Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The Meiji Period had been all in favor of education, but Taishō was the time of kyōyo, a word which falls within the general meaning of education, but carries connotations of enrichment, self-fulfillment, and gracious living. It lends itself to such expressions (these are taken from dictionaries) as “enrich one’s education” and “enhance the level of one’s culture.” The modern intelligentsia had arrived.

  The Peace Exhibition held in Veno Park in mid-Taishō. Dignitaries included the Prince of Wales (right)

  There were all manner of new schools besides universities: driving schools, beauty schools, English-language schools, typing schools. The day of the office girl (now known as the O.L., for “office lady”) dawned in Meiji, with the telephone operator, the nurse, and the shop girl, and now its sun rose radiantly. There was a popular song which began “I’m a typist, I’m a typist,” and whose refrain was “Typist, typist,” this word in English. Girls first appeared as bus conductors in the years before the earthquake. Theirs was an almost exclusively feminine calling until, with the emergence of the “one-man” (in English) bus, in the last decade or so, it went into a precipitous decline.

  Proletarian education and “liberal” education may be dated to the first “labor school,” founded by Christians very early in the Taishō Period. From late Meiji the city had several himmingakkō, rendered by certain dictionaries as “pauper schools” and “ragged schools.” They were first administered by the city, then transferred to the wards. Their chief purpose was to provide classes for the children of indigents and transient laborers. The distribution of such schools at the end of Taishō gives interesting evidence of where the ragged dwelt: five were in the two wards east of the river, and the remaining six, on the other side of the river, were evenly divided between the High City and the Low. There was one in Azabu, among the richest of the fifteen wards; the High City has always accommodated extremes of affluence and penury.

  The tourist bus was of course a new Taishō institution. The standard route included old things and creations of Taishō as well—Tokyo Station, the Meiji Shrine, the house and graves of the Nogis. It may be that the last will make their way back to the list one day soon, for the suspicion of military immortals that prevailed after 1945 is fading. On the whole, the monuments of Taishō have been supplanted. The standard list today is made up largely of earlier and later wonders. Here too, Taishō has the look of a valley between two eminences.

  As at the end of Meiji, one might have remarked at the end of Taishō upon the remarkable tenacity of tradition. Taishō lists of annual observances are strongly traditional, though with a sprinkling of triumphal and patriotic observances from Meiji and after, and a sprinkling as well of Western events and practices, such as April Fool’s Day. The seasonal pattern of the flowers, grasses, birds, and insects is familiar.

  Certain places for having these natural pleasures have disappeared by late Taishō, new ones have appeared. Among the lost places and things are the chrysanthemum dolls in Hongō, visited by Sōseki’s Sanshirō, and the night cherries of the Yoshiwara, but there are still places for chrysanthemum dolls and an ample selection of places for cherries, Ueno and the Sumida embankment still first among them. Although with improved transportation and the spread of the city into open lands, spots for the appreciation of grasses and flowers are sometimes more distant on Taishō lists than on Meiji ones, most of them are still present. The Yanaka cemetery glows with fireflies on a warm, damp evening and the Sumida embankment is a chorus of singing autumn insects. It is striking, indeed, that so many natural pleasures of late Taishō lie near the heart of the city. The Sumida embankment appears with some frequency, though the favored spots of Edo have clearly fallen victim to blight. Insect voices, wasted moors, and the like are farther upstream.

  Among fairs and festivals on Taishō lists are many old ones, closely joined to the grasses and flowers, such as those in May at which one bought bugs, bells, and goldfish in preparation for the summer. Then-are new ones too, such as the opening of the university baseball season in September. Baseball was ever more popular.

  In those same years Sumō wrestling enjoyed a renaissance. Early Taishō was for Sumō, as for Kabuki, a quiet period, when many a voice lamented its demise. The great wrestlers of Meiji had withdrawn from active service. A half-dozen years into the new reign began the flowering. The Sumō stadium burned down in 1917, just as the bud was opening. Until a new stadium was finished in 1920, semiannual tournaments were held at the Yasukuni Shrine. There was another Sumō strike in 1923 (for an earlier one, see page 169). In 1926 professional wrestlers organized a Sumō Association, an incorporated foundation. This major event in Taishō democracy is held to mark the final emergence of the Sumō world from feudalism, but in the long history of the sport, it sounds rather like one of those new names that do little to change reality.

  In late Meiji and Taishō the city seemed to be growing so rapidly that its weight might bring it down. Waste disposal was among the urgent and interesting problems. There were public collection points for garbage.

  Some was burned and some devoted to filling the bay or fertilizing paddies east of the bay. The burning was al fresco, and the unremitting smell of burning garbage is a detail commonly remarked upon in memoirs from east of the river.

  Sewage was the real problem. The night-soil cart continued to be the chief agent of disposal. Because there was a distance beyond which cartage became impractical, the problem reached crisis proportions. From about the end of the First World War, houses near the center of the city could no longer sell their sewage, but had to pay someone to take it away. As the crisis mounted, tanks would be deliberately broken in order that the stuff might quietly slip away, or sewage was carried out and dumped during the night. Edo was no doubt a smelly city; but Tokyo as it passed its semicentennial must have been even worse.

  In 1921 the city finally began to assume limited responsibility for sanitation. Still, by the end of the Taishō Period, three years after the earthquake, the city was disposing of no more than a fifth of the total mass. Tokyo was by then much larger than Edo had been, but in certain respects it had not much changed from the Edo pattern. The Low City was necessarily more advanced than the High City in this public service, because most of the High City lay nearer to farmlands than did the heart of the Low City. The crisis was less acute there.

  In the lore of sewage disposal are numerous curious details. Farmers, in the days when they bought, were willing to pay more for sewage the higher the social level of the house. The upper-class product was richer in nutriment, apparently. So, apparently, was male excrement. In aristocratic mansions where the latrines were segregated by sex, male sewage was more highly valued than female. It seems that the female physique was more efficient.

  Edo had a system of aqueducts bringing water from the west. It was expanded in Meiji and Taishō. Even so, estimates of the number of persons still dependent on wells within the city run as high as a third of the total. Wells were often noisome and brackish, and so water vendors still went the rounds of the Low City.

  We hear more about the problem of traffic and transportation than that of garbage and sewage. Late in Meiji, Nagai Kafū used an overcrowded and badly organized trolley system for one of his most beautiful soliloquies (see pages 61-62). Matters were even worse in the years just before the earthquake. Kafū’s diary is quite splashed with mud. Tanizaki, having settled in the Kansai, looked sourly back on the Tokyo of “those years”:

  I doubt that in those years, the years of prosperity during and immediately after the World War, there was anyone even among the most ardent supporters of Tokyo who thought it a grand metropolis. The newspapers were unanimous in denouncing the chaotic transportation and the inadequate roads of “our Tokyo.” I believe it was the Advertiser which in an editorial inveighed against the gracelessness of the city. Our politicians are always talking about big things, social policy and labor problems
and the like, it said, but these are not what politics should be about. Politicians should be thinking rather of mud, and of laying streets through which an automobile can pass in safety on a rainy day. I remember the editorial because I was so completely in agreement. Foreigners and Japanese alike denounced our capital city as “not a city but a village, or a collection of villages”…. Twice on my way from Asakusa Bridge to Kaminari Gate I was jolted so violently from the cushion that my nose hit the roof of the cab…. And so, people will say, it might have been better to take a streetcar. That too could be a desperate struggle…. With brisk activity in the financial world, all manner of enterprises sprang up, and there was a rush from the provinces upon the big cities. Tokyo did not have time to accommodate the frantic increase in numbers and the swelling of the suburbs…. For the general populace there was no means of transport but the streetcar. Car after car would come by full and leave people waiting at stops. At rush hour the press was murderous. Hungry and tired, the office worker and the laborer, in a hurry to get home, would push their way aboard a car already hopelessly full, each one for himself, paying no attention to the attempts of the conductor to keep order… The ferocity in their eyes could be frightening….

  The crowds, a black mountain outside a streetcar, would push and shove and shout, and we could but silently lament the turmoil and how it brought out the worst in people….

  They put up with it because they were Japanese, I heard it said, but if a European or American city were subjected to such things for even a day there would be rioting…. Old Japan had been left behind and new Japan had not yet come.

  It is to be noted that the idea of the city as a cluster of villages is not credited to Beard but rather is treated as commonplace, and that, like Beard, Tanizaki remarks upon the quality in deprecatory terms.

  We are often told that “those years,” the years when Taishō democracy was coming to be, were a time of sybaritism, irresponsibility, and disenchantment. The characterization itself has about it a disenchanted look, as if the burden of modernization had become too much. Meanwhile, those who were to bring about the reaction of the thirties were waiting in indignation.

  Taishō was the day when such apparently definitive symbols as the Yumeji girl looked as if they themselves, and not merely their bonnets, had been made abroad. The ease with which Taishō democracy surrendered, however, tells us that tradition was strong and near the surface; and a cynicism not far from disenchantment had been affected by the son of Edo. Japan was catching up with the world in respects which had seemed desperately urgent to the people of early Meiji. So the eagerness of the chase had somewhat diminished. There is a Taishō look, but more recent decades seem to inform us that the modern boy and modern girl were not at all inclined to drop out of the race. The Taishō look was another Western element that had been studied well and mastered.

  Rain in the Low City. A woodcut by Komura Settai, 1915

  The song everyone was singing in 1923 was both new and old. It was called “The Boatman’s Song.” The music was by Nakayama Shimpei, who wrote Matsui Sumako’s song in Resurrection and is held to have founded modern popular music.

  I am dead grass on the river bank.

  You are dead grass on the bank as well.

  So went the refrain. It was thought to be very decadent, but the stylized self-commiseration would have been familiar and congenial to the child of Edo. Among the righteous and the indignant were those who held that it invited destruction, and got what it asked for on September 1, 1923.

  BOOK TWO

  TOKYO RISING

  The City Since the Great Earthquake

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  This book is a sequel to Low City, High City, which told of Tokyo between the Meiji Restoration of 1867 and 1868 and the great earthquake of 1923. Most people who vaguely remember the title of the earlier book seem to think that it is High City, Low City, probably because “high” comes before “low” in so many conventional locutions. The reversing of the two was intentional. The book is elegiac, its emphasis on the part of the city which was the cultural center of Edo, predecessor of Tokyo, and was ceasing to be any sort of center at all. Low City, High City makes no claim to be political or intellectual history, and little more to be literary or economic history. It might possibly be called social or cultural history. So might this one, although, with the growing ascendancy of the High City—the wealthy hilly districts—politics and intellectual matters are bound to figure more prominently. The ascendancy is now virtually complete. The Low City, the less affluent flatlands, offered something to talk about as late as the years between the two world wars. The center of popular culture was there, in Asakusa. Since the Second World War it has offered very little indeed. The words before the comma in the earlier title have been almost completely eclipsed by the words after.

  There was another reason for the emphasis on the Low City: a fondness for the place. It follows with a certain inevitability that when there is little to say about the place one is fondest of, things must be said of places of which one is less fond. Many interesting things have happened in the High City, certainly, and Tokyo, which for cultural purposes is now the High City, goes on being the city among them all in which one has the least excuse to be bored. Yet the effort has been continuous to keep grouchiness from creeping in at the ways in which the city has chosen to spend its money. If I have not been entirely successful, and if a certain grouchiness does creep in at, for instance, the internationally famous architects, I can only hope that it is balanced by affection for people like Enoken.

  Low City, High City could have ended with the end of the Taishō reign, three years and a few months after the earthquake. The earthquake was the end of so much more than was the end of the reign, however, that it prevailed. If it had not, then this book might have been, more neatly, about Tokyo in the recently ended Shōwa reign. That is what it is mostly about in any event. Nothing is said about the end of the Shōwa reign because it had not occurred when the manuscript was finished. All that seemed practical was to go back and put the reign in the past tense.

  The problem of what to call Tokyo has been a nagging one, since the city of Tokyo ceased to exist as a political and administrative entity in 1943. In that year the municipal government and the prefectural government were amalgamated. The prefecture may be divided broadly into the “ward part” and the “county part,” the twenty-three wards as they have been since 1947, and the rest of the prefecture, off to the west of the wards. In the chapters having to do with the postwar period, I have tried to use “prefecture” whenever a government agency is referred to and whenever precise distinctions seem called for. Sometimes “city” has been a convenience. When the word is used it may be taken as referring to the ward part of the prefecture.

  The annotation is like that for Low City, High City: minimal. The sources of direct quotations are given, and the notes contain little else. A disproportionate number refer to the writings of well-known authors, disproportionate in the sense that the passages cited are less conspicuous in the text than in the notes. It will be observed that notes become less frequent toward the end of the book. Fewer memorable things seem to be said about the city as time goes by. The well-known authors have died, chief among them Nagai Kafū, to whose memory Low City, High City was circumspectly dedicated, and as writers about Tokyo they have not had successors. The point is made in the book that Tokyo is not the subject for distinguished writing that it once was. The Japanese name order, with the family name first, is used throughout. Modern life, for all its complexities, does produce a simplification from time to time. One has been the tendency of writers not to have “elegant sobriquets.” This means that when a single element of a name is used it can be, as in the West, the family name. “Nagai Kafū” is the major exception. “Kafū” is a sobriquet. In accord with Japanese practice, it is used when the whole name is not. The Tokyo Archives have been very helpful in
the assembling of illustrations. So has the Asahi Shimbun, in particular Mrs. Notoya Ryōko, of the staff of the weekly magazine Asahi Hyakka Nihon no Rekishi (The Asahi Encyclopedia: Japanese History). Where no credit is given, illustrations are from postcards in my collection or photographs by Mr. Fukuda Hiroshi.

  1.

  Kōjimachi

  19.

  Kamata

  2.

  Kyōbashi

  20.

  Meguro

  3.

  Nihombashi

  21.

  Setagaya

  4.

  Kanda

  22.

  Shibuya

  5.

  Shiba