The western part of Nihombashi did not begin going really modern until fairly late in Meiji. On the whole, Nihombashi was slower to change than Ginza or Marunouchi. The Nihombashi River was still at the end of Meiji lined by the godowns, some of them converted into dwellings, that had always been a symbol of the district and its mercantile prosperity. The Tanizaki family lived for a time in a godown. E. S. Morse wrote enthusiastically of converted godowns, which were doubtless ingenious, but other accounts inform us that they were as damp and badly aired as ever the Ginza bricktown was.
A row of merchant houses in Nihombashi, about 1919
The aristocracy did not occupy much of old Nihombashi, and neither did the religions. There were shrines, though what was to become the most famous and popular of them, the Suitengū, Shrine of the Water God, was moved from another part of the city only in early Meiji. There were a few Buddhist temples, most of them founded in Meiji, half of them on the site of the old Tokugawa prison, dismantled in 1875. Initially they had a propitiatory function.
Nihombashi was not without pleasures, but moderate about them, perhaps in this regard nearer the Tokugawa ideal than Asakusa or Ginza. Not since the removal of the Yoshiwara to the northern paddies after the great fire of 1657 (the occasion also for moving most Nihombashi temples to the paddies) had Nihombashi provided the more elaborate and expensive of pastimes. Nevertheless, it was in the Hamachō geisha quarter, near the river in Nihombashi, that O-ume romantically murdered Minekichi. Hamachō was a modest quarter compared to Yanagibashi in Asakusa Ward to the north and Shimbashi to the south. Of the major theaters in the city today, the Meijiza in Nihombashi has the longest history. Probably at no time, except perhaps briefly when rivals were rebuilding from fires, could it have been described as the premier theater of the city. Yet it has survived, eminent but not supreme. This seems appropriate to conservative, steady Nihombashi.
The Mitsui Bank in Nihombashi, by Kiyōchika
The Mitsui Bank and the First National Bank of early Meiji were both torn down at about the time the new Bank of Japan was going up. Printmakers contrived to show the two buildings in isolation, or perhaps to imagine what they would have been like had it been possible to view them in isolation. Photographers could not or did not achieve the same effect. There can have been nothing like them in Edo, except perhaps, in a very vague way, the castle keep. Yet they do not look out of place. They are as if imagined by someone who had never actually seen a Western building (in fact the builder of both had studied in Yokohama), and whose idea of the Western was the traditional made bigger and showier.
There is nothing Japanese about the Bank of Japan. It is a pleasing enough building, but it is obviously the creation of someone who had studied Western architecture well and did not presume to have ideas of his own. Very much the same can be said of the Mitsui buildings that went up on or near the site of the early Meiji bank. Only the Bank of Japan and some bridges—one of them the main Nihombashi Bridge itself and one of them, the Tokiwa, the oldest stone bridge in the city—survive from Meiji. The brick Mitsui buildings and the new stone building of the First National Bank have long since gone the way of their more fanciful predecessors.
The early buildings would obviously not have lent themselves to the purposes of increasingly monstrous economic miracles. Yet both institutions, the Mitsui Bank and the Daiichi Kangyō Bank, as it is now, are so hugely rich that they could have set aside their first sallies into Western design as museums, and so enabled us to see for ourselves something that cannot be quite the same in photographs and prints—something confused, perhaps, but also lovable, like a child trying to look regal in clothes brought down from the attic. Of course, since most of Nihombashi was lost in 1923, it is likely that the two buildings would have vanished then even if the mercies of the banks had been more tender.
So Nihombashi did not stand apart from all the Meiji changes. There were changes that were still invisible. Nihombashi may to this day perhaps be called the financial center of the city and the land, for it has the Bank of Japan and the stock exchange; but big management has for the most part moved elsewhere. Neither of the two banks that so delighted the printmakers has its main offices in Nihombashi. The beginnings of the shift may be traced to late Meiji. Rival centers were growing, to the south and west; the big movements in the modern city have consistently been to the south and west.
The novelist Tayama Katai came to Tokyo in 1881 as a boy of ten, and was apprenticed to a publishing house in Nihombashi. More than half a century later he mused upon the contrast between the old Nihombashi and Ginza, and between the parts of Nihombashi, bustling commerce on the one hand and stagnation on the other.
There was not a day when I did not cross the Nihombashi and Kyōbashi bridges. A dank, gloomy Nihombashi main street, lined mostly with earthen walls, as against the bricks of Ginza, across Kyōbashi. Entaro horse-drawn omnibuses sped past, splashing mud and sending forth trumpet calls. On the right side a short distance north of the Nihombashi Bridge…two or three doors from each other, were two large bookstores, the Suwaraya and the Yamashiroya, their large, rectangular shop signs dignified and venerable, of a sort that one sees in Edo illustrations. Yet what gloomy, deserted stores they were! Two or three clerks in Japanese dress would always be sitting there, in abject boredom, and I did not once see a customer come in to buy a book. The contrast with the house on the corner, the Echigoya, forerunner of the Mitsukoshi, could not have been more complete. One can still find the latter, I believe, in old pictures, a one-story building with a long veranda, livening the district with an incessant shouting. It sounded rather like “Owai, owai.” Customers were seated in rows, and the noise emerged from clerks ordering apprentices to get wares from the godown. Not only the Echigoya: on a corner towards the north and east was the yet larger Daimaru, and from it came that same “Owai, owai” …
Ginza was then in the new style, with what were called its streets of brick, but from Kyōbashi to Nihombashi and on to Spectacle Bridge there was scarcely a building in the Western style…
I was in Peking some years ago, and the crowding and confusion outside the Cheng-yang Gate—a pack of little shops and stalls, bystanders munching happily away at this and that—reminded me of early Meiji. It was indeed no different from the stir and bustle, in those days, at the approaches to the Nihombashi Bridge.
All up and down the main Nihombashi street there were shops with displays of polychrome woodcuts…
Off towards Asakusa were shops with displays of something approaching erotica. I was somewhat surprised—no, I should say that I would stand on and on, fascinated, as if, in that day when there were no magazines worthy of the name, I were gazing at life itself, and the secrets deep within it. But I doubt that the approaches to the Nihombashi Bridge of Edo were in such disorder. In the confusion something still remained of very early Meiji. I grow nostalgic for it, that air of the degenerate.
Nihombashi was wealthy, and it was poor and crowded. It had its gloomy back streets, lined by windowless godowns, and it had its entertainment quarter, off towards the river, on land once occupied by the aristocracy. Land in Nihombashi was, or so the popular image had it, worth its volume in gold, but for a decent garden in any of the lands reclaimed by the shogunate one had to import loam from the hills. Great care and expense went into little gardens squeezed in among the godowns. Besides gardeners, there were dealers in earth—not land but earth—brought in to make mossy gardens. By late Meiji the very wealthy had left, but it was still not uncommon for the middle ranks of the mercantile class to have houses and gardens in Nihombashi even if they owned land in the High City.
Tanizaki wrote about the dark back streets of eastern Nihombashi, only a short walk from the entertainment districts. If he remarked upon the contrast with Ginza on the south, Hasegawa Shigure contrasted it with Kanda, on the north. She had an aunt in Kanda, and it was there that she had glimpses of the West not to be ha
d in Nihombashi.
She took me to see the Nikolai Cathedral, then under construction. It was when I stayed with her that I first heard the sound of violin and piano and orchestra. In our part of the Low City such sounds and such instruments were quite unknown. So it was that I first caught the scent of the West. Kanda was where the students had their dens, where the intelligentsia, as we would call it today, assembled.
Katai thought the confusion of Nihombashi unlike Edo. The reminiscences of Shigure, who was born in Nihombashi in 1879, make it sound very much like Edo as it has remained in art and fiction.
On a late summer evening the breeze would come from the river as the tide rose. Hair washed and drying, bare feet, paper lanterns, platforms for taking the evening cool, salty cherry-blossom tea—all up and down the streets, under the stars, was the evening social, not to be savored by the rich ones and the aristocrats. It was easier and freer than the gathering in the bathhouse. The rows of houses were the background and the streets were the gathering place. If a policeman happened to be living in one of the row houses, he would become a human being once more, and join the assembly, hairy chest bare, kimono tucked up, a fan of tanned paper in his hand. He would not reprove the housewife if too much of her was exposed, and took it as a matter of course that the man next door should be out wearing nothing but a loincloth…
Shinnai balladry would come, and Gidayū, and koto and samisen together. They were not badly done, for they had a knowledgeable audience. Strange, wonderful, distant strains would emerge from the gardens of the teahouses… The samisen and the koto duos were mostly played by old women, most of them from the old Tokugawa bureaucratic class.
Just as in the lumberyards of Fukagawa no native was until the earthquake to be seen wearing a hat, so too it was in my part of Nihombashi. Down to the turn of the century a hat was a rare sight. The only hatted ones were men of affluence in party dress.
Photographs from late Meiji of eastern Nihombashi give an impression of changelessness, low-tiled roofs stretching on and on, but it is perhaps somewhat misleading. Edo must have been even thus, one thinks, and one forgets that the low roofs stretched over a wider expanse at the end of Meiji than at the end of Edo. The abodes of the less affluent stretched now all across Nihombashi to the river, as they had not in Edo. Such places of pleasure as Nihombashi did have—the quarter where Minekichi got stabbed, the shrine that had the liveliest feast days—stood mostly on land once occupied by the aristocracy. The departure of the aristocracy was not in any case the loss that the departure of the wealthy merchant class was. Though the pleasure quarters had been heavily dependent on the furtive patronage of the aristocracy, it had not provided open patronage, and it had remained aloof from the city around it. So perhaps an irony emerges: the changes that occurred in eastern Nihombashi through Meiji may have been of a reactionary nature. The area may have been more like the Low City of Edo at the end of Meiji than at the beginning.
Nihombashi Bridge looking east, 1911
Nihombashi was proud of itself, in a quiet, dignified sort of way. The young Tanizaki was infatuated with the West and insisted upon rejection of the Japanese tradition, but he never let us forget that he was from Nihombashi. Perhaps more in Meiji than in Tokugawa it was the place to which all roads led—for a powerless court in Kyoto still then had powerful symbolic import.
Pride in self commonly brings (or perhaps it arises from) conservatism. In certain respects Nihombashi, especially its western reaches, was every bit as high-collar, as dedicated to Civilization and Enlightenment, as Ginza. Yet it was far from as ready to throw away everything in pursuit of the new and imported. If Nihombashi and Ginza represent the two sides of Meiji, conservative and madly innovative, Nihombashi by itself can be seen as representative of contradictions that were not after all contradictions. Now as in the seventh and eighth centuries, when China came flooding in, innovation is tradition.
It has continued to be thus, even down to our day. The last Meiji building in Ginza has just been demolished. The Bank of Japan yet stands. Nihombashi itself—which is to say, the corps of its residents—has probably had less to do with the preservation of the latter than the Ginza spirit has had to do with the destruction of the former. Yet there is fitness in this state of affairs. Nihombashi did not, like the Shinagawa licensed quarter, explicitly reject change; but perhaps it was the more genuinely conservative of the two.
On the eve of the earthquake there were probably more considerable expanses of Edo in Nihombashi than anywhere else in the city. Even today, when one has to hunt long for a low frame building of the old sort, Nihombashi looks far less like New York than do Ginza and Shinjuku. As a summer twilight gives way to darkness in eastern Nihombashi, one can still sense the sweet melancholy that Kafū so loved, and observe the communal cheerfulness that Shigure described so well.
Kyōbashi was a place of easier enthusiasms. On the north it merged with Nihombashi. To the south of the “Capital Bridge” from which it took its name, it was narrower and poorer, a district of artisans, for the most part, where it was a plebeian district at all. Considerably under half of the lands south of the bridge and the canal which it crossed belonged to the townsman.
In Meiji the Ginza district, in the southern part of Kyōbashi, changed abruptly. Some might have said that it ran to extremes as did no other part of the city. The original Ginza was the “Silver Seat” of the shogunate, one of its mints, moved from Shizuoka to the northern part of what is now Ginza early in the Tokugawa Period, and moved once more, to Nihombashi, in 1800. The name stayed behind, designating roughly the northern half of what is now Ginza. It may be used to refer to the lands lying between the Kyōbashi Bridge on the north and the Shimbashi Bridge on the south. (The ward extended yet further north.) In this sense it was the place where the West entered most tumultuously.
Kyōbashi was a very watery place, wateriest of the fifteen wards, save Fukagawa east of the river, where the transport, storage, and treatment of the city’s lumber supply required a network of pools and canals. The Ginza district was entirely surrounded by water, and the abundance of canals to the east made the Kyōbashi coast the obvious place for storing unassimilable alien persons. They could be isolated from the populace, and vice versa, by water. Virtually all of the canals are now gone.
The Tōkaidō of the shoguns was the main north-south street in Meiji, and the main showplace of the new Bricktown. It still is the main Ginza street. In other respects Ginza has shifted.
Business and fun tended in a southerly direction when the railroad started bringing large numbers of people in from the south. If there was a main east-west street in this watery region it was the one the shogun took from the castle to his bayside villa, the Hama Palace of Meiji. It is now called Miyukidōri, “Street of the Royal Progress,” because the emperor used it for visits to the naval college and the Hama Palace. Presently a street was put through directly eastwards from the southern arc of the inner palace moat, somewhat to the north of the Street of the Royal Progress. When Ginza commenced moving north again, with the extension of the railroad to the present central station, the crossing of the two, the old Tōkaidō and the street east from the inner moat, became the center of Ginza, and of the city. This was a gradual development, somewhat apparent in late Meiji, but not completely so, perhaps, until Taishō. Though the matter is clouded by the enormous growth of centers to the west, it might be said that the main Ginza crossing is still the center of the city. There was a span of decades, from late Meiji or from Taishō, when almost anyone, asked to identify the very center, would have said Ginza, and, more specifically, the main Ginza crossing.
Both the fire and the opening of the railroad occurred in 1872. The two of them provided the occasion for the great change, which was not as quick in coming as might have been expected. Bricktown, parts of it ready for occupancy by 1874, was too utterly new. It was the rage among sightseers, but not many wanted to stay on and
run the risk of turning, as rumor had it, all blue and bloated, like a corpse from drowning. (There were other rumors, too, emphasizing, not unreasonably, the poor ventilation and the dampness.) In the early eighties, midway through the Meiji Period, the new Ginza really came to life. In 1882 horse-trolley service began on the main street, northwards through Nihombashi, with later extension to Asakusa. That same year there were arc lights, turning Ginza into an evening place. The age of Gimbura, a great Taishō institution, had begun. Gimbura is a contraction of Ginza and burabura, an adverb which indicates aimless wandering, or wandering which has as its only aim the chance pleasure that may lie along the way. It originally referred to the activities of the young Ginza vagrant, to be seen there at all hours. The emergence of the pursuit as something for all young people, whether good-for-nothing or not, came at about the time of the First World War.
Ginza began prospering by day as well. What was known as “the Kyōbashi mood” contrasted with the Nihombashi mood. One characterization of the contrast held Nihombashi to be for the child of Edo, Ginza for the child of Tokyo. In a later age it might have been said that Nihombashi still had something for the child of Meiji, while Ginza was for the child of Taishō, or Shōwa. Nihombashi contains relics of Meiji, and nothing at all remains, no brick upon another, of the Ginza Bricktown. The last bit of Meiji on the main Ginza street, completed as that reign was giving way to Taishō, has now been torn down. The Ginza of Meiji is commonly called a place of the narikin. A narikin is a minor piece in Oriental chess that is suddenly converted into a piece of great power. It here refers to the nouveau riche. As pejorative in Japanese as it is in French, the expression contrasts the entrepreneurs of Ginza with such persons as the Mitsui of Nihombashi.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 23