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

by Stephen Mansfield

  Asakusa spun like a kaleidoscopic orb, not always in the best of taste but guaranteed to dazzle. For Tanizaki it was a place that had everything. Two years later he was still singing the praises of the district with its intermingling of “innumerable classes of visitor and types of entertainment, and its constant and peerless richness preserved even as it furiously changes.” The crowds and distractions, the sexually charged air enjoyed by both men and women, the nearby river lit by ferries and barges and the bustling pedestrian streets created a night scene akin to a Venetian masquerade. A character in another of Tanizaki’s works, a short story entitled The Secret, suggests the possibilities of Asakusa at the dawn of the Taisho period, as it symbolizes the shift in the urban milieu from conservative social strictures to transgressive hedonism:

  Changing my costume every night so as not to be noticed, I plunged into the crowd in Asakusa Park... I enjoyed using a false beard, a mole, or a birthmark to alter my features. But one night, at a second-hand clothing shop... I saw a woman’s lined kimono with a delicate check pattern against a blue ground, and was seized with a desire to try it on.

  Hollywood was also a part of the Asakusa mix, with the faces of Claudette Colbert, Douglas Fairbanks and Lionel Barrymore hanging alongside huge billboards depicting samurai dramas with popular Japanese actors. Even the Marx Brothers had a place of honour in Asakusa, though a later film, Duck Soup, when it was released, was changed to I Am a Duck, an appropriation of Soseki Natsume’s popular novel, I Am a Cat. There was a resurgent Japanese cinema too, and in Asakusa customers might have enjoyed a screening of “Thomas” Kurihara’s The Lasciviousness of the Viper, or the Expressionist A Page Out of Order, for which Kawabata Yasunari wrote the screenplay. Audiences generally got value for their money. Reciters known as benshi, stars in their own right, provided the dialogue and provided embellished commentary on the action in the silent films, taking on both male and female parts. Some Asakusa picture houses even provided special effects, such as burning incense in the pits during funeral scenes.

  The area was, and remains, the home of Taishu Engeki, a very shitamachi brand of popular theatre. A ticket for these low-brow dramas, full of the verve and earthy humour associated with this area, costs little even today. The cramped and intimate playhouses in which they are staged provide the explanation for the cost. Strong plots are the order of the day, and audiences, equipped with boxed lunches and cans of beer, attend performance that re-enact the destinies of star-crossed lovers, double suicides and tales of massively bloody vengeance. Appreciation is shown from the gallery by tossing money onto the stage.

  Ginza Chic

  A tram ride to the south of Asakusa took you straight to the Ginza, its rival for the attentions of the public and another Tokyo zone that epitomized the era. Tokyo’s first subway opened in 1927, connecting Asakusa and Ueno. The mood along the Ginza had changed considerably since the final rather oppressive years of Meiji. Flapper girls in bobbed hairdos and Eton crops strolled under the willow trees of the boulevard in the company of foppish, lank-haired young men sporting bell-bottom trousers and round spectacles (roido eyeglasses) in imitation of the silent film actor Harold Lloyd.

  Popular culture was personified in the newly confident image of the “Modern Boy” and “Modern Girl”, abbreviated in spoken parlance to mobo and moga. The typical mobo was an office worker or student who affected to read the more serious western novels or, even more in tune with the radical chic of the day, Marxist literature. Long hair and western clothes were de rigueur. The tastes of his counterpart, the moga, were similar, though much to the distress of any relatives she might have in the countryside, she cut her hair short in a fashionable crop or spit-curl, or more stylishly had her hair shaped into a Marcel wave. The painter Kishida Ryusei commented on the physical transformation of the Modern Girl, aided by the new hair salons, fashion stores and cosmetic parlours, differentiating her from her Meiji-era counterpart, in a series published in 1927 for the evening edition of the newspaper Tokyo Hibi Shinbun: “The face is that of a Japanese, but it is one which skilfully endorses western-style beauty. It is certainly not something translated nor futilely imitated, as in the Europeanization of just one period before...” While the dancing, smooching and smoking of the young habitués of Tokyo café society was a clear imitation of the practices spawned by the Jazz Age in America and Europe, there were other more local influences. Working in one of the new occupations created by a modern, expanding city, the literate urban young were able to enjoy an unheard of degree of economic independence.

  The Ginza Line, Tokyo’s first subway

  The best place to spot the moga was the Ginza, which by the mid-1920s was Tokyo’s indisputable fashion centre. When they could afford to, these shocking symbols of the new age frequented cafés, cinemas and theatres. If the Modern Girl was emblematic of a new style of female eroticism obsessively covered by the press, males became besotted with the Ginza waitress, a figure closely identified with the new promiscuity. Parisian-style cafés and German beer halls, frequented by writers and journalists, sprang up, their clientele representing the worlds of entertainment and the mass media. Cafés had been a feature of the new Tokyo for several decades. The first modern-style café, opened in 1888, was probably the two-storey Ka-hi Chakan in Shitaya. The famous Café Paulista and the Café Plantan, another favourite among writers and artists, soon followed. Ordinary coffee was priced at a half-sen, café-au-lait cost two sen. Customers could avail themselves of books, magazines and even billiards. Later cafés, like the Maison Konosu, which opened in the Koami-cho district in 1910, attracted a more literary set. A year later, the painter Matsuyama Shozo opened the stylish Café Printemps in Kyobashi. Its strong roasted coffee and salon-type interior attracted writers, artists and intellectuals, creating the kind of meeting place for creative people that is sadly wanting in contemporary Tokyo.

  The Taisho café bore some resemblance to the Edo-period teahouse. The waitresses who worked in such places as the Lion Café were known, for a modest inducement, to be free with their favours. Kafu, always alert to the decadence mingled with longing that characterizes so much of his work, was a regular at the Ginza cafés and tea rooms, where the girls were as much a part of the attraction as the mugs of coffee and azuki bean cakes. On the topic of the Ginza waitresses, Kafu tells us that:

  Suddenly, from about the early twenties, they came into vogue and they held sway over the world, and along with movie actresses, took away the popularity of stage actresses. Today, however, a decade after the earthquake, the vogue of the café girls would seem to be passing. And their passing is the reason for my During the Rains.

  More accessible to people like students and housewives were the milk halls of the 1910s and 1920s, where newspapers and magazines were provided at moderate prices along with mug-sized cups of coffee. As cafés competed with each other for customers, special features and novelties were introduced. The 1920s saw the emergence of meikyoku kissaten (music coffee shops), where male customers could listen to classical music in the company of young women. Other cafés underwent more extreme commercial alchemy in the search for a theme that often turned the ordinary into the erotic, foreshadowing the popular no-panties kissaten of the 1970s and 1980s, and the “maid” and “butler” cafés of today’s Akihabara district, with their echoes of the old teahouse promiscuities of Edo. Certain types of nightclubs and dance halls provided taxi dancers for the benefit of single men.

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1923 Imperial Hotel

  Despite the self-conscious modernity, Tokyo was more of an Asian city in those days, with peddlers, mendicants and petitioners from esoteric religious sects entering cafés and circulating among the tables in a way that would be inconceivable today. In his later 1934 novel The Eight Ginza Blocks, Takeda Rintaro describes the scene as the door of a café opens:

  Everyone would look up in anticipation of a customer; but always there would be, and in considerable numbers, children selling flowers, and imitators of fa
mous actors and singers, and mendicant priests with boxes inviting contributions to the Church of Light and Darkness, and violinists, and sketchers of likenesses, and lutists, and solemn-faced young men in student uniform selling pills and potions, and, with babies tied to their backs, women selling horoscopes.

  Just around the corner in Hibiya, where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel stood, guests could take afternoon tea and munch on “Chaplin caramels”.

  Bathing in the River

  The intellectual and social vitality of the 1920s contrasting with the repressive climate of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the brevity of the Taisho experimentation represents a very real search for cultural identity, one that witnessed the advance of the women’s movement, the growth of unions and the brief flowering of Taisho democracy. Sadly, innovations in style and design together with the mood of liberalism embraced by the cultured and wealthy, the two groups best placed to appreciate the changes, were not strong enough to resist the advance of freedom-crushing militarists. The aspirations of the era were real enough, but no match for insistent militarism. As for the “new woman”, the champion of universal suffrage, she would have to go underground for a good two decades before reemerging from the rubble of defeat.

  The breakdown of social norms common under a dissolute leader had turned out to be little more than temporary. As the shadows of militarism lengthened, the fashions and tastes of a more liberal and generous age were increasingly viewed as subversive. With the military back at the helm and the new, more acquiescent Emperor Hirohito in situ from 1926, Japan reverted to a controlled society. Generals and officers were the new arbiters of taste, a fact evident even in art circles. By the late 1930s art institutions, bodies that set up and sat on their own selection committees, were reorganized to exert more state control over the art world.

  Away from the political currents that were soon to wash over everyone, an older city, closer to nature and with gentler graces was still able to stir the imagination. Architect Maki Fumihiko grew up in the Tokyo of the 1930s and recalls a city where nature could still breathe fresh life into the streets:

  In the yamanote, or “upper town,” where I lived, streets were often shadowed by big trees and were dark in the evenings. Small streets and narrow alleys were unpaved. After it rained, the smell of the earth and vegetation permeated the air.

  Life in the low-lying eastern parts of Tokyo, along the Sumida and the canals that flowed into it, could still evoke nostalgia for a former more languid age. It was no longer advisable to bathe in the river - though some families living on boathouses still did - but it was common enough to scoop up river water in buckets to make a hot bath. In Fukagawa a number of illicit gambling dens were located in old barges that also served as bathtubs, fuelled by wood salvaged from the river. The families of boatmen would come to such places for an evening soak. One account, told by a former gangland boss fallen on hard times, recalls the scene, the easy-going dalliances that defined relations between people in an age that, as the storm clouds gathered, would soon be little more than a memory:

  ... the women and children took their clothes off right in front of you before getting in. And they’d sit there soaking with their towels on their heads, watching the men play. It was summer, so the doors were left open, and you could see the moon reflected on the surface of the river.

  Houseboat life along the Sumida river

  A Time of Calamities

  1923-1945

  In the book dealer district of Kanda, the hands of the clock at the meteorological tower stopped at precisely 11.58 am on 1 September 1923, remaining frozen in shock for several weeks to come. The city had been expecting the sound of the noonday canon, which ever since 1871 had been fired regularly at that time. Instead, the earth shook with a series of violent convulsions. We know from records of the one seismograph at Tokyo University to survive the earthquake that over the next three days more than seventeen hundred shocks pounded the city.

  The earthquake, registering 7.9 on the Richter scale, struck as people were preparing lunch on gas burners and charcoal braziers; fires then raged for three continuous days. Precise figures are difficult to confirm, but at least 99,000 people were crushed and incinerated, while over ninety per cent of the downtown area and nearly 45 per cent of buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan area were razed in what quickly became known as “the Great Kanto Earthquake”. Whirlwinds of fire, several hundred feet high in some cases, engulfed the city. Compounding the destruction caused by fire were conflagrations caused by chemicals and electric wires. To the east, in Fukagawa and Honjo, the hardest hit and most densely inhabited areas of the city, 35,000 people fleeing to a nearby park with their bedding and cooking utensils perished as the flames devoured their belongings. Those who jumped into the canals were consumed by boiling waters. One man, arriving at Eitai Bridge, discovered that

  ... the whole area on the other bank, for hundreds of yards from Nihonbashi on to Asakusa, was like a roaring furnace. Looking back, we saw a cart being blown high up into the air. Bits of houses and roofs were being sucked up into the whirlwind too and were dancing about in the sky like leaves. A horse that had gone crazy was galloping about the street and finally jumped into the river.

  Among the singed walls, burnt out electrical wires, charred tin panels, dead horses and heaps of dust and ash were extraordinary sights. The film director Kurosawa Akira, then a schoolboy, was led through the carnage by his elder brother: “No corner of the landscape was free of corpses. In some places the piles of corpses formed little mountains. On top of one of these mountains sat a blackened body in the lotus position of Zen meditation.” Others saw equally bizarre sights. In her memoir of the city, My Map of Tokyo, Sata Ineko describes refugees walking along the tracks of the Keisei railway line:

  A man carried on his back the limp form of an injured Kabuki actor still wearing the red costuming of a young maiden. Hideously, the white makeup that thickly coated his face as it lay against the shoulder of the man bearing him had now taken on the appearance of a mask, suggesting that he had already breathed his last. The heavy hem of the red maiden costume was tucked up, exposing a man’s slender legs, which dangled limply beneath it.

  Elsewhere, builders in charge of restoring parts of the original Edo castle, where stones had been loosened in the quake, discovered the skeletons of men standing erect inside the walls, evidence of an ancient custom in which people were buried alive inside the foundations of bridges, river embankments and fortresses, in the belief that they would strengthen the buildings. These men, known as hito bashira (“pillar men”), were more often than not volunteers.

  As shock turned to panic, wild rumours spread through the ruined city. A story concerning the existence of an earthquake-making machine, devised by a western country for the purposes of experimenting on Japan, began to circulate in the afternoon of the first day. While there were no incidents of violence against westerners, more lethal rumours developed during the ensuing chaos that Koreans were poisoning wells. These stories were exploited by the police, who authorized radio broadcasts warning that Koreans were burning down houses, murdering inhabitants and looting. The broadcasts urged people to “use all necessary measures” to protect themselves. The rumours were groundless, but civilian vigilantes and army reservists took to the streets, massacring thousands of Koreans before the bloodletting stopped. The police took advantage of an emergency ordinance and the climate of fear and disorder they had helped to foster by ordering the mass arrest of individuals marked down as socialists, political dissidents and radicals. Pandering to the murderous rage of some of the survivors, they encouraged the mobs to seek out anarchists, polemicists and social activists. Among those beaten to death, boiled in drums of oil or drowned in the Sumida river were the trade union official, Hirasawa Keishichi, and Osugi Sakae and his wife Ito Noe, put to death by police officers in their prison cells. One young man of letters, Kikuchi Kan, expressed the prevailing mood of nihilism when he wrote, “I came to know that the
religion which teaches that there is a Being in the Universe greater than human beings who protects and reprimands men, is all nonsense... The Great Earthquake was, as a result, a social revolution. Property, status, and tradition utterly collapsed.”

  Asakusa’s brick-built Twelve Storey Tower after the earthquake

  As the winds got up, the corpses of victims tossed from the upper floors of the twelve-storey Ryounkaku bobbed eerily in the shallow water of the Gourd Pond in Asakusa Park. Kawabata Yasunari was in the district within hours of the earthquake to inspect the damage. The reinforced steel frame and girders of the brick tower held up moderately well, with the first eight of the original floors left intact, but the top storeys had collapsed into the nearby pond. Army engineers dynamited the remains the following year.

  Hundreds of geisha and prostitutes from the nearby Yoshiwara were burnt alive. Those who survived thronged the grounds of the Senso-ji temple, where the novelist found them flowing in “like a disordered field of flowers”. The writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke, whose interest in the ghoulish was well known, accompanied Kawabata on a walk through the Yoshiwara, an event recorded in an essay published in 1929: