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

by Stephen Mansfield

  I have such antipathy toward the institution of marriage I cannot even bear the names husband and wife.

  Not to marry is all the more natural since marriage prescribes unfavourable claims and duties to the woman.

  In her autobiography, she wrote that “my aversion to authority has lasted to this day, and will probably stay with me until the end of my life.” Her organization was also known as the Hongo Group as the offices of her publication were located in the Hongo area, a popular district for writers and artists.

  Spurred on by women like Hiratsuka, the True New Women’s Society was formed in nearby Hakusan in 1913. There were other women whose mere existence exacerbated anxieties over gender issues and modernity. In her Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, Phyllis Birnbaum profiles five outstanding Japanese women, all connected in some way with the arts. Each of these women came of age during a period in Japan when the concept of women’s rights was first being aired. Matsui Sumako, Japan’s first western-style actress, caused great excitement with her electrifying performances of self-possessed, individualistic women. Living a private life much the same as the characters she played on stage, this talented actress, much to the delight of the media, caused one scandal after another. It is more difficult writing about the complex life of Takamura Chieko, a painter who ended her days in a Tokyo sanatorium and is best known in Japan as the subject of a collection of love poems entitled Chieko’s Sky, written by her husband, the sculptor and poet Takamura Kotaro. Birnbaum re-examines the couple’s relationship and questions whether Kotaro really helped to liberate his wife, or destroyed her talent with the demands of his own ego. Yanagiwara Byakuren, a minor aristocrat forced by her family into marriage with the wealthy owner of a coalmine, is known in Japan for throwing both her husband and the country into a storm with the publication of a letter in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper informing him of her intention to file for divorce. The fact that Yanagiwara also happened to be a gifted poet and stunning beauty assured her a place among this rich group of highly individual Japanese women. Uno Chiyo, another of Birnbaum’s subjects, passed away in 1996. Celebrated for her passionate private life and semi-autobiographical novels and stories, she seems to have lived exactly the sort of life that best suited her, blithely ignoring most of the advice of friends and family.

  Art and Experiment

  Many of these new ideas and the climate of intellectual freedom they helped to create came from abroad. Strindberg, Proust, Eliot and Rilke were enthusiastically read in translation. In an early example of the Japanese love of compounds, students from the better institutions, thirsty for new ideas, talked passionately of “DeKanSho”, standing for Descartes, Kant and Schopenhauer. Russian novels and German philosophy were discussed in the “milk bars” of Ginza where earnest young people came to be known - as yet without too much of a censorial tone - as Marx boys and Marx girls. One could become acquainted with the works of Goethe, Carlyle, Baudelaire or even Lao-tze by reading their books in translation, by attending the People’s English Academy and the Athenée Français or by attending lectures at the Liberty English Academy in Kanda. The Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore visited Tokyo in 1916, casting a spell over all who met him. The future Nobel laureate formed views still worth pondering:

  The Japanese do not waste their energy in useless screaming and quarrelling, and because there is no waste of energy, it is not found wanting when required. This calmness and fortitude of body and mind is part of their national self-realization.

  The Literary Society was formed in 1909, training actors for performances of modern plays. Hamlet was performed in 1910 and Ibsen’s far more contentious A Doll’s House a year later. Audiences paid keen attention to the contents of plays by the likes of Maeterlinck and Hauptmann staged at Tokyo’s New Theatre.

  The actress Matsui Sumako was synonymous with the experimentation and daring of the new age. A survivor of two unhappy marriages, Matsui’s portrayal of Nora in the Japanese version of A Doll’s House embodied the new woman. Passionately discussed in magazines and the popular press, her role as Nora as well as her refusal to comply with the notion of marriage and male authority as sacrosanct constituted a troubling challenge to Meiji patriarchy. Matsui rose to fame as one of the founding members of the Geijutsu-za (Art Theatre), which was largely responsible for bringing western plays to Tokyo and the provinces. In her personal life she provided a parallel script to her acting. Barely surviving the opprobrium of the early years of Taisho, a woman like Matsui could not have existed in early Meiji. Her performance in Salome had been compared with that of the slightly older actress and early exponent of western theatre, Sadayakko. After Sadayakko and Matsui actresses became a permanent fixture in the modern Japanese theatre. Her final affair, with her theatre director, the playwright Hogetsu Shimamura, a married man who had abandoned his family to move in with the actress, ended when he unexpectedly died from influenza. Intense to the end, Matsui went backstage to the prop room after starring in the opening performance of Carmen, carefully applied her make-up, then hanged herself with a kimono sash. Her death has often been interpreted as symbolic of the conflict between the aspirations of the age and the social realities underlying them.

  Images in Paint and Print

  Nihonga was both traditional and modern. Its aim was to reassert a Japanese identity through the recovery of its cultural past. To that end traditional genres and subjects were reinstated in the newer context of a more westernized Taisho Japan. Close to the spirit of the nihonga artists, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro advocated a retrieval of Japan’s lost past and the creation of Taisho values more in keeping with an unassailably Japanese rather than western culture. These ideas were distilled into his influential book Restoring the Idols.

  Within the nihonga school itself, Okakura Kakuzo, an advocate of the classical heritage and Buddhism, also emphasized the need for individual self-expression and innovation in art, a view shared by other late Meiji and Taisho cultural figures like Soseki Natsume and the sculptor Takamura Kotaro. Although western techniques were incorporated into this new style, artists were mainly interested in creating subjects that would reaffirm and renew beleaguered Japanese values. The conjunction of orthodox and progressive tendencies is evident in much Japanese art of this time. Like Edo-period woodblock prints, the themes in nihonga are often taken from everyday life.

  Haunted by the sensual images and idealizations of both the Edo and Meiji periods, Taisho artists added deliberate touches of modernity to their binjinga, or “beautiful women” subjects: a casually held cigarette, a cocktail glass, a microphone stand, jazz dancers and bobbed hair. Taken in the socio-political context, the images are striking. The women in these prints have a physicality denied them by the more diaphanous, winsome treatment of the classic bijinga practitioners. Likewise, the vivid colour schemes are more assertive.

  The subjects engage in a modern dialogue, one in which women were beginning to question society, and society to question women. While some artists chose themes that would aid their retreat into the past, others opted to eschew depictions of women sitting pensive before their mirrors or appraising their cosmetics in favour of subjects playing golf, stepping out of automobiles, or - unthinkable a decade earlier - staring back squarely at the artist. The impact at the time of these apparently minor innovations cannot be overstated.

  Aesthetic innovation, political dissidence and the so-called “new women” were symptomatic of unprecedented enlightenment in the arts and society that characterized the few short years of Taisho and which met with equal measures of approval and opprobrium. The appearance of fashionably clad women in public, the compelling vogue for western habits and objects, aroused intense interest but also anxiety. As far as such things suggested privilege, this was acceptable, but implied independence was frowned upon. Rural elements in particular were severely critical of the social changes.

  The Taisho period witnessed a vogue in everything from enka songbooks and new textil
e art to glassware, art deco furniture and ceramic figurines, reflecting the changing tastes and social aspirations of the times. The sudden popularity of ceramic dolls, often modelled on paintings of Japanese actresses and socialites, demonstrated the increasingly commercial character of society, with department stores emerging as unlikely venues for exhibitions.

  The period also saw the emergence of a new mass, popular culture. Advances in communication, public transport, education, publishing and journalism, all parts of what was essentially an urban culture, were nowhere more in evidence than in Tokyo. Much of the cultural activity of the period was propelled by the wealth of the narikin, the nouveaux riches who had risen economically during the First World War. This newly empowered class was small, but helped to fill the gaping chasm between the working class and the unimaginable wealth of industrial oligarchs. With Japan on the side of the Allies during the war, its economy flourished as it took on the role of supplying goods that Europe’s factories, focusing almost entirely on war production, were unable to manufacture. The same would happen again in the early 1950s and through the 1960s and 1970s as a lucrative procurement industry grew with the Korean and Vietnam wars.

  The downside of the war, however, was that it created runaway inflation, which in turn led to riots over the price of rice. The rioting spread to Tokyo in mid-August 1918, when a well supported and initially peaceful rally took place in Hibiya Park. After predictably heavy-handed police methods, violence, looting and arson ensued and the rioters, now in the thousands, took their anger out on the police boxes and shop fronts of Nihonbashi, Kyobashi, Ginza and Shimbashi. A second wave of rioters, a crowd of roughly twenty thousand, closed in on Ueno and the Yoshiwara, inflicting more damage on the already declining fortunes of the pleasure quarter, where 69 houses were damaged. The riots brought about the downfall of the prime minister and also the formation of a government based on political parties. This turn of events symbolized for many people the beginnings of what became known as Taisho democracy.

  With mass movements and mass production came mass consumerism, turning culture into a commodity available to almost everyone. What emerged was a modern “cultural life”, one that continues to be at the heart of Japanese life today. The word bunkateki (“cultural”) was now indiscriminately used to describe everything from “cultural cafés” and “cultural houses” to “cultural shampoo”. Besides the large-scale expositions held in public parks, the new exhibition halls of culture were no longer restricted to the museum and gallery, but included that most “cultural” of Taishoperiod institutions - the department store.

  Though there were other flagships stores in Tokyo like Takashimaya and Shirokiya, Mitsukoshi had the greatest impact on the new urban consumer. Its first exhibition of paintings by the artist Ogata Korin had already been held in 1904. Three years later it established a permanent art gallery for both viewing and purchasing paintings and crafts by modern artists. Display windows and an in-house consumer magazine helped to promote its image as a conduit for art and literature. Art exhibitions and poster design competitions were part of its scheme for attracting and providing support to new talent.

  With the proliferation of venues where one could eat, shop and seek cultural enlightenment, demand grew for stronger elements within the entertainment provided by magazines and floor shows. A taste for “the erotic, the grotesque and nonsense,” truncated to ero-guro-nansensu, became the norm in even the most literary of magazines. Appropriated from late Edoperiod literature, ero stood for the erotic taken to excess, though it also stood for the vitality and colour of the age; guro designated the deformations of the time, the beggars and homeless of a grotesquely depressed social order; while nansensu denoted the vaudeville-like fantasies, the political farces and mass consumerism built on the vagaries and uncertainties of capitalism. The three words combined and applied in real life represented an attack on orthodoxies.

  If the Meiji era had been defined by nation building and the love of a good slogan like wakon yosai (“Japanese spirit, western awareness”), the Taisho period was characterized by the names of a number of art and literary movements. The New Print Group, one such movement, was active at this time. Under their rallying motto “Prints are for the masses,” their dominant theme was the transformation of Tokyo in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1923, and the life of the Low City, the districts of the shitamachi. The work of Shimizu Masahiro, a doctor in downtown Tamanoi, stands out for its focus on the ordinary lives of people in the Arakawa river districts.

  Thousands of people crowded every week into the new department stores and public museums, stimulating artists to further experimentation. After the formation of the Japan Communist Party in 1922 proletarian posters strikingly similar to Russian socialist art began to appear. As the period moved to its denouement, the year 1925 saw a gathering of avantgarde artists under the banner of the Third Section Plastic Arts Association, a bold event featuring what must have struck many passers-by as a hideous apparition, the “Gate Tower” construction in Ueno Park. One evening newspaper ran a photo of the construction, made from salvaged waste materials, and its main creator, Okada Tatsuo, dressed in nothing more than a loincloth, with the headline “Naked and imitating a carpenter while glared at by the police.” A partially visible section of an agitprop poster next to the structure reads: “the chains which bind ourselves... our own power... the workers... through workers’ unions.” Art and politics were about to engage.

  Kafu’s Tokyo

  The rapid physical changes to the city were noted in memoirs, city guides, gazettes and individual works of literature. Expressive of the intense sense of place that characterizes writers of the period, they provide a mass of observation and detail. This is how we know, for example, that not far from where the poet Basho lived, at the junction of the Sumida River and Onagi Canal, a fine old pine tree, gnarled but strong, survived until precisely 1909.

  During the Edo period the Onagi served as an important route for the transportation of grain, rice, salt, and fertilizer made from pulverized fish to the storehouses of Nihonbashi and Fukagawa. By the early Taisho period steam-powered boats were beginning to use the waterway, polluting a river where boatmen lived with their families aboard ageing vessels. The feudal mansions and expansive gardens that lined the river had now been superseded by steel and flour mills, textile factories and gasworks whose belching chimneys could be seen for miles around. Writers like Shimazaki Toson and Tayama Katai, admirers of the natural features of the city, watched the transformation of their favourite spots with a mixture of fascination and unease. “The groves of trees I had known have all been cut to the ground,” Tayama wrote in 1916: “the view of Meijirodai from the Suwa grove was once pleasant enough, but now large two-storied houses have been built.”

  Not everyone shared these sentiments, particularly when the subject was the development of more urban areas. Writing about Shinjuku, a former charcoal dealers’ district close to the stockyards of Shinjuku station, Soma Aizo, the owner of the western-style Nakamura Bakery, noted in his memoirs: “In those days Shinjuku looked so miserable that there is nowhere to compare with it now. As for any notion of rustic suburban charm, it could not have looked drearier, and if you walked just a little way back, you would come upon open-air latrines.” Better-class restaurants, fruit and clothes shops were to follow, clearing away most of the soot and grime from Shinjuku.

  Nagai Kafu was among the first writers to mourn the loss of greenery and the bad air contaminating the city’s once pastoral byways. By this time Kafu, a leading figure of the literary avant-garde known for his attempts to create a modern, western-style novel, had already begun to cultivate the persona of a latter-day Edo-period litterateur. It was typical of the writer that, at the moment the Taisho age was embracing everything new and novel, he should turn to nostalgia for a pre-modern age. In lamenting the passing of Meiji, Kafu, a master of threnodies suffused with remembrance of things past, was doing precisely the same thing he did during t
he latter years of Meiji, when he had written with longing about the Edo period. A contrarian by nature, he was a writer who took pains to remain outside the mainstream. When he did align himself with a movement, as when he associated himself with Mori Ogai and the anti-Naturalists, his position stood against the dominant trend of the times.

  Gazing down at the arches of Asakusa’s Azuma Bridge today, it is not difficult to imagine the ghost of Kafu, his slim figure shimmying over the oily water in trademark beret and horn-rimmed glasses. When he was alive the novelist was the unrivalled chronicler of the Tokyo demi-monde, a world that hardly exists now, but which can be strongly sensed from time to time by those familiar with the geography of his work.

  Many of his perambulations around the old town were as much of a sexual nature as a literary one, although in Kafu’s work the two pursuits intersected with remarkable success. If at times he saw himself as a gentleman scholar, it was the sort known as bunjin: intellectual but pleasure-seeking dilettantes accomplished, as Kafu was himself, in an assortment of minor arts that had flourished during the Edo period. It was a breed just as likely to be seen frequenting the gaggle of expensive teahouses at the mouth of the Kanda canal as the downtown machiai, or houses of assignation, for which certain parts of Tokyo were notorious.

  Kafu generally preferred the company of women to that of men. For all its talk of progress and modernization, the Meiji Tokyo in which he was brought up was run almost exclusively by the male reformers, moralizers and meddlers whom Kafu saw as the worst despoilers of an older, more graceful city. What Kafu seems to have detested was the contemporary equation of civilization with modernization, much of it in the writer’s view reckless. Even in his tirades against the architects of the new order, or the advent of the streetcar - a conveyance he nevertheless made liberal use of in his tireless explorations of Tokyo - Kafu was never a very stern moralizer. The main character of his story Quiet Rain is despondent that the young geisha he has set up in an elegant quarter of Akasaka is more interested in attending the movies in Asakusa or in meeting her friends at the Mitsukoshi department store than she is in perfecting her shamisen technique, and it is with sad but tolerant resignation that he laments that the younger generation “can read newspaper serials but not old novels” whose cursive styles are beyond them.