In his diary, Nagai Kafū indicated disapproval of the announcement.
December 14. Cloudy and cold. Toward evening it began to clear. I went in the evening to Ginza, which was noisy with hawkers of newspaper extras. I suppose they informed us that His Majesty’s death approaches. The detail with which newspapers, morning and evening, have reported the royal illness is extreme. They do not hesitate to tell us the state of his appetite and of his defecatory processes. This sort of reporting began with the death of the Meiji emperor. With the encouragement of the authorities, the newspapers told us that the emperor suffered from uremic poisoning, and that his august countenance had turned a muddy purple…. If my opinion were asked I would give it. I would say … that a national legend is thus destroyed. While he lives our sovereign is revered as a god, and to tell us that he has died a victim of uremic poisoning shatters the poetry…. Why must these facts about appetite and defecation be made public as the royal death approaches?
The emperor died very early on Christmas morning, and so the first year of Shōwa was only a week long. Among the curiosities one comes upon in flea markets are diaries and memorandum books for the year that failed to be, the sixteenth year of Taishō. It was too late to print books for the second year of Shōwa, and so people made do with ones printed before the royal death and the change of era names.
It has been the practice since 1868 to have era names coincide with reigns. In earlier centuries they were changed more frequently. The designation “Shōwa,” meaning literally “Clarity and Harmony,” and conveying a hope for peace at home and amity with all nations, comes, like most of them, from the Chinese classics. It is the longest-lived era name in Japanese history, and it is an inadvertency. The royal household got scooped and was embarrassed. Among the common Japanese ways of coping with an inadvertency is to pretend that it did not occur. A newspaper published the name originally chosen, Kōbun, before it was officially released. The alternative name Shōwa was therefore substituted on a moment’s notice and was with us for more than six decades. Kōbun, suggesting an age of brilliant letters, might have been more descriptive of the reign than Shōwa.
Interment of the Taishō emperor at Hachiōji, February 1927
The Taishō emperor was buried in February 1927 with suitable reverence and pageantry, and great crowds in which people were trampled to death, but without the public outpourings that accompanied his father’s obsequies. There had been disagreement about where the Meiji emperor should be buried. There seems to have been none in the case of the Taishō emperor. His grave is in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Lavish undertakings for a memorial to the Meiji emperor produced the Meiji Shrine and Gardens. No one took the trouble in the case of the Taishō emperor. General Nogi Maresuke, the greatest of modern military heroes, committed suicide on the first day of the Meiji emperor’s funeral. The poet and scholar who composed the official threnody died the day before the Taishō emperor’s funeral began, but not by his own hand.
All in all, a hush surrounds the Taishō emperor. It is not easy to assess the political importance of the Meiji emperor, but his name rallied the nation for the great efforts of the late nineteenth century. The Taishō emperor is by comparison a slight, sad figure.
He was, however, the first Tokyo emperor. His father was reared in Kyoto and buried in the outskirts of that city. The Taishō emperor lived his whole life in Tokyo, to the extent that anyone in this mobile age lives his whole life anywhere. His grave lies in Tokyo Prefecture. No one remembers much about him except that he was kept out of sight, but in this one regard he was unique, an original.
Chapter 8
HAPPY RECONSTRUCTION DAYS
The official view was that the reconstruction of Tokyo from the great earthquake was complete by 1930. A “reconstruction festival” took place in March of that year. The emperor, who had been regent at the time of the earthquake, was among those who addressed a reconstruction rally in the palace plaza. The mayor addressed a gathering in Hibiya Hall, a few hundred yards to the south. The citizenry was not much a part of these rallies, but the celebrations went on for several days and included events to please everyone—parades and “flower trolleys” and the like. These last were elaborately decorated trolley cars that went all over the city.
The Shōwa emperor, then regent, on an inspection tour after the earthquake; he is standing next to the chair
The emperor took an inspection tour, and expressed taciturn satisfaction with all that he saw by way of reconstruction and hopes for a future of unity and progress. He used the word “capital” to particular effect, as if to emphasize that there was to be no more talk of a capital elsewhere. The organizers of the tour shielded him from the masses with a thoroughness at which the Japanese are very good. Some fifteen thousand people with whom it was conceivable he might come into contact were vaccinated for smallpox. An estimated quarter of a million people were in some way involved in the planning and execution. The tour took him through the flat Low City, the regions most cruelly devastated by earth quake and fire. He stopped, among other places, at Sumida Park and the earthquake memorial (see page 299).
The park is a product of the earthquake, one of the two big new parks beside the Sumida River. It runs for not quite a mile along the right, or Asakusa, bank, less than half that distance along the left bank. The shorter, or left-bank, portion has been the more successful as a park, because it contains venerable religious institutions and the famous line of cherry trees. A new start had to be made on this last. The fires of 1923 destroyed the old one almost completely. Much of the right-bank portion is on reclaimed land. The Arakawa Drainage Channel of mid-Taishō had removed the threat of floods and made reclamation possible. When, in recent years, an ugly concrete wall was put up to contain the river, the incentive was less a fear of waters rushing down the river than of waters rushing up from the bay during stormy high tides. Title to the land for Hamachō Park, the other of the two, on the right bank downstream, presented few difficulties, since there were only three landowners. Getting rid of all the little places that had rights of tenancy was more complicated. Much of the Hamachō geisha district happened to sit upon the tract, and geisha and their patrons can be strong-willed and influential people. The quarter was rebuilt a short distance to the west.
If the official view is accepted, the city did not have long to enjoy its new self. The reconstruction had taken seven years. Only a decade and a little more elapsed before the Second World War started pulling things apart once more. Happy days were few. It may be, indeed, that the years of the reconstruction were happier than the years that followed, for the latter were also the years of the depression, the assassinations, and the beginnings of war.
The Japanese word that is here rendered as “reconstruction” is also rendered by the dictionaries as “restoration.” Perfect restoration of a city is probably impossible. There may be attempts to redo a city exactly as it was before whatever made restoration necessary. There have been such attempts in Europe since 1945. The results may be faithful to all the evidence of what was lost, but they are somehow sterile. The life that produced the original is not there.
Nothing of the sort was attempted in Tokyo. Probably it would have been impossible except in limited neighborhoods. We may be grateful that the city was allowed to live and grow, and not forced back into molds it had outgrown. Yet, though few people now alive are old enough to remember what was there before September 1, 1923, one has trouble believing that the old city was not more pleasing to the eye than what came after. If perfect restoration is probably impossible, a reconstruction is generally less pleasing than what went before it. In Tokyo the reasons are not mysterious. They have to do with the fact that Tokyo and Japan had opened themselves in the decade of the 1860s to a deluge of devices and methods from a very alien culture. These had much to recommend them. They were ways of fending off political encroachment. They also tended to be cheaper and more convenien
t than old devices and methods. So with each reconstruction jerry-built hybrids became more common.
The citizenry seems on the whole to have been rather pleased with the rebuilding, as it was again to be in 1945 and after. Everything had become so cheerful, all that white concrete replacing all that dark plaster and those even darker tiles. Sukiya Bridge, west of Ginza, with the new Asahi Shimbun building reflected in its dark waters like a big ship, and the Nichigeki, the Japan Theater, like a bullring, was the place where all the mobo and moga, the modern boys and girls (for these expressions see page 324), wanted to have their pictures taken.
Fully aware that there are no rulers for measuring, and at the disadvantage of not having been there, we may ask just how much it did all change. The opinions of the best-informed and most sensitive are not unanimous. Most of what survived from Edo had been in the Low City, because that is where most of Edo was. Therefore most of it disappeared. So much is beyond denying. It is in the matter of the rebuilding and the changes it brought to the physical, material city and to its folkwayschanges in spirit, we might say—that opinion varies.
Kyōbashi, as rebuilt after the earthquake
In the early years of Shōwa, Nagai Kafū was spending many of his evenings in Ginza, at “cafés,” which today would more likely be called bars or cabarets. In 1931 he put some of his experiences and observations into a novel, During the Rains (Tsuyo no Atosaki). An aging character who is in many ways a surrogate for Kafū himself—although Kafū was younger, and never served a prison term for bribery, as the character has—muses upon the Ginza of recent years. Every day something changes; the sum of changes since the earthquake is like a dream. The Ginza of today is not the Ginza of yesterday. The old gentleman’s interests are rather narrow. He is chiefly concerned with the cafés which sprang up in large numbers after the earthquake, most of them on burnt-over tracts, and which, being outposts of the demimonde, were highly sensitive to new fashions and tastes. He speaks for Kafū, however, and Kafū found the changes devastating. The old pleasure centers were gone, and good taste threatened to go with them.
Tanizaki Junichirō, a native of the city who had been away most of the time since the earthquake, felt differently. Change had not lived up to his predictions. On September 1, 1923, he was in the Hakone Mountains, some fifty miles southwest of Tokyo. He had a famous vision of utter destruction and a splendid flapper-age rebuilding. What he saw and wrote of in 1934 was disappointing, or would have been had he still been in his 1923 frame of mind. He had changed, and was glad that changes in the city had not been as extreme as he had hoped and predicted. The Tanizaki of 1934 would have been disappointed, this is to say, if the Tanizaki of 1923 had not himself changed.
So ten years and one have now gone by. The decade which seemed so slow as it passed came to an end on September 1 of last year. I am forty-nine. And how are things today with me, and how are things with Tokyo? People say that the immediate future is dark, and that nothing is as it should be; yet looking back over the meditations in which I was sunk on that mountain road in Hakone, I feel somewhat strange. I do not know whether to be sad or happy at the irony of what has happened. My thoughts then about the extent of the disaster, the damage to the city, and the speed and form of the recovery were half right and half wrong…. Because the damage was less than I imagined, the recovery in ten years, though remarkable, has not been the transformation I looked for. I was one of those who uttered cries of delight at the grand visions of the home minister, Gotō Shimpei. Three billion yen would go into buying up the whole of the burned wastes and making them over into something regular and orderly. They were not realized. The old tangle of Tokyo streets is still very much with us. It is true that large numbers of new bridges, large and small, now describe their graceful arcs over the Sumida and other rivers and canals. The region from Marunouchi through Ginza and Kyōbashi to Nihombashi has taken on a new face. Looking from the train window as the train moves through the southern parts of the city and on past Shimbashi to the central station, I cannot but be astonished that these were lonely wastes where I would play half a day as a child. People back from abroad say that Tokyo is now a match for the cities of Europe and America…. The daydream in which I lost myself on September 1, 1923—I neglected to think even of my unhappy wife and daughter, back in the city—did not approach the imposing beauty I now see before me. But what effect has all this surface change had on the customs, the manners, the words, the acts of the city and its people? The truth is that my imagination got ahead of me. Westernization has not been as I foresaw. To be sure, there have recently appeared such persons as the stick girls of Ginza, and the prosperity of bars and cafés quite overshadows that of the geisha quarters, and movies and reviews are drawing customers away from Kabuki; but none of these places, and even less the casinos and cabarets, bears comparison with even the Carleton Café in Shanghai…. How many women and girls wear Western dress that really passes as Western dress? In summer the number increases somewhat, but in winter you see not one in ten among shoppers and pedestrians. Even among office girls, one in two would be a generous estimate.
(Since Tanizaki was born in 1886, his age is obviously by the Oriental count. “Stick girls” were female gigolos. Like walking sticks, they attached themselves to men, in this case young men strolling in Ginza.)
So Tanizaki’s feelings are mixed. He is sad that he must admit his inadequacies as a prophet and sad too that with regard to Nihombashi, at least (see page 293), his predictions were not exaggerated. Yet he does not see changes in customs and manners as Kafū does.
Writing also in the early thirties, Kawabata Yasunari is more interested in physical change, and is a subtler chronicler of it, than Kafū or Tanizaki. (Kafū was twenty years older than Kawabata, Tanizaki thirteen.) In Hama Park he comes upon a kind of revivalism directed not at Edo and the Japanese tradition but at early Westernization. He finds Western tendencies, in other words, that have become thoroughly Japanized.
Everything is new, of course, Hama Park being one of the two new ones along the banks of the Sumida. Nothing is unchanged except the sea gulls and the smell of the water. Yet nostalgia hangs over the place. The new Venetian pavilion is meant to recall a famous Meiji building lost in the earthquake, the offices put up by Josiah Conder for the Hokkaido Development Bureau. Conder, an Englishman, was the most famous of foreign architects active in Meiji Japan. The music and revelry from the riverboats of Edo are too remote for nostalgia.
Kawabata does not tell us what he thinks of Sumida Park, the other new riverside one, but quotes a friend who is an unreserved booster. With its clean flowing waters and its open view off to Mount Tsukuba, Sumida Park, says the acquaintance, is the equal of the great parks beside the Potomac, the Thames, the Danube, the Isar (which flows through Munich). Give the cherry trees time to grow and it will be among the finest parks in the world. In his silent response Kawabata is perhaps the better prophet. Tsukuba is now invisible and concrete walls block off the view of a very dirty river. Only in cherry-blossom time do people pay much attention to the park, and even then it is not noticed as is the much older Ueno Park.
Kawabata has a walk down the whole length of the new Shōwa Avenue, from Ueno to Shimbashi. Some liken it to the Champs-Elysèes and Unter den Linden. Kawabata does not. “I saw the pains of Tokyo. I could, if I must, see a brave new departure, but mostly I saw the rawness of the wounds, the weariness, the grim, empty appearance of health.”
Shōwa Avenue (Shōwadōri), looking northwards from the freight yards at Akihabara
Famous old sweets, offered for centuries along the east bank of the Sumida, are now purveyed from concrete shops that look like banks. (Though Kawabata does not mention it, the mall in front of the Asakusa Kannon Temple was also done over in concrete, in another kind of revivalist style, the concrete molded to look like Edo. The main building of the National Museum of Ueno, finished in 1937, is among the most conspicuous examples of the
style.) The earthquake memorial on the east bank of the Sumida, where those tens of thousands perished in the fires of 1923, is a most unsuccessful jumble of styles, also in concrete. Is it no longer possible, Kawabata asks of a companion, to put up a building in a pure Japanese style? “But all these American things are Tokyo itself,” replies the companion, a positive thinker. And a bit later: “They may look peculiar now, but we’ll be used to them in ten years or so. They may even turn out to be beautiful.”
Kawabata does think the city justly proud of its new bridges, some four hundred of them. Indeed they seem to be what it is proudest of. In a photographic exhibition about the new Tokyo, he notes, more than half the photographs are of bridges.
In 1923 Tokyo was still what Edo had been, a city of waters. The earthquake demonstrated that it did not have enough bridges. There were only five across the Sumida. They all had wooden floors, and all caught fire. That is why more people died from drowning, probably, than directly from the earthquake. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, with the completion of Kachitoki Bridge, there were eleven. Kachitoki means “shout of triumph,” but the name is not, perhaps, quite as jingoistic as it may seem. Those who chose it in 1940 may well have had in mind the shout of triumph that was to announce a pleasant end to the unpleasantness on the continent, but the direct reference is to a triumph that actually came off, that over the Russians in 1905. The name was given to a ferry established that year between Tsukiji and filled lands beyond one of the mouths of the Sumida. The name of the ferry became the name of the bridge, a drawbridge that was last drawn almost twenty years ago. By the late fifties automobile traffic to and from Ginza was so heavy that there was congestion for two hours after a drawing of the bridge.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 36