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

by Stephen Mansfield

  It was not long before the Japanese, observing MacArthur’s imperial manner and almost ritualistic public appearances, were calling him, with a touch of reproof but mostly awe, the “blue-eyed shogun”. Tellingly, the general had installed himself along with his staff in the Dai-ichi Insurance Building, just across the moat from the Imperial Palace, earning him another epithet from the Japanese: “the emperor outside the moat”. The term SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) was to refer to both MacArthur himself and his bureaucracy. The building that served as its headquarters has been remodelled in recent years, but still stands, MacArthur’s office and furnishings left untouched. The spot became quite well known over the coming years as the building stood near the Hibiya Crossing, an intersection with the palace moat on one side, the entrance to Hibiya Park on the other. The crossing was a landmark of sorts, with two uniformed policemen directing the little traffic that existed in those days. One of the policemen was Japanese, the other American. They appeared to move in perfect synchronization, choreographed as if designed for each other, but looking closely one would notice that the Japanese officer was carefully watching out for the next move from his American counterpart before following suit. Things would be like this for some time in Japan.

  Censoring Culture

  In SCAP’s estimation the Japanese soul was infested with obscurantist values and misconceived notions of loyalty, many of these ideas promulgated in the arts and culture. In the light of Japan’s recent history, culture itself would have to be re-examined and remodelled. Dower has described the occupation as a “neocolonial military dictatorship”, a crusade by Christian zealots.

  Unlike Germany, this vanquished enemy represented an exotic, alien society to its conquerors: non-white, non-Western, non-Christian. Yellow, Asian, pagan Japan, supine and vulnerable, provoked an ethnocentric missionary zeal inconceivable vis-à-vis Germany.

  The Kabuki theatre, with its suicide scenes and loyal samurai retainers, was regarded as a malign medieval remnant. Plays were banned or heavily censored. These included the classic Chushingura, which was accused of glorifying the feudal-martial mentality that had put Japan on the road to war. Samurai films were completely banned. In 1946 a performer on the Tokyo vaudeville stage sang a song containing the lines, “Everybody is talking about democracy. But how can we have a democracy with two emperors?” Getting wind of the show, SCAP quickly moved to ban the song. Satirical cartoons questioning occupation policies were forbidden. Newspaper articles, books and documentary films on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were strictly banned, as were the many less than edifying stories of rape and prostitution involving GIs. As a symbol of Shinto worship, Mount Fuji was singled out as another negative cultural symbol. SCAP could hardly have the sacred mountain removed, but it could excise its image from Japanese films, which it proceeded to do. At the same time as these measures were being introduced and the Japanese were being lectured on the benefits of free speech, civic rights and women’s suffrage, any criticism or even mention of censorship was itself censored. As Dower observes: “The overall censorship operation eventually came to entail extensive checklists for taboo subjects, and in the best Orwellian manner these taboos included any public acknowledgment of the existence of censorship.”

  A similar list of prohibited subjects was drawn up for filmmakers. As none of these short-lived strictures could begin to compare with the restrictions of the years under Japanese militarism, few people voiced serious complaints. Although the occupying forces practised their own form of strict censorship, to their credit they set about abolishing the more irksome Board of Censors, releasing writers and Marxist intellectuals from prison. Rule by fiat may have hinted at white supremacism over a vanquished race, but it is difficult to imagine how, given the age and circumstances, it could have been much different.

  Many modernist writers, former avant-garde poets and proponents of radical change in the arts tried to conceal their wartime collaborationist activities with the militarists, or transform their work into something more appropriate for the times. Many showed a remarkable facility in adapting, causing one Japanese artist, Uchida Iwao, to comment, “Those who just a month ago disavowed culture, and wanted to organize attack battalions on our own soil are now going around yelling about culture, culture.”

  A committee of leftist Japanese critics and writers, as self-righteous as any of the fascist censors who had preceded them, began compiling a list of “literary war criminals”. Ono Masuji, the central character in Ishiguro Kazuo’s novel An Artist of the Floating World, is a painter who specializes in scenes from Tokyo’s demi-monde. With the rise of nationalism in the 1930s, he becomes an official artist, turning out propagandist work that wins him several prestigious awards. Wandering through the ruined districts of the post-war city, he belatedly ponders the futility of imperialism. Willing to atone but without the means to do so, he encounters unrepentant former colleagues who are relieved to see that the Americans, satisfied with token trials of the more conspicuously guilty, have little interest in probing down to the lower ranks. In the “June, 1950” chapter of the novel, a former acquaintance speaks his mind:

  “Army officers, politicians, businessmen,” Matsuda said. “They’ve all been blamed for what happened to this country. But as for the likes of us, Ono, our contribution was always marginal. No one cares now what the likes of you and me once did. They look at us and see only two old men with their sticks.”

  Fujita Tsuguharu was an artist whose reputation in Japan never really recovered from his enthusiastic support for the military government. Although nothing came of it, and in the event no artists were ever indicted, there was talk of him being classified a war criminal because of his wartime propaganda works. SCAP eventually got round to confiscating 153 Japanese war paintings, a fraction of the real number produced, which were then shipped back to the US, where they stayed out of the news for a few decades. The paintings were eventually sent back to Japan on “permanent loan” after pressure from the Japanese for their return. In 1977 Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, where the paintings were stored, planned to hold a large exhibition of the works, but cancelled the show at the last minute. The official reason given was that the paintings would provoke criticism from Asian nations under former Japanese occupation, but a likely concern was the reaction from the divided ranks of the Japanese themselves. Though single paintings occasionally appear in exhibitions, the collection remains in the museum in Ueno Park, away from public view.

  Through the ministries of MacArthur, who regarded Hirohito as essential to the stability of post-war Japan, the emperor had been spared from trial and possible execution for the very real part he had played in the war. Right from the start of the occupation, Brigadier Bonner Fellers also went against the prevailing mood for punishment and revenge, counselling the victors that “Hanging of the Emperor to them [the Japanese] would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us.” Their view prevailed.

  A few days after surrendering to the Allies, the emperor had expressed his unrepentant position in a short allegorical waka:

  Under the heavy snow of winter,

  The pine tree bends,

  But does not break,

  Or change its colour.

  People should be like this.

  If the emperor managed to evade both the noose and the judgment of his own amnesia-prone subjects, others were appalled at the collective memory loss descending on the country. In Osaragi Jiro’s aggrieved novel The Journey, an examination of the impact of the American occupation on Japan, a character remarks on the subject of war guilt and responsibility:

  “I can think of quite a few people who could do with a bit of shock treatment. To begin with, all the members of the Diet and the Cabinet - those fellows certainly need it once in their lives... they must be made to remember that there’s such a thing as shame in this world. They’re all suffering from chronic amnesia.”

  People could not bear to be reminded of the war, and
yet there were reminders wherever they looked. In 1946 and the following year 800,000 repatriated troops flowed into Tokyo alone, where as visible proof of Japan’s defeat and shame they were coldly received. Many of the men who returned were in worse shape than they should have been. MacArthur had pressed for a swift repatriation of soldiers after Japan’s broken army was dissolved. Britain, eager to exploit the troops as cheap conscript labour, refused. The sting of humiliation over Japan’s easy victories against British forces at the beginning of the war, and the appalling treatment of British POWs were still fresh in the mind. With the tables turned, the British treated their Japanese captives as barely human. Living on only half the stipulated prisoner-of-war diet and forced in many cases to kneel and beg for their food, almost 9,000 of them died from malnutrition or from untreated diseases. The last to return from “Operation Nipoff”, as the prolonged detention was spitefully called, did not arrive home until 1948. Among those who returned many were maimed, ending up on the street as beggars wearing their tattered military fatigues. The occupiers may have been trying to cheer the populace up, but the sight of former Imperial Army soldiers dressed in white, clutching their begging bowls outside stations with speakers blaring American boogie-woogie, was profoundly shaming.

  Among the Ruins

  The Japanese paid a high price for their military adventures in Asia. With the fabric of the city blown apart, living conditions were deplorable. Children, many of them orphaned, lived in the ruins, in train stations or under overpasses, making out as best they could by selling newspapers, recycling goods, shining shoes, dealing in illegal food coupons or working as pickpockets and beggars. Abandoned dogs, with a newly acquired taste for human flesh, ran in packs at night through the city like wolves. Rats and crows found rich pickings among the ruins. The use of rivers and canals as toilets exacerbated the incidence of typhus and cholera.

  Aerial views of Tokyo at the time show mainline stations and major river bridges mostly intact, but all the surrounding areas are wasteland. Even the American personnel seeing the city for the first time, were shocked at the extent of the destruction. Russell Brines, the first foreign journalist to enter the incinerated city, noted how everything had been flattened: “Only thumbs stood up from the flatlands - the chimneys of bathhouses, heavy house safes and an occasional stout building with heavy iron shutters.” The bathhouses had been targeted because American bombers mistook them for small factories. The American translator Edward Seidensticker, recalling the Tokyo of the 1940s, remembered some of the old Tokugawa tombs in Ueno, covered in weeds and neglected, but easily accessible if one was prepared to clamber over broken down fences. “All by myself,” he wrote, “I spent hours exploring the graves, and melancholy testimonial they were to the evanescence of glory. They were very beautiful, with the especial beauty of ruinous monuments.”

  The ruination was corroborated by Donald Richie, who wrote in his journals:

  February 28, 1947, Winter - cold, crisp, clear - and Fuji stands sharp on the horizon, growing purple, then indigo in the fading light. I stand at the main crossing on the Ginza, nothing between me and the mountain. It is clear because there is no smoke, few factories, no fumes because the few cars are charcoal-burning, Fuji looks much as it must have for Hokusai and Hiroshige... And it is dark, this Ginza which had once been a fountain of light. Now it is lit only by the passing headlights of Occupation jeeps and trucks, and the acetylene torches in the night stalls.

  Bombed and incinerated areas along the Sumida river

  Standing at this main crossing of the Ginza, where the curving Hattori Building had miraculously been spared, Richie reveals a documentary eye for detail. The open panels in the walls of the city, blown away by showers of ordinance, would soon close up again. Although what he saw was “a burned wasteland, a vast and blackened plain where a city had once stood,” there was already a hint of renewal in the air, “the yellow sheen of new wood” between the few brick and stone buildings that remained standing.

  In the shuffling, traumatized crowds, something was beginning to stir. The charred bodies had been removed and the living were coming back to re-inhabit the city. Richie walked through a world where the past was up for grabs, streets in which, perhaps with more relief than regret, an entire way of life - or at least its outer forms - was being auctioned off. In wonderfully drawn vignettes, the young Richie observes “the products of a dead civilization” laid across tables and stalls: “There were wartime medals and egret feather tiaras... bridles and bits and damascene cufflinks. There were old brocades and pieces of calligraphy, battered woodblock prints and old framed photographs.” In a city where the division between the urban and rural, between street and paddy, had been temporarily dissolved, Richie glimpsed the oddest of sights, “braces of oxen on the Ginza”.

  The old entertainment quarter of Asakusa was gradually getting back on its feet. Braving Allied occupation signs reading “NO FRATERNIZATION WITH THE INDIGENOUS PERSONNEL”, Richie, in an essay for Time magazine, recalled taking the Ginza line subway to its terminus in Asakusa, surfacing “into this sexy stratum, redolent of oysters over rice and camellia hair oil, cotton candy and underarm sweat.” The observation tower at the top of the subway restaurant tower building provided him with a full view of the flattened city. (The building had replaced the taller twelve-storey Ryounkaku after it snapped in half during the 1923 earthquake.) Finding himself in the company of Kawabata Yasunari, Richie seems to have experienced an affinity of feeling with the older writer about “a place that allowed anonymity, freedom, where life flowed on no matter what, where you could pick up pleasure, and where small rooms with paper flowers were rented by the hour.”

  It was still possible to find reminders of pre-war Tokyo, relics of an older culture. In the immediate post-war period Asakusa still had its street traders, soothsayers, hypnotists, mountebanks selling potions made from preserved vipers, and one straight-faced gent offering to sell an angel in a glass bell jar. Among purveyors of the mystical were spokesmen for the new religious cults that were springing up from the ruined city.

  The speed with which Asakusa rebuilt its entertainment district was remarkable. The need for novelties, escapist performances and titillation within a theatrical context produced among other phenomena tightrope strip shows, and the mildly erotic Onna Kengeki (“women’s swordplay”) dramas. Asakusa’s two ponds were filled in, the iconic Senso-ji temple rebuilt. Asakusa’s archery galleries ceased to exist, but the old licensed quarters of the Yoshiwara, Shinagawa, Shinjuku and Susaki prospered in the post-war years.

  Open soliciting took place in the park and on the riverbanks of Asakusa. Kafu’s story, Azuma Bridge, describes women importuning passers-by. One of the women, leaning against the railing of the bridge, evokes the beauty and forlorn sadness of the scene:

  The water was illuminated by a neon sing advertising Asahi beer that shone in the sky on the other side of the river and by the flickering lights of the unending succession of trains that ran back and forth across the Tobu railway bridge. She could clearly make out not only the figures of young men and women rowing boats they had rented, but also melon rinds and discarded geta floating amongst the refuse carried along by the current.

  While the Japanese starved, “Little America”, as the residential sections of the city that had survived the bombings to be requisitioned were known, went shopping. A steady stream of occupiers and their families could be seen entering the well-stocked PX stores. One colonel’s wife described the Japanese onlookers outside, “watching the customers come in and out, flattening their noses against the show windows, gazing in silent awe at the display of merchandise: the souvenirs, candy bars, cameras, milkshakes, shoes, wool sweaters, silk kimonos and guaranteed curios of the Orient.”

  Japan’s overseers were probably no worse, and in many cases a good deal better, than their equivalents among the masters of the subject peoples of the European empires, but SCAP staff’s privileged existence and absolute authority over the defea
ted must have been provocative in the extreme. George Kennan, a vocal detractor of SCAP policies, wrote that the Americans in Tokyo were indulging in “everything that smacks of comfort, elegance or luxury” and that the wives of MacArthur’s staff were behaving as if the sole purpose of the war was to furnish them with “six Japanese butlers with the divisional insignia on their jackets”.

  Black Markets

  It was on the scorched wastelands encircling major railway stations that, in the first months of stunned defeat, demobbed men and displaced persons would come and, spreading a towel, newspaper or piece of cardboard on the ground, place a saucepan, iron teapot or worn kimono in the hope of finding a customer. Literal proof of the alchemy of change, of the expression “turning swords into plough shares,” could be seen in pots and pans made from ex-servicemen’s helmets and kitchen utensils forged from military issue blades.

  These were the tentative beginnings of Tokyo’s black markets. A large market, optimistically advertising itself with the slogan Hikari Wa Shinjuku Yori (Light Shining from Shinjuku), opened towards the end of August 1945. Under the circumstances, the wares displayed on the wooden crates were of a remarkable variety: electrical goods, sandals, tea, cooking oil, rice and a surprising amount of military clothing and equipment. Most of the items for sale were contraband goods spirited away from a secret stock prepared to equip and mobilize a large home defence corps in the event of invasion. With nobody apparently in charge, military depots were broken into all over the country, their goods “liberated”. By September the market had acquired over a hundred electric light bulbs, their illumination helping to dispel some of the gloom that had descended on the dark city.