Tsukiji fish market
Wartime controls were invoked to solve the old problem of compensation for lost rights. It was an imposed solution, allowing less than a tenth of what had originally been asked, and it did not come until after Pearl Harbor. So more than a half century elapsed between the first attempts to uproot the market from Nihombashi and the final settlement.
The market has now been in the new location for more than sixty years and in its present buildings more than fifty, which may be counted, by Tokyo standards, as forever. There is talk of moving it again. The problem this time is not that it is smelly and unsightly, but that the city consumes too much fish. The market is cramped for space and contributes to congestion. It is also somewhat dilapidated.
Compensation for the old rights was at the beginning of the scandal. Upward of a year after the earthquake the mayor recommended a schedule of payments. The council demurred. It was the view of the council that the market had managed to obstruct the proposed move for more than thirty years. What duty had the city, then, to pay the dealers anything at all? After the change of reigns the matter was brought up again. This time, by a narrow margin, the council approved compensation. One of the sponsors of the new measure was also a director of the market. He had bought a council seat solely for purposes of promoting the interests of himself and his fellow dealers. Bribery seems to have been an open secret. Fifteen people, including ten of the forty-two councilmen, were arrested for offering and receiving bribes. The home minister voided the settlement and dissolved the council late in 1928, after several councilmen had been arrested. In 1929 came the resignation of the mayor, a “purification” movement, and new elections. The prefectural government, which was an arm of the Home Ministry, was all the while relatively free of scandals.
The city and the prefecture shared quarters, a red-brick building in Marunouchi, that red-brick quarter built largely by Mitsubishi and known as Londontown. To the left were the municipal offices and the mayor, to the right the prefectural and the governor. In front of the municipal entrance was a statue of Ota Dōkan, and in front of the prefectural entrance a statue of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Dōkan was the man who first made Edo into something more than a remote fishing village. A fifteenth-century warlord, he saw its strategic importance and put up a fastness where the palace now stands. Ieyasu founded the Edo shogunate and made Dōkan’s fastness into the political center of the land. A statue of Dōkan, though not the original one, now stands in the courtyard behind the governor’s office.
Metropolitan and prefectural offices, Marunouchi
This sharing of quarters was appropriate, for the two governments were close. The Home Ministry controlled the governorship, which it usually filled with one of its own. A majority of the mayors from the change of reigns down to 1943 also came from the Home Ministry. Several had been governors before they became mayors, which suggests that the mayoralty was the more desirable position. It was, so to speak, the more visible. Gotō was not the only mayor of ministerial rank. The seventeenth (or eighteenth) and last mayor was an army general.
In 1878, when the fifteen wards came to be, the population of Tokyo Prefecture was under a million. It reached a million by the mid-1880s, and two million by 1900. A jump in 1893 was due to the cession of the Tama counties by Kanagawa Prefecture. Figures before 1920, when for the first time there was a careful census, are somewhat conjectural in any event. Definitions and methods shift, as to, for instance, whether transient population is to be included, and how much weight is to be given to family registers.
One has a rough notion all the same of what was happening. The rapid growth of the early Tokyo years was in large measure a return to the population of the late Edo years. Thereafter the rate of growth slowed down, and in times of economic depression and disaster the population even fell. Since the rate was measured from an almost consistently expanding base, however, the absolute increase was massive. The census of 1920 showed three and two-thirds million, that of 1925 almost four and a half million, that of 1930 almost five and a half million. In 1932 the population was estimated at not much less than six million. During two-thirds of a century, 1868 to 1932, the city limits changed scarcely at all. They were becoming unrealistic.
The organization of these great masses of people was haphazard. Of all the large cities in the country, Tokyo was the one whose area was most at variance with its actual population. Negligible in 1878, the population of the “county part” accounted for about a third of the total by 1920. It continued to leap forward in the two succeeding censuses while that of the fifteen wards was falling. In 1920 there were about twice as many people in the “ward part” as in the five counties that bordered on it. By 1932 the proportions had been almost reversed. Not quite two-thirds of the people in the wards and the five counties were in the latter.
All along the limits of the city, which in no direction reached as far as the prefectural boundaries, stretched a patchwork of more or less heavily populated districts incorporated as towns and villages. The only incorporated city in the prefecture besides Tokyo itself was a silk-spinning center rather far out in the western counties. Some of the towns and villages had recognizable centers; some did not. Some, like Shinjuku (which straddled the city limits), were already emerging as major satellite cities. Others were arbitrarily defined accumulations of people. Behind the confusion was the assumption that someone would come up with a good idea someday. Someone had to, for it was a necessity.
In the meantime there was reluctance and intransigence on all sides. The entities chiefly concerned—the city, the counties, the prefecture, and the national government—all wished to gain from the new arrangements, whatever they might be, and stood in danger of losing. There were numerous possibilities, from doing nothing at all, on the grounds that the apparent confusion was not discommoding anyone seriously, to the bold step of unifying the mayor’s constituency and the governor’s and doing away with the office of mayor. The latter would have meant a loss of autonomy for the city and a reversion to a stage even earlier than the “special cities” one that had kept Tokyo, along with Osaka and Kyoto, without a mayor for a decade in mid-Meiji when all other municipalities in the country, however diminutive, had their mayors. In the counties sentiment ran strongly toward this most extreme reorganization. There would have been economic advantages, bringing rich places and poor places together under one budget, and making the mountain people of the far western counties into children of Edo. The final solution, which fell between the two extremes, did not come until 1943. By then the Crisis, the expression that was used to make the populace aware of the sacrifices expected of it, was worse than those who had brought it about had meant it to be.
Opposition within the old city subsided, in the face of an energetic propaganda campaign by the municipal government. The opposition was partly political. The expansion seemed a stage on the way to making Tokyo different from the other two special cities of Meiji. Kyoto and Osaka, and their prefectures. Originally the distinction had been made to keep these biggest and most threatening cities in the land under tighter control. Was Tokyo to be brought back under control, while the other two went on enjoying their autonomy? And then again (the political argument was by no means clear-cut): it might be good to be rid of City Hall, so extremely subject to scandal and malfeasance, and so cumbersome. The city bureaucracy grew more than a hundredfold between 1898, when the first mayor took office, and 1932. After 1932 the expenses of City Hall seemed even less necessary. The expanded city had more than 90 percent of the prefectural population and paid close to 100 percent of the taxes.
The economic argument was clearer, and perhaps stronger. The old city was more advanced than the county part, and was not especially interested in helping the latter catch up. Just upward of half the houses in the newly expanded city, and four-fifths of the houses in the old city, had running water. The poorer eastern wards were in this regard well served, Fukagawa being an exc
eption. A watery place troubled by land subsidence, it worried more about getting rid of water than about bringing it in. The well-to-do western suburbs, after 1932 the western wards, fell much below the average for the old fifteen, and would be an expense. Almost four-fifths of the old city by area had sewers in use or under construction on the eve of the Second World War, and this was the case with less than two-thirds, again by area, of the new wards. Before the expansion of 1932, nine-tenths of the streets in the city, which is to say the old fifteen wards, were paved or surfaced. Less than a third were after 1932.
The solution of 1932 may be thought rather timid. It left the two governments in place, there behind their twin doors and statues, but the five counties bordering on the old fifteen wards themselves became wards. Absorption of the five counties was approved by the city council and the mayor’s advisory council in May 1932 and received the approval of the Home Ministry shortly afterward. On October 1, 1932, eighty-two towns and villages were incorporated into the city. The city limits thus coincided with the prefectural boundaries in every direction except the west. The city shared borders with Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa prefectures. So it now covered essentially the area of the prefecture of early Meiji, and what remained of the county part was what had been ceded by Kanagawa Prefecture in 1893. Twenty new wards were added, raising the count from fifteen to thirty-five. This is not to say that the twenty were thoroughly urban. Extensive farmlands remained, and limited ones still do.
If timid in its treatment of political arrangements, the settlement of 1932 was startling in its effect on the population and area of the city. The population suddenly doubled, to more than five million, and the area increased sevenfold. It became the fifth-largest city in the world by area (none of the other four was in Japan, though before 1932 Tokyo was not, by area, the largest Japanese city) and the second-largest, following only New York, in population. Many a boy in the American West, no expert in the demography of the Kantō Plain, said that that was exactly the sort of thing the sneaky Japanese would do to catch up with honest, plodding New York. Two villages from North Tama County were annexed into Setagaya, one of the new wards along the western fringes of the city, in 1936.
It was most natural, given the fact that eighty-two towns and villages were reduced to twenty political entities, that there should be disagreement and some bitterness about the naming of the new wards. Those who made the decisions in 1932 did a better job than those who made similar decisions in 1947, when the number of wards was reduced from thirty-five to twenty-two. Some of the twenty-two names have a distinctly artificial ring to them, as if an advertising agency might have made them up. Only one of the thirty-five, Jōtō, has the genuinely fabricated look, and even it is vaguely descriptive. It means something like “the eastern part of the capital.” Some names came from prominent geographic features. Four of the five lost counties had their names preserved in ward names, only Toyotama being left out. The commonest device was to give the name of the most prominent town to the whole ward. This caused the most dissatisfaction. In what was to become Shibuya Ward, only the town of Shibuya favored the name. In the other towns sentiment was strong for Jingū Ward, after the Meiji Jingū, the Meiji Shrine, situated in the ward. Of the old Five Mouths, the stations on the main highways out of Edo, Itabashi became the name of the largest ward by area, the one farthest to the north and west, on the old inland road to Kyoto. Shinagawa also named a ward. Shinjuku, the oldest part of which had been within the city limits since 1920, became a ward name in 1947. So only Senjū was left out. Accounting for two of the Five Mouths, it might have received special consideration, but the name of the old county, and no one could object to that, prevailed.
Three of the new wards had populations of more than two hundred thousand, and two of them larger populations than Honjo, most populous among the old fifteen. Two of the three centered upon two of the three rapidly growing western centers, Shibuya and Ikebukuro. Shinjuku, lying on either side of the old city limits, was divided between an old ward and a new. The most heavily populated ward among the thirty-five was Arakawa, a very different case from the other two, it lay just north of Asakusa Ward, and became urbanized as the poorest of the poor were forced into it, many of them refugees from disasters, especially the great earthquake of 1923. The new wards had on the average a lower per capita income than the old ones, but the western ones were extensions of the middle-class High City wards, Arakawa an extension of the poorer Low City. The two wards east of the Sumida, Fukagawa and Honjo, had the lowest average income among the old fifteen, and the two neighboring counties, including the new Arakawa Ward (as well as Jōtō, the one with the fabricated name), were yet lower.
Asakusa Ward had the largest number of pawnshops in the city, and Honjo the largest number of night schools, for very young people who worked in the daytime. Akasaka, on the opposite side of the old city, had only a seventh as many pawnshops as Asakusa, and no night schools at all.
An important novelist (not Tanizaki, who had already fled) said of the proud new city that it got worse every day, and only made him want to flee. Yet it was tidied up, and the new city limits made sense. The crazy pattern of villages along the old limits went away, most of the population was brought within the mayor’s jurisdiction, and the new city had integrity. It stood together, a unit. Almost half the people who used public transportation within the prefecture moved between the new wards and the old. The remainder was divided almost exclusively and almost evenly between people being transported within the old wards and the new wards. Movement to and from and within the remaining three counties was negligible.
The time came when the new city limits did no better at containing the population than had the old ones. There are no longer towns and villages, only incorporated cities, along the limits of the ward part. Two of the three Tama counties have quite disappeared. They have been divided into cities. Some mountain towns and a single village yet remain in the remotest of the three. So why not go the whole distance, one might ask, and do away with the county part completely? Why not have a few new wards, and finish the business left unfinished in 1932 and 1943?
It probably will not happen, at least for a long time, because there are not the compelling reasons there were in 1932 for the city to expand. There are no exploding centers along the ward limits like the Shibuya, lkebukuro, and Shinjuku of late Taishō and early Shōwa. Books keep getting written which have the commercial and managerial center of the city, and not merely the population center, continuing to move westward, finally engulfing the tomb of that sad, weak man, the Taishō emperor. A bedroom sprawl all the way to the mountains seems more likely. The pattern of cities is not as crazy as the pattern of towns and villages was. And, finally, it would make more sense for the city—the ward part—to expand into neighboring prefectures, already on the borders of the wards, than to expand westward through what remains of Tokyo Prefecture. The reality is one megalopolis from Chiba on the east shore of the bay to Yokosuka near the mouth of the bay on the west shore. The governor of Tokyo is as likely to get jurisdiction over any part of the neighboring prefectures as the mayor of New York is to get jurisdiction over Newark and Jersey City. Meanwhile Saitama Prefecture, which borders Tokyo on the north, can worry about its own crazy pattern.
On October 1, 1932, the city suddenly had seven times the area it had had the day before, but it was not as big as some people seemed to think it was. The Nichinichi Shimbun, now the Mainichi, set a competition for a city song. The winning lyrics, by a young man in the city government, glorified the expanse of the new city, all 550,000 square kilometers of it. This would be an area somewhat greater than the squaring of seven hundred kilometers. From a spot seven hundred kilometers northwest of, let us say, Tokyo Central Station, the mountains of Siberia might, on a clear day, be in view. Set to music by a music professor, the song was widely sung.
The prime minister, the third to meet that fate during the years between the wars, was assa
ssinated in May 1932, the month in which the great expansion gained approval by everyone whose approval was needed. The Japanese recognized Manchuria as an independent nation in mid-September, a fortnight before the expansion became a reality. Such were the times. Taishō democracy had expired, reaction and aggression were in the air. Tokyo and Japan were, like most places, in economic depression, which is commonly listed among the causes of the hotheaded activism that swept democracy (such as it was), the political parties, and peace away.
The military persons who were the chief agents of the reaction might in the jargon of a later day have been thought “concerned.” They saw injustices and contradictions, and thought they saw easy solutions in a return to the virtues, chiefly loyalty and sincerity, of an earlier and purer day. Some people, such as capitalists and party politicians, seemed to thrive on depression, and far larger numbers of people were too obviously in distress. If the earthquake suggested to some that the heavens and their eight million deities were unhappy, the depression made it intolerably clear to others.
The panic of 1927, the remote causes of which might be traced to the earthquake, came under control, and need not have brought a general depression. Dependent on foreign markets and especially the American market, however, Japan could not escape entanglement in the world depression. By 1930, the year the Casino Folies opened, it had come. The late twenties and early thirties were a time of labor strife. Except for a brief time after the Second World War there has been nothing like it since. The early years of Shōwa were the full summer of left-wing activity, polemical and literary. Almost everything could and can be blamed on the depression. Whether or not the reaction of the thirties would have come had the depression not come, we will never know. Perhaps it was merely time for another seizure of puritan righteousness. Perhaps it was another of those mysterious cycles that seem to operate everywhere and in everything.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 44