Donald Richie
Used with permission of International House of Japan. This material originally appeared in the IHJ Bulletin and is an expanded version of an obituary which appeared in Japanese in the magazine Ueno, a publication for which Seidensticker regularly wrote.
BOOK ONE
LOW CITY,
HIGH CITY
Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
When young, I did not dedicate books. Dedications seemed overblown and showy. It is too late to begin; but if this book carried a dedication, it would be to the memory of Nagai Kafū.
Though he was not such a good novelist, he has come to seem better and better at what he was good at. He was his best in brief lyrical passages and not in sustained narrative and dramatic ones. He is the novelist whose views of the world’s most consistently interesting city accord most closely with my own. He has been my guide and companion as I have explored and dreamed and meditated upon the city.
I do not share his yearning for Edo, the city when it was still the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns and before it became the Eastern Capital. The Tokugawa Period is somehow dark and menacing. Too many gifted people were squelched, and, whether gifted or not, I always have the feeling about Edo that, had I been there, I would have been among the squelched ones.
I share Kafū’s affection for the part of the city which had its best day then. The twilight of that day lasted through the succeeding Meiji reign and down to the great earthquake. It is the Shitamachi, the plebeian flatlands, which I here call the Low City. Meiji was when the changes that made Japan modern and economically miraculous were beginning. Yet the Low City had not lost its claim to the cultural hegemony which it had clearly possessed under the Tokugawa.
Many exciting things have occurred in the six decades since the earthquake, which is slightly farther from the present than from the beginning of Meiji. Another book asks to be written, about those decades and especially the ones since the surrender. Perhaps it will be written, but it would have to be mostly about the other half (these days considerably more than half), the hilly High City, the Yamanote. That is where the artist and the intellectual, and to an increasing extent the manager and the magnate, have been. If there is less in this book about the High City than the Low City, it is because one is not drawn equally to everything in a huge and complex city, and a book whose beginnings lie in personal experience does have a way of turning to what interests and pleases.
Kafū was an elegist, mourning the death of Edo and lamenting the emergence of modern Tokyo. With such a guide and companion, an elegiac tone is bound to emerge from time to time. The departure of the old and the emergence of the new are inextricably entwined, of course. Yet, because the story of what happened to Edo is so much the story of the Low City, matters in which it was not interested do not figure much. It was not an intellectual sort of place, nor was it strongly political. Another consideration has urged the elimination of political and intellectual matters: the fact that Tokyo became the capital of Japan in 1868. A distinction may be made between what occurred in the city because it was the capital, and what occurred because it was a city.
So this book contains little political and intellectual history, and not much more literary and economic history. The major exception in literary matters is the drama, the great love of the Edo townsman. The story of what happened to Kabuki is central to the story of the city, and not that of the capital. The endeavor to describe a changing city as if it were an organism is perhaps not realistic, since cities change in all ways and directions, as organisms and specific institutions do not. The subject here is the changing city all the same, the legacy of Edo and what happened to it. To a much smaller degree is it the story of currents that have flowed in upon the city because it was the capital.
Japanese practice has been followed in the rendition of personal names. The family name comes before the given name. When a single element is used, it is the family name if there is no elegant pen-name (distinguished in principle from a prosy one like Mishima Yukio), and the pen-name when there is one. Hence Kafū and Shigure, both of them pen-names; but Tanizaki, Kubota, and Shibusawa, all of them family names.
The staff of the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives was very kind in helping assemble illustrations. The prints, woodcut and lithograph, are from Professor Donald Keene’s collection and my own, except as noted in the captions. I am also in debt to the Tokyo Central Library and the Toyo Keizai Shimpō. Mr. Fukuda Hiroshi was very helpful in photographing photographs that could not be taken across the Pacific for reproduction.
The notes are minimal, limited for the most part to the sources of direct quotations. A very important source, acknowledged only once in the notes, is the huge work called A History of the Tokyo Century (although it begins with the beginnings of Edo), published by the municipal government in the early 1970s, with a supplemental chronology published in 1980. Huge it certainly is, six volumes (without the chronology), each of them some fifteen hundred pages long. Uneven it is as well, and indispensable.
Guidebooks, four of them acknowledged in the notes, were very useful, the two-volume guide published by the city in 1907 especially so. Then there were ward histories, none of them acknowledged, because I have made no direct quotation from them. The Japanese are energetic and accomplished local historians, as much so as the British. Their volumes pour forth in bewildering numbers, those Japanese equivalents of the “admirable history of southeast Berks” one is always seeing reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Every ward has at least one history. Some are better than others, not because some are especially unreliable, but because some are better organized and less given to axegrinding.
I do not pretend to have been through them all, but none that I have looked at has been valueless.
The most important source is Nagai Kafū. To him belongs the final acknowledgment, as would belong the dedication if there were one.
E.S.
April, 1982
Chapter 1
THE END AND THE BEGINNING
There was foreboding in Japan on September 1, 1923. September 2 would be the Two-Hundred-Tenth Day, counting from the day in early February when spring is held to begin. Awaited each year with apprehension, it comes during the typhoon season and the harvest. The conjunction of the two, harvest and typhoon, can mean disaster. The disaster of that year came instead on September 1.
The morning was warm, heavy, as most days of late summer are, with the shrilling of locusts. The mugginess was somewhat relieved by brisk winds, which shifted from east to south at about nine. A low-pressure zone covered the southern part of the Kantō Plain, on the fringes of which the city lies. The winds became stronger as the morning drew on. Rain fell, stopping at eleven. The skies cleared.
The city was awaiting the don, the “bang” of the cannon which since 1871 had been fired at noon every day in the palace plaza.
At one minute and fifteen and four-tenths seconds before noon, the great earthquake struck. The initial shocks were so violent that the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau went out of commission. The surviving seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University made the only detailed record of the long series of quakes, more than seventeen hundred over the next three days. The epicenter was in Sagami Bay, southeast of the city. There was sinkage along a deep trough and a rising along the sides. The eastern limits of the modern city follow one earthquake zone, which runs along the Edo River and out into Tokyo Bay, and lie very near another, which crosses the wide mouth of Sagami Bay from the tip of the Chiba Peninsula to the tip of the Izu Peninsula. There had been a disastrous quake in 1855, centered on the Edo River zone, and a major though less disastrous one in the summer of 1894, also centered on the nearer of the two zones. It was assumed at that time that there would presently be another, and it is
so assumed today, in 1982. Talk in 1923 of moving the capital to safer regions had been quieted by a proclamation from the emperor himself.
Between noon of September 1 and the evening of September 2, most of the Tokyo flatlands—the eastern sections of the city, the Shitamachi or “Low City”—went up in flames. The Low City produced most of what was original in the culture of Edo (as Tokyo had been known until the Meiji emperor moved there from Kyoto in 1867). Much of the Low City survived on the morning of September 1, and then, in forty hours or so, most of it disappeared.
Though we do not know how many died in the earthquake and the fires that followed, initial reports in the Western press almost certainly exaggerated. The Los Angeles Times informed a large and alarmed Japanese readership that half a million had died. The highest estimates today put the figure for Tokyo at something over a hundred thousand. Far more were killed in the fires than in the earthquake itself, and there seem to have been more deaths from drowning than from collapsed buildings.
Almost half the deaths, or perhaps more than half, if lower estimates are accepted for the total, occurred in an instant at a single place in the Low City, a park, formerly an army clothing depot, near the east or left bank of the Sumida River. Fires had started in several parts of the city soon after the initial shocks. There were whirlwinds of fire up and down the Sumida from midafternoon; the largest of them, according to witnesses, covered about the area of the Sumō wrestling gymnasium, the largest building east of the river, and was several hundred feet high. A flaming whirlwind came down upon the park at about four in the afternoon, and incinerated upwards of thirty thousand people who had fled there from the fires sweeping the Low City.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the great writer of short stories and a man of strong suicidal impulses, liked to tell people that had he then been in his native Honjo, east of the river, he would probably have taken refuge where everyone else did, and been spared the trouble of suicide.
“In a family of nine, relatives of my wife, only a son, about twenty, survived. He was standing with a shutter over his head to ward off sparks when he was picked up by a whirlwind and deposited in the Yasuda garden. There he regained consciousness.”
The traditional wooden house has great powers of resistance to wind, flood, and earthquake. It resisted well this time too, and then came the fires, leaving only scattered pockets of buildings across the Low City. The damage would have been heavy if the quakes alone had caused it, but most of the old city would have survived. Even then, seventy years after the arrival of Commodore Perry and fifty-five years after the resignation of the last Edo shogun, it was built mostly of wood. Buildings of more substantial materials came through the quakes well, though many were gutted by the fires. There has been much praise for the aplomb with which Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel came through, built as it was of volcanic stone on an “earthquake-proof” foundation. It did survive, and deserves the praise; yet so did a great many other modern buildings (though not all). The Mitsukoshi Department Store suffered only broken windows from the quake, but burned as brightly as the sun, people who saw it said, when the fires took over. That the Imperial Hotel did not burn brightly was due entirely to chance.
It is difficult to judge earthquake damage when fires sweep a city shortly afterwards. Memories shaken and distorted by the horror of it all must be counted on to establish what was there in the brief interval between quake and fire. The best information suggests that after it was over almost three-quarters of the buildings in the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and almost two-thirds of them were destroyed or gutted by fire. The earthquake itself can be held clearly responsible only for the difference between the two figures.
Fifteen wards made up the city; a single one remained untouched by fire. It lay in the High City, the hilly regions to the west. In five wards the loss was above 90 percent and in a sixth only slightly less. The five all lay in the Low City, along the Sumida and the bay. The sixth lay mostly in the Low City, but extended also into the hills. In Shitaya Ward, half Low City and half High City, the flat portions were almost completely destroyed, with the line of the fires stopping cleanly at the hills. Had Ueno Park in Shitaya been hit as the erstwhile clothing depot was, the casualty lists might well have doubled.
Determining the number and cause of the fires has been as difficult as distinguishing between earthquake damage and fire damage. The best estimate puts the total number at upwards of a hundred-thirty, of which well over half could not be controlled. Most of the damage occurred during the first afternoon and night. It was early on the morning of September 2 that the Mitsukoshi was seen burning so brightly. Nineteen fires, the largest number for any of the fifteen wards, began in Asakusa, east of Shitaya. By the morning of September 3 the last of them had burned themselves out or been extinguished.
Ruins in Asakusa, including the Twelve Storys, after the earthquake.
It is commonly said that the chief reason for the inferno was the hour at which the first shocks came. Lunch was being prepared all over the city, upon gas burners and charcoal braziers. From these open flames and embers, common wisdom has it, the fires began.
But in fact many fires seem to have had other origins. Chemicals have been identified as the largest single cause, followed by electric wires and burners. This suggests that the same disaster might very well have occurred at any hour of the day. The earthquake of 1855 occurred in the middle of the night. Much of the Low City was destroyed then too. Most of the damage was caused by fire—yet in the mid-nineteenth century there were no electric lines and probably few chemicals to help the fire on. Fires will start, it seems, whenever buildings collapse in large numbers. No fire department can cope with them when they start simultaneously at many points on a windy day. Tokyo is now a sea of chemicals and a tangle of utility wires. It is not as emphatically wooden as it once was, to be sure, but the Low City, much of it a jumble of small buildings on filled land, will doubtless be the worst hit when the next great earthquake comes.
Among the rumors that went flying about the city was the imaginative one that an unnamed country of the West had developed an earthquake machine and was experimenting upon Japan. There were, nevertheless, no outbreaks of violence against “foreigners,” which in Japan usually means Westerners. Instead, the xenophobia of the island nation turned on Koreans.
The government urged restraint, not to make things easier for Koreans, but because the Western world might disapprove: it would not do for such things to be reported in the Western press. Rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells. The police were later accused of encouraging hostility by urging particular attention to wells, but probably not much encouragement was needed. A willingness, and indeed a wish, to believe the worst about Koreans has been a consistent theme in modern Japanese culture. The slaughter was considerable, in any event. Reluctant official announcements put casualties in the relatively low three figures. The researches of the liberal scholar Yoshino Sakuzō were later to multiply them by ten, bringing the total to upwards of two thousand.
Not all the things of Edo were destroyed. The most popular temple in the city, the great Asakusa Kannon, survived. An explanation for its close escape was that a statue of the Meiji Kabuki actor Danjūrō, costumed as the hero of Shibaraku (meaning “One Moment, Please”), held back flames advancing from the north. But fire did destroy the Yoshiwara, most venerable of the licensed quarters that had been centers of Edo culture.
Several fine symbols of Meiji Tokyo were also destroyed. The old Shimbashi Station, northern terminus of the earliest railroad in the land, was among the modern buildings that did not survive. The Ryōunkaku (literally “Cloud Scraper”), a twelve-story brick tower in Asakusa, had survived the earthquake of 1894, when many a brick chimney collapsed and brick architecture in general was brought into disrepute. It had been thought earthquake-proof, but in 1923 it broke off at the eighth story. The top storys fell into a lake nearb
y, and the rest were destroyed the following year by army engineers.
The great loss was the Low City, home of the merchant and the artisan, heart of Edo culture. From the beginnings of its existence as the shogun’s capital, Edo was divided into two broad regions, the hilly Yamanote or High City, describing a semicircle generally to the west of the shogun’s castle, now the emperor’s palace, and the flat Low City, the Shitamachi, completing the circle on the east. Plebeian enclaves could be found in the High City, but mostly it was a place of temples and shrines and aristocratic dwellings. The Low City had its aristocratic dwellings, and there were a great many temples, but it was very much the plebeian half of the city. And though the aristocracy was very cultivated indeed, its tastes—or the tastes thought proper to the establishment—were antiquarian and academic. The vigor of Edo was in its Low City.
The Low City has always been a vaguely defined region, its precise boundaries difficult to draw. It sometimes seems as much an idea as a geographic entity. When in the seventeenth century the Tokugawa regime set about building a seat for itself, it granted most of the solid hilly regions to the military aristocracy, and filled in the marshy mouths of the Sumida and Tone rivers, to the east of the castle. The flatlands that resulted became the abode of the merchants and craftsmen who purveyed to the voracious aristocracy and provided its labor.
These lands, between the castle on the west and the Sumida and the bay on the east, were the original Low City. Of the fifteen Meiji wards, it covered only Nihombashi and Kyōbashi and the flatlands of Kanda and Shiba. Asakusa, most boisterous of the Meiji pleasure centers, was scarcely a part of the old city at all. It lay beyond one of the points guarding approaches to the city proper, and was built initially to serve pilgrims to its own great Kannon temple. Later it was linked to the theater district, and was a part of the complex that catered to the Yoshiwara licensed quarter, yet farther to the north.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 2