Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  This is not to say that the moods of the Sumida, so important to Edo, were quite swept away. They were still there, if somewhat polluted and coarsened. A “penny steamer” continued to make its way up and down the river, and on to points along the bay, even though it had by the time of the earthquake come to cost more than a penny. Ferries across the river were not completely replaced by bridges until after the Second World War. The most conservative of the geisha quarters, Yanagibashi, stood beside the river, and mendicant musicians still had themselves paddled up and down before it. One could still go boating of a summer night with geisha and music and drink. The great celebration called the “river opening” was the climactic event of the Low City summer.

  The Yaomatsu restaurant on the Sumida, looking towards Asakusa

  In 1911 and 1912 the playwright Osanai Kaoru published an autobiographical novel called Okawabata (The Bank of the Big River, with reference to the Sumida). Osanai was a pioneer in the Westernized theater. Some years after the earthquake he was to found the Little Theater of Tsukiji, most famous establishment in an energetic and venturesome experimental-theater movement. Like Nagai Kafū, whose junior he was by two years, he was a sort of Edokko manqué. His forebears were bureaucratic and not mercantile, and he had the added disability that he spent his early childhood in Hiroshima. Such people often outdid genuine Edokko, among whom Tanizaki Junichirō could number himself, in affection for the city and especially vestiges of Edo, abstract and concrete. The Bank of the Big River has the usual defects of Japanese autobiographical fiction—weak characterization, a rambling plot, a tendency towards self-gratification; but it is beautiful in its evocation of the moods of the Sumida. The time is 1905 or so, with the Russo-Japanese War at or near a conclusion. The setting is Nakasu, an artificial island in the Sumida, off Nihombashi.

  Sometimes a lighter would go up or down between Ohashi Bridge and Nakasu, an awning spread against the sun, banners aloft, a sad chant sounding over the water to the accompaniment of bell and mallet, for the repose of the souls of those who had died by drowning.

  Almost every summer evening a boat would come to the stone embankment and give us a shadow play. Not properly roofed, it had a makeshift awning of some nondescript cloth, beneath which were paper doors, to suggest a roofed boat of the old sort. Always against the paper doors, yellowish in the light from inside, there would be two shadows… When it came up the river to the sound of drum and gong and samisen, Masao would look happily at Kimitarō, and from the boat there would be voices imitating Kabuki actors…

  Every day at exactly the same time a candy boat would pass, to the beating of a drum. Candy man and candy would be like distant figures in a picture, but the drum would sound out over the river in simple rhythm, so near that he might almost, he thought, have reached out to touch it. At the sound he would feel a nameless stirring and think of home, forgotten so much of the time, far away in the High City. The thought was only a thought. He felt no urge to leave Kimitarō.

  The moon would come up, a great, round, red moon, between the godowns that lined the far bank. The black lacquer of the river would become gold, and then, as the moon was smaller and whiter, the river would become silver. Beneath the dark form of Ohashi Bridge, across which no trolleys passed, it would shimmer like a school of whitefish.

  The old wooden bridges, so pretty as they arched their way over river and canal, were not suited to heavy vehicular traffic. Wood was the chief material for wider and flatter bridges, but steel and stone were used for an increasing number of important new ones. Of 481 bridges in the city at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, 26 were steel and 166 were stone. The rest were wood. A new stone Nihombashi was dedicated in 1911. It is the Nihombashi that yet stands, and the one for which the last shogun wrote the inscription. He led the ceremonial parade, and with him was a lady born in Nihombashi a hundred years before, when there were yet four shoguns to go. The famous Azuma Bridge at Asakusa, often called “the big bridge,” was swept away by a flood in 1885. A steel Azuma Bridge with a decorative superstructure was finished in 1882, occasioning a great celebration at the dedication, geisha and lanterns and politicians and all. It quickly became one of the sights of the city. The floor was still wooden at the time of the earthquake. It caught fire, as did all the other bridges across the river; hence, in part, the large number of deaths by drowning.

  Azumabashi, Asakusa. From a lithograph dated 1891

  Nagai Kafū accused the Sumida, which he loved, of flooding twice annually. “Just as when summer gives way to autumn, so it is when spring gives way to summer: there are likely to be heavy rains. No one was surprised, for it happened every year, that the district from Senzoku toward the Yoshiwara should be under water.”

  So begins the last chapter of his novella The River Sumida. It is an exaggeration, and in other respects not entirely accurate. Late summer and autumn was the season for floods. The rains of June are more easily contained than the violent ones of the typhoon season. The passage of the seasons so important to Kafū’s story required a flood in early summer. Records through the more than three centuries of Edo and Meiji suggest that the Sumida flooded on an average of once every three years. It may be that, for obscure reasons, floods were becoming more frequent. In the last half of Meiji the rate was only a little less than one every two years, and of eight floods described as “major, two were in late Meiji, in 1907 and 1910.

  The flood of 1910, commonly called the Great Meiji Flood, submerged the whole northern part of the Low City, eastwards from the valleys of Koishikawa. Rising waters breached the levees of the Sumida and certain lesser streams. Asakusa, including the Yoshiwara and the setting of the Kafū story, suffered the worst damage, but only one of the fifteen wards was untouched, and the flood was a huge disaster.The damage has been calculated at between 4 and 5 percent of the national product for that year. Kafū liked to say that Edo disappeared in the Great Flood and the Yoshiwara fire of the following year. The flood was the occasion for the Arakawa Drainage Channel, to put an end to Sumida floods forever (see page 257).

  Of all Meiji fires, the Ginza fire of 1872 had the most lasting effect upon the city. From it emerged the new Ginza.

  Ginza had not been one of the busier and more prosperous sections of mercantile Edo. Compared to Nihombashi, farther north, it was cramped and narrow, caught between the outer moats of the great Tokugawa citadel and a bay shore occupied in large measure by the aristocracy. The great merchant houses were in more northerly regions. Ginza was a place of artisans and small shops.

  W. E. Griffis gave a good account of what he saw there in 1870, before the fire. It contained no specific reference to Ginza, but a long walk, on his first visit to the city, took him from Tsukiji and the New Shimabara (which he wrongly calls the Yoshiwara) to Kanda. It must have been the Ginza district through which he first strolled.

  I pass through one street devoted to bureaus and cabinets, through another full of folding screens, through another of dyers’ shops, with their odors and vats. In one small but neat shop sits an old man, with horn-rimmed spectacles, with the mordant liquid beside him, preparing a roll of material for its next bath. In another street there is nothing on sale but bamboo poles, but enough of these to make a forest. A man is sawing one, and I notice he pulls the saw with his two hands toward him. Its teeth are set contrary to ours. Another man is planing. He pulls the plane toward him. I notice a blacksmith at work: he pulls the bellows with his foot, while he is holding and hammering with both hands. He has several irons in the fire, and keeps his dinner boiling with the waste flame… The cooper holds his tub with his toes. All of them sit while they work. How strange! Perhaps that is an important difference between a European and an Asian. One sits down to his work, and the other stands up to it…

  I emerge from the bamboo street to the Tori, the main street, the Broadway of the Japanese capital. I recognize it. The shops are gayer and richer; the street is wider; it
is crowded with people.

  Turning up Suruga Chō, with Fuji’s glorious form before me, I pass the great silk shop and fire-proof warehouses of Mitsui the millionaire.

  Ginza had once been something of a theater center, until the Tempō edicts of the 1840s removed the Kabuki theaters to the northern suburbs. Theater quickly returned to the Ginza region when it was allowed to, after the Restoration, but the beginning of Ginza as a thriving center of commerce and pleasure came after the fire.

  The governor decided that the city must be made fireproof, and the newly charred Ginza offered a place to begin. An English architect, Thomas Waters, was retained to build an entire district of red brick. The government subsidized a special company “for building and for the management of rentals.” The rebuilding took three years, when it could have been accomplished in the old way almost overnight. Rather proud of its fires, the old city had also been proud of the speed with which it recovered.

  There seem to have been at least two brick buildings in the Ginza district even before the great fire, one of them a warehouse, the other a shop, “a poorer thing than the public latrines of later years,” says an eminent authority on the subject. When the rebuilding was finished there were almost a thousand brick buildings in Kyōbashi Ward, which included Ginza, and fewer than twenty in the rest of the city. An 1879 list shows a scattering of Western or Westernized buildings through most of the other wards, and one ward, Yotsuya in the High City, with none at all.

  The hope was that the city would make itself over on the Ginza model, and become fireproof. Practice tended in the other direction. Only along the main street was a solid face of red brick presented to the world. Very soon there was cheating, in the form of reversion to something more traditional. Pictures from late Meiji inform us that Bricktown, as it was called, lasted longest in what is now the northern part of Ginza. Nothing at all survives of it today.

  Ginza Bricktown, with trees

  The new Ginza was not on the whole in good repute among foreigners. Already in the 1870s there were complaints about the Americanization of the city. Isabella Bird came visiting in 1878 and in 1880 described Tokyo as less like an Oriental city than like the outskirts of Chicago or Melbourne. She did not say what part of the city she had reference to, but almost certainly it was Ginza. Pierre Loti thought that Bricktown had about it une laideur americaine. Philip Terry, the English writer of tour guides, likened it, as Griffis had likened Nihombashi, to Broadway, though not with Griffis’s intent to praise. “Size without majesty, individuality divorced from all dignity and simplicity, and convenience rather than fitness or sobriety are the salient characteristics of this structural hodge-podge.” Not much of Bricktown survived when Terry wrote, in 1920. What did survive was the impression of a baneful American influence; and the original architect was English.

  The city was of two minds about its new Ginza. Everyone wanted to look at it, but not many wanted to live in it. In a short story from early in this century, Nagai Kafū described it as a chilling symbol of the life to come.

  The initial plans were for shops on the ground floors and residential quarters above, after the pattern of merchant Edo. The new buildings were slow to fill. They were found to be damp, stuffy, vulnerable to mildew, and otherwise ill adapted to the Japanese climate, and the solid walls ran wholly against the Japanese notion of a place to live in. Choice sites along the main street presently found tenants, but the back streets languished, or provided temporary space for sideshows, “bear wrestling and dog dances” and the like. Among the landowners, who had not been made to relinquish their rights, few were willing or able to meet the conditions for repaying government subsidies. These were presently relaxed, but as many as a third of the buildings on the back streets remained empty even so. Vacant buildings were in the end let go for token payments, and cheating on the original plans continued apace. Most Edo townsmen could not afford even the traditional sort of fireproof godown, and the least ostentatious of the new brick buildings were, foot for foot, some ten times as expensive. Such fireproofing measures as the city took through the rest of Meiji went no farther than widening streets and requisitioning land for firebreaks when a district had been burned over.

  Despite the views of Miss Bird and Loti, the new Ginza must have been rather handsome. It was a huge success as an instance of Civilization and Enlightenment, whatever its failures as a model in fireproofing. Everyone went to look at it, and so was born the custom of Gimbura, “killing time in Ginza,” an activity which had its great day between the two world wars.

  The new Ginza was also a great success with the printmakers. As usual they show it in brilliant sunlight with the cherries in bloom; and indeed there were cherries, at least in the beginning, along what had become the widest street in the city, and almost the only street wide enough for trolleys. There were maples, pines, and evergreen oaks as well, the pines at intersections, the others between.

  It is not known exactly when and why these first trees disappeared, leaving the willow to become the great symbol of Ginza. The middle years of Meiji seem to have been the time. Perhaps the original trees were victims of urbanization, and perhaps, sprawling and brittle and hospitable to bugs, they were not practical. Willows, in any event, took over. Hardy and compact, riffled by cooling breezes in the summer, they were what a busy street and showplace seemed to need. Long a symbol of Edo and its rivers and canals, the willow became a symbol of the newest in Tokyo as well. Eventually the willow too went away. One may go out into the suburbs, near the Tama River, and view aged specimens taken there when, just before the earthquake, the last Ginza willows were removed.

  With the new railway station just across a canal to the south, the southern end of what is now Ginza—it was technically not then a part of Ginza—prospered first. From middle into late Meiji it must have been rather like a shopping center, or mall, of a later day. There were two bazaars by the Shimbashi Bridge, each containing numbers of small shops. The youth of Ginza, we have been told by a famous artist who was a native of the district, loved to go strolling there, because from the back windows the Shimbashi geisha district could be seen preparing itself for a night’s business. One of the bazaars kept a python in a window. The python seems to have perished in the earthquake. From the late Meiji Period into Taishō, Tokyo Central Station was built to replace Shimbashi as the terminus for trains from the south. It stood at the northern boundary of Kyōbashi Ward, and so Ginza moved back north again to center upon what is now the main Ginza crossing.

  At least one building from the period of the new Ginza survives, Elocution Hall (Enzetsukan) on the Mita campus of Keiō University. Fukuzawa Yukichi invented the word enzetsu, here rendered as “elocution,” because he regarded the art as one that must be cultivated by the Japanese in their efforts to catch up with the world. Elocution Hall, put up in 1875 and now under the protection of the government as a “cultural property” of great merit, was to be the forum for aspiring young elocutionists. It was moved from the original site, near the main entrance to the Keiō campus, after the earthquake. It is a modest building, not such as to attract the attention of printmakers, and a pleasing one. The doors and windows are Western, as is the interior, but the exterior, with its “trepang walls” and tiled roof, is strongly traditional. In its far more monumental way, the Hoterukan must have looked rather thus.

  The great Ginza fire of 1872 is rivaled as the most famous of Meiji fires by the Yoshiwara fire of 1911, but neither was the most destructive. The Ginza fire burned over great but not consistently crowded spaces. The Kanda fire of 1881, the one that brought an end to Kiyochika’s flourishing years as a printmaker, destroyed more buildings than any other Meiji fire. And not even that rivaled the great fires of Edo, or the Kyoto fire of 1778. Arson was suspected in the 1881 fire, as it was suspected, and sometimes proved, in numbers of other fires. It was a remarkable fire. Not even water stopped it, as water had stopped the Ginza fire. Beginning i
n Kanda and fanned by winter winds, it burned a swath through Kanda and Nihombashi, jumped the river at Ryogoku Bridge, and burned an even wider swath through the eastern wards, subsiding only when it came to open country.

  The great Yoshiwara fire of 1911

  In a space of fifteen years, from early into middle Meiji, certain parts of Nihombashi were three times destroyed by fire. Great fires were commonest in the early months of the year, the driest months, when strong winds often came down from the north and west. (The incendiary raids of 1945 took advantage of these facts.) Much of what remained of the Tokugawa castle burned in 1873, and so the emperor spent more than a third of his reign in the Tokugawa mansion where the Akasaka Palace now stands. He did not move back into the palace until 1889. There were Yoshiwara fires in 1871, 1873, 1891, and 1911, and of course in 1923.

  But Kanda has in modern times been the best place for fires. Of five great Meiji fires after a central fire department was organized in 1880, four began in Kanda, two of them within a few weeks of each other in 1881. The great Yoshiwara fire was the fifth. Only one Taishō fire, that of 1923 excepted, was of a magnitude to compete with the great Meiji fires. It too began in Kanda. No other Taishō fire, save again that of 1923, was remotely as large. The flowers of Edo were finally withering.

  It was not until early Taishō that the fire department was sufficiently well manned to fight fires without amateur help. The disbanding of the old volunteer brigades did not come until after the earthquake. A ceremonial trace of them yet survives in the dezomeshiki, the display of the old panoply and tricks that is a part of the Tokyo New Year. Half the trucks owned by the department were lost in the earthquake, the first of them having been acquired five or six years before.