Today everything east of the Sumida is regarded as part of the Low City, but until Meiji only a thin strip along the east bank of the Sumida was so considered, and not even that by everyone.
The heart of the Low City was Nihombashi, broadest of the lands first reclaimed by the shogunate. Nihombashi set the tone and made the definitions. Nihombashi proper, the “Japan Bridge” from which the district took its name, was the spot where all roads began. Distances from the city were measured from Nihombashi. A proper resident of Nihombashi did not have to go far east, perhaps only as far as the Sumida, perhaps a few paces beyond, to feel that he had entered the land of the bumpkin. The Low City was small, tight, and cozy.
It changed a great deal between the resignation of the last shogun and the earthquake. As time runs on, new dates for the demise of Edo are always being assigned by connoisseurs of the subject. In 1895, we are told, or in 1912, Edo finally departed, and only Tokyo remained. Yet even today the Low City is different from the High City, and so it may be said that even today something of Edo survives. The earthquake was all the same a disaster from which the heart of the Low City did not recover. Already before 1923 the wealthy were moving away from Nihombashi, and vitality was departing as well. The earthquake accelerated the movement to the south and west, first apparent in the rise of Ginza. Today the most prosperous centers for drinking and shopping lie beyond the western limits of the Meiji city.
Tokiwa Bridge, Nihombashi, in early Meiji. Later site of the Bank of Japan
Nihombashi and the Low City in general were conservative. There was, of course, resentment at the rigid Tokugawa class structure, which put the merchant below everyone else. By way of fighting back, a satirical vein in the literature and drama of the Low City poked fun at the High City aristocrat, but never strongly enough to make the urban masses a threat to the old order. The Edokko, the “child of Edo,” as the native of the Low City called himself, was pleased to be there “at the knee” of Lord Tokugawa, and the shogunate was wise enough to take condescending notice of the populace on certain festival days. When the threat to the regime eventually came, it was from the far provinces, and the Edokko was more resentful of the provincial soldiers who became the new establishment than he had ever been of the old.
He may be taxed with complacency. The professional child of Edo has descendants today, and they are proud of themselves to the point of incivility. They tend to divide the world between the Low City and other places, to the great disadvantage of the latter. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō, a genuine Edokko, born in 1886 of a Nihombashi merchant family, did not like his fellow Edokko, whom he described as weak, complaining, and generally ineffectual. Yet the Low City of Edo had high standards and highly refined tastes, and if exclusiveness was necessary to maintain them, as the years since have suggested, that seems a small price to pay.
Kyōbashi, to the south of Nihombashi, included Ginza, which came aggressively forward to greet the new day. An artisan quarter under the old regime, Ginza stood at the terminus of the new railway and eagerly brought new things in from Yokohama and beyond. Tanizaki and others have described the diaspora of the Edokko, with Nihombashi its chief victim, as the new people came in. It can be exaggerated, and one suspects that Tanizaki exaggerated for literary effect. He made much also of the helplessness of the Edokko before the entrepreneur from the West Country. Yet many an Edo family did very well. Among those who did best were the Mitsui, established in Nihombashi since the seventeenth century. Not many children of Edo had been there longer. The demographic and cultural movement to the south and west was inexorable all the same, and more rapid after the earthquake.
The High City was much less severely damaged than the Low City. The growing suburbs, many of them later incorporated within the city limits, were hurt even less. Through the years before and after the earthquake, industrial production remained fairly steady for Tokyo Prefecture, which included large suburbs as well as the city proper. Within the fifteen wards of the city, it fell sharply in the same period. The suburban share was growing.
With the Low City pleasure quarters lost in the fires, those of the High City throve. They did not have the same sort of tradition, and the change meant the end of something important in the life of the city. The novelist Nagai Kafū—not, like Tanizaki, a real son of Edo, both because he was not from the merchant class and because his family had not been in the city the three generations held necessary to produce one—was even so an earnest student of Edo and Tokyo. All through his career (he was born in 1879 and died in 1959) he went on lamenting the fact that the latter had killed the former; and all through his career, with lovable inconsistency, he went on remembering how Edo yet survived at this and that date later than ones already assigned to the slaying. Though he is commonly considered an amorous and erotic novelist, his writings are essentially nostalgic and elegiac. The pleasure quarters were central to Edo culture, and it was in those conservative regions if anywhere that something of Edo survived. So it was natural that they should be his favorite subject. He had many harsh things to say about the emergent pleasure centers of the High City, and their failure to keep sex in its place—pleasurable, no doubt, but not the only thing at which the great ladies of the older quarters thought it necessary to excel. The old quarters were genuine centers of the higher arts.
The seventy-seventh of the Chinese sexagenary cycles came to a close in 1923. When Cycle Seventy-seven began, in 1864, the Tokugawa shogunate was in its final convulsions. The short administration of the last shogun was soon over, and the “Restoration,” as it is called in English, occurred. Edo became Tokyo, with the Meiji emperor in residence. “Restoration” is actually a bad translation of the Japanese ishin, which means something more like “renovation” or “revitalization.”
Edo could not have known, at the beginning of the Cycle Seventy-seven, that Lord Tokugawa would so soon be in exile. Yet there were ample causes for apprehension, not the least of which was the presence of the foreigner. He obviously did not mean to go away. At first, upon the opening of the ports, foreigners seem to have been greeted with friendliness and eager curiosity. Presently this changed. A Dutch observer dated the change as 1862, subsequent to which there were many instances of violence, including the stoning of an American consul. The Dutchman put the blame upon the foreigners themselves, an unruly lot whom the port cities attracted. The Edo townsman seems to have had little to do with the violence; his feelings were not that strong. Yet he seems to have agreed with the rustic soldiers responsible for most of the violence that the barbarian should be put back in his place, on the other side of the water.
Early in 1863, the new British legation was destroyed by arsonists of the military class—among them Itō Hirobumi, later to become the most prominent of Meiji statesmen. The legation had been built in the part of the city closest to the relative security of Yokohama. It was not yet occupied, and nothing came of plans for other legations on the same site. The Edo townsman seems to have received news of the fire with satisfaction.
Edo was not, like the great capitals of Europe, a commercial center in its own right, with interests independent of and sometimes in conflict with those of the sovereign. More like Washington than London or Paris, it was an early instance, earlier than Washington, of a fabricated capital. Technically it was not the capital at all, since the emperor remained in Kyoto through the Tokugawa centuries. It was, however, the seat of power. The first shogun established himself there for military reasons, and the commercial and artisan classes gathered, as in Washington, to be of service to the bureaucracy. It was an enormous bureaucracy, because the Tokugawa system required that provincial potentates maintain establishments in the city. The Edo townsman was happy, on the whole, to serve and to make money. He saw enough of the bureaucracy to know that its lesser members, at least, looked upon his own life with some envy.
Land-use maps, though they disagree in matters of detail, are consistent in sho
wing a very large part of the city given over to the aristocracy and to temples and shrines, and a very small part to the plebeian classes, mercantile and artisan. If the expression “aristocracy” is defined broadly to include everyone attached in some fashion to the central bureaucracy and the establishments of the provincial lords, then the Edo townsman occupied perhaps as little as a fifth of the city. Not even the flatlands commonly held to be his abode belonged entirely to him. The banks of the Sumida were largely aristocratic all the way to Asakusa. The aristocracy possessed most of the land east of the river, and very large expanses as well in eastern Nihombashi and to the east of Ginza. There were extensive temple lands along the northern and southern fringes of the flatlands. A half million townsmen were crowded into what was indeed a small part of the city, scarcely enough to make up two of the present inner wards, or four of the smaller Meiji wards.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edo was probably the largest city in the world. The population was well over a million, perhaps at times as much as a million and two or three hundred thousand, in a day when the largest European city, London, had not yet reached a million. The merchant and artisan population was stable at a half million. The huge military aristocracy and bureaucracy made up most of the rest. There were also large numbers of priests, Buddhist and Shinto, numbering, with their families, as many as a hundred thousand persons; and there were pariahs, beneath even the merchants, the lowest of the four classes established by Tokugawa orthodoxy. There were indigents and transients. And finally there were entertainers, accommodated more and more uncomfortably by the Tokugawa regime as it moved into its last years.
Pictures of Edo—woodcuts and screens—make it seem the loveliest of places to live. Elegant little shops are elegantly disposed among temples and shrines, each of which offers a range of amusing sights and performers, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and swordsmen, and perhaps a tiger or an elephant brought from abroad in response to the exotic yearnings of a sequestered populace.
Prominent in such representations are the main streets of Nihombashi. They suggest a pleasant buzz of life, which indeed there must have been, but they do not reveal the equally probable crowding of the back streets. The main or “front” streets were for the better shops and the wealthier merchants. Lesser people occupied the alleys behind, living in rows of shingled huts along open gutters, using common wells and latrines.
The old city did not fill the fifteen wards of the Meiji city, much less the twenty-three wards of the present city. “It is Edo as far as the Kaneyasu,” said the Edo maxim, with reference to a famous shop in the Hongō district, not far from the present Hongō campus of Tokyo University. There the provinces were said to begin, even though the jurisdiction of the city magistrates extended somewhat farther; and today the Kaneyasu is practically downtown. The city extended no more than a mile or two in most directions from the castle, and a considerably shorter distance before it reached the bay on the east. In a fifth or so of this limited area lived the steady and permanent populace of a half million townsmen, a twentieth, roughly, of the present population, on much less than a twentieth of the present land. In the back alleys the standard dwelling for the artisan or the poorer tradesman was the “nine-by-twelve,” two rooms, one of them earth-floored, with nine feet of frontage on the alley and extending twelve feet back from it. The wealthier merchants lived, some of them, as expansively and extravagantly as the aristocrats of the High City, but lesser inhabitants of the Low City lived with mud, dust, darkness, foul odors, insects, and epidemics. Most of the huts in the back alleys had roofs of the flimsiest and most combustible sort. They burned merrily when there was a fire. The city was proud of its fires, which were called Edo no harm, “the flowers of Edo,” and occurred so frequently and burned so freely that no house in the Low City could expect to last more than two decades. Some did, of course, and some have survived even into our day, but actuarial figures announced doom at intervals of no more than a quarter of a century.
It is easy to become sentimental about Edo and the beautiful way of life depicted on the screens. Nostalgia is the chief ware offered by the professional Edokko. But Meiji was an exuberant period, and even for the most conservative inhabitant there must have been a sense of release at its advent.
Tanizaki had a famous vision after the earthquake of what the rebuilt city would be like. He was in the Hakone mountains, some forty miles southwest of Tokyo, when the earthquake struck. He rejoiced in the destruction of the old city, and looked forward to something less constricting. Since he doubtless had the Nihombashi of his boyhood in mind, and the mood of Edo was still strong in that place and in those days, we may feel in his musings something of what the son of Edo must have felt upon leaving Edo and the repressive old regime behind.
Lafcadio Hearn once said that a person never forgets the things seen and heard in the depths of sorrow; but it seems to me that, whatever the time of sorrow, a person also thinks of the happy, the bright, the comical, things quite the opposite of sorrowful. When the earthquake struck I knew that I had survived, and I feared for my wife and daughter, left behind in Yokohama. Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. “Tokyo will be better for this!” I said to myself….
I have heard that it did not take ten years for San Francisco to be a finer city than before the earthquake. Tokyo too would be rebuilt in ten years, into a solid expanse of splendid buildings like the Marunouchi Building and the Marine Insurance Building. I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles. The geometric beauty of block towering upon block, and elevated lines and subways and trolleys weaving among them, and the stir of a nightless city, and pleasure facilities to rival those of Paris and New York…. Fragments of the new Tokyo passed before my eyes, numberless, like flashes in a movie. Soirees, evening dresses and swallowtails and dinner jackets moving in and out, and champagne glasses floating up like the moon upon the ocean. The confusion of late night outside a theater, headlights crossing one another on darkly shining streets. The flood of gauze and satin and legs and illumination that is vaudeville. The seductive laughter of streetwalkers beneath the lights of Ginza and Asakusa and Marunouchi and Hibiya Park. The secret pleasures of Turkish baths, massage parlors, beauty parlors. Weird crimes. I have long had a way of giving myself up to daydreams in which I imagine all manner of curious things, but it was very strange indeed that these phantasms should be so stubbornly entwined among sad visions of my wife and daughter.
In the years after the Second World War, one was frequently surprised to hear from the presumably fortunate resident of an unbombed pocket that he would have been happier if it too had been bombed. A lighter and airier dwelling, more consonant with modern conveniences, might then have taken its place. The Edo townsman must have shared this view when the gates to the back alleys were dismantled and, after disappearing in fires, the alleys themselves were replaced by something more in keeping with Civilization and Enlightenment, as the rallying call of the new day had it.
Meiji brought industrial soot and other forms of advanced ugliness, and Nagai Kafū’s laments for a lost harmony were not misplaced. But it also brought liberation from old fears and afflictions. In the spring of 1888 services were held on the site of the old Kotsukappara execution grounds, in the northern suburbs, for the repose of the souls of those who had been beheaded or otherwise put to death there. The number was then estimated at a hundred thousand. The temple that now stands on the site claims to comfort and solace two hundred thousand departed spirits. If the latter figure is accepted, then about two persons a day lost their lives at Kotsukappara through the three hundred years of its use—and Kotsukappara was not the only execution grounds at the disposal of the Edo magistracy. The Meiji townsman need fear no such judicial harshness, and he was gradually resc
ued from epidemics and fires as well.
Kotsukappara execution grounds
There was also spiritual liberation. The playwright Hasegawa Shigure, a native of Nihombashi, thus described the feelings of her father upon the promulgation, on February 11, 1889, of the Meiji constitution: “His joy and that of his fellows had to do with the end of the old humiliation, the expunging of the stigma they had carried for so many years as Edo townsmen.”
One should guard against sentimentality, then; but there is the other extreme to be guarded against as well. The newly enlightened elite of Meiji was strongly disposed to dismiss Edo culture as vulgar and decadent, and the latter adjective is one commonly applied even now to the arts and literature of the early nineteenth century.
Perhaps it was “decadent,” in a certain narrow sense, that so much of Edo culture should have centered upon the pleasure quarters, and it is certainly true that not much late-Edo literature seems truly superior. The rigid conservatism of the shogunate, and the fact that the pleasure quarters were the only places where a small degree of democracy prevailed (class did not matter, only money and taste), may be held responsible for the decadence, if decadence there was. As for the inadequacy of late-Edo literature, good taste itself may have been more important than the products of good taste.
Because of its exquisite products we think of the Heian Period, when the Shining Genji of the tale that bears his name did everything so beautifully, as a time when everyone had good taste. But it is by its nature something that not everyone possesses. Courtly Heian and mercantile Edo must have been rather similar in that good taste was held to be important and the devices for cultivating it were abundant.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 3