There was no attempt to equalize the area of the wards. Even after amalgamation the central wards remained much smaller than most of those remoter from Marunouchi and the palace. The smallest of all, an amalgamation of the old Shitaya and Asakusa, was only an eighth the size of Itabashi, the farthest of the wards to the north and west. Though Itabashi had had the same boundaries since it became a ward, with the same name, in 1932, it was now thought unwieldy. It was big, certainly, some ten miles across at its widest point, and rapidly growing in population. Later in 1947 it was split in two, and so the count of wards became the twenty-three it has remained.
The new ward lines had more to do with population than with area. Looking to the future, they anticipated a ratio of one to three between the smallest population and the largest. It is not surprising that the eye to the future did not serve well. Few could have foreseen that affluence and prosperity would return and that the outer wards would grow so hugely. If Itabashi had stayed whole it would today have some twenty-two or twenty-three times the population of Chiyoda, where the palace and the Marunouchi business district are. Setagaya, the farthest to the south and west, today has the largest population, upward of eight hundred thousand, seventeen times that of Chiyoda.
In the functions permitted the wards we may see a small instance of a successful popular rising. Outbreaks of resentment at this and that policy of the government have not been unknown, but few have produced even minor change. As a part of the reforms in local government that brought popularly elected governors, “ward heads” (this is the official translation, appearing on alien registration certificates and the like) were also popularly elected. In September 1952 the national government, one of several led by the strong-minded Yoshida Shigeru, replaced this method with something less direct, the announced reason for the change being that the wards were too small to go their own undirected way. Most of the cities in the prefecture, it may be noted, were smaller than most of the wards, but they continued to elect mayors. The ward heads were now elected by the ward councils with the agreement of the governor.
Two decades later the councils of five wards adopted as their policy the designating of ward heads by plebiscite. The candidate with the highest popular vote would be commended to the governor. Three wards actually held plebiscites. This happened, we are told, in response to a popular view that a certain decentralization might be at least a partial solution to the increasingly complicated problems of the city—and indeed it was getting smoggier and more debt-ridden all the time. In 1974 the Local Autonomy Law was amended to return to the earlier system of popular elections. Under the new law the prerogatives of the wards became as they had been under the Occupation, similar to those of incorporated cities.
There have been other little shows of independence at this lowest of administrative levels. Nakano Ward, to the west of Shinjuku, has gone against the wishes of the Ministry of Education and elected its school board by popular vote. Probably not much of significance will emerge from this smaller rising. Tokyo had a radical government, supported by both of the major left-wing parties, from 1967 to 1979. Faced with a choice between ward heads elected by popular vote and ward heads whose appointment required the consent of the governor, the Local Autonomy Agency was of the view that it did not much matter one way or the other, and that elections might actually be an improvement in Tokyo, where all the fuss was. We will never know what would have happened to the popular rising in other circumstances.
It is a bleak city that loses its sense of fun and pleasure. Tokyo did not. Pleasure quickly came back, and humor went the rounds. The jokes about General MacArthur and his Occupation may not seem exactly sidesplitting by American standards, but then Japanese humor is not American humor. The general emerged with more dignity, on the whole, from Japanese jokes than from American ones.
“Why is General MacArthur like a navel?”
“Because he is above the chin.”
The italicized word is a first-person pronoun used only by the emperor—he used it in the broadcast of August 15, 1945. Here it signifies His Majesty himself. It is also a ribald though not grossly indecent word for penis. So the general and the navel were above the chin in its two senses.
Nationalist sophistry has in recent years maintained that Japan did not surrender unconditionally, since the emperor remained in place. But popular wisdom had no doubt as to where the place was, and the first meeting between general and emperor clearly established it: the emperor called on the general, and not the reverse. The general did not go to the door to receive his guest or to see him off. In the famous photograph of the occasion the general is large and relaxed, the emperor small and tense. The emperor called on the general five times thereafter, and the general never paid a return call. Among the expressions used on every possible occasion during the autumn of the surrender was: “It’s MacArthur’s order.” He was an imperial presence, and probably he saw less of Japan than any other American who came during the Occupation years. He shuttled back and forth between his offices by the moat and his residence in the American embassy, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes’ walk away.
General MacArthur and the emperor, 1946
One major Kabuki theater, the Tōkyō Gekijō or Tokyo Theater, a part of the Shōchiku complex to the east of Ginza, came through the bombings and burnings. The Shimbashi Embujō and the Kabukiza, the other two major parts of the complex, were both gutted. Kabuki was playing at the Tokyo through the first half of August 1945 and was still there on August 15. The theater was closed for the rest of the month, but opened again on the first of September, even before it was known how the Americans would behave. They behaved in a way that may, from a certain remove in time, seem peculiar.
Ichikawa Ennosuke, a very popular actor who had led the troupe at the Tōgeki in early August, was back there leading it again in September. In October the Shimpa, a melodramatic form less stylized than Kabuki, was at the Tōgeki, and the sixth Onoe Kikugorō, one of the most celebrated actors of the century, was at the Imperial Theater in Marunouchi. Relations with the Americans seemed to be progressing nicely. Then, in November, there was trouble. It was almost as if the grand satraps of Kabuki were asking for it, or at any rate probing the limits of American permissiveness. The first Nakamura Kichiemon, another highly esteemed actor, chose as his November vehicle at the Tōgeki a play which, unless one is used to its sort of thing, may seem demented, pushing the old military virtues, and especially loyalty, to the point of insanity and still holding them to be virtues. So it seemed to the Occupation censors, who ordered the play closed. There were censors of the arts and literature in those days, not the most democratic of people, but people who must be tolerated, perhaps, in a crisis. There was a certain air of crisis about the Occupation. It had a great deal to get done in a short time—and a half dozen years is, in the long view, a short time.
Censorship was not new to Kabuki. Wartime censors had been stern with what they thought to be frivolous and immoral elements, and especially with the idealized rogues of late Edo. There was no attempt to resist before 1945, and there was none after 1945. The effort in both cases was to accommodate. Since the show went on in both cases, it may be deemed successful.
Shōchiku promptly organized a committee to select plays that no one could object to, and to negotiate with the censors. The latter accepted a list of 174 plays of a soundly democratic nature, and said that new plays might be a solution to the problem. Kabuki has never had a fixed repertory, a canon. New plays are always being written. To this Shōchiku acceded with an appearance of heartiness. Early in 1946 it announced a sad fact it had come upon. Kabuki was in danger of fossilization. New plays were the thing.
Had the early views of the censors and the announced ones of Shōchiku prevailed, dance might have become more central to Kabuki than it had traditionally been. Kabuki has always been a highly ritualized and choreographed form. The repertory contains pieces that are entirely danc
e. These would have come to prevail. The “feudal” old classics quickly started coming back, however. Plays not on the approved list were being performed from as early as 1947, and the censors did not object. The play that was the cause of all the trouble in 1945 was being performed before the end of the Occupation in 1952.
The Tōgeki, where Kabuki survived the most difficult times, perhaps, in its history, does not itself survive. The building does not, this is to say, though the institution does, under a dozen or so storys of offices and restaurants. As a place for Kabuki it did not last through the postwar decade. It became a movie house with the reopening of the Shimbashi Embujō and the Kabukiza. Redone on the inside, looking very much as they had before the war on the outside, the two reopened respectively in 1948 and 1951. As had been the case on its original opening, the Shimbashi geisha who had built the Embujō had the use of it in March 1948, the month of the reopening. Once again they gave their recital of Dance of the East. To save money, Shōchiku did not attempt to rebuild the ornate prewar roof of the Kabukiza, which had collapsed in 1945. The building is nevertheless one of the grander relics of the interwar fondness for old styles in new materials. The facade, still elaborate, is in a Tokugawa style.
The Tōgeki was the only major Kabuki theater to come through the bombings, but the Mitsukoshi department store in Nihombashi helped fill the gap until the Embujō and the Kabukiza could be redone. Ever since the mercantile revolution that produced department stores, around the turn of the century, they have been cultural and amusement centers. They became these things to draw people away from the old specialized stores and make them feel at home in a confusing and threatening emporium. It is to their credit that, having drawn the crowds, they have gone on being cultural and amusement centers. Ever since its rebuilding after the 1923 earthquake, Mitsukoshi had had an auditorium which it rented out for meetings and performances. The name was changed from Mitsukoshi Hall to Mitsukoshi Theater in 1947, at which time it became a full-fledged, full-time theater. In addition to providing another place for Kabuki, a somewhat more sumptuous and elegant one than the Tōgeki, the Mitsukoshi Theater was very important in passing Kabuki on from an aging generation to an emerging one.
The postwar decade was, like the first decade of the century, a time when everyone seemed to be dying. People announced the death of Kabuki itself. The great Kikugorō, the leading Kabuki actor of his time, died in 1949, within two months of two other major actors. His last performance was at the Mitsukoshi. (In the last year of his life, Kikugorō became the first actor of any sort to receive the Culture Medal, the highest honor the nation can bestow on its literary and artistic talents. Kabuki had climbed a great distance since, a scant century before, it had been beneath the notice of the Tokugawa military aristocracy.) The first Kichiemon, who would have been on most lists as Kikugorō’s leading rival, died at the end of the first postwar decade, in 1954. But death announcements for the Kabuki form as a whole were, as they had been in late Meiji, premature. The actors who are the old masters today were establishing themselves, and the Mitsukoshi Theater, more than the Tōgeki, was the place where they were doing it. The Mitsukoshi was last used as a Kabuki theater in 1951, the year the Kabukiza reopened. Since 1953 it has returned to its earlier duties, as a place for recitals and meetings.
The Meijiza in Nihombashi, the oldest Kabuki theater in the city, reopened a few months before the Kabukiza, in November 1950. Before the new decade was over it had been gutted and restored yet another time, the fifth since its original construction early in Meiji. Early on an April morning in 1957 a fire started in the illumination room. There were no casualties.
The Tōgeki narrowly escaped requisitioning by the Occupation. The story of how it escaped is a pleasant one, though there is considerable possibility that it is apocryphal: early in 1946 Ennosuke, he who was playing at the same theater in August 1945, appeared in a modern sort of play with Mizutani Yaeko, probably the most esteemed actress of the day. They kissed, unabashedly, right there in front of the public. Never had it happened before. The critical reception was mixed, but the public approved. So did the Occupation, which thought this display of independence and emotional honesty promising and did not requisition the theater.
The Takarazuka, that big Tōhō property across Ginza from the Kabukiza and the other big Shōchiku properties, did not escape being taken over. As the Ernie Pyle, known to every American who visited the city during the Occupation years, it was a movie and stage theater in the hands of the Americans for almost a decade. It had a huge staff and served as a sort of public-works project for unemployed Japanese theater people. When Tōhō got it back, in 1955, it launched a brave effort to break the Shōchiku monopoly on Kabuki. Some famous and accomplished actors joined the Tōhō Kabuki, and Shōchiku seems to have been genuinely unsettled. It responded by having popular singers do recitals (or something of the sort) at the Kabukiza, and by finding new Kabuki talent.The brightest among the new Kabuki actors was Bandō Tamasaburō, a female impersonator who made his debut in 1967 in the play the American censors had taken objection to in 1945, and who today, in his thirties, is the most popular Kabuki actor. In the end the Tōhō undertaking was not a success. Shōchiku still has its monopoly. The Takarazuka has returned to what it was originally meant for, light and popular musicals, prominent among them those of the all girl Takarazuka troupe. Yet a decade later the troupe was to have its most smashing hit, Rose of Versailles, in which, as in The Marriage of Figaro, a woman impersonates a man (in attendance upon Marie Antoinette) impersonating a woman.
Not long after its release by the Americans and its return to the Takarazuka troupe and others, the Takarazuka Theater was the scene of another famous fire, one which, unlike that in the Meijiza, resulted in deaths. The first day of February 1958 was opening day for a musical comedy (not all-girl) about the Ainu, the aborigines who survive vestigially on the northern island of Hokkaido. The play was in progress, the house was packed. On a higher floor an audience was having a movie afternoon, and on a level yet higher a program of the Yose variety theater was underway. Along toward the end of the performance in the main theater the Ainu village which was the setting was attacked by the Japanese. The effects were partly achieved by a fire machine, a sort of flame thrower. It seems that not all the sparks and flames it threw were extinguished. Still later in the performance a curtain began to smolder. The fire quickly spread. The audience applauded these yet more dramatic effects, and did not realize that they were unintentional until a barrier was lowered between the stage and the pits. There was panic and there were injuries from trampling, but no fatalities among the spectators. Those in the theaters above, not witness to the excitement, were evacuated quietly by emergency exits. The three deaths occurred backstagetwo child actors and a woman dancer.
Yose too had its troubles with censorship. Although certain feudal tendencies, such as an emphasis on loyalty and submission that runs all through Japanese society, are to be detected in Yose, the censors found nothing in the comic Rakugo monologue so undemocratic as to call for action. They did object, however, to the serious, didactic Kōdan, also done by monologuists. They thought, and they were right, that it glorified the military virtues. They were particularly suspicious of revenge and righteous violence. The form accommodated itself by devices similar to those resorted to by Kabuki. As with Kabuki, the attention of the censors presently flagged.
The most popular Yose theater in the city was for a time near the Sumida River in the Ningyōchō district of Nihombashi. It closed, for want of a clientele, in 1970. Ningyōchō, in which something of old Nihombashi yet survives, is not the bustling place it once was. It escaped the bombings, though the Meijiza, to the east, did not. In the years just after the war it seemed to beckon across the wastes to western Nihombashi, where big business and finance resided, as if asking it to come home again.
In late Edo and through much of Meiji, until the movies came along, Yose was the entertainment
for the masses who did not have much money. Presently radio and baseball also came along, and then television, and a far bigger city now contains only one percent as many Yose halls as during the best years of Edo. Yet one need not despair for Yose. It has come to terms with the newer media, and they have extended assistance. The Suzumoto in Ueno, the oldest hall in the city, and now the largest, seating upward of two hundred people, was having a very hard time during the depression years, 1930 and thereabouts, and fees from NHK, the public broadcasting system and the only one there was in those days, helped it come through. Radio and television fees still give a comfortable living to the better-known performers. Yose seems moreover to appeal to the young. Scarcely a university is without its Rakugo study society. Most of the active professionals, a scattering of women among them, were born in the last reign. A single one was born in Meiji, and fewer than twenty in Taishō.
So it seems that Rakugo, and, more tenuously, Kōdan, will survive. There is today a single house in the city and indeed in the nation that specializes in Kōdan. Also in Ueno, it opened in 1950, before the censorious Americans had gone away. The name, Hommokutei, is interesting. It once belonged to the Suzumoto, which was founded in the year of Commodore Perry’s landing. The Hommoku district of Yokohama was made famous by that event. So we may infer that Edo had a good idea of what was going on and was much interested.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 53