Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

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  The High City was sparsely populated in Edo and largely emptied by the Restoration. The high ranks of the military aristocracy went away, presently to come back with titles and new mansions. The lower ranks provided some of the most successful Meiji bureaucrats, politicians, and entrepreneurs, and ample stories of tragedy and desperation as well, including those of O-den, O-kinu, and O-ume, the eminent murderesses.

  Then they all went away, and the High City was turned over to tea and mulberries. The Meiji government, after initial hesitation, began a policy of confiscating unused lands and encouraging their return to agriculture. There were for a time more than a hundred acres of tea and mulberries in what was to become Akasaka Ward. The avenue that leads southwest from the Akasaka geisha quarter seems to have passed through mulberries and little else. Shibuya, beyond the Meiji city limits and one of the thriving entertainment and shopping centers of Taishō and since, was known for the excellence of its tea. The “tea-and-mulberry policy” was a brief expediency which left no lasting mark upon the High City. The tea bushes and the mulberry trees soon withered, and development came, to make the High City the half (or somewhat more than half) of Tokyo that has grown hugely in this century.

  From mid-Meiji, the repopulation of the High City progressed furiously, accounting for well over half the total population growth through the Meiji years. When the population reached a million, approximately the highest Edo figure, Yotsuya Ward in the High City still had the smallest population of the fifteen, and Akasaka, immediately to the south, was the least densely populated. Their opposites were of course in the Low City, Kanda with the largest population and Nihombashi with the highest population density. The population of the city reached two million by the end of Meiji, but growth in the central wards, the Low City plus Kōjimachi, was slow, and in some places population was actually declining.

  A line north and south from the center of the palace grounds would have divided the Meiji city into two almost equal parts, and on its way to the city limits at either extremity it would have passed almost entirely through hilly regions. Today the portion of the twenty-three wards that lies west of the line is larger than the eastern portion, and much more populous. A line north and south from the westernmost point of the Meiji city would divide the present city—the twenty-three wards—into approximately equally populated parts. It is a change indeed, when one remembers that the Low City had more than half the population of late Edo. The city has moved westward and goes on doing so, and the old Low City figures much less than it once did.

  Though growing rapidly, the High City did not really begin splitting its seams until after the earthquake. When the novelist Tokutomi Roka, among the most popular in his day of all Meiji writers, fell under the spell of Tolstoi and wished to live the Tolstoian life, he only had to go five or six miles west of Shinjuku and the Meiji city limits to be among the peasants. This was shortly after the Russo-Japanese War—and Shinjuku was the most rapidly growing of the new transportation centers. In 1920 a part of it became the first considerable annexation to the fifteen Meiji wards.

  For all these frantic changes, the High City changed less in some respects than the Low City. Class distinctions, once very clear if measured by money, tended to disappear from the Low City. They remained valid in the High City. So also, to a remarkable extent, did the pattern of land usage, the distribution of land between the affluent and the more straitened. In both parts of the city the street pattern, despite revolution and disaster, has continued to resemble that of Edo. It is sometimes said that the Japanese succeeded in putting together a rational city, by which seems to be meant one of gridwork, only when building themselves a capital in the Chinese style. In fact Edo was rather like Kyoto, the longest-lived of the Chinese-style capitals. The commercial center was laid out with reasonable consistency and thoroughness in a series of grids. The grids tended not to join one another very well, but that is another matter. Over considerable expanses the right angle and the straight line prevailed.

  A map of the High City, on the other hand, puts one in mind of a vast, ancient country village, with the streets following animal tracks and the boundaries of fields. So too it is with Kyoto, a grid where the old city was laid out, but something quite different in outlying districts.

  It is as if, having paid homage to the Chinese model, the Japanese settled back into something familiar and comfortable.

  Finding an address in the High City is a matter of navigating in more or less the right direction, and asking aid and comfort upon approaching the bourne. It must have been worse in Edo, when there were no house numbers, and the person of the Low City rarely ventured into that cold, alien land, the High City. There is a charming Kafū story about a young girl from a Shimbashi geisha establishment who is sent on a bill-collecting expedition into the High City, and the dreadful time she has finding the delinquent customer of whom she is in pursuit, and her resolve, upon returning safely to Shimbashi, never again to accept so hazardous an assignment.

  The High City is not merely a jumble of hills. It is a pattern of ridges and valleys. The main roads out from the city followed ridge lines and valleys, so that the premodern city had, and the modern city has preserved, a resemblance to the cobweb plan admired by planners. Lesser routes climbed up and down the slopes to join the greater ones. The residences of the upper classes were on the heights, and there were farmlands and plebeian clusters in the valleys and along the main roads. A map from late Meiji therefore shows, typically, a tract of undivided land, perhaps private, perhaps a parade ground or a religious or educational establishment, with a somewhat orderly arrangement of small blocks beside it, or on more than one side of it. The main streets are arteries radiating from the heart, with innumerable capillaries between them. From a combination of orderliness and confusion the modern pattern of the uplands grew, remarkably like Edo both in the configuration of the streets and the pattern of land use, except for the fact that farmlands were soon eliminated.

  There were other respects as well in which the streets and roads did not change greatly. A very few of the main avenues had been widened to accommodate trolleys, but for the most part they were pitted, narrow, and badly drained. Kafū’s little bill collector made her way westwards towards the city limits through a sea of mud. The novelist Tokuda Shusei recalled that in mid-Meiji the main street past the university in Hongo was as rough and narrow as a rustic lane—and this street was the beginning of a principal Tokugawa highway, running out past the Itabashi Mouth and on through the mountains to the Kansai. The hilly part of Kōjimachi Ward, to the west of the palace, where the British legation and embassy has stood for upwards of a century, is the Kōjimachi of Edo. Some think that it was the site of a yeast works, and therefore that the name means something like Yeastville. Others hold it to be a pun on daimyō kōji, “daimyo alley,” and yet others combine the two and make it “daimyo ferment.” The second and third are nicely descriptive, for the ward was given over to the residences of the lesser military orders, the hatamoto, the humblest who could still claim access to the shogun’s presence. It was bisected by a narrow mercantile strip along the Kōshū highway, leading westwards to the Shinjuku Mouth and the province of Kai. The hatamoto departed. Many of their houses remained, to be taken over by the bourgeois of the new day, the bureaucrat, the merchant, the journalist. The Nagai family lived there for a time in Kafū’s childhood.

  Yet if the displacement of the old inhabitants was virtually complete, the district was the least changed physically of any in the immediate environs of the palace. At the end of Meiji hatamoto houses still survived in large numbers. The Arishima family, from which sprang Takeo the novelist and Ikuma the painter, as well as another novelist who used the pseudonym Satomi Ton, possessed one of them.

  Still living in it after the earthquake, Ikuma wrote:

  I do not know whether it is a hundred years old or two hundred years old. I know from old
maps that it once belonged to a lesser hatamoto called governor of something or other, but I do not know who might have built it or lived in it over the years. I have no notion of the joys and sorrows that came and went. Nor have I had any urge to learn. They who come after me will probably not know about me, or have an urge to learn. It does not seem likely that there will be one among future dealers in culture who love this house for the reason that I love it, one reason only, that it is old. In the not distant future it will probably suffer the common fate and be torn down. The proverb has it that the head of a sardine can be deified if one is of a mind to do it. So we may account for my inability to think of giving up this shabby old house and its grounds. Not many are left of the hatamoto houses that lined the Banchō district. The fires that followed the earthquake reduced half of it to ashes.

  Banchō, “the numbered blocks,” Block One through Block Six, was another designation for the Kōjimachi district proper, the part of Kōjimachi Ward immediately west of the palace. Through a rearranging of numbers the British embassy was presently to acquire its fine address, Number One Block One. Arishima’s reminiscences inform us that Banchō came through Meiji fairly well, and was grievously damaged in 1923. Though under new ownership in Meiji and early Taishō, it wore an aged aspect that was different from surviving parts of the Edo Low City, a graver, more sedate look. Because of massive gates and high garden walls, there was little here of the street life that prevailed in the Low City. Tiny garden plots lined the streets of the Low City, but the walled garden was virtually gone there by the end of Meiji.

  Banchō had not contained the great estates of the daimyo, but the moderately ample places of the lesser aristocracy. The former became detached palaces and parade grounds and the like, while the latter were nicely proportioned to the needs of the upper middle class of the new day. In search of the look of the Edo High Town, therefore—an austere, walled-in, perhaps somewhat forbidding look—one might best, at the end of Meiji, have gone for a walk through Banchō.

  The northern and southern parts of the High City have, in the Tokyo century, gone different ways. The beginnings of that difference were already apparent in Meiji. The two southern wards, Akasaka and Azabu, became the home of the highly affluent, and of the international and diplomatic set. There were such people in the north too. The Iwasaki family of the Mitsubishi enterprises had the most lavish of their several estates in Hongō. For those who wished to be near the rich and fashionable, however, and participate in their doings, the northern wards of the High City, Hongō and Koishikawa, were on the wrong side of the palace, and ever more so as the decades went by. The Low City, of course, was even farther removed from Society. The wards to the west, Yotsuya and Ushigome, tended to be rather more like the north than the south.

  Insofar as they remained within the city limits at all, the good addresses came to be concentrated in the two southern wards. It says something, perhaps, that these two wards seem the least interesting of all the Meiji fifteen. They contained interesting people, no doubt, but, save for a few enclaves like the Akasaka geisha quarter, they were not interesting neighborhoods. Indeed the word “neighborhood” scarcely seems to apply. They encouraged the exclusiveness of the Tokugawa military classes.

  Less wealthy, the northern wards—and to an extent the western wards too—had an artistic and intellectual tone. Sometimes the lack of wealth was extreme. Yotsuya Ward, west of Kōjimachi, contained one of the “slums” of which historians of the city seem so proud. There it was that Hanai O-ume, the murderess, died in 1916. It was almost next door to the Akasaka Palace, where the Meiji emperor spent a good part of his reign. The High City has always accommodated, side by side, the extremely well placed and the extremely poorly placed. The Yotsuya slum seems not to have been industrial, but a gathering of uprooted farmers.

  It would probably be a simplification to say that the divergence north and south began with the disposition made of the grand estates. Yet that does seem to point the directions taken. Of the estates scattered around the castle, four stand out on Edo maps as rivals of the castle itself. They chanced to fall into four Meiji wards, all in the High City. The mansion and park of the Wakayama Tokugawa family, in Akasaka, became the Akasaka Detached Palace; the Nagoya Tokugawa estate in Ushigome became the military academy; the Mito Tokugawa estate in Koishikawa became an arsenal and later an amusement park, with a fragment of the Mito garden tucked somewhat sootily into a corner. And finally there was the one among the four that was not Tokugawa, the Maeda estate in Hongō, which became the Imperial University, and so Hongō, with the hilly parts of Kanda, became the student quarter of the city, and one of its intellectual and literary centers as well.

  The origins of the university are complicated. It did not settle completely on the Maeda estate until mid-Meiji. Its earliest beginnings may be traced to certain institutions established by the shogunate for the study of the Western barbarian, and for more genteel Chinese studies as well. A South School and an East School each lay in a southerly direction from the Maeda estate. The Occidental and traditional branches feuded chronically and bitterly, but by the time of the move to Hongō in the eighties the former was ascendant.

  Until the earthquake the Maeda family still occupied a generous—though by old standards restricted—expanse at the southwest corner of their old estate. Before it became the university campus the Maeda estate had provided housing for Western persons who taught here and there and were otherwise of service to the government. E. S. Morse lived on the Maeda estate or Kaga Yashiki, as he called it, from the name of the province that was the Maeda fief.

  His description suggests what was happening to many of the old aristocratic tracts: “Kaga Yashiki is now a wilderness of trees, bushes, and tangled masses of shrubbery; hundreds of crows are cawing about; here and there are abandoned wells, some of them not covered, and treacherous pits they are. The crows are as tame as our pigeons and act as scavengers. They…wake you in the morning by cawing outside the window.”

  Immediately to the north of the university stood that most haughty institution, the First Higher School. It was founded late in 1874 as the Tokyo School of English and did not move to its Hongō grounds until 1889. The Hongō site is now occupied by the agricultural college of the university, which in Meiji was in the southwestern suburbs. The First Higher School was perhaps even haughtier than the university, which was certainly haughty enough. All gifted and ambitious lads wanted to attend both, and the higher school had the fewer students. Most of its graduates who lived long enough became eminent in one way or another. More than half the graduates of both institutions went routinely into the bureaucracy or the academic life.

  A short distance from the university on the other side was the most elite of schools for women, the Women’s Higher Normal School. When, as soon happened, other institutions that called themselves universities came into existence, they congregated in the regions to the north of the palace. There were some famous boarding houses in Hongō, which, with Kanda, had more of them than any other part of the city. The most famous produced approximately one doctor of philosophy per year during the quarter of a century after its establishment.

  At least one such house survives from late Meiji, a three-story wooden building of a kind that fire regulations would not permit today. It was considered so exciting an addition to the university quarter that there were lantern processions for three nights to honor its opening. We have seen that the Nezu licensed quarter, down the hill in the flat part of Hongō, was moved lest it cause students to lay waste their treasures. Upland Hongō seems on the whole to have been a sober district, its students aware of their elite status and their responsibilities. The higher school was relatively the rowdier, but the university seems to have set the tone. There was and has been very little in its vicinity to suggest a Latin Quarter. It is commonly thought today that the quiet was brought by the Second World War—this despite the fact that much of the district escaped
the fires. It seems, however, to have been rather quiet all along.

  The most famous novel about the student life of late Meiji is Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō, whose title is the name of its hero. The campus pond, a survival from the Maeda days, is known as Sanshirō’s Pond. Sanshirō lives in Hongō, and does not have a very exciting time of it. He sees a performance of Hamlet, which strikes him as full of odd remarks, but the pleasurable event described at greatest length is a viewing of the chrysanthemum dolls at Dangozaka, just north of the university. The novelist Tokuda Shūsei remarked upon how students had to go to Kanda for almost everything, from school supplies to Kabuki. Hongō was very much a part of the High City, he said, informing us, probably, that the students of the private universities may have set the tone in Kanda, but Hongō was dominated by more austere sorts, professors and intellectuals and the young men of the future.

  Along its eastern border with Shitaya, Hongō extended a short distance into the flatlands. There was situated the soon-to-depart Nezu licensed quarter. At the top of the ridge a short distance south lay an older and unlicensed pleasure quarter, that of Yushima. In Meiji it was patronized chiefly by Nihombashi merchants, but the clientele also included the more affluent sort of student. There does not seem to have been any thought of doing to it what was done to Nezu.

  The Yushima quarter had come into being because the huge Ueno temple complex, ministering to the Tokugawa tombs, was so near at hand. It was not proper for priests to frequent the usual sort of teahouse, and so they took their pleasure at establishments called kagemajaya, in which Yushima specialized. Written in a fashion that invites translation as “shady teahouses,” the kagemajaya offered male geisha and prostitutes. Such places did not go out of business immediately upon the Restoration and the destruction of the temple. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Yushima shook off its past and became a more conventional geisha quarter.