Police search a woman smuggling rice into Tokyo
If a black-market stallkeeper risked being raided and losing a few commodities and spending a few nights in jail, things could also be risky for a more pitiable kind of black-market person: he, and very often she, who circumvented rationing by buying rice in the country and bringing it to city markets. There were occasional roundups, generally at railway stations in the northern and eastern part of the city where katsugiya, “bearers,” as they were called, were likely to leave or change trains. (The big Japanese-English dictionary renders katsugiya as “runner,” with a warning that this is an Americanism.) The policeman on the beat seems to have been reluctant to take action against katsugiya when he did not have to. The story was told of a policeman who tapped a woman on the shoulder and said, “Your baby is wetting its pants.” In those days when the almost universal way of transporting babies was by strapping them to adult backs, a woman would seek to disguise her black-market rice by strapping it and cosseting and posseting it and making soothing noises to it, quite as if it were a baby. This poor woman’s sack had sprung a leak and rice was trickling out.
At the beginning of 1946 Tokyo contained an estimated sixty thousand black-market stalls. Sad reminiscences of those hard days persuade us that most of the stallkeepers were desperate men and women who would gladly have done something else if there had been anything else to do. Many, however, were under the control of gangs. Very soon after the surrender, extortion and protection gangs occupied land at each of the main entrances, the “mouths,” east, west, and south, to Shinjuku Station.
The motto of the gang at the most important of them, Eastmouth, was “Let light spread forth from Shinjuku.” Court action was required to return the land, now not far from the most valuable in the world, to the rightful owners, some of them, such as the Takano Fruits Parlor, among the most venerable and esteemed of Shinjuku retailers. Gang warfare was endemic at Southmouth, and we may be grateful to very great complications at Westmouth that we still have the relic of the postwar years known as Piss Alley (see page 483). A farrago of rights and claimed rights made it possible for keepers of little drinking places to buy their own land. It was a decade and a half after the war that the old black market at the Ikebukuro Westmouth was finally leveled, by court order.
There was in those days the problem of the “third nationals.” It was conspicuous in the underworld and in gang squabbling. Third nationals were for practical purposes Chinese and Koreans resident in Japan. The expression put them in their place, distinguishing them both from Japanese and from the Occupation, which favored them, treating Chinese as allies and Koreans as quasi allies (enemies of the enemy). It is hard to deny that they took advantage of their position.
If the police could not intercede in behalf of Japanese gangs that thought of themselves (or at any rate advertised themselves) as Robin Hoods and defenders of the Japanese spirit, there is much evidence that they managed to aid them surreptitiously. In the “Shimbashi Incident” of 1946, American military police and Japanese police intervened to prevent an armed battle between Chinese and Japanese gangs for control of the market. The nonbattle was in effect a victory for the Japanese. It showed the Chinese, who were progressively weaker, that they could not have everything their way even in that day of confusion and demoralization.
Across the bay in Chiba, later in 1946, the police seem to have actually encouraged a showdown between Japanese and third-national gangs. It would be the occasion, the Chiba police and the American military police agreed, for rounding up gangsters of whatever nationality. The Japanese police told the Japanese gangs what was to happen and invited their cooperation. The Americans do not seem to have accorded the same favor to the third nationals. The encounter took place, a few minutes of gunfire in which several men were wounded but no one was killed, and in the end only third nationals were rounded up.
The problem of relations between the police and the underworld has always been a delicate and elusive one. At the very least the police seem to prefer organized crime to the more scattered and diffuse kind. Some elements in the police force would have to work harder if the gangs were to go, and the gangster for his part prefers police whom he knows and who know him to outsiders who might come meddling if an incident were to be prolonged.
The most powerful force in getting things moving again came fairly late. The Korean War broke out in June 1950, almost exactly at midpoint through what we may call the decade of the rebuilding. For Korea it was a terrible happening, for Japan a momentous one, with little sense of the terrible. The calm with which Tokyo and Japan assumed that someone would do something was rather wonderful. It was perhaps natural in an occupied country that had no foreign policy save to get rid of the Occupation and export things whenever and wherever possible; and an eminent editor once remarked that two subjects certain to send readers away in droves were Korea and education. Still it was rather wonderful. The prospect of losing Korea to the people (in those days the Chinese and the Russians seemed monolithic) from whom it had been won less than a half century before was received with huge indifference.
Momentous the event certainly was for all that. Japanese profits from the Korean War were massive, and they went into rebuilding city and land, and bringing them back somewhat near, in material terms, the position that had been theirs before the folly of the forties. Procurement contracts in the remaining months of 1950 ran to $180 million, and before the Korean War was over they ran to $2.3 billion. Production returned to and passed prewar levels. Direct American aid, which had been necessary in the immediate postwar years, now ceased to be. Brave beginnings had already been made toward putting things together again, but it was in the early fifties that matters went forward with speed and purpose. No one can blame the Japanese for having a delightful fish in troubled waters, and someone else would have done it if they had not. Yet it is ironic that the prosperity of a country which has renounced war (see Article IX of the postwar constitution) is founded on a war.
The days just after the surrender were very hard ones. When a middle-aged or aging Japanese remarks upon the terrible time, one must listen carefully to know which time is meant. One may instinctively suppose it to be the last months of the war, the time of the bombings, but for many the really terrible time was the first winter after the war, a time of cold, disease, and hunger. Typhus was the worst plague. There were almost ten thousand cases of it in Tokyo Prefecture during the winter of 1945 and 1946, and almost a thousand deaths. Smallpox and cholera may not have reached such epidemic proportions, but in a more settled day they would scarcely have been present at all. Typhus bespeaks lice and unclean bodies, very distressful to the well-washed Japanese. In those days not even a good hot bath was easy to come by. The city has always had fleas and chinches in ample numbers, but lice are a different matter.
A tenth of the populace that clung to the city through that winter lived in such emergency places as air-raid shelters and warehouses. The underground passages at Ueno Station, at that time the most considerable in the city, though they do not bear comparison with the honey combs that have been dug since, had the largest and most famous accumulation of beggars and vagrants in the city. From time to time they were rounded up, and ineffective attempts made at dispersal. On a night in mid-December 1945, some twenty-five hundred persons were taken in. There were deaths from exposure. Temperatures in Tokyo do not go much below freezing, but dampness can bring great discomfort even to the well-fed person. Through the last months of 1945 vagrants were dying in Ueno at a rate of two to three every day, and sometimes the number was as high as six. The second postwar winter brought improvement in the sense that exposure was not for the most part the immediate cause of death. Eleven people died in the Ueno Station complex during the first week of 1947, most of them from pneumonia.
A postwar census-taker at work among the homeless in the Ueno subway station
Dance hall scene, 1946
Students sat and shivered in their overcoats in unheated classrooms, professors stood and shivered. An office in one of the best buildings left to the Japanese, such as the Marunouchi Building or the Bank of Japan, might be heated only by a charcoal brazier or a scattering of them, to which typists would turn from time to time to thaw their stiffened fingers. The bravery of dancers in unheated theaters, such as the Rokkuza, the Sixth District Theater, in Asakusa, was something to arouse admiration. Everything was rationed. One had to have coupons to eat in a restaurant. The cod and the sweet potato were the staples. Many a Japanese of a certain age cannot look at either without shuddering.
Yet there was a communal spirit over the city and the land which, in the recall, makes the shabby Japanese of the day seem more estimable than the dapper (or chic) Japanese of today. It was beautiful the way in which people shook themselves from daze and shock and looked about them, and, military expansion having proved impractical, set about having a try at another kind.
As after the earthquake, huts began going up almost immediately on the burned-over wastes. Street stalls were back in the bustling places where they had always been—Shinjuku, Ginza, Ueno, and the like. They offered food and drink before less flimsy shops were doing so. The Occupation did not like the stalls. It ordered in 1949 that they be done away with, and on New Year’s Eve 1951 the last of them finally went. Efforts at coaxing stallkeepers into other businesses were not entirely successful. Many of the stalls were finally subsumed into covered markets, in such places as the filled-in canal east of Ginza and the revetment beneath the statue of the Meiji rebel Saigō Takamori, the most famous of Ueno landmarks.
The streets of Ginza and Shinjuku thus became more passable for people and automobiles in a hurry, but what they gained in that regard they lost as gathering places. The stalls probably would have gone anyway, as the city and the country became more affluent. Occasionally an aging stallkeeper is interviewed in a newspaper, and almost always he says that he would not for the world go back to the old business, with its prickly heat and chilblains. An unsuccessful experiment with stallkeeping a quarter of a century before had demonstrated that it was not a business for dabblers and dilettantes. In the summer of 1930, as a device for relieving unemployment in those bleak depression years, the prefectural police opened some ten miles of streets in the city and the suburbs to amateur stallkeepers. More than sixteen thousand stalls quickly lined them, but within a year more than fourteen thousand had gone out of business.
Charcoal-burning taxicabs also went away, not to reappear, on that New Year’s Eve of 1951. Scarcely any remained—perhaps fewer than ten still puffed about the city, as against three thousand or so during the war. Many liked the street stalls, no one liked the charcoal cabs. They were forever fuming and sputtering to a halt, choking their passengers along with themselves. Like the sweet potato and the cod, they were the embodiment of bad days.
In a sense the black market never really disappeared. We have seen that smuggled goods, often of Japanese make, can be purchased at, for instance, Ameyoko. It stopped dealing in necessities, however, as they became plentiful and were no longer rationed. The process of derationing began early. Retail derationing was slower than wholesale, which ended in 1950. Not many who visited the city for the Olympics in 1964 can have guessed that the system of coupons for meals in restaurants still prevailed. It was not discontinued until 1968, by which time it had long been meaningless. The black-market price of rice fell below the rationed price in 1959. So retail rationing withered away.
There may already have been huts among the cinders when the first Americans arrived, but the city has not done strikingly well in the matter of housing. One person in twenty was still living in a temporary shelter at the end of 1946, as against one in ten the year before, but the population had grown. The first public housing went up, on old army land, in 1948, and had three hundred applicants for every small house available. A survey of housing by the Construction Ministry showed that Tokyo had rebuilt about a third of its housing by early 1949. This was a better performance than that of Osaka, but not as good as those of a number of other cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cities of the nuclear bombs. Despite its poor record in new buildings, Osaka had more living space per capita than Tokyo, which had fewer than three tatami mats per person. (A tatami is about two square yards.) The figure has gone up gradually and continues to go up, but in 1986 Tokyo still had fewer than eight mats per person, the lowest for any prefecture in the country except Okinawa—and Tokyo is the richest of the prefectures, and Okinawa the poorest but one or two. The average citizen of Tokyo thus has a space of about twelve feet square to call his own. Seven people may be expected to share a house or apartment with a thousand square feet of floor space. This is the average, including the affluent wards along with the poor. The eastern and northeastern wards are well below the average. Of land prices and the distance from the center of the city to which an office worker must go to find a bit of land he can afford, more must be said later. They seem to be spinning out of control. All that “planning” can really hope to do is make things more convenient and expeditious for people who must commute long distances.
Nor has the city done very well with parks. Some considerable tracts, notably along the Sumida River, were left open after the earthquake and presently developed into parks. Little of the sort happened in 1945. The problem of what exactly did happen is complicated by the fact that several sets of parks are involved: national parks, royal parks, prefectural parks, and city and ward parks. The area of park lands has increased, but the prefecture was initially slow about adding to them, other than with small playgrounds. More considerable accessions to the system or the several systems resulted from donations. An example is the Hama Detached Palace, where in 1879 General Grant and his lady were accommodated. Once the bayside villa of the shoguns, from whose hands it passed to the royal household, it was donated to the city late in 1945. Somewhat halfheartedly, the Occupation requisitioned it a year and a half later. When it was needed for American training purposes the public was excluded, but it was open during periods when the Occupation had no specific need of it.
So the city itself did not do much when so much could have been done with the charred wastes. Some prewar parks actually disappeared. Conspicuous among them is Asakusa Park, one of the original five established early in Meiji. For this the Occupation may be held in part accountable. It returned the park lands to the Kannon Temple. The temple, hard pressed for reconstruction funds, made them utterly commercial. The famous ponds in Asakusa Park existed for perhaps three generations. Only the tract behind the main hall of the temple remains unbuilt upon. Hard-surfaced, it provides parking space for tourist buses.
Per capita the area of parks is equal to that for Kyoto, larger than that for Yokohama, and smaller than those for Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe, whose per capita park area increases in that order. It is only one-twentieth that of Washington, D.C. The absolute area is well under that in Philadelphia and only a bit over that in Detroit—both of them much smaller cities. It may be, though much depends on definitions, that Tokyo is worse off in the matter of parks than Edo was. The proportion of parks to the total areas of the city today is smaller than was that of the shrine and temple grounds that functioned as parks in Edo.
To the credit of Tokyo must be admitted the fact that large areas of the center of the city are freely open to the public. Tabulations always give Seoul a much larger per capita park area than Tokyo, but fail to note that one must pay an admission fee to every considerable park in or near the center of the city.
In these regards the city has not done well. In building to make itself more firmly what it already was, the economic center of the land—and to make it a strong challenger as well to the traditional economic centers of the world—it has done far better. The Korean War, crucial to the economic revival of Tokyo and Japan, speeded up the concentration of managers and executives in Tok
yo. Gradually, it came to mean as well the waxing of Marunouchi and the waning of Nihombashi as a managerial center. Before the war and in the early years after, new construction of offices was smaller in area than new construction of residences. In the early 1960s the former area passed the latter.
The Crisis of the thirties put a stop to monumental office building, and the Korean War set it going in earnest once more. In 1951 work began on a second Marunouchi Building, across the station plaza from Tokyo Central and across the street from the first Marunouchi Building, which was finished just before the earthquake and suffered damage in it. The foundations of the second building had already been laid before the war. The prewar excavations filled with water and remained a stagnant pond through the Occupation years, with an occasional corpse floating upon it. There was a great treasure hunt when drainage and filling began, for rumors spread that a trove had been dumped there at the time of the surrender. Nothing was found.
Viewed from the station, the two buildings look like twins, both of them with uninspired tiled fronts. The second one has a somewhat different floor plan, however, with more space for Mitsubishi to rent, and so it now became what the first one had been, the largest building in city and land. It did not long remain so. A third Marunouchi Building, more properly called the Otemachi Building from the district in which it reposes, was finished in 1958. Many a yet larger building has been put up since.
Very little was being done, meanwhile, to accommodate commuters to these new buildings. For the first decade after the war transportation to the center of the city remained as it had been before the war. The third Marunouchi Building held forty thousand workers, and the crush on the National Railways was becoming frightful. The most painful (to some amusing) pictures of station attendants pushing people in tighter so that the train doors will close date from these years. A segment of a second subway line, the first to pass directly under Marunouchi, opened from Ikebukuro to Ochanomizu in 1954. It cannot have done much good for anyone except a scattering of students and scholars on their way to browse in the Kanda bookshops. It opened as far as Tokyo Central in 1956 and Ginza in 1957, but did not go through to Shinjuku, whence and whither the largest floods of commuters came flooding, until 1959, a year after completion of the third Marunouchi (or Otemachi) Building. Free transfer between the two subway lines, that from Asakusa to Shibuya and that from Ikebukuro to Shinjuku, did not come until later yet. It would probably be unfair to say that metropolitan policy consciously favored business over convenience, but that is certainly the ordering that prevailed.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 51