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

by Stephen Mansfield

  The pond beside the Yoshiwara quarter was one of those horrible pictures of hell, which speak only to someone who has seen the real thing. The reader should imagine tens and hundreds of men and women as if boiled in a cauldron of mud. Muddy red cloth was strewn all up and down the banks, for most of the corpses were of courtesans. Smoke was rising from incense along the banks. Akutagawa stood with a handkerchief over his face.

  According to Edward Seidensticker, who quotes from the article above in his book Tokyo Rising: “The Taisho era needed a literary symbol, and Akutagawa was a good one, embodying (or so it is widely held) the sometimes neurotic refinement and intellectualism that were products of the great Meiji endeavor to encompass and catch up with the West. The common view has therefore been that his suicide, more than the death of the emperor, brought an end to an era.”

  Tokyo devastated in the Great Kanto Earthquake

  His suicide, according to another account, had been foretold by the prostitutes of Tamanoi who, turning pale as they watched the tall, thin figure passing along their narrow lanes, had whispered to each other: “A ghost, a ghost!”

  To everyone’s wonder, the great Senso-ji, or Asakusa Kannon temple, where Kawabata and Akutagawa had walked, remained intact. According to local residents, its miraculous survival was due less to divine intervention than the ministrations of a statue in its grounds of the Meiji-era Kabuki actor Danjuro. Dressed in his role as the hero of the play Shibaraku (“Just a Moment, Please”), locals were convinced that he alone held back the advancing flames.

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s just completed Imperial Hotel survived less by miracle than method. The design was based on a system of foundations that would “float” on pilings just below the earth’s stratum, preventing shocks from being directly transmitted into the building. It was not a totally original concept; there were other, older buildings in the city that had already applied the technique, and several of these also survived. Nor was the building as intact as some people have claimed. When the quake hit, the floor of the banquet hall dropped by two feet. Built near the site of the old Rokumeikan, with a lotus pond facing the main entrance, the hotel, though open to anyone who could afford it, had a similar cachet. Not everyone was enamoured of the building, though. The English writer Peter Quennell refused to join the chorus of praise, describing the structure, “built by an eccentric American architect,” as a “queer façade, its pretentious squat asymmetry recalls a modernist chest-of-drawers in stone and brick, the stone used being of a repellently porous type, pocked with large holes like a Gruyere cheese.”

  In the ensuing crisis all government ministers resigned. A former Tokyo mayor, Count Goto, was charged with the task of overseeing the reconstruction of the city. The count immediately cabled an old acquaintance, Charles A. Beard, an American civil administrator and one time advisor to New York City:

  EARTHQUAKE FIRE DESTROYED GREATER PART OF TOKYO. THOROUGH GOING RECONSTRUCTION NEEDED. PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY, IF POSSIBLE, EVEN FOR SHORT TIME.

  Beard’s reply was equally swift:

  LAY OUT NEW STREETS, FORBID BUILDING WITHOUT STREET-LINES, UNIFY RAILWAY STATIONS.

  Beard rushed to Tokyo, where he acted as advisor to the reconstruction programme. Survivors of the earthquake were eager to begin the rebuilding of the “pride of civilization”, as Tokyo had come to be referred to. Perhaps with the memory of the 1905 San Francisco disaster still within living memory, large sums of money were raised in the United States and sent to Tokyo’s stricken citizens, along with food and clothing.

  With the idea of the retributive catfish still lingering, the quake was widely interpreted as an expression of “the fury of the earth”, divine punishment for the excessive materialism of the age. Mindful of the corrupt officials, profiteers and privileged elite who seemed to be assuming control of the city, one artist, the cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten, depicted the spectral catfish on the front cover of the magazine Jiji Manga (Cartoons of contemporary events), the creature exclaiming, “Shall I shake them up one more time to really open their eyes?”

  From the physical destruction and psychological trauma came a period of reflection and, eventually, renewal. Cataclysms in Japan, natural and human, have often resulted in surges of creative activity. Like fires, earthquakes, however terrifying, have traditionally been thought of as transformative, even numinous events. Woodblock images produced after the 1855 Edo earthquake also feature the giant, retributive catfish. Living beneath the surface of Japan, the creature was believed to stir, moving its tail and causing tremors at times of spiritual, moral or social crisis. A harbinger of material and human destruction, it was also an indicator of the need for spiritual transfusion, a liberating signal containing within the immediate calamities a promise of renewal.

  Tanizaki Junichiro was in the mountains of Hakone south-west of Tokyo when the quake struck. Though fearing for his family left behind in Yokohama, he wrote: “Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. ‘Tokyo will be better for this!’ I said to myself.” Even Tanizaki’s prediction that the city would be rebuilt within ten years proved an underestimate. Tokyo’s reconstruction and recovery was complete in an astonishing seven years. Nobody, however, could have anticipated that its disaster-proof zones, new parks and generously proportioned streets would be inadequate for the populace that soon poured into the capital. And Tanizaki’s vision of “an orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming... The geometric beauty of block towering upon block” was not to be.

  No sooner had the ashes from the fires cooled than the reconstruction was underway. Tokyo and the city of Edo before it had experienced similar cycles of destruction followed by urban renewal. Department stores set up open markets, and street stalls appeared in places like Asakusa and the Ginza. There was even a popular ditty, The Reconstruction Song, to raise the spirits:

  Completely burned out. But look:

  The son of Edo has not lost his spirit.

  So soon, these rows and rows of barracks,

  And we can view the moon from our beds.

  The “barracks” referred to the prefabricated emergency housing that went up in the days after the disaster. Though the scale of the earthquake was unparalleled, stocks of lumber floating in canals to the east of the Sumida were kept in readiness for circumstances like this. The reconstruction of Tokyo also acted, ironically, as an impetus to popular culture, provisioning the city with cafés, bars and other places of entertainment and refined leisure where the new, conspicuously modern generation could gather.

  The turmoil was vividly depicted in a series of fourteen colour lithographs created by Ishikawa Shoten just one month after the disaster. The set, showing fleeing refugees, blackened buildings and people sucked into the air by cyclone-like fire twisters, was entitled a Pictorial Account of the Great Tokyo Earthquake. Prints, commemorative postcards and photographic collections marking the disaster and evoking the spectacle of poetic ruin were sold. The idea of the commercial postcard as documentary was a well established form in Japan. Photographers recorded new westernstyle buildings, trade exhibitions, railway stations, bridges, hotels, and families living on boats along the Sumida. Documenting the earthquake required a more forensic approach. It is still possible to come across postcards showing harrowing images of bodies floating in canals and ditches, or heaped into mounds that resemble Hindu funeral pyres.

  The catastrophe was the subject of several songbooks. Collections like Songs of the Great Earthquake were written and performed by enkashi, songwriters who took their material onto the streets. In Japanese costumes topped with a bowler hat, the enkashi, accompanying themselves on violin, may have looked like gypsy minstrels, but their lyrical range and scope was strongly populist. Mixing music, illustration, news and political commentary, the songbooks were a new medium, offering an interesting window onto Taisho popular culture. When the title number from Songs of the Great Earthquake was first performed on the streets of Nippori, a traditional
quarter of the city, the enkashi Soeda Tomomichi gathered a large crowd of people. In the song the earthquake, the ensuing fires and the struggles of victims to escape death are compared to Shura, the Buddhist hell.

  Though shocked at the murder of leftist supporters and friends, members of the radical magazine Mavo responded to the devastation of Tokyo with creative verve. One of their most visible acts was the decorating of barracks, the prefabricated structures put up in the days after the quake to house the homeless. Much of this barrack design consisted of socalled kanban kenchiku (“signboard architecture”) in which surfaces were painted and advertising boards for businesses created. Photographs of the two-storey Hayashi Restaurant in Hibiya show a highly expressive abstract façade that aspires to the level of public sculpture.

  Murayama Tomoyoshi was the central figure among the avant-garde artists who ran the magazine. Newly arrived from Europe, where he had been exposed to Surrealism, Futurism and Cubism, it was the work of the German Expressionists that most influenced him. In the same year that Paul Morand’s strenuously modern Ouvert la nuit was translated into Japanese, members of the Mavo committee declared their own intention of “denying things antique and inverting values.”

  Whatever traces of Edo persisted before the quake, including eastern sections of the city where much of Edo culture had sprung from, were almost totally obliterated in the quake. Another effect of the earthquake was the first diaspora of people moving from the Low City to western Tokyo and other districts deemed safer and more comfortable.

  For some, the passing of an age and its physical attributes was too much to bear. The Taisho period still had a few more good years left, but the terrors of the earthquake had reminded people once again that nothing was assured. As a consequence of losing its past, Tokyo would henceforth become a city almost entirely fixated on the present.

  Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

  Soon after the earthquake, Kawabata stepped into the editor’s seat of a new Tokyo magazine called Bungei Jidai (The Age of Literary Arts). Kawabata’s exalted aim of re-examining the human condition prompted leading critics of the day to dub his group of like-minded artists the New Perception School. He would later abandon the group and found another one, the New Art School, which brought out a very capital-centric collection of stories and urban sketches entitled Modern Tokyo Rondo.

  In Kawabata’s younger days Asakusa was held to be the apogee of everything new, “a foundry in which all the old models are regularly melted down to be cast into new ones.” Writers believed that the complexity of urban life, especially in Tokyo, could best be understood by revealing its multiform erotic and grotesque aspects. The first erotic revues were performed here as early as 1929, when the Casino Follies, on the second floor of an aquarium and next door to a museum with an extensive display of insects, put on a production typical of the ero-guro-nansunsu tastes that characterized the age. Kawabata described how the “girls of the Casino Follies passed the fishes in their tanks and turned in by a model of the sea king’s palace to go to their dressing rooms,” passing by “dusty cases of flies, beetles, butterflies, and bees” to get there.

  Kafu enjoyed lurking in these dressing areas, the green rooms of the cabarets and revues where, as a famous writer and connoisseur of the demimonde, he was well received. The best-known artists of a former age like Utamaru and Saikaku, having an entrée to the interior life of the pleasure quarters and teahouses, could portray their subjects in persuasive detail. Kafu, with a similar pass to the back stages of popular Asakusa entertainments and the dressing rooms of the Shimbashi geisha, could observe the characters of this modern floating world at close quarters.

  Asakusa’s cultural mix - the fact that there was no perceived contradiction in patronizing the operetta, a sword fight play or one of the bawdy vaudeville stages - made it possible for the literati, and anyone else who felt like it, to imagine themselves temporarily déclassé. The variety shows spawned fashions like pencilled eyebrows, sailor suits and the Eton crops that resurfaced on the street. Along with the cosmopolitan mix of fashions, imported films and foreign-style variety shows were White Russians giving revue exhibitions, dancers from Finland performing at the Teikyo Theatre, Chinese acrobats and a never-to-be-heard-of-again American woman who, dressed like a seagull, jumped from a hundred-foot ladder into a small pond.

  Women were highly visible in entertainment and shopping zones like Asakusa and Ginza, working in bars, coffee shops, go parlours, shooting galleries and the like, often offering services that exceeded their job descriptions. The great crowds in Asakusa attracted evangelists, anarchists, representatives of the workers’ movements and unions, besides a good number of shady characters. Behind the glittering amusement centres were slum quarters where at night, as the lights went on in the dance halls and the plebeian opera houses, squalid hovels could be made out in the darkness.

  Kawabata sought to create a modernist novel by merging the literary, vernacular and reportage in his hastily-written serialized work The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. This not altogether successful experiment in the synthesis of forms resulted in something like a newsreel scrapbook compilation. It does, however, capture the breathless, freebooting mood of the times, the fondness for free association, dissonance and borrowed surrealism that was an element in the new avant-garde Japanese film that Kawabata was linked to, having written the scenario for Kinugasa Teisuke’s deeply disturbing silent motion picture, A Page Out of Order, set in an insane asylum. The serialization of Kawabata’s novel in the Tokyo Asahi daily paper, following the publication in the same slot of radical Marxist Hayashi Fusao’s City Hyperbola, was typical of a practice followed by new and more established writers that had begun in the late nineteenth century, and continues to this day.

  The young writer saw Asakusa, where he briefly lodged, as a more extravagant and lurid heir to all the pleasure quarters and resorts of the Edo age, where

  ... the over-ripeness of the present era of capitalist corruption are thrown together in a forever disordered state. Or organized in a manner peculiarly like the place itself. Eroticism and frivolity and speed and comicstrip humour; the bare legs of dancing girls and jazzy reviews... Here the girls bob their hair and “bobbed-hair” so-and-so, wearing a red dress, plays the piano, deep in a narrow backstreet lane, with her knees exposed. Her rendezvous notes are scribbled on the back of the Goddess Kannon’s written oracles.

  Despite the lively patronage, Asakusa in the 1930s had more pawnshops and beggars than anywhere else in the capital. Kawabata maintained that the official figure of 800 homeless people sleeping in Asakusa Park was a gross underestimate. Exploring the grid of human existence in the early Showa-period capital, Takeda Rintaro’s novels ignored the Jazz Age excesses of Asakusa, highlighting instead the squalor and penury that stood in contrast to the modern buildings and optimism of Tokyo. Starting as a socialist publishing proletarian novels, he turned his attention in what he called his “town stories”, to the living conditions and social customs of real people living in the three-storey wooden apartments of Asakusa, or in the back lanes of Suzaki and Fukagawa that he and other novelists like him scoured for material.

  The Dark Corridor

  If the 1920s seemed to lean towards the left, the decade of the 1930s reoriented itself to the right. Idealistic civilians and young officers formed new organizations with ominous names like the Blood Brotherhood and the Cherry Blossom Society; assassination groups made it their responsibility to remove politicians and industrialists they felt were enriching themselves at the expense of the nation.

  A promising trend towards democratization was reversed as the military assumed a more dominant role in the affairs of the state. With the resurgence of militarism in the mid-1930s, the environment, whether in politics or the arts, became increasingly repressive. The economic depression, like the disasters that had followed the appearance of Perry’s black ships and the Great Kanto Earthquake, seemed further proof to many that the deities were displeased, that the time had
come for a return to the simpler, purer virtues of a different age.

  It did look as if parliamentary democracy had a sporting chance during the early Taisho period. By the late 1920s, however, a series of laws aimed at suppressing political dissent saw party politicians speaking out in favour of crackdowns on not only the radical left, but social democrats. In the place of free speech and a healthy national debate came propaganda urging national unity and emperor worship. Any lingering hopes that “Taisho democracy” as an idea might still have a future were dashed.

  A city that had been so in step with the times found itself at odds with a brisk new military rhythm. Military music gradually replaced jazz, and trumpet players who had blown their horns in Jazz Age ecstasy on the stages of Asakusa found the musical score changed, the trumpet replaced with the bugle. The marching songs of the new age went by names like “Military Spy Song” and “The Imperial Army Marches Off”. If the songs that dominated the airwaves and dance halls of the early 1930s were Japanese recordings of hits like “Sing Me a Song of Araby” and “My Blue Heaven”, by the latter part of the decade there were more edifying dirges like “The Bivouac Song” and “March of the Warships”. Lovers of ballet were reduced to productions with titles like the “Decisive Aerial Warfare Suite”.