Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The viewing places along the ridge fared better in Meiji than did those east of the river. Ueno gradually ceased to intimidate, as it had under the shoguns, and so moved ahead of Asukayama and the Sumida embankment as the favored place for the noisiest rites of spring. The part of the ridge that lay between Ueno and Asukayama, inside and outside the city limits, was the great Edo center for nurseries, for potted chrysanthemums and morning glories and the like. The pattern has prevailed through the present century. These establishments have been pushed farther and farther out, so that not many survive today in Tokyo Prefecture, but the northern suburbs are still the place for them.

  Early in the spring came the plum blossom. To admire it in early Meiji one went to Asakusa and Kameido, a slight distance beyond Honjo, east of the Sumida. Kameido is also recommended for wisteria in May. The Kameido wisteria have survived, but there are plums no longer, either in Kameido or in Asakusa. The plum is the personal blossom, so to speak, of Sugawara Michizane, a tragic and quickly deified statesman of the tenth century, who is the tutelary god of the Kameido Shrine. If his flower has gone from Kameido, a plum orchard has since been planted at another of his holy places, the Yushima Shrine in Hongō. So it is that the flowers and grasses cling to existence, losing here and gaining there. Towards the end of The River Sumida Kafū has his sad hero go walking with an uncle to Kameido, and the poignancy of the scene comes in large measure from an awareness already present, then in late Meiji, of what progress is doing to the district. It lies in the path of economic miracles.

  In April came the cherry, which might be called the city’s very own blossom. It has long been made much of, for the swiftness of its blooming and of its falling appeals to the highly cultivated national sense of evanescence. In the years of the Tokugawa hegemony the cherry became the occasion for that noisiest of springtime rites. Goten Hill, overlooking the bay at the southern edge of the Meiji city, is no longer found on early Meiji lists of blossom-viewing places. That was where the British legation had been put up and so promptly burned down. The most popular Meiji sites for the cherry blossom were Asukayama, remotest of the original five parks; Ueno; and the Sumida embankment. Two of the three have declined as the city and progress have engulfed them, while Ueno, nearest of the three to the center, thrives. It still draws the biggest crowds in the city and doubtless in all of Japan.

  The peach and the pear come at about the same time, slightly later in the spring. They are dutifully included in Meiji lists of things to see, but the Japanese have not made as much of them as the Chinese, whose proverb has the world beating a path to a door with a blooming peach or pear. It would be easy to say that they are too showy for Japanese taste, but the chrysanthemum and the peony, both of them showy flowers, are much admired. Perhaps observance of the passing seasons was becoming less detailed, and the peach and the pear are among the lost details. There were no famous places within the city limits for viewing either of the two. In the case of the pear, one was asked to go to a place near Yokohama (the place where, in 1862, Satsuma soldiers killed an Englishman, prompting the British to shell Kagoshima). There were other flowers of spring and early summer—wisteria, azaleas, peonies, and yamabuki, a yellow-flowering shrub related to the rose.

  Certain pleasures of the seasons were not centered upon flowers and grasses, or upon a specific flower or grass. For plucking the new shoots and herbs of spring, the regions east of the river and the western suburbs were especially recommended. For the new greenery of spring there were Ueno and the western suburbs. For the clams of summer there were the shores of the bay, at Susaki and Shibaura, where Tanizaki and his family went digging. Insects were admired, and birds. Fireflies, now quite gone from the city save for the caged ones released at garden parties, were to be found along the Kanda River, just below Kafū’s birthplace. They were also present in the paddy lands around the Yoshiwara, to the north of Ueno, and along the banks of the Sumida, where no wild fireflies have been observed for a very long time. Birds were enjoyed less by the eye than by the ear. Two places in the city are called Uguisudani, Warbler Valley, one in Shitaya and the other in Koishikawa. Horeites diphone, the warbler in question, may still be heard in both places. For the cuckoo there was a listening point in Kanda, near the heart of the old Low City, and another near the Maeda estate in Hongō, to which the university presently moved. For the voice of the wild goose one went beyond the Sumida, and also to the Yoshiwara paddies and to Susaki, beside the bay in Fukagawa. For singing autumn insects, the western suburbs were recommended.

  In high summer came morning glories, lotuses, and irises. The Meiji emperor’s own favorite iris garden, on the grounds of what is now the Meiji Shrine, was opened to the public a few years after his death. The morning glory has long had a most particular place in the life of the Low City. It was the omnipresent sign of summer, in all the tiny garden plots and along the plebeian lanes, a favorite subject, as principal and as background, in the popular art of Edo. The place to go for Meiji morning glories was Iriya, to the east of Ueno Park. It still is the place to go, but it has suffered vicissitudes in the century since its morning glories first came into prominence. In early Meiji, Iriya was still paddy land, and among the paddies were extensive nurseries. One looked across them to the Yoshiwara, the great houses of which kept villas in the district. The last of the nurseries left Iriya, no longer on the outskirts of the city, in 1912, and so too, of course, did excursions for viewing and purchasing morning glories. They have returned in the last quarter of a century. For the morning-glory fair in early July, however, the plants must be brought in from what are now the northern outskirts of the city.

  A famous lotus-viewing spot was lost in the course of Meiji. Tameike Pond in Akasaka was allowed to become silted in, and presently built over. Shinobazu Pond, the other Meiji place for viewing and listening to lotuses (some say that the delicate pop with which a lotus opens is imagined, others say that they have heard it), survived Meiji, despite expositions and horse racing, and yet survives, despite the years of war and defeat, during which it was converted to barley fields. In Meiji and down to the recent past there were extensive commercial tracts of lotus east of the river, grown for the edible roots. They too were recommended in Meiji for lotus-viewing, and today they have almost disappeared.

  Shinobazu Pond, Ueno

  The eastern suburbs were, again, the place to go for “the seven grasses of autumn,” some of them actually shrubs and only one a grass as that term is commonly understood in the West. The chrysanthemum, not one of the autumn seven, was featured separately. Dangozaka, “Dumpling Slope,” just north of the university in Hongō, was a famous chrysanthemum center that came and went in Meiji. Chrysanthemum dolls—chrysanthemums trained to human shape—were first displayed there in 1878. They figure in some famous Meiji novels, but by the end of Meiji were found elsewhere, first at the new Sumō stadium east of the river, and later in the southern and western suburbs. (Also, occasionally, in a department store.) The grounds of the Asakusa Kannon Temple were famous for chrysanthemums early in Meiji, but are no longer.

  Asuka Hill, noted for its cherry blossoms, was the best place near the city for autumn colors. At the end of the year there were hibernal moors to be viewed, for the wasted moor ended the cycle, as snow had begun it. Had nature been followed literally, the sequence could as well have been the reverse; but an ancient tradition called for the wasted and sere at the end of the cycle of grasses and flowers. For the best among sere expanses, one went to Waseda, in the western suburbs.

  It is not surprising, though it is sad, that so many famous places of early Meiji for the things of the seasons are missing from late-Meiji lists. Gone, for instance, are the night cherries of the Yoshiwara, popular in the dim light of early Meiji. It is more surprising that many places remain, in a larger, smokier city. A guide published by the city in 1907 gives a discouraging report on the Sumida cherries, even then being gnawed by industrial fumes and obscured by bill
boards. Yet it has a ten-page list of excursions to famous places in and near the city. Arranged by season, the list begins with felicitous New Year excursions, “all through the city,” and ends with New Year markets, “Nihombashi, Ginza, etc.” Snow-viewing tides the cycle over from one year to the next, and the Sumida embankment is still preeminent among places for indulging. Most if not quite all of the flowers and grasses are covered, from the plum (twenty-nine places recommended, all in the city and the suburbs, with a new place, the Yasukuni Shrine, at the head) to wasted moors (none left in the fifteen wards—only the western and northern suburbs). The twenty-three places for viewing cherry blossoms are headed, as they would have been at the end of Edo, by Ueno and the Sumida embankment. The sixty-page section on “pleasures” includes cemeteries and graves. They are chiefly for those of an antiquarian bent, of course, but a Japanese cemetery can also be pleasant for observing the passage of the seasons.

  A person of leisure and some energy could have filled most of his days with the round of annual and monthly observances. The same guide contains a five-page list of monthly feast days at shrines and temples, and only on the thirty-first day of a month would there have been nowhere to go. In this too, tradition survives. No month in the lunar calendar had thirty-one days, and no thirty-first day in the solar calendar has been assigned a feast. Besides monthly feast days, most shrines had annual festivals, boisterous to the point of violence, centering upon the mikoshi “god-seats,” portable shrines borne through the streets and alleys over which the honored god held sway. The god-seat sort of festival was among the great loves of the son of Edo, who, it was said, would happily pawn his wife to raise the necessary funds. Some of the god-seats were huge. Weaving down narrow streets on the shoulders of manic bearers who numbered as many as a hundred, they could go out of control and crash into a shopfront. Sometimes this happened on purpose. In Asakusa, especially, such assaults were welcomed: it was thought that if a god in his seat came crashing through the front of a shop, the devils must depart through the rear.

  Some shrines and temples had annual markets, perhaps the most remarkable of them being the Bird Fair, the Tori no Ichi, on the days in November that fell on the zodiacal sign of the bird. It was held at several “eagle shrines” throughout the city, the most famous and popular of them just outside the Yoshiwara. Bird days occur either twice or three times in a month, and when they occurred in November the throngs at the Yoshiwara were enormous. They threatened the pillars of heaven and the sinews of earth, said Higuchi Ichiyō in the best of her short stories. It was believed that years in which November contained three bird days were also years in which “the flowers of Edo,” the conflagrations, flourished.

  Though obviously the motives were mixed for crowds so great and boisterous, it was essentially a shopkeepers’ fair, and a part of the townsman’s culture. The day of the bird was chosen from among the twelve because the Japanese love a pun. Tori, “bird,” also means “taking in” or “reaping,” and ornamental rakes were purchased at the market, as a means of assuring a profitable year. The rake merchants added a pleasant twist: to insure the flow of profits, a larger rake must be purchased every year. Bird fairs have declined in recent years, largely because the traditional business of the Yoshiwara has been outlawed. They have not, however, disappeared.

  But many observances that must have been very amusing are gone. One no longer hears, for example, of “the watch of the twenty-sixth night.” On that night in the Seventh Month under the lunar calendar (which would generally be August under the solar), people would gather along the coasts and in the high places of the city, waiting for the moon to rise. If it emerged in a triple image, presently falling back into a single one, it presaged uncommonly good luck. The watch lasted almost until dawn, since the twenty-sixth is very near the end of the lunar cycle. Devices were therefore at hand for enhancing the possibility of the triple image.

  Annual observances were closely tied to the agrarian cycle even when they did not have to do specifically with the flowers, the grasses, the birds, and the insects. A sense of the fields has survived, despite the expansive ways of the city that had driven wasted moors from the fifteen wards by the end of Meiji, and eaten up most of the paddy and barley lands. Spring began in two ways, the lunar and the solar. The lunar way is now hardly noticed, but the solar way survives, with spring beginning, to the accompaniment of appropriate ritual, midway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. So it was that the city was awaiting the Two Hundred Tenth Day when the earthquake came.

  Lists of “great festivals,” the boisterous shrine affairs centering upon god-seats, always come in threes. The Kanda festival and the Sannō festival in Akasaka, to the southwest of the palace, are to be found on most Edo and Meiji lists of the big three.

  The Sannō festival has fared badly in this century. Certainly it was among the great festivals of Edo, accorded condescending notice by Lord Tokugawa himself. The Sannō was the shrine to which baby Tokugawas were taken to be presented to the company of gods. It seemed to lose vigor as Tameike Pond, above which the shrine stood, silted in and was developed. Akasaka became a wealthy residential district and a place of chic entertainment, much patronized by the bureaucracy. The affluent bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy do not have much truck with shrine festivals, affairs of the Low City and the lower classes.

  The Kanda festival had a troubled time in Meiji, for curious reasons, telling of conservatism and traditionalism. Two gods had in theory been worshipped at the Kanda Shrine. One of them was a proper mythological deity whose name scarcely anyone knew. The other was Taira Masakado, a tenth-century general who led a rebellion in the Kantō region. Unlike most Japanese rebels, he attempted to set himself up as emperor; the usual way has been to take the power but not the position. In 1874 the shrine priesthood, in somewhat sycophantic deference to the emperor cult of the new day, petitioned the governor to have Masakado removed, and another proper mythological entity brought from the Kashima Shrine in Ibaragi Prefecture. The festival languished. The demotion of Masakado, for whom a secondary shrine was presently built, is thought to have been responsible—this despite the fact that the arrival of the new deity, the other proper one, was boisterous. Resentment does seem to have been strong. Everyone had thought of the Kanda Shrine as belonging to Masakado, and he had a devoted following in his own East Country, whose inhabitants had for centuries been victims of Kyoto snobbishness. By 1884 old divisions and resentments were thought to have sufficiently healed that a good old-fashioned festival might be held. It was, and there was a typhoon on the second day, which the newspapers attributed to Masakado’s anger. The press was frivolous, but one reads serious intent behind it. The Kanda festival never quite came into its own again.

  If some observances disappeared in Meiji, others emerged into prominence, some quite new, some revivals, some revisions of the old. New Year celebrations culminated in a military parade, something new, and a review of the fire brigades, something old given a new turn. The latter had been banned for a time as dangerous. The danger was to the firemen who, dressed in traditional uniforms, did daring things high upon ladders. The old brigades were losing their practical significance, although it was not completely gone until after the earthquake. The New Year review was becoming show and no more, albeit exciting show, and aesthetically pleasing as well. It has survived, and seems in no danger now of disappearing.

  Observances now so much a part of the landscape that they seem as venerable as the landscape itself frequently turn out to be no older than Meiji. The practice of taking small children to Shinto shrines in mid-November is an instance. Its origins are very old indeed, for it grew from the primitive custom of taking infants to a shrine at a certain age to confirm that a precarious bit of life had taken hold. It had been mainly an upper-class ritual in Edo, and did not begin to gain popularity in the Low City until mid-Meiji. The flying carp of Boys’ Day must unfortunately be associated with militarism. The
y came into great vogue from about the time of the Sino-Japanese War. Boys’ Day, May 5, is now Children’s Day, and the first day of summer by the old reckoning. Girls’ Day, March 3, is not a holiday.

  Some of the god-seat festivals were very famous and drew great crowds, but they were essentially local affairs, gatherings of the clan (the word ujiko, “member of the congregation,” has that literal significance) to honor its Shinto god. There were other Shinto festivals of a more generally animistic nature, affairs for the whole city. The two biggest occurred in the summer, in the Sixth Month under the old calendar, transferred to July under the new. Both honored and propitiated the gods of nature, Mount Fuji in the one case and the Sumida River in the other, upon the commencement of the busy summer season, when both would be popular and a great deal would be asked of them.

  The Sumida and Fuji were not the only river and mountain that had their summer “openings,” but they were the most famous and popular. Besides honoring animistic deities, the observances had practical significance. The opening of the Sumida meant the beginning of the hot weather, and of the pleasures associated with seeking coolness upon the waters. The opening of Fuji, or any other mountain, was the signal for the summer crowds, less of a religious and more of a hedonistic bent as time went on, to start climbing. It was not considered safe earlier in the season, because of slides and storms. Both openings are still observed, the Fuji one now at the end of June, the Sumida one at a shifting date in July. Boating upon the Sumida is not the pleasure it once was, of course. The throngs upon Fuji are ever huger.

  In the Edo and early Meiji periods there was a strongly religious element in an ascent of Fuji. The mountain cult was important from late Edo. The opening of the mountain was and is observed at several Fuji shrines through the city. Some may be recognized by artificial hillocks meant to be small likenesses of Fuji. Believers could with merit ascend one of them if an ascent of the real mountain was impractical.