Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Barracks begin to go up in Hongō Ward after the earthquake

  More than ashes had to be cleared away. The tallest building in the city, the Asakusa “Twelve Storys,” broke in two, at the eighth story, during the earthquake. The novelist Kawabata Yasunari was off for a look at Asakusa a scant two hours afterward. He was less impressed with the destruction than with the refugees, especially the courtesans and geisha who poured in from the north, “like a disordered field of flowers.” The great Yoshiwara quarter, to the north of Asakusa, was completely destroyed and several hundred of its women were incinerated, but the fires stopped just short of Asakusa proper, where Kawabata wandered in his field of flowers.

  He did describe the final disappearance, the following year, of the Twelve Storys. It seems to have been a rather festive occasion. More properly the Cloud Scraper, the Twelve Storys was a pleasure and retailing center, a somewhat ungainly brick tower completed in 1890. Army demolition squads completed the destruction.

  A character in Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenaidan) published at irregular intervals between 1929 and 1935, is speaking:

  “All around us and as far as we could see were burned wastes. A few shacks had gone up here and there, but nothing blocked the view of the park from the school roof. The elevated portion of the roof was crowded with spectators. We must have waited an hour or so. There was an explosion and a cascade of bricks. The wall at one side had not fallen. It was like a thin sword. Another explosion and the sword fell. The crowds on the school roof cheered, and then how we all did laugh! As the sword collapsed a black mass of people raced up the mountain of rubble.”

  Individual enterprise was so swift and forceful that some of it got in the way of larger plans. Charles Beard, the American historian, was also swift and forceful, generous with his advice. A telegram from him crossed with one from Gotō Shimpei, the home minister, now in charge of reconstruction. Mayor of Tokyo until shortly before the earthquake, Goto had once before asked Beard’s advice. He was known as “the mayor with the big kerchief,” which might be rendered as “the mayor with all the plans.” At his invitation, Beard studied the city administration for six months in 1922 and 1923 and submitted a report early in 1923. Now Gotō summoned him back. He came, and the telegram, a stern one, preceded him. Sentimentality about the old must not be allowed to interfere in any way with plans for the new: no new buildings were to be allowed until a new street plan had been drawn up. But of course barracks were already appearing at a rate of close to ten thousand per week, if that police report was accurate.

  The earthquake came at a time of political disarray. The admiral who had become prime minister in the summer of 1922 died late in August 1923. It was the age of what historians call “Taishō democracy,” a somewhat liberal age between the authoritarianism of Meiji and that of the thirties and early forties. Political parties were for the first time experiencing the delights of power, and they were much given to squabbling. A successor cabinet was not easily arranged. On September 2, while the city still burned, a cabinet headed by another admiral took office. It lasted only until early 1924, but under it, and especially Gotō, the national government assumed the lead in the rebuilding. It would probably have done so even without the services of Gotō, since the city did not have the money.

  Gotō’s original plan covered the whole city, including the relatively undamaged High City, and almost every lesser category imaginable streets, parks, rivers, canals, transportation. A grand arterial highway some two hundred yards wide was to run north and south through the city proper from beyond the city limits at either end, passing just to the east of Ginza and the main part of Nihombashi. For a politician, Gotō was curiously unrealistic. The budget was scaled down from several billion yen to about a half billion for Tokyo, and an additional amount for the still more grievously injured Yokohama. The main emphasis in the more modest plans was upon getting roofs over people’s heads and widening streets. The width of Gotō’s grand avenue was reduced to a little over half, and its length greatly reduced as well. Known as Shōwa Avenue from the era designation for the reign just recently ended, it runs past Ginza and Nihombashi and on to Ueno in Shitaya Ward.

  Less than the half billion yen was finally approved. The new Reconstruction Agency was not of a single mind. Some thought that matters of little immediate concern were included and that the requisitioning of land for the widened streets would be a great bother. One of the two major political parties agreed. Why, it asked loudly, should so small a part of the country make demands upon the whole country? Widened streets and some new parks remained of Gotō’s dreams. The street pattern was similar to that of Edo.

  The rebuilding of the city may seem like a case study in lost opportunities. It would not do, however, to suggest that nothing at all was accomplished. The city was rebuilt, after a nondescript fashion, and it was to an extent redesigned. Nor would it do to leave the impression that the city did nothing at all for itself. The national government took responsibility for main thoroughfares, new and widened, and the city for lesser streets. In the end almost a quarter of a million residences were moved. The proportion of streets to total area was much higher after the earthquake than before. Three big new parks were financed by the national government, all in the Low City, near or along the Sumida. The city built more than fifty small parks, many of them by waterways now gone, most of them near schools. Motomachi Park, in what was then Hongō Ward, near Ochanomizu Station, is perhaps the only one of the small parks to survive in its original form. Opened in 1930, it is a charming Art Deco composition, with something in it of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel as well. The erection of a memorial hall on the site east of the river where the largest loss of life occurred was the mayor’s idea. It took seven years to complete, but already by the first anniversary of the quake it was receiving pilgrims to its mass graves.

  An anniversary service at the Earthquake Memorial Hall east of the Sumida, site of the largest loss of life in the fires following the earthquake

  One of Kawabata’s short-short stories, which he called “palm-of-thehand stories,” is set on the first anniversary of the earthquake. A woman whose whole family died in the earthquake has become the companion of a clever and skillful Asakusa beggar. They go off to the memorial site. The man removes one of his shoes, and tells the woman that her questions about this eccentric behavior will soon answer themselves. He uses the bare foot to pick up coins that have been tossed at but missed the offertory box, and puts them in the shoe. A royal emissary arrives. So do the home minister and the mayor. All of them read messages at the altar. There are wreaths from ambassadors. “At two minutes before noon all vehicles in the city stopped for one minute. The whole city prayed in silence.”

  The novelist Nagai Kafū tells in his diary how it was on that first anniversary, a day of aprehension for the superstitious. “The citizenry was in terror. Banks locked their doors, greengrocers and fishmongers took a holiday. The weather was good, with a fresh autumn wind.”

  The climax to Kafū’s The Woman in the Rented Room, written in 1927, also occurs on September 1, 1924. “It was already dark, but the back alleys were ridiculously silent. The Yotsuya geisha quarter was, on the surface at least, taking a holiday. That was not all: even on the main trolley street there was none of the usual bustle of night stalls and shops. The trumpet from the grounds of the Military Academy, beyond Tsunokami Hill, seemed very near.” The woman of the title, through whom we observe the silence of this dread anniversary, is a kept woman, and the fact that she does not expect her patron to come calling this night of all nights causes him, after a sequence of almost ludicrous mishaps, to discard her.

  The origins of the panic of 1927 may be traced directly to the earthquake. The causal relationship between the two was not inevitable, but the behavior of the government gave it the look of inevitability. The Yamamoto cabinet, which took office on September 2, declared a limited
debt moratorium. Under certain conditions and in certain areas payment could be deferred. In effect, the Bank of Japan was required to guarantee losses by commercial banks, and its own losses were guaranteed by the government up to a specified limit. The time limit for these arrangements was extended repeatedly. Because the value of uncollected and uncollectable instruments far exceeded the official guarantee, the Bank of Japan was affected, and through it the commercial banks.

  In March 1927 the finance minister did a peculiar thing. He said in the Diet that the Watanabe Bank, an important commercial bank, would be forced to close its doors in a few hours. This was untrue. The Watanabe Bank was in trouble, but not such critical and immediate trouble. He seems to have said it to divert attention from a bank still more heavily burdened with bad instruments. There was a run, and the Watanabe Bank was forced to suspend payments. So, after a time, was the second bank, the Bank of Taiwan, in the interests of which the minister had spoken his untruth, and half the capital of which came from public funds. Efforts to bail it out were declared unconstitutional by the Privy Council. Other banks failed, including one of the five largest in the land. It was the worst financial panic in the history of modern Japan, and its remote origins were in the earthquake. The cabinet resigned, to be succeeded by that of Tanaka Giichi, an army man and an early advocate of assertive policies on the continent. So the political and economic effects of the earthquake reached far. The politicians who said that the damage to the capital was of little concern to them and the nation were wrong.

  Through a moratorium, actions by the Bank of Japan, and a bit of trickery, the crisis presently came under control. The banks that reopened did so with ostentatious piles of cash by their teller windows. Much of the money was printed only on one side, for there had not been time to print both sides.

  It is possible—though to state it as fact we must put complete credence in the professed motives of the culprit—that the most sensational crime of the post-earthquake years was also caused by the earthquake. On December 27, 1923, the regent, after 1926 the emperor, was on his way to the opening of a Diet session. As he passed Toranomon, “Tiger Gate,” a young man pushed his way out of the crowd and fired point-blank at the regent, who escaped injury. This attempted assassination is known as the Tiger Gate Incident, from the site of a castle gate on the outer moat. (Both gate and moat are long gone.)

  The young man was from a good provincial family, the son of a Diet member. He later said that he had to do what he did, and that he did it out of anger at the treatment of laborers and Koreans after the earthquake.

  However matters were with laborers, Koreans were very badly treated indeed: they were massacred, as many as two thousand of them.

  The would-be assassin was pummeled by the crowds and arrested. Not quite a year later, in November 1924, he was hanged at Ichigaya Prison, and that evening given a pauper’s burial east of the Sumida, in the northeastern suburbs. The river embankment was very pretty, it is said, with police lanterns.

  Only after the sentence was handed down did the defendant break his silence. This he did with two shouted words encouraging revolution. So the theory that he might have avoided execution had he been less vehemently revolutionary is not supportable. The court was not prepared to be merciful to someone who had done such a thing.

  Nagai Kafū, a quirkish man, had his own thoughts in the matter, and set them down in his diary.

  November 16. Sunday. Sunny. Big play given in all the newspapers to the execution of Namba Daisuke. Daisuke is the student who was arrested after trying to shoot the regent at Toranomon last year. Some denounce the act as the vilest treason, but I do not think it anything so very astonishing or reprehensible. The assassination of monarchs is no rarity in the West. Everything about modern Japanese life is superficial imitation of the West. Daisuke’s behavior is but another instance of imitation. What is there to choose between him and a Westernized woman out dancing?

  It is interesting to note, by way of comparison, what happened to earlier and later would-be assassins. In 1891 a policeman in the town of Otsu, just east of Kyoto, slashed the czarevitch of Russia with a sword. The Otsu trial was swifter than the Tiger Gate one, but the assailant was sentenced to life imprisonment rather than death. Though the prosecution asked the death penalty, the judge allowed only a charge of simple assault, holding that this attack on royalty was no different from an attack on anyone else. The fact that extraterritoriality was still in effect may have influenced the decision. The judge wished to demonstrate the independence of the courts from political pressures, and therefore the superfluity of extraterritorial consular courts. The fact remains that the Tiger Gate court did not follow the Otsu precedent.

  On January 8, 1932, the emperor (the 1923 regent) was the victim of another attack. A Korean threw a hand grenade at his cavalcade as he was returning from a military parade. No one was injured, though one of the automobiles, not the emperor’s, was damaged. The incident bears the name of another of the old palace gates, the Sakurada or Cherry Orchard Gate. The Tiger Gate precedent, and not the Otsu one, was followed: the assailant was put to death. The conclusion seems hard to escape that not all royalty is equally royal. The cabinet resigned after the 1923 incident, and attempted to resign after the 1932 one. It was persuaded to stay on in the latter instance because of the outbreak of hostilities in Manchuria.

  The Tiger Gate Incident had an effect on the culture of the nation that could not have been foreseen. The chief of the Tokyo police was dismissed, as was the assistant chief in charge of the patrolling forces.The latter was Shōriki Matsutarō, who set forth on a new career that brought him fame and power, in the media and in entertainment. He became president of the Yomiuri Shimbun in February 1924. It was a time when aggressive Osaka journalism seemed to be having everything its way. Two Osaka newspapers, the Asahi and the Mainichi, each passed a million in nationwide circulation the year after the earthquake. The largest Tokyo newspaper had a third of a million. The two Osaka papers ganged up on it, undermining it so successfully that the Yomiuri took it over. The Osakans next turned their energies on another distinguished Tokyo newspaper, and the Nichinichi, the Tokyo edition of the Mainichi (both names mean “daily”), took that one over.

  Shoriki went quickly to work. He sought to give the Yomiuri a common touch, without the intellectual tendencies of the Osaka newspapers. His Yomiuri had the first women’s page and the first advice-to-thetroubled column. He also did wonders with sports, giving the Yomiuri a professional baseball team which the whole nation loves. He made it into the largest paper in the city. Since the war it has become the largest in the land.

  So all manner of remarkable sequences of events (Shōriki was also to become a pioneer in commercial television) are traceable to the earthquake, if we may assume that the Tiger Gate Incident is traceable to it. But to return to the immediate aftermath. The governor of Yamaguchi Prefecture, whence the assailant came, docked his own pay for two months. The governor of Kyoto Prefecture, where the man had lingered on his way to Tokyo, was reprimanded. The man’s father resigned from the Diet and withdrew into the stoic seclusion of the dishonored samurai. The village in which he had been born forwent all New Year festivities by way of atonement. The principal of his elementary school—he had graduated a decade earlier—resigned.

  The trail of punishment and contrition following the Otsu Incident is altogether less exaggerated. The home minister resigned, and the governor and police chief of Shiga Prefecture, of which Otsu is the capital, were dismissed: and that was that. All of these people may in some measure be held responsible, whereas it is hard to think the governor of Kyoto and the rural school principal responsible for what happened at Tiger Gate.

  * * *

  The Taishō period, the reign of the Taishō emperor, stands almost exactly midway through the first Tokyo century, 1868 to 1968. The whole of the Meiji reign and the portion of the Shōwa reign that falls within the c
entury are of almost equal length. Taishō stands at midpoint in another sense. The city has not ceased changing since the end of Taishō, and the early years of Shōwa were to bring a disaster that almost destroyed it once again. Taishō may have been the era when change was fastest. There is no device for precise measurement of such phenomena as cultural change. Yet one has a “sense” that it must be so. The last year of Taishō must have seemed more different from the first than 1912 did from 1897, or 1925 from 1940. The things of late Taishō and early Shōwa, the institutions and the modes of behavior, have a familiar look about them that those of the Russo-Japanese War do not. Even “Taishō democracy,” which surrendered so meekly to the reaction of the thirties, seems familiar. It has come again. We have similar extravagances today. Only a prophet can say whether or not indignant, righteous men with guns will try one of these days to work a similar reaction.

  The Taishō emperor

  The Taishō emperor was mentally incapacitated—from how far back in his not very long life (he was born in 1879) we do not know. His birth was difficult and he was given up for dead. So it may be that he was retarded from infancy. He had already withdrawn from public life before the future Shōwa emperor became regent, late in 1920 and some months after his twentieth birthday. There was little stir over the Taishō emperor’s death, certainly very little compared with that which accompanied his father’s last illness. The announcement that he had pneumonia came early in December 1926. He was taken to the royal villa at Hayama, on Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo. (The villa disappeared, a victim of arson, in 1971.)