Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Asakusa and Ginza were not in the close competition that a theater count might suggest. Greater Ginza had the Kabukiza, the “cypress stage” (the Big Apple, so to speak), which overshadowed all other Kabuki theaters. It had two other big theaters for live productions of a traditional sort. For concerts and recitals to please cosmopolitan tastes it had the Imperial and Hibiya Hall. It had the Nichigeki and the Takarazuka (known to Americans of the Occupation as the Ernie Pyle). Most important, it was the leader, the center of things, the place where one went in search of Culture. The girls at the Nichigeki could be fairly ero and those at the Takarazuka rather guro, but quality was there, as it was not at Asakusa, for those who wanted it and could pay for it.

  Ginza had almost a monopoly on foreign performers, who began streaming in at about the time of the First World War, and continued to do so until the Crisis began looming too threateningly. The Shimbashi geisha was on the rise and the Yoshiwara geisha on the decline, surviving, indeed, only vestigially. The geisha of the Asakusa district proper, just behind the temple, had never had great prestige. The few children of Edo who were still around to observe Ginza so much at the center of things must have thought it all very odd. The Ginza of late Edo had not amounted to much in the realm of refined pleasure and vulgar entertainment, and Asakusa had been everything.

  Cafés and coffeehouses in Ginza

  The Meiji elite had sought to improve Kabuki, by which was meant to remove it from its crass mercantile origins and make it into something elevated and edifying. The West came into Kabuki. The first and second Sadanji, gifted actors, father and son, experimented seriously with Western forms and a new realism, which did not go to the extreme of using actresses. And Western spectators came to Kabuki, and found it good, and so the Meiji effort, based largely on feelings of cultural inferiority, came to seem meaningless. Meiji wanted a theatrical form which it need not be ashamed of before the world, and was surprised to find that it already had one.

  Kansai Kabuki was all the while declining. Tanizaki’s Makioka sisters, all of them thoroughly and almost aggressively Osakan in their tastes, prefer Tokyo Kabuki. Several of the most famous and gifted actors of our day have Kansai origins, but they have had to make names for themselves in Tokyo.

  During the interwar years geisha had their go at improvement. In 1905 the metropolitan police banned public performances by geisha. In their search for a way around the ban, the Shimbashi geisha hit upon the idea of seeking permission to sing and dance in their own theater. Determination prevailed, permission was granted, and the theater was built. Work on the Shimbashi Embujō (the second element in the name means something not far from “dance hall,” though the spirit is very different) began in 1923. It ran into the earthquake and was not completed until 1925. The opening program, in April of that year, was a gala recital of classical dances by Shimbashi geisha, the Azuma Odori, Dance of the East, in contradistinction to the Miyako Odori, Dance of the Capital, or Kyoto. The geisha at first used their theater three months a year and rented it out for the other months. Having made their point, they allowed improvement to withdraw into the background. In 1934 they leased the Embujō to Shōchiku. Thereafter it became a sort of adjunct to the Kabukiza, a few paces up the canal. Dances of the East, and geisha, were less prominent. The grand recital is now an annual affair, a springtide observance.

  Whatever Kawabata may have meant by the high-quality thing that was not to be found in Asakusa, the suggestion is very strong from Scarlet Gang of Asakusa that the sideshows in the tents and huts scattered around Asakusa Park were near the bottom. From them grew a little genre that had a very brief career and may be considered an original Japanese contribution to the performing arts. It was done in by television, a form, or device, for which Japan can claim no credit. From as early as Meiji, storytellers had used silhouette figures by way of illustration, a little as the shadow performers of southern Asia do. Early in the Shōwa Period they emerged from their shelters and took to the streets, taking with them not cumbersome figures but readily transportable cards. So the kamishibai, the “paper show,” came to be. Kamishibai persons, mostly men, went the rounds of the city with their cards and boxes of sweets on bicycles. In vacant lots and the like they would summon together very young audiences, whom they would hold with illustrated stories and sell the sweets to. Their best days were in the thirties. They fell in nicely with the nationalism of the time, and those who were very young when they were flourishing tell us that their representations of Anglo-American beasts were very vivid indeed. These disappeared after 1945, though the appeal to manly little fellows who went around beating one another with bamboo swords continued. Kamishibai seemed an indispensable part of the city and its street life, but it quickly surrendered before television, its career having lasted a generation or so.

  Another graphic form, much nearer the bottom, many would say, than kamishibai, also had its beginnings in the years between the wars, and continues to flourish. What are called comics are probably today the only presence gigantic enough to rival television. The cartoon, often comic, has a venerable and estimable tradition, centuries old. The panel narrative, the form that so inundates our day, had its beginnings just after the earthquake. The very earliest ones were self-contained episodes in four frames. The Asahi and the Hōchi both had cartoon strips, tending toward slapstick, from late 1923. The first extended narrative was also something the Asahi thought up. It began in 1926, and so “comics” became earnest. Today, in their pursuit of sex and violence, they are more than earnest. They are grim. Whether or not their origins can be blamed on the confusion that followed the earthquake, that is where they are.

  Though, as we have seen, there had earlier been faltering essays in the direction of professional baseball, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and some others came to Japan in 1934, and that same year Shōriki and the Yomiuri put together their Giants. So professional baseball began in great earnest. A very young Japanese pitcher became a national hero by holding the Babe to one hit out of three times at bat. He finally lost this now legendary game, 1-0, but it was a moral victory if ever there could be such a thing. In 1936 a professional league got underway. It had three Tokyo teams and two each from Nagoya and Osaka. One of the Nagoya teams, the Goldfish, beat the Giants in the initial game, but the Nagoya Dragons, successors to the Goldfish, have had nothing like the success and popularity of the Giants. “Goldfish” is not a good translation. They really were the Gold Leviathans of the Castle Donjon, with reference to Nagoya Castle and the maritime monsters that decorate the ridge ends of its donjon. The names in general were more imaginative than they are today, when lions and tigers and giants, all in English, predominate. One Tokyo team was named the Senators, also in English, albeit Japan may have seen some senators but has never had one. Only the Giants (Tokyo and the Yomiuri still) and the Tigers (Osaka) survive of the original names.

  Baseball was required to pretend, as the Crisis deepened, that it had never been anything but a Japanese game. All the American terms, “strike” and “ball” and “pitcher” and the like, part of every young person’s vocabulary, were translated into Japanese. There is a very funny scene in a movie about the war in which a game has trouble proceeding because no one can remember the words with which to make it do so. The Crisis cast its shadow in other ways. A grenade-throwing contest was offered as a special attraction at a Giants game in 1942. This occurred at the Kōrakuen Stadium, which, in 1937, became the premier baseball park of the city. It stands on what had been the main Edo estate of the Mito Tokugawa family. In 1943 baseball players changed to unnumbered khaki uniforms and were required to salute one another. Professional baseball held out longer than many other diversions and in the end disbanded voluntarily. In November 1944, the Patriotic Baseball Association, as the league had become, announced a recess in its activities.

  The Japanese in these years were acquiring a certain amount of international sports fame not for their baseball playing but for the
ir swimming. If the 1940 Olympics had come to be, they might well have been a demonstration of national (not to say racial) superiority such as Hitler hoped to offer at Berlin in 1936. Though a source of great pride, however, swimming produced only intermittent bursts of enthusiasm. It was becoming sadly that way with Sumō as well. The national accomplishment has not in recent decades held the continuing interest of the nation as baseball has. Here too there were bursts of enthusiasm, a very intense one coming during the years before the Pacific War. It was brought on by the achievements of Futabayama, the most famous modern wrestler, and probably the most famous in the whole long history of the sport. He had the attention of NHK, the national broadcasting system, as no talented wrestler had had it before him.

  January 15, 1939 (the year of the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union), was a day on which the whole nation gasped. Until that evening Futabayama had had a streak of sixty-nine victories, extending over a half dozen tournaments and three years. It was and continues to be the longest in the history of Sumō. January 15 was the fourth day of the Tokyo spring tournament, so called although it takes place in the coldest part of winter. Futabayama failed to win his seventieth victory. He lost to a younger wrestler of lesser rank who some years later reached the top rank but whose place in history was really achieved during those few seconds.

  Futabayama retired in 1945. For a time after the war his image suffered because of his adherence to a parvenu religion (there were scores of them in those days) that did not seem very dignified. He returned to head the Sumō Association in 1957 and clear up the confusion that had caused his predecessor to attempt suicide. This unhappy episode is one in the long history of making Sumō, or so it is said, modern and not feudal. Futabayama died, still in his fifties, in 1968. Because of the demands which great corpulence makes on the vital organs, wrestlers tend not to live long lives. Sumō did not, like baseball, declare itself out of business. It persisted through the war. Two tournaments were held in 1945, one before and one after the coming of the Americans.

  In these darkling days there were other matters to keep the city interested, incidents sometimes sentimental and sometimes chilling. The city and the nation have never been afraid to risk being sentimental—or perhaps the point is that they define the expression differently, being tolerant as other places might not be of effusive emotional outpourings.

  High among the warming items is the story of the faithful dog Hachikō. The name means something like “Number Eight,” or possibly, since it has an intimate, affectionate ring and is masculine, “Good Old Octavius.” Hachikō was an Akita dog that died on March 8, 1935. For a decade or so before that he had appeared regularly each evening at Shibuya Station, faithful to his practice of seeing his master home from work. Each night he lay waiting as train after train came in. No one could explain that the master was dead. A statue of Hachikō was erected in front of the station about a year before his death. The statue fell victim to the wartime shortage of metals, but a replacement has gone up since the war, and is one of the objects in the city almost everyone knows. Shibuya is now a most bustling sakariba (it was not yet within the city limits when Hachikō’s master died). When people meet at the station, at Hachikō’s feet is the place where they most commonly arrange to do it. There can be no mistakes.

  The statue of faithful Hachikō, as it is today in Shihuya

  At least one noted European was swept up in the outpourings. Shortly before Hachikō died the German architect Bruno Taut spoke admiringly in his diary of the dog he kept seeing in front of the station. (Because of Taut’s writings it was standard for a half century, especially in Japan, to deplore the architectural endeavors of the shoguns and to glorify those of the Kyoto court. A reaction has recently set in, and it is possible once more, without demonstrating one’s own bad taste, to aver that that of the Tokugawas and their minions was not uniformly bad.) Hachikō had a very grand funeral, and now, stuffed, is in the collection of the National Science Museum at Ueno.

  As with so many warming stories, there is another side to this one, having to do with Hachikō’s motives, of which we will never know the whole truth. Such observers of his behavior as the novelist Ooka Shōhei have held that he did not go to the station in the evening at all, but hung around it the whole day through, waiting to be fed. The station attendants were kinder to him than the people at home—and it may be that they recognized a good story when they saw one. If so, they were very successful. They gave Shibuya its most famous landmark.

  Tokyo criminals have always had a certain flair, and sometimes it has seemed that a wish to be apprehended is among their peculiarities. The Tokyo police probably deserve their reputation for effectiveness, and yet one sometimes wonders. How would they perform if they had the unruly, uncooperative citizenry of Chicago or Marseilles to put up with? There was, for instance, the preaching thief who broke into more than a hundred houses from 1927 into 1929. He never harmed anyone, and did not mind being seen. After having chosen what he wanted to take with him, he would stay for a while and talk with his victims, pointing out to them the advantages of watchdogs and well-bolted doors. He left behind fingerprints in the house of a rice merchant in Itabashi, in the northern suburbs, and yet he went on stealing and preaching for some months before he was apprehended, early in 1929. He proved to be a craftsman in the building trades.

  The most celebrated criminals of Meiji were murderesses, and the most celebrated criminal of early Shōwa was a murderess. The early decades of the twentieth century did not produce a Tokyo murderess whose accomplishments became legendary, as did those of Takahashi O-den in early Meiji. To say, as is often said, that the newspapers turned with eager delight to the case of O-sada for relief from the gloom of the February 26 Incident, the military rising of that day in 1936, would probably be to exaggerate. They probably would have loved O-sada in any case. The gloom seems to have dispelled itself rather quickly, especially in the poorer parts of the city, in which O-sada did her thing. Retail sales fell off drastically in rich Nihombashi, and especially at its richest store, the Mitsukoshi, but were relatively unaffected at the Matsuya in Asakusa. Expensive seats at the Kabukiza went unsold, but not cheap ones. It is true that there were also empty seats at the Asakusa review houses—but we have seen that they had High City intellectual types among their fanciers.

  O-sada the murderess under arrest

  It was in May 1936, in any event, that Abe Sada, familiarly known as O-sada, did it. For a week she had been staying at a machiai, an inn catering to amorous trysters, with her employer, a restaurant owner in the western part of the city. The machiai was in Arakawa, that most populous of the new wards, near the northern limits. The man was in his early forties, she in her early thirties. On May 18 he was found strangled. His sexual organs had been cut away and were not on the premises. On May 20 O-sada was apprehended near Shinagawa Station. She had the organs on her person, and his underwear as well.

  She was sentenced to a prison term and released from the Tochigi Women’s Prison in 1941. For some years she ran a drinking place on the outskirts of Asakusa. Then she disappeared. Recently she has been traced to a Buddhist nunnery in the Kansai. Predictably, she had imitators, none of them remotely as famous as she.

  Much black humor was inspired by the O-sada affair. The verb “to cut” also functions as “to punch,” as of a bus ticket. Great was the merriment, therefore, when the “red collar” girls on the buses would go about with their standard petition: “Allow me, please, to cut those that have not already been cut.” The murder also inspired a superior work of art which demonstrates that the Japanese can still turn out fine pornography, as they did under the shoguns. The moving picture In the Realm of the Senses contains hard-core scenes, and has great visual beauty and a suffocating intensity; and it is a reasonably authentic retelling of the O-sada story. The actor who played O-sada’s friend is still very prominent. The actress who played O-sada has quite disappeared from s
ight.

  Voguish words of the time inform us with concreteness and immediacy of what we would have known anyway, that Taishō democracy was over and more somber times had come. Neologisms stream in and out of Japanese at a rate perhaps unrivaled among major languages, and tell us what is fashionable and socially acceptable. The minister of education did not succeed in evicting “mama” and “papa” from the language, but newspapers and radio and the advertising agencies, overwhelmingly in and controlled from Tokyo, could be brought into line and made to use only worthwhile words, appropriate to the Crisis.

  As late as the mid-thirties we still have foreign words and expressions in ample numbers, some of them imported in finished form, some of them fabricated from imported elements. “Air girl,” for stewardess, has disappeared from the language. “Yo-yo” might still be recognized by fair numbers of people, but the word itself is no longer to be found in standard dictionaries. “Hiking” is still very much with us.

  Sufu was among the last foreign words in vogue before the decade of exclusiveness and xenophobia began, and widely used neologisms came for the most part to have native or Chinese origins. It would be as difficult to eliminate a Chinese influence from Japanese as a Latin one from English. One might as well try to eliminate the language itself. Sufu remains in the language, but probably most Japanese would be as slow as most foreigners to recognize its foreignness. It is an acronym from the Japanese pronunciation of “staple fiber,” the phonetic patterns of the language requiring a muted “u” after each of the initial consonants. Good cotton and wool almost disappeared during the war. Sufu took their place. Some varieties tended to go to pieces in water, and so sea bathing suffered. Being foreign and decadent, it would have suffered anyway.