The critic Oya Sōichi (today he might be called an opinion-maker) remarked that the two Chinese characters with which printers could not, keep their fonts adequately supplied were those for “step” or “grade” and for “woman.” Left-wing argumentation and evangelism would have been helpless without the former, because without it such expressions as “class struggle” and “class consciousness” cannot be written. The popularity of the latter had to do with eroguro nonsense. Kawabata said that two subjects monopolized the media in those days, depression and eroticism.
As early as 1929 firm measures were taken against the radical left. As for eroticism, both prosperity and depression, as suited the moods and conditions of the day, could be blamed for it. The prosperity of the First World War brought laxness, and depression made people turn to eroguro nonsense for distraction and comfort. During the years of the Crisis such pleasures disappeared, to emerge in far opener and bolder form after the Second World War, or, as the Japanese call it, the Pacific War. A flood of girls poured in upon the city from the poor northeastern provinces in the mid-thirties. Rural poverty and the depression were the general causes, and crop failures the immediate ones. The fact that crop failures cannot be explained in social and economic terms made no difference. The poor girls added to the indignation, even as they made work easier for the purveyors of ero and guro. These were darker days than the days of very early Showa.
In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Kawabata reports on the beggars. More of them than usual were living in Asakusa Park in the summer of 1930. Perhaps the number was as high as eight hundred; but Kawabata was reluctant to make an estimate himself, and did not trust the estimate made by the ward office. Someone stole the hilt from the sword on the statue, up behind the temple, of the celebrated Kabuki actor Danjūrō. Asakusa had drinking places that specialized in beggars. Bare-legged waitresses would come and sit upon the tables. Kawabata observed the forbearing code of the beggars. The park benches were full on a warm night, and each of the regulars had his place, which was respected. Asakusa had in those years a beggar chief, or chief beggar, known as Goldtooth, because much of his money was in his mouth. An intelligent man rumored to be a college graduate, he lorded it over the other Asakusa beggars and took a share of their earnings. He was finally incapacitated by stab wounds.
On a level just above beggars and vagrants, ragpickers decreased in numbers in the last years of the Taishō reign, and rapidly increased during the early years of Shōwa. Their number almost quadrupled between 1925 and 1932. About half were in the new ward which many wanted to call Senjū, after the old mouth, but which was called Adachi after the county of which it was a part. Urbanization and disaster forced the very poor outside of the city limits, into what was to become Arakawa Ward, and then beyond the Arakawa, as the Sumida is known in its upper reaches, into the fens of Adachi. In late Meiji truck gardens were islands among fens and lotus ponds.
Ragpickers hovels at Nippon in Arakawa Ward
Drainage brought industrialization, and ragpickers from the old Low City put together a community on lands still too watery for industrial or ordinary residential use. It was rather as Asakusa had been a few centuries earlier, before reclamation of the wetlands along the Sumida: pilgrims made their way to a great temple, in this case the Yakushi temple at Nishiarai, through bogs and queaches among which the few permanent dwellers eked out a subsistence livelihood. The best days for the ragpicking vocation lasted down to about 1960. Thereafter a modest amount of capital was required for what before had required none. Collectors of scrap and wastepaper now make their rounds in small trucks. In the years after the Second World War there was a smaller but more famous community of ragpickers on the right bank of the Sumida just above Asakusa. It seems to have given the language the commonest word for “ragpicker.” The last syllable of bataya applies to any kind of mercantile enterprise, and the first two seem to be from kawabata, “riverbank.”
The Shōwa reign was a decade old on Christmas Day 1936. Had it ended then the reign designation, suggesting peace and accord, would have been somewhat ironic. The decade had moved rapidly in the direction of obfuscation and strife. A time of some pluralism and tolerance gave way to jingoism and repression. Quite aside from the effect on left-wing radicalism, the harmless if by some standards wanton pleasures of the populace were being affected. So was the appearance of the city. The most extreme internal bloodletting of the thirties took place on February 26, 1936, precisely ten months before the end of the first Shōwa decade. The military rising of that day had among its secondary results the chopping down of the palmettos that were among the symbols of Hibiya Park, the central park of the city, immediately south of the palace plaza. The insurgents had their last fortress at the Sannō Hotel, a short distance to the west. The park became artillery emplacements and the palmettos got in the way of the guns.
The Olympic Games were a somewhat later casualty. Soon after the Los Angeles games of 1932, at which the Japanese and especially their swimming team did well, sentiment began to grow for having the 1940 games in Tokyo. By the time purposeful campaigning began Hitler was chancellor of Germany. So, had circumstances not intervened, the world would have had two sets of fervently nationalistic games in a row. The Japanese returned the franchise even before developments in Europe made the games impossible. Developments in Asia had already made them impossible, or so the official view was, for Japan. The war with China, which the Japanese go on calling the China Incident, began the year after the Berlin Olympics.
A delegation set off for Berlin in the summer of 1935. It went by the Trans-Siberian Railway and had trouble with the Russians. Among the lavish presents to Hitler was a gold sword. It was confiscated at the border, but eventually reached Berlin by diplomatic channels. The Tokyo city representative at the Berlin Olympics did not come home. He stayed on in the United States, by way of which he was returning, and took a position at Northwestern University.
Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Olympics on the day before the 1936 (or Nazi) Olympics began. The Japanese did well in them too (for the first time a Japanese woman won a gold medal), but behaved so badly that the Japanese embassy in Berlin got off a special report to the minister of education. Fighting and slashing occurred on the ship back to Yokohama. The samurai spirit was in command.
It was in firmer and firmer control at home too. The turnover of prime ministers was brisk in those days. Three of the six men who held the office during the four years after the Berlin Olympics were from the army or navy. Midway through the four years the Japanese announced that they must give up the Olympics. The reason was that not enough steel for a stadium could be spared from the China Incident. The original plans called for enough steel to build a destroyer. They were cut almost in half, but the government decided that even that quantity would be difficult to come by. The main installations were to be on the Komazawa golf links, far out in Setagaya, farthest to the southwest of the new wards. There was to be a gymnasium in Kanda. The golf links are now Komazawa Park, where a part of the 1964 Olympics took place.
Had the games been held, they would have been doubly nationalistic. The year 1940 was the Zero Year from which the famous fighting plane took its designation. It was the year 2600 by the traditional, mythical reckoning of the age of the Japanese empire—which was, in the patriotic view, now twenty-six centuries old. It was a year to be observed.
Besides the Olympics, there was to be a world’s fair, which was also called off. It too would have been markedly nationalistic, and it was changed to something explicitly so, the Zero Year celebrations. The sense in high places was that something was needed to shake the populace out of its gloom and make it buoyant and positive once more. By 1940 it was becoming apparent that the Chinese problem did not admit of a simple solution. Most of the Chinese cities had fallen, and yet resistance went on, pertinaciously. Sacrifice or humiliation, or perhaps both, seemed to lie ahead.
Plans for the fair got as
far as Shinto propitiatory rites to the gods whose land, by the bay in Yokohama and at the mouths of the Sumida in Tokyo, was to be disturbed. Tickets went on sale and sold well. Kachitokibashi, Bridge of the Triumphant Shout, the farthest downstream of the Sumida bridges and the newest of the prewar ones, was built for the occasion. Missions were sent abroad to stir up interest. And then, also in the summer of 1938, the government announced its opinion that the fair, along with the Olympics, should be postponed. So the city got the less expensive Zero Year observances instead. There was talk of moving City Hall to Tsukishima, the reclaimed island that was to be the fair site. Reports of profiteering caused the idea to be dismissed. The mayor, who had earlier been governor, was among the cleaner ones. It seems a pity now that City Hall did not move then. It might not now be moving out of Edo.
The twenty-six-hundredth birthday of the nation fell, by traditional if unreliable reckoning, on February 11, 1940. There were parades and a river carnival on that day but, because February is one of the coldest months of the year, the culminating celebrations occurred in clement November. In the summer the city (not the nation) had an eminent guest, Pu-yi, the puppet emperor of Manchuria. The city itself invited him, doing so, said the mayor, in cooperation with the cities of China and Manchuria, the two treated of course as separate political entities. The mayor went on to say that he had no doubt of the resolve of the city to attain to the lofty ideals upon which the nation was founded and climb to the pinnacle of world culture. Such was the rhetoric of the day.
The nation held rallies in the palace plaza on November 10 and 11. Their Majesties attended. The second rally was a big picnic at which everyone, including Their Majesties, ate army field rations. The nation was much moved, newspapers tell us. On November 12 the city had a big banquet in a restaurant across from the plaza, and on November 13 a rally in the Meiji Gardens that was twice as big as the one on the tenth. It wistfully imitated the lost Olympics. A sacred flame was brought by relay from the Kashiwara Shrine, south of Nara. Built in Meiji, the Kashiwara occupies the legendary site of the palace where the first emperor assumed the throne. The flame arrived on November 11 and was kept in the mayor’s office until time to run it to the gardens.
A flower trolley
Festive observances had been banned because of the Crisis, but the ban was lifted for five days. Floats and portable shrines (mikoshi, or “god seats”) and lantern processions were so numerous that it was as if local festivals, usually scattered over the landscape and the seasons, were taking place all together. “Flower trolleys,” the vehicles decorated for great public occasions, ran all through the city. And then on the fifteenth there were posters: “The fun is over. Let’s get back to work.”
Secondary observances furthered the cause of bringing the eight directions (as the slogan of the day had it) under one roof, the Japanese one: international conferences for writers, educators, and young people, a conference on “building the new East Asia,” a tournament in the martial arts and a more conventional athletic meet.
The closing pages of Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters include scenes set in Tokyo in the autumn of 1940, as the Makioka family makes another attempt, this one successful, to marry off its third daughter. Tanizaki conveys very nicely the fervor which the Japanese are so good at mustering up on such occasions; he manages to suggest as well, from his Kansai vantage point, that it is a peculiarly Tokyo-like kind of silliness. Among the principals in the marriage negotiations is a bustling lady journalist who is busy as can be. She is speaking.
“And the day after that a meeting to organize the Rule Assistance Association. And the festival of the Yasukuni Shrine is going on, and on the twenty-first there is a parade. Oh, Tokyo is just full of excitement. All the hotels are overflowing. That reminds me—the Imperial has twice as many people as it can handle. We got you a room, but not much of a room.”
The Rule Assistance Association was an invention of Prince Konoe’s to advance “spiritual mobilization,” which is to say totalitarianism. The Yasukuni, northwest of the palace, was and continues to be the shrine where war dead are venerated. The Imperial is of course the Frank Lloyd Wright building that was completed just before the 1923 earthquake and came safely through it.
Among the proposals by way of getting ready for the Zero Year celebrations was that the palace plaza be made a broader and more continuous expanse by putting the streets that crossed it underground. The proposal was rejected as undignified and risky, with the sacred royal presence so near at hand, though, relying on private contributions and voluntary labor, the city did tidy the plaza up somewhat. Proposals for tunneling under the palace grounds have been dismissed in the years since for similar reasons. Far larger than the grounds of Buckingham Palace or the White House, they go on inconveniencing rapid public transit. Everything moving between Tokyo Central Station and the busiest station in the city, Shinjuku, must make a detour around them.
The authorities were having their repressive way in matters that may seem trivial and even ludicrous but to them must have seemed important. They could clearly have their way in the naming of cigarettes, tobacco being a public monopoly. So cigarettes formerly known by the English names Golden Bat and Cherry took Japanese names. Yet it is not easy to judge how much was done by force and how much by suggestion. The pressure on popular entertainers to do the popular thing must be very strong, and so it may be that some of them acquiesced in what was expected of them before they were told. A singer who had called himself Dick Mine became Mine Kōichi. Back in freer days a comedian had taken a name, Fujiwara Kamatari, that now was deemed irreverent. There had been a historical Fujiwara Kamatari a dozen centuries before, the founder of the great Fujiwara clan and so a forebear of the royal family. The comedian took a different name.
The pattern was by no means consistent, however. A minister of education sought to extirpate the words “mama” and “papa” from the language, and he was not successful. The pair was so firmly rooted that many a child would not have known what to put in its place. A comic ensemble known as the Akireta Boys, who provided song and patter to the accompaniment of a guitar, became the Milk Brothers. The second word in the earlier designation had been the English one. Now both words were English. Akireta means something like “absurd” or “egregious,” and was thought not to accord well with the solemnity of the times. Two of the boys called themselves Shiba Rie and Bōya Saburō, which is to say, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer. “Chevalier” died before the change from Akireta Boys to Milk Brothers. “Boyer” did not change his name.
Though more gradually, the war was doing to the reviews what the earthquake had done to the opera. A little Kafū vignette written in 1942 is set in the dressing room of the Opera House in Asakusa, among the places he loved best. A cannon booms onstage and the smell of gunpowder comes drifting up to the dressing room; the actors are in military uniform. Guns and gunpowder had come to the review houses some years earlier, as inspirational pieces came to prevail over eroticism.
Kafū was strongly opposed to the war, and once it had entered its Pacific phase he did almost the only thing a dissident could do: he lapsed into silence. Yet his writings for the Asakusa review houses tell us that he engaged in a kind of self-censorship, and suggest too what was happening to the houses. In 1938 he did the libretto for a two-act operetta called Katsushika Romance (Katsushika Jōwa). It had a ten-day run at the Opera House. Katsushika is the name of an old county and a new ward, the farthest northeast of the thirty-five wards. After the war he wrote three skits for the Asakusa burlesque houses. One senses in these skits the somewhat lubricious thing he would have liked to write, in the operetta the sort of thing he felt constrained to write if he was to write for his girls at the Opera House at all. It is a very moral piece, preaching the good old virtues of loyalty and sacrifice. It is tearful, thin, abstract, and didactic.
There are three principal characters, each of whom has solos, and a chorus. In t
he first act the tenor is courting a bus conductor. Almost all bus conductors, from the earliest days of the calling, were young women. She is swept off to the city by a gang of movie people who will make her a star. They have spotted her on her bus and noted a close resemblance to a person who is already a star. This is her solo as she gets swept off:
Location
Through the long spring days
Location
Such a happy path
Such an amusing way to live
Sing, dance
Dance, sing
The scarlet lights of the city beckon
They beckon, those lights
Hurry home
Fly away, automobile
Sing, make haste
Make haste, sing
The word “location,” indicating a movie location, is in English. The syllable count irregularly follows the alternation of sevens and fives that is standard in Japanese balladry.
In the second act the tenor is married to a girl who in the first act kept a little refreshment stall on the far bank of the Arakawa Drainage Channel. The young wife is about to go off and buy medicine for their colicky baby. The tenor goes in her place, for he is a good husband and it is beginning to rain. The erstwhile bus conductor enters, forlorn and bedraggled.
It is all a dream now
The city excitement I yearned for
I cast off love
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 45