The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  notes of temple bells, lyrical but imprecise In Making Time (cited above), Yulia Frumer argues for a more nuanced understanding of the traditional view that Western timekeeping methods introduced during Meiji were ‘more accurate’ reflections ‘of astronomical reality’ than the Japanese timekeeping methods they replaced.

  Time fascinated Mishima These quotes come from Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy. ‘The world was like a leather bag’, and ‘a whirlpool’, from Spring Snow (Michael Gallagher, translator, Vintage, 1999), pages 18 and 163. ‘A sundial that can stop time passing’, Spring Snow, page 219. ‘A palace’s great hall’, from The Temple of Dawn (E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, translators, Vintage, 2001: ‘Honda felt as if he were standing in the center of time, as if in some enormous hall in which all partitions had been removed…’ (page 48). ‘A vast river’: ‘… a flood of past and future might have occurred subconsciously in the mind of Princess Moonlight, and the isolated phenomena of this world, like islands dotting the vast stretch of water clearly reflecting the moon after the rains, might be the more difficult of the two to believe. The embankments had been broken down and all divisions had disappeared. The past had begun to speak freely…’ The Temple of Dawn, page 118. ‘The most enchanting hourglass in the world’, Spring Snow, page 248.

  Mishima writes about a young extremist who is planning a coup in the 1930s Runaway Horses (Michael Gallagher, translator, Vintage, 2000), page 261.

  Shinjuku

  Shinjuku sits at the intersection of perception and reality Taken from the beautiful manga Shinjuku, a collaboration between Christopher Morrison and the artist Amano Yoshitaka (Dark Horse, 2010).

  the publisher Kaizōsha invited Einstein to lecture in Japan Tsutomu Kaneko has argued that the country’s interest in relativity reflected ‘the general intellectual class which supported the wide-spread Taishō democracy movement [and saw relativity] not as an isolated physics theory, but as an idea opening up new horizons.’ ‘Einstein’s Impact on Japanese Intellectuals: The Socio-Cultural Aspects of the “Homological Phenomena”,’ in The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Thomas F. Glick, editor, Reidel, 1987), pages 351–79, and Tsutomu Kaneko, ‘Einstein’s View of Japanese Culture’ in Historia Scientiarum #27, 1984, pages 51–76.

  The theory of relativity further appealed to the Japanese because, ‘contrary to its name, the theory ultimately depicts an absolute world, an idea-like world. Individual events that occupy actual space and follow time are shadows of this idea-like world. Even so, unless things exist, this absolute world (space-time) will also cease to exist.’ Also, relativity ‘dissents radically from man’s commonsense feeling that he is the center of the universe. Previously it had been thought that by using watches, it would be an extremely simple matter to determine that it was the same time … According to relativity, however, if twins were to hold two perfectly-synchronized watches and one travels in space while the other remains on earth, immediately the pace of the watch hands and the speed at which the twins age, would come to differ … Thus, relativity set a theoretical limit on man’s five senses.’

  Not everyone in Japan was so enamored of Einstein, however. The great philosopher Nishida Kitarō said that Einstein ‘himself may not know the philosophical implications of his own thought’, and observed that crowds ‘flocked around him as if to see an exhibit of an exotic animal rather than to listen to him’ (Letters, 26 August 1922 and 17 December, 1922, in Yusa Michiko, Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō, University of Hawaii Press, 2002, page 187). And one writer complained to a newspaper: ‘These days even science is nothing more than a kind of superstition that makes one lose one’s “balance of mind”.’ Another observed that the scientist’s press tour reflected ‘handing over a cheap article at a night stall.’

  There were fierce arguments in the government Cabinet Council over whether the Japanese public would understand Einstein’s lectures on relativity Japan Weekly Chronicle, quoted in Tsutomu, ‘Einstein’s Impact on Japanese Intellectuals’, page 376 note 18.

  And confusion over how to pronounce the word for ‘relativity’ (sōtai-sei) meant that it was mixed up with a word for ‘sex’ (aitai-sei) The character 相 used in the word ‘relativity’ has many pronunciations, among which are both ‘sō’ and ‘ai’. In the early 1920s, writes Tsutomu, ‘there was a flood of articles on sex, and spectacular love affairs which had no regard for class or age were creating a sensation, so it is understandable that the theory of relativity (sōtai-sei) was immediately mistaken for sex between lovers (aitai-sei).’

  At Tokyo University, Katori Hidetoshi builds clocks Professor Katori first achieved international prominence in 2001 after engineering the so-called ‘magic wavelength trap’ within optical lattice clocks: this trap allowed accuracy and stability to be possible within a single system. The optical lattice clock thus became a sensor for which ‘stability’ – that is, ‘precision over time’ – is key: Katori’s magic wavelength revolutionized the field of quantum optics.

  Helen Margolis, Principal Research Scientist at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, describes Katori’s contribution this way: Katori ‘made it possible to use, really use, the number of atoms that you can trap, with light, but without perturbing the atoms’ (interview, August 2015), something technically impossible before.

  Shinjuku: Tokyo Tomorrow

  Shinjuku is a monster, a chimera Quotes from the photographer Moriyama Daido, who has been shooting the district since the 1960s. ‘In Shinjuku, “Blade Runner” in Real Life’, New York Times, 1 August 2016.

  Honma Kunio In 1914, Honma Kunio published Impressions of Tokyo. Quoted in Alisa Freedman, Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road (Stanford University Press, 2011), pages 127 and 284.

  Shadows are paler here Contrast Ryūtanji Yū, below, and his comment that Shinjuku is a place where the ‘colors of daily life are deeper than those of pleasure.’

  Hayashi Fumiko This passage appears in the May 1931 issue of ‘Examining the City’ (Tokai o shinsakusuru), a collection of fifteen one- to two-page sketches by modernist writers; also taken from Freedman, Tokyo in Transit. For the writer Ryūtanji Yū, Shinjuku was the single neighborhood that best exemplified the ‘vortex of modern life’ in Tokyo; a place where the ‘colors of daily life are deeper than those of pleasure’ (page 168). Ryūtanji’s description of Shinjuku Station and the commuters streaming out of it: ‘like the inundation of the high tide on the night of a full moon.’ Writing about Ryūtanji, Alisa Freedman observes: ‘He presents the motion of passengers and passersby through various areas of the station, which cannot be seen by the human eye all at once, but is occurring in reality all at the same time.’

  With its motion and crowds, Tokyo has not changed between Ryūtanji’s early 1930s and the twenty-first century.

  Raymond Lucas ‘Getting Lost in Tokyo’ in Footprint, 1 July 2014, vol. 2 #1, pages 91–104. Lucas’ graphics are wonderful. A true schematic diagram of aporia.

  ‘Yes, we have the original!’ Japan’s temple bells often carried great political significance. The first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu used the casting of a Kyoto bell as an excuse to eliminate his last political rival, when the bell (which that lord’s faction had commissioned) was found to contain an ambiguous inscription. The bell itself ‘was fourteen feet high and seventy-two tons in weight … As usual, it had an inscription written in elaborate Chinese text … Great was the surprise and agitation of everyone when the Governor of Kyoto interposed with a demand for the postponing of all the celebrations on the grounds that the inscription on the bell was an insult to the dignity of the Shogun and his family.

  ‘The objections formally made to the inscription on the bell were that: Ieyasu ought to have been written immediately after the name of the era … Also [the phrase] “In the East it greets the pale moon, and in the West bids farewell to the setting sun” was interpreted as alluding to the lord of the east [Ieyasu] as the lesser luminary’ (A. L. Sa
dler, The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, cited above, pages 273–4).

  For the destruction of temple bells, see S. Katsumata, Gleams from Japan (Routledge, 2011): ‘About the time of the arrival of the Perry fleet’, the emperor issued an edict that ‘historic bells and bells used for telling the hour should be spared’ from being melted down into war materiel. The author notes that this edict came too late in certain domains, where the bells had already been melted down and recast as cannon and ‘other weapons’ (page 344).

  Hibiya: The Imperial Hotel

  At every turn, it is possible to leave the major spaces for minor ones Cary James, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel (Tokoudo Shoten, 1972), page 16.

  a colossal evening glow Mishima Yukio, The Temple of Dawn (E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, translators, Vintage, 2001), page 12.

  ‘the fusion of extreme electronics with extreme sentimentality is typically Tokyo’ Waldemar Januszczak, ‘Countdown Conundrum’, in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 9 November 2009. See also Tom Lubbock, ‘To Infinity and Beyond’, in the Independent, 24 June 1997, and Rosanna de Lisle, ‘To the Light Fantastic’, in the Independent, 14 June 1997.

  Time is not what we think it is Miyajima Tatsuo quotes taken from his Youtube interview on the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ installations.

  For information on Miyajima Tatsuo and his work, see his website, and catalogues: Time Train (Kerber Art, 2009); Big Time (Hayward Gallery, 1997); MEGA DEATH: shout! shout! count! (Tokyo Opera City Art Foundation, 2000), Opposite Level/ Counter Circle, (Richard Gray Gallery, 2001), Art in You (Esquire Magazine Japan, 2008), and Cristina Garbagna’s Tatsuo Miyajima (Electa, 2004). The website of the Lisson Gallery, which represents Miyajima, is also a good resource.

  ‘They were in the business of bathhouses’ See Joseph De Becker, The Nightless City (Z. P. Maruya, 1899), page 13 note: ‘These “bath-houses” were in reality houses of assignation and unlicensed brothels. Carrying on their business under this innocent title they engaged women called “kami-arai-onna,” or (for want of a better word) “shampooers,” but these females were really “jigoku” (“Hell women”) and were selected for their beauty in order to attract persons to “take baths.” The “bath-house” women were not only as beautiful and accomplished as the regular courtesans, but they were cheaper and would accommodate guests either day or night, whereas the regular girls were only permitted to exercise their calling in the day-time. These unlicensed prostitutes were so numerous that they seriously interfered with the business of the real Yoshiwara, and it was to the interest of regular brothel-keepers that they should be suppressed…’

  Also, James L. Huffman’s Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), ‘Earning a Living: Movers and Servers’, especially page 93.

  samurai doctors for the shoguns Quotes taken from Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Belknap Press, 2002), page 213. See also The Introduction of Modern Science and Technology to Turkey and Japan (Kuriyama Shigehisa and Feza Günergun, editors, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 1998).

  a set of surprisingly glum motivations Waldemar Januszczak, ‘Countdown Conundrum’, cited above.

  no architect would admit to designing See Paul Waley for the Imperial Hotel’s demise: ‘an act of cultural barbarism … Frank Lloyd Wright’s hotel was idiosyncratic, and it was unique’, Tokyo Now & Then: An Explorer’s Guide (John Weatherhill, 1984), page 32.

  In Asia, it’s a circle’ See the writings of aristocrat and philosopher-poet Kuki Shūzō for the contrast between ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ concepts about time. Kuki crystallized his ideas in two lectures (‘Considerations on Time’ and ‘The Expression of the Infinite in Japanese Art’) delivered in 1928 to a gathering of French literati (Stephen Light translates both in his Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence in the Early History of Existential Phenomenology, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).

  See also Kuki’s ‘Metaphysics of Literature’: ‘The past is not simply something that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already come into the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite future and, moreover, that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but the infinite present, the eternal now’ (quoted in Michael Marra’s Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry & Poetics, University of Hawaii Press, 2004, page 34 and note 91).

  ‘The flow of time has completely changed…’ See Rob Gilhooly’s dispatch from Ishinomaki, one year after the 2011 earthquake: ‘Time Has Stopped for Parents of Dead and Missing Children: Closure Next to Impossible at School Where 70 Pupils Were Washed Away’ (Japan Times, Sunday, 11 March 2012). Gilhooly quotes Ono Dairyu, a Buddhist priest who worked with bereaved families: ‘Everyone says that the flow of time has completely changed; that the clocks have stopped…’

  Edo was imagined as a place that could not be entered, or might not be left Katō Takashi, ‘Governing Tokyo’, in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (James L. McClain, John M. Merriman and Ugawa Kaoru, editors, Cornell University Press, 1997), Chapter 2, page 43.

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