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

by Stephen Mansfield

  Most of the black markets were run by underworld gangs, each with their own turf that they fiercely, sometimes violently, protected. There were Chinese and Korean operators too, men forced into serving in the Imperial Army who now found themselves classified as sankokujin, “third-country persons”. As the markets grew, so did the quality and range of their goods. Though they failed to get the markets closed down, police swoops were common. The black market at Ueno, a veritable emporium of re-tailored clothes, soap, cigarettes and kitchen utensils, is fondly remembered for its sweets. Many of the goods, originally from the PX stores, were sold to stall holders by the pan pan, prostitutes who served American forces. Dozens of stalls were set up in the warren of lanes and houses between Okachimachi and Ueno stations on the Yamanote loop line, giving rise to the name Ameya Yokocho, Confectionary Row. Many of the sweets were made from potato but satisfied the craving for sugar. Scenes of the large black market at Ikebukuro feature in Hayashi Fumiko’s 1951 novel Floating Clouds.

  Another area of prophetically lively commerce was Akihabara. Akihabara’s post-war black market developed into an area of stalls under the railway tracks, selling spare parts for radios. Stolen and recycled American provisions - everything from powdered milk and drugs to inner tubes - helped to get several new enterprises off the ground in the early post-war years. Black-market items like radios and walkie-talkies were assiduously cannibalized for their parts, often by near-destitute students from the Kanda-Hongo university quarter who found building radios a more profitable sideline than selling matches and peanuts on street corners. Rajio Kaikan is the site where the original spare parts salesmen were housed after their operation became too sprawling for the streets. Provision was made in 1951 for dealings to take place under the tracks of the Sobu line.

  If the black markets provided desperate, enterprising and occasionally unscrupulous men with a way of making ends meet, the post-war phenomenon most strongly associated with the activities of women on the margins of Tokyo life were the so-called pan pan girls. The etymology of the name is obscure, but may refer to a South Pacific island term for available women picked up by American servicemen. There was nothing new about Japanese women consorting with foreigners for gain. Financial arrangements had been made in the mid-nineteenth century for certain women to become the mistresses or temporary “wives” of foreigners living in the treaty ports, and near the foreign settlement in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district a licensed pleasure quarter, exclusively for the use of westerners, had been set up. Yet what struck people as new and shocking about the pan pan was their frankness, even defiance of social conventions, which dictated that paid sexual relations should be conducted discreetly. The sight of the heavily made-up pan pan smoking on street corners beneath railway overpasses at stations like Yurakucho, or even worse, the sight of these women hanging from the arm of their swaggering GI partners, constituted a painful affront to male national pride. In his book Meeting with Japan (1959), Fosco Maraini witnessed the reaction to “the shameless pan pan, painted like harridans, with huge heels and misshapen legs, who shout, smoke, spit, chew gum, and call out ‘Hey, Johnnie!’ to passers-by.” An even greater affront in the eyes of some Japanese was the habit of some GIs of tossing their used condoms into the waters of the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace, where the emperor resided. The offending objects were removed once a week with the aid of a large wire scoop.

  While the pan pan girls were generally treated with contempt by society, others were attracted by their brazen sexuality and open-mindedness, recognizing a modern counterpart to the women of the old pleasure quarters whom Saikaku and others had written about. In a magazine interview on the topic of the newly democratized Japan, the well-known scholar and critic Tatsuno Takashi went so far as to suggest that pan pan were the most liberal elements in contemporary society, the people who best “transcended racial and international prejudice.” Inevitably, the pan pan entered into the literature of the time.

  The Decadents

  In conditions like these, men and women with barely enough food to eat drank themselves into oblivion. When it came to profit, the black marketers had few scruples about selling concoctions that were near lethal. One particularly vicious blend was a mixture of artificial sweetening and an alcohol base stolen or otherwise acquired from aircrafts, where it was used as an engine lubricant. Not much better was kasutori shochu, a truly repellent drink that left most people comatose by the third glass. Those who made a regular habit of it risked blindness.

  This was the drink of choice among a group of young artists, writers and barfly intelligentsia who were making a virtue, even a movement, out of nihilism and degeneracy. With the endorsement of some genuinely talented figures, kasutori bunka (kasutori culture), centred around erotic entertainment, pulp fiction, sleazy bars and clubs, could seem like an authentic counter-culture. Embracing the world of black marketers and pan pan, it was wilfully nihilistic and iconoclastic,

  More talented writers, while affecting an air of fashionable nihilism in both their work and lifestyle, fused moral decay and eroticism with the idea of ascendant individualism and the repudiation of traditional, authorial values. In On Decadence, a highly influential, passionately argued essay published in the spring of 1946, Sakaguchi Ango drew a parallel between the unreality of the war years and the post-war experience, seeing the former as a baptism of fire, the latter as an intensification of a degeneracy that, forced to breaking point, might yield hope. Dismantling three sacred icons at once, Ango asked:

  Could we not say that the kamikaze hero was a mere illusion, and that human history begins from the point where he takes to black-marketeering? That the widow as devoted apostle is mere illusion, and that human history begins from the moment when the image of a new face enters her breast? And perhaps the emperor too is no more than illusion, and the emperor’s true history begins from the point where he becomes an ordinary human.

  In Sakaguchi’s view, the Japanese had gone along with the war because it offered them the rare comfort of not having to think for themselves. Another writer who epitomized the kasutori culture was Tamura Taijiro, a former foot soldier in the Imperial Army, who confronted his disillusionment with the war years in a series of novels and essays extolling the physical reality of the individual over the dangerous abstractions of the militarists. The best-known of these novels of exploratory debauchery was Gate of Flesh. Published in 1947, it portrays the lives and ethics of streetwalkers living in the wrecked dockyards of the Sumida.

  The relative freedom of expression enjoyed by writers under the occupation was tempered by a sense of dislocation and unease most clearly embodied in the work of these so-called burai-ha or “dissolutes”. The burai-ha, viewing the world as an existential void in much the same way as their less emotional French counterparts Sartre and Camus struck out against what they saw as the double standards, duplicity and self-illusions of the age, the ill-fitting, hybrid values promulgated by the occupation authorities and their Japanese counterparts.

  The most notorious representative of this new school of literary louche, a past master of self-cultivated neurosis and carefully affected dissoluteness, was Dazai Osamu. Born into a wealthy landowning family in Aomori prefecture, in 1930 Dazai entered Tokyo University, where he involved himself in the left-wing student movement, a means to atone for the privileged social position in which he was born. Like his fellow literary aspirant, Sakaguchi Ango, Dazai had affected the life of a literary vagabond in the pre-war city. His descent to the lower depths of Tokyo life, the suicide and double-suicide attempts, the hospitalization to recover from self-poisoning, his troubled first marriage and subsequent divorce from a geisha all provided him with the raw material for books like the 1935 Retrogression and the collection of linked novels, Eight Views of Tokyo, which would gain him literary recognition.

  Dazai’s characters, much like the writer himself, attempt to reignite the efforts of the late Meijiand Taisho-period proletarian writers to secure, as Dazai put it, “an
admission ticket for the rooms of the people.” From the start of 1947 through to 1948 Dazai wrote with an extraordinary passion and clarity. The Setting Sun, Villon’s Wife, Cherry and No Longer Human were produced during this short period. In The Setting Sun, Dazai tells the story of an aristocratic family’s decline in the post-war years. The family scion, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the author himself, declares:

  “I wanted to become coarse, to be strong - no, brutal. I thought that was the only way I could qualify myself as a ‘friend of the people.’ Liquor was not enough. I was perpetually prey to a terrible dizziness. That was why I had no choice but to take drugs. I had to forget my family. I had to oppose my father’s blood.”

  Few works capture the mood of demoralization and dream with as much accuracy as this novel. Dazai’s trademark instability together with drug and alcohol addiction led to four pre-war attempts at suicide. In one tragically botched attempt with a barmaid, she perished while he survived to shame his family and despise himself even more. Dazai made his personal demons work for him in a series of deeply flawed but brilliant works, until inevitably, they overpowered him. His fifth attempt at self-destruction in 1948, a double suicide with another mistress, involved tying themselves together with a kimono sash, then plunging into the Setagaya reservoir at the edge of Tokyo. A successful suicide, it terminated his life at the age of thirty-nine and left behind a wife and three children. His illegitimate daughter, Tsushima Yoko, born a year before his death, is a wellknown fiction writer living in Tokyo. The romantic self-annihilation of these writers still resonates with the Japanese. There would be more suicides of writers to come in later decades. The “terrible dizziness” experienced by Dazai’s characters captured one of many complex post-war moods. That theories of decadence and hedonism could co-exist with lingering malnutrition was one of the more disturbing paradoxes of the time.

  Kafu addressed the moral decline, the dog-eat-dog attitudes all too easily justified by necessity, in one of his last stories, The Scavengers. Scouring the countryside outside Tokyo for food, two women manage to exchange towels and shoes with a farmer for rice. Overcome by the heat and exertion, the older woman dies. Making sure she is not observed, her companion robs the corpse and, once over the next hill, sells the rice at a good profit to another scavenger.

  Disinclined to continue living in the post-war era, Kawabata Yasunari declared in a short essay in November, 1945: “I have the strong, unavoidable feeling that my life is already at an end. For me there is only the solitary return to the mountains and rivers of the past. From this point on, as one already dead, I intend to write only of the poor beauty of Japan, not a line else.” Most of his best work would appear in the following decades, as would the Nobel Prize for Literature. The desire for death would also be satisfied, but not until 1972.

  Pulp Culture

  On the premise that the opposite of war is not, as one poet put it, peace but civilization, Tokyo set about remaking itself into a city of culture. After ten years of repression and silence, imprisoned writers, along with those who had gone into hiding, began pouring into Tokyo, renewing old ties, writing with a new fury, founding dozens of new publications. Pin-up magazines, pulp fiction and strip shows were part of the new culture. Pulp fiction revived the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsensical) fad associated with the 1920s and early 1930s. Kasutori zasshi (kasutori magazines) with titles like Buinasu (Venus), Oru Ryoki (All Bizarre) and Neoriberaru (Neo-liberal) were quick to exploit the urge towards rebellion and carnality and to provide the escapist illusion that authority had been abolished once and for all.

  The big hit of 1948, the year Dazai’s alcohol-sodden body was retrieved from the Tama river reservoir, was a jazz ditty by the name of “Tokyo Boogie Woogie”:

  Tokyo Boogie-Woogie

  Rhythm. Wowie Wowie.

  My heart goes pit-a-pat. Tick-a-tack.

  A song of the world. A happy song.

  Tokyo Boogie-Woogie.

  It was like the 1920s all over again. So was the re-emergence in the coffee shops and university campuses of Marxism and the politics of the left. An older school of established writers, the bunkajin or “people of culture”, notably Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu and Tanizaki Junichiro, novelists who had withdrawn into dignified, largely unmolested silence during the war years, choosing to neither actively resist nor endorse the military, resumed working as if nothing had happened.

  Their main theme, the primacy of the individual, was well suited to the times, though Kafu’s continued peregrinations through the twice-razed, increasingly modernizing neighbourhoods to the east of Tokyo were a doomed search for traces of Edo and Meiji culture. Contenting himself with graveyards, mouldering tombs and carved deities, Kafu has a character in one of his later stories comment, “A certain cemetery in Minowa, north of Asakusa, was about to be moved, and there were tombstones that I desperately wanted to have pictures of before they disappeared.” Offsetting the prevailing nihilism and the unexamined embrace of all things western were themes springing from the rediscovery of Japanese culture. Two postwar works in particular, Osaragi Jiro’s Homecoming and Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles, are outstanding examples of this counter-tendency.

  Despite a paper shortage (a flourishing black-market commodity) publishing went into overdrive in the immediate post-war years. Over a thousand books, many of them serious, well-considered works by authors who had been suppressed during the war years, appeared even before the end of 1945. Given the shortages, this was a remarkable achievement. Magazines in particular were sold out as soon as they appeared. It was a common sight in those days to see book retailers pressing into the offices of popular publishers with rucksacks on their backs filled with vegetables and other foods, commodities needed to supplement cash. The market was insatiable. As the writer Nakamura Mitsuo put it: “People were hungry for art and culture as much as they were for food. As they ate meat, fish or anything so long as it was palatable, anything that looked like literature or had the form of literature was satisfactory for healing the dissolute mind.”

  Publishers responded to the thirst for words by bringing out everything from translations of foreign writers to trenchant critical journals, books and essays promoting left-wing ideologies, and cheesy pulp magazines. “What a race of readers the Japanese are!” Edmund Blunden wrote after a visit at this time to the bookshop district of Jimbocho: “it is almost a national vice, this appetite for printed matter.” A photo taken by a photographer with the Asahi Shinbun newspaper in July 1947 supports this view. The image depicts a long line of customers sleeping outside the Iwanami bookstore in the Kanda district, patiently waiting to buy copies of the collected works of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro. The queue, which had begun forming three days before the publication date, grew to over two hundred people.

  Ten years later, Edward Seidensticker could portray a fully awakened city, a pullulating urban mass with little to offer in the way of beauty but steeped in atmosphere, a place where the newcomer:

  ... must walk the streets until he sees for himself. The roar about him is not just the roar of trains and taxicabs. It is also the roar of sinews and blood. A good Buddhist, in the days when the species survived, might have described Tokyo as smelling of meat; Walt Whitman might have said that it had the fine, clean smell of armpits. Tokyo is a stewing mass of people, and there are no beautiful, dead surfaces to distract one from the vitality once it is known.

  Many foreign writers without Seidensticker’s more nuanced view of Japan continued to fixate on its more exotic aspects. Even Arthur Koestler, on a visit to “Lotus land”, described his first sensation of the country as evoking “an atmosphere with an erotic flicker like the crisp sparks from a comb drawn through a woman’s hair.”

  Razing the Yoshiwara

  That old affliction, the need for western approval, resurfaced in the preOlympic years (Tokyo was chosen in 1958 to host the 1964 Games of the XVIII Olympiad). One of the first items coming in for a publi
c drubbing was the old Yoshiwara pleasure quarter. The Yoshiwara of the print masters and poets had long vanished. The elegant old teahouses, where a certain amount of protocol was maintained, had been replaced with ersatz western confections, forerunners of some of the more fanciful love hotels that appeared in the 1960s. The soft glow of red and orange lanterns had given way to neon signs advertising beer, jazz and girls. A tourist could go there to buy a table napkin decorated with an Utamaru print or a teacup with a quote from Saikaku. Laws were introduced in 1949 to abolish the quarter. A counter-campaign was launched to preserve the Yoshiwara, but it was too late. As the sentimental Koestler put it: “Old guard sensualists fought in rage and bitterness to save the Yoshiwara... For nine years the old guard, the ancient rakes, the men with memories of better times and wilder joys fought the government. But puritanism had come in with TV, coke and stretch pants.”

  With the official outlawing of prostitution on April Fool’s Day 1958, the Yoshiwara breathed its last. Naturally, the law itself was toothless, having little effect on the profession itself, with the more marketable women of the Yoshiwara simply relocating to hostess bars, night clubs, massage parlours and other water trade venues - places that were unlikely to leave much of a cultural legacy or be celebrated in art or literature.