river’s ferries and water-taxis that spirited passengers to the brothels and back.

  Woodhull looks more favorably on Markus’ hourly girls and their teahouse district southeast of Edo Castle. ‘Fukugawa, originally a port, was naturally filled with boathouses. Sometime in the late 1700s, it became something of a fad to go there for secret liaisons, small parties, etc. Gradually this practice grew to the point where the teahouse activity was the great part of the business. Again, since gondolas were the fastest means of transportation, these boathouses were very conveniently located’ (page 357 note 47).

  ‘Since Fukagawa was not a licensed Quarter, there were no courtesans as such, but only free-agent geisha. It was the fashion of these haori-geisha … that led the modish world’ (page 363). Woodhull translates the nineteenth-century poet Tamenaga Shunsui: ‘Fukagawa is/ port harbor of Romance./ Along the river banks are lined/ Storehouses filled with Love. / The gondolas which come and go/ Love-laden cross their paths,/ The shouts of boatmen to the docks/ “Ho, Master So-and-So’s/ Arrived,” ring out along beside/ the raucous, lively songs/ Which endless as this world drift forth, /from teahouse parlors ring’ (page 228).

  For Yokoami today, see Kit Nakamura’s thoughtful ‘Cool (Old) Japan Flourishes along Flowing Rivers of Edo’, in the Japan Times, 27 June 2010. Nakamura describes the district’s history as the shogunal – and later, imperial – lumberyard whose wood was essential for constructing the ‘high city of gardens and villas’.

  the Sumida has been moved and merged The Sumida remains strangely unexplored in English.

  I have borrowed most facts from Roderick Ike Wilson’s excellent ‘Changing River Regimes on the Kantō Plain, Japan, 1600–1900’, in A History of Water: Rivers and Society, volume 2 (Terje Tvedt and Richard Coopey, editors, I. B. Tauris, 2010).

  Helen Craig McCullough’s commentary of The Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 1968) sums up the limits of understanding: ‘It is still usual for different stretches of a Japanese river to have different names. Between 1621 and 1654, the government diverted the Tone River into its present channel, which carries the waters of five prefectures into the Pacific Ocean at Chōshi. There is disagreement about the exact location of the old channel … The present Sumida River, which flows through the eastern part of the city of Tokyo into the bay, apparently was a tributary that joined the old Tone River further upstream, where it is still known as the Arakawa. It seems to have begun to follow its present course, and thus to have acquired its present name of Sumida, only after the Tone’s diversion’ (page 205, note 8).

  Patricia Sippel researched the river’s flood patterns and its channels during the Edo Period (‘Japan’s First Urban Water Disaster: The Great Kantō Flood of 1742’, published on-line). This article is especially valuable for its historical maps of the river basins.

  See also Gregory Smits’ Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawaii Press, 2013). Smits notes that beneath the bottom of Tokyo Bay is ‘a large valley or trough created by the flow of the Old Tokyo River roughly twenty thousand years ago. Sediments have gradually accumulated over this ancient valley.’ The Tokugawa shogunate constructed artillery batteries (o-daiba) by piling up sacks of dirt on this poor soil base, in water ‘about five meters deep.’ When all five batteries inevitably collapsed, the public viewed the event ‘as a direct strike by the cosmic forces on bakufu military capabilities…’ (page 115).

  One nineteenth-century gazetteer claimed that the word is older Shinpen Musashi Fudoki-kō (A Description of the Musashi Region) offers the earliest known etymology of the kanji used for sumi (隅). Thanks to Marky Star’s Japan This! blog (31 May 2014) for the reference.

  Greenwich Village or Montmartre Taken from Andrew Markus’ ‘Terakado Seiken’s Blossoms Along the Sumida’, in Sino-Japanese Studies 3 #2 (April 1991), pages 9–29. Markus describes Seiken’s writing as ‘an entire vision through fragments’: ‘the jumps, skips, and repetitions of the text suggest not an organized panorama but a true bird’s-eye view, which darts from one salient feature to the next…’

  on the eastern embankment See Markus’ note in Sino-Japanese Studies, cited above: ‘Although a broken series of levees and embankments some fifty miles long bordered the Sumida, “the embankment” usually refers more narrowly to [the segment] between Mimeguri Shrine on the south and Mokuboji temple in the north. The embankment, a good twelve feet above the surrounding lowlands, afforded a fine view of the river and “downtown” wharves of the central city … At the direction of the shogun Yoshimune, peach, cherry, and willow trees were planted along the Sumida embankment in 1725–26; Ienari expanded the project in 1790, and additional trees replaced dead stock in 1831. The trees – probably intended as a check to erosion – provided a continuous canopy of buds and blossoms. “Until the end of the Third Month,” notes the usually somber Edo Meisho Zue (Pictorial Album of Famous Sites of Edo), “branches brilliant with red, lavender, azure, and white blossoms mingle and intertwine. The effect is like brocade left out to air…”’ (page 19).

  The writer Nagai Kafū remembered Quotes taken from ‘The River Sumida’, in Edward Seidensticker’s Kafū the Scribbler (Stanford University Press, 1965). ‘Lotuses blooming in rank profusion’, page 184, and ‘mossy shingled roofs’, pages 215–16.

  Right-wing members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly The cultural geographer Cary Karacas wrote me: ‘Despite Tsuchiya’s best intentions … it is not used as Tsuchiya designed it: for people to actually be able to enter the site and view the meibo [books with memo
rial names written inside]. Another rather fascinating aspect of the memorial is the fact that, while modelled on his previous works, [Yokoami] unintentionally bears striking resemblance to certain wartime air raid shelters. One comment from a Tokyo air raid survivor, upon seeing the memorial: “It’s as if they (those killed by firebombing) were once again forced into an air raid shelter…” [where so many died].’

  See Karacas’ extensive research on the Tokyo air raids, listed in the bibliography.

  His first art memorializes the salaryman The 2001 volume Tsuchiya Kimio: Remembrance (Bijutsu Shuppan-sha) provides a good overview of the artist’s work and philosophy. It includes several essays translated into English, and photographs of the war memorial’s interior space. See Shioda Junichi’s essay in Remembrance: ‘Ash is an extremely difficult material with which to work. As a material it has neither solidity nor hardness; consequently it lacks volume and possesses no unique shape … Ash transcends life; it is the symbol of the boundary with Nirvana. Ash is the condition of nothingness after worldly passions and the delusion of life have been burned away; one occasionally senses even purity. Ash is invested with a kind of supernatural power, being the first stage of rebirth, yet occurring at the completion of death. In this way, it possesses a dualist character’ (page 13).

  Shioda sees Tsuchiya as an artist of Japan’s first ‘lost decade’: ‘an age of absence, an age of shadows, from which substance has been lost. And even today, though the new century has begun, we are yet to escape this feeling: yet to reclaim the substance that we lost…’ (page 12).

  Marunouchi: New Origins

  Imperial rule over the eight corners of the earth In Japanese, ‘Hakkō ichiu’: ‘A saying attributed to the mythical Emperor Jimmu that by 1940 was pervasively invoked in support of Japan’s expansionism’, Kenneth J. Ruoff’s Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary (Cornell University Press, 2010), page 17. Also, Walter Edwards, ‘Forging Traditions for a Holy War’, Journal of Japanese Studies 29 #2 (2003), pages 289–324. Nanette Gottlieb translates the phrase as ‘universal brotherhood’ (Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script, Kegan Paul International, 1995, page 98).