Nagai Kafū thought that he detected certain leisurely, recreational tendencies in it all.
I turned into a side street and noted that the rows of geisha houses were silent, their shutters closed and their lights out. Back on the main street, I was passing time in a beer hall when a young man who seemed to be a student told me of attacks on Ginza shops and on geisha establishments in the Shimbashi district.
So I first learned of riots over the price of rice. From the next day there were no newspaper reports in the matter. I heard later that the rioting always occurred in the cool of evening. There was a good moon every evening during those days. Hearing that the rioters gathered menacingly before the houses of the wealthy when the evening had turned cool and the moon had come up, I could not put down a feeling that there was something easy and comfortable about it all. It went on for five or six days and then things returned to normal. On the night of the return to normal, it rained.
The city was becoming somewhat more fireproof, and the flowers of Edo were being stamped out. The biggest fire of Taishō, excluding the gigantic one of 1923, was another in the fine series of Kanda fires. It came in the first year of the reign, and destroyed more than twenty-five hundred buildings from Kanda eastwards into Nihombashi and Kyōbashi. Among Taishō fires of some note was the one that destroyed the first Imperial Hotel on the eve of the opening of the second. Improved firefighting methods may have had something to do with diminished losses, bur fireproofing no doubt played a larger part. In 1916 thatched roofs were banned for new buildings. The fire brigades of Edo, spirited and cheerful, remained on the job right up until the earthquake. The central fire department was reduced to ashes in 1923, along with most of its equipment. Such a disaster was needed to bring unified and centralized firefighting. The new system was not, of course, able to prevent the disaster of 1945, nor can it hope to be completely effective against similar disasters in the future.
The great flood of late Meiji was the last to devastate the center of the city. In 1917 the Kabukiza, east of Ginza, was knee-deep in water, but that was because a typhoon blew the bay inland. The Arakawa Drainage Channel was begun after the great flood and finished on the eve of the earthquake. Even before its completion it worked well, controlling torrential rains in the summer of 1918. The Tone River system still floods the farthest eastern wards from time to time, but the Arakawa Drainage Channel has contained the more mischievous Sumida.
The channel was the most ambitious engineering project the city had seen since the shogunate filled the marshy mouths of the Sumida to make the Low City. The money came from the national government, and the Home Ministry directly supervised operations, digging a wide new watercourse for upwards of fifty miles, from deep in Saitama Prefecture to the bay. In its upper reaches it generally followed the old Arakawa River. From approximately the point where the Arakawa changes names and becomes the Sumida, it swept eastwards, entering the bay at a point about halfway between the eastern boundary of Fukagawa Ward and the eastern limits of the present city. Sluices control the flow of water into the Sumida.
Nowhere did the new channel pass through any of the fifteen wards of the Meiji and Taishō city. The land was acquired at what was then thought to be a very great expense. Since the regions it crossed were then mostly suburbs and farm and fishing villages, the cost would have been several times as much a few years later. The endeavor showed great vision, and the results were splendid. The floors of a few houses may sometimes even now be under water from a cloudburst, but no major flood has been caused by the Sumida since 1910.
Perhaps inevitably (though one wonders why it must be so), fires and floods have been controlled at a cost of beauty. A somewhat fireproof concrete box does not have the tones of aging wood, nor has a flat roof pasted over with tar paper the appeal of a massive, deep-eaved roof of thatch. One now looks across the river not at grassy embankments and expanses of reed and rush, but at walls of splotchy concrete.
Writing in 1920, E. Philip Terry warned the tourists whom he hoped to have as readers that they need not expect night life in Tokyo.
After dark Tokyo is a big dusky village to all but the initiated, and to some an intolerably dull one. Unless one figures in the diplomatic swing, and officiates at the almost ceaseless round of entertainments enjoyed by that favored class, there is little for the average man to do outside the comfortable hotel…. On the other hand, the Japanese, who do not go in much for a fast life, and who are easily pleased, find the decorous allurements of Tokyo so potent that they are drawn to them, as by magnets, from all parts of the Empire. To hobnob perpetually with a tiny pot of insipid, sugarless tea and a tobacco-pipe with a bowl no bigger than a bullet, the while listening to the beating of a tom-tom and the doleful ditties of pantomimic geisha, fills them with rapture; and once installed in the capital they regard with positive pity all who are so unfortunate as to dwell outside it.
It is a lively account, and the tourist must have found truth in it. Had Terry known as much about Japan as did Chamberlain and Mason, those authors of a much superior guidebook, he would have known that there was more night life in Taishō than the city had known before. Edo had been black and silent after dark, its nocturnal pleasures reserved entirely for men, and not for many of them. The crowds that poured forth on Ginza with the coming of its bricks and bright lights were quite new. It was an innocent sort of night life, perhaps, but still it offered something for all the family, and especially for the younger adult members, who had rather been left out of the pleasures of the pleasure quarters. The great day of Gimbura, “killing time in Ginza,” began in Taishō and lasted until the Second World War, though by then such western centers as Shinjuku were drawing away the youthful crowds.
Ginza and Gimbura were the heart of Taishō Tokyo. Nihombashi, the heart of mercantile Edo, was being challenged by Marunouchi as the place for big planners and managers, but it went on being the place for the big retail sell. Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, the two department-store pioneers in the mercantile revolution of late Meiji, continued trying to outdo each other. Mitsukoshi, as has been noted, was the better of the two at advertising.
Losing crowds to Ginza, Nihombashi might have seemed to be losing its mercantile preeminence as well—for the purpose of advertising is to draw crowds. Yet one should remember that conservative, systematic Nihombashi had not been a place to draw huge crowds, and the Gimbura crowds, such a new phenomenon, were not of a sort to buy expensive merchandise. It would be decades before Nihombashi had rivals as the big shopping center of the city. Gimbura was merely a pleasant way for people about twenty years old to pass time, among people indistinguishable from themselves, the sort they liked best. It may have been the first time that the city had a place for them—and for the most part only them—to go. The expression Gimbura has fallen into disuse and the largest crowds have moved westwards; but the crowds go on being about twenty years of age.
The willows of Ginza, 1921
The famous willows, symbol of Ginza in the years when Gimbura was coming into vogue, disappeared on the eve of the earthquake. They had been badly damaged by the typhoon which in 1917 brought the waters of the bay within a block or two of the center of the district. In 1921, when the main Ginza street was rearranged to give less room to pedestrians and more to vehicles, authorities replaced them with gingkos, which were more compact, and better served the convenience of motorists.
By then, of course, the day of the motorist had arrived, and his convenience had become the most important thing, as it has remained. The first automobile is said to have come from abroad (in those years all internal-combustion engines did) in late Meiji, and to have been the property of a man with a curious name, Isaac Satō. There were taxicabs from the beginning of Taishō. By the time of the earthquake there were several hundred motorcycles in the city. G. B. Sansom, the British historian, liked to say that he had the very first one in the land. He brought it in shortly before the Fi
rst World War and used it to explore the countryside.
The opening of the new Ginza main street was not a complete success. The part of the street for vehicular traffic other than trolleys had been uncertainly surfaced, and as a result was often muddy or dusty. Now it was covered with wooden blocks, the interstices filled with asphalt, a technique assuring durability and thought appropriate to the anticipated weight of traffic. On the day of the opening, heavy rains caused a large number of blocks to float, and the splashing was extreme. There was similar trouble the following year, and trouble with melting asphalt in the torrid August sun. Finally, in 1923, the street caught fire and burned up. So in a way the story of Tokyo’s first half-century is bracketed by Ginza fires.
For the masses, however things may have been with the managers, Taishō was the era of Ginza and Asakusa. Only on the eve of the earthquake was the name “Ginza” officially applied to the full length of the district as it is today. It had in the strictest sense designated only the northern blocks, where the old mint, the “Silver Seat,” had been. Most people would have thought Ginza the center of the city, but it was not really “downtown.” It did not possess really big things, except perhaps in journalism and the theater. It was a mood, rather, not easy to define or characterize. For all the accomplished world-weariness of the Yumeji girl, Taishō had a younger culture than Meiji. It was then that the mobo and moga, the “modern boy” and “modern girl,” emerged and started having fun on next to nothing. Ginza was the main place where they had it.
Asakusa is where the masses went to do what the masses of Edo had been wont to do, find performances to view and thereby ruin themselves. It was the show center, and it had the best range of little roistering places and unlicensed lechering places as well. It was traditional in the sense that the most popular temple in the city, the Asakusa Kannon, had long been friendly to such places. At the end of Edo, Asakusa had a near-monopoly on the theater and served as the final station on the way to the most distinguished of the pleasure quarters, but its great day, between the two world wars, continued the old tradition and was very modern as well.
Asakusa had a flair for the new mass culture. It kept up with the times and may have been a little ahead of them, leading the masses its way. In the years after the Russo-Japanese War, it contained the most thriving cluster of movie palaces. Asakusa was preeminent in this respect through Taishō and on into Shōwa. Kafū would go there to look at the “motion picture” posters, and so keep up with the times. Asakusa still had Kabuki. The Miyatoza, behind the temple, was looked upon by connoisseurs as the last ground of Edo Kabuki. Kabuki was not, however, the popular form it once had been in its own Low City, and cinema, though growing and favored with such talents as Tanizaki’s (he wrote scripts), was still something of a curiosity.
Shopping “mall” in Asakusa
Between the two, popular Kabuki and monstrously popular movies, came the best day of the music halls, and Asakusa was where they throve. The Asakusa of Meiji may have been the noisiest pleasure center in Tokyo, but it had rivals in other cities. The Asakusa of the music halls, middle and late Taisbō and into the present reign, was without rivals, the place where Tokyo outdid itself and the rest of the nation at the fine old art of viewing things.
“Asakusa opera” is the expression that covers musical endeavors in Asakusa during middle and late Taishō. It is a generous term, encompassing everything from pieces that would without challenge call themselves operas in the West, through various strains of light opera, domestic and foreign, all the way to the chorus-line revue.
Opera in the narrow sense was a form which it was thought necessary to have if Japan was to be civilized and enlightened. Very shortly after the opening of the Imperial Theater in 1911, the entrepreneurs and dignitaries who were its backers set about this new task, the importation of opera. They found a willing Italian, G. V. Rossi, in England, where he was a choreographer and director of light opera. He undertook to manage what was to be a permanent repertory troupe at the Imperial. He was somewhat disappointed to learn, upon his arrival in 1912, that the Imperial was not, as the name had suggested, the state theater of Japan, but, having been given a very large sum of earnest money, he stayed.
His first production was The Magic Flute with a Japanese cast. This seems unrealistic, and indeed it was. Even today, with training and competence in Western music so vastly improved, The Magic Flute is among the operas the Japanese are not quite up to. The Imperial production must have had a makeshift look about it. The same soprano, with a stand-in at the point where the two encounter each other, did Pamina and the Queen of the Night. Rossi decided that lighter things would better suit the available talent. Though he continued to produce Italian opera in the narrow sense, he gambled also on operetta.
The gamble did not succeed. The permanent repertory theater lasted only three years. Rossi was dismissed in 1916. The venture had not been a financial success. He had another try, at Akasaka in the High City, where he bought a movie house. It became the Royal (in English), famous in the history of Western music in Japan, but no more successful than the Imperial. The Royal closed in 1918, and Rossi left Japan for America, a disappointed man.
He was an important teacher. Many of the people who were to become famous in Asakusa were among his Imperial and Royal singers. Insofar as Asakusa opera was genuine opera, it could not have existed without him. His troupe had started deserting him while the Royal still persevered, and upon its closing they all went off to Asakusa. One might have advised the hapless Rossi to go there himself when the Imperial fired him. Akasaka has its geisha and hosts of rich people, but it was not a place to attract crowds. It was on the southwestern edge of the city, to be reached by a trolley line along which few trolleys ran. Asakusa was where things were happening.
There was another strain, a more important one, in Asakusa opera. A skit called The Women’s Army Is Off for the Front was such a huge success early in 1917 that the date of its opening is called the birthday of Asakusa opera. It was a frivolous war piece, about the First World War. There being a shortage of men on the Western Front, a women’s army is dispatched. Mostly the piece is song and dance, including a hornpipe and a Highland fling (so we are told, though descriptions make it seem more Cossack). Because of it “Tipperary” became very popular, sung along all the coves and strands of the nation. The pack day after day was such that people had to be rescued by stagehands at closing time and hustled out through back doors.
This popular strain was the dominant one, though lists of performances at Asakusa show an occasional opera of the genuine sort, such as Rigoletto or Lucia. “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto was among the big hits of the years before the earthquake. A memorable event occurred in relation to Rigoletto. No competent tenor being available, the duke was once sung by a soprano. Operetta and revue prevailed, however. Among Westerners, Suppè (of the “Light Cavalry” overture) seems to have been the most popular. Facing each other across an Asakusa lane were a theater that specialized in the Western and one that went in for the native. Domestic productions, tending towards the erotic, outnumbered Western.
That there should have been genuine opera at all and that it should have been popular is remarkable. Yet it must have gone on looking makeshift, and having a somewhat traditional sound to it. The two most famous Asakusa tenors had scarcely any formal musical training. They were both still to be heard in the years after the Second World War, and one of them survives in this year 1982, in his eighties, still belting away on television. His early career was with the Mitsukoshi boys’ band. He said proudly, not long ago, that when the band performed at Hibiya he could be heard in the farthest corners of the park. How considerable an achievement this was is hard to judge. The farthest corner is some four hundred yards from the bandstand where the boys performed. There are many trees to be gone through along the way, and so it may indeed have been a feat, but the important point is that the singer seemed to pr
ize volume above all else. Even today there is more volume than art in his singing. The crowds of Asakusa loved it.
Asakusa opera was astonishingly popular, especially among the young. That eroticism is what most attracted them is scarcely to be doubted. But a decade or two before, young men of Meiji had gone in great numbers to see (and hear) pretty girls perform traditional music (see page 167 for the popularity of musumegidayū). Their motives, too, are scarcely to be doubted. The Taishō look was different from the Meiji. In addition to the strong foreign influence, “Tipperary” in its own right and in many a native adaptation, the Asakusa opera was far more open. The sudden exposure of firm young flesh was the most obvious element in the new openness. Pretty legs went kicking in every direction. The performer of musumegidayū might as well not have had legs, for all the use she made of them. And the soprano duke and flailing legs were alike part of Asakusa opera.
There were intellectual and bourgeois types among its followers, as there could not fail to be, since it numbered an Italian and the Imperial among its forebears. The fanatical devotees known as peragoro were young and often penniless. There are two theories as to the origin of the word peragoro. Everyone agrees that the first two syllables are the last two of “opera.” As for the last two, some say that they derive from “gigolo,” others that they are from gorotsuki, an old word for “thug” or “vagrant.” The latter signification, whether or not it was there from the start, came to predominate. The peragoro were the disorderly elements that hung around the park. They went to the theaters night after night, provided unpaid claques for favorite singers, and formed gangs, whose rivalries were not limited to vehement support for singers. There were violent incidents. A non-peragoro could not with impunity protest the excessive vehemence in the theaters. Peragoro gangs would gather in the park, each having plighted its allegiance to a popular singer, one gang under the statue of Danjūrō, another under the wisteria bower by the lake. Two marches upon the theaters would occur each night, one for the more affluent at opening time, one for the more straitened when the signals sounded that half-fare time had come.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 31