The most popular of the Fuji shrines is just north of Asakusa, to the east of the Yoshiwara. Several days in early summer (a single day is not incentive enough for moving the giant trees and rocks that are offered for sale) there are garden fairs north of Asakusa, and great crowds.
The Sumida had always had a special significance for the city. All the wards of the Low City but one either bordered it or fell but a few paces short of it, and the elegant pleasures of Edo could scarcely have done without it. The summer opening, at Ryōgoku Bridge, was a time of boats and splendid crowds and fireworks. Purveyed by two venerable and famous makers, each of which had its claque, they were of two kinds, stationary displays near water level, and rockets. General Grant joined the crowds in 1879. E. S. Morse was there earlier, and described what he saw with delight:
At the river the sight was entrancing, the wide river as far as the eye could reach being thickly covered with boats and pleasure barges of all descriptions. We had permission to pass through the grounds of a daimyo, and his servants brought chairs to the edge of the river for our accommodation. After sitting for a few minutes we concluded to see the sights nearer, and at that moment a boat came slowly along the bank, the man soliciting patronage. We got aboard and were sculled into the midst of the crowds. It would be difficult to imagine a stranger scene than the one presented to us; hundreds of boats of all sizes—great, square-bottomed boats; fine barges, many with awnings and canopies, all illuminated with bright-colored lanterns fringing the edge of the awnings… It was a startling sight when we got near the place to see that the fireworks were being discharged from a large boat by a dozen naked men, firing off Roman candles and set pieces of a complex nature. It was a sight never to be forgotten: the men’s bodies glistening in the light with the showers of sparks dropping like rain upon them, and, looking back, the swarms of boats, undulating up and down, illuminated by the brilliancy of the display; the new moon gradually setting, the stars shining with unusual brightness, the river dark, though reflecting the ten thousand lantern lights of all sizes and colors, and broken into rivulets by the oscillations of the boats.
Clara Whitney went too, and had mixed feelings:
The Sumida stretched out before us, and for nearly a mile up and down it was covered by myriads of boats, from the clumsy canal boat to the gay little gondola dancing like a cockle shell on the tiny wavelets… Millions of lanterns covered the river as far as we could see until the sober Sumida looked like a sea of sparkling light… It was altogether a very pretty sight—the brilliantly lighted houses, the illuminated river, the gay fireworks, and crowds of lanterns held aloft to prevent their being extinguished… Like a stream of humanity they passed our perch and Mama and I spoke with sadness of their lost and hopeless condition spiritually.
There were, of course, changes in the festive pattern through Meiji and on into Taishō. New Year celebrations were less elaborate at the end of Meiji than at the beginning. Certain customs quite disappeared, such as the use of “treasure boats” to assure a good outcome for the “first dream of the year,” which in turn was held to augur good or ill for the whole year. Treasure boats were paintings of sailing-boats manned by the Seven Gods of Good Luck or other bearers of good fortune. A treasure boat under a pillow, early in the New Year, assured the best sort of dreams. Conservative merchants paid particular heed to such matters, and so the simplification of the New Year may be taken as a sign of emergent modernism in commercial affairs. Meiji New Year celebrations lasted down to the “Bone New Year” on the twentieth of January, so designated because only bones remained from the feasts prepared late in the old year. They have gradually been shortened, so that little now happens after the fourth or fifth. In late Meiji there was still a three-day “Little New Year” centering on the fifteenth. The fifteenth is now Adults’ Day, vaguely associated with the New Year in that it felicitates the coming of age. Under the old system New Year’s Day was, so to speak, everyone’s birthday. Reckoning of age was not by the “full count,” from birthday to birthday, as it usually is today, but by the number of years in which one had lived. So everyone became a year older on New Year’s Day.
Still, with all the changes, the flowers and grasses, the god-seats and the shrine fairs, survived. New Year celebrations became less prolonged and detailed. The advent of spring became less apparent in the eastern suburbs as industrial mists replaced natural ones. Nurseries were driven farther and farther north, and presently across the river into another prefecture. Yet the city remained close to nature as has no other great city in the world. In midsummer, for the festival of the dead, people returned in huge numbers to their villages, and those who could not go had village dances in the city. It was the double life at its best. Civilization and Enlightenment had to come, perhaps, but they did not require giving up the old sense of the earth. It is a part of Japanese modernization which other nations might wish to emulate, along with managerial methods and quality control and that sort of thing. No one can possibly have attended all the observances that survived from Edo through Meiji. It is a pity that no record-keeper seems to have established who attended the most.
The moods of a place will change, whatever its conscious or unconscious conservatism. The exotic and daring becomes commonplace, and other exotic and daring things await the transformation. Tolerance grows, the sense of novelty is dulled, and revolutions are accomplished without the aid of insistent revolutionaries. The old way did not go, but more and more it yielded to the new. The shift was increasingly pronounced in the last years of Meiji, after two ventures in foreign warfare.
If a native who departed Tokyo in 1870, at an age mature enough for clear observation and recollection, had returned for the first time forty years later, he would have found much to surprise him. He might also have been surprised at how little change there was in much of the city. The western part of Nihombashi and Kanda had their grand new banks, department stores, and universities, while fires played over the wooden clutter to the east. So too with trendier, more high-collar Kyōbashi: the new Ginza went as far as the Kyōbashi bridge, where the shadows of Edo took over.
He would have found ample changes, certainly: the new Ginza, the government complex to the south of the palace, the financial and managerial complex to the east. Scarcely a trace remained of the aristocratic dwellings that had stood between the outer and inner moats of the castle. He would have found department stores in place of the old “silk stores” (though he would still have found silk stores in large numbers as well), and an elevated railway pushing into the heart of the city, through what had been the abode of daimyo, badger, and fox.
He might have been more aware of a change in mood, and had more trouble defining it.
There was great insecurity in the early years of Meiji. Nagai Kafū describes it well in an autobiographical story titled “The Fox.” The time is the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion. The place is Koishikawa, the northwest corner of the High City, above the Kōrakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family.
The talk was uniformly cruel and gory, of conspirators, of assassinations, of armed robbers. The air was saturated with doubt and suspicion. At a house the status of whose owner called for a moderately imposing gate, or a mercantile house with impressive godowns, a murderous blade could at any time come flashing through the floor mats, the culprit having stolen under the veranda and lain in wait for sounds of sleep. I do not remember that anyone, not my father or my mother, gave specific instructions, but roustabouts who frequented our house were set to keeping guard. As I lay in my nurse’s arms through the cold winter night, the wooden clappers of the guards would echo across the silent grounds, sharp and cold.
Some of the disorder was mere brigandage, but most of it was obviously reactionary, directed at the merchant and politician of the new day, and reflecting a wish to return to the old seclusion. Of a piece with the reactionary radicalism of the 1930s, it suggests the gasps and convulsions of the dying. A
lready the Rokumeikan Period was approaching, and the high-water mark of Civilization and Enlightenment. The serving women in the Nagai house read illustrated romances of the old Edo variety, and we know that their children would not. At the beginning of the Rokumeikan Period the revolution known as the Restoration was not yet complete and thorough. The violence was nationalistic in a sense, stirred by a longing for the secluded island past, but it suggests an afterglow rather than a kindling.
The Meiji Period was sprinkled with violence. It was there in the agitation for “people’s rights” and the jingoism that inevitably came with the first great international adventure, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. The sōshi bully-boys of the eighties and nineties were a strange though markedly Japanese combination of the expansive and the narrow. They favored “people’s rights” and they were very self-righteous and exclusive. “The Dynamite Song,” “The Chinks,” and “Let’s Get ‘Em” were among their favorite militant songs. Not many voices were raised against the xenophobia, directed this time at fellow Orientals, save for those of a few faltering Christians. The disquiet of Kafū’s boyhood was probably more serious, in that people lived in greater danger, but it was less baneful, something that looked to the past and was certain to die. The mood of the city at the end of the century was more modern.
Despite economic depression, it would seem to have been festive during the Sino-Japanese War. We hear for the first time of roistering at Roppongi, on the southern outskirts of the city, and so have the beginnings of what is now the most blatantly electronic of the city’s pleasure centers. Roppongi prospered because of the army barracks it contained. What is now the noisiest playground of self-indulgent pacifism had its beginnings in militarism. The ukiyo-e print, also more than a little militarist and nationalist, had its last day of prosperity. Anything having to do with the war would sell. The great problem was the censors, who were slow to clear works for printing. Great crowds gathered before the print shops, and pickpockets thrived. The Kyōbashi police, with jurisdiction over the Ginza district, sent out special pickpocket patrols. No Japanese festive occasion is without its amusing curiosities. A Kyōbashi haberdashery had a big sale of codpieces, strongly recommended for soldiers about to be exposed to the rigors of the Chinese climate.
There was ugliness in the “Chink”-baiting and perhaps a touch of arrogance in the new confidence, and one may regret that Roppongi ever got started, to drain youth and money from less metallic pleasure centers. Yet, despite casualties and depression, the war must have been rather fun for the city.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a more somber affair. The boisterous war songs of the Sino-Japanese War were missing. Nor were the makers of popular art as active. Pounds and tons of prints survive from the Sino-Japanese War; there is very little from the Russo-Japanese War. It may be said that the ukiyo-e died as a popular form in the inter-bellum decade. Dark spy rumors spread abroad. Archbishop Nikolai, from whom the Russian cathedral in Kanda derives its popular name, felt constrained to request police protection, for the first time in a career that went back to the last years of Edo.
The rioting that followed the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905 was a new thing. It was explicitly nationalist, and it seemed to demand something almost the opposite of what had been demanded by the violence of Kafū’s boyhood. Japan had arrived, after having worked hard through the Meiji reign, and now must push its advantage. The politicians—the violence said—had too easily accepted the Portsmouth terms. The war itself had of course been the first serious engagement with a Western power. That it should have been followed by a burst of something like chauvinism is not surprising. Yet rioting could more understandably have been set off by the Triple Intervention that followed the Sino-Japanese War and took away some of the spoils. The early grievance was the greater one, and it produced no riots. The mood of the city in 1905 was even more modern.
On September 5, 1905, the day the Portsmouth Treaty was signed, a protest rally gathered in Hibiya Park. For the next two days rioting was widespread, and from the evening of the fifth to the evening of the sixth it seemed out of control. The rioters were free to do as they wished (or so it is said), and the police were powerless to stop them. Tokyo was, albeit briefly, a city without government. There were attacks on police boxes, on government offices, on the houses of notables, on a newspaper, and on the American legation. (Today the American embassy is an automatic target when anything happens anywhere, but what happened in 1905 was unprecedented, having to do with Theodore Roosevelt’s offices as peacemaker.) Ten Christian churches were destroyed, all of them in the Low City. Casualties ran to upwards of a thousand, not quite half of them policemen and firemen. The largest number occurred in Kōjimachi Ward, where it all began, and where the largest concentration of government buildings was situated. Some distance behind, but with enough casualties that the three wards together accounted for about a third of the total, were two wards in the Low City, Asakusa and Honjo, opposite each other on the banks of the Sumida. It would be hard to say that everyone who participated did so for political reasons. Honjo might possibly be called a place of the new proletariat, now awakening to its political mission, but Asakusa is harder to explain. It was not rich, but it was dominated by conservative artisans and shopkeepers.
In some ways the violence was surprisingly polite. None was directed at the Rokumeikan or the Imperial Hotel, both of them symbols of Westernization and right across the street from Hibiya Park. Too much can be made of the attack on the American legation. It was unprecedented, but mild, no more than some shouting and heaving of stones. So it may be said that the violence, though widespread and energetic, was neither as political nor as threatening as it could have been. There was an element of the festive and the sporting in it all. There usually is when violence breaks out in this city.
Yet the Russo-Japanese War does seem to mark a turning point. Edo had not completely disappeared in the distance, but the pace of the departure began to increase. Our old child of Edo, back in 1910 after forty years, might well have been more surprised at the changes had he gone away then and come back a decade later. The end of a reign is conventionally taken as the end of a cultural phase, but the division between Meiji and Taisho would have been clearer if the Meiji emperor had died just after the Russo-Japanese War, in perhaps the fortieth year of his reign.
The Russo-Japanese War was followed by economic depression and, for the city, the only loss in population between the Restoration disturbances and the earthquake. Kōjimachi Ward, surrounding the palace, lost population in 1908, and the following year the regions to the north and east were seriously affected. When next a war came along, it brought no surge of patriotism; the main fighting was far away, and Japan had little to do with it. In an earlier day, however, there would have been huge pride in being among the victors. The city and the nation were getting more modern all the time.
Chapter 4
THE DECAY OF THE DECADENT
People like to think themselves different from other people; generally they like to think themselves superior. In the centuries of the Tokugawa seclusion, the Japanese had little occasion to assert differences between themselves and the rest of the world, nor would they have had much to go on, were such assertion desired. So the emphasis was on asserting differences among various kinds of Japanese. The son of Edo insisted on what made him different from the Osakan. He did it more energetically than the Osakan did the converse, and in this fact we may possibly find evidence that he felt inferior. Osaka was at the knee of His Majesty, whereas Edo was merely at the knee of Lord Tokugawa. Today it is Osaka that is more concerned with differences.
Aphorisms were composed characterizing the great Tokugawa cities. Some are clever and contain a measure of truth. Perhaps the best holds that the son of Kyoto ruined himself over dress, the son of Osaka ruined himself over food, and the son of Edo ruined himself looking at things.
This may seem inconsistent with othe
r descriptions we have heard of the son of Edo, such as the one holding that he would pawn his wife to raise funds for a festival. There is no real inconsistency, however. What is meant is that Edo delighted in performances, all kinds of performances, including festivals and fairs. Performances were central to Edo culture, and at the top of the hierarchy, the focus of Edo connoisseurship, was the Kabuki theater. On a level scarcely lower were the licensed pleasure quarters. So intimately were the two related that it is difficult to assign either to the higher or the lower status. The great Kabuki actors set tastes and were popular heroes, and the Kabuki was for anyone (except perhaps the self-consciously aristocratic) who had enough money. The pleasure quarters, at their most elaborate, were only for male persons of taste and affluence, but the best of what its devotees got was very similar to what was to be had at the Kabuki. The difference between the two might be likened to the difference between a performance of a symphony or opera on the one hand and a chamber concert on the other.
It has been common among cultural historians to describe the culture of late Tokugawa as decadent. It definitely seemed so to the bureaucratic elite of the shogunate, and to eager propagandists for Civilization and Enlightenment as well. That it was unapologetically sensual and wanting in ideas seemed to them deplorable. They may not have been prudes, exactly, but they did want things to be edifying, intellectual, and uplifting, and to serve an easily definable purpose, such as the strengthening of the state and the elevating of the commonweal. If certain parts of the Edo heritage could be put to these purposes, very well. Everything else might expect righteous disapproval.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 17