Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  And soon was cast off by the world

  Mired in filth and shame

  A scrap of paper blown by the wind

  Down among the fallen leaves

  Trampled at the wayside

  No one to pity me….

  Bars, cafés, here, there

  And I, homeless

  A fallen leaf, soaked by autumn rains

  Going where the wind blows

  Clutching at my breast

  Having allowed just enough time for the solo to finish, the young wife’s uncle enters. Her father is in jail. Money is needed for the defense. It saddens him deeply to ask it, but will she not indenture herself to the pleasure quarters? The bus conductor steps forward and offers to make the sacrifice herself. She is in any event “mired in filth and shame.” The young husband and wife must live out their lives, long ones, be it hoped, in happiness.

  Let it be so

  A body sunk in the slough

  Does not matter

  Filthy

  Let it sink

  What matters it where

  To make up for the betrayal

  To help him who was betrayed

  I gladly make the sacrifice

  It is the world of Meiji Kabuki, whose mission was to praise virtue and chastise vice. Even more, perhaps, it is the world of Shimpa, “the New School,” a hybrid melodramatic form, its origins in mid-Meiji, that retained female impersonators but experimented with more realistic styles of acting. The women of Shimpa are always sacrificing themselves to men who are happy to let them do it, and scarcely seem worth the trouble. They tend to be nobler the deeper mired in filth they are. Little of the early eroticism remains in Kafū’s operetta save the scantily clad figure of the ruined woman.

  After the war, with enfeebled police and an American Occupation indifferent to such matters, Kafū let himself go. The most amusing of his skits for the burlesque or strip theaters is called What Happened the Night the Lights Went Out (Teiden no Yoru no Dekigoto). It is without music, one act and three scenes. The central figure is a woman kept by an elderly man whose business is unclear but conveniently has him out of town for protracted periods. In the first scene she is out of the house and her housemaid is dallying with the laundry boy.

  “‘Don’t. It tickles.’ As she writhes and seems about to fall face up from the window frame, Yamaoka takes her in his arms. Her legs inside, her torso outside, she reveals her thighs as she pulls herself upright. At that moment there is a sound in the hall.” It is the woman, who gets measured in delicious detail by her seamstress.

  Her patron appears and tells her that he must be in Osaka for some days. She cajoles and caresses, and when he goes out she says, “This isn’t the easiest business in the world to be in.” The second scene is a dream. A young lieutenant and a baby figure in it. “When,” he asks, “will war disappear from human affairs?” Antiwar platitudes were de rigueur in the postwar years. It may be said for Kafū that he had more right to utter them than did most writers and intellectuals.

  In the third scene the lights have gone out. It is something they often did in those years. A police admonition is circulated. People must be on guard, this dark night, against robbers. A young robber appears. She invites him to stay the night. He is in the process of stripping her when an elderly robber appears. (There is kissing, taboo before 1945, in the first and third scenes.) She sends an inquisitive policeman on his way, allowing the elderly robber to escape. The lights have meanwhile come on again. “Aiko smiles and turns off the light. Putting tissue in the bosom of her kimono, she kneels on the bedding. The curtain falls. Only a humming of insects breaks the silence.”

  What Happened the Night the Lights Went Out was presented at an Asakusa theater in March and April 1949. Another skit, called Love Suicide at Hatonomachi (Shinjū Hatonomachi), was presented at the same theater in 1949, and again in 1950, this time at the Rokkuza (House of the Sixth District), most famous of the Asakusa strip places. Kafū himself appeared in both versions. With a different title, which might be rendered Springtide Passion in Hatonomachi (Shunjō Hatonomachi), the piece was made into a movie. Hatonomachi was a “private” or unlicensed pleasure quarter east of the Sumida, successor to the Tamanoi district that had attracted Kafū a decade earlier (see pages 335-336).

  In the Tamanoi “den of unlicensed whores” about 1932

  All the varieties of girls and their customers pass in review, sincere ones and frivolous ones, responsible ones and irresponsible ones, girls who rather enjoy their work and girls who are in it because they have no other way to help straitened parents and siblings. A sincere man who has been betrayed by a woman and a sincere woman who has been betrayed by a man go off and commit suicide together. The high moral posture of the Katsushika piece is certainly not wanting in the postwar pieces, and we have a new strain of didacticism, the pacifist sermon. There is, however, a pronounced strain of the ero and the guro, even though it may seem bland and inoffensive by the standards of our own day. It is missing from the Katsushika piece. Patriotic ideologues made Asakusa do without these little pleasures as its best day was coming to an end.

  Like Asakusa itself and its reviews, chronicles of Asakusa come to have a thin, attenuated look. Kawabata wrote little about Asakusa after his interest moved on to the snowy parts of the land (specifically, Niigata Prefecture—the first installment of Snow Country appeared in 1935). Kafū’s diary is full of interesting bits about Asakusa and the pleasure quarters to the north and east, and he wrote poignantly of the warmth and dirt and uselessness of life in the review halls.

  The most famous chronicle of Asakusa on the eve of the “Pacific War” is Under What Stars (Ikanaru Hoshi no Shita ni) by Takami Jun. Although almost three decades younger, and although a bar sinister intervenes, Takami seems to have been Kafū’s first cousin. His mother was unmarried, and his father, a governor of Fukui Prefecture, was a younger brother of Kafū’s father. Under What Stars is commonly treated as a “novel of customs and manners,” specifically those of Asakusa. It was published in 1939 and 1940, and is set a year or two earlier. Asakusa does not by any means emerge as the sensual, tactile presence that it is in Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. The consensus is that Takami’s work is the better novel of the two, and so the trouble may be that Asakusa was not, at the end of the thirties, the presence it had been at the beginning.

  Much of the reporting does not go beyond what we already know. We hear, for instance, about the unjust and rigid class structure of the review houses, with the dancers forever at the bottom. We learn, as we learned from Kawabata, that they worked hard. “The Asakusa theaters are such hard work that the girls immediately begin to put on weight when they leave. Misako was doing it too, in that particular way, like a sudden bursting when the hoops that have held the staves together are removed.”

  There is a conspicuous new institution in Asakusa, but it lies outside of the Sixth District. Shōchiku opened its Kokusai Gekijō or International Theater (which has recently been torn down that a hotel might be put up) in 1937. Takami reports that its devotees, mostly women, marched eyes-front from the subway to their theater and back again, and did not set foot in the Sixth District. Devotees of the opera and the reviews had been mostly male. For obscure reasons, all-girl troupes attract overwhelmingly feminine audiences, and the Kokusai had one of these.

  Under What Stars is occasionally amusing. It obliquely informs us that the patriots were not wholly successful at stamping out corrupt Western influences. One of the review performers has the most unlikely name Bottlernouth. This is so that his full name can be pronounced Bingu Kurosubei, which is to say, Bing Crosby. What is best about the book, however, is less a matter of character and action and (what Scarlet Gang is so very good at) reporting than of mood. The good days are over. The action is coming to an end.

  “The famous old places of Asakusa had b
een abandoned. The aquarium, said to be the birthplace of the Asakusa reviews, was in a state of advanced neglect, the subject of weird stories. Late at night, it was said, you could hear the sound of tap dancing on the roof. It has since been torn down, and so those who loved the Casino Folies have lost all trace of their dream.” The time is late 1938.

  Asakusa owed much of its vitality in the late Edo years and on into the first Tokyo century to the fact that it was on the edge of town. To keep mischievous things from the center, the shogunate moved the Yoshiwara there, and, much later, the Kabuki as well. Still on the edge of all the urban excitement, but now on the wrong edge, Asakusa could not keep them. It had a terminal department store, the Matsuya, where the subway ended and whence a private railway departed for Nikko and other points in that direction, but for the most part it was a district of small family shops. Old ones held on with admirable tenacity; new ones did not come.

  In a 1939 essay called “Nesoberu Asakusa,” which might be rendered “Asakusa All Sprawled Out,” or “Asakusa Supine,” Takami compares Ginza and Asakusa.

  Asakusa does not have face and obverse. Ginza has a provocative surface and little of substance, a certain emptiness, behind it. Asakusa sets forth a peculiar kind of warmth right there in front of you, and does not hide an inconsistency, a makeshift quality. It is like a jazz record blaring forth in an alien tongue. When it does not blare it goes to the other extreme and becomes all shyness and awkwardness, as of a girl with an old-fashioned coiffure and an advanced bathing suit. There are none of the voguish places which, in the Ginza fashion, have cover charges. That is not quite true. We have recently witnessed the opening of “grand tea salons,” such as the Purple Gold and the Grand Harbor. They do have minimal cover charges, but, like the places that depend on the subway, they lie outside the Sixth District. In sum: there may be a surface resemblance to Ginza, but it is like a ringworm. It has not penetrated to the heart of Asakusa conservatism….

  The Asakusa subway tower

  Here too there is an inconsistency. The young heirs to the Asakusa shops are modern boys, not apparently conservative at all. Their hair is in I forget what advanced style and their trousers are tight. Dance halls no longer interest them. In their spare time they speed about in borrowed Datsuns. And their talk is all of Ginza….

  [The girls in Asakusa drinking places] spend their holidays in Ginza. I could give any number of examples. Asakusa yearns for Ginza…. And does Ginza do the reverse? Do Ginza people come to Asakusa on their holidays? They do not. They have a low opinion of Asakusa.

  At this point Takami refer to Kawabata’s view that nothing in Asakusa is of the highest quality. Takami continues:

  Asakusa has an unshakable standing as a place of crowds and noise [sakariba], but it is indeed of a lower quality than Ginza. The pull of Ginza for the child of Asakusa may well be the pull of the best for the next best.

  Ginza, the best, always seems ready for battle. Asakusa lies supine. Pleasure seekers in Ginza are always on their mettle. Pleasure should mean relaxing, letting things go.

  Further evidence that foreign poisons had not been completely expunged, the adjectival element in the name Grand Harbor is in English.

  It is an ambiguous passage, and it may seem inconsistent with certain statements in Under What Stars, in which we learn, for instance, that girls from Ginza places choose Asakusa for their private conversations because they are not likely to encounter Ginza customers there. It does not much matter which is literally true. Takami is praising the openness and the conservatism of Asakusa, but he is also telling us that there is something a bit less than truly professional about Asakusa. For that, one goes to Ginza. If a Ginza girl does sometimes have a little tête-à-tête in Asakusa, that is because the Ginza clientele is the one that matters, and it is sometimes to be avoided. Takami did not think to make the comparison that would be the most obvious today, between Ginza and the western sakariba, Ikebukuro and Shinjuku and Shibuya.

  Kafū never seemed to give up on Asakusa. One cold night during the last full year of the war he recorded the closing of the Opera House, his Asakusa favorite. It is a touching entry. “As I passed the lane of shops …on my way to the subway, I found myself weeping again…. I have been witness to it all, Tokyo going to ruins.”

  The closing of the theaters brought an end not only to the reviews but to Asakusa as a leader of popular culture. After the war came the burlesque and strip houses, which tended to lack imagination, and in which Asakusa often seemed to be imitating and following Shinjuku. Yet Kafū went on liking Asakusa better than any other part of the city. When, in his last years, he went into the city at all from the suburban dwelling that was his last, it was most commonly to Asakusa.

  Nor did Takami immediately give up. Through the war years he went on finding reserves in Asakusa. It goes on drawing factory workers from east of the river, he observes in a 1944 essay called “Enticement and Solace” (“Ian to Miryoku”), as Kinshichō, a sakariba built especially for the district, does not. Kinshichō is an entertainment cluster, mostly of movie houses, in Honjo Ward, since 1947 a part of Sumida Ward, near the eastern limits of the city as they were before 1932. It was developed in the thirties by entrepreneurs who thought that what was happening along the western fringes of the city might be made to happen along the eastern fringes as well. Though it was not a complete failure, it fell very far short of becoming a Shinjuku. Not inclined to go as far as Shinjuku, the proletariat of the eastern wards still preferred Asakusa to the more convenient Kinshichō. Takami has an interesting explanation. Kinshichō “has all the facilities, but the attraction of Asakusa is simply not there. Unlike Asakusa, it has no tradition. It has theaters and they have nothing behind them. We may draw a moral from this.”

  It is an interesting theory, but one which the facts do not support. Shinjuku and Shibuya flourished. Newest and smallest of the Five Mouths of Edo, Shinjuku was a place with a thin tradition, and Shibuya was a place where scarcely the most delicate film of it was to be detected.

  The bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia were more important than the proletariat, and they were going west. Takami did lose interest in Asakusa after the war. So did many others who had been among the celebrities during the good years. In his postscript to a collection of essays he edited about Asakusa, he says that his initial inclination was to decline the task. The Asakusa of recent years has meant so little to him. It is a statement repeated with variations in responses to a questionnaire about Asakusa carried in the same collection.

  “I never go there,” says Enoken. “The Asakusa I knew is thirteen and fourteen years in the past,” says Mochizuki Yūko, Japan’s mother. Tokugawa Musei, most famous of the benshi movie narrators, responds with a poem in seventeen syllables:

  The end of the year.

  The day has come

  When I neglect the place.

  When Kawabata said that Asakusa offered nothing of the first quality, he cannot have been thinking of literature. The Asakusa coterie, if we may call it that—Kawabata himself, Kafū, and Takami—was superior to anything Ginza or Shinjuku has succeeded in putting together. Asakusa attracted the attention of gifted writers as no other part of the city has been able to do, and when it went into its final decline the city lost something irreplaceable.

  In a coffeehouse near where the Kokusai Gekijō, the International Theater, once stood there is a somewhat naive mural by the writer Kata Kōji. It is charming and it is sad. All the Asakusa celebrities of the interwar period are there, with Enoken in the middle. Many of them are dead and none hold forth any longer in Asakusa. The girls of the all-girl troupe at the Kokusai once patronized the coffeehouse. The guests at the hotel that has taken its place do not.

  The Ginza district, generously defined so that it spills over toward Marunouchi and Hibiya Park on the west and Tsukiji on the east, had almost as many movie theaters on the eve of the war as Asakusa h
ad. Ginza proper, in terms of movies and the performing arts, was a sort of valley between two ridges, Marunouchi-Hibiya on the west and Tsukiji on the east. Ginza proper was a place of drinking, eating, and shopping.

  A memento of Asakusa between the wars—Kata Kōji’s mural in the Peter coffeehouse. Chaplin is seated at right; the rumpled, full-length figure in the foreground is Enoken;and Nagai Kafū stands at left, holding an umbrella

  A large movie company dominated each of the two ridges, Tōhō the western one, Shōchiku the eastern. An Osaka firm that moved in on Tokyo late in the Meiji period, Shōchiku came to dominate Tokyo Kabuki. Its canny impresarios quickly recognized the importance of movies, and moved into them as well. Tōhō too was from Osaka. Its origins were in the all-girl Takarazuka review, Takarazuka itself being a suburb of Osaka. From the mid-thirties Tōhō began making movies. In 1932, as a company called Tokyo Takarazuka, it launched an assault on Tokyo, as Shochiku had done some decades earlier. It was never able to loosen the Shōchiku grip on Kabuki, though it tried mightily, but it did very well in the staging and distributing of reviews and movies. By the end of the decade it controlled most of the movie palaces and review and concert halls to the west of Ginza, including the Imperial and the grandest of them all, the Nihon Gekijō, or Japan Theater, on the outer castle moat. In 1943 Tōhō became the legal name of the company. It condenses Tokyo Takarazuka, making use of the first and third of the four Chinese characters with which this last is written.

  The Nichigeki, as everyone calls it, had big and little movie theaters, a chorus line, and strip shows. It was not quite as big as the Shōchiku property, the Kokusai, or International. They were the two largest in the land, the one seating three thousand people, the other a few hundred more. The Kokusai was in Asakusa, however, and so fell victim to the Asakusa malaise. As has just been noted, a hotel now stands on the site. The old Nichigeki too is gone, but the Tōhō movie complex to the west of Ginza, of which a new Nichigeki is a part, now quite overshadows the Shōchiku equivalent to the east. Ginza has tended in a westerly direction, even as the city has.