The High City was, as in 1923, a patchwork of places burned and places spared. Of the twenty new wards, Jōtō, along the lower reaches of the Arakawa Channel, was almost totally destroyed, and all of the other wards along the fringes of the old fifteen, including the one that contained a part of Shinjuku, were badly damaged. An almost solid expanse of burned-over wastes stretched westward from Shinjuku as far as Nakano and the eastern borders of Setagaya Ward, the farthest of the thirty-five to the southwest. A solid and unbroken if somewhat winding band of wastelands stretched all across the city from the westernmost wards to the Arakawa Channel. There was no band by any means that extensive after the earthquake. Starting from the eastern part of Setagaya Ward and Suginami Ward and proceeding past Shinjuku and Kanda, or, alternatively, along the south side of the palace and on through Nihombashi, one could in the summer of 1945 have walked all the way to the Arakawa Channel upon nothing but cinders.
Four of the thirty-five wards suffered more than ten thousand fatalities. All were in the Low City, and among them they accounted for more than 80 percent of the total. It is a situation that once more calls to mind 1923. Punishment was then said to have come down upon decadence, and it might now be said to have come down upon military aggression. It descended most cruelly, however, on people who had little to do with decadence in the first instance and the making of aggressive schemes in the second.
Parts of the Low City were virtually depopulated. If one takes the population of February 1944 as 100, the populations of Honjo and Fukagawa, the two wards east of the river among the old fifteen, were down to 4 and 6, respectively. Fewer than ten thousand people were left in Honjo. Of the fifteen old wards, the southernmost, Shiba, had a higher proportion of bitter-enders than any other. Its population in June 1945 was still more than a third what it had been in February 1944. Of the twenty new wards, Jōtō, immediately east of Fukagawa, was down to 5 from the 1944 base. No other among the twenty suffered a loss of as much as four-fifths of its population. The old city was the worst hit, and, as in 1923, the flat parts of it worst of all. Some districts along the fringes of the city had larger populations in the spring of 1945 than in early 1944.
The war cabinet, that of General Tōjō, resigned in the summer of 1944. In May 1945 the Germans surrendered. Early in August came the atomic bombs. On one of the two days between them the Russians entered the war, invading Manchuria and Korea. On August 15, for the first time in the history of the land, the emperor made a radio broadcast. He announced acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Since less than half the Tokyo citizenry is old enough to remember the bombings, less than half is old enough to remember the broadcast. Many who do remember it did not understand it. Reception was generally poor, and the language was stilted. The general import was soon clear enough, however. He was obviously not exhorting them to get out their bamboo spears and await the enemy along the beaches and in the hills. So only one explanation seemed possible for so extraordinary a performance.
Some soldiers gathered on Atago Hill north of Shiba Park, thinking to hold out as supporters of the shogun had held out on that other “mountain,” Ueno, three-quarters of a century before. There were suicides. The American occupiers would not have been surprised if they had encountered guerrilla war. The Japanese rather hoped that the Americans would occupy the government buildings at Kasumigaseki, and leave the commercial and financial heart of the city alone. Perhaps they already sensed that the next war would be economic. Advance scouting parties thought that Marunouchi would be easier to defend. General Douglas MacArthur agreed to the choice of the Daiichi Insurance Building for his headquarters. It is a thick-walled citadel with windows recessed behind solid square pillars and the open spaces of the moat and the royal plaza in front of it. The ineffectual defenses of the city had had their command post there.
Takami Jun’s wife said that if the emperor had told them to fight to the last man and woman they would probably all of them have done it. Takami was inclined to agree. In the event, there was no resistance. The general would have been as safe if he had gone to Kasumigaseki or pitched a tent in the wastes east of the river.
The “chief executive” of the prefecture, a general, resigned late in August. A very quick succession of executives followed him, six of them between August 1945 and May 1947. The last of them, Yasui Seiichirō, who had had a brief term earlier, resigned to run for election and became the first popularly elected governor of the prefecture.
Americans were in Tokyo from late August. An advance party, heavily armed, set up tents, well surrounded by barbed wire, on the Yoyogi parade grounds, where a few days earlier some boys of the radical right had committed suicide. The purposes of the party were to test the land and to scout out buildings suitable for requisitioning. General MacArthur landed at Atsugi, southwest of the city, on August 30. He spent his first nights in Yokohama, where the guerrillas would be easier to fend off than in the middle of the gigantic capital. The surrender documents having been signed aboard ship in Tokyo Bay on September 2, the occupation of Tokyo began in earnest on September 8. The city could turn its thoughts to another in its venerable series of reconstructions.
Chapter 10
THE DAY OF THE COD AND THE SWEET POTATO
In the early years after the war, praise for Nagoya and blame for Tokyo were much in fashion. Nagoya took advantage of the bombings to refashion itself. Tokyo was a growth which, flattened, lay flat for a time and then pulled itself together much as it had been. The redesigning of Nagoya brought wide avenues, sufficient, one might have thought, for all the vehicles likely to pass through the central business district. The corresponding district of Tokyo has a street pattern scarcely different from that of Taishō.
It is more challengeable now than it was forty years ago that Nagoya benefited greatly from the changes. Not many today think that the widening of streets can keep up with the flood of automobiles. Nagoya has its traffic jams too. Nor do wide streets seem to be among the things the Japanese are good at. They range from featureless to ugly. In Nagoya the wide streets took away the past. The bombings, it might be argued, had already taken it away; but one has no sense, along the broad avenues of central Nagoya, of all the people who lived there over the centuries. Not much is old in Tokyo, but the street pattern is, and makes Tokyo seem warmer and cozier than Nagoya, a much smaller city. There can be no final conclusion to arguments over the Tokyo way and the Nagoya way. Yet a person may feel that if there is going to be congestion anyway it is better had on comfortable old streets.
Tokyo might not have been able to do as Nagoya did even if it had had the wish and the will. For one thing, there were all those buildings in the way. A walk east and west through the cinders of 1945 could have taken one close to Tokyo Central Station. The prefectural offices were heavily damaged. Mitsubishi Londontown, however, the heart of financial and managerial Marunouchi, escaped. Only a very iconoclastic prefectural government could have persuaded itself to destroy good, solid buildings in a city that had lost so much.
Then there were the Americans. They left the Japanese the Marunouchi Building, the largest office building in the city and the land, but they took almost everything else in Marunouchi. Unsuccessful at persuading them that the bureaucratic quarter of the city would admirably serve their needs, the Japanese had no way of dislodging them from Marunouchi. Harassment might have worked, but there was none of that. If the Japanese had any policy in those days it was to smile and accommodate and hope that the invaders would soon go away. By 1947, when popular election of the governor brought a measure of stability to the prefectural government, retention of the old street pattern was the established condition all over the city. We cannot know whether the opportunity to do something with Marunouchi would have kindled a zeal to do something all over the city. Nagoya did not do much with its outskirts either.
As after the earthquake, the first thing that had to be done was to clear away the cinders. Again they we
re dumped in huge volume into the canals. There were not enough vehicles and there was not enough gasoline to take them out and, as was done with garbage in later years, dump them in the bay for landfill. Canals, along with such wide streets as Showa Avenue, put through east of Ginza after the earthquake, provided convenient receptacles. The streets, though piled high with rubble for a time, presently became usable again. The filled-in canals did not come back as usable canals; and one wonders where all the cinders will be put when the next disaster comes. Some of the canals were already so silted in that they were little more than broken puddles of stagnant water, and some of the important ones, such as the Kandagawa, the “Kanda River,” were in the years of rapid economic growth to become so filthy that, as popular wisdom had it, not even typhoid germs could live in them. They bubbled and seethed with noisome gases. The old canal system thus became a broken ruin. It had been left behind in any event, and when economic growth kills something one is foolish to lament over it. Still the canals were a necessary part of Edo, for which one may pardonably feel nostalgia.
The filling in of canals and the disposition of the land that resulted were among the first stirrings as the city began coming to life again. The conspicuous presence of the Americans in Marunouchi may have been in part responsible for the new prosperity of what had been the back side of Tokyo Central Station. Perhaps more important was the filling in of the portion of the outer palace moat that ran along that east or back side, also known as the Yaesu Mouth. In the early years of the station, railroad yards and the canal cut it off in a most unfriendly way from the old Low City. Now the canal was filled in, and an eating, drinking, shopping, and watering complex arose where it had been. A Yaesu station building went up in 1947, across the tracks to the east of the old station. It burned down a few months after its completion, but it would soon have gone anyway, as the Yaesu Mouth reached up into the sky and down into the earth.
In 1953 a meitengai, which might hesitantly be translated “shopping center,” began business at the Yaesu Mouth. The reason for the hesitation is that a meitengai does not provide accommodation for the automobile. It is more like a bazaar. The city had long had such places, and the one at the Yaesu Mouth led the way to ever vaster ones. It began going underground, and in the next fifteen years or so had become the largest underground complex in the Orient. The first multistory building after the war started rising, eight floors aboveground and two below, near the north end of the landfill even before the Korean War brought a great building boom. By 1954 the number of persons passing through the Yaesu Mouth exceeded that for the Marunouchi Mouth, the old front entrance, and a dozen years later the Yaesu figure reached a half million a day. So the Low City could have thought, if it wished, that an old wrong had been righted.
A similar instance is Sanjūsangenbori, the “thirty-three-ken [two hundred-foot] dig,” which ran north and south just east of Ginza. The back streets to the east of the main Ginza street do not seem to have been very lively before the war. The canal, which cut Ginza off from the Shochiku entertainment center, farther east, became a cinder dump. When it was completely filled in, by about 1950, the land was divided among people who could be expected to make it a bustling pleasure center. It had pinball parlors, drinking places, cabarets, and a burlesque hall which was in business for less than a year, even though it offered such celebrities as “the queen bee of Anatahan.” (The queen bee had spent several postwar years with several men on Anatahan, a small island in the Marianas.) And it had the Tokyo Onsen, the “Tokyo Spa,” a pleasure palace not of a completely new kind, perhaps, but of a bold sort that seemed to bring an end to the years of deprivation. It was until 1986, when it was torn down to make way for a much higher building, a four-story watering place. There are no natural hot springs within a great distance of downtown Tokyo, but since Meiji there had been fabricated ones at, for instance, Shinagawa, at the southern limits of the old city.
The Tokyo Onsen contained big communal baths, said to incorporate the latest techniques from Turkey and Scandinavia, and private rooms as well, and for a tariff of a hundred yen, not much in those days of inflation, one could have a bath attended by a pretty masseuse. It all seemed rather shocking at the time, not because of the sexual abandon, so much a part of the life of the city that only a missionary or a policeman could object, but because of the prodigality. It seemed a luxury which the city and the nation could not afford. The builders of the Onsen were presently vindicated. They led the way into a future in which the pleasures their enterprise offered came to seem modest and even demure, and it may be that their boldness was just what the city needed in those difficult times.
The filling in of the “dig” had one consequence that cannot have been foreseen: it brought the entertainment complex east of Ginza closer to Ginza, by which it was presently absorbed. The old Kobikichō became East Ginza and then plain Ginza. The change of names had no great practical effect. The smaller districts into which the Tokyo wards are divided have no more administrative or political significance than the streets of an American city. Nor has the entertainment complex been in the television age what it was in the movie age. Yet a grand old place name was lost. Elderly people still go to Kobikichō, not Ginza, for their Kabuki. It will take time for the old name to fall completely into oblivion.
A reconstruction of the Ikebukuro black market
Like the cinder-filled canals, the black markets helped to get things started again. Probably they were necessary. Rationing did not provide adequate sustenance. In 1947 the death of a judge in the Tokyo District Court received much attention from the newspapers. He died of malnutrition, because he refused to eat anything purchased on the black market.
Every little station along the commuter lines had its little market for illicitly acquired foreign products. When the need for them passed, with the passing of rations and the presence of adequate supplies, they became the clusters of eating and drinking places where, at the end of their day, office workers fortify themselves against the rigors of home and family. There have been such places ever since there have been office workers and commuting, but the black markets contributed to the huge increase in their numbers, a far more rapid increase during the postwar years than that for enterprises in general.
The Occupation left the Japanese to do what they could by way of controlling the black markets, though they would have been impossible without the generous cooperation of many a commissary sergeant. It did wish them to keep out of its sight, and show reticence in operating where most of its operations were. So in the center of the city black marketing did not contribute to the first stirrings of revival and reconstruction as it did along the big transfer points of the Yamanote loop line.
The most thriving among the black markets was what came to be known, and still is known, though its functions have changed, as Ameya Yokochō, just south of Ueno. The Americans had their own name for it, the Ueno PX. Yokochō is “alley,” and Ameya is a pun on “American shops” and “sweets shops.” Sugary items, in cruelly short supply in those years, were important to Ameyoko, which offered sweet concoctions from beans and potatoes. There were repeated raids on the district. On a day in May 1946 six hundred armed police staged a very big raid. They could not cope with Ameyoko’s resilience, however, and it is doubtful that they really tried very hard. A raid might briefly diminish the flow of American goods, but only briefly. Unless they were suspected of having committed more serious crimes, stallkeepers and shopkeepers were treated leniently, as if by way of recognizing that at least they were doing something, and someone had to do something. When Japanese started going abroad again, they of course had to come home bearing gifts. One would hear that those who were too busy or too timid to do their shopping abroad would go to Ameyoko for it.
The Ameya Yokochō black market as it looks today
During the second postwar decade Ameyoko began to shift from American goods to marine products, which no one would dream of impor
ting from America. The change may be taken as a sign that the worst deprivation and confusion were coming to an end. In 1983 an Ameyoko Center, all shining metal and glass, was finished. The small retailers who moved in dealt mostly in manufactured goods. Purveyors of foodstuffs remained along the street and far outsold the food department of the gigantic Matsuzakaya department store a few steps away. In very recent years Ameyoko has been the center of a new kind of black market. Japanese (or whoever) can buy easily transported goods in, for instance, New York, bring them back to Tokyo without paying duty, and sell them at a lower price than they sell at in Japan through legal channels. All of these changes, and many others, are symbolic of larger change. Step by step, Ameyoko has kept up with a changing city, and, after a fashion, represented it.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 50