Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Nor were there enough bridges across the Kanda River and the downtown canals. These waterways did not claim the victims that the Sumida did, but they were obstacles to crowds pressing toward the palace plaza. Of the streets leading westward from Ginza toward the plaza and Hibiya Park, only three had bridges crossing the outer moat. The moat was now bridged on all the east-west streets, as also was the canal that bounded Ginza on the east.

  Moat and canal now are gone. There was some filling in of canals from late Meiji, as the city turned from boats to wheels for pleasure and for commerce. Between the earthquake and the war several canals in Nihombashi and Kyōbashi were lost, but one important canal was actually dug, joining two older canals for commercial purposes. Other canals were widened and deepened. Both in 1923 and in 1945 canals were used to dispose of rubble, that reconstruction might proceed. It has been mostly since 1945 that Tokyo of the waters has been obliterated. In the old Low City the Sumida remains, and such rivers or canals as the Kanda and the Nihombashi, but the flatlands are now dotted with bus stops carrying the names of bridges of which no trace remains. Venice would not be Venice if its canals were filled in. Tokyo, with so many of its canals turned into freeways, is not Edo.

  It was after the earthquake that retail merchandising, a handy if rough measure of change, went the whole distance toward becoming what the Japanese had observed in New York and London. Indeed it went further, providing not only merchandise but entertainment and culture. Mitsukoshi, one of the bold pioneers in making the dry-goods stores over into department stores selling almost everything, has had a theater since its post-earthquake rebuilding. Most department stores have had amusement parks on their roofs and some still have them, and all the big ones have gardens and terraces, galleries and exhibition halls.

  The great revolution occurred at about the turn of the century, when Mitsukoshi and the other Nihombashi pioneer, Shirokiya, started diversifying themselves. What happened after the earthquake is modest by comparison, but a step that now seems obvious had the effect of inviting everyone in. Everyone came.

  The change had to do with footwear, always a matter of concern in a land whose houses merge indoors and outdoors except at the entranceway, beyond which outdoor footwear may not pass. Down to the earthquake the department stores respected the taboo. Footwear was checked and slippers were provided for use within the stores. There were famous snarls. They worked to the advantage of smaller shops, where the number of feet was small enough for individual attention. After the earthquake came the simple solution: Let the customer keep his shoes on.

  Simple and obvious it may seem today, but it must have taken getting used to. Never before through all the centuries had shod feet ventured beyond the entranceway, or perhaps an earth-floored kitchen.

  Smaller shops had to follow along, in modified fashion, if they were to survive. In earlier ages customers had removed their footwear and climbed to the straw-matted platform that was the main part of the store. There they sat and made their decisions. Customer and shopkeeper were both supposed to know what the customer wanted. It was fetched from warehouses. Now the practice came to prevail of having a large part of the stock spread out for review. Floor plans changed accordingly. There was a larger proportion of earthen floor and a smaller proportion of matted platform, and customers tended to do what they do in the West, remain standing and in their shoes or whatever they happened to bring in from the street with them.

  Private railways were beginning to put some of their profits from the lucrative commuter business, which in Meiji had been largely a freight and sewage business, into department stores. In this they were anticipated by Osaka. The Hankyu Railway opened the first terminal department store at its Umeda terminus in 1929. Seeing what a good idea this was—having also the main Osaka station of the National Railways, Umeda was the most important transportation center in the Kansai region—the private railways of Tokyo soon began putting up terminal department stores of their own. Thus they promoted the growth of the western transfer points—Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro—and their control over these most profitable of places.

  The department stores discontinued old services The bourgeois matron from the High City now had to come to the store. Fewer and fewer stores would come to her, as all of them had in the old days. New services were added as the railways began to open their stores and competition became more intense: free delivery, even free bus service to and from stores. If it asked that the matron set forth and mingle with the lesser orders, the department stove made the pvocess as painless for her as possible.

  External architecture changed along with floor plans. Tiled roofs began to disappear behind false fronts. The old shop signs, often abstract and symbolic and always aesthetically pleasing, gave way to signs that announced their business loudly and unequivocally. Advertising was now in full flood. Huge businessman and little businessman alike had taken to it, and the old subdued harmonies of brown and gray surrendered to a cacophony of messages and colors. This seems to have been truer west than east of the Sumida. In the conservative eastern wards rows of blacktiled roofs were still visible from the street. The west bank was said after the earthquake and rebuilding to resemble a river town put up by the Japanese in Manchuria.

  The first vending machines were installed at Tokyo and Ueno stations early in 1926. Like advertising, whose origins in Tokugawa and Meiji were so simple that they were almost invisible, vending machines have become an insistent presence in the years since. They now offer an astonishing variety of wares, from contraceptives to a breath of fresh air.

  Like the practices and habits of shoppers, those of diners-out changed. The restaurant in which one eats shoeless and on the floor is not uncommon even today. Yet new ways did become common at the center, Ginza, and spread outward. Good manners had required removing wraps upon entering a restaurant, or indeed any interior. Now people were to be seen eating with their coats and shoes on, and some even kept their hats on. Before the earthquake women had disliked eating away from home—it was not good form. The department-store dining room led the way in breaking down this reticence, and the new prominence of the working woman meant that women no longer thought it beneath them to be seen by the whole world eating with other women. Before the earthquake a restaurant operator with two floors at his disposal tended to use the upper one for business and the lower one for living. Now the tendency was to use the street floor for business. An increasing number of shopkeepers (a similar trend in Osaka is documented in Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters) used all the floors for business and lived elsewhere, most often in the High City. So it was that money departed the Low City.

  The habits and practices of the Buddhist clergy were also changing. The priests of some sects had long married. Now there was an insurgency in a stronghold of Tendai, one of the sects that had remained celibate.

  The Kaneiji Temple once occupied most of the land in Shitaya Ward that is now Ueno Park. There it ministered to the souls of six Tokugawa shoguns, whose graves lay within the premises. It was almost completely destroyed in the “Ueno War” of 1868, when the Meiji government subdued the last Tokugawa holdouts in the city. Sorely reduced in scale, the temple was rebuilt and came through the earthquake without serious damage. In the Edo centuries there were fifteen abbots, even as there were fifteen shoguns. All of the abbots were royal princes, and all were celibate, at least to appearances, though dubious teahouses in the districts nearby seem to have catered to the needs of the Kaneiji clergy. In Meiji the abbots started taking common-law wives. In 1932 one of them made bold to enter into a formal, legal marriage. The appointment of his successor was the occasion for a struggle between the Kaneiji and Tendai: headquarters on Mount Hiei, near Kyoto. Hiei demanded that the Kaneiji candidate choose between marriage and career, and did not prevail. He had both. The Hiei abbots have gone on being celibate.

  The female work force was expanding rapidly. In that day when Taisho democracy wa
s dying but not quite dead, a few people were beginning to have ideas about the equality of the sexes. Already in Meiji, women had taken over nursing and the telephone exchanges. In the years before and after the change of reigns “red-collar girls” appeared. These were bus conductors, and their trade was almost entirely feminine until its extinction after the Second World War. Up and down Shōwa Avenue, the wide new street cut through from Shimbashi to Ueno after the earthquake, were gas-pump maidens. The day of the pleasure motorist-had come, and pretty maidens urged him to consume. The day of the shop girl had also come. Sales in the old dry-goods stores had been entirely in the hands of shop boys.

  The question of the shop girl and whether or not she was ideally liberated added much to the interest of the most famous Tokyo fire between the gigantic ones of 1923 and 1945. The “flowers of Edo,” the conflagrations for which the city had been famous, were not in danger of extinction, but they were becoming less expensive and less dramatic. Firefighting methods improved, the widening of streets provided firebreaks, and, most important, fire-resistant materials were replacing the old boards and shingles. Except for the disasters of 1923 and 1945, there have since the end of Meiji been no fires of the good old type, taking away buildings by the thousands and tens of thousands within a few hours. The number of fires did not fall remarkably, but losses, with the two great exceptions, were kept to a few thousand buildings per year.

  The famous fire of early Shōwa occurred in a department store. It affected only the one building and the loss of life did not bear comparison with that from the two disasters. It was, however, the first multiple story fire the city had known, and the worst department-store fire anywhere since one in Budapest late in the nineteenth century.

  The Shirokiya fire

  The Shirokiya, an eight-story building constructed after the earthquake, was the chief rival of the Mitsukoshi through the years of diversifying and expanding. On the morning of December 16, 1932, a fire broke out in the toy department on the fourth floor. The end of the year had traditionally been a time of giving gifts, and Christmas gifts had of recent years been added to those based on older customs. The Taishō emperor brought Christmas Day into prominence by dying on it. Christmas Eve was now becoming what New Year’s Eve is in the West. The Shirokiya was bright with decorations. A technician was repairing Christmas lights and a tree caught fire. The fire spread to the celluloid toys, and the whole fourth floor was soon engulfed. Fortunately this happened at a few minutes after nine, before the store had filled with customers. A watcher from a fire tower nearby saw the fire before it was reported. Firemen were changing shifts, and both shifts rushed to the scene. Presently every pump in the city was on hand. Not much could be done to contain the fire. The floors of the Shirokiya were highly inflammable and all the top ones were quickly in flames. The fire was extinguished a few minutes before noon.

  Utility poles and wires along the main streets, and the narrowness of side streets, made it difficult to use ladders, though some rescues were effected. Ropes and improvised lines from kimono fabrics in the store inventories brought people down and slings up to bring more people down. Army planes came by with ropes, although, according to the fire department, they were too late to do much good. It may be that no one except a single victim of asphyxiation need have died. The other thirteen; deaths were by jumping and falling. The bears and monkeys on the roof came through uninjured, to demonstrate that the roof was safe enough-throughout. The jumping was of course from panic. The falling had more subtle causes, having to do with customs and manners—in this instance, the slowness of women in converting to imported dress.

  All shop girls in those days wore Japanese dress and underdress, wraparound skirts in various numbers depending on the season. Traditional dress for women included nothing by way of shaped, tight fitting undergarments to contain the private parts snugly. The older ones among the Shirokiya women also being bolder, made it safely down the ropes. Some of the younger ones used a hand for the rope and a hand to keep their skirts from flying into disarray. So they fell. In 1933 the Shirokiya started paying its girls subsidies for wearing foreign dress, and required that they wear underpants.

  From about the time of the earthquake, advertising men had been pushing Western underdress for women, which they made a symbol of sexual equality. But a disaster like the Shirokiya fire was needed to effect decisive change. It demonstrated that women were still lamentably backward, and the newspapers loved it. Underpants became one of their favorite causes and enjoyed quick success, though the reform would actually seem to have begun earlier. Kawabata noted that all the little girls sliding down the slides in Hama Park were wearing underpants.

  Some years earlier another department store, the new Matsuya in Ginza, which was to be the Central PX for the American Occupation, had provided the setting for another new event. The Shirokiya had the first modern high-rise fire, and the Matsuya the first high-rise suicide. It occurred on May 9, 1926. In a land in which, ever since statistics have been kept, there has been a high incidence of suicide among the young, suicides have shown a tendency toward the faddish and voguish. Meiji had suicides by jumping over waterfalls, and the closing months of Taishō a flurry of jumping from high buildings.

  In May 1932 a Keiō University student and his girlfriend, not allowed to marry, killed themselves on a mountain in Oiso, southwest of Tokyo. The incident became a movie, Love Consummated in Heaven, and the inspiration for a popular song.

  With you the bride of another,

  How will I live? How can I live?

  I too will go. There where Mother is,

  There beside her,

  I will take your hand.

  God alone knows

  That our love has been pure.

  We die, and in paradise,

  I will be your bride.

  At least twenty other couples killed themselves on the same spot during the same year.

  Early in 1933 a girl student from Tokyo jumped into a volcanic crater on Oshima, largest of the Izu Islands. Situated in and beyond Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo, the islands are a part of Tokyo Prefecture. The girl took along a friend to attest to the act and inform the world of it. A vogue for jumping into the same crater began. By the end of the year almost a thousand people, four-fifths of them young men, had jumped into it. Six people jumped in on a single day in May, and on a day in July four boys jumped in one after another.

  On April 30 two Tokyo reporters wearing gas masks and fire suits descended into the crater by rope ladders strengthened with metal. One reached a depth of more than a hundred feet before falling rocks compelled him to climb back up again. They found no bodies. After more elaborate preparations the Yomiuri sent a reporter and a photographer into the crater a month later. Using a gondola lowered by a crane, they descended more than a thousand feet to the crater floor. There they found the body of a teenage boy.

  The year of all these suicides seems to have been a nervous and jumpy one in general. It was the year in which Japan, having rejected the Lytton Report, left the League of Nations. The report demanded that Japan withdraw from Manchuria. Feelings of isolation and apprehension seem to have swept the land. Yo-yos were bobbing everywhere. Peak sales ran to five million a month. During the summer, the withdrawal from the League having come in the spring, everyone was out in the streets and in the parks, hopping about to the accompaniment of the great hit song of the day, “Tokyo Ondo” (“Tokyo Dance”). The music of this is by Nakayama Shimpei, generally held to be the founder of modern Japanese popular music, and the lyrics are by Saijō Yaso, a poet of such distinction that he is given three pages in a one-volume encyclopedia of modern Japanese literature.

  The lyrics do not say very much. Half of them and a bit more are meaningless chants to keep rhythm by: sate ya-a to na sore yoi yoi yoi, and that sort of thing. Interspersed among them are fleeting references to places and things and combinations of the two, suc
h as the moon upon the Sumida, the willows of the Ginza, and Tsukuba and Fuji, the mountains that are supposed to adorn the Tokyo skyline but seldom do.

  Advised that the dancing in Hibiya Park was disturbing His Majesty’s rest, the Marunouchi police ordered it to desist at nine o’clock. At Asakusa the police did the opposite, protected the dancers. They had had reports that the movie theaters, most of whose potential customers were out in the streets dancing, had hired men from underworld gangs to break the dances up. In parts of town the dancing crowds stopped traffic, and the police were powerless either to disperse or to protect.

  The number of Tokyo suicides doubled during the first decade of Showa. The number of attempted suicides doubled in three years toward the end of the decade. Despondency, illness, and family difficulties were the predominant motives. The effects of economic depression are to be detected in the last category. The number of suicides began to fall with the approach of war and continued to fall during the war.

  The most famous suicide of early Shōwa occurred in the northern suburbs of Tokyo. On July 24, 1927, the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke killed himself with an overdose of “Veronal, etc.,” as accounts of the event uniformly have it. He did not, as General Nogi did, choose the day of the emperor’s funeral, but his passing has widely been taken as symbolic of the passing of the Taishō reign.

  A remarkable Kawabata essay, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and the Yoshiwara” (“Akutagawa Ryūnosuke to Yoshiwara”), published in 1929, associates the Akutagawa suicide with the horrors of the earthquake, and so makes it yet more symbolic.