Notices of the state of the royal health were sent out from the palace by pony express and put up before police boxes. There were silent crowds in the palace plaza. Public-minded persons (not, it seems, the city) provided water. There were crowds as well at shrines near the palace—Kanda to the north, Sannō to the south, the Hibiya Shrine near the Imperial Hotel. From temples poured great clouds of smoke, day and night, the burning of sesame seeds being an ancient form of exorcism, and ancient beliefs about malign spirits yet widespread.
Vehicular traffic made every attempt to move silently when it had to move past the palace. Rags muffled the sound of wheels along the trolley track that followed the palace moat from Hibiya towards Yotsuya and approached fairly close to the royal apartments on its southwest arc. From the plaza, the cannon that since 1871 had fired the don at noon each day was moved to a remoter spot.
Outside the palace as the Meiji emperor lay dying
The emperor died late on the night of July 29. The announcement came early on July 30, and so the forty-fifth year of Meiji became the first year of Taishō. Rain began falling a few minutes past midnight and fell as the announcement was made, but crowds, standing or kneeling, remained in the plaza all through the night.
Demonstrations of grief and affection continued through the weeks before the funeral. Theaters called off all performances upon the announcement of the death, and some remained closed until the funeral. The variety theaters seem to have been the quickest to go back into business. Many shops closed, especially in commercial districts near the palace. Sales throughout the city fell by perhaps a fifth, perhaps as much as a third, during the early days of mourning. The grief had a streak of anger in it; the house of the emperor’s chief physician was stoned.
There was a movement to have the interment in Tokyo, but Fushimi, on the southern outskirts of Kyoto, had already been selected. The funeral took place on September 13. Newspaper descriptions emphasize the stillness of places usually noisy, save only the railway stations, and especially Ueno, accommodating travelers from the poor and conservative northeast. The Nihombashi fish market, usually closed only at the New Year, was silent on the day of the funeral. Shops remained closed all over the city. Asakusa was described as quieter than in the aftermath of the great flood two years before. The ladies of pleasure beneath the Twelve Storys in Asakusa observed the day solemnly.
The weather was good. The funeral was a combination of the old and the new, richly symbolic of the era that had ended. Night had always been the time for the most sacred of Shinto ceremonials, and the funeral was at night. The guards regiment fired a salute at eight in the evening. Naval vessels off Shinagawa answered, and temple bells all through the city started tolling. The cortege left the southeast gate of the palace to a bugle call and funeral marches played by the guards band. The way to Babasaki, on the other side of the plaza, was lighted by gas torches in iron baskets, while attendants in the immediate cortege carried pine torches. The funeral pavilion, at the Akasaka parade grounds, was also lighted by gas, in that latter day of gaslight. Five oxen in single file drew the hearse. Some attendants wore ancient court dress, others modern uniforms.
The cortege made its way southwards from Babasaki past Hibiya Park, westwards along the outer moat, and then south to the parade grounds, which it reached at about eleven. At Babasaki the crush was so great that there were injuries. All windows and utility poles along the way were draped in black and white, all lights were put out, and all shop signs were either draped or removed. The body was taken to Kyoto by train on the fourteenth, and that night interred at Fushimi. With the energetic Shibusawa Eiichi in charge, planning for a memorial shrine began immediately. Land belonging to the royal household in the western suburbs, beyond Akasaka Ward, was chosen for the site of the shrine proper, and the parade grounds, site of the funeral, for the “outer gardens.” The iris gardens that are the most famous part of the shrine grounds are said to have been designed by the Meiji emperor himself for the pleasure of his empress, to whom the shrine was also presently dedicated. It was begun in 1915 and dedicated in 1920, although construction was not finally completed until late the following year. The outer gardens were not finished until 1926, the year in which another reign began, the Shōwa, which yet continues. On the day of the dedication a bridge collapsed, leading to a construction scandal already remarked upon (see page 49). It coincided with a scandal over gas rates. The double scandal led to the resignation of the mayor.
The most remarkable happening attendant upon the funeral was the suicide of General Nogi and his wife. It seems to have occurred as the temple bells began tolling at the start of the obsequies. The Nogi house, a modest one which yet stands, is very close to the parade grounds. In that day when the southern wards were so little developed, it may have been visible from the funeral pavilion.
Funeral procession for the Meiji emperor
No shrine would be dedicated to the Taishō emperor, successor to the Meiji emperor, nor can his passing have seemed so clearly the passing of an age. Meiji is remote as a person, but as a symbol he remains important. Of Taishō this cannot be said. His last years were spent in shadows deep even for an emperor. A regency was proclaimed in 1921, with the crown prince, the present emperor, then a youth of twenty, as regent. Gingerly, we are told in biographical notes that the emperor had fallen ill. That the illness was mental is one of those facts which no one speaks of but everyone knows.
The Taishō reign was a short one, only a third as long as Meiji. The emperor had ceased to exist as a public figure, and his death, coming so soon after the earthquake, must have seemed an event of no great moment for the populace of the city, where manifestations of grief for his father had been conspicuous. One wonders whether, if he had died before his father and the present emperor had succeeded as a boy of ten or eleven, the period from 1912 to 1926 would be thought by historians to constitute a unit at all.
In any case, it might be described as unexciting, compared with the preceding and following reigns. The former brought huge successes, the latter brought a catastrophe of its own making and now brings successes of a quite different order. Taishō had its war, a comfortable one for the Japanese, in which the principal action was far away in Europe and certain fruits of victory lay near at hand. The expressions with which “Taishō” is most commonly associated are “the great Taishō earthquake” and “Taishō democracy,” the latter a pale flower that bloomed briefly after the First World War and left nothing behind save its name. Taisho history contains little to be either very proud of or deeply ashamed of.
We are accustomed to thinking of modern Japanese history in terms of reigns, however, and so there are Taishō literature, the Taishō theater, and the like. The fact remains that the things of Taishō do have their own look.
Wandering through the more crowded parts of the Low City, one comes upon pockets that survived the conflagration of 1945, and there it is, the Taishō look. Very rarely is the Meiji look to be come upon, and almost never the genuine Edo object. One recognizes Taishō in the pressed-metal fronts of little shops, in irrelevant turrets, in oriel windows and shutters that fold rather than slide. Nagai Kafū rejoiced in the obliviousness of the regions east of the river to the call of Civilization and Enlightenment, but Taishō may be seen as the time when they started paying attention at least to its decorative elements.
In 1914 the city sponsored a great fair called the Taishō Hakurankai, the Taishō Exposition. The purpose was to honor the new reign and, in the Meiji spirit, to promote industry. It got off to a bad start. The contractors did not seem very intent upon promoting industry. Construction was incomplete on opening day, and the emperor had to make his way to the site through a sea of mud. Letters to editors objected to the inclusion of a mummy among exhibits felicitating the new era, but the exposition was on the whole a success. More than seven million people purchased tickets. Whatever it may have done for industry, it did succeed
in giving the Taishō reign a certain independence from its predecessor, an identity of its own.
There were other expositions, one of which celebrated the semicentennial of the establishment of Tokyo as capital; another honored the conclusion of the war to end wars, and itself ended just a year and a half before the earthquake. But no exposition was more important than the Taishō Exposition. It introduced and established the Taishō look, right there at the beginning of the reign.
Tokyo led the way into the new era, as it had into the old. By the end of Meiji, monumental architecture in the Western style had become soberly, somewhat academically Western. The earliest exercises in Western architecture, such as the Hoterukan, had been something different—different, indeed, from anything Western. Much the same may be said of the influence which the Taishō Exposition had upon shop and domestic architecture, nowhere more conspicuously than in the pleasure quarters. Extremes of fancifulness make them look like Disneylands before their time. E. Philip Terry, that writer of colorful if not wholly reliable guidebooks, thought the Yoshiwara “Pompeiian.” Looking at pictures of what was lost in 1923, others might think that it was Venetian, rather, in the exuberance and liberality of its decoration. It had something of San Marco in it.
There was a Taishō look in people too, more noticeable in women than in men. The day of the flapper did not arrive until after the earthquake. Men had for the most part taken to Western dress before the earthquake, but Japanese dress prevailed among women. The Taishō woman in Japanese dress looks more Western, somehow, than does the Meiji woman in Western dress. The bustles and bonnets of the Meiji woodcut are all very gay, and, at the remove of a century (however they may have looked to a Parisian couturier of the time, and indeed did look to Pierre Loti), seem authentic enough, but the face is of an earlier day. A languorous beauty of Taishō, by contrast, speaks of a world-weariness that has been studied well and mastered, and it is not of domestic provenance.
Two years older than Tanizaki, the painter and illustrator Takehisa Yumeji was in his late twenties when Taishō began. Among all artists and craftsmen he is the most symbolic of Taishō. His creative years were mostly in Taishō, and his illustrations, while they may not be great art, speak more eloquently of Taishō than do those of any other artist. Wan, consumptive, with sloping shoulders and lips, the Yumeji girl would have felt at home in the Germany of a century before.
Edo artists in the woodcut admired slender beauty, certainly, but it is an abstract, fleshless sort of beauty, very far from this wasted flesh. The Yumeji girl may look ill, but she smiles sometimes, albeit wanly. The Edo beauty did not smile, and the Meiji beauty did but rarely. All manner of smiles flash across Taishō paintings and posters, and give a sense that Western things have been absorbed and become part of the organism as they had not earlier been. The enterprising cosmetologists of the Shiseidō may at length have succeeded in clearing the national skin of its murkiness.
A Yumeji girl—with cat
The painter Kishida Ryūsei, who was born in Ginza in 1891, thought he found a Taishō look in men too, and especially actors. “There is a certain briskness about these handsome figures. There is something that suggests Valentino.” He wrote of the quality after the earthquake, but it must have been there before. The Valentino look may be associated with the Taishō look—though “briskness” is the last word one would apply to the Yumeji girl. It is a pity that we have no Yumeji boys.
The population of the fifteen wards grew during Taishō, and the population of the prefecture grew yet more rapidly. By the time of the earthquake the former had risen to well over two million, and the population of the prefecture to almost four million.
The High City was reaching beyond the city limits in all directions, especially the south and west. At the beginning of Meiji the city did not fill the fifteen wards, and at the end of Taishō the fifteen wards no longer defined the city. The city proper was larger in area than Yokohama, Kobe, or Kyoto, but covered less than half the area of Osaka, and only a little more than half that of Nagoya. Not until almost a decade after the earthquake were the city limits expanded to encompass most of the population, and such burgeoning suburbs as Shibuya and Ikebukuro. The municipal government seems to have been reluctant to press for expansion. The city was vulnerable to incursions upon its autonomy, and any approach to the size of the prefecture meant risking a return to the old “special” status, with a governor and no mayor.
Yet it seems to have been thought inevitable that the city would expand. Aside from Tokyo itself, there was still at the end of Taishō only one incorporated city in the prefecture. Much more populous districts than that one city, Hachiōji, lay just beyond the fifteen wards. It seems to have been assumed that these would presently become wards themselves. In 1932, they did.
The governor continued to be a faceless bureaucrat from the Home Ministry, while the mayor was sometimes a man of considerable eminence. There were mayors of ministerial stature, such as Gotō Shimpei, he of the “big kerchief,” who would have had the earthquake and its aftermath to preside over had he not resigned in the spring of 1923.
None of the eight mayors of Tokyo during the Taishō Period was born in the city. Gotō may have been the most famous of them, but probably the most popular was his predecessor, Tajiri Inajirō, so eminent an authority on administration that he lectured at the Imperial University. He had to resign because of the bridge that collapsed while the Meiji Shrine was being dedicated. An eccentric in a way that made people like him, he wore hand-me-down clothes and walked to his office from Koishikawa, his lunch tied up in a kerchief like that of any other worker. A tendency towards incontinence in moments of tension was taken as a mark of earnestness.
The nation enjoyed a war boom, and the city shared in it. Industrial production in 1919 was almost four times what it had been in 1910. As for finance and management, there was a rush to Marunouchi, the old Mitsubishi Meadow. In 1922 more than a third of companies with a capitalization of over five million yen had their headquarters in Kōjimachi Ward, chiefly Marunouchi. The number was about equal to the combined total for Nihombashi, the heart of the old merchant city, and Kyōbashi. The city was falling into its present shape by mid-Taishō.
Across from the central railway station, the Marunouchi Building, largest in the land, was finished on the eve of the earthquake. The Marine Insurance Building, finished in 1917, was the first to be called biru, short for “building.” (Most office buildings are now so designated.) The two buildings represented another Taishō look, the box-like one. The small shopkeeper may have fancied oriels and turrets, but big builders were eschewing unprofitable decorations. Another lesson had been learned.
* * *
The First World War produced inflation, and at the end of it came riots over the high price of rice. They led to the formation of the first government based on political parties, an event generally held to mark the beginning of “Taishō democracy.” The rioting reached Tokyo in mid-August of 1918, having begun on the coast of the Japan Sea ten days earlier.
Police dispersed a rally in Hibiya Park on the night of August 13, and marauding bands ranged through Kyōbashi and Nihombashi. There was more rioting on the evening of the fourteenth. One swath of violence began in Hibiya and extended from Shimbashi northwards through Ginza and Kyōbashi into Nihombashi. The other was more interesting. It began in Asakusa and advanced upon Ueno, where the crowd was estimated at twenty thousand, and upon the Yoshiwara, where sixty-nine houses were damaged. Arson and looting occurred.
On the fifteenth, riots struck the same parts of the Low City and for the first time moved west into the High City. On the sixteenth there was violence in Ginza once more, but in Ueno mounted troops scattered a band of eager rioters. No reporting on the riots had been allowed since the fourteenth. On the seventeenth it resumed, the papers having protested and the peak of the troubles having passed.
The riots led to the resi
gnation of a prime minister who as a lad not yet twenty had served with the Restoration forces, they that overthrew the shogunate, and to the investiture of a new kind of prime minister, symbolic of Taishō democracy. Another important man of a new sort first came into prominence because of them. Shōriki Matsutarō was in command of the police who dispersed the initial Hibiya riot, and got into the newspapers because he suffered a gash on the forehead. He was so forceful and energetic a man that he was bound, sooner or later, to make his appearance in chronicles of the twentieth century. The riots were the occasion for his debut. Shōriki later became president of the Yomiuri, which, when he took charge, was fifth or sixth among the dozen or so newspapers in the city. He made it the largest of them all in terms of Tokyo circulation (and it is a native of the city, and not, like the Asahi and Nichinicki or Mainichi, Osakan). He may be called the father of professional baseball and commercial television; and so there are few Japanese lives upon which he has had no effect.
The provincial riots clearly originated in discontent over inflation. There is room for disagreement about the real meaning of the Tokyo riots. Probably the national government would not have been called upon to resign had the violence not reached the capital but been restricted to remote fishing villages. Yet there is always a suggestion in Tokyo rioting that participants gather for fun and excitement. In these events, a thousand were arrested. About a quarter received prison sentences, the highest fifteen years. Few of the accused seem to have been poverty-stricken.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 30