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

by Stephen Mansfield

  For the indentured women of the Yoshiwara, those whom the moats and walls were meant to keep in, the reforms intended to liberate them were in any case too late. Jokan-ji, a sad little temple in the district of Minowa, not far from the old site of the Yoshiwara, is also known by the name Nagekomi Temple. Nagekomi means “thrown away”; it was here that women who died in the Yoshiwara were, quite literally, tossed over the walls of the temple for the priests to cremate and dispose of in unmarked graves. J. E. de Becker, in his exhaustive 1899 study of the Yoshiwara, The Nightless City, gives us a memorable account of the temple:

  Here the whole surface of the earth is damp and humid, and a dismal grave-like smell of mouldy earth pervades the locality. Probably the sunshine has never penetrated to this spot for centuries. The dead leaves of the e-no-ki trees have been allowed to lie as they have fallen year after year, so they have piled up, crumbled, mouldered, and rotted on the dark ground, and from the purulent mildewed soil have sprung into being myriads of weird uncanny poisonous toadstools and foul fungi fearful and horrid in shape and strangely ghastly in colour. Ah! what a desolate uncanny appearance the place has! Persons visiting it soon experience a deep sense of commiseration and sympathy, and feel as if they had entered a chilly under-ground vault. In this gloomy dismal place lie the bones of the courtesan who only up to yesterday resembled a beautiful butterfly or lovely blossom when seen in all the glory of her gorgeous apparel, with her glossy black hair ornamented with gold and her snowy-white body clad in rich brocade robes now exchanged for the cerements of death.

  It is still a lugubrious place, the air smelling of incense and mildew. Kafu’s wish was to be buried here in an ignominious plot beside the decaying headstones of the Yoshiwara women, but it was not to be. When death came in 1959, his brother, always a stickler for the social proprieties, had his ashes interred in a plot alongside those of his parents in Zoshigaya cemetery. He did at least get his way with the inscription on the headstone, which reads: “The Grave of Kafu the Scribbler”. He was far more than just a scribbler, and unquestionably knew as much himself. There is a small stone marker to Kafu though, in front of the memorial to the women who were disposed of at Jokan-ji. It contains his false teeth and one of his writing brushes.

  A Film View of the City

  In the 1950s and 1960s, the coffee shops and bars of Shinjuku emerged as the centre for a new type of intellectual life, one grounded in the literature and cinema of the day. The Chikyu-za was the first cinema in Japan to start showing European and Russian films. By this time the Japanese were once again making their own films. Rather than resorting to a dictated or imported style, this was an indigenous school of cinema.

  Earlier films, like Naruse’s 1935 Wife, Be Like a Rose, and Mizoguchi’s even older White Threads of the Cascade, contain interesting location shots tracing Tokyo’s changing skyline. Kurosawa’s early post-war films are bleakly realistic and ironic studies. No Regrets For Our Youth, a political film released in 1946, concerns the persecution of liberals in the repressive early 1930s; Wonderful Sunday, which appeared the next year, follows two young lovers through the bombed ruins of Tokyo; his Stray Dog (1949) has the great Japanese actor Mifune playing a detective searching through the grimmer parts of Ueno and Asakusa for his stolen pistol. Imai Tadashi’s 1951 And Yet We Live was also shot in the vicinity of Ueno Station, using hidden cameras and a crew who blended in with real crowds and street scenes. Gosho Heinosuke’s Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953) looks at the creeping industrialization along the banks of the Sumida river.

  Films concentrating on the plight of women were also common. Naruse’s Mother (1952) depicts the life of a young widow in a depressed suburb of Tokyo. Mizoguchi’s semi-documentary Red Light District is a sympathetic look at the world of the Tokyo prostitute on the eve of the ineffectual banning of that trade. A widowed daughter-in-law turns out to be the most sympathetic character in Ozu Yasujiro’s 1953 classic, Tokyo Story, when elderly parents visit their children, only to find them too busy with their new lives to take care of them.

  Oshima Nagisa’s film, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, was made in the 1960s. The dimly lit bars and jazz coffee shops that sprouted up in the almost bohemian milieu of Shinjuku epitomized Japan’s version of the alternative culture of the 1960s, attracting a lively mix of radical students, novelists, poets and experimental playwrights like Kara Juro, Terayama Shuji and Suzuki Tadashi. Among the circles of writers were beatniks, hippies and Vietnam-bound draftees in the US army, and a few deserters too. A centre of free love and art movements, the district also attracted its fair share of ruffians, drug peddlers and yakuza - Tokyo’s violent mafia connected to the black market.

  Growth and Resurgence

  Remnants of the feudal city, at least the parts that had survived the bombings, could still be glimpsed a decade or so after the war. Architect Charlotte Perriand described Tokyo at the time of her visit as a compress of ancient looking wooden buildings in the shadows of new colossi: “Tokyo 1956: modern buildings, small glass and cement fortresses, one after the other, housing the most unbelievable complexes: railway stations, metro, department stores, restaurants, theaters. At their feet a city of eight million inhabitants built from paper and wood.”

  All of that was about to change, though not everyone had the prescience to see it. In 1957 the respected Japan scholar and future US ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer, gloomily observed, “The economic situation in Japan may be so fundamentally unsound that no policies, no matter how wise, can save her from slow economic starvation and all the concomitant political and social ills that situation would produce.” How utterly wrong he was. Japan was already moving towards an economic resurgence that would astonish the world. By the beginning of the 1960s, its GNP was the fifth largest in the world. By the end of the same decade it was second only to that of the United States. On 27 December 1960 Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato initiated an ambitious tenyear plan to double incomes by the end of the decade. The target was reached in just seven years.

  Japan’s rapid post-war progress is often dated from the Korean War (1950-53), when the country benefited from a massive procurement trade, producing goods for American military forces. The infusion of funds from the Korean and later Vietnam War, when Japan once again became a supply depot and staging post for US forces, spurred investment in industrial plants and equipment and boosted Japan’s confidence in competing in the international marketplace. In a supreme irony, Japan’s former, very recent enemy, was now providing the country with a flood of contracts to supply goods for new Asian wars.

  Exogenous events like the Korean War may have stimulated the economy, but the roots of the economic miracle were in the Meiji era, when the country began a massive industrialization programme, one that was largely destroyed in the Second World War. That programme was driven by similar factors to those of the post-war revival: an ability to adapt and innovate, a thirst for progress, determination to catch up and surpass the West, a skilled labour pool, prodigious amounts of hard work, astute planning and a long tradition of entrepreneurship. Tokyo, the ideal engine for the economic resurgence, had always been a thoroughly commercial city. The Victorian traveller Isabella Bird noted the fact with some distaste when she wrote in 1880 that “a bald materialism is its highest creed and material gain its goal.”

  Tokyo Olympiad

  In 1964 Tokyo invited the world to come and take a look at the new Japan. The year of the Olympic Games was to be Japan’s annus mirabilis, its reentry into the international community as a fully functioning democracy.

  It also provided another economic turning point. A staggering eighty per cent of expenditure on the Olympics went on public works projects. Most visible were the complex overhead system of expressways, the expanded subways, gigantic apartment blocks, gleaming new hotels and the city’s plans for skyscrapers. On 1 October of the Olympic year, the new “bullet train”, the world’s fastest, left Tokyo Station for the 300-mile trip to Osaka. Joining a long list of rousing sloga
ns and refrains dating back to the previous century came a new one, freshly minted for the times: “Prosperity in Peace Time”.

  The area facing Omotesando-dori, the “Outer Approach Road” to Meiji Shrine had been requisitioned by the occupation forces after the war and turned into housing quarters for military personnel and their families. The site remained in US hands after the occupation ended in 1952. The land the barracks stood on, renamed “Washington Heights”, was now handed back to the Japanese government after Tokyo was selected as the host city for the games. The barracks were turned into a temporary village for athletes. Author Norma Field recalls in one of her books that in the decade or two before the transfer, “there was a scary spot under a set of train tracks where Japanese veterans dressed in white and chained to a wall played accordions and thrust out tin cups on a hook.” The same tracks would soon run alongside the concrete pavilions of the Olympic structures.

  Ichikawa Kon’s documentary Tokyo Olympiad, scripted by the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro, was a visual masterpiece that failed to impress the Olympic Organizing Board, which seems to have had something grander and more heroic in mind. In the uncut version of Ichikawa’s film, the camera pans across the faces of the spectators, capturing not only the victories of the Japanese participants, but also the human moments of exhaustion and defeat. Sadly, many scenes from what Donald Richie has described as “the most beautiful, attentive, and moving sports film ever made,” have never been publicly screened.

  The foreign media declared the games an unconditional success, however, some going as far as saying they were the best organized Olympics in living memory. In addition to the flawless organization, was the impressive Olympic architecture. The location for the Nippon Budokan, venue for the martial arts events, close to the great stonewalls and moats of the Imperial Palace, reinforced the link between tradition and modernity. Constructed of ferro-concrete and steel, the octagonal floor plan, with a roof and orb similar to a sumo wrestler’s topknot, were designed to evoke the wooden Hall of Dreams, part of Horyu-ji Temple near the ancient city of Nara.

  The standout designs, however, were the work of Tange Kenzo. The architect’s National Yoyogi Sport Centre, sweeping and curving tent-like rooflines of tensile steel, won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1967, reinforcing the pride of the Japanese, for whom the Olympics were a celebration of Japan’s democratic revival. The postwar period of humiliation and poverty was finally over.

  Remodelling Tokyo

  The fever of construction leading up the Olympics remodelled the city almost beyond recognition. Disinterred from their graves in the already much reduced grounds of Zojo-ji, the embalmed bodies of the Togugawa shoguns were examined and probed by historians and scientists before being reburied in a much smaller graveyard behind the temple. The original tombs stood in the way of development and plans to build a new hotel, golf club and the construction in 1958 of Tokyo Tower, built for the purpose of transmitting radio and television signals. The seizing of temple land by the authorities, begun in the Meiji era, resumed in earnest in the post-war period. In Tanizaki’s final novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961), the narrator muses:

  The bones of my grandmother and grandfather have been disturbed twice: once when their temple was moved from Fukagawa to Asakusa because the whole neighbourhood had become industrial, and again, after the temple burned down in the great earthquake, to the Tama Cemetery. So graves in Tokyo have to be constantly shifted to escape destruction.

  Dozens of new hotels followed, including the super-modern Hotel New Otani. The spacious new hotels were, quite literally, eating into the past. The Australian writer Hal Porter revisited in 1967, remarking on how

  ... the authorities of Hie Shrine have sold an area of their rocks and moss and elderly gingko trees to the Hilton. I learn that this has become a common practice. Other gigantic structures, the Tokyo Prince Hotel and the Tokyo Tower for example, now occupy former shrine grounds once forlorn with lichened torii (shrine gateways), gangling stone lanterns, and raven-sullied cryptomerias gloomy as Pluto.

  Wooden stalls were removed from the streets, new subways and a monorail built and a terminal for the world’s fastest train system constructed. The utilitarian concrete buildings and drab cookie-cutter apartment blocks that were springing up beyond the Olympic pavilions and the grounds of luxury hotels were less impressive. Ian Fleming’s secret agent took a swipe at the utilitarian city in his 1964 novel, You Only Live Twice: “Bond waved at the cluttered shambles of the Tokyo suburbs through which they were tearing at what seemed to Bond a suicide speed. ‘Doesn’t look the most attractive city in the world. And why are we driving on the left?’” Interestingly, the title of Fleming’s book comes from a little known haiku by Basho:

  You only live twice:

  Once when you are born

  And once when you look death in the face.

  In the rush to put up elevated freeways with sound-protective steel barriers, entire canal systems were filled in with concrete. Systems that remained were often noisome in their levels of pollution. People still remember the waters of the Kanda river bubbling and reeking with gases. The end result of all these efforts at breakneck modernization were lost on many foreign observers. To quote once more from Hal Porter, that sternest critic of all things Japanese, Tokyo was

  A city built too late for feudalism and too early for democracy, it remains makeshift and confused, a freak weed sprung from a crack in history, and drenched by a fertilizer that makes it monstrous but not mighty, immense but immoral, overgrown and undercivilized.

  Porter preferred the ruined city he knew during the years of the occupation, and its more submissive, defeated people. In the years since his earlier visits the Japanese had become more self-assured and assertive. In demonizing the city as “groaning, shrieking, roaring, clashing, squealing and thundering like a satanic factory,” he was also, in the company of many other foreign writers and observers who inspected the new Tokyo, demonizing the new Japanese.

  One of the saddest casualties of the Olympics was also one of the most enduring symbols of the city: the Nihonbashi Bridge. At the congested heart of Edo, this important span was rebuilt several times after fires devastated it. On one occasion its wooden supports had given way under the weight of the crowds, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand townspeople. The present bridge, a graceful granite structure guarded by four bronze lions of Chinese provenance, four seated unicorns and two obelisk-shaped bronze light standards, dates from 1911. Photos taken at the time show a purposefully durable European structure standing among a sea of perishable wooden houses, shacks, barges along the quays of Tokyo’s main fish market.

  In one of the city’s famously reckless drives towards modernization, the authorities decided in the run up to the Olympics to build a system of expressways to relieve Tokyo of its traffic congestion. The ready-made corridors of rivers and canals were co-opted as the obvious choice for construction of a ferro-concrete nexus. One of these routes, an eight-lane freeway, ran right over the top of Nihonbashi, consigning the bridge not to destruction but perpetual shadow and the rumble of motorized traffic.

  Assuredly reflecting his own feelings on the subject, Tanizaki’s main character in Diary of a Mad Old Man, declares: “I suppose it doesn’t matter where they put you once you’re dead; still I dislike the thought of being buried in a place as unpleasant as Tokyo, a place that has lost all meaning for me.” Referring to the city as “that overturned rubbish heap of Tokyo”, the narrator pursues the theme of defilement when he asks:

  Who made Tokyo into such a miserable, chaotic city? Weren’t they all boorish, country-bred politicians unaware of the good qualities of old Tokyo? Weren’t those the men who turned our beautiful canals into muddy ditches, men who never knew that whitebait swam in the Sumida River?

  Tanizaki had written about shadows of a different order: textured, subdued lighting, full of the cultural fermentation of a different age. The catchphrase that came to best express the aspirations
of this altogether different city, a neon and fluorescent western derivative, was akarui seikatsu, the “bright new life”.

  Dream Messenger

  1970s-

  On 4 October 1970, the author Mishima Yukio sat down and wrote a letter to the young British journalist Henry Scott Stokes, in which he concluded, “Finishing the long novel makes me feel sometimes as if it will be the end of the world.” The next month he was dead.

  This was no ordinary death. Mishima and members of his private army known as the Tatenokai (Shield Society) had entered the office of General Mashita at the headquarters of the Self-Defence Forces in Tokyo’s Ichigaya district and, in a scene thoroughly documented by the media, Mishima had made a speech from the balcony appealing for the restoration of imperial sovereignty. Having failed to win over the troops assembled for his speech, much of which was inaudible above the commotion below, the author returned to the room and, in the tradition of the samurai warrior, committed seppuku, ritual disembowelment.

  By the time Stokes jumped into the taxi that took him to Ichigaya amidst the din of helicopters circling overhead and revving police motorbikes, it was all over. Mishima’s hungry ghost, though, has never really been laid to rest, the image of his death never quite brushed under the bloodstained carpet of the general’s office.