Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989
Page 1
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
www.tuttlepublishing.com
Copyright © 2010 The Estate of Edward G. Seidensticker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for permission to publish illustrations supplied by them appearing on the following pages: Tokyo Prefectural Archives: pp. 296, 299, 307, 310, 313, 331, 335, 337, 338, 339, 350, 361, 370, 372, 380, 383, 391, 396, 406, 491, 534, and 552; Asahi Shimbum: pp. 318, 346, 355, 388, 402, 416, 431, 455, 467, 471, 474, 481, 505, 516, 548, 549, and 586; Asahi Hyakka Nihon no Rekishi: pp. 425, 428, 446, and 477; Asahi Graph: p. 432; Tokyo Prefectural Government: p. 605.
English translation by Edward Seidensticker of excerpts from Collected Works of Nagai Kafū. Originally published by Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, Japan. English translation by Edward Seidensticker of excerpts from Collected Works of Takeda Rintarō, and excerpts from Collected Works of Kawabata Yasunari. Originally published by Shinchosha, Tokyo, Japan.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Chuokoron-Sha, Inc.: English translation by Edward Seidensticker of excerpts from Collected Works of Tanizaki Junichirō. Copyright 1934 by Tanizaki Junichirō. Reprinted by permission of Chuokoron-Sha, Inc., 2-8-7, Kyobashi Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104, Japan. Keiso Shobo, Ltd.: English translation by Edward Seidensticker of excerpts from Collected Works of Takami Jun, Vol. XIX, 1974. Reprinted by permission of Keiso Shobo, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Seidensticker, Edward, 1921-2007.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa, 1867-1989 : the emergence of the world’s greatest city : two volumes in one, Low City, High City and Tokyo rising / Edward Seidensticker ; introduction by Paul Waley ; preface by Donald Richie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4629-0105-0
1. Tokyo (Japan)--History--1868-1912. 2. Tokyo (Japan)--History--20th century. 3. Tokyo (Japan)--Social life and customs. 4. Tokyo (Japan)--Social conditions. 5. City and town life--Japan--Tokyo--History. 6. Social change--Japan--Tokyo--History. 7. Japan--History--Meiji period, 1868-1912. 8. Japan--History--Taisho period, 1912-1926. 9. Japan--History--Showa period, 1926-1989. 10. Capitals (Cities)--Case studies. I. Title.
DS896.64.S425 2010
952’.13503--dc22
2010011099
ISBN 978-1-4629-0105-0
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CONTENTS
Introduction
6
Preface
9
BOOK ONE
LOW CITY, HIGH CITY
Author’s Preface
15
1.
The End and the Beginning
23
2.
Civilization and Enlightenment
43
3.
The Double Life
101
4.
The Decay of the Decadent
150
5.
Low City, High City
186
6.
The Taisho Look
247
BOOK TWO
TOKYO RISING
Author’s Preface
281
7.
The Days After
291
8.
Happy Reconstruction Days
307
9.
Darker Days
368
10.
The Day of the Cod and the Sweet Potato
422
11.
Olympian Days
495
12.
Balmy Days of Late Shōwa
546
Notes
607
Index
615
INTRODUCTION
There can be few cities in the world that live, pulsate, and breathe through their geography as Tokyo does, few cities with a history that shifts through the creases of space as does that of Tokyo. This is particularly ironic in a city whose neighborhoods today hold few distinctive features and whose gentle topography has been all but obscured by batteries of buildings. But it was not always so, and what better way is there of writing Tokyo’s history than by reflecting this shifting geography as neighborhoods prospered and declined while others, more aspirational, climbed up the socio-spatial ladder? This is precisely what Edward Seidensticker does in the pages of these two books, brought here together for the first time under one cover thanks to the efforts of a number of people, including Donald Richie, and the publisher.
Few books in whatever language are so suffused with the spirit of a city as Seidensticker’s classic accounts, suffused with the spirit of the city, but also imbued with the wit of their author. These are not conventional histories. While they are written with a strong sense of history’s ebb and flow, they are held together by their representation of the decline and marginalization of a way of life that was at the same time a part of town. Throughout these books, there is a sense of foreboding and of a fatal destin
y being played out. But at the same time, there is a lightness of touch and an appropriateness of the chosen detail that provokes a smile, a chuckle, and a raised eyebrow on each reading.
This is definitely not anyone’s Tokyo. It is Seidensticker’s Tokyo. And Seidensticker’s Tokyo starts in the Low City and moves out with it to embrace Asakusa. Much of these two volumes is dominated by the demise of the Low City and all that it stood for, until, that is, more recent years, when the deed is all but done and Asakusa consigned to the role of outpost for tourists. Many of Tokyo’s districts have a part to play in these pages, indeed they are the principal characters, invested with a personality that can change with time but that is rooted in a sense of the almost atavistic attraction of the Low City and the parvenu presumption exhibited by the districts of the High City. So it is that we see the emergence of Ginza from obscurity in the shogun’s city of Edo to shop window for all that was stylish and new. Nihonbashi, the old center of the merchants’ city, was much more sedate, losing out slowly to the nearby district of Marunouchi. Roppongi gets short shrift as an upstart pleasure district that grew up as a result of US military facilities in the post-war period. Shinjuku and Shibuya are the back of beyond, to put it politely.
Alongside the districts, there are a number of buildings whose presence animates these books: the Twelve-Storys tower in Asakusa, destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923; Tokyo Central Station, inconveniently located in the center of the city; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, which famously withstood the tremors; the city’s main theatres, prominent among them the Kabukiza and the Shibuya Embujō. And people, too, whose lives have helped to shape the city and define its culture—people like Hattori Kintarō, the founder of Seikō, the watch-making company; or Josiah Conder, the British architect whose influence was seminal in the teaching of architecture in Japan; or Enoken, the most famous and best-loved of Asakusa’s comedians; or the man called Suzuki who built a block in Shinjuku which he optimistically called Kabukichō. But the individuals whose presence most influences the tenor of these books are the many writers who have built at least part of their opus on Tokyo’s ground, not only the likes of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari, with whom many of us will already be familiar, but lesser-known authors such as Osanai Kaoru and Takami Jun.
This is a cultural and social history which for all its quirkiness is peppered with enlightening vignettes that create a wider context for Tokyo’s history. It is built around a number of leitmotifs: corruption in high places; new cultures and technologies such as the department store; festivals, performances, theater; the geisha and the licensed quarters. But these two books are far from being orthodox history. They really belong to a genre of their own. It is hard not to reflect on the freedom Seidensticker must have felt writing about Tokyo. On the one hand, he was not translating, with its bondage to the original text. On the other, he was not writing as a historian, and so had no need to adopt the tools of the historian’s trade. Nevertheless, he managed to capture in uncanny ways the telling details of historical change—the transition from feet to wheels in Meiji Tokyo or the change in eating habits after the great earthquake when women started eating out in numbers. This is very much history as it was lived at the time, which is a history reflected in newspaper articles, on stage, in cafés. It is in fact an approach that has more in common with certain traditions of Japanese representations of places and of the past, a cross between topographical writing and satirical social and cultural history. But above all in reading these pages one feels subliminally the presence of Nagai Kafū, the writer whose wistful stories were translated by Seidensticker and whose cultural prejudices are, one senses, shared.
Paul Waley
PREFACE
Now that my friend of some fifty years is no more, I often think of him as I walk along the shores of the Shinobazu no Ike, near where we both lived, he up the hill in Yushima, me in Ueno by the pond. Shinobazu made a good meeting place because it was familiar to both of us and because the whole area had associations we liked.
These associations were mostly literary. Natsume Soseki had lived in the neighborhood when he wrote I Am a Cat, and Mori Ogai’s house was still there (though now turned into a hotel) while Ed himself lived at the top of the steep street which Otama in Ogai’s Wild Geese daily climbed.
Ed found the neighborhood still somehow literary and thought of himself as one of the last local bunjin. Not only did he concern himself with past literature, as in his translation of the Genji Monogatari, but also he loved the past for its own sake, as he demonstrated in his splendid, two-volume history of Tokyo. Yet he entertained a certain ambivalence toward the past, one he shared with us in the finest of all of his works, Kafū the Scribbler.
Just as Kafū disliked Meiji Japan until Taisho Japan turned out even worse, giving him then something to like about vanished Meiji, so Seidensticker disliked much of modern Japan until newer manifestations indicated something worse was on its way, at which point he would become nostalgic about what he had formerly disliked.
He collected these opinions in his feisty columns for the Yomiuri Shimbun, published in English as This Country, Japan, a title with a double meaning. It could be read simply as “this country” (kono kuni), or as “this country!” indicating an extreme degree of exasperation with Japan. His opinions and his way of arriving at them were so close to those of Kafū that is not surprising that Kafū the Scribbler is both an extraordinarily perceptive literary history and also a completely personal identification.
As I walk along the shores of Shinobazu no Ike I now think of the many times I met Seidensticker there, as he slowly wandered about, looking (though fatter) much like a latter-day Kafū himself. And when we talked about literature we always talked about Kafū. One of his regrets, he said, was that he had never met the great author. He knew Kawabata and Tanizaki, Mishima and others, but he had never met Kafū, the author he most admired.
Since Kafū was also my own favorite Japanese author, he became one of the things that Ed and I had in common. We also both favored a certain kind of English author who, like Kafū, had an immaculate style and an anomalous taste for the past: authors such as Thomas Love Peacock, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ronald Firbank.
And Jane Austen. We were both besotted with her six novels, read them all the time, even formed an unauthorized Jane Austen Society of Japan (along with Shulamith Rubinfein and Sheelagh Cluny), just for ourselves. Such tastes might be thought narrow but they had admirable results. Whenever I reread Seidensticker’s Genji, I see that the tone, the mood, the feeling of this translation—its lightness, its rightness—owe much to his admiration for Jane Austen. She is standing there, just behind Murasaki Shikibu.
Sometimes in my evening walks around Shinobazu I would discover Ed on one of the benches, sitting there, regarding the pond. Sometimes he had been drinking (he liked shochu), sometimes not. Whichever, we always talked about the same things. I remember one such conversation. “I am delighted to see you,” he said. “For I have something to tell you. My afternoon was spent with Abe Kobo and we spoke of his style, and he said that critics always said that the influence was Franz Kafka, but they were absolutely wrong. The real influence was Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t that nice? Lewis Carroll!”
But then Seidensticker’s physical problems began. He conquered his liking for shochu, but he had two hip replacements and could never properly walk after that. I would sometimes see him hobbling about Shinobazu of an evening, but gradually he stopped coming—he fell down too often. Instead we would meet, once a week or so, at an Ueno Indian restaurant we both liked and which he could reach by taxi.
Having much criticized Showa Japan while we were still in it, he was now praising the immediate postwar years because he found so much wrong with Heisei Japan. During our later meetings it was the contemporary young that irritated him the most with their laziness, their rudeness, their narcissistic ways. He remembered how mu
ch nicer the young people of Showa Japan had seemed, those he had formerly criticized just as bitterly. And we often (like Kafu, like all old people) remembered a kind of beauty which, whether or not it had actually existed, lived on in us.
Seidensticker was not only a bunjin and a splendid translator, he was also a man who (like Kafū) had the highest standards and was honest enough to criticize what he loved. He cared deeply for Japan, more so than many another foreigner, more so than many Japanese. Perhaps that was why he was on the shores of Shinobazu Pond on the day of the accident, April 26, 2007. It had been an unusually warm spring day with sun and the promise of summer. Now, as evening approached and the long shadows spread across the waters, it was perhaps because of a wish to enjoy this that he left the taxi and walked as best he could through the park on his way to the Indian restaurant and dinner with me and our friend Patrick Lovell.
Now when I take my stroll around the pond I always pass the small staircase down which he fell that day and fractured his skull. It is very short, just five steps, but falling from the top one was enough to put him into the coma that lasted four months to the day, ending with his death on August 26.
And then as I continue around the pond I see in the distance that someone is sitting on the bench where we used to sit. It has grown dark now—it is twilight, a star or two has appeared. I walk nearer to the seated person. I know that it is not my friend, Edward Seidensticker, but I wish it were.