Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  They were there for the excitement, of course, as crowds of young people are at all times in all places, but devotion to the Asakusa opera was their primary motive. That is the mark of its popularity. Their lady friends, often from the dubious little houses below the Twelve Storys, were sometimes called peragorina, though this expression had by no means the currency of peragoro.

  When, in the diminished Asakusa of our latter day, old persons reminisce upon the good times, it is not the Asakusa described by Morse and Griffis that they are thinking of. It is the Asakusa of the opera. Nothing in the new entertainment districts, Shinjuku and the like, has quite taken its place. The Low City may be essentially conservative, but it changes, and good things are lost. Some of the best were lost when the crowds departed Asakusa. There is a Kafū story at the wistful ending of which the hero wearies of Asakusa and moves west. That is what the crowds did.

  The division of literary history into reigns seems somewhat forced. What began happening at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War went on happening in the new reign, and if there is a Taishō look in literature it does not really become prominent until late in the reign, when it might as well be incorporated into the next one.

  The theater, and especially the Kabuki, the art so central to the culture of the city, better accommodates the division into reigns. Generations of actors do correspond rather well to reigns. The most famous of Meiji actors all died in the last decade of the reign. It took a few years, during which there were many laments for the death of the form, before the generation of Taishō actors had established itself. The Kabukiza, east of Ginza, has been the grand stage for Kabuki ever since it was opened, in 1889. It was the biggest and the best situated, immediately east of Ginza, and in 1912, the year of the change of reigns, it came to have energetic Osaka management, with which to bludgeon its rivals. Morita Kanya (the twelfth of that name, who was active during Meiji—the line has continued) died a few years after the opening of the Kabukiza, which quite overshadowed his Shintomiza.

  For all the grandeur, and some may say arrogance, of the Kabukiza, it had rivals during the Taishō Period—more interesting, possibly, than it was. Among these were the “little theaters” scattered all over the city. The one most fondly remembered is the Miyatoza, that guardian of tradition in Asakusa. Of the three “big” theaters of late Edo, one was gone by the end of Meiji; the other two—the Shintomiza, formerly the Moritaza, and, in southern Shitaya, a few minutes’ walk from the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, the Ichimuraza—both prospered. The sixth Kikugorō and the first Kichiemon, two fine actors who survived the Second World War and brought the great tradition down to our time, held forth there.

  Then there was the Meijiza in Nihombashi, today the oldest Kabuki theater in the city. It may not have provided the best of Kabuki, but its chief actor, the second Sadanji, was a worthy successor to Kanya in the matter of innovating and improving. He was the first important Kabuki actor to study abroad, and the first to act in the new Western theater.

  He joined Osanai Kaoru (see page 69), one of the leading entrepreneurs of the new theater, to form, in 1909, a troupe called the Jiyū Gekijō, the Free Theater. In the years that followed, the Free Theater presented in translation plays by such Westerners as Ibsen and Maeterlinck.

  This was very different from the sort of thing that the fifth Kikugorō had essayed in, for instance, his balloon ascent. A kind of realism and cosmopolitanism had been introduced in Meiji that was less a matter of style than of accessories. Little Western bibelots were introduced, and actors appeared in Western dress. All of this seems in retrospect amusing and not serious.

  What Sadanji undertook was very serious. He was a Taishō man. As with the Yumeji girl, we may say that the pursuit of Western things had become more than exoticism. It had sunk deeper. Sadanji set the example. It has become common for Kabuki actors in these latter days to appear in Western or Westernized vehicles. In many a subtle way the influence of the West has insinuated itself into Kabuki. The Valentino look came to stay. Today it could be called the television look. All of this began with Sadanji.

  Sadanji’s Free Theater was not the only troupe that undertook performances in the Western style, in translation and by Japanese writers. From the first uncertain sproutings in the political drama of Meiji, the “new theater” increased and multiplied. There was a bewildering proliferation of troupes between the two wars, and from them emerged a most energetic movement in the experimental theater.

  The most celebrated performer of early Taishō was an actress. That this should have been the case has, again, the Taishō look about it. The most celebrated female celebrities of Meiji had been murderesses.

  In this regard the women of Taishō were not up to their Meiji forebears. No Taishō murderer or murderess had the appeal of Takahashi O-den, though there were interesting murders, sometimes of a technically advanced kind. In 1913 a thief used power from a high-tension line to dispose of a policeman. (Taishō was not a happy time for policemen. In the wartime and postwar inflation, police wages rose only a third as much as average wages.)

  The Taishō celebrity was of a different sort, positive in her attainments, and sufficiently prominent, as no Meiji woman had been, to be called a symbol of her day. Matsui Sumako was vibrantly symbolic, and she came to the kind of sad end best loved in Japan and best suited for immortality. A country girl born in 1886, she arrived in Tokyo at the turn of the century, worked as a seamstress, was married and divorced, and entered the Bungei Kyōkai or Literary Society, a dramatic group founded in 1905 by, among others, Tsubouchi Shōyō. Shōyō was a man of many parts, a pioneer in the new novel and drama. (It was probably a production of Hamlet by the Literary Society that so puzzled Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō.) Sumako had her first great success in 1911, as Ibsen’s Nora. The Literary Society was disbanded in 1913, largely because Shōyō disapproved of a flamboyant affair Sumako was having with Shimamura Hōgetsu, his favorite disciple and an eminent theorist in the new movement. Hōgetsu and Sumako organized their own troupe, the Geijutsuza (Art Theater) that same year. Her greatest success was in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. “Katyusha’s Song” from that production, her song, so to speak, is held by historians of the subject to mark the beginning of modern Japanese popular music. It was popular all through the Japanese empire, and, we are told, in North China as well.

  Hōgetsu died a sudden and solitary death in the influenza epidemic of 1918. On January 15, 1919, after a performance in Hibiya, Sumako returned to the Ushigome theater which the two of them had struggled to build and where, in one of the back rooms, he had died, and there hanged herself.

  She was a willful woman, who seems to have caused endless trouble in both troupes, and she was also passionate and courageous, representative of the new, liberated womanhood. Taishō had other representatives of the type. The soprano Miura Tamaki, for instance, was a member of Rossi’s company at the Imperial Theater and the first Japanese to perform Madame Butterfly abroad; she came into prominence for a shocking practice, riding a bicycle to music lessons at Ueno. But Sumako was first among the new women. She could not have existed in Meiji. The old ways were still too strong in Meiji for women to be among the examples that defined it.

  In the Taishō Period the popular entertainments went resolutely international. It may be that similar resolve would have come to nothing in Meiji, because only with the advent of movies were international celebrities placed in front of everyone. There could have been no Meiji equivalent of the Chaplin caramels that were vastly popular before the earthquake, and made huge amounts of money for the Meiji Confectionary Company. A song from just before the earthquake has the shareotoko, the dapper youth, accoutered in a blue shirt, a green tie, bell bottoms, a bowler hat, and roido spectacles. Roido seems to be a transliteration of “Lloyd,” from the horn-rimmed spectacles worn by Harold Lloyd. A less pleasing theory derives it from the last syllable of “celluloid.” Most probably it is bo
th, for the Japanese have always loved a pun. Lloyd and Chaplin were as well known to the populace of Taishō Tokyo as to the populace of any place on earth. Perhaps the nearest Meiji equivalent was Spencer the balloon man. Perhaps, again, it was General Grant.

  With Chaplin and Lloyd in everyone’s movie theater, visits of prominent foreigners may not have been quite the festivals they were in Meiji; or it may be that the city and the land, ever more modern, were more resistant to such excitement; or that the excitement was there, but in a less obvious form. In any case, eminent visitors in Taishō tended more towards the intellectual and the artistic than had General and Mrs. Grant.

  Pavlova, Schumann-Heinck, and Prokofiev were at the head of the stream of performers who met with acclaim and good fees in Tokyo. Then there were Margaret Sanger and Einstein, whose visits were not affairs of state but caused great stirs all the same. After the visit of the former, which occurred in 1920, a local counterpart known as the “Margaret Sanger of Japan” appeared, handing out devices. Einstein’s modest, somewhat comical warmth greatly affected the Japanese. He liked them too. He said that they were pleasanter people than Americans. He came to Japan the year before the earthquake and spent two months on a lecture tour. No one seems to have been called “the Einstein of Japan.” Perhaps that was the greatest mark of respect the Japanese could have accorded him.

  Frank Lloyd Wright was probably the most famous foreigner to come on business in the narrow sense of the term. His Imperial Hotel, the second one, under construction from 1915 to 1923, was formally opened in 1922 and finished just in time for the earthquake, which it survived so famously.

  Wright had a wide variety of troubles in the building, and left Japan after the formal opening without staying to view the completed structure. There seems to have been resentment at the presence of a foreign architect, and in this one sees a contrast between Taishō and the golden Meiji days of Conder. There was labor trouble, one more new Taishō institution, and trouble with the underworld, which had strong roots in the building trades. The old Imperial was demolished by fire on the eve of the opening of the new. Wright’s original backers found in the fire their pretext for withdrawing. Their real reason was financial: the enterprise was running several times over the original budget.

  The result of all the trouble was worth it. The old imperial (as it would be called in the last years before its destruction in 1968, for by then yet a third—and now likewise departed—Imperial Hotel had been put up) was a fine building. It gave repose in the noisy heart of the city. Its famous performance in the earthquake did not, however, demonstrate that Wright’s principle of floating piles on mud was superior to that of driving them through to bedrock. The old Imperial settled badly, while more traditional buildings in the Low City, such as the Bank of Japan, did not. Some of the corridors came to have a wavy, rubbery look about them. Perhaps it had to go, but its departure, occasioned less by the unevenness of the floors and corridors than by the implacable urge to put valuable land to more intensive use, was the greatest loss that postwar Tokyo has had to endure. The facade may be viewed in Meiji Village near Nagoya (despite the fact that it is not Meiji but Taishō). For those who know what once lay beyond that façade, it is less comforting than saddening.

  The Sanger and Einstein visits were events of national moment, even though they may not have touched off quite the surge of fervor that met the Grants. The visits of Charles Beard, the American historian, were more specifically Tokyo affairs. There was one before the earthquake and one after. Beard was received by the most eminent statesmen and financiers in the land, but Tokyo was the reason for the visits. Immediately upon assuming office, Gotō Shimpei, that famous mayor whose sweeping plans for the city were known as “the big kerchief,” assigned his son-in-law, resident in New York, the task of luring Beard, who would surely contribute greatly to the contents of the kerchief. Beard studied the city for six months just before the earthquake and wrote a report on the city administration that is still widely read. Many of his recommendations could have been adopted in the aftermath of the earthquake, and few were.

  He made practical suggestions and some that were not so practical. He urged the installation of electric meters, because the system of charging by the number of bulbs was wasteful. He also argued for simplified administration and local autonomy. He wanted a single government for greater Tokyo—for the prefecture—a system that was not adopted until 1943. Here he may be taxed with inconsistency, since the reason for the dual structure, a prefectural office and a city office, was that it permitted a measure of local autonomy.

  He admired the metropolitan bureaucracy but lamented the absence of a popular base and of control over its own finances. Though Beard is often credited with inventing the notion of Tokyo as a cluster of villages, it seems to have been almost commonplace. We have seen that John Russell Young, in attendance upon General Grant, regarded the city in that light almost a half-century before. The center of Tokyo enjoyed a certain preeminence, Beard said, because it was the place from which the nation was governed, but the surrounding towns were more considerable than in any other metropolitan complex of his acquaintance. He concluded that this state of affairs should be remedied by pumping capital into the central district. Today the vogue among planners is all for decentralization.

  The report continues to be admired, probably because it is Beard’s; but it is a chilly document, not as alive to the humanity and the variety of the city as it might be.

  The neologisms of Taishō often have a High City, bourgeois sound to them, and so inform us that the Low City, which had slipped into a secondary position by the end of Meiji, was slipping ever further. Some of the new words are surprising. That English words should have supplanted native ones for the most intimate and complex of personal relationships seems strange indeed. It was in Taishō that “mama” and “papa” came into currency among the bourgeois and intellectual types of the High City. Now they are next to universal. The explanation may be that they are easier to use than the native words, which introduce delicate honorific problems, and because of their complexity had always been unstable. What the High City chose to do in such matters, in any event, the Low City tended to follow. Cultural hegemony had passed from the Low City.

  On the eve of the earthquake the sexes may have been more clearly differentiated from each other than on the eve of the Restoration. Most of the men among the Ginza crowds wore Western dress and most of the women Japanese. Even working women tended to favor Japanese dress, although nurses were pioneers in dressing Western. Photographs of telephone exchanges look very quaint, with the operators in kimono, their hair swept up in the traditional styles. (Why a telephone operator in kimono should seem quainter than one in Western dress is not easy to explain. The universal Japanese notion that Japanese dress is impractical, difficult to maintain and given to falling to pieces, may be part of the explanation.) The middy blouse, to become universal for girl students, first appeared in Taishō. So did sewing schools. Girls had learned the simple old ways of sewing from their mothers. Bathing dress became big business in Taishō.

  The switchboard, Tokyo Central Telephone Exchange

  If the sexes were clearly differentiated by dress, their hair styles tended to merge. Women took more easily to Western coiffure than to Western dress. Long hair became the mark of the “modern boy” and short hair that of his female companion. Hairdressers in the traditional styles belonged to a dying trade. They had a place to go if they wished, however, because wigmakers prospered; there continued to be occasions of a ceremonial kind when the old styles were appropriate. Few women, in that day of short hair, had an adequate supply.

  The “all-back” style for men, with the hair combed straight back from the forehead and not parted, became popular among the young because an American stunt pilot, Taishō successor to Spencer, affected it. For women there was something very new, the “ear-hiding” style. Ears and napes of necks had been
left exposed by the old styles, and were thought erotic. Now, irony of the new day of liberation, they disappeared. The shampoo style of the Meiji geisha had sometimes obscured these points, but the “eaves” coiffure, in the Western style, had not (see page 104). Eye shadow and the hairnet also became stylish.

  Fashion, in the chic sense of the term, was created in Taishō by the agency that always creates it, advertising. There had been fads and vogues in Edo, often induced by Kabuki actors, but styles of dress changed slowly until advertising took over. Advertising arranged that dress be increasingly loud and polychrome in the years before the earthquake.

  Western sweets were in ever greater vogue, especially the Chaplin caramel. Chocolate was a luxury. The Taishō emperor bought some jelly beans at the Taishō Exposition. There was a soda fountain in Ginza just before the earthquake, though in this respect Tokyo seems to have been behind Yokohama. A measure of modernization has been the advance of dairy products upon this nonpastoral society. Meiji had ice cream and Taishō had “milk parlors.” Butter and cheese were slower to take hold. The intelligentsia of Taishō, they who made Taishō democracy, gathered in milk parlors to engage in rarefied conversation and read the official gazette over milk toast and waffles.

  From late Meiji into Taishō there was a great increase in university students, and in ideology. The Marx boy and Marx girl made their appearance in early Taishō, somewhat in advance of the words for (if not the fact of) “modern boy” and “modern girl.” Students have always delighted in larding their speech with foreign expressions. Some of the Taishō neologisms have stayed with us, such as rumpen, from “lumpen-proletariat,” signifying a vagrant, and saboru, “sabotage” converted into a Japanese verb. The latter seems to have been invented during the Kawasaki Shipyards strike of 1919. It has come in more recent years to signify cutting class, or staying away from work for no good reason.