Meat may have become a permanent fixture on the Japanese table, but a lingering distaste for the slaughter and handling of animal flesh, and its association with Edo’s outcasts, persisted. Butchers making deliveries to Keio University, where the students seem to have been inordinately fond of beef, would hear the striking of flints, a traditional cleansing ritual, as they passed through the gates into the main campus.
No sooner had the emperor become an avowed carnivore than the empress gave up the practice of teeth blackening, quickly followed by the ladies of the court. Sports and leisure activities grew, with clubs and societies for such western pursuits as boxing and billiards; horse racing took place at Kudan and Ueno. Steam paddleboats plied the Sumida, where metal bridges replaced wooden ones. A French restaurant opened in Ueno; men grew luxuriant moustaches and hung gold watch chains from their waistcoat pockets. The Edo-born satirist Kanagaki Robun captured the mood of the times in a withering parody on the aping of western customs, called Eating Beef Stew Cross-Legged. He may have had a popular beef stew dish of the day called kaika nabe (civilization hot pot) in mind.
The emperor had led the way into the new age by having his topknot cut in 1872, and wearing western clothing for official appearances. The government had ordered the cutting of topknots the year before, equating the practice with feudalism. The lyric from a popular song at the time corroborated the view: “If you tap a shaven and topknotted head you will hear the sound of retrogression... but if you tap a close-cropped head of hair you will hear the sound of civilization and enlightenment.”
If the samurai were required to cut off their topknots, women, inspired perhaps by the example of the empress, underwent a more voluntary makeover into the new age. Returning home one day, playwright Hasegawa Shigure was astonished to find her mother performing “the usual maternal functions without the smallest change,” but with an entirely different face. Accustomed to seeing a woman with shaved eyebrows and to smelling the acrid scent from the iron oxide solution that women still used at home to blacken their teeth:
The mother I now saw before me had the stubbly beginnings of eyebrows, and her teeth were a startling, gleaming white. It was the more disturbing because something else was new. The new face was all smiles, as the old one had not been.
While all of these western developments were doubtless exciting to behold, some of the charms of Edo, its easier relationship to time and space, were being forfeited in the rush for modernity. Fukuzawa Yukichi, in a book called Western Clothing, Food and Homes, spoke of the necessity to “familiarize oneself with the reading of time; all people carry a watch in the West to know the time without relying on temple bells as in our country.” One can only imagine in a city devoid of trains, horse-drawn tramcars and bellowing rickshaw pullers, the pleasant sensation at hearing those felicitous bells.
Memoirs of a City
Private journals and memoirs play an invaluable role in our ability to reconstruct the past of a city that was changing daily. Hasegawa Shigure, born in 1879 into a merchant family living in Nihonbashi Odenmacho, spent much of her childhood among the dark and narrow back streets and black plaster-walled storehouses of a district whose surroundings had changed little since the Edo period. Hasegawa’s childhood years are described in detail in her Old Tales of Nihonbashi. Her home was located near the site of the city’s main prison at Kodenmacho. By Hasegawa’s time the area had become open ground for acrobats and freak shows - one of her family’s sidelines was renting monkeys to itinerant street performers - but the prison remains a sinister presence in her work.
Another invaluable account of the mid-Meiji period in downtown Tokyo appears in the memoirs of Tanizaki Junichiro, under the title Childhood Years. Born in 1886, Tanizaki grew up in Nihonbashi, an area close to Hasegawa’s home, before moving across the Nihonbashi river to Ningyocho. Despite its proximity, Ningyocho, the centre of the grain trade, was quite a different place to Nihonbashi, the merchant heart of the city. Tanizaki lived a few doors down from the western-style rice exchange building, which is still there in a back street of the district. The area was also something of an all-purpose leisure quarter, with shops, restaurants, entertainment halls, theatres and geisha establishments concentrated into an area a little west of Suitengu shrine, where a monthly market always attracted a large crowd. Like Hasegawa, Tanizaki was weaned on stories from the Kabuki repertoire as well as the amateur theatricals seen each month at a local temple.
Though there was much to admire about the strides made during the early years of Meiji, there was something immature, even a touch pathetic in Japan’s need for approval, its fear of ridicule, the unconsidered excesses that seemed to endorse the denigration of its own native culture. Classic painters like Hashimoto Gaho and Kano Hogai witnessed their works being sold on the street for a pittance. In a frenzy of cultural vandalism, ancient Buddhist buildings were desecrated and works of Buddhist art burned for fuel. The destruction and theft of hundreds of thousands of priceless statues, paintings, temple bells and other ritual objects began when the Meiji government, in an effort to elevate Shintoism, ordered the separation of Buddhism from state Shinto, ending centuries of religious syncretism. The worst of the violence against Buddhism was over by 1871, but not before Shinto zealots had destroyed much of its tangible heritage.
Even the great Zojo-ji temple in Shiba, one of Edo’s great religious complexes, was not immune to new developments. Zojo-ji was chosen by the Tokugawa clan as their ancestral temple. Ieyasu chose the location as part of a scheme to protect Edo from evil spirits. This south-eastern purification gate into the city lay close to the bay and the Tokaido Road, so it also served as a post station for travellers and pilgrims. The splendours of the grounds in its Edo prime were manifest. A wooden slope and lotus pond stood behind the temple’s hundred or more buildings, dormitories and refectories, where a shrine dedicated to the lute-playing goddess Benten could be found. Contemporary accounts describe the temple’s woodwork, a riot of beams, joinery, transoms and trellises covered in the ornate pine, crane, peony and Chinese lion motifs and reliefs much beloved of the Tokugawas. The mausoleums of the shoguns stood behind black-lacquered gates amidst stately rows of bronze lanterns. Because the site contained the mausoleums of the now deposed shoguns, the authorities moved swiftly to deprive it of much of its former power and wealth. The new leaders of the Meiji government showed their contempt for the outgoing Tokugawa by confiscating the temple, turning the grounds into a park and removing six of the mummified shogun to the rear of the Main Hall. Nothing was actually destroyed, but slow neglect served the same end.
One did not have to be a member of the aristocracy to suffer the indignities of relocation, as space, including temple lands, was appropriated by the authorities in the name of development. In Nagai Kafu’s 1909 novella, The River Sumida, an anxious family faces the prospect of losing its traditional grave-site: “As a matter of fact,” the daughter says, “they’re widening the streets, and the cemetery in Komagome is to be cleared away. And so we’ll have to move Father to Yanaka or Somei or somewhere.”
The Hybrid City
Tokyo began to look like a different city, a veritable hybrid. This was most noticeable in individual buildings rather than entirely re-conceived zones. Single designs, however bizarre they might have looked to outsiders, stood as beacons of modernity. The Tsukiji Hoterukan, a hotel built for westerners and one of Meiji’s early meeting places between the two worlds, was a prime example of this new, syncretic architecture. The building had a short life, but was enthusiastically recorded by photographers, painters and print-makers. In these works we see a Japanese garden, castle turret and wind-bells vying for attention with European-style furnishings, sash windows, and a verandah faintly reminiscent of the British Raj. If it was an occidental building, it was of a type never encountered in the West itself. Buildings like this represented a desire to move into the future, combined with a reluctance to entirely jettison the past. Jinnai Hidenobu, a scholar of urban morphology,
has written:
Many architectural masterpieces of this time reflected the plurality of demands growing out of a mixture of old and new values, in which an admiration for western structures signalling a new epoch coexisted with an unwillingness to discard trust in castle architecture as a symbol of stable social status.
After a major fire in 1872 destroyed Ginza and Tsukiji, the authorities became convinced that wooden buildings should be replaced with fireproof materials like brick. An understanding of the ferocity of the fires that periodically laid waste to parts of the city can be had from the account of a conflagration at a similar time in the district of Asakusa, recorded by James Hingston in his two-volume travelogue, The Australian Abroad. Taking a rickshaw to the Yoshiwara, Hingston suddenly found himself in streets blocked with dead bodies, full of the cries of firemen and stretcherbearers:
The earth was strewn everywhere with smoking and smouldering wood ashes, reddened now and again into a glow as the wind came their way. The fireproof stores or go-downs stood in bold black relief over the frightful scene, and looked like giant monsters standing sentry in the fiery, infernal regions. The smoke was unbearable to the eyes, making them smart and water in a way that stopped all progress through the streets of this fire quarter. Away on every hand it looked like a wilderness of flame and smoke...
Regardless of the horrors, the ever-pragmatic residents of Tokyo saw these disasters as a much-needed opportunity for urban renewal. The reconstruction of Ginza, acquiring at the same time the name Rengagai or “Bricktown”, was overseen by an English engineer named Thomas J. Waters. The inspiration for the buildings, paved streets and pavements was London’s Regent Street. The architectural era is often referred to as the “English period.” There were almost a thousand brick buildings in the area when the project was finished, not a single one of which survives today.
The spectacle of so many western-style buildings concentrated in one street and several back streets attracted enormous interest. More visitors arrived in 1874, when the country’s first gas lamps appeared along the Ginza. Three years on, the Kabuki theatres were gas lit, dispelling their shadows and perhaps a little atmosphere as well. Introduced a good sixty years later than in European cities, Japan’s experience with gas lighting was a short one.
Few people wished to live or work in Ginza’s brick structures. Unlike wooden buildings, which encouraged a circulation of air during the unbearably humid summer months, the brick buildings trapped the air. Neglected corners of interiors soon turned into fine incubators for mildew and nests of centipedes. Vacated by more reputable tenants, the buildings fell on hard times as street and circus performers, acrobats, jugglers and itinerant entertainers with their dancing bears and monkeys moved in. The façades, overlooking an avenue lined with cherry, maple and willow trees, remained impressive, a leafy, cosmopolitan boulevard much as it was intended to look.
Despite its shortcomings, the new Ginza was a showcase for Japanese modernity. Foreigners were less easily persuaded. In her long forgotten book, Jinrikishaw Days in Japan, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, an American who lived in Japan for three years during the formative 1880s, wrote:
This is not the Yeddo of one’s dreams, nor is it an Occidental city. Its stucco walls, wooden columns, glaring shop windows, and general air of tawdry imitation fairly depress one. In so large a city there are many corners, however, which the march of improvement has not reached, odd, unexpected, and Japanese enough to atone for the rest.
One hears the same kind of remark today from expatriate residents of Tokyo. Over the following decades the original coordination suffered as hybrids were added that further offended the classically trained sensibilities of some foreign visitors. The guidebook writer Philip Terry, describing the area in 1920, dismissed it: “size without majesty, individuality divorced from all dignity and simplicity, and convenience rather than fitness or sobriety are the salient characteristics of this structural hodge-podge.” Yet despite its shortcomings, the rebuilding established the Ginza as a centre of commerce and urbane leisure.
The Rokumeikan: Western Tastes
The mix of neoclassical, colonial and northern European, adapted to the Tokyo climate, was most visible in the ministry offices of the Marunouchi area, whose confining walls, gates and bridges were systematically dismantled during the early years of Meiji. These buildings have long gone, but an idea of this style can be seen in the Koishikawa Botanical Garden, where the former hall of the Tokyo Medicinal School still stands.
Another pseudo-western building that ended up looking more exotic than anything in the West was Mitsui House, Japan’s first bank. The structure was designed by Shimizu Kisuke II, a master carpenter who had worked as a building contractor in the foreign settlement of Yokohama. The stonefaced, timber-framed building, with verandah, open galleries, tiled roof and a central bell tower reminiscent of traditional castle architecture, was one of the first examples of a western-style building by a Japanese architect; it only survives in photographs and prints. Woodcut prints were often visual hyperbole, but in the work of artists like Utagawa Kuniteru II there is a remarkable similarity between print and photos. With such an extraordinary building, there was apparently no necessity for exaggeration.
Where others embraced the process, Nagai Kafu had mixed feelings. There is a touch of rebuke in his 1931 novel, During the Rains, when, casting an eye over the type of city that rose from the impulses of the Meiji era, he wrote, “... when a city aped the West to the degree that Tokyo did, the spectacle provoked in the observer is an astonishment, along with a certain sense of pathos.” Soseki Natsume, the foremost novelist of his time, shared Kafu’s reservations about the speed with which Japan was assimilating western civilization, warning that the country was plunging headlong into a nervous breakdown not unlike the one always simmering beneath the surface of his own unstable personality.
Other designs of the period were moderately successful, in spite of incongruent settings. In the 1880s the wealthy entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi commissioned a leading architect to build him a grand, Europeanstyle villa at the confluence of two waterways in Nihonbashi. Tanizaki Junichiro remembered it from his childhood, recalling its graceful galleries and pillars: “The barges and lighters that moved up and down the stream past the ‘palace’ were strangely in harmony with it, like gondolas moving on a Venetian canal.” Other villas followed, many of them swept away or damaged beyond repair in the great 1910 flood.
The English architect Josiah Conder arrived in Japan in 1877. Conder not only worked as an architect, but also taught at the influential College of Technology, an institute destined to become Tokyo University. His statue stands today in the grounds of the main university campus at Hongo. Tokyo’s premier showcase for “civilization and enlightenment”, an example of daring social élan, was Conder’s Rokumeikan, or Deer Cry Pavilion. The two-storey brick building was a mix of high Victorian, Italianate and airy Moorish galleries, topped with a French belle-époque roof. Guest suites boasted alabaster bathtubs. The pavilion, with its ballroom, promenade halls, music and reading rooms, was a venue where Japan and the highest western representatives could mingle over ice-cream sorbets, Havana cigars and games of billiards and whisk. The spacious dining room was presided over by a French chef who served such unfamiliar dishes as red snapper casserole, Hungarian-style leg of lamb, roast quail and that redoubtable Victorian favourite, plum pudding. American cocktails and German beer were served in the bars. The music was provided by a German band playing mazurkas, waltzes and polkas, and a French orchestra performing operettas. It was a finishing school for Tokyo high society and the setting for balls, charity bazaars, tea dances and banquets. Yet the French author of Madame Chrysanthemum, Pierre Loti, found the Europeanized mimicry distasteful, dryly observing: “They danced quite properly, my Japanese in Parisian gowns. But one senses that it is something drilled into them that they perform like automatons, without any personal initiative.”
Serious intentions, however, underpinned
the costumed events at the Rokumeikan. The government hoped that this display of easily assimilated cultural practices would earn it enough respect to be treated seriously by the western powers, that it would persuade them to forfeit privileges maintained through the Unequal Treaties. The agreement permitted among other things, a system of extraterritoriality, by which foreigners accused of crimes committed on Japanese soil, were exempt from trial in a Japanese court. A masquerade ball held in 1887 was lampooned as an example of the degree to which high-ranking Japanese officials could go in order to curry the favour of westerners and to prove that they were familiar with the social graces. Times had clearly changed, and what might once have been lauded as enlightened behaviour was now sneered at. In a comment on the humiliating efforts of the government and Prime Minister Ito, the public dubbed them “the dancing cabinet”. When it became apparent that the western diplomats who attended these functions were happy to feast and dance, but unwilling to revise the treaties, the glittering evenings at the Rokumeikan came to an end. Converted into the Peers’ Club in 1899, then into a bank and insurance company office, the building was eventually demolished in 1940. Photographs and a model of the Rokumeikan can be viewed at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku, east of the Sumida. Also to the east of the river, in Hirai, a district of Edogawa ward, a fragment of the original building can be found in a most unlikely location. One of the Italian-style bronze chandeliers from the ballroom has mysteriously found its way into the Buddhist prayer hall at Tomyo-ji temple where, fully reinstalled, it no longer casts light over a glittering crowd of socialites, but a modest congregation of Buddhist worshippers.
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 13