The performers who played murderer and victim in the drama described by Tanizaki were both men. So it will be seen that many conventions of Kabuki were retained by the “avant-garde” theater of the day, in spite of its aim to make the theater more Western and realistic. Men still played female roles.
In 1890 the chief of the Tokyo prefectural police let it be known that men and women might appear on the stage together. One of the two great Kabuki actors, improver Danjūrō, supported the policy, and the other, Kikugorō, opposed it. The Kabuki stage continued to be exclusively masculine. The new policy was revolutionary all the same, in a day when so many mixed things, such as bathing and wrestling, were held to accord ill with Enlightenment.
Women had never been absent from the performing arts. They had quite dominated the parlor varieties found at their best in the pleasure quarters. There were well-known actresses in late Meiji, and fullblown celebrities, symbols of their day, in Taishō. Musumegidayū, Osaka theater music (gidayū) performed by pretty girls (musume), was enormously popular in Meiji, especially among students, who seem to have found it erotic. In 1900, when the vogue was at its peak, there were more than a thousand musumegidayū performers in Tokyo.
Music was less disposed than other arts to go Western. The musumegidayū vogue passed, not so much because it was overtaken by Western forms as because other traditional forms came into fashion. Yet already in Meiji are to be found the beginnings of modern popular music, which, with its volatile trendiness, may be distinguished from folk music and from the various forms of stage music, popular or otherwise, as well.
The street minstrel known as the enkashi had his beginnings in the Tokyo of mid-Meiji and was still to be seen for perhaps a half-dozen years after the earthquake. He was such a part of late Meiji and of Taishō that he can scarcely be omitted from graphic and dramatic attempts to convey the mood of the day. The word enkashi may be written in two ways, one of them conveying merely “singer,” the other something like “singer of amorous songs.” The enkashi was Western at top and at bottom—bowler hat and shoes—and always accompanied himself on a violin. The remainder of his dress was Japanese. He would stand on a street corner and sing topical songs in return for pennies. The repertoire was in part amorous, but it was also strongly political and satirical. There were war songs and there were songs of a righteous nature criticizing the customs and manners of the day. Perhaps the nearest thing to a hit was called “The Voice of the Pine.” In a satirical vein, it criticized the decadent ways of girl students, and might have been called anti-amorous. Fujiwara Yoshie, later to become the most famous of Japanese opera singers, got his start as an enkashi, in attendance upon the man who did the voice of the pine.
Three things to ruin oneself in the viewing of—the theater, cherry blossoms, and Sumō wrestling—were held to be the great delights of Meiji Tokyo. Sumō is a very ancient sport, its origins traceable, according to the earliest chronicles, to prehistory. It is more complex and sophisticated than at first sight it seems to be. The rules are simple: when a wrestler touches the ground with any part of himself save the soles of his feet, or when he is forced from the ring, he loses. It may seem that size is the only important thing, for the wrestlers in recent centuries have been huge. The hugest on record, however, have not been the most successful. There are delicate skills having to do with balance and timing.
Early in Meiji, change touched Sumō. Like so many things of Edo, it was meant for masculine enjoyment. In the last years of Edo, women were admitted to the audience only on the final day of a tournament. There seem to have been religious reasons for this exclusion, having to do vaguely with ritual purity. From 1872 women were admitted on every day except the first, and from 1877 they were admitted every day. The Sumō ring continues, however, to be sexist. No woman may step inside. When, recently, a boxer with a lady manager fought in the Sumo stadium, the manager was required to manage from a distance.
Sumō, as we have seen, was made respectable by a royal viewing. This happened in 1884, at the Hama Palace. Sumo had seemed in early Meiji to be declining, but in late Meiji it enjoyed popularity as never before. This was probably due less to royal notice than to the emergence of two uncommonly skilled wrestlers, one of whom fought to the famous draw in the royal presence.
In 1909 Sumō acquired the biggest sports arena in the city and indeed in the whole Orient, a great improvement over the shelters in which tournaments had earlier been held, they were so flimsy that competition had to be called off in bad weather. The new arena was named Kokugikan, “Hall of the National Accomplishment,” and Sumō has since been thought of as that, although baseball might in recent years have better claimed the sobriquet. Before construction was begun in 1907 there was a lengthy hunt for a site. Marunouchi, the Mitsubishi Meadow, was considered, but rejected as too remote from the traditional Sumō base in the Low City. The promoters finally decided on an old tournament site at the Ekōin, east of the river. The Meiji building was gutted by fire in 1917, badly damaged in the earthquake, and afterwards rebuilt on the same site.
Sumō was modernized in another way. The “human rights” of wrestlers became a burning issue. Some thought the old authoritarian methods of training and management inappropriate to the new enlightened age. The Tokyo band of professional wrestlers, based at the Ekōin, split over the issue in 1873. The rebellious faction, advocating human rights, withdrew to Nagoya. Back in Tokyo soon after, it held its tournaments at Akihabara, south of Ueno. In 1878 the police intervened, being of the view that two rival bands in the same city had disruptive possibilities. The factions were brought together under a system of government licensing, although a number of wrestlers of advanced views refused to participate.
The rebels became the establishment, and were themselves presently the victims of a strike. This occurred in 1895. The immediate occasion was a contested decision, but the authoritarian ways of the people in control were the real issue. The strike succeeded in that the head of the family, who had been among the rebels of the earlier day, was shorn of his powers. Sumō has continued to be very conservative all the same. Managerial methods, long similar to those of the theater, have remained close to their origins.
Early in Meiji (the precise date is a subject of scholarly dispute) there occurred an event of great moment. Few events have affected the lives of more Japanese. A stick and several hard balls arrived in Yokohama, bringing baseball to Japan. The first games were somewhat aristocratic. They were played on the grounds of a mansion on the southern outskirts of Tokyo belonging to the Tayasu, an important branch of the Tokugawa clan. The early years of Japanese baseball were dominated by the Shimbashi Club, named from the railway station and yards. It included numbers of Americans in the employ of the government. The work of the catcher seems to have been hazardous, for neither mitt nor protector had come with the stick and balls.
By mid-Meiji there were several clubs here and there around the city, and school teams as well. The last years of the century were dominated by the First Higher School, most elitist of institutions. Baseball was still somewhat elegant and high-collar, but it was on the way to becoming business as well. Waseda and Keiō universities, whose teams are today not quite amateur, had their first engagement in 1903. The mood in the stands grew so murderous towards the end of their 1906 series that they did not meet again until late in the following reign.
An international game, believed to have been the first, took place in 1896 between a team of Japanese schoolboys and an American team from Yokohama. The Japanese won. A Japanese university team went to the United States in 1905, and two years later the first foreign team, semiprofessionals from Hawaii, came to Japan. On that occasion an admission fee was charged for the first time.
In 1890 there was an international incident, demonstrating even earlier than the Waseda-Keiō fanaticism how important baseball had become to the Japanese. During a game between Meiji Gakuin and the First Higher School an exc
ited American dashed onto the field. He proved to be a missionary from the Meiji Gakuin faculty. After a pummeling by students from the First Higher School, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. A consular trial seemed in prospect, extraterritoriality yet prevailing. The view of the arbiter that both sides were at fault was accepted, however, and so the matter ended. It was long before the two schools were once again on friendly terms.
Baseball was something very new, a team sport. Traditional sporting encounters had been man-to-man. One can only speculate upon why baseball, among all the possible foreign importations, was chosen to become (as indeed it did) the national accomplishment. A prophet in early Meiji might have given cricket the better chance, for anglomania was strong. Today cricket is almost the only major foreign sport that does not interest Japanese at all.
Having had its beginnings in Tokyo, Japanese baseball is now everywhere. Like so many things, it continues to be dominated by Tokyo. The Tokyo Giants have a nationwide following that is rivaled by no Osaka team, and a Waseda-Keiō series still arouses passions such as are aroused by no other amateur (if somewhat professional) encounter.
Sumō became “the national accomplishment” in late Meiji, but its great popularity had to do less with nationalism than with the attributes and accomplishments of certain wrestlers. Judō, on the other hand, as distinguished from the earlier jujitsu (more properly jujutsu), fell definitely into the category of martial arts, and had strongly nationalist connotations. Its origins lie in mid-Meiji, in a temple of the Low City. The two words, judō and jujitsu, are almost synonymous, judō being a development of jujitsu in the direction of “the way,” the Chinese Tao, with emphasis upon spiritual training and upon utter concentration and dedication. Perhaps more remarkable than judō itself were the organizing skills of the founder, Kanō Jigorō. The huge following which judō came to have meant a return to tradition, which in Japan often means nationalism. Yet the growing popularity of baseball, also in the last decades of Meiji, informs us that the nationalism of those years was not the sort of revivalism that wished to return to the old isolation and reject importations.
With engaging openness and a regard for reality, the guide published by the city in 1907 includes the licensed quarters in its pleasure section, along with the theater and other places to see things, and with graves and cemeteries as well.
The licensed quarters had a rather bad time of it in Meiji. They had been important cultural centers, and, though prostitution continued to flourish, they declined badly as places of culture. Nowhere was the decay of the decadent more in evidence than here. The playwright Osanai Kaoru stated the matter well.
One has no trouble seeing why playwrights of Edo so often set their plays in the Yoshiwara. It was the fashion center and the musical center of Edo. In the dress of the courtesans and in the dress of their customers as well were the wanton colors and designs for all the latest rages. The brightness of the samisen when the ladies were on display, the quiet sadness of the old schools of music, Katō and Sonohachi: one no longer has them at the Yoshiwara. The courtesan has degenerated into a tasteless chalk drawing, the stylish clientele has given way to workmen’s jackets and flat-top haircuts and rubber boots, and mendicant musicians [enkashi] who play “Katyusha’s Song” on the violin. The Yoshiwara of old was the veritable center of Edo society. The daimyo with his millions, the braves of whom everyone was talking, robbers in the grand style who aimed at aristocratic houses, all of them gathered in the Yoshiwara. When an accidental meeting was required, therefore, the Yoshiwara was the obvious place to have it occur. No playwright would be silly enough to put the Yoshiwara of our day to such use. A chance encounter under the lights of the beer hall at the main gate would most likely involve a person with a north-country accent and a home-made cap, and his uncle, in the city with a petition to the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. The customer sweetening his coffee with sugar cubes in a Western-style salon, given a farewell pat on his new muslin undershirt, would most likely be a numbers man in a visor cap, or a wandering singer of Osaka balladry who does the outskirts of town. No one could think of the Yoshiwara as in the slightest degree a romantic setting.
This passage is quoted by Kubota Mantarō, who remarks that the decay was still more pronounced after the earthquake. “Katyusha’s Song,” commonly held to be among the earliest examples of popular music, had first been sung by Matsui Sumako, most celebrated of Taishō actresses (see below, page 267), in a stage version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. After the earthquake, says Kubota, it gave way to “Arabian Love Song.”
The demimonde did not disappear or even decline, but it changed. The best of music and the dance, not inferior to that of the Kabuki, with which it shared a great deal, had indeed been found in the quarters, and especially the oldest and largest of them, the Yoshiwara. It was what the big spender wanted and got. There were both male and female geisha, but the performing arts of the quarters were largely the province of women, as those of the Kabuki were exclusively the province of men.
The elegant word for the bright centers of the demimonde has long been karyūkai, which an earlier edition of the principal Japanese-English dictionary defines as “a frivolous community,” and the most recent edition, with less flourish, “the gay quarters.” The expression means literally “streets of flower and willow.” It comes from Li Po, the great Tang poet, who made the flower and willow similes for the ladies of the demimonde. For the purist there was a distinction between the two which has largely been forgotten, the flower being the courtesan and the willow the geisha.
The distinction was never widely respected, and even when it was accepted in theory it quickly ran into trouble in practice. Geisha is one of the most difficult words in the Japanese language to grasp and define. Literally it is “accomplished person.” Nagai Kafū lamented the degeneration of the word and the concept, especially in the “geisha” quarters of the Meiji High City. Some geisha doubtless had a nunlike dedication to their artistic accomplishments, but many would have had trouble naming any that they possessed. They were for sale if the price and the asker were right. The grander of Edo courtesans, on the other hand, were sometimes very accomplished indeed, as little designs and billets-doux which survive from their hands demonstrate most clearly.
For all these imprecisions, the geisha and the courtesan had different places in the elaborate organization of the Edo Yoshiwara. To the former was entrusted the early part of a big evening, music and dance often of a very high quality, and to the other the more carnal business of the smaller hours.
As Meiji moved on towards Taishō, the geisha languished in the licensed quarters even as she thrived elsewhere. The licensed quarters became places of prostitution and little else, and for a more elegant sort of evening the affluent pleasure-seeker went rather to one of the geisha quarters. The change is seen most clearly in the fate of the hikitejaya, literally “teahouses that take one by the hand.” Central to the organization of the old quarters, the “teahouses” were guides to and intermediaries for the bordellos proper. Houses of high grade did not receive customers directly, nor did the wealthy merchant, as he set forth upon an evening of pleasure, think of going immediately to a brothel. Preparations were made by a teahouse, to which the customer went first, there to be taken by the hand; and so ties between teahouse and geisha, male and female, were close. The teahouses were in large measure guardians of the old forms, and as they declined prostitution became almost the exclusive business of the quarters.
A brothel in the Yoshiwara, as rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1911
The number of licensed prostitutes declined through Meiji, unlicensed prostitution flourished, and, as Nagai Kafū did not tire of telling us, certain geisha quarters, especially in the High Town, were little better than centers of prostitution. More to the point than this decline in the rolls of the professionals is the sharp decline in the number of teahouses. A successor institution, the machiai, prospered as
the teahouses declined. Originally antechambers to tea cottages, machiai became places of assignation and presently restaurants to which geisha were summoned. “Streets of flower and willow” came presently to mean geisha quarters, as the old teahouses, the hikitejaya, and also the boathouses that had seen people so elegantly and comfortably to the Yoshiwara, merged with or gave way to the new machiai. It is not to be thought that the geisha quite disappeared from the Yoshiwara, where, indeed, some of the most talented and accomplished geisha of the Taisho period plied their trade. Geisha from all over town came to them for lessons.
The first thing that Civilization and Enlightenment did to the Yoshiwara and the other licensed quarters was to “liberate” their courtesans. An order of liberation was handed down by the Council of State, the high executive of the new government, late in 1872. It seems to have been a direct result of the Maria Luz affair, which gave international prominence to the licensed quarters. The captain of the Maria Luz, a Peruvian ship, was in 1872 convicted by a Yokohama court of running slaves, specifically Chinese coolies. In the course of the recriminations the Japanese were accused by the Peruvians of being slave traffickers themselves, their chief commodity being the ladies of the Yoshiwara and the other licensed quarters.
So the ladies of the quarters were liberated legally whether or not they wished to be, or had other means of subsistence. Stern measures were taken for the repression of “private,” which is to say unlicensed, prostitution. The aging aunt in Kafū’s The River Sumida had gone to the uncle for help when she was liberated, and was among the fortunate ones, for he married her.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 20