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

by Stephen Mansfield

  There were no electric trolleys and no buses and taxis... horse trolleys ran along the main streets of the Low City. It was a very rare occasion indeed when the Tokyo person set out for Ginza or Asakusa after dark. He would for the most part range no farther than the night stalls in the neighbourhood or perhaps a temple or shrine fair. Yose was his one real diversion.

  Besides fairs and flower exhibitions, the larger temples and shrines like the Asakusa Kannon offered diversions as well as the prospect of merit gaining through religious observations. More akin to a complementary world than a parallel universe, there was no apparent conflict between devotion and entertainment, the world of non-attachment and the performing arts. Piety had its place among the figures kneeling among clouds of incense before a dimly lit altar at the rear of the main hall, but once outside, life came bubbling up to the very steps of the temple. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W.B. Mason, authors of an 1891 guide to Tokyo, strongly recommended a visit to the temple:

  ... for it is the great holiday resort of the middle and lower classes, and nothing is more striking than the juxtaposition of piety and pleasure, of gorgeous altars and grotesque ex-votos, of pretty costumes and dingly idols, the clatter of clogs, cocks and hens and pigeons strutting about among the worshippers. The temple authorities welcomed the crowds of pleasure seekers and their donations and didn’t question too closely what went on inside some of the tents erected right inside the precincts of Senso-ji.

  Whether W. E. Griffis, an early tourist, understood that the archery galleries were a subterfuge for prostitution is not clear in his description of the grounds of Asakusa as “the quaintest and liveliest place in Tokyo”, where the visual feast included “performing monkeys, cheap photographers, street artists, jugglers, wrestlers, life-sized figures in clay, vendors of toys and lollipops.” Yet a later passage seems to suggest that he might have had more than an inkling of what went on:

  At the north end are ranged the archery galleries, also presided over by pretty black-eyed Dianas, in paint, powder, and shining coiffure. They bring you tea, smile, talk nonsense, and giggle; smoke their long pipes with tiny bowls full of mild, fine-cut tobacco; puff out the long white whiffs from their flat-bridged noses; wipe the brass mouth-piece, and offer it to you; and then ask you leading and very personal questions without blushing...

  Alongside the clay figures noted by Griffis were highly realistic papiermâché dolls. The old hag of Adachi Moor, a notorious character known to entice travellers into her hut before robbing and murdering them, was a particularly frightening figure for children. The print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, whose early work depicts scenes of appalling violence and horror, produced a triptych on the subject, showing a pregnant woman, bound, gagged and hanging by her feet as the celebrated hag sharpens her knife beneath her swollen abdomen. Big-nosed westerners were less harrowing as subjects for dolls. Curiosities more than monstrosities, they were invariably depicted with red hair and blue eyes. The ever-sympathetic Clara Whitney visited the displays in 1875, noting with amused appreciation: “A lady and gentlemen with flame-red hair and azure eyes were standing arm in arm”:

  ... a red-haired beauty rode a velocipede, one walked with a crutch, and another swept while a gardener very lifelike sat by a flower bed smoking an English pipe, and a little boy had a string of balloons. It was all very well done. Wonderfully lifelike - even the redheaded individuals, who were ugly to be sure, looked like some I have seen before.

  Tokuda Shusei, in his novel Rough Living, gives us a similar mix of the sacred and earthbound when describing the visit of his main character to Nishi-Arai Daishi, a temple in one of the poorer districts east of the river:

  On leaving the main hall, Oshima roamed around the expansive temple compound, halting to observe some sort of sea mammal on exhibit and a rural, itinerant juggler... she loitered for a while in a rough, barren playground where cherry trees had recently been planted. Then she went around back to the cemetery. She witnessed an old peasant receiving the incantation of sacred waters from a priest, and she paused in front of rows of statues of Saint Kukai, a candle burning in front of each figure. In a nearby grove, a crowd had formed to see a scrawny monkey in a sailor’s suit walking a tightrope.

  It was just as well these earthier plebeian forms of entertainment were surviving, as culture was increasingly being appropriated by the new establishment. In the days of Edo the Kabuki theatre and the pleasure quarters had done more than set the styles. In a very real way they were the inspiration and setting, the incubators of culture. The latter continued their basic function as houses of prostitution during the Meiji period, but lost much of their lustre as demi-monde institutions where artists, writers, musicians and wealthy patrons could indulge in, but also transcend, carnal pleasures in the fruitful symbiosis of higher aims.

  Osanai Kaoru, recalling perhaps the glory days of the Yoshiwara, lamented the decline of the courtesan into “a tasteless chalk drawing” and the degeneration of the Yoshiwara clientele into a shabby crowd in “workmen’s jackets and flat-top haircuts and rubber boots”. There was a barely concealed sneer in this rebuke of the masses for their unschooled tastes, but also a sense that, not only had the colour and refined taste been leached out of the place, but also the human drama. Recalling that Yoshiwara had often acted as a stage for Edo-period plays, Osanai offers more regrets tinged with bitterness:

  No playwright would be silly enough to put the Yoshiwara of our day to such use. A chance encounter under the lights of the beer hall at the main gate would most likely involve a person with a north-country accent and a home-made cap, and his uncle, in the city with a petition to the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. The customer sweetening his coffee with sugar cubes in a western-style salon, given a farewell pat on his new muslin undershirt, would most likely be a numbers man in a visor cap, or a wandering singer of Osaka balladry who does the outskirts of town. No one could think of the Yoshiwara as in the slightest degree a romantic setting.

  For entertainment of a more refined kind, people who could afford it now went to the geisha houses. The great fire of 1911 dealt another blow to the Yoshiwara, although it was hastily rebuilt in the hybrid style of the day: a Japanese frontage here, a European tower or miniature wing of a château there. There were several Yoshiwara rivals, well-established pleasure quarters that could offer some of the older graces. One of these was at Nezu, near the campus of the new Imperial University at Hongo. A little too close to the students for the authorities, who wanted to protect the best and brightest from temptations and distractions, the Nezu quarter was duly moved to Susaki in Fukagawa, an area of reclaimed land near the mouth of the Sumida. The dispersal of pleasure quarters reflected the dismembering of the mercantile culture that had marked the Meiji period.

  The Willow World

  The great pleasure districts of the late Edo and Meiji periods were Yanagibashi and Shimbashi. The etymology of the name Yanagibashi is much disputed. It may have derived from the willows (yanagi) that lined its embankment and the approach road from Asakusa Bridge, which still retains its trees in homage to the past, or it is possibly a phonetic warp from Yanokibashi, “Armoury Bridge”, a reference to an arrow depot used by the shogun’s troops located in the same area. Just as plausible is the theory that the name was taken from Yanagiwara, meaning “Willowfield”, the area on the banks of the Kanda river at its confluence with the Sumida.

  Yanagibashi seems to have begun as an entertainment district by developing an association with the much larger licensed quarter of the Yoshiwara. Chokibune, narrow sculls powered by single oarsmen from their moorings along the Kandagawa, were used to ferry customers up to the brothels and teahouses located in the marshy fields and paddies north of Asakusa. The Kandagawa boathouses were also the departure points for customers going to the great shrine to Tenjin out at Kameido to the east. Lanterns lit the doorways of Yanagawa restaurants until the early post-war period. One or two riverside restaurants still remain, but now it is mostly apartment ow
ners who enjoy the river views.

  Mendicant musicians and balladeers would be paddled up to the gardens of the Yanagibashi geisha houses and restaurants, where they serenaded visitors in the manner of Venetian gondoliers. The gardens, with their cherry trees, wisteria trellises and azaleas, were extensions of the river bottom mud, adding a natural touch to the contrivances of the pleasure quarter.

  In its heyday, Yanagibashi’s geisha were highly regarded. The area received a fair number of literary tributes, the equivalent then of free advertising or critical endorsement. “The great metropolis of Edo,” Ryutei Tanehiko wrote in his Geisha Tora no Maki, “is honeycombed with canals and waterways, and wherever they flow, the water laps and washes the city’s many geisha. In Yanagibashi, the geisha bloom in rivalry like primroses in the grass.” A later writer, Tanizaki Junichiro, wrote in his Childhood Years memoir that he “never once came across anyone who communicated even a trace of the stylish femininity so characteristic of the Yanagibashi geisha.”

  Edokko, still clinging to the nostalgia of a period they made their own, seem to have preferred Yanagibashi and its stylish women, skilled in the shamisen, dance and the arts of conversation, to its brasher rival Shimbashi, much patronized in the early Meiji period by reformist politicians hailing from the somewhat déclassé prefectures of Yamaguchi and Kagoshima. The air of elegance which its clientele of Edokko aficionados of pleasure, patrons of the arts and wealthy philanderers, once imparted to the district, was considerably diluted by this new breed of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs ushered in by Meiji. Though Yanagibashi remained one of the most respected geisha quarters during this period, it had already lost some of the special élan that set it apart.

  Because of its position at the confluence of two rivers, Yanagibashi was the preferred venue for the grand annual “opening of the river” marked by a huge fireworks display at the end of July. Its restaurants, commanding exorbitant prices for the privilege of viewing the show in the company of geisha and an elite clientele, were reserved months, sometimes years, in advance. Although one of the great observances of the Edo period, fire concerns and the increasingly malodorous waters of the Sumida caused the event to be terminated. The displays were revived in 1978 but the venue was relocated further up river, dealing a crippling blow to Yanagibashi. Retaining walls placed here during the high-growth 1960s were perhaps a necessary evil given the frequent flooding and subsequent loss of life and property, but such precariousness was part of life in the floating world.

  Although the old wooden teahouses synonymous with the district have almost vanished, Yanagibashi geisha are still in demand as entertainers for riverboat parties. It is still possible to see stylishly robed women lifting their kimonos as they gingerly make their way across the gangplank and descend onto the deck of a pleasure boat strung with paper lanterns.

  Geisha in Rivalry

  Shimbashi, Yanagibashi’s great rival, had a similar system, with boats functioning as houses of assignation, a subject much beloved by ukiyo-e artists. A woodblock triptych by Torii Kiyonaga, entitled A Moored Pleasure Boat beneath the Bridge, showing gorgeously clad geisha seated under roof awnings, is typical of the genre.

  After the great fire of 1872 that destroyed much of the city, including Ginza, Shimbashi geisha were the first of their breed to move into the new redbrick buildings replacing the old black plaster walls that formerly characterized the district. The Victorian furnishings, floral wallpaper and the chintz and velvet may have borne a superficial resemblance to the guest parlours and drawing rooms of high-society London and New York, but the lack of proper ventilation, with air trapped in rooms already stuffy with the fumes from oil lamps, must have been more ordeal than elegance in the humid summer months.

  As the Shimbashi area grew, so did its entertainments. The Kabuki Theatre was within its orbit, so too the later Shimbashi Embujo theatre. As the Shimbashi geisha’s star rose, a simmering rivalry sprang up with the geisha houses of Yanagibashi. By the 1910s the two districts were the city’s premier geisha quarters. In Kafu’s novel, Geisha in Rivalry, the writer portrays the insincere, coldly calculating women of Shimbashi, but also gives us a sense of the strictly tiered world of the Tokyo geisha. During a theatre performance

  ... geisha in groups of four or five at a time came incessantly to pay court at the boxes of the powerful teahouse mistresses of the Shimbashi district. Not only geisha, but also actors, other entertainers, and professional flatterers who happened to pass by bowed ceremoniously before them, and a ceaseless traffic of ingratiating gifts of fruit and sushi rice sandwiches and the like flowed toward their boxes.

  Kafu’s disapproval of the scheming geisha in his novel did not detract from the pleasure he took in the company of such women, nor his belief that in the karyukai (the flower and willow world) the flavour of Edo culture was preserved. If the geisha were the earthly equivalents of Benten, the lute-playing goddess of art and beauty, they were also, as Kafu showed, made of flesh and blood. In his illustrated series The Twenty-four Hours at Shinbashi and Yanagibashi, the print artist Yoshitoshi Tsukioka took a similar interest in the foibles and weaknesses of geisha, and the impact of western culture on Meiji Tokyo. Images of photographers, gas-lighters, rickshaw-pullers, and references to newspapers, all novelties at the time, make their appearance in this set of prints.

  By Yoshitoshi’s time, the strictures governing the lives of geisha and courtesans in the Shimbashi and Yanagibashi districts, as well as the Yoshiwara, had been considerably relaxed since the Edo period. Geisha were able, should they so desire, to spend the night with a guest. The new freedoms led to predicaments, which the new, vigilant media only exacerbated. The narrative cartouche accompanying one of the prints of a pregnant, clearly worried geisha reads:

  I hear the newspaper hawker’s voice.

  There seems to be no way

  To delete the bad mouthing

  Of these despicable jealous editors.

  The Performers

  At the same time as Kabuki was being gentrified by having its links severed with the now languishing pleasure quarters, a small revival of the musical narrative form of chanting known as gidayu was taking place in Tokyo. In 1877 the new Meiji government lifted its 1629 ban on women performing in public. By the early 1880s several young female narrators had begun appearing in the theatres and music halls of the city. The most famous of these performers was Takemoto Ayanosuke, a woman of striking beauty and musical talent. Enormously popular with Tokyo audiences, she was well known enough to receive a mention in Mori Ogai’s novel, Wild Geese. In the great print artist Kunichika Toyohara’s portrait of her, this hardworking Meiji beauty appears in a radiant purple, floral-patterned kimono. Beside her is a cup of water and cloth for wiping the sweat from her face during performances.

  Western theatre was being introduced to the urban elite of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. The radical activist Kawakami Oyojiro and his wife, an ex-geisha by the name of Sadayakko, were early pioneers in the popularization of western-style drama. The fact that Kawakami could get away with riding a bicycle onto the stage in the role of Hamlet, without a suggestion of dissonance, was simple: both character and machine were modern and unfamiliar to Meiji audiences. The couple took their company on extended tours of Europe and the United States, presenting colourful costume dramas and digests of Kabuki. What they offered were exotic but abridged versions of Kabuki to hugely appreciative audiences, and they received favourable reviews wherever they went.

  The creators of popular entertainment turned to the city and its burgeoning population for their dramas, seeking out human interest stories, scandals or, even better, outrageous crimes for their narratives. There was nothing like a good murder, particularly if the victim was a woman associated with the pleasure quarters, to arouse the interest of the public, playwrights and the more sensational novelists of the day. A crime with all the right elements to appeal to the public and lend itself to literary adaptation occurred in the autumn of 1897, when a man named Mats
udaira Noriyoshi murdered his common-law wife, named Kono, a serving woman in a geisha district who had amassed some money. After strangling her, he mutilated her face in an effort at delaying her identification, then wrapped the naked body in straw mats and rolled it down the steep embankment of the Kanda river at Ochanomizu. The murderer was soon arrested, the incident giving the newspapers an unexpected boost in circulation. The story was quickly written up as a play, making a well-received debut on - of all places - the Kagura stage of the Meitoku Inari shrine. Perhaps it was not such an unusual setting for the day as it might sound now. Tanizaki recalled seeing “card-sized pictures of Kono’s mutilated face among the usual pictures of actors and geisha” in the shops and stalls at the Suitengu shrine fair in Ningyocho.

  Nostalgia, Meiji Realities

  Nature and art were no longer the city’s sole agents of transformation. Factories began to spring up like noxious mushrooms. Despite the cement works, commercial shipyards and factories disfiguring the east bank of the Sumida, Kafu could satisfy some of his cravings for old Edo in Fukagawa, the flood-prone flatlands where Basho’s retreat once stood. Three important Edo writers much admired by Kafu were associated with the district: Kyoden Santo, an incisive commentator on the customs of the pleasure quarters; Tsuruya Namboku IV, one of Edo’s foremost playwrights; and Takizawa Bakin, a writer of highly popular moral romances. Given its literary credentials and partial physical survival in the alleys, teahouses and brothels compressed into an area known as Monzen-Nakacho (“Central Quarter in Front of the Gate”), it was not surprising that Kafu, in his 1909 Song of Fukagawa, could write: “My longing to take refuge in Fukagawa was irresistible.” Yet like so many of the districts that Kafu patronized and wrote about, exterminating forces were never far away. Besides the terrible death toll they produced, the great floods of 1910 and 1917 washed away a great deal of the area’s history.