23.
Yodobashi
6.
Azabu
24.
Nakano
7.
Akasaka
25.
Suginami
8.
Yotsuya
26.
Toshima
9.
Ushigome
27.
Itabashi
10.
Koishikawa
28.
Ōji
11.
Hongō
29.
Takinokawa
12.
Shitaya
30.
Arakawa
13.
Asakusa
31.
Adachi
14.
Hongō
32.
Mukojima
15.
Fukagawa
33.
Jō tō
16.
Shinagawa
34.
Katsushika
17.
Ebara
35.
Edogawa
18.
Ōmori
Tokyo Prefecture as it has been since 1947. Certain offshore islands, not shown here, are also part of the prefecture. The four surrounding prefectures, reading clockwise from the west, are Yamanashi, Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa. Nos. 3 through 25 are the twenty-three wards, as follows.
3.
Chiyoda
15.
Shibuya
4.
Chūō
16.
Suginami
5.
Minato
17.
Nakano
6.
Shinjuku
18.
Toshima
7.
Bunkyō
19.
Nerima
8.
Taitō
20.
Itabashi
9.
Sumida
21.
Kita
10.
Kōtō
22.
Arakawa
11.
Shinagawa
23.
Adachi
12.
Ōta
24.
Katsushika
13.
Meguro
25.
Edogawa
14.
Setagaya
The remaining portions are what was after 1932 the “county part” of the prefecture. The unnumbered portion at the extreme west is all that remains of West Tama County. Everything else is now incorporated cities, except for No. 41, which is two incorporated towns. No. 44 is Hachiōji, the oldest incorporated city in the county part. The Taisho and Shōwa emperors are buried in the western part of Hachiōji. Mitaka, of the celebrated train wreck, is No. 26. Higashimurayama, wherein reposes the reservoir that has replaced the one at the Shinjuku Westmouth, is the southern of the two Nos. 35. Tachikawa of the big (the newspapers said notorious) American air base is the eastern of the two Nos. 39.
Chapter 7
THE DAYS AFTER
In a few years the governor of Tokyo, the council, and the bureaucracy will move their offices out beyond the western limits of the old city.
Despite opposition from the eastern wards, the decision was made in 1985. Unless there are delays in building the somewhat grandiose new offices, the move will take place in 1991. The governor will then be nearer the population center of his constituency than he is now. However one may regret the departure from the old city, the reasons for the move are good ones.
The city has moved westward in the century and twenty years since it became Tokyo. So the governor recognizes the facts, and will go where the people who elect him have gone. American city halls tend to stay put. The New York city hall has not moved north or east with the spread of population, and the Philadelphia city hall has remained where William Penn put it. Perhaps the Japanese are more realistic and flexible in these matters.
Yet one does have regrets, for the move and for the shift that has made it seem realistic. Edo, the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns, became Tokyo in 1868, after the overthrow of the shogunate. The Low City, mostly reclaimed flatlands, was where the lesser orders lived, the merchants and artisans or workmen. It was the crowded part of the city, and the lively part. The hilly High City, to the west of the castle, was sparsely populated. A line north and south from the old magistracies (there were two of them) would have had the larger part of the population east of it, and the centers of commerce and culture as well. The aristocracy in the great castle complex and the High City had money and taste, but it was not imaginative or inventive. It was in the Low City that the things which interest us a century and a half and two centuries later were made and done.
By “aristocracy” is here meant the military class, the court and its courtiers having stayed in Kyoto. The military class was on the whole conservative. Its tastes and the tastes deemed appropriate to it were antiquarian and academic. What was new and interesting in Edo, the cultural center of the land under the last six or seven Tokugawa shoguns, was mercantile. The daimyo patronized Nō drama and the tea ceremony. The wealthy merchant patronized Kabuki and the entertainments, often of very high quality, provided by the geisha, whether in the licensed pleasure quarters or the less strictly regulated “private” quarters. Nō and the tea ceremony were elegant and elevated pursuits, but during the Tokugawa Period they became highly ritualized and formalized. If they changed, it was almost imperceptibly. Kabuki changed and grew, and so did the music and dance of the pleasure quarters. It has become common in our day to think of Kabuki, like Nō, as a crystallization of unearthly beauty, but it can be earthy, erotic, and ribald. More important, new and good things were constantly being added to it, and to the art of the geisha, as they were not to Nō and the tea c
eremony. The former were living and growing, the particular treasures of the Low City.
In Meiji the governance of Tokyo Prefecture moved slightly westward, to Marunouchi. Meiji is the era designation for the first reign after the upheaval of 1867-68. The Meiji emperor died in 1912, and the era name changed to Taishō. The prefectural government, along with the city government when there has been one, as there has not been since 1943, has been in Marunouchi ever since. And now it will move much further west, to a part of Shinjuku that was not brought within the city limits until 1932.
Even if the governor and government were not moving, we would have to admit the fact, melancholy for some of us, that the Low City has fallen far behind. It was the cultural center of Edo, and the new prefectural offices will lie beyond the old High City, beyond even the first of the old post stations on the highway to the mountain province of Kai. Although already declining, the Low City was still important enough in Meiji that a cultural history of Meiji Tokyo could not leave it out.
The simplest and the best explanation for the decline of the Low City is economic. Money departed. Kabuki stayed behind and so did the best geisha, but rich merchants, such as the Mitsui, moved to the High City when the class structure of Tokugawa disappeared. The chief sources of patronage came to be the entrepreneurial and bureaucratic classes of the High City. In 1923 mansions of the wealthy and aristocratic stood along the Sumida, central to the arts and pleasures of the old Low City. Most of them then disappeared. The new Sumida Park and a brewery came to occupy the tract on the east bank of the Sumida where the greatest of them, the river villa of the Mito Tokugawa family, had stood.
Except for the regions immediately east of the outer moat, now filled in, not many would notice if the Low City were to disappear completely from a postwar history. Only the omission of Ginza, just east of the old castle complex, would be certain to bring complaints. Ginza is geographically in the Low City, since it lies east of the hills that begin in the palace (once the castle) grounds, but it belongs to the whole city. If the city, sprawling and decentralized, has a center today, it is probably Ginza and districts nearby.
Amusing things were still going on in the Low City during the interwar period, but they fall in the realm of popular culture, amusing enough for an evening, but ephemeral, not likely to be of much interest to anyone except very specialized antiquarians two centuries from now. So, even without insisting upon them, the story of Tokyo since 1923 must implicitly be about the decline of the Low City and the rise of the High City.
The Low City did almost completely disappear for a time late in the Taishō reign, which ended on Christmas Day 1926. Fires raged through it for two days following high noon of September 1, 1923, and left almost nothing behind save modern buildings along the western fringes. The fires followed upon the great Kantō earthquake, which struck at a minute and a few seconds before noon on September 1. The great shift to the High City was already in process and would have occurred even without the disaster, but the disaster sped it along. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō was born in Nihombashi, the heart of mercantile Edo, between the old castle complex and the Sumida. He remarked in 1934 that he could no longer think of Nihombashi, or indeed Tokyo, as home. The place where he had spent the most impressionable years of his boyhood now lay under asphalt, in the middle of a thoroughfare cut through after the earthquake. It is an extreme instance, but symbolic of what happened to the whole Low City. The sites were there, but denuded, stripped of history and culture.
Old things would probably, most of them, have vanished in any event. Except for grand public structures like temples, buildings were not meant to last long and did not last long. But they would not have gone so quickly. Crowded and flimsily built, the Low City could not be protected against the fires that broke out immediately after the earthquake. The High City fared better. It too was largely built of wood, but broken topography and irregular building patterns reduced the damage.
The financial, entrepreneurial, and merchandising center of the city—Nihombashi, Ginza, and Marunouchi—also fared better. The offices of governor and mayor, in Marunouchi, came through so solidly that no one within was immediately aware of what had happened. Lights swayed, but it was the news that automobiles were unable to get through to the east that brought the first sense of disaster. Presently, people on their way to the safety of the palace plaza were dying of burns and having babies under the mayor’s windows.
Marunouchi was less severely damaged than Nihombashi, and so the managers and entrepreneurs started moving westward, even as the city did. Marunouchi derives its name from the fact that the district lay within the outer revetments and moat of the castle. Developed in Meiji by the Mitsubishi enterprises, which bought it from the government, Marunouchi now emerged clearly dominant over Nihombashi, where the merchant class of Edo had been most affluent and powerful. The stock exchange and the Bank of Japan stayed in Nihombashi, but Marunouchi more and more became the right address for the big managers.
The Yamanote loop line of the National Railways, joining the center of the city with transfer points to the western suburbs, was finally finished in 1925. The last link joined Tokyo Central Station with Ueno, the point of departure for the north. Marunouchi thus became the genkan, the “front door,” for the whole nation. The front door of the station faced Marunouchi and, from 1926, a broad avenue leading to the palace plaza. Nihombashi, on the east side of the station, did not even have a back door. The number of big companies with offices in Marunouchi doubled between 1922 and 1924. Almost three decades, since the completion of the first Mitsubishi brick building in 1894, had been required to reach the 1922 figure.
Nihombashi was also losing out to Ginza as a retail district. It had Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, the energetic Meiji pioneers in the new, Western kind of retailing, but department stores in quick succession established main or branch stores in Ginza. Mitsukoshi was among them. As the lesser parts of the Low City, save only Ginza, were left further and further behind by the High City, so was proud—some might have said, arrogant—Nihombashi.
There was talk of more shattering change, spiritual and man-made this time—the physical disaster could scarcely have been more complete. Kyoto was still officially the capital of the land in 1867, when the shogunate collapsed. There was talk of having the capital somewhere other than Edo, seat of the shoguns and the actual seat of power. It was stilled when the emperor took up residence in Edo, and not revived until 1923.
With the city so grievously damaged, might it not be better off without the national bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy without the snarls and tangles of the great city? It should be easy to find a new capital less prone to disasters. Tokyo lies in earthquake country. Another flattening earthquake was bound to come. It has not come in the more than sixty years since the last one, but the assumption that it will come someday is universal.
Among nonseismic arguments for moving the capital was that Kyoto, or elsewhere in the Kansai, would be nearer the center of the Japanese empire, by which was meant Taiwan and Korea as well as the home islands. There even seems to have been talk in the armed forces—already feeling the spur of ambition—of moving the capital to the continent. Dispersal was suggested (and again today, when concentration in Tokyo has come to seem extreme and unhealthy, it is a popular subject). Kyoto had been all this while going on thinking of itself as the Western Capital. A measure of reality might be given to the claim. The government could be in both Kantō and Kansai.
On September 12, 1923, a royal proclamation said that Tokyo would remain the capital. This is the official translation: “Tokyo, the capital of the empire, has been looked upon by the people as the center of political and economic activities and the fountainhead of the cultural advancement of the nation. With the unforeseen visit of the catastrophe, the city has entirely lost its former prosperous contours but retains, nevertheless, its position as the national capital. The remedial work, therefore, oug
ht not to consist merely in the reparation of the quondam metropolis, but, in ample provisions for the future development of the city, completely to transform the avenues and streets.” The regent, the next emperor, took a drive through the burnt-over wastes of the Low City. (He was to do it again, as emperor, in 1945)
The city burned for some forty hours, and before the last embers were out reconstruction had already begun. It was used to and indeed rather proud of fires, known as “flowers of Edo,” and proud as well of the speed with which it recovered. The proper merchant insisted upon speed in these matters. If a shop had not resumed business within three days, common mercantile wisdom held, it had no future. Prepared for what must come sooner or later, merchants kept reserves of lumber east of the Sumida River. The lumberyards were very watery, and reserves of lumber had a chance of surviving the worst conflagration, as also did inventories in somewhat fireproof warehouses. Department stores quickly put up emergency markets. Ginza and Asakusa almost immediately had street stalls again, as they had them before. Already on September 3 there was a sign in the wastes of the central fish market, in Nihombashi, summoning such fish dealers as survived to discuss plans for reopening.
Completely burned out. But see:
The son of Edo has not lost his spirit.
So soon, these rows and rows of barracks,
And we can view the moon from our beds.
So went “The Reconstruction Song,” popular in the months after the earthquake.
Late in September a newspaper account based on a police report said that thirty thousand “barracks” had already gone up. Here and in “The Reconstruction Song” the English word is used, in the singular, to signify a building erected hastily on the site of a disaster. The new barracks were most numerous in Asakusa, Shitaya, and Honjo wards, the northern tier of the old Low City. The smell of new wood was everywhere, faces were black from clearing the ashes, though the wares offered for sale were skimpy.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 34