There were pig fanciers. Pigs commanded high prices. The tiny creatures known as Nanking mice also enjoyed a vogue. But the rabbit vogue was more durable and more intense, a rage of a vogue indeed. Though it spread all over the country, its beginnings were in Tokyo, with two foreigners, an Englishman and an American, who, situated in the Tsukiji foreign settlement, offered rabbits for sale. They also offered to make plain to the ignorant exactly what a rabbit connoisseur looked for in a particularly desirable beast. The rabbits were to be patted and admired, as dogs and cats are, and not eaten. A society of rabbit fanciers was formed. Rabbits with the right points brought huge prices, far greater, by weight, than those for pigs. Large floppy ears were much esteemed, as was the sarasa, or calico coat. A person in Shitaya was fined and jailed for staining a white rabbit with persimmon juice.
Imports from distant lands increased the rabbit count, and encouraged speculation and profiteering. In 1873, a year in which the population of domestic rabbits in the central wards reached almost a hundred thousand, authorities banned a meeting of the society of rabbit fanciers. Later that year they banned the breeding of the rabbits themselves, and imposed a tax to discourage possession. The vogue thereupon died down, though foreigners were observed thereafter selling French rabbits in Asakusa. Newspapers regarded the consular courts as too lenient, and so the rankling issue of extraterritoriality came into the matter. So did one of the great social problems of early Meiji, because the lower ranks of the military aristocracy—who had great difficulty adjusting to the new day—were the chief losers from the profiteering.
The enthusiasm for foreign things waned somewhat in mid-Meiji. In the realm of personal grooming there was a certain vogue for “improving” Japanese things rather than discarding them for the Western. This nationalist reaction was by implication anti-Western, of course, but it was not accompanied by the sort of antiforeign violence that had been common in late Tokugawa. There were such incidents in early Meiji, but usually under special circumstances. When, in 1870, two Englishmen who taught at the university were wounded by swordsmen, W. E. Griffis was on hand to help treat them. Initially he shared the anger and fear of the foreign community, but eventually he learned of details that shocked his missionary sensibilities and caused him to put the blame rather on the Englishmen. They had been out womanizing. What happened to them need no more concern the God-fearing citizen of Tokyo than a similar incident at the contemporary Five Points slum need concern a proper citizen of New York. Two men from southwestern clans were executed for the assaults, some have thought on insufficient evidence. Sir Harry Parkes, the formidable British minister, was about to depart for home, and it was thought necessary (or so it has been averred) that something memorable be done for the occasion. One of the two condemned men retracted his confession, which did not in any event agree with the evidence presented by the wounds.
Out of fashion for some decades after Prince Itō’s masked ball, dancing became wild and uncontrolled, by police standards, in the years after the First World War. Another new institution of the Rokumeikan period, the coffee house, also left its early primness behind. A Chinese opened the first one near Ueno Park in 1888. Descriptions of it suggest that it may have been a sort of gymnasium or health club, with coffee offered as an invigorating potion. The transcription of “coffee” had a sort of devil-may-care quality about it. Today the word is generally written with two characters that have only phonetic value, but the founder of the Coffee House chose a pair signifying “pros and cons,” or perhaps “for better or for worse.” The English word has continued to designate the beverage, while the French came to signify a place where stylish and affluent gentlemen (without their wives) went to be entertained by pretty and accommodating young ladies. It was among the symbols of the Taishō high life.
Though sea bathing was not completely unknown in Meiji, ladies’ bathing garments became good business only in Taishō. Immersion in natural bodies of cold water has long been a religious observance, but it was not until recent times that the Japanese came to think it pleasurable. When Nagai Kafū describes a summer beach of late Meiji it is notable for its loneliness, even a beach which now would be an impenetrable mass of bodies on a hot Sunday afternoon. In his memoirs Tanizaki describes an excursion to the Shiba coast, to a beach situated almost exactly where the expressway now passes the Shiba Detached Palace. The purpose of the outing seems to have been more for clamdigging than for bathing. In late Meiji there was an advertising campaign to promote the district and induce people to come bathing in its waters (then still clean enough for bathing, even though the south shore of the bay was becoming a district of factories and docks). Among the points made in favor of sea bathing was that it was held in high esteem by foreigners.
Eminent foreigners began coming to Tokyo at an early date. They were on the whole treated hospitably. An exception was the czarevitch of Russia, who was wounded by a sword-swinging policeman, though not in Tokyo, when he paid a visit to Japan in 1891. The very earliest was the Duke of Edinburgh, who came in 1869. Others included German and Italian princes, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and a head of state, the King of Hawaii. William H. Seward called in 1870. The Meiji government felt more immediately threatened by Russia than by any other nation. Seward suggested an Alaskan solution to the Russian problem: buy them out. Pierre Loti was probably the most distinguished literary visitor of Meiji, but such attention as he received—his invitation to the Rokumeikan, for instance—had less to do with his writing than with his diplomatic status as a naval attaché.
The eminent foreigners most lionized were without question General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. On a round-the-world journey, they reached Nagasaki by cruiser in June, 1879, and were in Tokyo for two months, from early July to early September. They were to have visited Kyoto and Osaka, but this part of their schedule was canceled because of a cholera epidemic. The guard along the way from Yokohama was commanded by Nogi Maresuke, who became, in the Russo-Japanese War, the leading military immortal of modern times, and demonstrated the extent of his loyalty to the throne by committing suicide on the day of the Meiji emperor’s funeral. For the Grants there was a reception at Shimbashi Station, before which a display of hydrangeas formed the initials “U.S.G.” Japanese and American flags decorated every door along the way to the Hama Palace, where the party stayed, and where the governor honored them with yet another reception. Receptions were held during the following weeks at the College of Technology and Ueno. The former is said to have been the first soiree essayed by the Japanese, whose ways of entertaining had been of a different sort. There were parades and visits to schools and factories, the sort of thing one gets on a visit to the New China today. The general planted a cypress tree in Ueno. It came through the holocausts of 1923 and 1945, and yet survives, providing the background for an equestrian statue of the founder of the Japanese Red Cross. Mrs. Grant planted a magnolia, which survives as well. There was classical theater, both Kabuki and Nō, and there was the most festive of summer observances, the “opening of the Sumida” in July. The general viewed it in comfort from an aristocratic villa, it being a day when there were still such villas on the river. The crowds were twice as large as for any earlier year in Meiji, despite the fact that the weather was bad. Fireworks and crowds got rained upon. All manner of pyrotechnical glories were arranged in red, white, and blue. The general indicated great admiration.
A parade during General Grant’s visit in 1879. Woodcut by Kunichika (The Metropolitan Museum of Art: gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1962)
The general and the emperor saw a good deal of each other. The general paid a courtesy call on the Fourth of July, the day after his arrival. They had breakfast together after a troop review on July 7, and met again at the great Ueno reception in August. Also in August, they had a long and relatively informal meeting in the Hama Palace. The general argued the virtues of democracy, though with a caution against too hasty adoption of this best of systems. He expressed the hope
that the Japanese would be tactful and considerate of Chinese sensibilities as they took over the Ryūkyū Islands, claimed by both countries. A few days before his departure, he took his leave of the emperor.
Though overall the visit was a huge success, there were a few unpleasant incidents. Clara Whitney overheard a catty Japanese lady remark “that General Grant is treated so much like a god here that a temple should be erected immediately.” Towards the end of his stay there were rumors of an assassination plot, but they proved to be the inventions of a jealous Englishman. The 1879 cholera epidemic, by no means the only such epidemic in Meiji, had led to the building of the first isolation hospitals in the city. Rumors spread similar to earlier ones about telegraph poles (see p. 65): the hospitals were for purposes of snatching livers, General Grant being ready to pay a handsome price for a liver.
These were minor details, however. On the whole, the city seems to have loved the general and the general the city.
The high point of the visit, for the historian of the event if not for the general himself, was his evening at the Kabuki. He went to the Shintomiza near Ginza, the most advanced theater in the city. Carpets and lacquered chairs had been carried in from the Hama Palace. Three royal princes were in attendance, as was the prime minister. The play was called The Latter Three Years’ War in the North. Minamoto Yoshiie, the victorious general in that war (a historical event), resembled the visiting general in a most complimentary manner: he behaved with great courtliness and magnanimity towards his defeated adversary.
The theater manager, accompanied by Danjūrō, the most famous actor of the day, stepped forth in frock coat during an entr’acte to thank the general for a curtain he had donated. The climax was a dance performed against a backdrop of flags and lanterns. Some of the musicians wore red and white stripes, others stars on a blue ground. Then appeared a row of Yanagibashi geisha, each in a kimono of red and white stripes drawn down over one shoulder to reveal a star-spangled singlet. Japanese and American flags decorated their fans.
“Ah, the old flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes!…” Clara Whitney wrote in her diary. “It made the prettiest costume imaginable… We looked with strong emotion upon this graceful tribute to our country’s flag and felt grateful to our Japanese friends for their kindness displayed not only to General Grant but to our honored country.”
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Next to General and Mrs. Grant, the foreigner who got the most attention from the newspapers and the printmakers was probably an Englishman named Spencer, who came in 1890, bringing balloons with which he performed stunts, once in Yokohama and twice in Tokyo. The emperor was present at the first Tokyo performance. Parachuting from his balloon, Spencer almost hit the royal tent, and injured himself slightly in his efforts to avoid it. He drew huge crowds at Ueno a few days later, and this time landed in a paddy field. An American named Baldwin tried to outdo him the following month, with aerial acrobatics and a threatening smoky balloon. Spencer is the one who is remembered, to the extent that he was given credit by the printmakers for stunts that apparently were Baldwin’s. The following year the great actor Kikugorō appeared on the Kabuki stage as Spencer, in a play by Mokuami. Coached by a nephew of Fukuzawa Yukichi, he even essayed a speech in English. There was a vogue for balloon candies, balloon bodkins, and, of course, balloon prints. Since the Japanese had been launching military balloons for more than a decade, it must have been the parachuting and stunting that so interested people—or perhaps they enjoyed seeing a foreigner in a dangerous predicament.
W. E. Griffis, who felt that those two grievously wounded Englishmen (see page 113) deserved what they got, said that the same judgment applied to all attacks upon foreigners of which he was aware. It may be true. The attack on the czarevitch may not seem to fit the generalization as well as it might, but the assailant could have argued that Russia itself was behaving provocatively. Violence was also directed at Salvation Army workers, and much the same justification might have been offered—the army itself was provocative.
An American colonel of the Salvation Army arrived and set up an office in the summer of 1900. Very soon afterwards he published a tract called Triumphant Voice (Toki no Koe), addressed to the ladies of the Yoshiwara. It exhorted them to flee their bondage, and offered help to those who responded positively. The brothel keepers attempted to buy up all copies. A Japanese worker for the Salvation Army was pummeled by a Yoshiwara bully boy as he hawked Triumphant Voice. Two men tried to rescue a lady from the Susaki quarter, and they too were attacked. This charitable endeavor attracted the attention and support of the newspapers. A reporter succeeded in rescuing a Yoshiwara lady, whereupon fleeing the quarters became something of a fad. The Salvation Army announced that during the last months of 1900 there were more than a thousand refugees in Tokyo alone. The figure is not easy to substantiate, but publicity was enormous. The vogue presently passed, and the Salvation Army was not afterwards able to match this initial success.
The “double life,” that mixture of the imported and the domestic, was certainly present from early Meiji and indeed from late Tokugawa, for people to enjoy and to be tormented by. Eminent foreigners came, objects of admiration and emulation, and once Civilization and Enlightenment had been accepted as worthy, it must have been difficult to see pinching shoes and injunctions to urinate indoors as other than important. Through most of Meiji, however, the cosmopolitan part of the double life was the part added, the frills attached somewhat selfconsciously and discarded when a person wanted to be comfortable. The big change, the domestication of the foreign, began in late Meiji, at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and the advertising man and the retail merchant may have been responsible for it. Perhaps it would have occurred without their aggressive urgings. Yet the old drygoods store became the modern department store in late Meiji, and in the change we may see how the double life itself was changing. Civilization and Enlightenment were no longer much talked of in late Meiji, but it was hard for anyone, in the dingiest alley east of the river, not to know what the Mitsukoshi and the Shirokiya were offering this season.
Advertising is a modern institution. The canny merchant of Edo had been aware of its merits, and there are well-known stories of Kabuki actors who promoted lines of dress. Edo was a closed world, however, in which vogues, led by the theater and the pleasure quarters, spread like contagions. People knew their stores, and stores knew their people. Even the largest and richest were highly specialized. Faster transportation led to the development of a wide clientele, gradually becoming something like national. At the same time came the idea of offering everything to everyone.
Through most of Meiji, the old way prevailed. The big shops specialized in dry goods. The customer removed his footwear before stepping up to the matted floor of the main sales room. There was no window shopping. If the customer did not know precisely what he wanted, the clerk had to guess, and bring likely items from a godown. Aristocratic ladies from the High City did not go shopping in the Low City. Clerks came to them from the big “silk stores,” or from smaller establishments that would today call themselves boutiques.
The Mitsui dry goods store, presently to become Mitsukoshi, had a fixed schedule of prices from early in its history. Haggling seems to have been common in early Meiji all the same, and a mark of cultural differences. The clans of the far southwest had made the Meiji revolution, and were the new establishment. Their ways were frequently not the ways of Edo and Tokyo. Their men took haggling as a matter of course, and the shopkeepers of Edo resisted it or acceded to it as their business instincts advised them. At least one old and well-established dry goods store bankrupted itself by the practice. Mitsui held to its fixed schedule, and survived.
Mitsukoshi’s famous glass display cases
The last decades of Meiji saw the advent of the department store. In many of its details it represented the emergence of a Western institution and the retreat of the traditional to the lesser re
alm of the specialty store. Certainly there was imitation. The big Mitsukoshi store of the Taishō era, the one that burned so brightly after the earthquake, was an imitation of Wanamaker’s. If the department store symbolized the new city, however, it remained a Japanese sort of symbol. Department stores sold their wares by drawing crowds with culture and entertainment as well as merchandise. They were heirs to the shrine and temple markets, shopping centers ahead of their time.
Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, at opposite approaches to the Nihombashi bridge, led the way into the great mercantile transformation. Edo methods predominated until about the turn of the century. They did not disappear even then, but the big dealers quickly moved on to mass sales of myriad commodities.
Mitsui, or Mitsukoshi, had entered Edo from the provinces in the seventeenth century. Shirokiya had opened for business in Nihombashi a few years earlier. Mitsukoshi has fared better than Shirokiya in the present century, but it would be facile to see in this the commonly averred victory of the provincial trader over the son of Edo. Both enterprises had been a part of Edo from its earliest years. Mitsukoshi was better at advertising and “image-making” than Shirokiya. Though purveying almost everything to almost everyone, it has preserved a certain air of doing so with elegance. In late Meiji, standing face to face across the bridge to which all roads led, the two sought to outdo each other with bold new innovations. Shortly after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 Mitsui added a second floor, with showcases. These were innovations so startling that they were for a time resisted. Edo had done its shopping on platforms perhaps two or three feet from the ground, with no wares on display.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 13