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

by Stephen Mansfield

  Shinto shrines were places of worship for a religion concerned with customs and rituals useful to earthly existence, a faith predisposed towards encouraging benevolent fortune. They demanded courtesy calls, something Ieyasu quickly set about doing. The first pace of worship he came across was a shrine dedicated to the deity Tenjin. Ieyasu remarked, “Ota was a poet? It was surely natural that he should build a shrine to the god of literature!” The temple, out on the marshes of Asakusa, was duly visited in the following days.

  The deserted castle that Ieyasu inspected was in a deplorable state. Three wooden steps made from the beams of old ships led to the main gate, a rickety portal conveying little sense of even diminished grandeur. The outlines of the main building, the Honmaru, flanked by two smaller buildings, the Ninomaru and San-no-maru, could still be made out. Other structures, the outbuildings and kitchens were thatched, the ceilings made of narrow boards, the walls blackened by smoke. Underfoot the straw matting was damaged and sodden from leaking roofs made from crude wooden shingles.

  The citadel would have to be completely rebuilt. It cannot have taken much effort clearing away the fungus-stained buildings. When the time came to erect a new city, nature had already done most of the demolition work.

  The Citadel

  1590-1638

  Three days of Noh and Kyogen followed Ieyasu’s self-appointment as shogun, a measure of the importance the performing arts would have on the new city. In his younger years Ieyasu, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe who went on to earn a reputation as a drama critic, had performed Noh himself. Throughout his office he continued, as Hideyoshi had done, to support the four main schools of Noh with estate rights and generous rice stipends, a practice continued by his successors until the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868.

  Kyoto, where the emperor, the Heavenly Sovereign resided, remained the nominal capital of the realm. A new city for a new century, Edo was not yet the national capital but its status as the de facto military and political capital, and its potential as an engine for wealth creation, foreshadowed its later domination of the entire country.

  In selecting Edo as a site for this new political machinery, certain requirements of Chinese geomancy would have to be met; symbols and co-ordinates, correctly chosen, would endorse and secure the power of the new city. The east, the direction of the Cyan Dragon, required a major watercourse. The Sumida served this end. The west, provenance of the White Tiger, demanded a major road. The Tokaido trunk road was already in place. The domain of the Vermilion Bird to the south required a pond. With a little imaginative interpretation, Edo Bay might substitute for such a pond. The north, the lair of the Dark Warrior, was more problematic. This direction demanded a mountain. Mount Fuji was the obvious choice, but its orientation lay to the west. The problem was solved by repositioning the castle’s main gate, the Ote-mon, from its traditional place in the south to the east. Using the new castle layout as a compass, the mountain’s coordinate could hence be read as north. Traces of these considerations survive today in Tokyo place names such as Tatsunokuchi (Dragon Mouth) and Toranomon (Tiger Gate).

  As an extra precaution against ill fortune, Zojo-ji temple, dating from 1596, was moved to Shiba, an undeveloped area to the south of Edo. A special place of worship for the Tokugawa dynasty, experts in geomancy were consulted to ensure that the temple was correctly appointed to protect the city from infiltration by evil spirits. A grand gate, the San-mon, was erected in 1605. Classified as a national treasure, it still stands today, a rare survivor of earthquakes, fires and man-made catastrophes. Temples, shrines and monasteries lent the new city some much needed cultural credentials. For the first time, Ieyasu had the Chinese classics printed on paper and brought the renowned library of the Kanazawa Bunko to Edo.

  The building that ultimately proclaimed the ascendance of a new realpolitik, and which served as the lodestone of Edo’s structure and protective force fields, was the Tokugawa citadel itself. The construction of this supposedly unassailable fortress was a titanic undertaking. The remains of Ota’s old fortification, its rotting mats, collapsing earth walls and termite-infested rafters were soon cleared away. Carpenters set about replacing the putrescence with sweet-smelling freshly planed timber. Following the tastes of Kyoto aristocrats who treasured the flower as an aesthetic adjunct to the tea ceremony, Ieyasu even had a camellia garden created at the centre of the castle.

  The area, now the Imperial Palace East Gardens, formed the nucleus of the complex, with a five-storey donjon at the core. In order to make the castle grounds impregnable, a system of river-connected moats and canals, closer to a series of whorls than precision circles, was dug. These disgorged at two points into the Sumida. The channels were breached by bridges and fortified gates. The shape was something akin to a logarithmic spiral, a mystical form in Shinto deriving from the ancient, Chinese-based yin-yang scheme by which the universe functions. The spiralling moats and height of the buildings within emphasized centrality, a single, unassailable political organism. The view of the castle from the congested alleys, low-rise homes and stores of the townspeople who depended on the citadel and its needs for their livelihoods must have been impressive. A green, watery void surrounded by a human termite nest, the working parts of this precision machine were designed to ensure that they would not rebel against each other.

  Townspeople crossing the original Ryogoku Bridge

  Recent advances in engineering meant that certain natural disadvantages of location could be overcome. Ieyasu’s priority was to develop reclamation projects along Edo Bay that would secure major coastal roads and provide quays for ships. Shipping was the lifeblood of the trade that supported the city; one early visitor observed that the vessels moored in the bay were “as thick as the scales upon the back of a fish, while the masts presented the appearance of a dense forest.” As more space was consumed, the bay was forced back, land reclaimed, hills levelled. Beginning the re-moulding of the city that continues relentlessly up to today, earth was taken from the higher bluffs to fill in the Hibiya Inlet, a watercourse that flowed from the bay to the feet of the castle site. Edo’s water-courses were adapted into more geometric, rectilinear forms, the inner moats and canals containing the castle, the intermediate spaces the residences and offices of officials; the less appealing outer peripheries, a system of ditches stretching down to the bay and designed to provide a first line of defence, were occupied by merchants, artisans, labourers and craftsmen.

  Moats, a conduit for drinking water and a canal leading from the salt flats near the bay, were among the first infrastructural projects. Ieyasu forced the daimyo into providing the funds, materials and labour needed for the massive task of constructing the castle and canals. A single vessel could carry just two of the larger stones, which required as many as 200 men to load. In all, 3,000 ships were used to transport the granite and volcanic materials the sixty miles from quarries on the Izu Peninsula. Once the rocks reached Edo, they were offloaded onto carts drawn by oxen. The larger stones were placed on sledges, wooden palettes drawn by teams of labourers. Seaweed was placed under the sledges to facilitate their movement forward. But for the comic spectacle of hired entertainers, it would have been a Herculean task worthy of heroic depiction. As teams of men from different fiefdoms vied with each other to finish the work in a competitive spirit, they were spurred on by troupes hired to beat drums, blow conches and to mimic the manners of Europeans (southern barbarians as they were called) in lewd dances. In this atmosphere akin to a community festival, the great citadel rose inch by inch.

  The castle and its dependent buildings, including the shogun’s private residence, a series of secondary fortresses, munitions stores, watchtowers, gardens and teahouses, occupied the centre of the web, with hundreds of warriors, administrators, family members and concubines in residence. Its fortifications were made of stone, grey tiles were baked from clay, the surfaces of its white walls made from lime. Two golden dolphins sat on the roof.

  As a symbol o
f authority it was highly effective, but the sprawling grounds and the fact that it depended almost entirely on the outside for water and food rendered it indefensible. The period of peace crafted by Ieyasu and passed down to his descendants eventually neutralized the building’s function as a fort, replacing it with a system of feudal interdependency.

  The Military City

  The physical arrangement of the city was conceived to embody the hierarchical social order. Ieyasu ruled over the 176 Inside Lords who had shown the prescience to side with him at Sekigahara in 1600, and the 86

  Outside Lords who had not. Lords who had fought on Ieyasu’s side, together with their families and followers, were allotted spacious residencies close to the castle walls. The Outside Lords were handed plots of land that formed a strategic circle, a first line of defence in the now unlikely event of invasion.

  As in all totalitarian states, fear and suspicion dictated policy. Daimyo and their families lived under constant threat of punishment for disloyalty or misconduct. Estates could be requisitioned and families banished to inhospitable provinces or god-forsaken, barely inhabited islands. By preventing horizontal alliances, segregating the population and establishing an extensive network of spies, Ieyasu and his successors made insurrections difficult as no individual group could develop a military or economic base strong enough to challenge the central government.

  Dictatorships require loyal retainers, but ultimately, because of the paranoia and insecurity bred by such systems, nobody is beyond suspicion. Lords on both sides of the shogun’s loyalty ranking were restricted in the amount of arms they could amass, and the fortifications they could build around their estates. Social contact between the estates was discouraged in an unofficial version of non-fraternization; each estate was encouraged to spy on the next and report any suspicious goings-on. Government inspectors dispatched to keep an eye on the activities of the lords and report back to the castle tightened the surveillance web.

  In order to hobble their power and to discourage foment around their still armed retainers and vassals, daimyo were required to leave hostages in Edo as surety for their good conduct. Later, a more unified version of sankin kotai (alternate attendance) was introduced. Devised to keep the lords distracted and their coffers depleted, the system required a one-year residence in Edo, another year in the home estate. As these estates were often hundreds of miles from Edo, the bi-annual journey was a colossal undertaking. As a further precaution, barriers were erected at strategic points along the highways into Edo, where a rule of “no women out, no guns in” tightened the hostage system and ensured that the daimyo remained impotent.

  With their lacquered palanquins, liveried retainers, horses, spears, banners and decorative halberds, the processions were great spectacles for the townspeople and eagerly awaited events in the high ritual of Edo. A woodblock print by the great Edo artist Ando Hiroshige depicts a daimyo and his retinue crossing the Sumida on their return journey home. Beyond spectacle, they were also reminders to commoners of the authority of their masters.

  The castle defined the shape of the city. At its feet, Nihonbashi, Kanda and Kyobashi were inhabited by craftsmen, the nuclei of a scheme whereby each trade or craft would occupy an assigned quarter, chandlers in this one, coopers in another. Plasterers were found in Kanda Shirokabecho, for example, scabbard-makers in Minami-Sayacho, indigo dyers in Kanda Konyacho, gunsmiths in Teppocho. Thirty-six approaches to the city gates, called mitsuke, were built as security checkpoints. Although the mitsuke have vanished and only a small section of the outer moat exists today, they survive in the names of districts and metro stations like Akasaka-mitsuke, and Yoysuya-mitsuke. The gates were firmly locked at night, a practice that worked for a time before a more natural order asserted itself.

  Nihonbashi, connecting the main commercial street of Otemachi with the castle, was an important district from the very beginning. Ieyasu had Nihonbashi Bridge, a 160-foot long wooden construction, built in 1603, making it the starting point for the five great roads that led out of the city. The five trunk roads that converged and bifurcated here were the Tokaido, Nakasendo, Koshu Kaido, Oshu Kaido and Nikko Kaido.

  The shogun’s perpetual fear of an armed uprising was expressed in the design of the Tokaido road, which was kept narrow enough to discourage the movement of armies, and suitable only for travel by foot or horse. An elaborate system of barriers and checkpoints kept human traffic under strict supervision. Boxes and chests were carefully examined to ensure that no arms, especially firearms, entered Edo. Even a horse required a written permit to enter the city. Like the risks faced by nineteenth-century Europeans travelling in disguise to the holy cities of Lhasa and Mecca, the penalty for trying to smuggle oneself into Edo might easily be death.

  All distances were measured from the zero point at Nihonbashi Bridge, a practice that continues today. Travelling to the city with the Dutch trade mission in the 1690s, the scholar Engelbert Kaempfer noted: “Among the bridges, there is one 42 fathom in length, famous all over Japan... It is call Nihonbas, that is, the bridge of Japan.” The original arched bridge appears much later in the history of the city in Hiroshige’s print Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido. Reflecting its central role in the life of the city, this is print no.1 in the series. The background of the work shows us five towers rising above tiled warehouse roofs. The human elements contain almost the entire social strata of Edo, with a daimyo procession approaching, lance bearer’s weapons held aloft, while the riverfront fishmongers, fearing for their lives, move gingerly back to allow their superiors to pass.

  Despite the beauty of the design, the bridge could be a fearful place. Felons were exhibited to the public in fetters at its south end. Adulterers and priests who had committed sexual offences were displayed here before being taken off to the execution grounds. Murderers were placed in a hole with their head and neck exposed. Two saws were placed next to the heads for any passer-by to execute justice should they so wish. Few did. The severed heads were skewered on pikes at the end of the bridge as a warning to would-be criminals. If you had no business with the bridge or the fish market, it was a place to admire from a distance.

  By 1608 the moats of Edo castle extended as far as Kudan, a slope where the Yasukuni Shrine now stands. Sixty-six gates, 19 towers and a donjon rising almost 200 feet created an image of fortified majesty endorsed by ritual and protocol. Those who failed to observe even minor rules of etiquette could be subjected to severe punishment. By the time the castle was completed in 1638 it was the largest construction of its kind in the world, though few people living in Edo would have been aware of the fact. Within a mere decade, moreover, the new capital had mushroomed into a major city. Its proportions had already been noted by visitors and favourably compared with other world cities. Visiting Edo in 1611, John Saris, an English sea captain, commander of the Clove, the first English merchant ship to visit Japan on a mission to establish a branch of the East India Company, wrote in his journal: “The fourteenth (of September) we arrived in Edo... which made a very glorious appearance unto us; the ridge-tiles and corner-tiles richly gilded, the posts of their doors gilded and varnished.” Engaged in a profession that made him acutely aware of fire and water, the captain noted not only the profusion of rivers and canals, but also of stone wellheads hung with buckets that could be used in the event of a conflagration. The main street of the town, he observed, was “as broad as any of our streets in England”. This spacious boulevard would have been the prototype for many wide avenues constructed as firebreaks. Another Englishman, Richard Cocks, visiting Edo in 1616, was better placed to make comparisons. “We went rowndabout the Kyngs castell or fortress,” he wrote, “which I do hould to be much more in compass than the city of Coventry.”

  Southern Barbarians

  Japan’s first encounters with westerners date from 1543 with the arrival of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English traders, together with numbers of Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. Although the official reaction to foreigners
eventually turned to repugnance followed by animosity, ordinary Japanese were mesmerized by these “southern barbarians” or nanbanjin; their clothing, customs, even eating habits all struck them as a mixture of the exotic and grotesque. Many of these Europeans arrived in the company of their Southeast Asian and Indian servants, by way of the East Indies and the Malay Peninsula.

  The Portuguese were the first to land, introducing bibles and firearms in a familiar but ultimately unsuccessful strategy, the Church softening up the ground, the military hardening it. Japan’s first Christian missionary, the Basque priest Francis Xavier, was powerfully drawn to Japan. “This militant man,” as Nicolas Bouvier wrote in The Japanese Chronicles (1975), was “attracted by difficult countries, by a slightly melancholic moral rigour that he could sense without formulating... some indefinable quality, born of a tradition of which the West was ignorant.” Curious to know more of the priest’s doctrine, many Japanese daimyo, aware that Xavier’s journey to Japan had begun after the completion of his mission in India, took Catholicism for a new sect of Buddhism.

  The tolerant but shrewd Ouchi clan in Yamaguchi, for example, their eyes less on baptism than the Portuguese cargoes from Macao, granted the Jesuit permission to preach in the manner of the bonzes. The uncompromising Xavier took to the streets of the city, denouncing, among other things, infanticide, idolatry and sodomy (the latter a widespread practice at the time among the military and Buddhist clergy). Misunderstandings and offence, both real and imagined, were inevitable. Europeans, ignorant about the Japanese language, found that its vocabulary fell lamentably short of being able to render their message with clarity. Buddhist terminology was used to translate the scriptures; the concept of God came out as the ambiguous kami, which could signify any number of gods. The word “sin”, faring little better, was termed tsumi, meaning the generic “morally wrong”. Proselytizing with groups of Jesuits, Xavier did, however, initiate a stream of conversions which by 1600 had reached a staggering and worrisome 300,000 - this at a time when the official population of the country stood at a little over twenty million.