Hirotsu Kazuo describes in a recent story how he and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, having seen Uno Kōji to a hospital, went off for a look at the Tamanoi district and its unlicensed prostitutes…. I had an account directly from Mr. Hirotsu, and the impression it left was more powerful than that of the story. The conclusion had a certain ghoulishness about it, with the women of Tamanoi turning pale as Akutagawa passed, and whispering to one another: “A ghost, a ghost!”
Akutagawa had by then completed preparations for his suicide, and so I wanted to attach all sorts of meanings to the anecdote, and of course I remembered how, some five or six years ago, I went with him to look at the Yoshiwara….
I had been taking long walks through the city every day from September 1. There cannot be many who saw as well as I did what the earthquake had done. I believe I was sitting on the veranda of the Akutagawa house describing a little of it. Akutagawa himself suggested, I think, that he and Mr. Kon and I go look at the bodies in the Yoshiwara pond. Akutagawa was wearing a striped kimono and a helmet. The helmet was incongruous, like a gigantic toadstool perched on the thin face and figure. Walking along in those great strides of his, swinging his body as if about to take flight, he looked like a villain setting forth on some evil mission. He was a war-horse striding past the devastated wastes, up streets that were a tangle of charred electric lines, among survivors tired and dirty as war refugees. I was a little annoyed with him and the briskness that put him in such contrast with everyone and everything else. As I ran after him, I thought what fun it would be if a policeman or a person from the vigilance committees were to stop him and question him.
The pond beside the Yoshiwara quarter was one of those horrible pictures of hell which speak only to someone who has seen the real thing. The reader should imagine tens and hundreds of men and women as if boiled in a cauldron of mud. Muddy red cloth was strewn all up and down the banks, for most of the corpses were those of courtesans. Smoke was rising from incense along the banks. Akutagawa stood with a handkerchief over his face. He said something, but I have forgotten what. Probably it was something light and sarcastic, well worth forgetting.
He came upon a policeman in the Yoshiwara. For a kilometer or so on our way back they walked side by side, and he drew forth all manner of information about the earthquake. The policeman was an accommodating sort who answered all his questions….
For me who had so little to do with Akutagawa while he lived, the picture that comes first to mind, now that he is dead, is of that helmeted figure striding vigorously along with no regard for his surroundings. There was in it a lightness and briskness that contained no hint of death.
But when, two or three years later, he had made his resolve to die, the picture must have come back into his mind, I am sure, of those horrible corpses piled on one another in the Yoshiwara pond. He seems to have deliberated all sorts of ways to die in search of one that would leave a handsome corpse. In contrast to the handsome death, its antithesis, were those corpses in the pond.
That was the day in his life when he saw the largest number of them.
And I who was with him in observing the most repellent of deaths can perhaps visualize his handsome death better than those who have been spared the repellent kind.
All of the other persons mentioned were well-known writers. Tamanoi is a district east of the Sumida River, then in the suburbs. Until 1945 it contained an unlicensed pleasure quarter. It is the setting of Nagai Kafū’s A Strange Tale from East of the River (see pages 335-336).
The Taishō era needed a literary symbol, and Akutagawa was a good one, embodying (or so it is widely held) the sometimes neurotic refinement and intellectualism that were products of the great Meiji endeavor to encompass and catch up with the West. The common view has therefore been that his suicide, more than the death of the emperor, brought an end to an era. It is not easy to establish that Akutagawa’s mental illness was peculiar to the era. Yet he will do as a symbol, as the poor emperor will not. The emperor’s illness ran in the direction of retardation, which will hardly do for either Meiji or Taishō. The Akutagawa suicide provides reasonable grounds for considering the unlikely Taishō reign an independent and in some measure self-contained cultural period.
The new and popular words of the post-earthquake years were mostly foreign. This seems proper for that relatively cosmopolitan day of Taishō democracy; people did not have to be apologetic about importing their neologisms. Things were rather different in the late thirties. The Japanese language has always been hospitable to new words. Tokyo, where the lords of the media and of advertising have their seats, has coined most of them and helped others to spread. Numbers of Osaka words have made their way into the standard language, but they have had to be adopted by Tokyo before prevailing in the provinces.
Here are some popular words and expressions from late Taishō and early Shōwa: “It,” “shan,” “mobo” and “moga,” “Charleston,” “mannequin girl,” “modern life,” “stick girl,” “casino.” The significance of some should be clear enough; some require explanation. (Among the pleasure of modern Japanese is that its use of one’s own language so often requires explanation.) “It” refers to the Clara Bow quality. “Shan” is from the German schōn. It is a masculine term referring to feminine beauty. The “mannequin girl” is a particular kind of beauty, the fashion model. Though models had been used in advertising even before the earthquake, the modeling business really got started in 1929. From the spring of that year all the big department stores began using them. Curiously, an early photograph of the Mannequin Club—like most other people, models quickly formed a club which had as its chief aim the exclusion of everyone else—shows almost all of the ladies in Japanese dress. “Stick girl” will be found above, in Tanizaki’s remarks about his native city. “Mobo” and “moga” are acronyms, and among the words that might be thought symbolic of the age itself. They are from “modern boy” and “modern girl”; (garu): the advanced young people of the day, the ones most sensitive to fad and fashion, they who went strolling in Ginza and had their pictures taken at Sukiya Bridge.
Many a neologism has had its brief day and gone, but all of the above remain in the language and are to be found in any dictionary. “Casino,” from French rather than Italian or English, might be rendered “music hall.” A neologism that did not gain immediate currency but has since become very much a part of the language was first used in a women’s magazine in the spring of 1929. Before the earthquake “mama” was already supplanting native words for “mother.” “Mama-san,” adding the common appellative, now came to indicate the lady in charge of a café or bar, also often called a “madame.”
Taishō was a time of great change. Such places of entertainment as the cafés make Ginza, for instance, come to seem near and familiar. And, given that wars, especially lost ones, and economic miracles are always potent engines of change, there has been no paucity in this respect in the years since. A 1929 survey of Tokyo sakariba shows us a city that is in important and interesting respects different from the city of today. The biggest of Japanese English dictionaries gives “a bustling place” as one of its definitions of sakariba. These are places where crowds gather, and where revelry and shopping occur with the greatest intensity.
The sakariba covered are Ginza, Shinjuku, Ueno, Asakusa, Shibuya, Ningyōchō, and Kagurazaka. No one today would include the last two, and Asakusa would be a borderline case; and no one would leave out Ikebukuro or Roppongi. Omissions and inclusions tell of the westward march of the city. Now among the gigantic transfer points in the old western suburbs, Ikebukuro was slower to get started than Shibuya and Shinjuku, those other western giants. To the huge profit of the Seibu Railway, one of the private commuter systems, it has grown hugely this last half century. The southern wards contained no bustling places in 1929. Shibuya lay beyond the city limits. Roppongi is in the old Azabu Ward, but it is a latecomer which got its start as a camp follower. This wa
s in the late nineteenth century, when war (a victorious one in this instance) brought military barracks to the district. It has really emerged since the Second World War, as the most highly amplified of the sakariba and among the ones dearest to the very young.
Ningyōchō was lively in Meiji and has been in decline since the earthquake. So has most of the old Nihombashi Ward, the recognized center of mercantile Edo. Ningyōchō is as good a place as any to go in search of the mood and flavor of the old Low City, but it is not the smallest competition with a place like Shinjuku in the matter of drawing crowds. Kagurazaka, in Ushigome Ward, to the northwest of the palace and not far from the western limits of the old city, was for a time after the earthquake among the leading sakariba. It was one of the uptown geisha districts for which the knowledgeable Nagai Kafū had great contempt.
Their geisha were, he thought, without accomplishments other than those of the bedroom. Kagurazaka had its period of prosperity with the destruction in the earthquake of the Low City pleasure quarters. It lay near a station on the western suburban line of the National Railways, but was not a transfer point, and so was outstripped by Shinjuku, which was.
The 1929 survey was made in the afternoon at all the places except Ningyocho, where it was done in the early evening. In none of them do women outnumber men. Shinjuku in midafternoon has the highest proportion of women, 43 percent, and of these only a third are recognizable as housewives. In Ginza at four o’clock, young men account for almost half, young women only a little over a tenth; and so those who went strolling seem to have done it mostly by themselves or with male companions. Mobo were most commonly without moga. Asakusa, as noted above, would today be a borderline instance. It drew big crowds a half century ago but does no more. In 1929 the golden age of the music halls was just getting underway; yet the survey contains ominous signs. The proportion of young men is much smaller than in Ginza, and that of middle-aged men higher. Already so early, it may be, the blight was setting in. The middle-aged crowd may spend more generously, but it is the young crowd that sets the tone and ensures that there will still be crowds for a while. When the young start to abandon a place, it is in for bad times.
The sex ratio would be different today. Ours is a much more womanized age. At four in the afternoon women would probably outnumber men in any of the places that still draw great crowds, except just possibly Ueno. Asakusa, Ningyōchō, and Kagurazaka do not.
The survey also spelled out categories, which would seem to show that a great uniformity has settled over Japanese crowds this past half century. Here is a full list of them: provincials, soldiers (Ueno had the most), shop boys, laborers, young boys, male students, youths (other than students, presumably), middle-aged men, old men, old women, housewives, young women, female children, female students, serving maids, geisha, and working women. They obviously are not carefully enough defined to be mutually exclusive, but we may assume that the surveyors could confidently, albeit vaguely, distinguish the categories one from another. Many of them would be indistinguishable today—students from other young men and women, for instance, and housewives from serving maids, or shop boys and laborers from other young men the same age. Many a provincial these days could easily cross the line and pass as a Tokyo person. There has been a leveling process which some might call democratic and others might call conformist.
Another survey of 1929, of department stores, also reveals a few interesting things. There were as many men as women. Today there might just possibly be on a Sunday afternoon, if an uncommonly large number of wives were able to drag their husbands forth on shopping expeditions. There certainly would be at no other time. The categories, again, call for notice: gentlemen, merchants, provincials, housewives, working women, serving maids. Again they are obviously rough, and they cannot be all-inclusive. Why are there no children and no students, who were in those days, as they are not now, easily detectable by their uniforms?
Yet the categories are more distinctive than they would be today. Almost two-thirds of the men are in Western dress, but only a sixth of the women—and only 2 or 3 percent of “adult women,” which category is not defined. The tendency of women to stay longer in traditional dress than men seems to be universal, and was clear in Japan from the beginning of Meiji. Cosmetics seem to have been a way of distinguishing the urban lady from the provincial. Heavy applications were the mark of the provincial.
Since 1898 Tokyo had had a mayor who presided over the “ward part” of the prefecture, the fifteen wards of the Meiji city, whose limits remained almost unchanged until 1932. Appointed governors had jurisdiction over the whole prefecture, including the “county part,” the towns and rural regions that lay outside the city limits. Population was already spilling beyond the city limits in 1923, and did so ever more rapidly in the years that followed. The city wished to go west, and indulged the wish more and more.
Already in 1923 the prefecture was growing faster than the city. The process speeded up after the earthquake. Because the suburbs suffered relatively light damage, many of the 1923 refugees did not return, and population increase tended toward places where land was cheaper. With 1918 considered as 100, the population of the wards stood at only 90 in 1932. It fell by about a sixth immediately after the earthquake (though this was by no means as drastic a fall as that during and after the Upheavals of 1867 and 1868 and the disaster of 1945). It quickly began to recover, but at no time before 1932 had it returned to the 1918 level. The population of the prefecture, again with 1918 as the base, stood at 156 in 1932, and the population of the city as its limits were redrawn in 1932—the population, that is, of the fifteen old wards and twenty new ones—stood at 322. Even what remained of the counties, to the west of the newly enlarged city, had risen to 129 as against 100 for 1918.
In 1920 the city still contained more than half the population of the prefecture. In 1930 the proportion had fallen to between a third and two-fifths. Four towns on the edges of the fifteen wards had more than a hundred thousand people in 1930. Fifteen had fifty thousand to a hundred thousand. The expansion of 1932 lagged far behind the facts. The city was much larger than the area the mayor had jurisdiction over.
As the old city filled up and spilled over, so did its cemeteries. The big new ones of Meiji, along the western limits of the city, were filling by the end of Taisho. Plans were completed on the eve of the earthquake for a new one, out in the “county part” of the prefecture, not far from the Tama River. It too was filling before the new reign was a decade old. This time the city looked eastward. A tract was purchased at a place named Yasumi in Chiba Prefecture. Yasumi seems a most pleasant and appropriate name for a cemetery. The commonest word for “rest” is homophonous.
The western and southern suburbs were growing more rapidly than the northern and eastern ones. So once more we have evidence of the decline of the Low City. The northern and eastern suburbs were an extension of the Low City, the southern and western ones of the High City. The southern suburbs, on the way to Yokohama and in the industrial belt that lay between the two cities, were growing fastest of all. The town of Ebara, immediately beyond the southern city limits, had more than fifteen times the population in 1932 that it had had in 1918. Only one town to the north and east had an increase of more than sevenfold during the same period.
The suburbs, particularly the western and southern ones, were the realm of the bunka jūtaku, the “cultural dwelling,” a euphemism for the kind of dwelling the “salaryman” or office worker was expected to be happy in. (“Salaryman” is a coinage from English which seems to have come into use during the First World War.) A cultural dwelling typically had three or four little rooms, one of them in a somewhat Western style, two floors, a floored kitchen, and a bath. In more traditional houses for the middle and lower orders the kitchen had a floor of packed earth. The private bath marks a major departure from tradition. In recent years it has become more economical for a family to bathe at home than to go to a public bat
h, and so of course the public bath has declined grievously. The public baths of Edo and Meiji were social and even cultural centers. Many cultural dwellings had pink and blue roofs, and so we have the beginnings of the plastic look, to replace the earthen look of the older styles.
At irregular but convenient intervals among all the new cultural abodes were shopping districts, many of them called the Something Ginza. Thatch-roofed farmhouses still dotted the suburbs, and some of them still had lands to farm. In late Taishō there was farming in eleven of the fifteen wards. Today there are truck gardens and a few paddies in the twenty new wards, but none in the fifteen old ones.
Universities began deserting the old city after the earthquake. Burned out in Kanda, the University of Commerce (Shoka Daigaku); moved by stages to the place where, with the name Hitotsubashi from the old site, it now is, far out in the western suburbs. Burned out in Asakusa, the University of Technology (Kōgyō Daigaku) moved out to the paddies in what is now Meguro Ward. Keiō, one of the better regarded private universities, built itself a second campus in Kanagawa Prefecture, beyond the Tama River. In this it was abetted by one of the private railways, many of which were also energetic real-estate developers.
Title to the new land passed, without reimbursement, from the Tōyoko (Tokyo-Yokohama) Railway to the university. Today the Tōyoko is a part of the Tōkyū, or Tokyo Express, system. Keiō retained the original campus in the old High City where it had since early Meiji been an evangelical center for Westernization.
The growth of the suburbs was not only residential and educational. Industry was also moving outward. In 1932, when rebuilding from the earthquake was held to be complete, more of the large factories in the prefecture—factories with more than a hundred workers—were outside than inside the city. By the thirties the district from southern Tokyo into Kanagawa Prefecture was emerging as one of the great industrial belts of the country, and the largest in the Kantō region. Really heavy industry situated itself across the Tama River in Kanagawa, but there were many subcontractors in what from 1932 were the southern wards of Tokyo. By that year the prefecture had passed Osaka in industrial output.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 38