Asakusa, that playground for the townspeople of Edo, was just across the river from Mukojima. The entertainment quarter developed a stronger, albeit sleazy, identity during the Meiji period. The indulgent climate of Asakusa found people suddenly possessed of new, liberating passions. Mori Ogai has the main character of his novel Vita Sexualis describe walking through the area around the Senso-ji temple:
Passing behind old men and women on bended knees, their bodies bent like lobsters as they muttered their incomprehensible prayers... We came out on a narrow street lined with archery shops. I was amazed to find in each of these shops a woman whose face was covered with white paint... Their eyebrows had been sketched on as high as possible, sometimes even up to the borders of their hair. Their eyes were strained open as wide as possible. Even when they talked or laughed, they tried not to move that part of the face above the nose. I wondered why the faces of these women looked as if they had been prearranged. Though I didn’t understand what I was witnessing at that time, I later learned that these faces were for sale. These were the faces of prostitutes.
Mori’s novel first appeared in serialized form in his literary magazine Subaru (The Pleiades) on 1 July 1909. The authorities, conscious of the fact that Ogai held the exalted rank of surgeon general, hesitated until the end of the month before banning the story on the grounds that it might have a harmful effect on public morals. Commenting on the decision, writer and critic Sato Haruo wrote: “Because the author treated the problem of sexual desire, the authorities considered this a novel of sexual desire.”
By now something else, more troubling than censorship, was happening in Japan. In 1895 the country had won its war with China, its subsequent annexation of Formosa a warning of incipient colonial ambitions. Even Lafcadio Hearn, who preferred the Old Japan, wrote of a “nation regenerated through war... The real birthday of New Japan - began with the conquest of China.” A patriotic fervour swept through the entire nation with these victories, whetting its thirst for more territorial expansion. Between 1904 and 1905 Japan successfully waged a war against the Russian Tsarist empire. Japan’s surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur and its campaign to drive out the Russians from Korea was a costly and protracted undertaking, but resulted in a humiliating defeat for Russia. The defeat of a massive European nation by a small Asian country established Japan as a world power to be reckoned with. In 1910 it annexed Korea.
From the Japanese perspective, however, the conditions that concluded the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 were unsatisfactory. In the view of the protesters who gathered in Hibiya Park on 5 September 1905 the government had failed in pressing its advantage, giving in to poor terms dictated by the western powers when they signed the Portsmouth Treaty of that year. The police were powerless to control the crowds, who vented their frustrated nationalism with attacks on government offices, police boxes, newspapers, the American legation and Christian churches, ten of which were destroyed. It was all part of the disturbing cross-cultural currents stirring in Tokyo in the last decade of Meiji.
An Imperial Shroud
While attending graduation day at Tokyo Imperial University on 12 July 1912, the emperor complained of tiredness and shortness of breath. He had been suffering from kidney failure and diabetes for years, refusing treatment for both. His first thorough examination revealed that he was suffering from uremic poisoning, a fatal condition in those days. As the emperor’s body was considered divine, his doctors were not permitted to administer injections.
With the news of the emperor’s declining health, crowds gathered in silent vigil in the palace plaza. Passing tramcars were slowed down and blankets, rough cloth and sacking placed over their rails to muffle the noise. A scheduled display of fireworks along the Sumida was cancelled, street festivals scaled down and great quantities of sesame seed burnt at temples throughout the city, where it was believed that the smoke exorcised evil spirits.
A little after midnight on 30 July special newspaper extras announced the death of the Meiji emperor. The same papers declared a five-day ban on music and dance. All performances at theatres and music halls were forbidden. The imperial funeral took place on 13 September. The country may have modernized itself during the years of Meiji, but when it came to ritual obsequies, tradition held sway. According to Shinto rites that went back over a thousand years, the funeral ceremony took place at night, preceded by a cortege drawn by five white oxen, escorted by bowmen and banner-bearers, and attendants bearing fans, staffs and halberds. Utility poles and windows along the route were draped in black and white to resemble ceremonial lanterns; two feet of sand was strewn on the roads to muffle the sound of the passing wheels. The main character of Oswald Wynd’s 1977 novel The Ginger Tree observes the scene:
The marchers on foot looked dressed for the Noh drama, in medieval robes with the flowing lines which said China, not Japan, all in white except for some of the head-dresses. Banners had black characters on white, fastened top and bottom to white painted bamboo poles. Elaborate though all this was it was also almost without pomp, the opposite of a state funeral circus in the West, as though here the object underlying pageantry was silence.
Following shortly upon the announcement of the death of the emperor, the nation had another momentous event to fathom: the junshi of General Nogi and his wife. Meant to express fealty, junshi was the act of suicide committed by a samurai upon the death of his master. The practice had not been much heard of since the seventeenth century, when it had been effectively outlawed. Taking up brush and ink as the practice required, the general wrote his farewell poem and then prepared the instruments of death. After helping his wife to sever her carotid artery, he then performed the most demanding form of ritual suicide, requiring a horizontal and then vertical slash to the stomach and abdomen. General Nogi appears to have accomplished the complete ritual without fainting, as his naval uniform was neatly re-buttoned when the body was found.
The death pact revealed a strong division of views among the public, some excoriating the general for belittling all the achievements of the previous decades, others seeing heroism and loyalty, a reminder of lost values. The suicides overshadowed the emperor’s funeral itself. Many newspaper readers struggled to comprehend what had taken place. Soseki Natsume expressed bewilderment when he wrote, “I had almost forgotten that there was such a thing as junshi.” Another writer of significance, the novelist Shiga Naoya, thought that Nogi was simply baka na yatsu - “an idiot”. For the majority of Japanese, the suicides tarnished the hard-earned modernity of the era, even if they would be re-honoured in the 1930s by a government more interested in martial traditions than modernity.
The general’s house is still there within the grounds of Nogi shrine, eerily preserved, the deathly atmosphere of its rooms much the same as it was in 1912. In a later age, under even more different circumstances, another general, Douglas MacArthur, planted a magnolia tree in the shrine garden in Nogi’s memory, on the spot where the couple’s bloodied clothes were buried. The house stands on Nogizaka (Nogi’s Slope), a rare instance of a road being named in honour of a person. Now a very central district of Tokyo, it appears to have been semi-rural during the general’s time - if his complaints about foxes attacking his poultry are anything to go by.
Soseki Natsumi, arguably the greatest writer of the Meiji era, majored in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University before going on to studies in London. Soseki’s central theme was the isolation and loneliness of the Japanese intellectual. Born and bred in Edo, Soseki established a pattern replicated by many writers who, initially besotted with all things foreign and contemporary, became increasingly disillusioned with outside influences, ending up more than ever traditionalist.
Soseki had stepped into Lafcadio Hearn’s shoes at Tokyo Imperial University, a difficult act to follow by all accounts, though he appears to have made a good job of it. Hearn had entered a faculty peopled by gifted but fractious students known to disrupt lectures if they were not to their taste. “
His lectures,” one student later recalled, “were revelations to us, at once poignant and lucid.” This view is corroborated by one of Hearn’s colleagues, who chanced upon his teaching one day. Opening the door and entering, he found the first two or three rows of students in tears: “I do not know what it was all about. It is a rare event for a Japanese to be in tears; even a coolie is ashamed of it, and with men of higher rank it is much more striking than it would be in England. Hearn had been reading some very simple English poem; and there was the effect.”
Soseki was never affiliated with any literary school or movement. In one of his finest works, the 1914 Kokoro, he examines the friendship between a younger and older man, the former embracing the new age, the latter witnessing the junking of much of his own culture in the rush to acquire western learning, technology and tastes. After writing a confessional letter to his young friend, the older man, referred to in the novel as Sensei or “Master”, commits suicide. The year is 1912, one marked by the death of the Meiji emperor. Sensei notes in his letter that “I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms.”
Like General Nogi, Sensei, reading a newspaper account of the suicide on the day of the emperor’s funeral, senses the passing of an irretrievable era. He resolves to commit suicide himself, an act lending itself to two interpretations: self-execution as high symbolism, or the copycat annihilation of an overwrought neurotic. In either instance, it signalled the death of a difficult age.
Taisho Style
1912-1926
As Nagai Kafu saw it, the Great Meiji Flood, the 1910 inundation that submerged almost the entire part of the lowland city to the east, and the dreadful Yoshiwara fire the following year signalled the end of a period in the life of the city. More accurately it was the death of the emperor himself, a year later, that brought about the great social shifts.
There are certain historical periods that resonate with a style that is inimitable, but easily reconstructed in fictional settings. They last for only a few intense years. The Restoration period in England, coinciding with the florid tastes and theatricality of Japan’s Genroku age, was one such period, the Belle Époque another. The Taisho era (1912-26) was another special time. During this period the authorities temporarily relaxed their hold on civil conduct, a reaction perhaps to the physically and morally corrupted state of its central symbol, the emperor.
The oppressive climate of late Meiji soon lifted as the firm manner of the former emperor passed into the limp hands of his son Yoshihito, the new Taisho emperor. Although monarchs were supposed to fill only symbolic roles as heads of state and Shinto divinities, their character and deportment might define the age. In recent years historical revisionists in Japan have tried to polish the image of the Taisho emperor, but the fact remains that he was virtually incapable of fulfilling even the simplest of ceremonial duties. Dogged by poor health, weakness of character and a reputation for drinking, womanizing and eccentric behaviour, he was said to be fond of dressing up in western-style military uniforms in the manner of Kaiser Wilhelm II and throwing extravagant parties at the ostentatious Akasaka Detached Palace. An inferior successor to his father, his conspicuous defects made a mockery of the idea that a Japanese emperor was a manifest deity. Attending a Diet session, the poor fellow is said to have rolled up an important document and used it as a telescope to observe the proceedings. Quietly removed from the public’s gaze, he was henceforth rarely seen in public. Nothing pertaining to the emperor’s condition appeared in the press, but rumours of his eccentricity and debauchery must have circulated freely. The public instinctively took advantage of an emperor sidelined by a publicly unacknowledged mental infirmity.
Overlooked until recently, this important and highly distinctive period in the arts carried political and social resonances. Fertile social unrest was fuelled by the relaxation of government surveillance and censorship, a closer questioning of social inequalities and the traditional position of women, the introduction of worker’s unions, the encouragement of big business and the long overdue development of parliamentary procedure. The writer Nitobe Inazo took up the banner of modernity when he urged a more cosmopolitan outlook, encouraging his readers to become “world citizens”.
The struggle for a modern cultural identity was one of the main themes of the era. The 1914 Taisho Exposition, though primarily aimed at promoting industry, helped to establish the independence of the new age. Its booths, including a gas-heated bathtub, the country’s first escalator and tableaux from Japan’s colonized territories of Taiwan and Korea, were staffed by Tokyo geisha. It was a major success. Even the new emperor, still able to make public appearances at this point, attended the event. Before leaving he bought a bag of jellybeans. Several pavilions at the exposition in Ueno reflected an interest in prevailing European architectural tastes and trends, such as the Viennese Secession movement and Art Nouveau. A second exposition, held in 1922, attracted seven and a half million visitors. The themes this time were modern living, the exhibits ranging from cable cars, escalators, a refrigerator and new styles of western architecture, including a reconstructed apartment house, examined with intense interest.
Magazines and Movements
The transference between Euro-American and Japanese cultures proved immensely stimulating for both the wealthy elite and the majority. Education and the growth of the press were helping to drive urbanization and mass culture. The appetite of the newly educated classes for printed matter stimulated journalism. Within just two years the literary magazine Bungei-Shinju achieved a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. All tastes were catered for, not just the highbrow, with huge initial sales of magazines like the popular King, paperback pocket books, and enpon (oneyen books).
Cover of the radical art magazine, Mavo
The pioneering magazine Hosun, first published in 1907, focused on small format prints and manga, devoting considerable space to the changing appearance of Tokyo. In 1910 the sculptor and free-style poet Takamura Kotaro published an essay in the literary magazine Subaru entitled “A Green Sun”. Its advocacy of total individualism and freedom in the arts, a complete break with the past, created quite a stir. It struck a deep chord with a group of young writers and artists who went on to publish a magazine called White Birch, arguably the most concept-forming publication of the period. The magazine featured the work of new writers like Shiga Naoya. Their work, though naive in its idealism and hopeful humanism, stood for the worship of the individual, an enormously appealing message for the young.
Satirical magazines had already appeared during the late years of Meiji. The best known, Tokyo Puck, lampooned the new fashions. The Tokyo of the 1920s saw the birth of another audacious magazine, Mavo. Inspired by Futurism and Dadaism, it attempted to turn conventional magazine methods on their head, sometimes quite literally, with whole pages of text or linocut prints appearing upside-down. Feminist literary magazines like Myojo (Morning Star), a publication devoted to poetry, and popular magazines aimed at women, such as Nyonin Geijutsu (Women’s Arts) and Fujin Koron (Women’s Forum), began to appear during these years.
Some of the most popular and emblematic images of the time were created by Takehisa Yumeji, a gifted painter and illustrator whose portraits of the “new woman” appealed to the masses. In 1914 Takehisa opened Minatoya, a Tokyo shop and café where he sold kimonos and illustrated stationery of his own design; the shop acted as a salon where artists of all stripes, particularly women, could gather.
Blue-Stocking
Another women’s magazine, the enormously influential Seito (BlueStocking), had been brought out by the group Seitosha (the Blue-Stocking Society) in 1911. Edited by Hiratsuka Raicho, the magazine, originally published as a literary journal promoting creative writing, altered course and took up the cause of women’s rights. It promoted the idea, still shocking to many outside the relatively progressive urban centres, of a “new type of woman”, independent of the
“good wife, wise mother” ideal promulgated during the Meiji era. The first issue of the magazine carried Hiratsuka’s famous proclamation:
In the beginning Woman was the Sun. She was a genuine being. Now Woman is the Moon. She lives through others and glitters through the mastery of others. She has a pallor like that of the ill. Now we must restore our hidden Sun.
This was stirring rhetoric, but in many instances, of course, the New Woman was humoured yet expected at the same time to fulfil her traditional filial duties. In cities like Tokyo, however, education (the first women’s university was established in 1918) and a fledgling feminist movement facilitated the efforts of some women to work outside the home.
In addition to their roles during the Meiji period as teachers, nurses and midwives, women began to take up posts, albeit minor ones, as clerks in government departments, typists, telephone operators and department store salesgirls. The working woman of the 1920s might be employed as an office worker, bank teller, “elevator girl”, or even in the recently unthinkable position as chauffeur, bus conductress or journalist.
The press took much delight in excoriating this new breed, but some women of advanced ideas responded by going into print themselves. Hiratsuka, who favoured cohabitation over marriage, was different in that she put theory into practice. Her writing was enough to turn the faces of the Meiji-born male an apoplectic blue, as these published samplings of her views on marriage illustrate:
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 18