Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Streetwalkers gave the language at least one neologism which has survived. They were and still are known as “panpan girls.” The origins of the first word are unknown. The second is the English. They had their literary spokesman. The novelist Tamura Taijiro was the leading exponent of the “carnal literature” (nikutai bungaku) of the day. His most famous work, a novella published in 1947, has the same title, Flesh Gate (Nikutai no Mon), as the very popular movie made from it. A group of streetwalkers work the district from Yurakucho eastward through Ginza to the Sumida River, and live a communal life in the ruined dockyards. They have their code: they do not give themselves to men except for money; business is business, and any suggestion that sex is other than business is a threat to them all. The main action has to do with the punishment meted out to girls who violate the code by indulging gratis and with pleasure. The first stage, exposure, made the work obvious material for the strip theaters, which did not overlook it. The girls have such vivid names as Borneo Maya. Maya has never been to Borneo, but her brother was killed there, and she is always talking about it. Poor Maya is awaiting punishment as the story ends.

  It is sometimes the case that a minor work of literature captures the sense of a time and place better than any major one. Flesh Gate must be called a minor work, but one would have trouble thinking of a work that better catches the desperation of those grim years, and the determination to survive. The code may not be of a very elevated sort, but the girls are expected to live by it, one for all and all for one.

  Poster for the film Flesh Gate

  So much for the flower of the old pair, flower and willow, courtesan and geisha respectively. The sad decline that was to overtake the willow profession of the geisha was not apparent in the immediate postwar years, although there were shifts and changes. Because of a rumor that Americans would be widely requisitioning to the south of Yanagibashi, the Willow Bridge from which the old and elegant geisha quarter derives its name, the houses farthest to the south moved north, and the whole quarter came to lie north of the bridge. The Shimbashi district was meanwhile moving eastward, though there was no similar threat, and leaving the Ginza district entirely to the dancer and the bar girl. In hindsight it is as if they were leaving the future to these latter types. Aficionados talked, as they had for a century or so, of the decline of the geisha. The new geisha had neither the accomplishments nor the brains of the old one. Doubtless the complaints had, for a century or so, been valid. The problem of the decline of the geisha, not numerically apparent until later decades though adumbrated by these complaints, is essentially a moral one. The old sense of pride and responsibility was declining. The flower and the willow were less and less distinguishable.

  Already in October 1945 the police permitted the reopening of bars and cafés. The profusion of such places presents taxonomic difficulties. One is hard put to grasp the distinction between a dance hall and a cabaret. They may have been much the same thing, with the former predominant before the war and the latter after. So it is too with the café and the bar. Ginza led the way. It had the only high-rise building, six storys of it, that was cabaret from top to bottom. The opening in 1947 was segregated. There was a floor for foreigners, by which was meant Occidentals. Soon after the San Francisco Treaty it became exclusively Japanese, not admitting “foreigners” at all. Even today, this sort of racism (so it must be called) is not uncommon. Many a deal that contributed to the economic miracle, we are told, was arranged amid the din. The big Ginza cabaret came upon bad times toward the middle of the fifties, as the Akasaka district, near the bureaucratic center of the city and still the abode of elegant geisha, began to have cabarets that were tonier and more convenient. The building was sold to a large magazine in 1955.

  One does not often hear the word “café” anymore. “Bar,” on the other hand, is everywhere, and unquestionably English, while “café” could be French. Connoisseurs may draw distinctions between them. To the person who has not known the prewar cafés except from literary sources, they may seem very much the same. Young women of varying degrees of elegance, depending on the price, provide company in bars even as Kafū’s café girls did before the war. The most elegant and expensive ones have continued to be in Ginza.

  Then there were the coffeehouses, the kissaten, literally tea shops, though this is misleading. In them persons of more limited means could take more moderate and innocent pleasures. They proliferated in the years after the war, and the years after the San Francisco Treaty may be seen as their best ones. There were coffeehouses where a person could watch newsreels for the price of a cup of coffee until he had had his fill of them or concluded a deal of some description, and places where one could do the same to the accompaniment of popular or classical music. There were “chanson” coffeehouses, where some very famous performers got started. The coffee was not cheap, but one could stay all afternoon and evening and not feel rushed. Coffeehouses got bigger and bigger until, in the mid-fifties, they perhaps got too big. In 1955 a six-story coffeehouse opened in a busy part of Ginza, very near the six-story cabaret. It had life-size animated female dolls to greet customers at the entrance, and several live bands, and the dominant color was purple. It could accommodate six hundred fifty customers. It was not a success. People seem to have gone once and decided that it would not do for every day.

  Also toward the middle of the fifties, coffeehouses started becoming less innocent. The matter of the “late-night coffeehouses” attracted the attention of the media, and in 1956 the prefecture handed down regulations for their governance. Licensing of such places had been lax. Some stayed open all night, offered curtained-off and otherwise sequestered nooks, and were much frequented by prostitutes and petty criminals. They provided inexpensive substitutes for inns. The 1956 regulations forbade such places to take customers under eighteen and overnight customers. There were raids. Intermittent fits of police sternness did not succeed in eradicating them. It may be that this was impossible in so energetically sensual a city; and it may be that the police did not try very hard.

  Then there was the “arbeit salon,” abbreviated arusaro. The first word is of course German, and it has since the war indicated part-time nonprofessional work, chiefly by students piecing out their income. The arbeit salon was a sort of cross between the coffeehouse and the cabaret. Office girls, girl students, and even housewives with spare time would be companionable waitresses during the daylight hours and dancers in the evening. It was less expensive than the cabaret, and for a time customers found the amateurishness of the hostesses pleasing. The vogue for such places had largely passed by the end of the fifties.

  In 1947 an imperial edict (for the Meiji constitution was still in force) did away with publicly recognized prostitution. This in theory meant the end of prostitution. What it meant in practice was that the old public quarters, the Yoshiwara and such, turned private, like Kafū’s beloved Tamanoi. The operators of the old houses became “special purveyors of beverages,” and the women who wished to could work as waitresses. They were free agents, got a share of the earnings, and could depart whenever they wished. The Yoshiwara women formed a union and set up their own clinics, replacing the ones that had sought to control venereal disease among licensed prostitutes. They were supposed to be over eighteen, but many were not.

  The evidence is that the change from public to private prostitution made things worse for them. It had been harder to obtain work in the Yoshiwara than elsewhere, because the Yoshiwara required stronger assurance that women would not run off leaving debts behind them. The private operators had pimps and gangsters to assure that this did not happen.

  The events of 1947 have a cyclical look. Much the same sort of things had happened in early Meiji when, out of deference to what were thought to be Western notions of propriety, the ladies of the quarters were liberated. It was to happen again in 1958, when, this time by act of the Diet under the new constitution, prostitution was finally outlawed. The new law w
as opposed by the union, which organized an anti-anti-prostitution movement.

  A clerk for the Supreme Court wrote in 1955 of the 1947 edict (Edict 9) outlawing prostitution, and the reasons for its ineffectiveness: “Many Japanese laws fail to work as their drafters intended them to, and this is because of a failure to investigate, thoroughly and in detail, the manner in which society is likely to react. A reaction sets in, and the law becomes incapable of imposing the controls which are its reason for being. It is like an old sword that has no function except as a family heirloom. The assigned function of the law does not accord with reality. So it was with Edict 9.”

  In a word, society was not ready. Four decades have passed and it is still not ready. Yet the sword that has become the family heirloom does swing occasionally. It is true of many laws in Japan that they are ignored until it suits someone’s convenience to enforce them. Heads then may fall.

  Baseball may have replaced Sumō as the national accomplishment, but vogues for other diversions have blazed so violently that they have seemed capable of sending even baseball into eclipse. There blazed the yo-yo, and the Hula-Hoop, which even appeared on the Kabuki stage. Shiga Naoya, one of the dignified elders of Japanese letters, aroused some interest when, in Japanese dress, he had a try at it. When it began, a half-dozen years after the surrender, one might have thought that pachinko would blaze and fade. It has not faded. Even today, looking for pursuits that keep people mindlessly happy, one might well come up with a trio: baseball, television, and pachinko.

  The word is an onomatopoeic one that had several uses before it settled upon the pinball machine. It was a slingshot, a catapult, and a pistol. The vogue for pachinko as pinball began in Nagoya, not Tokyo, but Tokyo had more than five thousand pinball parlors by 1952, after which the number fell off somewhat, though the number of machines and customers remained constant. Some were and are very grand, veritable casinos of parlors, blazing with lights and sending forth their metallic clangor to be drowned somewhat in amplified music. The balls fall vertically and not, as in Western prototypes, along an incline, and so speed and noise are increased. With premiums offered for skillful play, pachinko became a gambling game. Skillful players were willing to sell their premiums at prices that undercut the retail market. The underworld therefore entered the scene. Petty racketeers would loiter about to buy up premiums.

  In 1956 the prefecture, along with other local bodies here and there across the country, took action against automatically fed machines, which greatly increased the speed of play, allowing as many as two hundred balls to flow through a machine in a minute. Automatic feeding led to bigger premiums and a bigger role for the underworld. “Third nationals” have always been prominent in the pachinko business, as owners and as buyers of premiums. More than a decade later the automatic feeders were back again, though with the proviso that no more than a hundred balls were to be admitted to a machine per minute. In the mid-fifties upward of one divorce in ten was on grounds of prodigality. Pachinko often figured in the matter.

  Playing pachinko

  Why has pachinko, among all the fads that have come, most of them to go again, shown this perdurability? That it is a flight from reality, a refuge from nagging worries, seems almost too obvious. But there are many such refuges, and why the Japanese have taken to pachinko as no one else has, save imitators elsewhere in East Asia, is mysterious. Probably there is no simple answer, but it does seem to be the case that the Japanese would prefer to be knocked into happy oblivion by sheer noise than by most things. Pachinko is in any event an instance of Japanese originality.

  Baseball came back quickly after the war, both the professional kind and the semi-amateur kind that draws large crowds. The Patriotic Baseball Association returned to its old name in October, and returned as well to the corrupt old terminology, largely English. The Kōrakuen Stadium once more took the English for the second element in its name, the professional teams went back to their old names, Giants and Tigers and the like, also in English, and the best pitcher by far, a Russian, reverted to his real name from the Japanese name he had been required to take during the Crisis. The first professional games took place in November, in Tokyo and Osaka. They were anticipated slightly by a resumption of the Keiō-Waseda rivalry. A game between “old boys” of the two schools was held at the Meiji Stadium on November 18. The stadium had been requisitioned by the Americans and was lent for the occasion. The Occupation was all in favor of baseball, which was peaceful and democratic and which it thought would cement relations, not that it had done much toward this end during the preceding decade.

  The novelist Funabashi Seiichi was at the Keiō-Waseda game and set down what it meant to him.

  The gates having been closed off by the Americans, we had to go in over concrete rubble along the passage between infield and outfield. This was unpleasant, but I suppose inevitable….

  In the violence of the war, so recently over, we thought that we would never again see a baseball game. And here we were already, under autumn skies, listening to the crack of the baseball bat. It was like a dream. Today, even now, behind the net, I was witness to a squeeze play, a fielder’s choice, a pitcher giving an intentional walk, a two-three count with two out and the bases full.

  I wanted to feel my eyes and make sure that they were open. But it was no dream. American officers, viewing a serious university baseball game for the first time, seemed to take a different view of us Japanese.

  Funabashi uses the old and revived terminology, laced with English.

  The Occupation was sensitive to the argument that baseball would be good for the national morale, and Funabashi’s remarks suggest that the view was not groundless. The Kōrakuen Stadium, the main grounds for professional baseball in Tokyo, was in a very dreary state at the end of the war. The Scoreboard was a twisted ruin from the April bombings, the stands were artillery and machine-gun emplacements, the field was vegetable patches. Unpromising though it was, the stadium had to remain in Japanese hands if professional baseball was to survive. This was the view of the magnates of the sport, who gathered in emergency session early in November. Their resolve was initially frustrated when the Occupation requisitioned the stadium a few days later. They did not give up, however. They argued eloquently that baseball was necessary to restore the shattered morale of the nation. The requisition order was revoked in February 1946. The first postwar season began in April, at the Korakuen and at the Nishinomiya Stadium in the suburbs of Osaka. The morale of Tokyo was not helped by the fact that the Giants did not win the championship that year. An Osaka team did.

  The Korakuen Stadium was surrounded by potholes in the early years after the war. Then in 1955 it came to be surrounded by an amusement park, the brightest and best in the city, quite overwhelming the Hanayashiki, the “Flower Garden” in Asakusa. It had roller coasters, of course, and it had skating rinks and gymnasiums too. There it was that Mishima Yukio took up boxing and bodybuilding to reshape the rather fragile endowments with which he had had to be satisfied in his earlier years.

  Professional baseball had enough players and sponsors that by the end of 1949 it had enough teams to split into two leagues, the Central and the Pacific. So 1950 was the first two-league season, and in that autumn occurred the first Japan Series, on the American model. Again Tokyo was disappointed. A Tokyo team won the series, but it was not the idolized Giants. Lefty O’Doul, who had given the team its name, came visiting with his San Francisco Seals in 1949. The first night games were held in 1950, and so the language received a new word, “nighter,” in modified English.

  Shōriki Matsutarō, the father of Japanese professional baseball, became the first chairman of the baseball commission, overseeing both leagues. The circumstances leading up to the split into rival leagues suggest that, besides the national morale, baseball was interested in money. The Giants and the Osaka Tigers had initially been on opposite sides in the matter of admitting new teams to the o
ld league. But then the possibility arose to haunt the Tigers of having to give up games with the Giants, the most lucrative games, if the two remained at odds. So the Tiger organization switched its vote, the teams were admitted, the split occurred, and Giants and Tigers remained lucratively matched.

  The promptness with which the Occupation returned the Korakuen may have been responsible for the survival of Shinobazu Pond, a part of Ueno Park, and one of the prettiest spots in the city, especially in midsummer, when the lotuses are in bloom. A very shallow pond, it was drained after the war and put to the growing of cereals. There was a nasty scandal having to do with the disposition of the cereals thus grown. (A large part of the pond disappeared again in 1968, when excavation for a new subway line accidentally punched a hole in the floor.)

  Water came back in 1949, but there was talk of putting the site to uses other than pleasure boating and the growing of ornamental water plants. A suggestion which had strong backing was that it be made into a many-level parking garage—for even in those thin days it was apparent that the number of automobiles and the proportions of the traffic problem would not stop growing. Another suggestion, and one that was very popular with businessmen who thought that Ueno, like Asakusa, might be languishing, was to make the site into a baseball stadium. The faction in favor of filling in the pond and making it useful had a majority on the Taito Ward council, and the death of the pond seemed a matter of time.