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

by Stephen Mansfield

  Japan prepares the hardware for war

  The partygoers of Asakusa and Ginza might turn up their gramophone players a little higher when they returned home, but the jazz ditties failed to drown out the growing fear that the 1930s were turning into a decade of insurrection and political terror. By 1936 dance halls, revues and cafés were under surveillance. Even rakugo, never more than lightly scatological, attracted the attention of the Japan Arts and Culture League, a government body empowered with drawing up guidelines of acceptability even in the humble popular arts. Badgered into re-examining their stories, rakugo representatives keen to avoid the wrath of the authorities drew up a list of 53 stories that would be “voluntarily” dropped from their repertoires. A stone memorial to rakugo was erected by a group of “mourners” in the grounds of an Asakusa temple. After the war, rituals were conducted at the site to restore the 53 banned stories.

  Escapist entertainment was still sought in the ero-guru-nansensu world of dance halls and all girl revues. Even the most literary magazines of the day provided temporary oblivion from the new realities. Filmmakers continued to test permissible limits, though under more constraints than before. Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1929 Tokyo March, a leftist film that proved a box-office hit, spurred the director to make Metropolitan Symphony the same year. This film ran into more problems. On location in the shitamachi district of Fukagawa, the director, cast and crew spent much of their time avoiding the attentions of the police, who were already trying to ferret out dissidents. Mizoguchi’s team resorted to dressing as labourers and concealing their cameras under workmen’s clothes. The director had a similar experience when he took his crew to Tamanoi in 1931 to film And Yet They Go On. It was still possible as late as 1931 to explore themes of social inequality, as two films released in that year, Ozu Yasujiro’s I Was Born, But... and Naruse Mikio’s Flunky, Work Hard, proved. Both were set in the gritty Tokyo distict of Kamata. Tokyo cinemas were still able to offer escapist relief from the combined effects of the Depression and militarism. Comedies and erotic farces fitted the need for distraction. One of the decade’s big hits was a Naruse film called Uproar over the Aphrodisiac Dumpling.

  The Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the China War, which broke out in 1937, accelerated the suppression of personal freedoms in Japan, strengthened the government’s hand and brought about tighter censorship. The Tokyo newsstands soon began to offer a predictable diet of nationalist rhetoric. Women’s magazines celebrated the war effort, running profiles of war widows, battlefield narratives and pieces on how to budget on food and clothing during the emergency.

  Many nihonga painters of the period began to resurrect Japan’s ancient myths as subjects. At the same time, the Taishoand Showa-period intellectual Kuki Shuzo helped to restore the partially discredited culture of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras in his 1930 work, The Structure of Iki. Here he presented what he believed to be evidence of the uniqueness of Japanese aesthetics and spirit. Literary quality was one of the first casualties of militarism. Those who still retained enough reason to feel a profound unease with the expansionist ambitions of the military were shocked to read the anti-war poet Yosano Akiko’s new work Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song, with its recycled imagery of falling cherry blossoms, glorifying the death of young soldiers whose scattered bodies were “purer than a flower”.

  Patriotic Insurrections

  On the afternoon of 15 May 1932, a group of young naval officers stormed into the offices of the prime minister and shot him dead. Memories of police torture and the murder of anarchists and left-wing activists and sympathizers under cover of the chaos following the 1923 earthquake, the activities of the so-called Special Higher Police, the suppression of the Communist Party in 1928 and the quashing of agitprop art and art groups by 1934 must have sent a clear message that the containment of ultra-nationalism and military expansion was unlikely.

  An ill wind blew through Tokyo in the bitter winter of 1936. In the early morning of 26 February, a month that saw the heaviest snowfall for thirty years, junior Imperial Way officers went on strike. It was a day as beautiful as the one on which the 47 ronin had carried the head of Lord Kira through the snow-shrouded streets of Edo. In the attempt to take over central Tokyo, a feat accomplished by 1,400 rebel troops for a period of four days, assassins struck at key government officials including the finance minister. Prime Minister Okada narrowly escaped with his life when his brother-in-law was mistakenly murdered in his place. Okada, who promptly resigned from office after the incident, had been the leader of a government energetically promoting emperor worship and its accompanying theory of a mystical kokutai or “national essence”. The fact that his assailants wished to target him for his lack of zeal is an indication of how extreme the young renegade officers were.

  The attacks were orderly, highly focused and not without a touch of tradition. As a token of respect, the rebels burned incense beside the bodies of their victims. Emperor Hirohito, astutely seeing the coup as an attack on the central establishment that supported his own position, refused to endorse the aims of these insubordinate young officers, who made their last stand in the grounds of the Sanno Hotel near Hibiya Park. The walls and bridges that led to the palace just across from the park, symbols of imperial rule, were the setting for pseudo-samurai suicides by some of the failed officers, though most were executed by conventional means.

  Shocking as these developments were, the violence should not be exaggerated. Unlike Germany in the 1930s or the contemporary political climate in communist Russia or Kuomintang China, there were no mass atroocities in Japan. The government did not make a practice of liquidating its opponents, nor did political rivals in general assassinate each other. Dissenters remained for the most part free, restricted in their public utterances or, in the case of politicians, required to renounce office.

  Mishima Yukio glamorized the officers’ insurgency in a story, Patriotism, which appeared in 1961. Mishima portrays a double suicide, set in the upper room of a dismal rented house in the Tokyo Aoba-cho district of Yotsuya. Excluded by his closest colleagues from taking part in the uprising because of his recent marriage, loath to bear the shame of his friends being branded as traitors and afraid that he may be ordered to shoot them, an imperial army lieutenant, after a scene of protracted lovemaking, ritually disembowels himself in the room. He is followed by his wife, who thrusts a knife into her neck. The suicides are described in highly realistic detail. If the story had been published in 1936 rather than 1961, it would have undoubtedly delighted the authorities. Mishima leaves us in no doubt about where his feelings and inclinations lie when he writes, “The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep.” The writer, eager in his own words, to “restore the sword” to Japanese culture, had previously written about the event in his Voices of the Illustrious Spirits, where he stated that, “I admired the heroic posture of the rebels, their unmatched purity, their determination, their youth and their death. They seemed to be mythological heroes.” The combination of sex and death, so beloved of Mishima, reached its climax here and in the film Mishima made of the story. Casting himself in the role of the doomed officer, it may have been a dress rehearsal for his own death several years later.

  Imperial Metropolis

  The violence against politicians by fanatical army officers was reflected in the actions of the authorities themselves, as communists were arrested, left-wing sympathizers and dissenters marginalized and rigorous censorship imposed on writing that was not overtly patriotic. The government issued authors with subjects to write about that would inspire students to volunteer for military service, while the reading habits of the public were carefully monitored. Works of fiction like Kafu’s A Strange Tale from East of the River and Hayashi Fumiko’s First Journey were disliked by the authorities for their failure to address the war effort.

  Although he was never a political animal, the nationalist drift stupefied Kafu. As the nation began to revaluate its traditional
culture under the spell of an increasingly effective indoctrination campaign, Kafu was openly critical of government policy and the debased culture that was helping to create it. While the rest of the nation, with the exception of a few notable dissenters, embraced the new doctrine of Nihon kaiki or “Return to Japan”, Kafu pointedly dissociated himself from the current. Rejecting the values of the military government, he refused to cooperate with the authorities for the war period. His dissent is clear from a reading of his Dyspepsia House Days, the diary he kept from 1917 to 1959.

  Tanizaki was another passive dissenter in the field of literature, as were Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri in art, but they were few and far between. Few writers, film directors, painters or journalists hesitated in their support of the government’s push to establish its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, its scheme to spread Japanese cultural hegemony alongside the iron grip of its military. Creative people in all media rushed to praise the invincibility of the Japanese spirit, the courage of its soldiers and the need to make the Japanese language a mandatory part of school curricula in the occupied countries. Although giants of literature like Tanizaki and Kafu were mostly left to their own devices, those who actively resisted could face harassment, imprisonment, even torture.

  More wholesome than Kafu’s work, at least in the government’s view, were the war diaries written by Hino Ashihei, respectively entitled Troops among Barley, Troops on Bare Earth and Troops among Flowers. Published in 1938 and 1939, these tributes to Japan’s divine mission to free the Asian mainland from colonial rule by the European powers were instant bestsellers.

  Polar Cities

  Families brought their conscripted sons to the moated area surrounding the Imperial Palace to photograph them in their new uniforms before they were dispatched to Manchuria, and later to the Pacific war zone. Bands played military marches and flags were waved with a singularly Japanese blend of decorum and passion on 10 November 1940 when parades celebrated the 2600th anniversary of the founding of the imperial line. Rising from the imperial moat, Fushimi Tower, Nijubashi (Double Bridge) and the walls of the palace became symbols of a mystical patriotism. Passengers in trams passing along this stretch of the outer moat would rise from their seats, steady themselves and bow deeply towards the palace. Pointing cameras in the direction of the imperial residence was strictly forbidden.

  Even the architecture of the city was affected by the times, the 1938 Daiichi-Life Insurance Building reflecting in its austere, Bauhaus-style lines tastes closer to Berlin than Tokyo. The design preferences, the transplants of an earlier age, were still in evidence. The 1936 design for the second National Diet building, modelled on one of the ancient world’s seven wonders, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, was an example of the severe hybridization of many Tokyo buildings. A slightly earlier design, the Honganji temple in Tsukiji, is another striking example of architectural eclecticism. Designed by Ito Chuta in 1934, it is a curious blend of Indian, Chinese, Javanese and the prevailing Tenjika style, a Japanese Buddhist form of the Edo period. To their credit, though, both the temple and the Diet building have shown their durability. Symptomatic of the decline were more vulnerable buildings. Takami Jun wrote that by 1938 many of the best-known Asakusa venues had been abandoned, including the Casino Follies, now “in a state of advanced neglect, the subject of weird stories. Late at night, it was said, you could hear the sound of tap dancing on the roof.”

  On Halloween Night 1940 the government closed down all Tokyo dance halls and banned jazz performances. The neon lights of the Ginza were extinguished, women were forbidden to style their hair or to wear smart western clothes. In the same year daily commodities like salt, sugar and rice were rationed. The Tokyo of 1920 was poles apart from the city of 1940. Where the former was experimental, an urban laboratory of dance halls, tattoo artists, union leaders, poets and print-makers, the latter was now a stage for political assassination, censorship and summary arrest, a terror camp run by an ascendant military class.

  In the remaining days before Pearl Harbor a haunting stillness overcame the city. Martin Cruz Smith’s novel December 6 recreates the mood of those hours before catastrophe struck. Distrusted by the Japanese police, spurned by his own embassy and abandoned by friends, Smith’s main character, Harry Niles, watches as the city stiffens itself for war. Passing the inner moat of the Imperial Palace, with its fairy tale bridges “patrolled by a few guards with white-socked rifles,” he muses that even “on the eve of war, the emperor’s tranquillity was maintained. Either the palace was a sinkhole in the middle of reality, or the rest of the world was the emperor’s dream.”

  Emperor Hirohito in military uniform

  Although a small number remained open throughout the coming years of war, all the large cinemas were closed down by the spring of 1944. Travelling Kabuki troupes kept performing in front of small audiences, but the main Kabuki-za theatre was closed down. The Shimbashi Embujo fared a little better, reopening towards the end of the war. Both theatres were thoroughly gutted in air raids during the closing months of the war. Large theatres like the Nichigeki and Imperial Theatre were requisitioned for the production of incendiary balloons. One of the more harmless failures of the Japanese military, the balloons were supposed to float across the Pacific, igniting firestorms over American cities.

  If geisha establishments were required to close by eleven, they were not completely shut down until the spring of 1944. The patronage of the civil bureaucracy, police and military may explain their reluctance to close them down. Individual geisha houses, affiliated with branches of a power structure riddled with mutual mistrust and suspicion, served in their traditional role as disseminators of information, intelligence and carelessly uttered confidences.

  Kafu, savouring one of the city’s last chorus line shows, described the backstage scene at the Asakusa Opera in The Decoration, one of his last stories, written in 1942. What first caught the eye, he noted:

  ... was not the violent jumble of colours, or even the faces of the girls as they sprawled about on the floor and then sat up again. It was the powerful flesh of the arms and legs... it called to mind the earthen hallway of a florist’s shop, where a litter of torn-off petals and withering leaves is left unswept and trampled into shapelessness.

  Most of the dance hall girls and other members of the entertainment quarters, including geisha, would soon be coerced into working in factories to support the war effort. Kafu’s story centres on the figure of an old man who earns a little money bringing the girls their food. Boasting of his military record in the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, he is asked to bring in one of the medals that he won. The girls get him to pose for a photograph dressed in a military stage uniform. When the image is developed, it is seen that the medal appears on the right-hand pocket of the uniform, not the left. To “make things seem in order,” the photographer reverses the negative. Kafu’s commentary on the manipulation of truth and the emptiness at the core of militarism was not published until 1946.

  The Wasteland

  If Britain had painted its colonies dark red on the world map, Japan’s chosen colour was a lighter, bloodier version. As China was sliced open, the stain spread. In early 1942, at the height of its expansion, Dai Nippon Teikoku, the Great Japanese Empire, had its foot soldiers planted at all points across the Asian compass, from the northern Aleutian Islands to Southeast Asia, from interior China to the islands of the mid-Pacific. It was to be the briefest of empires, the optimism a delirium soon referred to by the Japanese themselves as “victory disease”. Overstretched resources and a far more powerful America meant that Japan’s holy war, predicated on the notion of an invincible, emperor-centred national polity, was doomed from the very onset, though such was the public’s euphoria that few had the vision to see that.

  Only six months after Pearl Harbor, the country suffered its first major defeat in the Battle of Midway. A year later, with the annihilation of its forces on Attu Island, in the Aleutian Archipelago, the by now increasingly irrational mili
tary high command began using the term gyokusai, an ancient Chinese word with the literal meaning of “a jewel shatters,” but with the applied sense of “dying gallantly” rather than surviving ignominiously.

  The first US aerial attack on Tokyo, an experiment in long-range bombardment, was carried out in April 1942, a warning of worse to come. With the destruction of munitions factories no longer the main priority, attention was turned to heavily populated areas of major cities. Mock-ups of Japanese houses were built at Florida’s Elgin airbase, where they were subjected to attack by incendiary bombs. While the results were considered adequate, a more realistic test was considered necessary before major air raids could be made on civilian areas. On 25 February 1943, just before 3p.m. on a snowy afternoon, 130 bombers took off for a trial raid on Tokyo. In all, 25,000 buildings were destroyed and several hundred people killed, a result that was deemed satisfactory.

  B-29 Super Fortresses under the command of the cigar-chomping Major General Curtis E. Le May, were loaded with incendiaries aimed at destroying tightly packed residential areas of Tokyo. Unnerving the capital and weakening the resolve of the government to continue a hopeless war by causing heavy damage and loss of life were the main purposes of the coming raids. The attacks were also intended to shatter the morale of the Japanese, their faith in leaders who had led them to the brink of disaster.

  Robert Guillain, correspondent for Le Monde, captured the mood in the days before the storm: