Along towards mid-Meiji the metropolitan government embarked upon the creation of an early version of the public mall or shopping center. On land that had been occupied chiefly by chapels in attendance upon the Kannon, the city built two rows of brick shops, forming a lane from the horse trolley to the south or main front of the grand hall. The city retained ownership and rented the shops. The original buildings were casualties of the earthquake, but the prospect today is similar to that of 1885, when construction was finished. It is not displeasing. Though no longer Meiji it rather looks it, and is perhaps somewhat reminiscent as well of the Ginza Bricktown. From late Meiji into Taishō there had grown up what sons of Edo called the new Asakusa, generally to the south and west of the Kannon. Then came the earthquake, to destroy almost everything save the Kannon itself, and afterwards, those same sons inform us, the new quite took over.
“The word Asakusa,” said Akutagawa, who grew up in Honjo, across the river, “first calls to mind the vermilion hall of the temple—or the complex centered upon the hall, with the flanking pagoda and gate. We may be thankful that they came through the recent earthquake and fire. Now, as always at this season, droves of pigeons will be describing a great circle around the bright gold of the gingko, with that great screen of vermilion spread out behind it. Then there comes to mind the lake and the little pleasure stalls, all of them reduced to cinders after the earthquake. The third Asakusa is a modest part of the old Low City. Hanakawado, Sanya, Komagata, Kuramae—and several other districts would do as well. Tiled roofs after a rain, unlighted votive lanterns, pots of morning glories, now withered. This too, all of it, was left a charred waste.”
The pleasure stalls, said Kubota Mantarō, “are the heart of the new Asakusa, Asakusa as it now will be”:
This Asakusa took the recent disaster in its stride…
But the other, the old Asakusa.
Let the reader come with me—it will not take long—to the top of Matsuchi Hill… We will look northwards through the trees, towards the Sanya Canal. The color of the stagnant water, now as long ago, is like blackened teeth; but how are we to describe the emptiness that stretches on beyond the canal and the cemetery just to the north, and on through mists to the fuel tanks of Senjū, under a gray sky? The little bell tower of the Keiyōji Temple, a curious survivor, and the glowing branches of the gingkos, and the Sanya Elementary School, hastily rebuilt, and nothing else, all the way north, to catch the eye.
Let us go down the hill and cross Imado Bridge… No suggestion remains of the old air, the old fragrance, not the earthen godown remembered from long ago, not the darkly spiked wooden fence, not the willow at the corner of the restaurant. In front of the new shacks … a wanton profusion of hollyhocks and cosmos and black-eyed susans, in a dreariness quite unchanged since the earthquake.
It is the common view, and in the years just after the earthquake, when these melancholy impressions were set down, almost anyone would have thought that the old Asakusa was gone forever, and that “the new Asakusa,” represented by the flashiness of the park and its entertainments, had emerged dominant. In recent years there has been a reversal. The life of the park has been drained away by the new entertainment centers elsewhere, and to the north and east of the temple are still to be found little pockets answering well to Akutagawa’s description of the old Asakusa. Not having flourished, certain back streets had no very striking eminence to descend from.
The novelist Kawabata Yasunari used to say that, though he found abundant sadness in the culture of the Orient, he had never come upon the bleakness that he sensed in the West. Doubtless he spoke the truth. Tanizaki remarked upon the diaspora to the suburbs and beyond of the children of the Low City. He too spoke the truth. Not many residents of Asakusa were born there, and still fewer can claim grandparents who were born there. One may be sad that life has departed the place, but one does not reject Asakusa. There is still something down-to-earth and carpe-diem about it that is not to be found in the humming centers of the High City, or in the stylish, affluent suburbs.
Shitaya and Kanda wards, to the west of Asakusa, were partly flat and partly hilly—partly of the Low City and partly of the High. The Shitaya Ward of Meiji contained both the old Shitaya, “the valley below,” and Ueno, “the upland stretches.” Lowland Shitaya, generally south and east of “the mountain,” Ueno Park, was almost completely destroyed in the fires of 1923. The hilly regions of the park and beyond were spared. At the end of Edo the merchant and artisan classes possessed very little of even the flat portion of Shitaya—a cluster south of the great Kaneiji Temple, now the park, a corridor leading south along the main street to Kanda and Nihombashi, and little more. Almost everything else belonged to the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. Like the busiest part of Asakusa, the busiest part of Shitaya—the “broad alley” south of the mountain and its temple—was a plebeian island largely cut off from the main Low City.
By the end of Meiji the upper classes had for the most part moved west, and their gardens had been taken over by small shops and dwellings, a solid expanse of them from the Hongō and Kanda hills to the river. A brief account in the 1907 guide put out by the city suggests the sort of thing that happened.
Shitaya Park. Situated in the eastern part of the ward. To the east it borders on Samisen Pond and Asakusa Ward, and to the north on Nishimachi, Shitaya Ward. It was designated a park in April, 1890, and has an area of 16,432 tsubo. Once an estate of Lord Satake, it returned to nature with the dismemberment of the buildings, and came to be known popularly as Satake Meadow. It presently became a center for theaters, variety halls, sideshows, and the like, and, as they were gradually moved elsewhere, was assimilated into the city. It may no longer be said to have the attributes of a park.
There is no trace of a park in the district today. The expression rendered as “assimilated” says more literally that the Satake estate “is entirely machiya,” meaning something like the establishments of tradesmen and artisans. Most of the aristocratic lands of Shitaya became machiya without passing through the transitional stages.
Northern Shitaya, near the city limits, was a region of temples and cemeteries, a part of the band streching all along the northern fringes of Edo. A part of Yanaka, north of Ueno, where the last shogun is buried and where also the last poem of Takahashi O-den may be read upon her tombstone, became the largest public cemetery of Meiji. The city has sprawled vastly to the south and west, and today almost anyone from southerly and westerly regions, glancing at a map, forms an immediate and unshakable opinion that anything so far to the north and the east must be of the Low City. In fact it was the new High City of Meiji. As temple lands dwindled it became an intellectual sort of place, much favored by professors, writers, and artists. There is cause all the same, aside from its place on the map, for thinking that it gradually slid into the Low City. Professional keeners for dead Edo would have us believe that what was not lost in 1923 went in 1945, and that most things were lost on both occasions. In fact the Yanaka district came through the two disasters well. Its most conspicuous monument, the pagoda of the Tennōji Temple, was lost more recently. An arsonist set fire to it one summer evening in 1957. The heart of the old Low City contained few temples and Yanaka still contains many. With its latticed fronts, its tiled roofs, and its tiny expanses of greenery, it is the most extensive part of the present city in which something like the mood of the old Low City is still to be sensed.
The Negishi district, east of Yanaka, gave its name to a major school of Meiji poetry. It had long been recommended for the wabizumai, the life of solitude and contemplation, especially for the aged and affluent, and had had its artistic and literary day as well. A famous group of roisterers known as “the Shitaya gang” had its best parties in Negishi and included some of the most famous painters and writers of the early nineteenth century. Like Yanaka in the hills and over beyond the railway tracks, Negishi still has lanes and alleys that answer well to descripti
ons of the old Low City, but it has rather lost class. No artistic or intellectual person, unless perhaps a teacher of traditional music, would think of living there. It is not a good address. From Yanaka and Negishi one looked across paddy lands to the Yoshiwara. In late Edo and Meiji the owners of the great Yoshiwara houses had villas there, to which the more privileged of courtesans could withdraw when weary or ill. Nagai Kafū loved Negishi, and especially the houses in which the courtesans had languished.
Always, looking through the fence and the shrubbery at the house next door, he would stand entranced, brought to his senses only by the stinging of the mosquitoes, at how much the scene before him was like an illustration for an old love story: the gate of woven twigs, the pine branches trailing down over the ponei, the house itself. Long unoccupied, it had once been a sort of villa or resthouse for one of the Yoshiwara establishments…. He remembered how, when he was still a child on his mother’s knee, he had heard and felt very sad to hear that one snowy night a courtesan, long in ill health, had died in the house next door, which had accommodated Yoshiwara women since before the Restoration. The old pine, trailing its branches from beside the lake almost to the veranda, made it impossible for him to believe, however many years passed, that the songs about sad Yoshiwara beauties, Urasato and Michitose and the rest, were idle fancies, yarns dreamed up by songwriters. Manners and ways of feeling might become Westernized, but as long as the sound of the temple bell in the short summer night remained, and the Milky Way in the clear autumn sky, and the trees and grasses peculiar to the land—as long as these remained, he thought, then somewhere, deep in emotions and ethical systems, there must even today be something of that ancient sadness.
Shitaya Ward, now amalgamated with Asakusa Ward to the east, was shaped like an arrowhead, or, as the Japanese preference for natural imagery would make it, a sagittate leaf. It pointed southwards towards the heart of the Low City, of which it fell slightly short. The character of the ward changed as one moved north to south, becoming little different from the flatlands of Kanda and Asakusa, between which the point of the arrow thrust itself. The erstwhile estates of the aristocracy had been “assimilated,” as the 1907 guide informs us.
Kanda was almost entirely secular. There were Shinto plots, and the only Confucian temple in the city. There were no Buddhist temples at all. The shogunate did not want the smell of them and their funerals so near at hand. The Akihabara district that is now the biggest purveyor of electronic devices in the city took its name from a shrine, the Akiba— “Autumn Leaf.” The extensive shrine grounds, cleared as a firebreak after one of the many great Kanda fires, were Akibagahara, “field of the Akiba.” Then the government railways moved in and made them a freight depot, and the name elided into what it is today. This is the sort of thing that infuriates sons of Edo, and certainly the old name does have about it the feel of the land, and the new one, as Kafū did not tire of saying, has about it the tone of the railway operator. Names are among the things in Tokyo that are not left alone.
The purest of Edo Low City types, popular lore had it, was produced not in the heartland, Nihombashi, but on the fringes. Quarrelsome in rather a more noisy than violent way, cheerful, open, spendthrift, he was born in Shiba on the south and reared in Kanda. It was of course in the Kanda flatlands that he was reared, with the Kanda Shrine (see page 141) to watch over him. (Like Shitaya, Kanda was part hilly and part flat.) Kanda had once been a raucous sort of place, famous for its dashing gangsters and the “hot-water women” of its bathhouses, but in Meiji it was more sober and industrious than the flatlands of Shitaya and Asakusa, nearer the river.
The liveliest spot in Kanda was probably its fruit-and-vegetable market, the largest in the city, official provisioner to Lord Tokugawa himself. Though not directly threatened by the forces of Civilization and Enlightenment, as the fish market was, the produce market of Kanda yet lived through Meiji with a certain insecurity. In the end a tidying-up was deemed adequate, and the produce market escaped being uprooted like the fish market. The big markets were where the less affluent merchant of the Low City was seen at his most garrulous and energetic. The produce market, less striking to the senses than the fish market but no less robust, is a good symbol of flatland Kanda and its Edo types.
The western or hilly part of Kanda was the epitome of the high-collar. There it was that Hasegawa Shigure, child of Nihombashi, had her first taste of the new enlightenment (see page 194). Hilly Kanda had by the end of Meiji acquired the Russian cathedral, one of the city’s grandest foreign edifices, and it had universities, bookstores, and intellectuals. The Kanda used-book district that is among the wonders of the world was beginning to form in late Meiji, on the main east-west Kanda street, then so narrow that rickshaws could barely pass. Losses in 1923 ran into tens of thousands of volumes.
Kanda had the greatest concentration of private higher education in the city, and indeed in the nation. Three important private universities, Meiji, Chūō, and Nihon, had their campuses in the western part of Kanda Ward—three of five such universities that were situated in Tokyo and might at the end of Meiji have been called important. All three were founded in early and middle Meiji as law schools and had by the end of Meiji diversified themselves to some extent. Law was among the chief intellectual concerns of Meiji. If Western law could be made Japanese and the foreign powers could be shown that extraterritoriality no longer served a purpose, then it might be done away with. The liberal arts did not, at the end of Meiji, have an important place in private education. Meiji University had a school of literature, one among four. Nihon had several foreign-language departments, while Chūō had only two branches, law and economics. The liberal arts and the physical sciences were for the most part left to public universities. In Kanda professional and commercial subjects prevailed. This seems appropriate, up here in the hills above the hustlers of the produce market, and perhaps it better represents the new day than does public education. It defines the fields in which the Japanese have genuinely excelled.
The regions east of the river were the saddest victims of Civilization and Enlightenment. This is not to say that they changed most during Meiji—the Marunouchi district east of the palace probably changed more—but that they suffered a drearier change. Someone has to be a victim of an ever grosser national product, and the authorities chose Honjo and Fukagawa wards, along with the southern shores of the bay, after a time of uncertainty in which small factories were put up over most of the city.
It would be easy to say that the poor are always the victims, but the fact is that the wards east of the river, and especially Honjo, the northern one, do not look especially poor on maps of late Edo. Had there been a policy of putting the burden on the lower classes, then Nihombashi and Kyōbashi would have been the obvious targets. The eastern wards were chosen not because they were already sullied and impoverished but because they were so watery, and therefore lent themselves so well to cheap transport. They were also relatively open. Many people and houses would have had to be displaced were Nihombashi to turn industrial.
Lumberyards in Kanda, late Meiji
Though more regularly plotted, the Honjo of late Edo resembles the western parts of the High City, plebeian enclaves among aristocratic lands. Wateriest of all, Fukagawa was rather different, especially in its southern reaches. It contained the lumberyards of the city. The lumberyards were of course mercantile, though some of the merchants were wealthy, if not as wealthy as the great ones of Nihombashi. By the end of Meiji the wards east of the river were industrial and far-from-wealthy makers of things that others consumed. Nagai Kafū wrote evocatively of the change. The hero of The River Sumida, returning to Asakusa from a disappointing interview with his uncle, wanders past rank Honjo gardens and moldering Honjo houses, and recognizes among them the settings for the fiction of late Edo, to which he is strongly drawn. In certain essays the laments are for the changes which, in the years of Kafū’s exile overseas, have come upon “F
ukagawa of the waters.”
Heavily populated as the city spilled over into the eastern suburbs, Honjo and the northern parts of Fukagawa were but sparsely populated at the beginning of Meiji. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who was born in 1892 and spent his boyhood in Honjo, described the loneliness in an essay written after the earthquake and shortly before his suicide.
In the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, Honjo was not the region of factories that it is today. It was full of stragglers, worn out by two centuries of Edo. There was nothing resembling the great rows of mercantile establishments one sees in Nihombashi and Kyōbashi. In search of an even moderately busy district, one went to the far south of the ward, the approaches to Ryōgoku Bridge….
Corpses made the strongest impression on me in stories I heard of old Honjo, corpses of those who had fallen by the wayside, or hanged themselves, or otherwise disposed of themselves. A corpse would be discovered and put in a cask, and the cask wrapped in straw matting, and set out upon the moors with a white lantern to watch over it. The thought of the white lantern out there among the grasses has in it a certain weird, ominous beauty. In the middle of the night, it was said, the cask would roll over, quite of its own accord. The Honjo of Meiji may have been short on grassy moors, but it still had about it something of the “regions beyond the red line.” And how is it now? A mass of utility poles and shacks, all jammed in together….
My father still thinks he saw an apparition, that night in Fukagawa. It looked like a young warrior, but he insists that it was in fact a fox spirit. Presently it ran off, frightened by the glint of his sword. I do not care whether it was fox or warrior. Each time I hear the story I think what a lonely place the old Fukagawa was.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 25