Mitsubishi Meadow and London Block
Given the number of western engineers and architects in Tokyo, it is not surprising that many of the city’s public edifices bore a remarkable likeness to Victorian buildings. The Mitsubishi Group, a huge financial and industrial conglomerate, had already bought up large plots of land for property development in the Marunouchi area. The “Mitsubishi Wasteland”, as it was known, hardly lived up to the pastoral associations conjured up by its name. According to those who knew or assiduously avoided the area, the land, though only a stone’s throw away from the inner moat of the palace, was a forlorn and lonely place. The poet Takahama Kyoshi spoke of it as an “abode of foxes and badgers”, of weed-covered hillocks where aristocratic gardens had once stood: “Marunouchi was a place of darkness and silence, of loneliness and danger.”
As the model for the area was the financial district of London, it came to be known as “London Block”. Conder completed the first brick buildings here in 1894. The four-storey, redbrick structures with white stone quoins faced onto streets lined with a very modern civic mix of trees and electric poles. The pride of Meiji-period Tokyo, the area stood for progress, but as an exercise in transplanted town planning may have been less successful. Paul Waley observes that the buildings:
... have that late-Victorian London air of Marylebone High Street or parts of Kensington, but without the architectural conviction and spontaneity that grows out of native soil. Photographs of the London Block in its early days reveal a pronounced sense of unease. The buildings need carriages and trolleys and the bustle of late-Victorian and Edwardian London. Instead, all they have to look out on is a few rickshaws and the occasional disoriented passer-by.
The piles of these ostensibly stable western buildings were sunk into earth that, at Edo’s beginning, were mudflats. The narrator of Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Thousand Cranes (1949) describes the area in the post-war years before Mitsubishi demolished the last of the London Block’s redbrick structures:
As the train approached Tokyo Central Station, he looked down upon a tree-lined avenue. It ran east and west, almost at right angles to the railroad. The western sun poured into it, and the street glittered like a sheet of metal. The trees, with the sun behind them, were darkened almost to black. The shadows were cool, the branches wide, the leaves thick. Solid Occidental buildings lined the street.
There were strangely few people. The street was quiet and empty all the way to the Palace moat. The dazzlingly bright streetcars too were quiet. Looking down from the crowded train, he felt that the avenue alone floated in this strange time of evening, that it had been dropped here from some foreign country.
With the completion of Tokyo station in 1914 the area managed at last to shrug off any lingering associations with its original name, Mitsubishigahara, the Mitsubishi Wasteland. The terminus was now firmly established as the new “doorway to Tokyo”, a role formerly enjoyed by the Ginza. With the station in place, many imposing buildings like the Marine Insurance Building and the Marunouchi Building, the nation’s largest office complex, were erected. Imposing brick structures went up in the nearby Kasumigaseki district, housing ministries, the Metropolitan Police Department and the Supreme Court.
Conceived during the Meiji era, Tokyo Station was completed in 1914
Begun in the last days of the Meiji period, Tokyo Station, designed by Tatsuno Kingo, a former student of Josiah Conder, was ready just two years into the new Taisho era. The building marks the beginning of modern Japanese architecture. Faced with locally made bricks, the main structure was built from steel imported from Britain and the United States. Tastefully rendered in the Queen Anne style consonant with Beaux Arts tastes, the building, modelled on Amsterdam Centraal station in the Netherlands, survived the 1923 earthquake but lost its two upper storeys and cupolas in the Second World War.
Despite the impermanence of many of the buildings Conder designed during his long years in Tokyo, his pioneering of the grand style in public architecture left a lasting legacy. The Tsunamachi Mitsui Club, a 1913 Conder building, remains in much the same state as when it was inaugurated. Its similarity to some of the features of the Rokumeikan provides us with an insight into the way the upper classes socialized during the Meiji period. Several of Conder’s students went on to design distinguished buildings of their own, among them the first Imperial Hotel, the Imperial Theatre, Akasaka Palace and the neoclassical Bank of Japan.
The Cloud Surpassing Pavilion: An Asakusa Wonder
Height had always been synonymous with power and mystique. Sacred mountains were worshipped, the tallest shrine trees revered; towering castle keeps were intended to impress, pagodas to suggest the celestial reaches. By the 1880s the old limits on height had begun to be exceeded. One of the most remarkable was the twelve-storey Ryounkaku (Cloud Surpassing Pavilion), destined to become the symbol of Asakusa at this time and to be much reproduced in postcards. Constructed in 1890 under the supervision of a British engineer called W. K. Barton, the 216-foot redbrick, octagonal tower was the tallest building in Tokyo. Lit up at night by electric arc lights, the building may have been a little like the Great World in Shanghai. Despite its pretensions to modernity, it even resembled a Chinese structure of the Tang or Song periods.
Yet where the six floors of the rather more risqué Chinese version offered singsong girls, peep shows, fan-tan tables and earwax extractors, the floors of the Ryounkaku were mostly packed with imported goods, restaurants and an observation deck near the top replete with telescopes; the ninth floor was reserved for art exhibitions. Japan’s first elevator ran up to the eighth floor, while its illuminated windows, 176 all told, made it highly visible at night. Even during the daytime, the tower could be seen from as far away as Mukojima, east of the Sumida, and Atago Hill towards the bay. The alleys to the north of the building, packed with brothels, were less visible from a distance. If the Rokumeikan, commissioned by government fiat, represented the western tastes and aspirations of the Meiji elite, the Ryounkaku was an early symbol of mass culture and entertainment.
Tokyo Slums
As grand western-style buildings were being built and the first trade fairs took place, Tokyo was discovering the concept of poverty, something that had always existed but had never been classified as a social ill. The area of Shitaya Mannencho was counted among Tokyo’s sandai hinminkutsu or “three great ghettoes”. (The other two were Shiba Shinamicho and Yotsuya Samegabashi.) The areas were essentially the scheme of Edo-period government officials keen to relocate undesirables, convicts and beggars into strictly confined zones. Beside social outcasts, the row house here was also inhabited by labourers, itinerant street merchants and performers. Airless places with no view of the sky, single rooms measuring from four-and-ahalf to six tatami mats might accommodate a typical family. Compounding space deprivation were the shared toilets and the brackish communal wells residents were obliged to use. Residents who could survive these privations might be faced with cholera epidemics caused by rats, with pestilential insects and transmissible diseases like tuberculosis.
Writing in September 1892 from the fetid room he shared with nine others in a hostel in Shitaya Mannencho, one of the worst of the Meiji slums, the youthful journalist Matsubara Iwagoro could say in all truth that “I saw there stranger natural objects, more mysterious products, and more astonishing artefacts than in any museum or in any kind of fair or factory.” On his own initiative, Matsubara, in the employ of the Kokumin newspaper, had taken the unprecedented step of researching his accounts of the poor by living and working among them, sharing a room in a lodging house and working on a subsistence wage as a porter. While clearly honing his journalistic skills and instincts, Matsubara appears to have been entirely sincere in his desire to get to the bottom of his story by experiencing the deplorable conditions of the Meiji poor. As George Orwell would do much later, Matsubara’s newspaper reports were compiled and appeared in book form under the title In Darkest Tokyo. Another pioneering work, Japan’s Under
class by Yokoyama Gennosuke, appeared a few years later. In these very contemporary examples of reportage we learn exactly who the poor are, hearing the stories and sharing subsistence meals with the rag pickers, tinkers, rickshaw pullers, ditch diggers, peddlers, umbrella repairers, jugglers, sutra preachers and quacks who inhabited the three slums and the hovels of Asakusa and Honjo.
The impact of these two books, human documents of a kind never seen before in Japan, was felt even among literary circles, influencing the work of writers like Higuchi Ichiyo and Kunikida Doppo. Tokuda Shusei, one of the most accomplished novelists of the Meiji and Taisho periods, was one of those writers who chose to find his material and characters from the experiences of an urban working class. Closely in touch with his own society, he drew many of the subjects of his naturalistic novels from the life of ordinary people in the Morikawa district of the city’s Hongo ward where he lived. The life of a maid working in the house next door became the main character of his 1908 novel The New Household; the early years of his marriage, the material for two works, Mould and Footprints; the life and trials of a former prostitute, a friend of his wife, the substance for the 1913 novel Festering.
Novelist Higuchi Ichiyo was a Meiji-era figure who knew the underside of Tokyo better than most of her literary contemporaries. Published in 1895, Higuchi’s masterpiece, Growing Up, concerns the plight of a young girl living with her elder sister in one of the licensed quarters of Tokyo who is doomed to lose her childhood freedoms the moment her sexual awakening is sensed by the brothel owners. Its portrait of the plight of young women trapped in circumstances that pass for tradition is one of the most poignant social novels of the day. At one time Higuchi, who died from consumption at the age of 24, lived in a narrow house on the street leading to the Yoshiwara, a result of a series of financial disasters suffered by her family:
Nowhere a decent house, only rows of low tenements, ten and twenty to the row, their roof lines sagging, their front shutters carelessly left half open. One hears no rumours of rich men in these parts.
Higuchi was able to observe at close quarters how the “Yoshiwara moat, dark like the smiles of the black-toothed beauties, reflects the lights and the sport in the three-storey houses near enough to touch.” From such surroundings she was able to observe the comings and goings of the district, the sale of young girls at the entrance, the removal of dead bodies late at night. Before the girls entered the pleasure quarter they would pass by a willow tree, taking one last look back at the life they were about to forsake. The tree has been moved several times in its long life, but the “Look Back Willow”, as it is poignantly called, is still alive, a straggly but enduring specimen standing on a busy street corner in front of a garage.
The young novelist, Higuchi Ichiyo
Higuchi’s fiction, reflecting the wit and cynicism of Saikaku, a writer she much admired, is refreshingly unsentimental. Unlike Kafu’s women, reminders of a lost age, Higuchi’s flesh and blood prostitutes are symbols of failure and penury. We see the Nightless City, its denizens and those who live nearby for what they are: a priest who compromises his position for wealth and status, a grasping grandmother in the money-lending business, a confectioner who cheats his customers by diluting his products, parents who, watching their children blossom into adolescence, can observe, “there are times when daughters are more valuable than sons.” Her descriptions, sympathetic but heavy with irony, never attempt to gild the sordidness of the quarter:
It’s one thing to see a woman of a certain age who favours gaudy patterns, or a sash cut immoderately wide. It’s quite another to see these barefaced girls of fifteen or sixteen, all decked out in flashy clothes and blowing bladder cherries, which everybody knows are used as contraceptives. But that’s what kind of neighbourhood it is.
The plight of prostitutes was never alluded to in the work of Edo artists like Kitao Shigemasa and Katsukawa Shunsho, though the explicit eroticism of the shunga drawings reveals the real purpose of the quarter. Accounts by foreigners resonate with the later writings of Higuchi. A. B. Mitford, for example, writes of visiting the Yoshiwara just after nightfall, when the women
... take their places, side by side, in a kind of long narrow cage, the wooden bars of which open to the public thoroughfare. Here they sit for hours, gorgeous in dresses of silk and gold and silver embroidery, speechless and motionless as wax figures, until they shall have attracted the attention of some of the passers-by, who begin to throng the place.
Kafu, writing some two decades after Higuchi and Mitford, is more wistful as he bemoans the changes assailing the district:
In the autumn of 1908, when I came back from several years abroad, I felt like an old devotee for whom the rules had been turned upsidedown. There were beer halls on the old central street of Yoshiwara, and the harmony of “the two rows of lanterns, that first sign of autumn” had already been destroyed. The rows of ladies waiting in the houses had disappeared. The Five Streets were dark, the rickshaws along the embankment were conspicuously fewer in number.
Prostitutes on display at the Yoshiwara
Eminent Foreigners
As the great Meiji experiment moved forward, foreigners working at the delegations were now joined by specialists co-opted by a government eager to catch up and perhaps even overtake the West. Two German doctors were invited to oversee a school of medicine in Shitaya, Italians came to teach the arts and music, two French jurists were recruited to work on the drafting of new legal codes. The American professor of zoology, Edward Sylvester Morse, discoverer of the Omori shell mound in southern Tokyo, was another foreign specialist who, along with the American scholar, James C. Hepburn, set about compiling the first Japanese-English dictionary. Engineers, lecturers and architects followed.
With the Japanese acquiring so much expertise from the West, some foreign settlements like Kobe went into a slow decline. Lafcadio Hearn, the most influential western writer in Meiji Japan, described the naiveté and disillusionment of some outsiders with little grasp of the capacity of the Japanese:
Within two decades from the founding of the settlements, those foreigners who once imagined it a mere question of time when the whole country would belong to them, began to understand how greatly they had underestimated the race. The Japanese had been learning wonderfully well - “nearly as well as the Chinese.” They were supplanting the small foreign shopkeepers; and various establishments had been compelled to close because of Japanese competition.
For Hearn, arriving in the city in December 1895 to take up the prestigious chair of English Language and Literature at Tokyo Imperial University, the prospect of living in the new capital was irksome in the extreme. He defined Tokyo as the “most horrible place in Japan”, and in his view it was not even Japan but an invented city of “dirty shoes, - absurd fashions, - wickedly expensive living, - airs, - vanities, - gossip.” Settling into an undistinguished-looking house in the suburb of Ushigome, Hearn noted that the road outside the house his family rented was being dug up to make room for water pipes, requiring him to step around a series of ditches before reaching his door, another sign of the restless development gripping the city. He found some consolation at the rear of the house, where a field and hill, covered in cypress, pine, bush clover, bamboo and sorrel, provided shelter for rabbits, foxes, owls and pheasants. Behind dense layers of vegetation, an ancient temple known as Kobudera (the “gnarled temple”) and its equally ancient abbot were much more to Hearn’s liking. This is where the writer, among grounds overgrown with weeds and scattered with Buddhist statuary, was able to retrieve some of the atmosphere he savoured at former habitats in the Japanese provinces.
The first foreign tourists began to appear at this time. Tokyo now formed part of a New Grand Tour of the Far East, one that might include a spell in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Others, like Hearn, were more serious, intent on accomplishing something in Japan. Yorkshire-born Isabella L. Bird, author of the travel classic Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, arrived in Tokyo in 1878. A devout Victorian
Christian with unflinching moral views, she was by the standards of her day an open-minded writer driven by a strong spirit of inquiry. Dependent on the good graces of her hosts and interpreter when she ventured into remote parts of the country never visited by foreigners, she was an adaptable traveller, prepared to make do with simple, unfamiliar food and to respect local customs. She delighted her hosts when she removed her muddy boots at the entrance to houses and inns, something few foreigners seem to have done at the time. (Even a much later visitor, George Bernard Shaw, obdurately refused to remove his shoes when stepping onto the delicate straw tatami mats used as interior flooring.)
Bird took a rickshaw in the company of Basil Hall Chamberlain to the Senso-ji temple in Asakusa, where she found “much that is highly grotesque at first sight. Men squat on the floor selling amulets, rosaries, printed prayers, incense sticks, and other wares. Ex votos of all kinds hang on the wall and on the great round pillars. Many of these are rude Japanese pictures.” Encountering the temple’s main altar, she found a concentration of...
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 14