Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34)

by Stephen Mansfield

  There are, of course, as many Tokyos as there are visitors. If a common perspective is missing, this is a tribute to the diversity and complexity of a city that can generate so many different interpretations. This present interpretation of Tokyo was not conceived as a guidebook, though in a very real sense it can be read as a guide to a cross-section of the city’s cultural life. I have not attempted a district-by-district description, but to evoke the atmosphere of the city, its sensuality (a word rarely associated with Tokyo), and to indicate areas of creative fermentation past and present by focusing on elements of the city’s culture, in particular the extraordinary richness of its literature. Rather than divide the book by subject, I have detailed the historical development of the city from its pre-Edo origins to the present day, allowing themes to surface and dominate the text as they arise naturally in the course of the city’s evolution.

  Important subjects touched upon here are the establishment of the castle town of Edo as paradigm for a national power structure, the rise of the merchant class, collapse of the shogunate, relocation of the emperor to Tokyo, the rapid modernization programmes and arrival of foreign experts and visitors that followed, the conflict between western ideas and a deeply rooted isolationism. As with the formative Edo period, I have devoted considerable text space to the subsequent Meiji era, the so-called Age of Civilization and Enlightenment, and the hybridization that affected the appearance of Tokyo. The latter part of the book places the growth of popular culture and the first yearnings of democracy alongside the traumas of the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the rise of militarism and the devastation of Tokyo in the Second World War. The final two chapters describe the rebirth of the city and its remarkable transition to the present day.

  While the book tracks a chronology of events, of formative dates that have in some way shaped the city, the main themes form a commentary on people and culture: Tokyo’s persistent craving for the new, its urge to replace outmoded forms, aspects of contemporary Japan that are by no means recent phenomena. Takao Yoshii, in his book The Electric Geisha, describes how even in the Edo period, the rapid dissemination of information among the townspeople hastened the replacement of old values and tastes. “In the urban setting,” he notes, “social and cultural phenomena would arise one after another and each new value thus generated might soon be overturned by the next.” If change in Japan is essentially culture and technology driven, then Tokyo, the laboratory for this experimentation, is in both the real and fictive sense, the global imagination’s proxy setting for the future, as the science fiction novels of William Gibson illustrate.

  It would be easy enough to conclude that Tokyo today is poised in a transition between past and future upheaval, but the truth is that Tokyo is a city of perpetual transitions. There are few cities in the world as well schooled in the concept of destruction as part of the cycle of rebirth. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, epidemics, floods, the eerily beautiful fires known as the “flowers of Edo”, the bombing of tightly compacted civilian areas in the war - these and many other calamities have been periodically visited upon it. Whether as Edo or Tokyo, the city has faced these and other cataclysmic strokes and endured, a testament to its granite heart. Tokyo’s insecurities, its impermanence, the conviction that it could all be gone at any given moment, lend this city of dark premoni­ tions and bright lights an intensity unlike any other capital in the modern world.

  The Shell Mound

  Early Human Settlement to Military Capital

  8000 BC?-1590

  Even by American standards of individualism, Edward Sylvester Morse was a strange bird. Where other western visitors to Meiji-period Japan (1868-1912) attempted to establish trade agreements, amass valuable art collections, convert the Japanese through missionary endeavours or write accounts of the exotic capital of a lotus land at the extremity of the earth, the New England zoologist had come to Japan to further his studies of brachiopods, Western Pacific shellfish.

  Insatiably curious and with a passion for detail, Morse had travelled to Japan at his own expense, setting himself up temporarily in the port city of Yokohama. The morning after his arrival on 18 June 1877, he boarded the newly inaugurated Tokaido railway line from Yokohama to Tokyo. Six miles from the terminal at Shimbashi the train passed through the village of Omori, moving slowly enough for passengers to take in the details. Glancing out of the window of his carriage at the sunlit embankment, Morse’s trained eye fell on an object of little interest to his fellow travellers: a five thousand-year-old cockleshell, Arca granosa, something he recognized from his walks along the coast of Maine.

  What everyone had seen, but only Morse had noticed, was an ancient kitchen heap, a prehistoric midden alongside the railway tracks. Conscious of its significance, Morse returned to the site a few days later with a group of students from the recently founded Tokyo Imperial University. “Frantic with delight,” as he put it in one of his beautifully written accounts, “we dug with our hands and examined the detritus that had rolled down and got a large collection of unique forms of pottery, three worked bones, and a curious baked-clay tablet.” The pre-Bronze Age site, known as the Omori Shell Midden, marked the birth of Japanese archaeology and provided an immeasurably valuable key to human settlement in the Tokyo Bay area.

  More discoveries followed. On 2 March 1884, three students digging into the shell heaps near present-day Nezu station unearthed quantities of pottery shards. Older than anything previously found, the discovery pushed back the date of the earliest agriculturalists, communities that gave up nomadic existences to settle in the region. More Neolithic remains have been found in the Tokyo area than in any other region of Japan.

  As the sea advanced, deep encroachments into the valleys and plains of this area forced inhabitants up onto the ridges and bluffs, vantage points from which plentiful supplies of fish and shellfish could still be gathered. An important part of the diet of the Stone Age dwellers of the Jumon period (8000-300BC) who lived along the ridge of the wave-lapped Yamanote hills, the shells were dumped onto middens. As the waters of the bay gradually retreated, brackish pools and swamps were left behind at spots like present-day Koishikawa, Shinobazu Pond in Ueno and at Tameike near Toranomon. Primitive settlements existed at the head of the bay. From the remains of stone tools unearthed in strata excavations along the upper banks of rivers, we know that the region was the home of late Palaeolithic inhabitants, hunter-gatherers in a biologically diverse area. During the Meiji period fifth-century burial mounds containing swords, armour, gems and totemic clay sculptured vessels known as haniwa were discovered in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward.

  A Goddess in the Nets

  On 18 March 628, two fishermen hauling their catch from the Sumida river found a golden image trapped in the nets. The Hinokuma brothers, credited with finding the statue of Kannon, goddess of mercy, are remembered in Asakusa Shrine, next to the present Asakusa Kannon temple, also known as Senso-ji. Built to house the statue and dedicated in 635, it is the oldest Kannon temple in Japan.

  The establishment of the temple on the edge of the desolate Musashino Plain probably represents the arrival of Buddhism in this area. The remains of stone pillar bases in Kokubunji in west Tokyo mark the spot where another temple was erected after Emperor Shomu’s 737 decree that each province should have its place of worship and a monastery. At the same time, an official road was opened, connecting the plain with Kozuke in present-day Gunma prefecture. This allowed hunters access to the game-rich area and opened the plain to the breeding of horses. The same century saw the arrival of groups of naturalized Koreans who settled on the plain.

  The name of the deep, eroded valleys and diluvial swampland appears in the poems of the eighth-century anthology, the Manyoshu. The desolate wilderness of reeds, pampas and wetlands inspired educated and privileged travellers who, in the manner of the age, kept detailed literary diaries. Visitors on imperial business passed through the region via ancient routes that radiated from Kyoto, the capital. A very basic fe
rry system existed for crossing the Sumida. The poet Ariwara-no Narihira used it in 880. His verse about seagulls flying over the river seems to have inspired the adoption of the bird as one of the symbols of present-day Tokyo.

  Crossing the river one windy autumn night in 1020, the twelve-year-old Lady Sarashina, returning to Kyoto after her father’s recall from the provinces, found little to admire in the desolation she recorded the next day. The pampered members of Kyoto’s Heian court, where the aristocracy resided, were easily vexed when expectations of profound and mystic landscapes raised by reading literature, failed to correspond with reality. “On the beach the sand was not white but a sort of muddy colour,” she writes; “in the fields, there were none of the murasaki plants I had heard about.” Close to the volcanic sands of the bay noted in the Sarashina Diaries mention is made of the ruins of what might have been either a temple or early dwelling called Takeshiba. The number of inhabitants in the area, however, remained small. The Musashino Plain was still a lonely place, an expanse of reeds and tall grasses, the moon turning the tall vegetation into a sea of silver plumes. The melancholic cry of the plover could be heard near the banks of the Sumida, where a few wretched huts stood. Even in daylight Lady Sarashina found that the reeds were so high “the tips of our horsemen’s bows were invisible.”

  Two centuries later, Lady Nijo, determined to see the eleven-faced Kannon statue at Senso-ji temple in Asakusa, crossed the plain in autumn. To reach the goddess she had to go through vast fields so densely covered with bush clover, reeds and pampas grass that no other plants were able to grow there. The height of the grasses was such that a man on horseback could pass through unseen.

  Desolate though it may have been, the plain was not completely uninhabited. Several pre-Edo residences have since been unearthed in the area. In Akasaka’s Hitotsugi-machi district, traces of the home of the twelfth-century lord Imai Kanchira have been identified as the coastal dwelling of Edo Shiro Shigetsugu, a local chieftain who seems to have taken his name from the area where he established a clan power base. Armed bands passed across the plain during this period of clan rivalry, engaging in vicious but forgotten battles and leaving disease and famine in the wake of their bloodbaths. The plain could still inspire moments of inspired literature, even entire works like the poet Motomasa’s The River Sumida, written in 1432. The Noh play, centring on a woman who, driven insane with grief, is comforted by the ghost of her child, was adapted by the composer Benjamin Britten after he visited Japan in 1956. The libretto for the work, Curlew River, was written by the English poet and novelist William Plomer, who lived in Japan in the late 1920s.

  The Warrior Poet

  This wild and scattered grassland, destined to become the largest urban development in the world, was organized into a martial entity, a domain of sorts, with the arrival of Ota Dokan in 1456. Ota, a minor feudal lord, belonged to a cadet branch of the Uesugi family. Its patriarch, Uesugi Sadamasa, served the Kyoto-based Ashikaga shogun. The clansman settled on a location called Chiyoda, connected to a primitive road leading north. Despite the bleakness noted by poets and diarists, the site had some obvious advantages. Situated in the largest of Japan’s alluvial plains on well-irrigated rice land - the farthest position from a potential continental invader - it provided good grazing and exercise for the breeding of horses, an important factor in the rise of the warriors of the eastern seaboard. The tributaries and watercourses of the Tone river, the largest in the east, served as important transportation channels and were conveniently close.

  Villagers were removed and work on the building of a castle began. Its earthen embankments, palisades, bamboo poles, shrubs, thatched buildings, wells and ditches gave it the appearance of a military camp rather than a fortress, but as the plain was dominated the settlement grew in scale. Though the castle was still surrounded by insalubrious marsh land, rice fields were cultivated in place of the tall reeds.

  Statue of Ota Dokan, the “warrior poet”, in the Tokyo International Forum

  Great men were expected to be versed in the classics. By all accounts Ota was an untutored rustic more interested in subjugating rival clansmen until an encounter while out hunting in the area where Takadanobaba station now stands turned him into a man of culture and good taste. The story was no doubt liberally embellished over the years, but a kernel of truth remains. Waiting out a heavy shower, Ota asked a peasant girl emerging from a hut to provide him with a mino (straw raincoat). To his dismay, the girl presented him with a single wild flower, a yellow rose, before silently withdrawing. Baffled by the gesture, Ota asked his fellow hunters the meaning of the girl’s action. An ancient poem, he was told, describes the simple dignity of a yellow rose that, though blooming abundantly, produces no seed.

  Sad indeed am I

  That I have not one straw raincoat

  Like the seven-petalled, eight-petalled

  Blossom of a yellow rose.

  The characters for the flower in Japanese, mino hitotsu, can also be read as “one straw raincoat”. Humbled by his ignorance of the language of poetry, Ota determined to apply himself to the study of literature. The story illustrates the point that rulers were expected to be men of culture, and how historical events are often subsumed into literary accounts. Ota subsequently became known by the title of the “warrior poet” on account of his devotion to literature and works of Chinese philosophy.

  The fortified castle of Ota Dokan, built in 1457 and equidistant between the fiefdoms of northern and southern Honshu, was on rich farmland endowed with plentiful land and water access. The ancient site name, Edo, meaning “mouth of the estuary”, was retained. Ota administered the settlement that grew around his military fortification for thirty years, turning the town into one of the key shipping and trading centres of the Kanto region. Boats anchored at its gates offloaded iron and copper weapons, fish, tea, rice, even rare medicines imported from China. Ota’s fortress also provided an unintended shelter for monks, poets, artists and aristocrats who had abandoned the imperial city of Kyoto during the catastrophic Onin civil war of 1467-77, a feud that destroyed much of the capital.

  As a highly able administrator and military strategist, a man of sensibility and good taste, Ota attracted the envy and suspicion of his own lord, who ordered his assassination in 1486. With Ota’s death the settlement passed into the hands of weaker descendants who were swiftly overcome by the predatory Hojo clan. Warriors in the purest sense, unwilling to contaminate themselves with trade, they allowed Edo’s thriving commerce to languish, finally abandoning the stronghold to the elements. Made almost entirely from wooden materials, the castle, merchant houses, lowly hovels and salt-encrusted port structures facing the bay were subjected to damp and decay during Japan’s sub-tropical summers, turning a dynamic trading entrepot into a worm-ridden, termite-infested ghost town. Edo fell into a trance state lasting a full century.

  In 1573 effective rule over the whole of Japan fell into the hands of one man, the warrior and military general Oda Nobunaga. A Machiavellian figure whose passion for unifying the country was matched by his ruthlessness in quelling enemies - including on one occasion an entire monastic complex of fractious monks - Nobunaga was also a sensitive devotee of the arts. A close link between official power and the arts was always strong in Japan. When, in 1582, he was assassinated by a general he had insulted, it was, in a strangely fitting choreography of death, while he was in a temple dancing a scene from a Noh play.

  Visions of a City

  Nobunaga’s second-in-command Toyotomi Hideyoshi appointed Tokugawa Ieyasu as chief commander of his forces. Anxious to remove Ieyasu from the centre of political power in Kyoto, he offered the warlord large land holdings in eastern Japan in exchange for his territory near the imperial capital. To the consternation of his followers, Ieyasu readily accepted. As daimyo (feudal lord) of the eight provinces of the Kanto, Ieyasu’s audacious private vision was to create from the insignificant village of Edo a military capital from which he and his heirs would control th
e entire country.

  With Toyotomi’s death in 1598, Ieyasu moved a step closer to realizing his ambitions. Daimyo were resolutely divided into two factions: those supporting Toyotomi’s son Hideyori, and those who gave their backing to Ieyasu. In the ensuing power struggle among contesting daimyo, culminating in the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1603, Ieyasu prevailed. The emperor formally appointed the general as shogun, or military governor, an ancient title abbreviated from the longer “Commander-in-Chief for quelling the barbarians”.

  Ieyasu, now effectively the country’s military dictator, immediately transferred the seat of the bakufu, the military government, to Edo though Kyoto remained the imperial capital. Moving the centre of civil and military power from the weak aristocratic court in Kyoto to Edo Bay, he ruled over Japan in the name of an emperor so powerless that many Japanese today would be hard pressed to even recall his name.

  Despite the coastal swamps and lack of natural spring water, Ieyasu saw much promise in a flat, easily defensible, sea-facing settlement standing at the point where an important trunk road to the mountain province of Kai, the Koshu Kaido, also branched off in the direction of imperial Kyoto. An official entry into Edo was made on 1 August 1590. Ieyasu’s first night in the town was spent in the rooms of a Buddhist temple, common hostelries at the time for honoured visitors. The first foreign diplomats to arrive in Edo in the nineteenth century would find themselves similarly accommodated.