The transformation of a feudal city into a modern one came at a very high cost. Configured around a natural landscape of hills, valleys, ponds and rivers, the city’s trees and woods were now cut down, undulating areas flattened, watercourses filled in, place names changed. With the abolition of the aristocracy, residential estates were converted into public buildings and embassies, or passed into the hands of the remaining nobility and military elite. The disappearance of panoramic vistas, greenery and fine scenery did not completely erase the collective memory, thanks in large part to the visual records found in woodblock prints and the descriptions of districts preserved in the repository of the city’s literature. By the end of the Meiji period many streets had been widened to make way for trolleys or to act as firebreaks. Others disappeared altogether. Canals, rivers and other watercourses were much reduced. Districts like the Ginza, Mitsubishi Meadow and Nihonbashi were soon unrecognizable.
Only the means was new for a city long accustomed to renewal; instead of fire, earthquakes and typhoons, planned change was now the order of the day. Many welcomed the changes, happy to exchange the dank, ill-lit and crowded uradana or back alleys for the opportunity to move onto street fronts. Open drains ran down the middle of these earthen grids. When it rained the boards over the drains often came off, sending up raw sewage.
It is a convention of sorts for people returning to a place after an absence of some years to lament change in the form of elegies to the past. Those like Kafu who could afford to, lived elsewhere, but sharing his strong nostalgic bent, they were quick to condemn any form of modernization. In the government’s view, alleyways and the row houses that stood along them represented a serious health and fire hazard and would have to be torn down. In Kafu’s view, these micro-districts were valuable beyond measure:
Its downright homely sentiments and downright homely way of life come together in every object in the alley - latticed sliding doors, wooden ditch covers, clothes-drying decks on the roof, wooden gates, fence-top spikes. One must admit that the backstreets constitute a world of artistic harmony born amid confusion.
Novelist Tayama Katai shared Kafu’s alarm at the changes, writing: “Bridges were rebuilt, there were evictions after fires, narrow streets were widened. Day by day Edo was destroyed.” The transformations, however unwelcome, provided rich themes for writers with nostalgic tendencies. As Meiji superseded Edo, and even that era began to show the first signs of ageing, Tayama could cast a regretful eye over its imminent demise. “In the confusion something still remained of very early Meiji,” he wrote about the Nihonbashi district, “I grow nostalgic for it, that air of the degenerate.”
Hasegawa Shigure, too young for the carefully crafted nostalgia of older writers such as Kafu, compared the dark back streets of the old merchant quarter with Kanda to the north, where she sometimes stayed with an aunt. Here she got a glimpse of the new world emerging on her doorstep:
She took me to see the Nikolai Cathedral, then under construction. It was when I stayed with her that I first heard the sound of violin and piano and orchestra. In our part of the Low City such sounds and such instruments were quite unknown. So it was that I first caught the scent of the West.
The Josiah Conder-designed Nikolai Cathedral in Ochanomizu
For Kafu, many of the new buildings that people were starting to live in were dreary in the extreme, especially the incongruous non-Japanese structures springing up in the downtown areas to the east of the river. He railed against the unexamined imitation of the West and the new hybrid culture it was producing in his Diary of a Recent Returnee, Sneers, and a short story published in 1909 called A Song of Fukagawa. In the tale a young man recently returned from the West takes a trolley car east. When a power failure strands him in Fukagawa, once home to a thriving Edo pleasure district, he ventures into a drab and claustrophobic city where:
... Western-style buildings standing unevenly on the opposite corner, some tall, some short, looked utterly impoverished, like shacks without depth or weight. Perhaps this was because they were all nooks and windows, devoid of ornamentation. The power lines crisscrossing overhead formed a frenzied obstruction to the transparent winter sky. Utility poles, made out of timbers so raw they might have been felled just yesterday, jutted out along the street, threatening to block the view completely. Slapped indiscriminately onto the poles were signs painted in awful colours, flaunting an utter ignorance of design.
Kafu’s changing viewpoint, shared by many of his generation, is commented upon by the critic Kato Shuichi; writing about the Meiji period, he observes that “the alienation of the artist drove him either into a nostalgic yearning for the culture of the Edo period, or into an infatuation with the West.”
By the early 1890s this infatuation was already showing signs of disillusionment, a reaction to over-hasty westernization expressing itself in a fresh interest in traditional values and culture. Reflecting increasing disenchantment with the aims of materialistic progress, a new term, bunmeibyo (civilization disease) was coined. This coincided with the first, troubling signs of a resurgent nationalism. Accused of a slight against the imperial shrine in Ise, the minister of education was assassinated in 1889; the following year, the foreign minister, criticized for dragging his feet over negotiations for treaty revision, was seriously injured in a bomb attack.
The Nihonga School
A dual process of assimilation and subordination of western influences was taking place in painting. Cultural preferences were evident in the way artists affiliated themselves with either the western styles of painting (yoga), or Japanese (nihonga). The western school of artists worked mostly in oils and watercolours, the Japanese fraternity in traditional mineral pigments. Although its main aim was to reassert a Japanese identity through the recovery of its cultural past, there were modernist elements in nihonga. To that end, traditional genres and subjects would be reinstated in the newer context of a more occidentalized Taisho Japan. A great many nihonga artists devoted themselves to bijinga, representations of female beauty.
The newer canons of feminine beauty were explored in the nihonga paintings of artists like Yamakawa Shuho and Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, who were intrigued by the creative possibilities offered by mingling progressive western styles with more orthodox Japanese ones. Though marginalized for being women artists, several female nihonga painters like Kajiwara Hisako and Uemura Shoen appeared at this time. Within the nihonga school, Okakura Kakuzo, an advocator of the classical heritage and Buddhism, emphasized the need for individual self-expression and innovation in art, a view shared by other late Meiji and Taisho artists like the novelist Soseki Natsume and sculptor Takamura Kotaro.
Renewed interest in Japanese art and architecture among scholars and collectors abroad was evident in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Impressionists were among the first to be influenced by the art of the ukiyo-e. Japanese prints had already started circulating in Paris as early as 1856. Artists like Degas, Monet and Manet either owned or were inspired by exhibitions of prints by the likes of Hiroshige. Van Gogh’s 1887 painting, “The Courtesan”, rendered in the striking colours of Provence, is actually a reproduction of a figure by the artist Eisen Kesai. Shops selling Japanese furnishings and objets d’art were opening in Paris and London. Books like Edward Sylvester Morse’s Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings had a later impact on the tastes of the Art Nouveau movement.
Woodblock prints also underwent a transformation in the early nineteenth century as tastes changed. Prussian blue, similar in tone to the colours of indigenous indigo fabrics, became popular. Imported synthetic aniline dyes associated with western modernity began to usurp traditional organic pigments that had animated prints with such restrained verve. Chemical pigments were introduced to prints in the 1860s. Enthusiastically applied, they give the prints of this era a gaudy, exaggerated or fanciful appearance, but are invaluable documents of the period, their over-animated fusion of steam engines, penny-farthings and electric lamps with blue skies and c
herry blossoms embodying the exuberance and optimism of the times.
The great Meiji print artist Kobayashi Kiyochika preferred a more realistic, nuanced approach, turning to delicately graded nocturnes, even when he was depicting trains. A master of pathos, Kobayashi’s print of a little shrine standing in the fields outside the Yoshiwara is prescient. Looking at the print, we sense that as the new city expands, the shrine and the courtesans who patronize it, depicted at twilight with exquisite melancholy, are doomed.
So, to some extent, was the woodblock print as it was overtaken by newer western techniques of copperplate printing and lithography. Some woodblock artists, sensitized to the new influences, responded with prints depicting the encounter between Japan and the West. Kiyochika’s prints of locomotives and Yoshitoshi’s images of brick buildings, rickshaws and gas lighting brought the modern world into the floating world.
With the widespread adoption of not only western political systems and technology but also social values, institutions like the Yoshiwara and art forms like the erotic shunga became an embarrassment. Western Victorian sensibilities were appalled by the Yoshiwara, but there were others who took a lively interest in the place, recognizing its vigour.
Many writers and artists of the day lived in the contiguous districts of Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi, within walking distance of Tokyo University and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Along with Tenshin, Natsumi Soseki had a house in Yanaka, where he wrote two of his most popular novels, I Am a Cat and Botchan. Mori Ogai had lived in the same house some years before, moving to a more permanent residence in nearby Sendagi. Kafu visited the house, noting the kind of austere good taste one would expect from a disciplined master of Ogai’s rank: “Save for the hanging and vase in the alcove, the room was quite bare... In the middle of it was a desk, again bare, actually more like a table, a single board with four legs and no drawers, and no ornamentation.”
Nature and Nostalgia
Despite creeping industrialization, human interaction with nature and seasonal change survived within the sinews of the city. The muddy back alleys that froze in winter, resonating with the sound of geta (wooden clogs), became steamy passages of fermenting heat in the summer. In eulogizing beauty and mood, writers preferred to associate the season with floral aromas and women faintly damp with perspiration than with the pungent smells of decay. At the high point of summer, notorious then as now for its stifling humidity, a mid-year celebration called chugen took place during which temples placed their priceless treasures in the sunshine, airing them in an effort to protect them against insects and mould. This was often the only chance for ordinary people to view exquisite works of art often kept in the dark recesses of the temple.
Writers could find inspiration in the lotuses at Tameike Pond, under the cherry blossoms at Asukayama, along the embankments of Mukojima and in countless other places. In Kawaguchi Matsutaro’s novel Mistress Oriku: Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse, the main character recalls: “You know, you could drop a line in the river from the garden of my place and catch a sea bass. The tide brought them all the way up here. In summer you could jump in from the jetty - people didn’t swim so much as just cool off in it. That shows you how clean the Sumida river was back then.”
Teahouses along the river served as venues for the powerful and wealthy, hosting statesmen, business elites and the new industrialists. Restaurants and teahouses also played a central role in the cultural life of the city, developing carefully nurtured affinities with the world of Kabuki actors, bunraku puppet masters, koto performers, the better-off gidayu chanters and the idly elegant.
In Kawaguchi’s novel, a series of linked stories based on the real life proprietress of the teahouse, her reputation for mature beauty and generosity earns her many admirers among the young, gifted but inexperienced men of the entertainment world who petition her to manage their sexual initiation, a practice apparently quite common at the time. A true daughter of Edo, Oriku embodies the values of a former age. Devoted to her business and customers, kind-hearted and discreet, she exemplifies the true qualities of Edo that the author implies had become increasingly rare by the Meiji era.
By the late years of Meiji an exquisite culture of taste, embodied in the teahouses and cherry trees that lined the embankments of Mukojima, a place of tranquillity and spiritual refreshment, was still possible despite the new smokestacks and spillage from coal barges. Egrets stood in the shallow water of rice paddies abutting the nearby Mimeguri shrine, redfooted gulls floated on the waters between the ferry crossings. The devout continued to make pilgrimages here to the shrines of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, and poets gathered for meetings at the Hyakka-en Garden, but the effects of encroaching industrialization were obvious. The haiku poet Kikakudo Kiichi, who had managed to live in near blissful seclusion like an Edo-period aesthete in a nook of land near the shrine, soon found his one-floor home swallowed up by a factory.
In Kawaguchi’s tale, a grim future devoid of the beauty and finer aesthetics associated with Mukojima is not foretold in the tea leaves, but in the appearance of a shoe factory whose owner buys up land next to the teahouse. Nearby jetties are soon requisitioned for industrial cargos, and a new bathhouse and inn beside Chomei-ji temple sticks up a dazzlingly vulgar sign. “It’s what happens when people abuse the invention of electric lighting,” Oriku muses as she passes the advertisement: “They say something invented means something destroyed, and it’s true. I dare say electric lighting will destroy the beauty of Mukojima.” Dependent for their livelihood on the views of the river and of embankments synonymous with the works of poets and woodblock artists of a previous age, Oriku rightly surmises the situation: “Once the scenery’s gone, we’re through.”
The artists and literati who were drawn to the area were gradually displaced by wealthy businessmen and politicians who built villas along the river. “After the flood of early August 1910,” Kafu wrote, “almost everyone departed... In the changing times since, as the outskirts of the city have moved on, the cherry trees along the river embankment have died one by one.” The ever-vigilant Kafu noted the changes with a moist eye and dry pen in his 1909 short story The Peony Garden. Kafu’s Sumida is a lightning rod for the changes being carried out in the name of progress. The story begins promisingly, with a gentleman of the old school and his geisha companion hiring a boat to view the peonies at Honjo, east of the river. Here is Kafu’s trance writing at its best in the narrator’s spellbound description of the scene:
The rich green of the Kanda Canal in the rising tide shone like a freshly polished sheet of glass, catching the sun as it sank into the grove of the Kanda Shrine. At the mouth of the canal where barges and little boats were collecting, the waters of the Sumida spread before us, the more radiant for the depth of the scene. Along the measured lines of the stone embankments, straggly willows waved in the breeze, quiet and languorous beyond description.
As they pass beneath Ryogoku Bridge, “the sky descended to cap the mouth of the river, the smoke from the factories spiralled upward.” Arriving at the garden they find that “even the blossoms that had not lost all of their petals were faded badly, their hearts black and gaping... Are these the Honjo peonies? Are these all?” the narrator’s companion asks disconsolately. The district of Honjo where the garden stood for so long is now, in keeping with the plaintive tone struck by the story, an area of small sheet metal factories and used car dumps.
The writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa spent much of his childhood in the watery lowlands of Honjo. Recalling in an essay how his father had seen the apparition of a fox spirit in the form of a young warrior, driving it away with his sword, the writer conveys a strong sense of the loneliness of the area before industrialization.
Corpses made the strongest impression on me in stories I heard of old Honjo, corpses of those who had fallen by the wayside, or hanged themselves, or otherwise disposed of themselves. A corpse would be discovered and put in a cask, and the cask wrapped in straw matting, and set out upon the moors with a w
hite lantern to watch over it... And how is it now? A mass of utility poles and shacks, all jammed in together.
Edo and Meiji-period literature, as this passage attests, paid a great deal of attention to locale, something that is less important to today’s writers. Yet lovers of language and literature will even now find themselves intrigued by the urban geography of Tokyo, where so many streets have hidden meanings and allusions implanted in their names. Because it is not possible to experience the city in its entirety, it must be explored street by street, district by district in an episodic manner, which may be the reason it provided such a promising structure for fiction. Little remains today of the physical fabric of late Meiji Tokyo, but in the profoundly nostalgic descriptive novels of writers like Kafu and Tayama Katai, we can not only follow the social trends of the age, but sample its tastes and moods.
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 17