There were foreign performers in Asakusa, most of them, as the passage suggests, Russian refugees. In that summer of 1930 (it seems to have been June) a pair of Finns, mother and daughter, the latter only ten years old, were a big hit. They, or one of them, did an imitation of Chaplin, and they sang in Japanese and did a Japanese dance. Four Russian sisters did Gypsy, Cossack, Spanish, and “jazz” dances, and sang Japanese songs with a sweet Russian accent. (Kawabata reminisces upon his student days, just after the Russian revolution, when little Russian girls no more than twelve or thirteen were walking the streets and selling themselves at no high price.) The Casino had a popular hula dancer, but she was Japanese. An American diver performed in a sideshow somewhere, and there was a French chanteuse, a dramatic soprano, we are told in English. “Her naked, pearl-white beauty quite radiates eroticism.” Asakusa is kind to foreigners, says Kawabata, and especially to foreign children.
The “ero” that is up on all the marquees is of course that of eroguro, from “erotic” or “eroticism.” The Shōchikuza is one of the grand theaters, the property of the Osaka company that dominated the Tokyo theater and had a large chunk of the movie business as well. Kawabata is saying that this institution, which should be above cheap tricks, must go erotic if that is what everyone else is doing. The sweets flung out so vigorously were aimed mostly at children. That there were children in the audience is interesting indeed, and may seem to go against generalizations about eroticism and grotesquerie. Probably such eroticism as there was, mostly bare legs, passed lightly over the heads of children. Though the Japanese police do sometimes treat foreign manifestations as if they were invisible (the original of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was sold openly even as criminal litigation was in progress against the publisher and translator of the Japanese version), neither Kawabata nor anyone else tells us that the chanteuse was uncommonly naked.
Asakusa connoisseurs (again our authority is Kawabata) have said that things were actually dirtier back in the days of the Russo-Japanese War. The diving girls in the sideshows of those days were far bolder than the dancing girls of early Shōwa were permitted to be. The garb of the latter was not much different from the bathing dress of the time. And there had been wantonness in the park, right there beside the great temple, at least since the eighteenth century, when Edo came into its own as a cultural center. Wayside teahouses and archery and shooting stalls and the “famed sake places” all had had their pretty girls whose business was not only the announced one.
Yet the police of early Shōwa were being challenged. They had taken a position with regard to nudity, and the impresarios were pushing ahead in that direction as rapidly as they could. The police were also becoming more self-conscious. A spasm of puritanism was coming over the city and the nation, which had been victims of such spasms from time to time through the Tokugawa centuries.
Kawabata remarks upon the conservatism of Asakusa. In the following passage, the speaker, who is addressing a young lady of Asakusa, is Kawabata’s alter ego.
“I don’t care what you say, Asakusa people are old-fashioned. They look after others and others look after them, they care for people and have a sense of duty, all of them, the dealers and hawkers at the top to the tramps and beggars at the bottom. They’re like the gamblers of Edo. I’m told that the toughs in Shibuya and Shinjuku are a newer sort than the ones we have here. They don’t have a tradition, and Asakusa does. It may all seem like flash and glitter, but there’s nowhere else things are so on the move. It’s like the Bug House too. Or an island way off somewhere, or an African village with a chief and a set of rules and bonds the modern world doesn’t have.”
Two important matters are involved: acceptance of a moral and ethical code, and sensual abandon. It is quite possible to have both. Not even the puritan radicals of the thirties forwent the teahouses and extralegal polygamy. For all its willingness to provide and sell almost anything for and to almost everyone, Asakusa does seem to have had moral groundings. The Bug House to which the man refers is the place with the dusty display cases next door to the aquarium and its Casino Folies.
The sentence about the hawkers and the others contains several words that are almost untranslatable. The people who look after and are looked after are oyabun and kobun, the surrogate parents and children in the social arrangements of such persons as gamblers, firefighters, construction workers, and extortionists. The qualities of sympathy and duty are the giri and ninjō so prominent on the Kabuki stage. They come down to something not far from the Golden Rule.
As there were for the reviews, there were rules for the shooting stalls, which had long been covers for prostitution. The temple grounds still contained some forty of them in the early thirties. They could stay open for twelve hours from sunrise. Drinking was not permitted, nor was “wanton” touting and hawking. Only employees were allowed behind the counter. The rules may or may not have been enforced, but the fact that they were there, and that many customers were addicted to the stalls, suggests that they were used for something besides shooting.
Kawabata adverts to Asakusa speciousness and reports upon it. He is also good at scamps and beggars, the bottom of the heap. One sideshow promises nude beach photographs to those who will put down money for tickets; inside are photographs of athletic teams training on beaches. The curious passerby must buy the suggestive magazines at the stalls if he is to see what is in the secret supplements; they contain cooking and knitting lessons. A sideshow (another chronicler, not Kawabata, tells us of this one) offers an underwater strip show; inside, beyond a tank of water, is a painting of a nude woman. The code of Asakusa did not preclude misrepresentation, but it does seem to have forbidden complaining. Those who got cheated did not go to the police or otherwise protest.
When, at least partly because of Scarlet Gang, the “Ginza people” started coming to the Casino Folies, beggars and vagrants started going away. Earlier they had drifted in from the park to watch the girls. One caught the smell of them as the audience thinned out.
As for the scamps, there was a young delinquent known as the Mantis. He knew his law. Arrested numerous times, he could not be prosecuted until he was fifteen. Finally he got sent off to Iwo, the remotest place under the jurisdiction of the prefecture. One member of the Scarlet Gang, also a minor, works as a “cherry” for an Indian who peddles jewelry beside the temple. A cherry is a shill, someone who buys wares by prearrangement in hopes of starting a trend. An elderly man befriends him and teaches him a new trade, cat-catching. Skill and patience are required—a little, perhaps, as in fly-fishing. A sparrow on a string lures cats to within grabbing distance. Having seized one, the boy beats it to death and takes it off to the riverbank or a secluded part of the temple grounds, there to skin it. Makers of samisens pay a good price for cat skins, which function as sounding membranes on samisens.
At the end of “The Asakusa Mynah Bird” (Asakusa Kyūkancho), the bird of the title, which lives in a department store, is stolen. This exchange takes place:
“Someone stole it? The first time since the place opened that a bird’s been stolen.”
“You don’t say.”
“Only in Asakusa.”
The last remark catches Asakusa nicely. It seems to have been proud of its scamps. A history of the ward published in 1933 finds evidence of old-style verve and gallantry in the fact that Asakusa produced so many “knights of the town,” as one dictionary defines the members of the underworld gangs.
In Scarlet Gang there is a labor demonstration. Asakusa did have its little touches of fashionable left-wing radicalism. From the sheet-metal roof of a theater marquee, a performer agitates the passing crowds. Unless the system is reformed, he shouts, they will all starve to death. The harangue over, several of his fellows join him, there on the roof, for a display of swordsmanship. He is not of the reviews, whose lower orders would have had every right to demonstrate against the class system of which they are victims.
He is rather from one of the swordplay troupes that were another Asakusa attraction.
Kengeki means literally “swordplay,” if “play” is understood in the sense of “dramatic performance.” There were several such troupes in Asakusa. Like O-kichi, swordsmen appealed to old virtues, and thus satisfied the police, the radicals of the right, and the Asakusa masses. Female swordplayers were more like O-kichi than the men. They brought in eroticism, as the men could not easily do. Like plucky little Orientals overwhelming huge ugly Occidentals in Bruce Lee movies, they were always overcoming adversaries more muscular than they, and they appealed to the sympathy for the underdog which was a part of the image the son of Edo and Tokyo had of himself. Best of all, they managed, wielding their swords, to show their legs every bit as generously as the review girls were permitted to do.
Singers of Naniwabushi, Osaka narrative balladry, also answered to right-wing tastes. They were very popular in Asakusa, if not everywhere. In the late thirties a Naniwabushi man was unsuccessful in Hibiya Hall, the place for advanced performances and awarenesses, but filled the Kokusai, the largest theater in Asakusa. The heroes of their ballads were strong on old virtues—loyalty, sacrifice, duty.
All of these attractions, and more, were available in Asakusa. The movies drew the biggest crowds, as they did everywhere, but it is well to note that Asakusa, in these its last good days, offered a variety of things.
After Enoken’s departure the Casino Folies went arty. The choreographer had studied under Pavlova. There were dramatizations of socially conscious novels. There were ideological pieces aimed at the May Day crowd, the early years of Shōwa still being a time when the proletariat took to the streets of a May Day.
Sometimes the suggestion is strong that the reviews were not entirely serious even about artiness. On a stage other than the Casino, Kawabata saw two Heian courtiers, one of them Genji of the long romance that bears his name, the other the great lover Narihira. To all appearances they are in Heian dress, but under their arms they each have a walking stick hidden. They sway (not wriggle) their hips and sing. No, they are not courtiers at all. Observe these, their blue collars. And these weapons are not for elegant swinging, they are for smashing. The chorus line makes sedate Heian motions, and suddenly one of its number breaks into a Charleston, so earnestly that she falls exhausted. There ensue discussions of society and politics, a fox-trot, and a final “jazz chorus” and dance.
Artiness, however, may have had something to do with the untimely demise of the Casino Folies. Asakusa was not the place for that sort of thing. Shinjuku was. Shinjuku also had a review house, the Moulin Rouge, which opened on New Year’s Eve 1931. The choice of opening day was an indication that it meant to be very advanced. New Year’s Eve in Japan has traditionally been somewhat akin to Christmas Eve in the West, a vaguely religious night for family gatherings. Having done what they could by way of cleaning house and clearing debts, people stayed at home and perhaps went out to a shrine. Now they were invited to go to Shinjuku and watch the girls.
The Moulin Rouge was initially an offshoot of the Casino Folies. The first manager was a Casino man, and the first shows were scarcely distinguishable from the Asakusa sort. Shinjuku, however, was a place with middle-class crowds. It was also a student and intellectual center. Waseda University lay not far away. There were railway stations nearer the Waseda campus, but crowds draw crowds, and Shinjuku had the big ones. So the Shinjuku reviews gradually became sharper and more bracing than those of Asakusa. Eroticism waned as the challenge to the mind waxed. It was the sort of thing that brought radicalism of the left and of the right together. Both disliked venal politicians and money-mad businessmen. The police do not seem to have worried about it as they worried about the girls and their drawers at the Casino Folies.
Chapter 9
DARKER DAYS
Until 1926 the mayor was appointed upon royal command from a list of candidates preferred by the city council. The practice was to appoint the candidate at the top of the list—the one who had the strongest backing from the council. After 1926 the mayor was actually elected by the council. During the four and a half decades until, in 1943, there ceased to be mayors, the city had seventeen of them, or eighteen, if the one who had two separate tenures is, like President Cleveland, counted twice. So the average term was a little over two years, and for the early years of the Shōwa reign, down to the reorganization of 1943, it was even less.
Since 1947, when for the first time a governor was elected by general franchise, there have been only four governors. The average postwar tenure has been more than a decade. Only one mayor in early Showa served a full four years. Only one governor since the war has not been elected to serve three full terms, or twelve years. The present governor is in his third term. The one exception was the “Olympic governor,” who thought it best to leave after the Tokyo Olympics of 1964.
The chief causes of the prewar instability seem to have been the power of the council and the cumbersome system, typical for municipalities before the war, whereby a body of select councilmen presided over by the mayor had perhaps even more power than the council. Prey to factionalism, susceptible to malfeasance, and very intrusive in the matter of appointments, this select body could cause trouble whenever it was in a bad mood. The strong and imaginative Gotō tried to curb it, but his successor, who had been his vice-mayor, did not follow his example. The successor was the mayor who may be counted twice. He presided over the two great events of the decades between the wars, the earthquake and the expansion of the city limits in 1932, which suddenly made Tokyo the second most populous city in the world.
Scandal was endemic in the affairs of the metropolitan government. There were scandals in rich variety during the post-earthquake years: over the purchase of city buses from private hands, over the fish and produce markets, over the election of a council president, over the purchase of land for cemeteries, over gas rates. Two interesting ones may be related, if not very directly, to the earthquake itself and the reconstruction.
The Keisei (Tokyo-Narita, the name means) Railway, a private line serving the eastern wards and suburbs, had long wanted to come across the Sumida River into the main part of the city. It wanted to come into Asakusa, there to join the first subway line, initially from Asakusa to Ueno and presently to Shimbashi and Shibuya. It kept petitioning and getting rejected. In 1928 the mayor recommended rejecting a sixth petition, on the grounds that another private railway, the Tōbu (which from 1929 had the rich tourist business to the ornate Tokugawa tombs at Nikkō, some eighty miles north of Tokyo), had already been given permission to come to the subway terminus, and that the Keisei, entering through Sumida Park, would be an eyesore. The latter seems a peculiar argument, since the elevated Tōbu line, put through in 1931 to a multilevel transportation and shopping complex somewhat resembling that at Shibuya, is very visible from the park. It could not have been made, in any event, if the new park had not been among the results of the earthquake. The council overruled the mayor, and then it became known that the Keisei had spent very large sums of money on the council.
The mayor recommended to the home minister that the council be dissolved. The council got even by passing a vote of no confidence, during a session that ended in fistfights. The minister did not approve the recommendation.
The mayor then resigned, taking his three vice-mayors with him. Some eminent men were implicated, including Hatoyama Ichirō, who later became prime minister, and the ubiquitous Shōriki Matsutarō of the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Thus prevented from entering Asakusa, the Keisei entered Ueno in 1933. In recent years it has finally been allowed into Asakusa, where it joins a subway line (not the one it originally wanted to join) and whence it sends trains through the heart of the city. Asakusa is not the prize now that it was in the days of the scandal. Nor is the station well situated for such Asakusa business as there is. The Keisei is a poor cousin among the commuter lines.
/> Then there was the fish-market scandal of 1928. From the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate the market had stood beside Nihombashi Bridge, in the mercantile center of Edo. It was not a pretty place and it did not smell good, and from mid-Meiji there had been efforts to move it from what was becoming a center of modern finance and merchandising. The problem of compensation for traditional rights proved intractable. The market stayed where it was until the earthquake destroyed it utterly.
On the evening of September 3, 1923, a sign was already up at the site of the old union headquarters inviting survivors to assemble and deliberate what was now to be done. The chairman of the union had lost his whole family in the earthquake; he himself escaped by boat. The decision was against attempting to rebuild in Nihombashi. Not everyone agreed. A temporary market opened on September 17, in Shibaura, by the bay. Five hundred dealers were back in business by the end of September. The market was already turning a profit. Holdouts attempted to resume business in Nihombashi, but they were turned away, whereupon some of them went to Shibaura and some withdrew to the provinces.
More fighting ensued when former naval lands in Tsukiji, east of Ginza at the mouths of the Sumida, were proposed as a permanent site. Tsukiji was approved in mid-November, at a tumultuous meeting of dealers, a type held to be particularly quarrelsome even among sons of Edo. Opening ceremonies took place on December 1, and the new market (properly, the Central Produce Market, because more than fish is sold there) opened for business the following day. The buildings were not finished until 1935.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 43