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

by Stephen Mansfield

  Blending into the peaceful, wooded grounds of camphor, trident maples, black pines, dogwood and a Japanese red pine dating back to the completion of the garden are over 6,000 deciduous, coniferous and evergreen trees, The pond has become the depository for a host of small creatures - turtles, goldfish, frogs - children’s pets no longer wanted by young families living in the cramped, multi-storey apartment blocks around the Rikugi-en. Stealthily re-stocked with aquatic creatures by the neighbourhood, the grounds are also a haven for birds: blue magpies, bush warblers, dabchicks, and migratory species such as the widgeon.

  Kiyosumi-teien

  Like many gardens that can be traced back to the Edo period, the Kiyosumi-teien has an interesting history of ownership and change. The garden, located close to the Sumida in Fukagawa ward, was part of a larger estate owned by a wealthy timber merchant named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon.

  Timber merchants did particularly well in Fukagawa as buildings in these congested areas burned down regularly. The stroll garden that Kinokuniya built here in 1688 was designed around a large pond. Water was originally diverted from the Sumida, the pond’s level changing with the ebb and flow of the tides in Tokyo Bay. Stone, water and artificial hills were the main features of Edo period stroll gardens. Artificial hills, many in the likeness of Mount Fuji, were designed to be climbed and to provide a panoramic view of the garden below. The garden’s central hill, covered in Japanese azaleas, is also known as Mount Azalea.

  The Kiyosumi-teien garden east of the river

  With the declining fortunes of its owner, the garden fell on hard times. The grounds were taken over in 1878 by Iwasaki Yataro and used as a recreational retreat for Mitsubishi company employees and as a place where business clients and distinguished guests could be entertained. Iwasaki set about restoring the garden, adding some distinctive features. Iwasaki’s brother, Yanosuke, an art connoisseur, spent a great deal of time and expense selecting rare and lovely rocks from all over Japan, which were then transported to Tokyo in the company’s steamships. A ryotei, a traditional Japanese teahouse, was constructed in 1909 to host Lord Kitchener, on his official state visit from England. Overlooking the pond, the ryotei was built in the sukiya style, a domestic architectural form that developed out of the Momoyama period (1573-1615) tea aesthetic.

  The Kiyosumi-teien is an all-seasons garden. In spring, forsythia, cherry, Japanese andromeda, quince and azaleas are at their best. Summer sees the blooming of irises, gardenia, hydrangea, crepe myrtle and Japanese catalpa. Drawn by the scent of water in the hot Tokyo summers, serpents slither into the reeds beside the pond, a reminder of the presence of reptiles and animals at one time in this area. During the autumn months, fragrant olive, camellia and red spider come into their own, while winter is the time for plum, wandflower and pheasant’s eye.

  A Literary Garden

  The laying out of the Mukojima Hyakka-en (Garden of One Hundred Flowers) began in 1804, close to the banks of the Sumida and Arakawa rivers, an area of temples and teahouses that served as a focal point for the cultural and social life of many early nineteenth-century Edo writers and artists. The garden was the creation of Sawara Kiku, a wealthy antique shop owner with an interest in literature. Sawara moved in literary circles and was well acquainted with the painters and poets of the day, numbering among his friends the Confucian scholar Kameda Hosai, the artist Sakai Hoitsu and the writer Ota Nampo.

  Sawara set out to design a retreat in the manner of a Chinese literary garden. Friends contributed stones, engraving them with poems that can still be read today. The plum trees, flowers and plants they selected were all closely associated with the pages of Chinese and Japanese classic literature.

  Pampas grass, bellflowers, kudzu vine, valerian, irises, cudweed, three pergolas of lilac-blue climbing wisteria, agueweed (a herbaceous perennial), asters and a well known tunnel of flowering, rose-purple coloured bush clover are among the diverse plants in this simple but imaginative garden. Trees include the cherry, deciduous Japanese oak, maple-leafed hibiscus and a very singular maidenhair tree.

  Literary pretensions notwithstanding, the garden was created as an ironic comment on, or rebuttal of, the culture of the ruling military class and their fondness for sprawling gardens replete with complex rock settings, clipped hedges and the recreation of famous scenery. A simple pond, grasses and trees growing in the most natural of ways are the extent of this modest garden of little more than two acres.

  The garden aroused great interest among the people of Edo and was even honoured by a visit from the shogun Ienari after its opening in 1804. The garden was much visited during the time of the autumn moon, attracting poets who came to write haiku and linked verse. Along with an August “singing insects” festival, the moon-viewing festival is still held every September.

  Here, as elsewhere in the city, we are reminded of the paramount importance of gardens, temples and estates, not just as beauty spots, cultural or historical time capsules, but as conservation areas, their borders establishing lines of defence against development.

  Shadows over the Bay

  By the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of Edo’s 1,650 districts was now well in excess of one million. Impressive demographic growth was not matched by development. The degree of isolation into which Edo had hardened can be sensed by comparing the city to the industrialized capitals of the West, and to newly emerging Asian centres of commerce and modernity like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Edo in the 1850s presented an extraordinary contrast. The absence of any wheeled vehicles, metalled roads, trains, carriages or even bicycles must have made it, a city without factories or machines, an unusually quiet place. Flaming torches and candles provided a small amount of light, but most of the streets would almost certainly have been pitch black at night.

  Presiding over the decadent early nineteenth-century years of the city, Japan’s longest ruling shogun, Ienari, took a dim view of Edo’s public morality, though his own life was hardly a model of Confucian rectitude. Censorship, always a fitful affair at best, was more sternly applied under Ienari. Ukiyo-e artists in particular, came in for severe treatment. The great woodblock artist Utamaro, faithful chronicler of the demi-monde, was kept under house arrest, handcuffed and manacled for fifty days to appease Ienari’s moral outrage at prints judged indecent and subversive. Other artists, like Utagawa Kuniyoshi, risked a similar fate but persisted in incorporating political satire into their drawings and prints. The main architect of drives to promote public morals, Ienari enjoyed an immodest lifestyle, indulging his pleasures in a flourishing harem of some 600 or more concubines. To further amuse himself, he had a bridge made of sugar - a highly expensive commodity beyond the dreams of ordinary people - built over a pond in his garden.

  With the death of Ienari in 1841, further decline set in. Writers, historians and philosophers began to engage in an open debate on the legitimacy of the shogunate, while from outside more foreign ships were appearing along the coast, demanding entry into Japanese ports. Russian vessels were sighted off the northern coast of Hokkaido, while British ships made incursions along the southern shoreline of Kyushu.

  In 1837 the Morrison, an American ship returning a group of shipwrecked Japanese sailors it had helped to rescue, was strafed with gunfire when it sailed into Edo Bay. In 1846 another American vessel, the Columbus, arrived in Uraga Bay, demanding the release of shipwrecked American sailors. It was told in no uncertain terms to depart and never return. Three years later the release of the prisoners was obtained after Commander Glynn sailed his ship, the Preble, into the bay, menacing Edo with its guns.

  In the face of threats from abroad, attempts were made to reinvigorate the faltering Tokugawa system with a further spate of largely ineffective measures banning improper books, and encouraging authors and storytellers to produce edifying homilies and discourses along neo-Confucian and Shinto lines. Authors were arrested, theatres closed and the pleasure quarters temporarily shut down in a fruitless attempt to turn the Edo lotus eater
into an example of moral virtue.

  One of the most astonishing confrontations of the century took place on 8 July 1853, when Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry sailed four heavily armed American ships, two steam frigates and two fighting corvettes, into Edo Bay, discharging a shuddering cannon salute at the Japanese coast that had been off-limits to foreigners for over two hundred years. Perry had sailed on the orders of President Millard Fillmore, who wished to press the Japanese to open diplomatic and commercial relations with the United States. The president had authorized Perry to use any methods he saw fit, adding that “any departure from usage or any error of judgment will be viewed with indulgence.” Ignoring Japanese warnings, Perry sailed up the bay to a position where he could, if he so chose, shell the perimeters of the city. Besides a proclamation of intention and a testing of the waters, no Japanese person who saw the ships could fail to notice that the visit was a pointed display of superior western technology and maritime power, a reminder that progress had bypassed Japan.

  Perry returned as he promised, on 11 February 1854, this time with a larger squadron of nine ships and 2,000 men. Greeting Perry’s “black ships of evil” were a delegation of Japanese armed with swords, antiquated muskets, halberds and assorted medieval weaponry. Uppermost in Perry’s mind was less the notion of a mission civilisatrice than the question of trade and the right of American ships to enter Japanese ports.

  Armed with another letter from President Fillmore and accompanied by two colossal black bodyguards, Perry was eventually permitted to go ashore. The ritual exchange of gifts that ensued between the uniformed Americans and the Japanese, attired in their finest silks, was telling. Among the gifts given by the Japanese to their American counterparts were a bronze temple bell, a lacquer writing case and a teapot. The Japanese party received samples from a more technologically fixated civilization: a daguerreotype camera, a telegraph machine and, much to the delight of the samurai officials who were able to sit on top of its carriages, a miniature steam train set on a circular track. There were also books, maps, perfumes, and cases of whisky, Madeira wine and champagne.

  Adding to the atmosphere of a diplomatic fairground, sumo wrestlers were produced and Perry was invited to punch them in the stomach. Lubricated by the unaccustomed quantities of champagne and whisky drunk in making toasts to each other, one Japanese official, in the pontificating manner common to inebriated Japanese males promoting international friendship, declared, “Nippon and America, all the same heart!”

  Upheaval and Millenarian Beliefs

  Perry’s black ships exposed the vulnerability of the Edo bakufu and divided the authorities into two factions: those who wished to open Japan to trade with foreign powers, and those who conspired to replace the weak and discredited regime and place the emperor, and a newly empowered government, at the centre of the state. As if to punish Edo for its intransigence in dealing with the foreign intruders - or so it was interpreted by the townspeople - a violent eruption, known as the Ansei earthquake, shook Edo during the night of 2 October 1855, and again on 11 November 1855. The quakes had been preceded by strange explosions of ground water throughout the city, accompanied by bizarre groans emitting from the earth and flashes in the night-time sky. When the second earthquake struck, its epicentre, around the mouth of the Arakawa river running through the middle of the Low City area of reclaimed land, destroyed over 16,000 homes, leaving some 10,000 people dead. Interminable downpours, flooding and an outbreak of cholera followed the earthquakes. In the absence of a better explanation, the natural disasters, expressions of divine displeasure, were blamed on the appearance of Commodore Perry’s black ships.

  News of the disasters was spread by printed broadsheets and colour woodblock prints called namazu-e (“catfish pictures”), the name taken from an ancient superstition that earthquakes occurred when a giant, subterranean catfish thrashed its tail. Large numbers of Edo residents took to praying at Kashima shrine, where it was believed a massive rock formation plunging deep into the earth possessed the power to subdue the fractious fish. Yonaoshi, or “reform the world” beliefs, sprang up like millenarian cults among the more optimistic Edo residents who imagined that these were signs portending the birth of a new world. The period from Perry’s arrival in 1853 and a second mission the following year, and the final overthrow of the shogunate in 1868, was characterized by assassinations, intrigues, coups and countercoups, culminating in civil war. A revival of emperor-worship fuelled by ultra-violence and xenophobia was embodied in the rallying cry: “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.”

  Even some of the newcomers had their doubts about this strangest of encounters between the US and Japan, a country that had sealed its border during the Jacobean period and only opened them in the reign of Victoria. Townsend Harris, the first American consul-general, wrote gravely in his journal on 4 September 1856: “Grim reflections - ominous of change - if for the real good of Japan?” The same thoughts are echoed in the diary of Henrikus Conradus Joannes Heusken, Harris’ Dutch interpreter, whose entry reads, “I fear, oh my God, that this scene of happiness is coming to an end and that the Occidental people will bring here their fatal vices.”

  Sporadic resistance to the inevitable continued. On the snowy morning of 24 March 1860, Ii Naosuke, Lord of Hikone, chief counsellor to the shogun, was assassinated outside the palace gates by a group opposed to all agreements with the “western barbarians”. The assassination, which left Ii’s body and those of his guards lying bloodied in the snow, only succeeded in weakening the Tokugawa ancien régime.

  These were dangerous times for foreigners living in Edo and the foreign settlement at nearby Yokohama. The British legation had already been attacked in 1861, and a British merchant, Charles Richardson, cut down by samurai after refusing to bow to a procession of ex-daimyo. Another British casualty, the delegation’s residence, was blown up in 1863. An American businessman, Francis Hall, wrote in 1859 that he would “start out for a walk by putting a revolver in one pocket and a copy of Tennyson in the other.”

  Though an age of unease, of portents and consultations with the supernatural, there was still time enough for novelties, new sights and experiences. In 1863 an enterprising Portuguese businessman exhibited an Indian elephant in the Ryogoku district, causing much excitement. The creature was depicted in countless prints, with text describing its size, history and eating habits. The satirical journalist Kanagaki Robun, writing the commentary for a diptych print by Yoshitoyo, was so impressed as to lapse into the rhetoric of the fairground tout:

  It understands what people say and it can guess their feelings and it puts out fires and drives out harmful pestilences. It gets rid of poisonous things. For those who see it, the seven misfortunes will decrease and the seven fortunes will grow.

  As opposition to the status quo was reaching critical mass, a strange delirium overtook the eastern seaboard towns and villages of the country in the autumn of 1867. Stepping into the chaos were briefly lived millenarian cults, delirious mobs parading Shinto images through the streets of Edo and shouting quasi-religious slogans. When they were not looting the houses of the rich or indulging in bouts of eating and drunkenness, hundreds of thousands of exultant people, both men and women, stripped offtheir ordinary clothes, making their faces up in outlandish visages. Dancing half-naked in the streets and dragging customers from restaurants and shops to join in the debauchery, crowds beat gongs, chimes, whistles and drums to the defiant singsong refrain of Ee ja nai, ka, ee ja nai, ka! (“Anything we do is OK. Why not? What the hell!”), proving the point by wearing outrageous costumes, cross-dressing and openly having sex in alleyways. While the lewdness and abandon were signs of crowds venting frustration at the insecurity of the times, their songs and slogans ridiculing the policies of the shogunate and the mismanagement of the economy helped to hasten the end of the old order.

  Violence blended with more superstition. People’s worst premonitions seemed confirmed with the sudden death from a rare disease at the age of
37 of the Emperor Komei in 1866, and in the same year the passing away of the shogun Iemochi. More unnatural events took place in the frenzied autumn of the following year when talismans and amulets inscribed with the name of Ise shrine, the most sacred religious site in Japan, rained down on Edo and other towns along the eastern seaboard, a good omen according to those who interpreted such things.

  The inevitable occurred in the February of 1868 with the departure into retirement at Kannei-ji temple in Ueno of the last shogun, Yoshinobu. Rebels against the new order took up arms, staking out positions on the hills above Shitaya, the location of present-day Ueno Park and Kanei-ji, one of the Tokugawa shogunate’s mortuary tombs. Some three hundred soldiers were killed in the short but fierce battle that ensued, and as many as a thousand houses destroyed by shells that fell short of their targets before the rebels finally surrendered. On the day the battle was fought, torrential rains caused Shinobazu Pond to flood. Many of the soldiers had to fight in knee-deep water as cannon rounds directed respectively from the second floor of a teahouse and from a cave shrine dedicated to the Inari fox god, roared overhead.

  Shortly after the event, Hozumi Eiki wrote a haiku called On Fleeing the Battlefield at Ueno. Its evocation of horror is more powerful when you understand the age-old association between the nightingale and the coughing up of blood:

  Rain washes away

  The blood: Just at that moment