Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The original Asakusa Park was expanded in 1876 to include the gardens and firebreak to the west. There was further expansion in 1882, and the following year “the paddies,” as the firebreak was called, were excavated to make two ornamental lakes. The reclaimed wetlands were designated the sixth of the seven districts into which the park was divided. In the Meiji and Taishō periods, and indeed down to Pearl Harbor, “Sixth District” meant the music halls and the movie palaces and the other things that drew mass audiences. The Sixth District had its first theater in 1886, and, in 1903, Electricity Hall, the first permanent movie theater in the land. Among the other things were a miniature Mount Fuji, sixty-eight feet high, for the ascent of which a small fee was charged, and a rope bridge across the lakes, to give a sense of deep mountains. The Fuji was damaged in a typhoon and torn down the year the Twelve Storys, much higher, was completed, on land just north of the park limits. Among those who crossed the bridge was Sir Edwin Arnold, the British journalist best remembered as the author of The Light of Asia. Several urchins tried to shake him and a lady companion into one of the lakes. The workmanship of the bridge reminded him of the Incas.

  By the turn of the century, the Sixth District was a jumble of show houses and archery stalls—the great pleasure warren of a pleasure-loving city. It may be that the change was not fundamental, for the “back mountain” of the Asakusa Kannon had already been something of the sort. The Sixth District was noisier, brighter, and gaudier, however, and its influence extended all through the park. Remnants of the old Asakusa, shrinking back into it all, spoke wistfully to the few who took notice.

  Kubota Mantarō, poet, novelist, playwright, and native of Asakusa, wrote of the change wrought by the cinema:

  Suddenly, it was everywhere. It swept away all else, and took control of the park. The life of the place, the color, quite changed. The “new tide” was violent and relentless. In the districts along the western ditch, by the Kōryūji Temple, somnolence had reigned. It quite departed. The old shops, dealers in tools and scrap and rags, the hair dresser’s and the bodkin and bangle places—they all went away, as did the water in the ditch. New shops put up their brazen signs: Western restaurants, beef and horse places, short-order places, milk parlors. Yet even in those days, there were still houses with latticed fronts, little shops of uniform design, nurseries with bamboo fences, workmen from the fire brigades. They were still to be observed, holding their own, in a few corners, in the quiet, reposed, somehow sad alleys of the back districts, in the deep shade of the blackberry brambles behind the grand hall.

  Asakusa had its gay and busy time, which passed. The lakes grew dank and gaseous in the years after the surrender, and were filled in. The crowds ceased to come, probably more because of changes in the entertainment business and new transportation patterns than because of what had happened to the park. It might be argued that Asakusa would have fared better if it had not become an entertainment center. If the old park had gone on looking like a park, then Asakusa, like Ueno, might still have its lures. As to that, no one can say—and it may be that if we could say, we would not wish the story of Asakusa to be different. It was perhaps the place where the Low City had its last good time. Nowhere today is there quite the same good-natured abandon to be found, and if people who remember it from thirty years ago may properly lament the change, the laments of those who remember it from twice that long ago are, quite as properly, several times as intense.

  It is another story. Asakusa is an instance of what can happen to a public park when no one is looking, though the more relevant point may be that it never really was a park. As an episode in intellectual history, it illustrates the ease with which words can be imported, and the slowness with which substance comes straggling along afterwards. In 1873 Tokyo could face the other capitals of the world and announce that it too had public parks; but it was not until two decades later, when the city acquired land suitable for a central park (if that was what was wished) that the possibility of actually planning and building a park seemed real. The double life, in other words, was gradually reaching down to fundamentals. What had happened at Ueno had happened more by accident than forethought, and not much at all had happened at Asakusa—except that the purveyors of pleasure had had their cheerful and energetic way.

  Since the rise of Marunouchi, Hibiya Park, along with the public portion of the palace grounds abutting it on the north, has been the central park of the city—perhaps more important, because of easy access to Ginza, than Ueno. In early Meiji it was not a place where a townsman would have chosen to go for a pleasant walk, and it did not become a public park until thirty years after the original five. Lying within the outer ramparts of the castle, it was at the end of the Tokugawa regime occupied by mansions of the military aristocracy. While the castle grounds nearby were being put to somewhat helter-skelter use by the new government and ultimately, after their time of providing homes for foxes and badgers, were left as public gardens or turned over to the commercial developers, Hibiya was a parade ground. It was cleared for the purpose in 1871, and there, a year later, the emperor first reviewed troops. It seems to have been fearfully dusty even after the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel were built to the east, for a scorched-earth policy was deemed in accord with modern military methods. In 1893 the army, which had acquired more suitable spots on the western fringes of the city, announced its intention of turning Hibiya over to the city by stages. Hibiya Park was opened in 1903.

  Initially it was thought that the present Hibiya park lands would become the bureaucratic center. Planning to that effect began after the burning of the palace in 1872. There was no hesitation about rebuilding the palace on the site of the old castle, and in 1886 a government planning office proposed a concentration of government buildings on the parade grounds. The advice of the Germans was invited. Two eminent architects arrived and drew up plans for a complex of highly ornate buildings. A big hole was dug, at great expense, before it was concluded that the soil would not really bear the weight of all that echt Western brick and stone, and that lands farther to the west might be more suitable. Though German prestige slid, we may be grateful for the results. Without the excavation Tokyo might lack a central park (as Osaka does). The German plans, modified in the direction of simplicity, found use in the government complex that did presently come to be. The original plans have been described as seven parts Nikkō (with reference to the most florid of the Tokugawa tombs) and three parts Western.

  Some liked the new park, some did not. Nagai Kafū, on his return from France in 1908, found it repellently formal. It became so favored a trysting place, however, that the Kōjimachi police station felt compelled to take action. On the summer night in 1908 when a dozen or so policemen were first sent into the park, they apprehended about the same number of miscreant couples, who were fined. Hibiya is usually referred to as the first genuinely Western park in the city and in Japan. That is what Kafū so disliked about it—he did not think that Westernization worked in any thing or person Japanese but himself.

  In fact a good deal of the park is fairly Japanese, and it contains relics of all the eras—trees said to be as old as the city, a fragment of the castle escarpment and moat, a bandstand that was in the original park, a bronze fountain only slightly later. The bandstand has lost its original cupola and the park has changed in matters of detail; yet of all the major parks it is the one that has changed least. Perhaps the fact that it was Western in concept as well as in name may be given credit for this stability.

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  The area officially devoted to parks grew slightly through Meiji and Taishō, but remained low compared to the cities of the West with which comparison is always being made. (It is high compared to Osaka.) In the last years of Taishō, the total of open spaces, including temples, shrines, and cemeteries, offered each resident of the city only one four-hundredth as much as was available to the resident of Washington. Even New York, whose residents were straitene
d in comparison with those of London and Paris, boasted forty times the per-capita park area that Tokyo did.

  Yet there is truth in the excuse given by that Taishō mayor for the shortage of tracts officially designated as parks. While public parks were not pointless, they may have seemed much less of a necessity than they did in Western cities. Besides the tiny plots of greenery before rows of Low City houses, there continued to be a remarkable amount of unused space, especially in the High City, but in the Low City as well.

  Kafū could be lyrical on the subject of vacant lots.

  I love weeds. I have the same fondness for them as for the violets and dandelions of spring, the bell flowers and maiden flowers of autumn. I love the weeds that flourish in vacant lots, the weeds that grow on roofs, the weeds beside the road and beside the ditch. A vacant lot is a garden of weeds. The plumes of the mosquito-net grass, as delicate as glossed silk; the plumes of foxtail, soft as fur; the warm rose-pink of knotgrass blossoms; the fresh blue-white of the plantain; chickweed in flower, finer and whiter than sand: having come upon them does one not linger over them and find them difficult to give up? They are not sung of in courtly poetry, one does not find them in the paintings of Sōtatsu and Kōrin. They are first mentioned in the haiku and in the comic verse of plebeian Edo. I will never cease to love Utamaro’s “Selection of Insects.” An ukiyo-e artist sketched lowly grasses and insects quite ignored by Sinified painters and the schools of Kyoto. The example informs us how great was the achievement of haiku and comic verse and the ukiyo-e. They found a subject dismissed by aristocratic art and they made it art in its own right.

  Far more than the plantings in all the new parks around the outer moat and behind the Nikolai Cathedral, I am drawn to the weeds one comes upon in vacant lots.

  An important addition was made in Meiji to the lists of shrines, some of them not so very different from parks. Kudan Hill, to the west of the Kanda flats and northwest of castle and palace, was once higher than it is now. It once looked down over the swampy lands which the shogunate early filled in to accommodate merchants and artisans. The top half or so was cut off to reclaim the swamps. Barracks occupied the flattened top in the last Tokugawa years. In 1869 it became the site of a shōkonsha, a nationally administered “shrine to which the spirits of the dead are invited,” or, in a venerable tradition, a place where the dead, and the living as well, are feasted and entertained. The specific purpose of several such shrines scattered over the country was to honor those who had died in line of duty “since the Kaei Period.” This is a little misleading. Commodore Perry came in the Kaei Period, and there may seem to be an implication that he was resisted with loss of life, which he was not. The real intent was to honor those who died in the Restoration disturbances. As other conflicts and other casualties occurred, the rosters expanded. They include three Englishmen who died in the battle of Tsushima, at the climax of the Russo-Japanese War, as well as other surprises. Not many now remember that Japanese lives were lost in the Boxer Rebellion. It is of interest that Tokyo names on the growing rosters ran consistently below the national average.

  The son of Edo was not as eager as others to die for his country. In 1879 the Kudan shōkonsha became the Yasukuni Jinja, “Shrine for the Repose of the Nation.” It was in the Edo tradition, combining reverence and pleasure. There was horseracing on the grounds before the Shinobazu track was built. In 1896, the grandest equestrian year, 268 horses participated in the autumn festival. The last meet took place in 1898, and the track was obliterated in 1901. The shrine continued to be used for a great variety of shows, artistic and amusing, such as Sumō tournaments and Nō performances. A Nō stage built in 1902 survives on the shrine grounds, and a lighthouse from early Meiji. The latter served to guide fishing boats—for there were in those days fishing boats within sight of the hill.

  A military exhibition hall was put up in 1882, a grim, Gothic place. It contained a machine gun made by Pratt and Whitney and presented to the emperor by General Grant. The Yasukuni had ten million visitors annually during and just after the Russo-Japanese War. Though the figure fell off thereafter, it continued to be in the millions. The shrine was more of a park, as that term is known in the West, than Asakusa. To those Japanese of a traditional religious bent it may have seemed strange that expanses of protective greenery extended to the southeast, southwest, and northwest of the palace—Hibiya Park, the Sanno Shrine (a very old one), and the Yasukuni Shrine—while the businessmen of the Mitsubishi Meadow were custodians of the most crucial direction, the northeast, “the devil’s gate.”

  Tokyo grew the most rapidly of the large Japanese cities. At the close of Meiji, there can have been few foxes and badgers left in the Mitsubishi Meadow, lined all up and down with brick, and not many weeds can have survived either. Yet the fact remains that Tokyo was, by comparison with the other large cities of Japan, even Kyoto, the emperor’s ancient capital, a place of greenery. Tanizaki’s wife, a native of Osaka, asked what most struck her on her first visit to Tokyo, replied without hesitation that it was the abundance of trees. The paddies had by the end of Meiji withdrawn from the gate of the Yoshiwara, and they have been pushed farther and farther in the years since; but it was still a city of low buildings, less dense in its denser regions than late Edo had been. So it has continued to be. Perhaps, indeed, it contains the most valuable unused land in the world—the most luxurious space a weed, and even an occasional fox or badger, could possibly have.

  There is another sense in which the city was still, at the end of Meiji, near nature, and still is today. The rhythm of the fields and of the seasons continued to be felt all through it. Everywhere in Japan Shinto observances follow the seasons. (It may be that in the United States only the harvest festival, Thanksgiving, is similarly bound to nature.) In deciding which among the great Japanese cities is, in this sense, most “natural,” subjective impression must prevail, for there are no measuring devices. When Tanizaki’s Makioka sisters, from an old Osaka family, wish to go on a cherry-blossom excursion, they go to Kyoto. They might have found blossoms scattered over Osaka, of course, but Osaka, more than Tokyo, is a place of buildings and sterile surfaces. From one of the high buildings, it is an ashen city. Having arrived in Kyoto, the sisters seem to have only one favored blossom-viewing spot near the center of the city, the grounds of a modern shrine. All the others are on the outskirts, not in the old city at all.

  One is left with a strong impression that Tokyo has remained nearer its natural origins, and nearer agrarian rhythms, than the great cities of the Kansai. This fastest-growing city did remarkably well at preserving a sense of the fields and the moods of the seasons. At the end of Meiji the Tokyo resident who wished to revel under the blossoms of April might have gone to Asukayama, that one among the five original parks that lay beyond the city limits, but he could have found blossoms enough for himself and several hundred thousand other people as well at Ueno or along the banks of the Sumida. Nothing comparable was to be had so near at hand in Osaka or Kyoto.

  Places famous in early Meiji for this and that flower or grass of the seasons did less well at the end of Meiji. Industrial fumes ate at the cherries along the Sumida, and clams, the digging of which was a part of the homage paid to summer, were disappearing from the shores of Shiba and Fukagawa. (The laver seaweed of Asakusa, famed in Edo and before, had long since disappeared.) Even as the city grew bigger and dirtier, however, new places for enjoying the grasses and flowers came to be.

  Every guide to the city contains lists of places to be visited for seasonal things. Going slightly against the natural pattern, these things begin with snow, not a flower or a grass, and not commonly available in quantity until later in the spring. The ornamental plants of midwinter are the camellia and a bright-leafed variety of cabbage, but neither seems to have been thought worth going distances to view. The Sumida embankment was the traditional place for snow viewing. There were other spots, and in the course of Meiji a new one, the Y
asukuni Shrine, joined the list. Probably snow has been deemed a thing worth viewing because, like the cherry blossom, it so quickly goes away—on the Tokyo side of Honshu, at any rate.

  At the beginning of Meiji, the grasses and flowers of the seasons were probably to be found in the greatest variety east of the Sumida. One did not have to go far east to leave the old city behind, and, having entered a pastoral (more properly, agrarian) village, one looked back towards the river and the hills of the High City, with Fuji rising grandly beyond them. These pleasures diminished towards the end of Meiji, as the regions east of the river fell victim to economic progress. Kafū seems prescient when, in a story from very late Meiji, he takes a gentleman and a geisha to view some famous peonies in Honjo, east of the river. They are disappointed, and the disappointment seems to tell us what the future holds for the peonies and indeed all these regions east of the river. Yet as the peony lost ground in Honjo it gained elsewhere: famous peony places have been established nearer the center of the city.

  Another generous disposition of blossom-viewing and grass-viewing places lay along the ridge that divided the Low City from the High City. From here one looked eastwards towards the river and the fields. At the southern end of the ridge was the site of the British legation that never came to be. Ueno and Asukayama, famous spots for cherry blossoms, both stood on the ridge.