Many neologisms from the xenophobic decade, such as “spiritual mobilization,” are merely cant. They do not say what they mean, in this instance “totalitarianism.” Others have sinister, threatening overtones. One hopes that the age which produced them will not come again. They speak of loyalty and patriotism gone mad, and they speak of mindlessness. “The eight directions under one roof” could mean nothing more baneful than that all persons are siblings, but the mood of the times left only one possible interpretation, that it was a kind of manifest destiny for the whole world to become Japanese.
It must be admitted that some of the patriotic coinages of the decade are rather clever. “The ABCD encirclement” is good, and contains delicate irony, perhaps unobserved by the coiners. The encirclers are the Americans, the British, the Chinese, and the Dutch. It may be that the French, down in Indochina, got left out because they did not fit the alphabetic sequence. That and the nonaggression pact may be the explanation in the case of the Russians. Be these omissions as they may, the expression could not have caught on without the aid of the Roman alphabet. So a device from hated Europe was put to the uses of Great Japan and its xenophobia.
Kokutai meichō is the sort of thing that lay in wait for Taishō democracy. It is rendered by the biggest Japanese-English dictionary as “clarification of the fundamental concept of national polity.” The expression “national polity” (kokutai) may be put in the realm of cant. It sometimes seems that among the claims of the Japanese to superior uniqueness is that they alone have a polity. The longer expression speaks of an anti-intellectual response to a reasoned and intellectual position.
In 1935 the constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi, whose son was governor of Tokyo from 1967 to 1979, following “the Olympic governor,” published what has come to be known as the theory of the emperor as an organ of the state. This produced a violent reaction on the part of those who thought that the emperor, if not identical with the state, presided over it as a father presides over a family. The “clarification” movement found its highest expression in The Essence of National Polity (Kokutai no Hongi) of 1937. Put together by the Ministry of Education, this treatise condemned individualism, and informed Japanese that they belonged unquestioningly to the emperor as head of the mystical family state; fulfillment lay in service and submission and self-denial. Minobe was prosecuted for lèse-majesté, but no sentence was handed down. He resigned from the House of Peers, to which he had been appointed after his retirement from Tokyo Imperial University. All his works were banned. In 1936 he was attacked by right-wing radicals but escaped with minor wounds. After 1945 he unsuccessfully opposed rewriting the Meiji constitution. He died in 1948, a legend and something of a national hero.
It is but one four-character expression and one series of incidents having to do with one man and his ideas, but in it we have the mood of the times and the travails of the city, intellectual center of the land. Minobe was an independent thinker and a survivor of Taishō democracy. The left wing had already been broken as a concerted movement before his great agony began. Tenkō is among the voguish words of the early thirties. It means something like apostasy, recanting, or disavowal, and is applied to persons, and especially writers and intellectuals, who renounced Marxist beliefs and turned to serving the national polity with more or less enthusiasm. There are many ways, chief among them, perhaps, geographic isolation, to account for the fact that Japan had no organized resistance and no selfless underground martyrs. In any event, it had none. Tenkō prevailed.
In 1946, after such grim wartime expressions as “Anglo American beasts” and “a hundred million fighting to the end” (four Chinese characters state this succinctly), we again have bright and often flippant cosmopolitanism, with such expressions as “après-guerre,” suggesting sometimes hedonism and sometimes new beginnings, and “hubbahubba.”
As there were voguish, trendy words, so too of course there were vogues and trends. All cities have them, but at least since a cult of rabbit fanciers sprang up in early Meiji, Tokyo has had them more furiously and frequently than most places. In 1932 women suddenly all had permanent waves, Japan having learned to produce the equipment necessary for creating them. The year 1933, as we have seen, was that of the yo-yo. Slightly later there was a craze for stamps, not the postage kind but the rubber kind, provided by famous places to give evidence that the earnest, thorough traveler has been to them. The American writer Helen Mears describes, in The Year of the Wild Boar, how the acquiring of stamps seemed to take on its own obsessive importance, greater than the sights behind them. Her boar year, last in the Chinese cycle of twelve, was 1935. As cycles went in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a tranquil one, despite assassinations and the beginnings of the Crisis. The preceding one contained the earthquake, the succeeding one the Pacific War.
Nagai Kafū lamented the loss of harmony when Western techniques and motifs began intruding upon the streets of Edo. Yet it may be said that the Western buildings of Meiji had their own kind of harmony. When, in monumental public building, the wildly fanciful architecture of early Meiji gave way to brick and stone, the major buildings and complexes that resulted, such as Mitsubishi Londontown in Marunouchi and the Bank of Japan in Nihombashi, may not have looked much like Edo, but they did look like one another, and like Western prototypes, a statement that cannot be made about the very earliest excursions into the Western. Now concrete and all its plasticity were coming to the fore, and so, in the years after the earthquake, the eclectic jumble—the miscellany—of today began to emerge. It began to take shape, one might say, but it really has no shape. The twentieth century is the century of fragmentation, and it had come to Tokyo, which was pulled in more directions and ended up with a larger fragment count than most cities.
The Kabukiza, as reconstructed after the earthquake
There were the old and new European styles, modern utilitarian box and Queen Anne side by side in Marunouchi, and there were old Japanese styles done in modern materials. The main building of the National Museum in Ueno and the Kabukiza are probably the chief surviving examples of this last, but there are many others, such as the priestly lodgings behind the Asakusa Kannon. Though gutted in 1945 and renovated with a simpler roofline, the Kabukiza is not much different from the building that went up after the earthquake. The museum is relatively plain and utilitarian, with a roof like that of many a lecture hall in many a temple, though none are so big, and an entrance bay that also looks like a temple. It was finished in 1937, on the site of a Meiji building by the English architect Josiah Conder which was badly damaged in 1923. (The National Museum did not become that until 1947, when jurisdiction passed from the royal household to the Ministry of Education.) An earlier and a later building flank this main one: a Renaissance building in stone put up late in Meiji and a very modern glass-and-concrete structure put up since the war. They are an interesting progression: reading from left to right as one faces the entrance to the main building, a replica of something Western, a somewhat traditional building in Western materials, and a building which eschews Japanese forms but in its basic principles is not far from traditional Japanese architecture. Many will say that the central building is dishonest, pretending to be something that it is not. None of the three is shockingly unpleasant, but they are diverse. They are what the twentieth century has made the city.
It must be added that many buildings from the interwar period, such as Hibiya Hall and the Daiichi Hotel in Shimbashi, built for the Olympics that never happened, are distinctly unpleasant. They look as if no one, least of all the architects, had expected them to last so long.
The post-earthquake Honganji Temple, Tsukiji
Then there are curious exercises in styles neither Western nor Japanese. Chief among them, probably, is the Honganji Temple in Tsukiji, not far from the fish market, the villa where General and Mrs. Grant stayed, and the site of the Meiji foreign settlement. The principal east country temple of the pie
tist Shin sect, the Honganji was in Edo from the early seventeenth century and has been in Tsukiji since the great fire of 1657. It was twice burned in Meiji. At the time of the earthquake the complex—much grander than now exists—had a main hall in an imposing courtly style. This too was lost. The rebuilding, in stone, from 1931 to 1935, is a representation of an Indian temple. So it seeks to take us back to the origins of Buddhism, to which the name Honganji also adverts. One of a kind, it looks stranger, there in one of the more unchanged parts of the city, than would a glass block from New York. A lady in Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters calls it “that odd building.” It is highly unlikely that she would have so characterized a foreign exercise of the Western sort.
The wards of the old Low City, inundated at increasingly brief intervals through Meiji, have been relatively free from flooding since the completion of the Arakawa Drainage Channel shortly before the earthquake. (It was on the banks of this that the young lady in Kafū’s Katsushika Romance had her refreshment stand. See page 385.) Parts of the city traditionally immune from such troubles, on the other hand, came to be readily and regularly immersed when rain waters were too much for drains. Hibiya, right at the heart of the city and in front of the royal palace, is an example. The explanation is that waters which once went into canals had now, the canals having been filled in, nowhere to go. (Similarly, the disappearance of paddy lands in the suburbs is blamed for the greater frequency of floods in the Meiji Low City. They acted as storage reservoirs during heavy rains.) Land subsidence, chiefly from the consumption of underground water, has been worst in the wards east of the river, parts of which lie below sea level; but such central and technically advanced places as Hibiya have also been affected. Some of the older buildings have their foundations exposed, so that they stand an awkward distance above the ground.
The city limits had been expanded in 1932 to include the five contiguous counties, but the debate over what to do about the duplex government, municipal and prefectural, went on for more than a decade afterward. The interests of the ward part, the county part, and the prefecture did not coincide, especially as regards money. There was increasing agreement, as the Crisis dragged on and deepened, that Tokyo as the capital called for close scrutiny, and perhaps direct control by the national government. In July 1943, by which time it was becoming clear to intelligent and informed people that the Pacific War was not going to end happily, reform of the Tokyo government was put through by proclamation.
The proclamation was issued on the first day of June and went into effect on the first day of July. The discussions that led up to it were kept secret, for it was believed that they might reveal information useful to the British and American beasts. The Doolittle raids of just upward of a year before would seem to have produced the necessary sense of urgency. Reorganization fell short of the more sweeping proposals, which would have made prefecture and city one and done away with the old county part. The latter remained. What the proclamation did chiefly was abolish the city government and the office of mayor. Tokyo-fu, the Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture, became Tokyo-to, the Tokyo Capital District.
The powers of the wards were a matter of concern, since nothing now stood between them and the prefectural government. Fears that reform would lead to a loss of autonomy proved to be well founded. The wards had fewer powers than cities and towns elsewhere in the country.
In a sense the proclamation and reorganization only made explicit what had already become fact. It brought the city more clearly and openly under the contol of the Home Ministry, which already had control over the police, including the notorious thought police, and over the appointment of prefectural governors. Even before 1943 the Home Ministry had a very large say in the functioning of the city government. Of the nine men who were mayor during the less than seventeen years between the change of reigns and the abolition of the office, five were former officials of the ministry. By way of emphasizing that Tokyo was different from the other prefectures, the governor was called not a chiji, like other governors, but a chōhan, which means something like “chief executive.” The first chief executive had been home minister under Hiranuma Kiichirō, who spent his last years in Sugamo Prison as a first-class war criminal, and mayor and military governor of Singapore, which the occupying Japanese renamed the Shōwa of the South. He had been in charge of preparations for the reorganization of 1943.
The defeat of the Olympics by a metal shortage and the expunging of foreign words from baseball were by no means the only signs of the austere times that lay ahead. The age of the ersatz arrived soon after the beginning of the China Incident. Bamboo and ceramics replaced metals for cooking and tableware. The hegemony of sufu, staple fiber, has already been remarked upon. In 1938 appeared the smelly, fuming, sometimes asphyxiating charcoal taxicabs that continued to symbolize deprivation in the years after the war.
The General Mobilization Law and charcoal-burning cabs came into being at about the same time. Essentially the direction of the nation’s efforts was turned toward technology and production, toward bringing the Crisis to a happy conclusion. There is a similarity to the tactics used in the great postwar trade campaign. A nation’s inclinations and institutions do not change easily. A major difference is that big business objected, late in 1938, to certain provisions having to do with dividends and loans, and forced a compromise. This was the only serious snarl in application of the law. When the great trade campaign was being launched after the war, the army was not strong enough to return the favor. Neither was the other natural enemy, the labor movement.
The economic mobilization of recent years has not taken the joy from life as the military kind did. Two installments of Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters appeared in the magazine Chūō Kōron early in 1943. Then it was banned, the contents, about life in a bourgeois suburb of Osaka during the early years of the Crisis, being deemed frivolous. Tanizaki went on writing, but the novel was not published in full until after the war.
The years of the Pacific War and the years immediately preceding were grim, certainly, but the authorities did not go as far as they might have gone. Tanizaki and Kafū were never compelled to break their silence, as they might have been in a thoroughly totalitarian state. Some movie directors managed to pursue their own interests; some almost managed to make fun of censorship. Not all movie houses were required to close, though all of the big ones, and most of the Ginza ones, had closed by the spring of 1944. Some were allowed to reopen again before the end of the war. Late in 1944 the Nichigeki (the Japan Theater), near Ginza, the Imperial Theater in Marunouchi, and the Kokusai (International) in Asakusa were commandeered for the manufacture of the incendiary balloons that were intended to drift across the Pacific on westerly winds and set America afire.
Kabuki did not entirely disappear. In its very worst days there were traveling companies. The largest theaters in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto were all closed in March 1944, but the Shimbashi Embujō was allowed to reopen after a short recess. The great Kikugorō was playing there on the day in 1945 when the Embujō, along with the Kabukiza, was gutted by American firebombs. Performances after the reopening were limited to five hours a day, with the same program twice repeated. This was a sad falling off from the days when the devotee could sit for nine and ten hours in a theater and not have to put up with any repetition at all. The Tokyo Theater (Tōkyō Gekijō), third in the Shōchiku trio east of Ginza, survived the bombings, and Kabuki was playing there down to mid-August 1945. It was soon to find itself belabored by the other side. Wartime censors disliked the raffish heroes of the early nineteenth century, whom, with the best Kabuki of that day and perhaps of all days, they found decadent. The American Occupation was suspicious of the grand historic tradition, which it thought militaristic.
Already a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, the Crisis was having its effect on the geisha districts. The expensive restaurants at which they entertained (the establishments commonly called “geisha houses” in English) w
ere required to close at eleven, and geisha to cease entertaining at ten. The districts were not required to close down completely until the spring of 1944. People in a position to close them down both needed and enjoyed them. Some geisha belonged particularly to the military police, some to the ordinary police. Then there were army and navy geisha and the geisha who enjoyed the special patronage of the civil bureaucracy. They formed a considerable part of the intelligence network. This was in an old tradition. The Shimbashi and Akasaka districts had become prosperous in large measure because the military and civil services condescended to use them.
New taxes after the beginning of the Pacific War made geisha more expensive. Then finally, on March 5, 1944, all the geisha restaurants closed. They stayed open almost until dawn the night before. Many geisha donned the baggy trousers that were the feminine uniform in the last months of the Crisis and went off to work in munitions and supply factories. The apprentice geisha (hangyoku) of Shimbashi formed a brass band which, toward the improvement of morale, had concerts in the palace plaza. In 1942 Kafū had seen the ladies of Tamanoi mustered at a shrine to give thanks for the fall of Singapore.
The all-girl troupe at the Takarazuka Theater, immediately west of Ginza, had its final performance on March 4, 1944. The crowds were so great and dense that the police faced them with swords unsheathed.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 48