Traffic on the left side of the street also appears to have been a Meiji innovation. There had not been much vehicular traffic in Edo, but bridge signs give evidence that such as there was had been expected to pass on the right. In early Meiji, police orders—probably under the influence of the British, at the forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment in so many ways—required carriages to pass on the left.
Reading a line of horizontal print from left to right was a Meiji innovation. Not imposed by authority, the practice gradually and uncertainly came to prevail. Two adjoining Nihombashi financial establishments might have signs reading in contradictory fashion, one in the old direction, right to left, the other in the new. On the same train the description of the route would read right to left and the no-smoking sign left to right.
Beer, which has now replaced sake as the national drink, even as baseball has replaced Sumō as the national sport, made its appearance early in Meiji. The first brewery was in Tokyo, just south of the Hibiya parade grounds, not far from where the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel later arose. The first beer hall opened in Kyōbashi on the Fourth of July in 1899, celebrating the end of the “unequal treaties.”
Until very recently, the system of house numbers was so chaotic that ancient uncodified custom seemed the most likely explanation. In fact, however, there were no house numbers at all until Meiji. The sense of place centered upon the machi or chō, which might be rendered “neighborhood.” A few streets had popular names and today a few have official names, but the neighborhood continues to be the central element in an address. Before Meiji there was nothing else. If more detailed information was required as to the site of a dwelling, only description could be offered—“two houses from the retired sealmaker in the second back alley,” and the like. House numbers were observed by early travelers to the West, and thought desirable, and assigned helter-skelter as new houses went up and old houses wished numbers too.
The want of system has been remedied somewhat in recent years, so that Number 2 in a certain neighborhood will usually be found between Number 1 and Number 3; yet the consciousness of place continues to be by tract or expanse and not by line. Though it provides its pleasures, and sometimes one has a delicious sense of adventure in looking for an address, a system of numbers along a line is without question more efficient than one of numbers scattered over an area. The chaos of the Meiji method was a product of Civilization and Enlightenment, however, and not of benighted tradition, which eschewed house numbers.
What is now the most ubiquitous of Japanese accessories, the calling card, is a Western importation. The first ones are believed to have been brought from Europe in 1862 by a Tokugawa diplomatic mission. In the 1903 edition of their guide to Japan, Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason describe Tokyo as having “a tranquil and semi-rural aspect owing to the abundance of trees and foliage.” Compared to most Japanese cities, and especially Osaka, Tokyo is indeed a city of greenery. Yet the planting of trees along streets is a modern innovation. In the premodern city there had been some public trees (as they might be called) along waterways. The Yanagiwara, the “Willowfield” along the Kanda River, even predated the Tokugawa hegemony. Virtually all the trees and grasses of the old city were in pots or behind walls, however, and the pines, cherries, maples, and oaks of Ginza were the first genuine street trees.
Western things tended to make their first appearance in the treaty ports. Yet many an innovation was first seen in Tokyo. Yokohama may have had the first lemonade and ice cream, but Tokyo had the first butter and the first Western soup.
The first artificial limb in the land was bestowed in Yokohama upon a Tokyo Kabuki actor, the third Sawamura Tanosuke. Dr. J. C. Hepburn, a pioneer medical missionary and the deviser of the Hepburn system of romanization (still in use despite modifications in detail), amputated a gangrenous leg and then sent to America for a wooden one, which arrived and was fitted in the last full year before Meiji. Tanosuke lost his other leg and a hand before he finally died, in 1878. He went on acting to the end.
Men were in most respects quicker to go high-collar than women. It was so in the cutting of the topknot, and it was so as well in the discarding of traditional dress. The phenomenon is to be observed elsewhere in Asia. It has to do, probably, with the decorative functions assigned to women, and also with somewhat magical aspects assigned to Western panoply and appurtenances. Whether or not the business suit is more businesslike than the kimono, people are bound to think it is, because the wearer has been better at business.
There may have been a few geisha with bustles and flounces and the shampoo coiffure, and these were the proper accouterments for a well-placed lady of the upper classes on her way to the Rokumeikan. Yet even for upper-class ladies the emphasis in the late years of the century shifted from Western dress to “improvement” of the Japanese kimono. Though hot-weather dress became Westernized more quickly than dress for the cooler seasons, most lady strollers in Ginza still wore Japanese dress on the eve of the earthquake. Some two-thirds of the men were in foreign dress, which was very expensive in the early years, and attainable only by the wealthy and the bureaucracy (for which it was mandatory). The military and the police were the first to go Western. The change had begun before the end of the shogunate. By 1881, there were two hundred tailoring and dressmaking establishments in the city, more than half of them in Nihombashi.
The emperor’s buttons and the empress’s bracelets and bodkins arrived from France in 1872. Traditional court dress was abolished by the Council of State that same year, though most court officials were still in traditional dress at the opening of the Yokohama railroad. Willingness to wear Western dress was more prevalent among men than among women, and among the upper classes than the lower.
Even at the height of the Rokumeikan era (for a description of that building see pages 82-83), when the world was being shown that the Japanese could do the Western thing as well as anyone else, there seems to have been more determination than ardor. Newspaper accounts inform us that the dance floor at some of the more celebrated events was dominated by foreigners, and Pierre Loti informs us that Japanese ladies, when coaxed out upon the floor, were correct but wooden.
Rokumeikan parties did not have much to do with the life of the city. They belonged in the realm of politics and the highest society, and if the sort of person who took his pleasures at Asakusa ever set foot in the place, it was doubtless as a servant or a delivery boy. Such affairs do not belong to the story of what happened to Edo and all its townsmen. Yet the Rokumeikan era was such an extraordinary episode, or series of episodes, that to dismiss it as political and really too high-class would be to risk letting the Meiji spirit, at its most ardent there in Tokyo whether of the city or not, disappear in an excessively rigid schema.
The building itself is gone, and historical treatment of the era runs towards dryness. The life of the place is best sensed in the works of woodcut artists who, not themselves of high society, can have attended few if any Rokumeikan soirees. They make the best years of the Rokumeikan, and especially the ladies in their bright, bright dresses, seem utterly charming. Had one lived through those years, however, and been among the lucky few on the invitation lists, one might well have found the Rokumeikan hard work, no more charming than the doings of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society today. The flounces and bustles might not be so much fun had they been photographed rather than made into prints. They came when the art of the Ukiyo-e was having its last show of vigor, and lent themselves well to the bold pigments favored by Meiji artists.
The Rokumeikan seems to have been the idea of Inoue Kaoru. When Inoue became foreign minister in 1879, treaty reform was among the great issues. He was of the Nagato clan, which with the Satsuma clan had been the principal maker of the Restoration. In 1881 his good friend and fellow Nagato clansman, Itō Hirobumi, emerged as the most influential figure on the Council of State. Both were young men as politicians go, Itō in his l
ate thirties, Inoue in his early forties. They had gone together some years before the Restoration to study in England. When, in 1885, Itō became the first prime minister with the title that office still bears, Inoue was his foreign minister. They saw Europeanization as the best way to get rid of the unequal treaties, and most particularly of extraterritoriality. Among the details of the movement was the Rokumeikan.
Whatever other ideas he may have had, Inoue is best remembered for conceiving of the Rokumeikan. The charm of the place, in addition to the bustles and flounces, lies largely in an element of fantasy. What politician, one asks, could possibly have thought that such a hardheaded person as the British minister would be so moved by a few Westernized balls at the Rokumeikan that he would recommend treaty revision to the home office? Yet that is what the Rokumeikan was about. In the episode is all the eagerness and wishfulness of young Meiji.
Records are not consistent as to the number of guests invited by Inoue for his opening night. There may have been upwards of a thousand, with several hundred foreigners among them. The facade was a great expanse of branches and flowers, dotted with flags and the royal crest. The garden glittered rather than blazed, with myriads of little lights, each shining chiefly upon a miniature stag. In the hallway were two stags formed from leafy branches. The great staircase was solidly embanked with chrysanthemums. Wishing to seem European in every respect possible, Inoue had the orchestra play to what would have been a fashionable hour in a European capital, but well beyond the hour when the son of Edo would have headed for home or settled in for the night. Accordingly, there was a special train to accommodate guests from Yokohama.
Almost everything for which the Rokumeikan provided the setting was new. Invitations addressed jointly to husbands and wives were an astonishing innovation—the son of Edo would not have known what to say. The Rokumeikan saw garden parties and evening receptions, and in 1884 there was a big charity bazaar. This too was very new. The old order had managed charities differently; it might have been thought proper to give largesse of some sort to a deserving individual who was personally known to the donor, but the trouble of a bazaar to benefit faceless strangers would have seemed purposeless. The 1884 bazaar lasted three days, and ten thousand tickets were sold. At the end of it all, the head of the Mitsubishi enterprises bought the unsold wares. The chief organizer was a princess (by marriage) belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family, and many another great lady of the land was on the committee.
Whether done easily or not, dancing was the main thing to do at the Rokumeikan. Ladies and gentlemen were expected to appear in foreign dress, so much less constricting than Japanese dress, and so flattering to the foreigner. Beginning late in 1884, ladies and gentlemen gathered for regular and studiously organized practice in the waltz, the quadrille, and the like. Two noble Japanese ladies were the organizers, and the teachers were of foreign extraction.
The grand climax of the Rokumeikan era did not occur at the Rokumeikan itself, but serves well by way of summing up. In 1885 Itō Hirobumi, still prime minister, gave a huge masked ball at his Western mansion. Again, reports on the number of guests vary widely, ranging from four hundred to over a thousand. Foreign dress was not required, and numbers of eminent Japanese guests took advantage of this fact. Itō himself was a Venetian nobleman, but Inoue was a Japanese buffoon, and the Home Minister a Japanese horseman. The president of the university came as the poet Saigyō, who had lived some seven centuries earlier.
Itō was involved shortly afterwards in an amorous scandal, an affair with a noble lady who was another man’s wife. The Itō cabinet became known—and the appellation is no more flattering in Japanese than in English—as “the dancing cabinet.” Itō held on as prime minister until 1888, but the fresh bloom of the Rokumeikan was passing. The antiquarian example of the university president seems to suggest that not everyone who went there was enthusiastic.
Strongly elitist from the outset, the Rokumeikan became the target of growing criticism, some of it spiteful and emotional, some of it soundly realistic. There were incidents, the Normanton incident of 1886 most prominent among them. The Normanton was a British freighter that sank off the Japanese coast. All the survivors were British, and all twenty-three Japanese passengers drowned. The captain was tried by consular court in Kobe and acquitted. He was later sentenced to a short prison term by the Yokohama consulate, but the sentence did not still public outrage. Extraterritoriality was becoming intolerable. The Rokumeikan and all its assemblies were accomplishing nothing towards the necessary goal.
The end of the decade approached, and it came to seem that the Rokumeikan had no friends anywhere. Itō’s political career did not end with the scandal and his resignation, but Inoue never really came into his own. Demagogues of the radical right and leaders of the “people’s rights” movement on the left were at one in thinking that the Rokumeikan must go. In 1889 it was sold to the Peers Club, and so began the way into obscurity and extinction that has been described. The name will not be forgotten. During its brief period of prominence the Rokumeikan was among the genuinely interesting curiosities the city contained. It has fascinated such disparate writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Mishima Yukio.
Though the enthusiasm with which the grand men of the land went out courting Europe and America had passed, the vogue for big parties did not pass. Three thousand five hundred guests were present at a party given by a shipowner in 1908, at what had been the Korakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family. Another shipowner gave a remarkable party in 1917, by which time the art of party-giving had advanced beyond mere imitation of the West. He had been tigerhunting in Korea, and his two hundred guests, assembled at the Imperial Hotel, were invited to sample tiger meat.
Government offices were first provided with chairs in 1871. Later that year it became unnecessary to remove the shoes before gaining admission. Shoes were quickly popular with both sexes. Schoolgirls in full Japanese dress except for what appear to be buttoned shoes are common in Meiji prints. Clara Whitney, an American girl who lived in Tokyo from 1875, was distressed to see, at the funeral in 1877 of the widow of the fourteenth shogun, a band of professional mourners in traditional dress and foreign shoes. In early Meiji there was a vogue for squeaky shoes. To produce a happy effect, strips of “singing leather” could be purchased and inserted into the shoes.
Student uniforms of the Western style were adopted for men in mid-Meiji, and so came the choke collars and the blackness relieved only by brass buttons that prevailed through the Second World War. At the outset, school uniforms were not compulsory. Rowdiness was given as the reason for the change. Curiously, there had been a period earlier in Meiji when students were forbidden to wear foreign dress. Rowdyism seems to have been the reason then too, and the fact that foreigners were distressed to see students wandering about in foreign underwear.
It was not until the Taishō Period that the masses of students, young and older, changed to Western dress. A graduation picture for a well-known private elementary school shows all pupils in Japanese dress at the end of Meiji. A picture for the same school at the beginning of Shōwa (the present reign) shows most of the boys and about half the girls in Western dress. The middy blouse that continues to be a standard for girl students on the lower levels did not come into vogue until after the earthquake.
At the end of Meiji, the old way of dress yet prevailed among students, though the enlightened view held that it was constricting and inconsistent with modern individualism. When male students chose Western costume, they often wore it with a difference. A flamboyant messiness became the mark of the elite, and a word was coined for it, a hybrid. The first syllable of bankara is taken from a Chinese word connoting barbarity, and the remainder from “high-collar,” signifying the up-to-date and cosmopolitan. The expression, still used though uniforms have virtually disappeared from higher education, means something like sloppily modern.
High-collar aspects of food had b
een present since early Meiji, especially the eating of meat, a practice frowned upon by Buddhist orthodoxy. It is recorded that Sumō wrestlers of the Tokugawa Period ate all manner of strange things, such as monkeys, but the populace at large observed Buddhist taboos. The beef-pot was among the radical Meiji departures, and among its symbols as well. Pigs, horses, and dairy products, almost unknown before Meiji, now entered the Japanese diet. So too did bread, which was not thought of as a staple until about the time of the earthquake. In Meiji it was a confection. A Japanized version, a bun filled with bean jam, was inexpensive and very popular among students.
The city had a slaughterhouse from late Tokugawa, first in the hills of Shiba, then, because of local opposition, on the more secluded Omori coast, beyond the “red line” that defined the jurisdiction of the city magistrates. The students at Fukuzawa’s Keiō University seem to have been inveterate eaters of beef, as was most appropriate to that Westernizing place. Yet they had their inhibitions. Reluctant to be seen in butcher shops, customers would receive their orders through inconspicuous windows. When a butcher entered the Keiō gates to make deliveries, he would be greeted with the clicking of flints that was an ancient cleansing and propitiatory ritual.
Chinese cuisine was also new to the city, though it had long been present in Nagasaki. It is so ubiquitous today, and in many ways so Japanized, that one might think it most venerable. The first Chinese restaurant in Tokyo opened for business only in 1883. It was the Kairakuen in Nihombashi, where Tanizaki and his friends played at whores and cribs. Where the beef-pot seems to have caught on without special sponsorship, the Kairakuen, like the Rokumeikan, had wealthy and powerful promoters, who thought Chinese cooking a necessity in any city worthy of the name.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 12