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

by Stephen Mansfield

  If Utamaro provides us with a valuable portrait of the sirens of the pleasure quarters and Hokusai, the little people who made Edo life and culture, Utagawa Hiroshige gives us images of the city itself in over a thousand prints. His best-known work, such as the Eight Views of Edo and its Suburbs and the One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo, are complete series. These valuable documents show us sections of the city founded by Ieyasu and developed by later shoguns. Hiroshige’s depictions of Ichigaya Hill, Gotenyama and Nihonbashi are no longer recognizable, but we can still see the outlines and features of Shinobazu Pond, Ueno Hill and Kaneiji temple, the great Sanmon gate at Shiba and the steep defile of the Kanda canal as it cuts through Ochanomizu. Such works were to exert a powerful influence on later European artists like Van Gogh, Whistler and Cézanne.

  The genre best matched to Hiroshige’s intensely poetic view of nature was the landscape form. In the early nineteenth century it was still possible to be a landscape artist without even leaving the city. The artist’s print of the Suwa Terrace in Nippori depicts people enjoying the cherry blossoms while gazing across rice fields to distant Mount Tsukuba. In Hiroshige’s day the shrine was a popular spot for moon viewing and listening to the sound of summer insects like cicadas. In a print showing a large area of rice paddies called Mikawashima Tanbo, north of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the artist shows us migratory flocks of crane alighting in the watery fields. In the desolate south-eastern reaches of Fukagawa, where the Sumida and Naka rivers begin to disgorge into the bay, Hiroshige has a hawk, about to descend on its prey, flying above the scene.

  The sacred cone of Mount Fuji looms large in many of these prints, its distant outline often bathed in a crimson and vermillion sunset. Pilgrimages to Mount Fuji were enormously popular during the Edo period. A Fuji cult developed after the hermit Jikigyo Miroku took to meditating on the mountain’s summit. Though it was visible from myriad angles within the city, the elderly, infirm and poor were not able to make the pilgrimage. Temple gardens with miniature Mount Fujis provided a novel substitute. Women, prohibited from scaling the real Fuji, were welcome to climb these artificial mounds. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were Fuji replicas at Fukagawa, Yotsuya, Asakusa, Shitaya, Komagome, Kayabacho and other locations throughout the city. The sites turned into lively, all night social venues, attracting the inevitable vendors of food, religious and non-religious trinkets and fortune-tellers.

  In her memoir My Asakusa, the actress Sawamura Sadako recalled that on 1 June, the opening day of the climbing season, “devout believers of Asakusa who could not climb Mount Fuji on a pilgrimage used to clothe themselves in white and pray while purifying themselves with cold water.”

  The Garden City

  By the first years of the nineteenth century the population of Edo had reached 1.3 million, making it by far the largest city in the world. By the middle of the century, that number had exceeded two million. Despite the burgeoning demographics, the people of Edo still continued to coexist with nature in a way that is only possible in pre-industrial cities. If we are to believe accounts of the day corroborated in paintings and print, Edo was home to geese, foxes, cuckoos, the Japanese nightingale, swans and the red-crested crane. Boat crews drew water from the Sumida river to brew their tea. Asakusa carp, bass, laver and whitefish were easily taken from its depths. Fireflies could still be seen and cuckoos heard along the Kanda canal; uguisu, Japanese nightingales, were occasionally spotted in Koishikawa, Shitaya and a district that took its name from the bird, Uguisudani - Nightingale Valley.

  This was the age of great gardens. Forbidden by the bakufu from spending funds on enlarging their military arsenals, many warriors chose to pursue leisure activities of a cultural nature. Some daimyo, wealthy merchants and later industrialists amused themselves constructing large, ambitiously conceived gardens. Unlike in European cities, these spacious, landscaped grounds were located in the urban centres of Edo. Daimyo residences in the High City were usually built facing ridge roads, providing a sloped area where natural springs could be turned into ponds surrounded by landscaped gardens. The dispensation of space was another reason Edo became known as a garden city. Even relatively low-ranking warrior families could expect to be given narrow but deep plots of land. As the house was likely to be small, their low salaries could be supplemented by growing vegetables on the generous expanse of garden.

  Gardening was the exclusive pastime of daimyo and samurai in the early days of Edo, but prosperous merchants began taking an interest in the activity in the nineteenth century. A more modest form of horticulture began to flourish among the townspeople, stimulating nurserymen to diversify their stock and to work within a more public domain. Market gardens in Hakusan, Somei and Sugamo supplied the city with flowers and plants.

  Nurserymen were granted permission to hold fairs in temples and shrines. A well-supported plant fair at Yakushi-in temple in Kayabacho, shown in a print from the 1830s by the woodblock artist Hasegawa Settan, includes, besides the standard irises, bamboo and wisteria, a number of imports. The flower fanciers at the fair, a high-ranking samurai, geisha and tonsured monk among the throng of commoners, are seen appreciating such plants as orchids and cactus.

  Signalling the arrival of high summer in Tokyo, an early July morning glory fair takes place at Iriya’s Kishimoji temple. Horticulturists in the early years of the nineteenth century began developing cultivars around the district of Ueno, a fad that later spread to Fukagawa and Asakusa. The morning glory was originally grown for seeds used in Chinese medicine. An energetic vine whose “glory” is over by noon, the flower has long been associated with the character and spirit of the hard-working, spendthrift Edokko, and their taste for short-lived pleasures.

  The cultivation of chrysanthemums by approved growers and their use as a motif was strictly limited to the imperial household until the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time the flowers’ popularity made such restrictions unenforceable. Cultivation was a lucrative business, with stallholders attracting customers by fashioning the flowers into statues. Dangozaka (Dumpling Slope) in Sendagi went a step further in 1856 by starting its own chrysanthemum festival. Customers paid a small fee to enter tents where battle scenes and tableaux from plays and romances were on display. The heroes and heroines of these scenes were made from chrysanthemum petals, although their heads were fashioned from papiermâché. Futabatei Shimei recorded the scene in his 1887 novel The Drifting Cloud, one of the first experiments in writing fiction in the spoken vernacular.

  Shaven-headed priests had come and long-haired men, men with halfshaven heads, and men with topknots... Dangozaka was in a state of the wildest confusion. Flower-sellers stood by the usual signboards waving the flags of their respective establishments in the attempt to lure in customers.

  Kiku Matsuri (chrysanthemum festivals) are still held at a number of locations throughout Tokyo. The Japanese garden at Shinjuku Gyoen, completed in 1772 after the estate was bequeathed to the loyal Naito clan, provides a matchless setting for chrysanthemum viewing. The current garden, a multicultural masterpiece, is divided into French, English and Japanese sections and also has a large botanical garden full of tropical plants, housed in an old, domed greenhouse. Early November is the best month to appreciate the chrysanthemum. Inside pavilions erected beside the pond and meandering paths at Shinjuku Gyoen, chrysanthemum cascades are planted months in advance.

  The temptation to add symbolism to a flower already imbued with all manner of meanings is evident in the inevitable representations of Mount Fuji that appeared at this time. Traditionally, the slopes of the sacred cone are decked out in deep gold and purple petals, the peak, representing snow and autumn shadow, in white and mauve sprays. The poet James Kirkup saw one such display in a Tokyo garden, noting in his 1962 travelogue These Horned Islands the “snow-white cloud of traditional formality, shaped like a long French loaf “, suspending its “dead-white, airy, colossal blooms just below the cratered peak.”

  Besid
es the raising of chrysanthemums, there was a celebrated lotusviewing spot at Tameike Pond in Akasaka, a peony garden in Honjo and night cherries along the streets of the Yoshiwara pleasure district. At Horikiri Shobu-en, a garden east of the Arakawa river in Katsushika ward, enthusiasts could view the June irises. Irises were first introduced here in the marshes of Horikiri village by a farmer named Kodaka Izaemon in the 1660s. New hybrid varieties were introduced in the early nineteenth century by a descendant of Izaemon, who opened the Kodaka Garden to the public. Among the visitors from Edo was Hiroshige, who included a woodblock print of the garden, Irises at Horikiri, in his One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo series. The garden was turned over to food production in 1942 during the first lean years of the war, but was re-opened to the public in 1960.

  Foreigners who entered the city in the years after the fall of the shogunate were struck by the vast expanses of greenery. Sir Rutherford Alcock, the first British minister to Japan, observed that the city could

  ... boast what no capital in Europe can - the most charming rides, beginning even in its centre, and extending in every direction over wooded hills, through smiling valleys and shaded lanes, fringed with evergreens and magnificent timber.

  Judging from nineteenth-century accounts of drinking, boating and versifying parties, gardens were more interactive than the solemn objects of reverence they have become today. Hiroshige portrayed Edo in the years between 1856 and 1858 as a well-watered garden city, an outgrowth of landscaped villages. Thirty-five years later, the British architect and garden designer Josiah Conder was still able to record estates and gardens of staggering beauty and scale in the suburbs of what had become Tokyo. Even as late as 1903, W. B. Mason and Basil Hall Chamberlain, collaborating on a guide to Japan, reported that Tokyo retained a “tranquil and semi-rural aspect owing to the abundance of trees and foliage.” Several Edo landscapes exist in Tokyo today, though in much reduced form.

  Koishikawa Korakuen

  Many of the great mansions that once stood within the domain of presentday Koishikawa and the Iidabashi-Suidobashi districts have gone, but others have survived as gardens or areas of pleasure and amusement. Tokyo’s oldest garden, the Koishikawa Korakuen, was laid out in 1629. It was constructed under the orders of Tokugawa Yorifusa, founder of the Mito clan, a branch of the Tokugawa family. The work was completed by the head of the second generation of the family, Mitsukuni, a great patron of learning.

  Edo-period gardens were greatly influenced by Chinese landscaping styles. Within the garden many famous spots in China and Japan have been recreated in miniature. The name “Korakuen”, meaning “a place to take pleasure after”, is derived from a Chinese poem by Fan Zhongyan, which reads: “Be the first to take the world’s trouble to heart, be the last to enjoy the world’s pleasures.” Tempering those pleasures, a rice field was created by Mitsukuni in a section of the garden with the intention of teaching his heir’s wife the hardships of farming.

  A stroll garden with a large central pond, its grounds were designed by Tokudaiji Sahei with the assistance of Zhu Shunsui, a Confucian scholar and refugee from the fall of the Ming dynasty. Mitsukuni took great note of the opinions of Zhu Shunsui, who is said to have designed the Engetsukyo Bridge, an exquisite “full moon” span in the Chinese style. Though largely ornamental, it may very well be the oldest intact bridge in the city. Another Chinese reference can be found in an earthen watercourse running through the centre of the garden’s small river, a reproduction of a dike that passes through Hangzhou Bay in China. A small hill near the pond represents Mount Lu in China’s Jiangxi Province. The slopes of the mound are covered in bamboo grass, while at its base is a pond of sacred lotus. The pulpy, cloud-shaped leaves rise to a height of three feet above the water, their flowers - a symbol of Buddhism - best appreciated in the early morning. The eleventh-century Chinese writer Zhou Tunyi describes its growth, the plant rising like the soul, “without contamination from the mud, reposing modestly above the clear water, hollow inside and straight without.”

  The Japanese name for the lotus, hasu, is a contraction of hachi-nosu or bee’s nest, a reference to the plant’s seed chamber. Punctuated by holes, it strongly resembles the cells of the ashinaga-bachi, the Japanese paper wasp. Koishikawa Korakuen is today dominated by the curving roof of Tokyo Dome, a baseball stadium, its peace broken by the squeals of passengers from the titanic roller coaster that is the pride of the nearby Korakuen Amusement Park.

  To the north of this garden lie the transformed remnants of another estate strongly associated with the Tokugawas. The Koishikawa botanical garden, hidden behind a canopy of trees and the domes of old greenhouses, traces its origins to 1684 when the shogun Tsunayoshi decided to turn the estate into a medicinal herb garden. The original garden can be sensed in the remains of primary broad-leaved evergreen and deciduous forests found on its hilly slopes. Flat stones, used for drying medicinal herbs, are visible in parts of the garden.

  Hama Rikyu

  In 1654 the younger brother of the shogun Ietsuna had parts of the watery shallows of the bay filled in and built a villa on the reclaimed land. Completed by the eleventh shogun, Ienari, the basic design and scale of the garden remain intact. After the Meiji Restoration the garden was turned into a residence for the imperial family and renamed the Hama Detached Palace. The highlight of the garden is a large tidal pond, with a small tea pavilion at its centre, and islets connected by wooden bridges. The only remaining tidal pond in Tokyo, sluice gates control the ebb and flow of the seawater, which brings in ocean fish such as gobies, black mullet and sea bass. Narrow watercourses were used as duck hunting sites. Enticed into the passages by grain, the fowl were caught in nets. Kamozuka, a mound built to console the spirits of ducks that were killed, can still be seen.

  A large black pine was planted in 1704 when the garden was remodelled to celebrate the succession of the sixth shogun, Ienobu. In spite of earthquakes, fires and air raids, the pine has miraculously survived. The eighth shogun, Yoshimune, turned parts of the garden into an experimental farm for the cultivation of new crops and herbs. He is said to have kept an elephant from Vietnam in the grounds. A large garden, with over 600 varieties of peony, it contains areas of crape flowers, cosmos, irises, cherry, spider lilies, wisteria, bamboo and plum.

  Close to Hama Rikyu is the diminutive, easily overlooked Kyu Shiba Rikyu, or Shiba Detached Palace, a scrupulously designed and very old Edo-period kaiyushiki-teien, or stroll garden, made from reclaimed land near the bay. Floating at the centre of the garden’s large pond are five islands. The largest, Horai-jima, a rocky island covered in black pine, takes its name from Taoist mythology, which tells of five islands to the east of China where the immortals lived in perfect harmony. Pines were venerated in China as symbols of immortality, and Taoist teachings encouraged monks to eat cones, resin and pine needles in order to acquire the life force of the tree. To the rear of the garden is a later addition, a hill called Kyua Dai, built for the Emperor Meiji so that he could watch the tides coming in.

  Kameido-Tenjin

  There were several shrines built to Tenjin, the god of learning, calligraphy and poetry, a typical string of accomplishments demanded by the populace of their hard-working gods. The Kameido-Tenjin shrine was built to the east of the river in 1662. Besides a lake, its main feature was a large wisteria trellis, beneath which visitors would sit sipping from cups of tea or sake. Food stalls and houses of prostitution sprang up nearby, testing among other things the often feeble moral resolve of the priesthood who served at the shrine. Old prints show the Kameido garden as an important feature of the city.

  The garden was laid to waste in the bombings of 1945, but a splendid wisteria still attracts swarms of visitors when it blossoms in early May. During the Edo period visitors arrived by boat from Yanagibashi or Asakusa, alighting at the pier in Kameido. Besides the shrine and its wisteria trellis, the other attraction here was a celebrated teahouse, Funabashiya, which served a starch-based confection known as kuzumoch
i. The teahouse, standing beside the entrance to the shrine, opened in 1805 and has been serving the sweet along with green tea ever since.

  Garden of the Six Principles of Poetry

  Construction of Rikugi-en, the Garden of the Six Principles of Poetry, began in the year 1695 under the supervision of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, a chamberlain of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, a highly regarded litterateur and art connoisseur. Edo gardens were not made overnight. Designed so that guests could stroll along paths that would reveal fresh perspectives on the miniature hills, teahouses, lake and islands planted with pine, the garden took seven years to complete.

  Rikugi-en’s name stands for the six principles used in the composition of Oriental poetry, and comes from the Shi no Rikugi, an anthology of Han dynasty poems. Although you would have to be a scholar to identify them, the park’s pond, flora and stones are said to embody 88 scenes described in the 31-syllable poetry form known as waka. The scenery, like many of these stroll gardens, was designed to evoke the spots described at 88 sites mentioned in major Chinese and Japanese literary works, in particular the settings found in two ancient Japanese poetry collections: the Kokin Wakashu and the Manyoshu.

  Although the garden declined after Yanagisawa’s death in 1714, its general contours, pond and rock settings have endured as a reminder of its original form. The Mitsubishi group’s founder, Iwasaki Yataro, bought the garden during the Meiji period and had it restored to its original state as a typical Edo landscape garden. In 1934 it was donated to the city and opened to the public.