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

by Stephen Mansfield

  shrines and gods, gigantic candlesticks, colossal lotuses of gilded silver, offerings, lamps, lacquer, litany books, gongs, drums, bells, and all the mysterious symbols of a faith which is a system of morals and metaphysics to the educated and initiated, and an idolatrous superstition to the masses.

  The essence of these scenes has not changed a great deal since then, though the following description of the worldly pleasures co-existing easily with the sanctity of the inner temple most certainly has:

  Behind the temple are archery galleries in numbers, where girls, hardly so modest-looking as usual, smile and smirk, and bring straw-coloured tea in dainty cups, and tasteless sweetmeats on lacquer trays, and smoke their tiny pipes, and offer you bows of slender bamboo strips, two feet long, with rests for the arrows, and tiny cherry-wood arrows, bonetipped, and feathered red, blue, and white, and smilingly, but quite unobtrusively, ask you to try your skill or luck at a target hanging in front of a square drum, flanked by red cushions. A click, a boom, or a hardly audible “thud,” indicate the result. Nearly all the archers were grown-up men, and many of them spend hours at a time in this childish sport.

  Whether or not Bird understood or was informed of the real purpose of the booths and their “sport” is not clear.

  John Russell Young, accompanying the former US President and First Lady, General and Mrs. Grant, on their tour of Japan in 1879, compared Tokyo at this time to a series of villages, an analogy much favoured by writers ever since. Using the spelling still then common among foreigners when writing about the new capital, he observed:

  It is hard to realize that Tokio is a city - one of the greatest cities of the world. It looks like a series of villages, with bits of green and open spaces, and enclosed grounds breaking up the continuity of the town.

  The Grants were well received. On a visit to the Shintomiza, a theatre in the Ginza, the audience were treated to an inventive display of international goodwill in the form of a dance finale in which a troupe of geisha from the Yanagibashi pleasure quarter appeared in red and white stripped kimonos beneath which star-spangled singlets could be seen. Their fans, an indispensable item in geisha dances, were decorated with Japanese and American flags.

  The ebullient Clara Whitney, daughter of American missionaries and educators who had moved to Tokyo in 1875, was in the audience and recorded the performance in her diary:

  Each girl was dressed in a robe made of the dear old Stars and Stripes, while upon their heads shone a circlet of silver stars. It made the prettiest costume imaginable. The stripes constituted the over-robe itself while one sleeve slipped off from one shoulder revealed a sleeve of stars below, their girdles were dark blue, sandals, red and white, and presently they took out fans having on one side the American and upon the other the national flag.

  The Grants seem to have thrown themselves into the life of the city, joining the throng lined up along the Sumida for the annual summer opening of the river. The always-enthusiastic Edward Morse was there too, noting what he saw: “It was a startling sight when we got near the place to see that the fireworks were being discharged from a large boat by a dozen naked men, firing off Roman candles and set pieces of a complex nature. It was a sight never to be forgotten: the men’s bodies glistening in the light with the showers of sparks dropping like rain upon them...”

  Victorian writers and travellers continued to be curious about a country that had hardly been visited since the reign of James I. Rudyard Kipling was in Tokyo in 1889. In a description not unlike some of the images in woodblock prints made at the time, he marvelled at Tokyo after dark, where “half the town was out for a walk, and all the people’s clothes were indigo, and so were the shadows, and most of the paper lanterns were drops of blood red.” The 24-year-old Kipling, an unknown journalist, was mightily impressed by what he saw, filling his letters with descriptions that have the freshness and spontaneity of eyewitness accounts. Tokyo was a city that...

  ... roared with life through all its quarters. Double lines of trams ran down the main streets for mile on mile, rows of omnibuses stood at the principal railway stations... All the trams were full, all the private and public omnibuses were full, and the streets were full of “rickshaws”. From the seashore to the shady green park, from the park to the dim distance, the land pullulated with people.

  Though only a handful of the best have survived, the Meiji period saw the first wave of books on Japan and orientalism. It seems that almost every literate traveller felt compelled to publish impressions of the country. “Not to have written a book about Japan,” Basil Hall Chamberlain remarked in 1890, “is fast becoming a title of distinction.”

  Boston Brahmins

  Once the perfumed phial was open some of its essence vanished. Chamberlain was right when he wrote, “For Old Japan was like an oyster - to open it was to kill it.” Old Japan had struck a chord with an unlikely group of American scholars, art collectors, aesthetes and aristocrats from New England who, repelled by American ostentation, detected in the high culture of Japan - in Buddhist ritual, Shinto purity, the austerity of Zen, the code of the samurai and the cultivation of an aesthetic way - values akin to those of their Puritan ancestors.

  Among the Bostonians drawn to Tokyo was Edward Morse, he of the famous shell mounds, now firmly established as professor of zoology at the Tokyo Imperial University. Ironically, at a time when many people in Japan were eager to bury the past and to allow westerners to cart off valuable works of art to Europe and America, Morse was about to introduce the study of archaeology, the preservation of heritage.

  Sensing the evanescence of Old Japan, and the disinclination of the Japanese themselves to preserve it, Morse was instrumental in urging institutions such as the Peabody Academy of Salem and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston to establish major Japanese collections. There were private collectors, too, like Isabella Stewart Gardner and the wealthy Bostonian physician, William Bigelow, who purchased literally thousands of Japanese artworks. Morse’s colleague, fellow Bostonian Ernest Fenollosa, was considered at the time to be the premier authority on Japanese art. By the early 1880s, Fenollosa, now converted to Buddhism and campaigning vigorously among government circles for the preservation of Japanese art in the face of the mania for all things western, had made the acquaintance of a remarkable Japanese by the name of Okakura Kakuzo.

  One incident testifies to the linguistic dexterity and quick wit of this extraordinary man, who was fluent in English. Accosted on a New York street by a fellow who imagined he could score a quick laugh at the expense of Okakura and his group, all dressed in traditional Japanese attire, the man asked, “What sort of ‘nese’ are you people? Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese?” Okakura answered immediately, “We are Japanese gentlemen. But what sort of ‘key’ are you? Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey?” In his poem Gerontion, T. S. Eliot has the tall figure of Okakura, dressed in formal kimono at a private museum in Boston, “bowing among the Titians.”

  Okakura’s position, that Japan was an integral part of Asia and that “the ideals of Asia are one,” was the very opposite of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s contention that Japan “should leave Asia and enter the West.” Author of The Ideals of the East, Okakura was appalled at the blind thrust towards western culture at the expense of the Japanese arts, observing in his highly influential The Book of Tea, “Civilization and Enlightenment did not bring a real civilization to Japan, but it rather brought materialism which should be removed.”

  Okakura’s art instincts, like those of his English equivalent John Ruskin, were unimpeachable. Okakura and Fenollosa’s crowning achievement was their involvement in setting up the 1889 government-backed Tokyo Art School in Yanaka, with its focus on the study and practice of Far Eastern art. Modern painters like Hishida Shunso and Yokoyama Taikan, exponents of a newer Nihonga style of painting, were products of the school, along with practitioners of bronze casting, traditional metalworking and ceramics.

  The rapture at living in an oriental capital, exempl
ified in the works of millionaire-turned-writer Percival Lowell, was by no means shared by all Bostonians of culture and good taste. The Harvard historian Henry Adams complained of Tokyo’s sweltering summer heat and offensive fields of night soil: “Tokyo is beastly,” he groaned, “nothing but a huge collection of villages, scattered over miles after miles of flat country; without a building fit to live in, or a sewer to relieve the stench of several hundred thousand open privies.”

  Human waste was proving a profitable commodity with suburban farms on the fringes of the city using it as compost for growing fresh vegetables. Waste from samurai households commanded a higher price than that from commoners, as it was reasoned they enjoyed a better diet. Wealthy farmers and village heads generally monopolized the right to collect premium night soil from the residences of the daimyo. Those who suffered most from the noxious smell were those living along the banks of the Sumida and Ara rivers, where the night soil was transported in boats that made no efforts to conceal their load.

  Distinguished Japanese

  Besides the “Boston Brahmins”, there were a number of eminent Japanese like Okakura residing in Tokyo. One of the most distinguished figures of the age, a strong advocate of westernization, was the author and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi, founder of a Tokyo academy that later became Keio University. An independent thinker and fierce critic, he facilitated an experiment in free thought and open political debate, strongly influenced by British utilitarianism and the primacy of modern education, which was short-lived but highly influential. Fukuzawa’s face appears on today’s ¥10,000 note, Japan’s highest denomination.

  Fukuzawa started out as a student of Dutch but quickly switched to English, gaining a reputation as a translator, a skill which qualified him as an attendant to the head of the first embassy to the United States in 1860. Two years later he joined an official delegation to Europe and an overseas trip to America again in 1867. His first book, Conditions in the West, established him as a serious authority on western matters. In a rebuttal of the Confucian view of a social order used to legitimize Tokugawa authoritarianism, he wrote in his popular An Encouragement of Learning:

  It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they are all equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low.

  Keio University, the institute Fukuzawa established, was, along with Waseda University and Tokyo Imperial University, the nerve centre of westernization, and it was in such a liberal milieu that such talk of social levelling and the championing of the rights of women could be conducted. The catchphrase that best sums up the early aspirations of the Meiji era, Bunmei Kaika (“Civilization and Enlightenment”), coined by Fukuzawa in one of his other books, was nothing if not cultural.

  A leading figure in Meiji letters, Mori Ogai was a graduate of the medical school of Tokyo Imperial University and an early exponent of the so-called “I-novel”. Close to the confessional diary form, it soon became the preferred medium of expression among writers of the Japanese romantic and naturalist movements. These authors were faced with the subordination of the individual to the greater interests of the state demanded by the Meiji constitution, whose promulgation seemed to dash the hopes of many artists and intellectuals that a people’s rights movement might provide a vehicle for creative dissent. Mori departed from the naturalist view, however, preferring like Natsume Soseki to elevate the role of reason and intelligence in an effort to create order through literature and science amidst the chaotic collisions of the old and new that characterized the Meiji period.

  The importance of place in Tokyo novels of the time can transform narrative accounts into something akin to a city itinerary. In Mori’s The Wild Geese, we read that:

  Okada had regular routes for his daily walks. He would go down the lonely slope called Muenzaka and travel north along Shinobazu Pond. Then he would stroll up the hill in Ueno Park. Next he went down to Hirokoji and, turning into Naka-cho - narrow, crowded, full of activity - he would go through the compound of Yushima Shrine... going through the Red Gate, he would proceed along Hongo-dori until he came to a shop where people were standing and watching the antics of some men pounding millet. Then he would continue his walk by turning into the compound of Kanda Shrine.

  It is still possible to plot a literary route through this part of the city. Finding the shop where the two men pounded millet might be difficult, but the original Red Gate is still there, along with Kanda shrine, better known as Kanda Myojin. Muenzaka, however, has undergone some changes since Mori wrote the following:

  Even in the days I am writing about, the Iwasaki mansion was located, as it is today, on the southern side of Muenzaka, though it had not yet been fenced in with its present high wall of soil. At the time dirty stonewalls had been put up, and ferns and horsetails grew among the moss-covered stones. Even now I don’t know whether the land above the fence is flat or hilly, for I’ve never been inside the mansion.

  The high walls described by Mori remain, screening off the mansion from passersby, though the grounds and house are now open to the public. Another monument to Meiji syncretism, the mansion was built for Iwasaki Hisaya, son of the founder of the industrial giant Mitsubishi. The 1896 estate, a short walk from the lotus pond in Ueno Park, was, like so many of the grand buildings of the time, the work of Josiah Conder. The coffered wood ceilings, fluted columns framing the entrance porch, parquet flooring, stone fireplaces and Japan’s first western toilet evoke a world of privilege. The overriding style is Jacobean, but traces of myriad western design forms can be found, including a second-floor colonnade recalling the Ionic style used in Pennsylvania country residences, while interior decorative motifs are Islamic in provenance. Set apart from the main house, a dark wooden building, part Gothic, part Swiss country cottage, houses a billiard room. Conder employed fluted columns to frame the entrance porch, along with a colonial style verandah and gold-embossed wallpaper. Gaspowered steam radiators placed throughout the house were an early form of central heating. These were refinements beyond the imagination of the common Tokyo dweller. Typifying the trans-cultural habits of the day, members of the family would change between Japanese and western footwear and clothing as they passed from one section of the house to another. A gloriously befuddled ensemble of styles, the mansion is a fine example of fin-de-siècle Tokyo eclecticism.

  The 1896 Iwasaki Mansion in Muenzaka

  New Civilization

  The ex-samurai turned oligarchs were quick to introduce far-reaching economic reforms, but these were not matched by meaningful political initiatives. The new Meiji constitution created a Diet consisting of the House of Peers and a House of Representatives. Granting the vote to only a small number of wealthy landowners, it remained resolutely authoritarian and patriarchal, a blend of traditional Japanese and German governance representing at best a limited interpretation of democracy.

  The works of reform-minded writers and thinkers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Guizot and Rousseau were now available in translation and much read by advocates of more radical change. Inspired by these possibilities, new groups like the Freedom Party and People’s Rights Movement emerged, none with more than a limited hope of success.

  An early casualty (some would say beneficiary) of the cultural purges meant to abolish or sanitize the past in order to curry favour with the West was Kabuki. The theatres returned from banishment in the east to the centre of the city. The Shintomi-za was rebuilt and the Kabuki-za located in its present position in Higashi Ginza. New, more respectable plays were written for what was originally a plebeian art form associated with the pleasure quarters, and powerful older works diluted. To some degree, elevating Kabuki to a national art form had the effect of neutering it. The great Kabuki exponent, Ichikawa Danjiru IX, was instrumental in this transformation of robust, earthy performances into more institutionalized dramas. At the opening of a theatre in 1872, dressed in white tie and tails rather than the racy kimonos
normally associated with him, he summed up the new order when he declared, “The theatre of recent years has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean,” going on to assert: “I am deeply grieved by this fact, and in consultation with my colleagues I have resolved to clean away the decay.”

  The emperor’s attendance at a Kabuki performance in 1887, following a similar visit to see a sumo tournament, was an official endorsement that would have been inconceivable a mere two decades before and sealed the fate of Kabuki as a respectable performing art. The new Kabuki-za theatre that opened in 1889 was notable for its western, faintly Renaissance-style exterior. An alternative existed at the Miyatoza in Asakusa. Regarded by aficionados as the last holdout of Edo-period Kabuki, the theatre was still in business during the Taisho period, though by then it was competing with music halls and motion picture palaces.

  Despite the purges Kabuki actors remained enormously popular in both their roles and as arbiters of style and taste, and the theatres were just as well attended as ever. The requisitioning of Kabuki and its transference from the low to higher city helped to create new audiences among the elite and nascent middle classes. Tickets for the Kabuki were still beyond the means of many ordinary citizens. The yose variety halls were the best alternative to the new, “improved” Kabuki performances. These were local affairs, obviating a trip from the eastern low-lying areas of the city, which even in the late years of Meiji were not as well served with public transport as the central districts. The playwright Osanai Kaoru commented on this feature of Tokyo life: