Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The beginnings of the reviews are in the opera, the ancestry of which was Italian. An Italian impresario named G. V. Rossi is the recognized progenitor. Though the word “review” itself seems to have come from English, the reviews were ostensibly of French ancestry. (“Opera” is probably from Italian.)

  Rossi never worked in Asakusa. First at the Imperial Theater in Marunouchi and then at a place which he bought near the southwestern city limits, he endeavored to produce Italian opera, including Mozart, using Japanese performers. Some of his disciples transferred the enterprise to Asakusa. The Asakusa performances based on Italian scores must have sounded more like operetta or musical comedy, people with pleasant voices singing in a manner all natural and unrestrained. The best of them had little musical education. The performance whose opening night is considered the birthday of Asakusa opera was definitely light and scattered. The language and the writer were Japanese. It could have been called a review.

  Hamamoto Hiroshi, a novelist who died in 1959 and who drew most of his material from Asakusa, said toward the end of his life that the Asakusa opera was ruined by its own most fanatical supporters. Predominantly male—women preferred the movies, where they could all weep into their handkerchiefs—they demanded eroticism. They demanded a “decadent” (Hamamoto’s word) something of the singers. Then there were dancers. Singing and dancing continued after the earthquake, but were beginning to look tired. They could not carry it all off by themselves.

  A new element was added: bright, fast comedy, thought to be Gallic. So the review came into being. “Eroticism and nonsense and speed,” said Kawabata, “and humor in the vein of the topical cartoon, and the jazz song and legs.” All the items in the medley except the last are in English. So maybe it is the most important—it and the foreignness, the fact of depending so on a foreign language.

  An Asakusa review

  Whether or not the review was greatly inferior to the opera, and whether or not the break between the two is a clear one, the day of the review was the last time Asakusa could be ranked high among the sakariba.

  It may also have been the last time the Low City, center of Edo mercantile culture, could be called the center and the producer of anything cultural at all. (Ginza, as we have seen, is a special instance, in but not of the Low City.) Asakusa has not done much in recent decades to return the affection of people like Hamamoto.

  July 10, 1929, is the birthday of the Asakusa review, and it was born in a little place called the Casino Folies. The founders, two brothers, had been to Paris, and they loved the follies, and combined the Casino de Paris and the Folies-Bergère to give their theater its name. The Casino Folies occupied the second floor of an aquarium on a back street, next door to an entomological museum. “It came to be,” says Kawabata in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, “that the girls of the Casino Folies passed the fishes in their tanks and turned in by a model of the sea king’s palace to go to their dressing rooms.” They also had to pass “dusty cases of flies, beetles, butterflies, and bees.” The aquarium and the Bug House were “relics of the old Asakusa Park, left behind in the Fourth District.”

  What was known as Asakusa Park, not much of it very parklike, was divided into seven districts. The Casino Folies was some distance from the main theater district, which was in the Sixth District, much the most famous and crowded of the seven. The founding brothers, besides their love for Paris and its follies, had a modest amount of money. They rented a place somewhat apart from the main Sixth District street because they could afford it. Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang, the first part of it serialized in the Asahi Shimbun from December 1929, attracted attention to the Casino Folies and made it popular. Those whom Kawabata called Ginza people started coming.

  The reviews were to be more popular than the opera had ever been, but the original Casino Folies did not last long. At a disadvantage when theaters nearer the heart of the Sixth District started presenting reviews, and deserted by its most famous performers, it changed management in 1932. Ownership of the property remained with the aquarium, which survived because groups of schoolchildren were taken there to look at goldfish and turtles. Often they had to be rounded up by their teachers after sneaking upstairs and getting themselves in at reduced prices to look at the reviews. Curiously, children watching the reviews did not seem to upset the police as did children going to movies, some of which were forbidden to them.

  The Casino Folies produced actors and actresses who were to become very famous. The actress Mochizuki Yūko was in her later years so successful in movie portrayals of troubled mothers that she became known as Japan’s mother; she got her start in the chorus line at the Casino. She was the daughter of the caterer who delivered lunch to the troupe; an actor looked at her legs and said she might join. The actor was Enomoto Kenichi, probably the most popular of all Japanese comedians. Enoken, an acronym from the two elements of his name, is how everyone knows Enomoto. He has been called the Joe E. Brown of Japan, but he was more versatile than Brown. Besides having an impish and feckless kind of charm that made people smile before he had uttered a word, Enoken was a rather good singer and a very lithe dancer. Had Danny Kaye been around at the time, he might have been a more appropriate American analogue than Brown. The son of a shopkeeper in Azabu, one of the affluent wards along the southern tier of the old High City, Enoken defied the Azabu notion of what a schoolboy should do and went off to watch Asakusa opera. Though he made his debut at the age of fifteen in one of the Sixth District opera houses, he had to wait for the reviews before he attracted attention, and the reviews had to wait for him. The July birthday assigned to the reviews might better be the November date when Enoken came onstage at the Casino.

  He left the Casino Folies in 1930 for the bigger theaters in the Sixth District, where he headed troupes with such Gallic names as Poupees Dansantes and Pierre Brilliant. From them he moved on to the big movie and management companies and the central theaters, the ones near Ginza. The reviews thus became big time, with huge troupes and budgets. The Casino had ten girls or so in its chorus line. In the big theaters there were sometimes as many as a hundred people onstage at one time. Asakusa may not have produced the very best of anything, but performers who went on to be the best at what they did got their start in Asakusa. Though the “crisis” of 1937 and after was not deemed a time when people should be funny in public, and though Enoken was in very bad health in his last years, he did not give up until his death early in 1970, at the age of sixty-five. Not even the amputation of a gangrenous foot stopped him, and indeed he showed great ingenuity in converting his disability into comedy. It was sadder in his case than it would have been for others, because in his prime his versatility included dancing and acrobatics.

  An impression that Enoken alone made a success of the Casino Folies and the Asakusa reviews would be wrong. Kawabata certainly helped. Enoken himself was to say in his late years that what really brought in the crowds was a rumor that the girls in the chorus line dropped their drawers on Friday evenings. It was, he said, a false rumor. Reminiscing back over a half century, Mochizuki Yuko said that a girl did in fact one day let the cotton wraparound drop from her breasts. It was an accident, and it may have been the source of the rumor. Falling drawers would not have signified very much in any event, said Miss Mochizuki, because the girls wore their own (and this before the Shirokiya fire) under the uniform stage costume. To give more strongly a sense of Paris, they sometimes wore golden wigs.

  Miss Mochizuki described the test, a simple one, which candidates for the line had to pass. They raised their skirts, so that Enoken might have a look at their legs. Legs were what was wanted. They were very young girls, and by all accounts very innocent compared with the ladies of Kafū’s café pieces. The average age was sixteen or seventeen. Kawabata tells of a girl who, at eighteen, had never worn cosmetics. Many commuted to the review houses from home. In one of Kawabata’s shorter Asakusa pieces several girls pass the night in the narrator
’s apartment, and it is all very virginal, not in the least suggestive of Kafū’s orgies. The erotic element had to do almost entirely with the lower limbs. The shoulders and a patch of the back might have been exposed, but the breasts were obscured by wraparounds of cotton. It was hardly extreme nudity. Yet the police were touchy.

  They forbade ad-libbing, for one thing, because they disliked surprises. As a device to forestall it they required that scripts be presented ten days in advance. Ad-libbing had been among the principal techniques of the comedians and it went on despite the ban. They did not have time to learn their lines very well. Besides, it was often the impromptu gag that brought the best laughs.

  The police also worried about the garb and demeanor of the girls and handed down regulations. Drawers must cover at least the top ten centimeters of the thigh. Flesh-colored drawers were not permitted. A portion of the back might be exposed, but the whole front of the torso must be covered from a safe distance above the breasts. There might be no suggestive lighting about the hips and pelvis, no kicking in the direction of the audience, and no wriggling of the hips. If the girls wore tights for photographs, they must also wear skirts. And so on, through nine articles. The Casino girls were one day herded off to the Asakusa police station to have their drawers measured. Enoken went with them, and had to stay behind when the measuring was over, to write out an apology for indiscretions.

  Two routines in particular put the police on their mettle. One, if it had gone a bit further, would have been consummated in a kiss, right there on the stage before everyone. (It was not until after the war that the movies made bold to show an unexpurgated kiss.) The other was about Tōjin (a translator has rendered this as “Chink”—it indicates a foreigner, or a Japanese whose foreign inclinations pass bounds) O-kichi, the reputed mistress of Townsend Harris, first American minister to Japan. O-kichi has been elevated to martyrdom, on the grounds that in surrendering to Harris she disgraced herself, and did it for her country. She was a good subject for Asakusa, combining nationalism and eroticism, but from the police point of view the writers seem to have provided too little of the former and too much of the latter. Comedians and chorus girls and staff worked hard. To compete with the movie theaters, the review halls changed their programs every ten days. There were three performances a day. In a short story called “Rainbow” (“Niji.” 1934). Kawabata reported that the dancers were required to stay for photographs after the last performance on opening day and that rehearsals for the next program began after the last curtain on the fourth day. So there were only two nights during every run, or six nights a month, when they could go home and fall into bed. Perhaps a half dozen dance routines and an equal number of skits had to be put together. The dressing rooms were full of sleeping dancers, and fainting from exhaustion was not uncommon. A character in “Rainbow” finds conditions so bad that he does not bother to learn his lines. Nothing polished or substantial is likely to come of the effort, and ad-libbing works best.

  Here, in a passage from “Rainbow,” a choreographer is meditating upon the reviews and the life of the dancers:

  But there was no time for training in any real sense of the term. An amateur would suddenly be thrust on the stage and not so much trained as told to follow the others. Those who had a certain grace would presently acquire a certain facility. The choreographer would have to put five and six dances together in three and four evenings of rehearsal. The process would be repeated three times a month; and in the weariness of it all any sort of trickery was permitted if it worked. To point out faults was taboo. Nakane, only twenty-seven years old, more often felt sorry for himself than angry at the dancers. So in the beginning he warmly argued the merits and shortcomings of the chorus line with the male actors who were in positions of authority; but he found that no one was really listening.

  There is a mild inconsistency here with what has been said earlier in the same story. The count of days for rehearsal is not quite the same. That there are not many is clear, as is the slapdash nature of the productions.

  So is the class structure, the distinction as to status and function between comedians and dancers. Clearest of all is that the dancers have a hard life. What have they to look forward to, Kawabata asks, but to go on kicking?

  In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Kawabata records a fragment of a program at the Casino Folies, six numbers out of eleven. They include a “jazz dance,” a dance to “La Paloma,” an “acrobatic tango,” a “nonsense” sketch called “That Girl,” and a comic song.

  The changes of costume are so rapid that breasts are openly displayed in the process.

  And now we have Number 6, “Jazz Dance. Ginza.”

  On a street the width of a sash:

  Sailor trousers, false eyebrows.

  An Eton crop. What fun,

  Swinging the snakewood!

  Silk hat at an angle, black velvet vest, red string necktie, collar opened whitely, a thin stick under an arm—it is of course an actress impersonating a man. Her legs are bare. Arm in arm with a pair whose skirts come to their hips and who are stockingless, she sings “Ginza Today.” They dance their stroll down Ginza.

  Nudity seems to have been more pronounced backstage than onstage. Most of the important nouns in the song—“trousers,” “Eton crop,” “snakewood”—are in English. Snakewood seems to be a South American wood with snakeskin markings, much used for walking sticks.

  Also in Scarlet Gang is a complete program from early summer of 1930. The theater is not the Casino.

  Grand Chorus: A Selection of Famous Songs

  Fairy Story: The Spirit of the Artist’s Brush

  Musical Comic

  Magnificent Magic, Made Public for the Very First Time

  Ocean Dance

  Dramatic Vignettes

  One Wants a Companion on a Journey

  Sleeping Car

  Cowboy Dance

  Dramatic Vignettes

  Falsehood

  Lady Angler

  Cannon: A Sad Tale from the Wars of the Roses

  Modern Dance: Five Festivals

  The New Year

  The Doll Festival

  The Iris Festival

  The Festival of the Stars

  E.Chrysanthemum Festival

  Daring Aerial Acrobatics

  Humorous Magic: Egyptian Paradise

  This program too is larded with English words. “Cowboy Dance” and “Ocean Dance” are in English. So is the curious expression “Musical Comic.” Even “Modern Dance,” which, given the subject matter, was probably done in traditional dress, may well have had touches of the foreign. Elsewhere Kawabata speaks of a famous Asakusa dancer who did not imitate the Japanese dance as one got it at Hibiya Hall, the best concert and recital hall in town, but rather that of the port cities, aimed at foreigners.

  Kawabata continues:

  The New Tsukiji Troupe had been here late in May, with the general theme “What Made Us Come to Asakusa?” It did “What Made the Girls Do It?” and “A Secret Tale of Tsukuba” and the like.

  On banners billowing in the winds before the Kannon Theater in July, “It,” written in three ways.

  The Nihonkan thought of the effective name Eroero Dance Team, and even the Shōchikuza had to reply, in big black letters, with Dance Ero. “Ero” on all the billboards. The faltering Japanese of foreign performers is better than many things. Those who wish these days to collect the mottoes on the billboards of the specious reviews will find the alleys behind the lake and its theaters the place to do it: “Diary of a Sex Lunatic”—but come along and see for yourselves, all of you, in the evening. One hears that the extortionists are out along these alleys even in broad daylight; and here are the stage doors for the “ero queens.” They come out to take the evening cool. My readers will understand that when I call the Danilevskis beautiful, the distortions and ill
usions of the night lights are at fault. Their legs are darker than those of Japanese.

  The program of this Tenshō troupe is, after all, not as specious as some of them. The magicians are marvelously skillful. The expressions the young dancers turn on the audience are studiously beautiful. Alas, Tenshō herself, old enough to be a grandmother, ventures to play a girl student. She appears in every act and throws herself about perhaps a bit too strenuously. Henry Matsuoka’s aerial acrobatics are splendid…. But what surprised Lefty Hiko most were the wares flung out to the audience from the stage. Sawa Morino, playing the artist in “The Spirit of the Artist’s Brush,” wound up like a baseball pitcher and flung thirty or forty bags of sweets.

  Another Asakusa review, at the Shōchiku

  Kawabata had only this one try at a chatty style and an intimate narrative stance permitting frequent intrusions, and he was not comfortable with it. Yet Scarlet Gang is full of good reporting. It gives most vividly a sense of what the Asakusa reviews were like, and Asakusa itself. The passage requires comment. The three ways in which “It” is written are the two Japanese phonetic syllabaries and Roman letters. Mount Tsukuba would seem to fit in with the general theme, “What Made Us Come to Asakusa?,” because Asakusa was proud of having it on the eastern horizon. Lefty Hiko is a member of the Scarlet Gang, an assemblage of young delinquents.