Cultivating the drained Shinobazu Pond, Ueno, 1946
Opponents lobbied here and lobbied there, and sought to stir up public attention and concern through such devices as fireworks displays. Finally they summoned up their last measure of courage and went to see Shoriki. He listened in a friendly manner and made a call to the president of the league. It seemed, he said, that the locals did not want a baseball stadium. He thought it might be well for the league to take action appropriate to this state of affairs. So the petitioners went to the president. He nodded smiling assent to their every word and suggestion, and thus ended a battle that had lasted three years. We often hear the word “consensus” with regard to Japanese decisions. The incident might offer evidence as to its deeper meaning. One of Shoriki’s visitors said that for the first time he really understood the expression “a single call from the crane.” The principal Japanese-English dictionary renders the proverbial call of the crane as “a word ex cathedra.” Shōriki might not have been as ready with his cathedral pronouncement if the Giants and those other teams had not already had the Kōrakuen at their disposal.
The Occupation was not as kind to Sumō as to baseball. The Sumō arena east of the Sumida River, the domed Hall of the National Accomplishment, was requisitioned the day after Christmas 1945. Like several big theaters, it had been used during the closing months of the war to make incendiary balloons. Except for a single tournament permitted by the Occupation in 1946 in the old arena, Sumō spent the next forty years west of the river. Its main grounds through the Edo centuries and most of the first Tokyo century had been in the east.
After several temporary sites during the immediate postwar years, including the Kōrakuen, Sumō settled on the west bank of the Sumida, just below Asakusa, and remained there for more than a third of a century. At the entrances to the temporary arenas was the warning: “Off-limits to all Occupation and non-Occupation personnel.” Those who spoke the Occupation dialect understood the meaning: that no foreigners, whether with the Occupation or not, were permitted within. As a practical matter this meant persons of European or African extraction, who could be apprehended, chided, and evicted. The reasons probably had to do with overcrowding, the Occupation taking the sensible position that Japanese crowds were quite large and dangerous enough already.
When the old arena was finally returned, on April 1, 1952, the Sumō Association found the cost of rehabilitating it, and especially of removing the huge masses of concrete that had been poured into the pit, prohibitive. In 1958 it was sold to a university, which in 1981 sold it to the prefecture, which in 1983 tore it down. The site is now a parking lot. (The Meiji Stadium and the Imperial Hotel were derequisitioned on that same April Fools’ Day of 1952. Important things happen on April Fools’ Day in Japan because it is the first day of the fiscal year.) In 1985 Sumō returned east of the river, but not to the old grounds, which were never reoccupied. The new arena lies a short distance to the north of the site of the old one, on the other side of the railway line to Chiba.
Probably all authoritarian regimes have their arbitrary side, and the American Occupation, despite its high democratic rhetoric, was authoritarian. It was not evenhanded in its treatment of the two sports. Perhaps the Sumō Association, being somewhat insular, was not as persuasive as the baseball magnates, and of course it did not have the bond of friendship and mutual admiration which each crack of the bat calls up. Because it was very old and very traditional, it may have been, like judo, associated with the martial arts. Certainly judo did help many a soldier, Japanese and American, offensively and defensively. It is hard to believe that Sumō ever did anyone much good in a martial way.
A dozen years after the war Sumō went through another in its series of crises and challenges on the road to what is known as modernization. It has already been mentioned for its place in the career of the great wrestler Futabayama (see page 399). There were hearings in the National Diet on the obstinate refusal of the sport to become modern. Pressures mounted periodically through the first “modern” century of the sport. The president of the Sumō Association was a man who had held the highest rank and taken the professional name of Tsunenohana, which means something like “Everlasting Flower.” (Sumō wrestlers often take flowery names.) The pressures became too much for him. One day in May 1957, in what was then the Hall of the National Accomplishment, on the west bank of the Sumida, he attempted a premodern kind of suicide, by disemboweling.
He recovered, but Futabayama replaced him, and in the autumn was able to push reforms through. The problem was the nagging one of how tickets should be sold. The solution was a compromise, as they all have been. Should they be sold directly through a box office managed by the association, or should they go through the traditional teahouses? Well, some would go the one way, some the other. It was a problem that also nagged Kabuki, but Kabuki reformers were more energetic and resolute. The teahouses have vanished from Kabuki sales arrangements. The formal status of the teahouses was also changed, but the change made little difference in their operations.
There were other gestures toward modernization or (another magical word) internationalization. Chairs were put into some of the stalls in which spectators had hitherto had to hunker down on straw matting. The pillars were removed from the roof over the wrestling ring. Like Nō actors, Sumō wrestlers had long performed under two roofs, that which closed the larger arena or theater off from the heavens and that which gave the stage or ring the aspect of a smaller, more intimate building. In 1952 the pillars disappeared from the smaller, lower roof of the Hall of the National Accomplishment. It has since been suspended from the higher ceiling. Safety and visibility were given as the reasons. Wrestlers were always injuring themselves against the pillars.
Futabayama retired a few months after the end of the war, and everyone said that his like would not come again. It may be true, and it certainly is true that Sumō as popular entertainment has been put in deep shadows by baseball. Yet Sumō more than survived. It returned from the ashes to have one of the most remarkable periods in its modern history. From about the end of the first postwar decade two fine wrestlers, Wakanohana and Tochinishiki, began their rise to the top, which both of them reached toward the end of the fifties. (Wakanohana is another of those floral names. It means something like “Flower of Youth.”) They may not have been the very finest of postwar wrestlers, but each was a worthy rival of the other, and it takes two to make a match. There was excitement in the Tochiwaka period, as the Japanese fondness for acronyms has it, as there has not been since.
The two provided moments of great excitement, and Wakanohana won the important matches. They fought to a draw in 1958, at the end of the tournament as a result of which one or the other was certain to be promoted to Yokozuna, the top Sumō rank. Wakanohana won the rematch. In 1960 both went into the fifteenth and last day of the March tournament undefeated. It was the first time in the history of the sport that two Yokozuna had gone into the final day in that condition. Again Wakanohana won. It is true that the rank has been debased in recent years, so that there may be stars to attract crowds and the television audience. Yet it was a fine moment. The pair provided fine moments as we have not had them since.
We often hear that the invasion of the old national accomplishment by “foreigners” did not begin until the late sixties, when a Hawaiian came into prominence. In fact there had earlier been Koreans. One of them, whose Sumo name was Rikidōzan, started something, the huge popularity of professional wrestling, that would probably have started one day even without him. As in all places, professional wrestling in Japan is less sport than show. Rikidōzan, a moderately successful and popular Sumō wrestler, though he did not reach the very top, left Sumō in some pique at the feudal ways of the Sumō world, and in October 1951 was the big attraction in the first professional wrestling matches. He became a great hero. He had come upon something the age and the nation yearned for, doing brutal things to monstrous persons of
European stock. It was the Bruce Lee act. Rikidōzan was proclaimed “world champion”in 1954. He had close ties with the underworld. Feeling that he needed bodyguards, he used gangsters. In December 1963 he was stabbed during an altercation in an Akasaka cabaret. The assailant was a member of the gang that controlled the place. Rikidōzan died a week later.
The great Sumō wrestler Futabayama being arrested. The religious group of which he was an adherent was suspected of black market activities
Besides the black market mostly provisioned by Americans, there was another market, blackish, at least, that is not often remarked upon. The Japanese armed forces had huge commissary supplies at the end of the war. Indeed they were almost the only organizations that might have been deemed affluent. The more lethal portions were for the most part turned over to the Americans and destroyed, and those that were less so found their way into the civilian market by various routes. They got many a Japanese company started on its way to recovery, and they also got Akihabara started. The Akihabara electronics market is today among the marvels of Tokyo. At Akihabara, it is said, and we who do not know must take the statement on faith, the electronically sophisticated person can find anything that has been invented.
“Akihabara” is literally “the meadow of the Akiba Shrine.” Nagai Kafū insisted to the end that anyone who did not pronounce it “Akibagahara” was a barbarian. Alas, the barbarians have quite taken over, for everyone today says Akihabara. A freight yard since Meiji, it became an important passenger station when, after the earthquake, the Yamanote loop line was finally completed. In Meiji the district was known for domestic handiwork, combs and split-toed socks and the like. Between the wars it was known for its bicycle wholesalers. Such of these as remained after the bombings withdrew some distance from the station.
The radio was very important during the last months of the war and the hard times after. Often it was the only bit of advanced technology a family took with it to the air-raid shelter. Radios were the way to know when danger was coming and when it seemed to have passed. The nation might not have surrendered so meekly if it had not been told to turn on all its radios at high noon on August 15, 1945. The radio became a kind of status symbol in the months after the war. To say that one had an allwave radio was to say that one had a particular pipeline.
So everyone wanted radios, not as easy to come by as the television sets everyone was to want in a few years’ time. Akihabara was ideally situated to take advantage of the blackish market in military supplies.The first to come in were from the Chiba Peninsula, to the east of Tokyo Bay. Akihabara stands at the junction of the Yamanote loop and the line that runs eastward to Chiba and westward to Shinjuku and beyond. The last of the electronics stalls still scattered over the Kanda district moved north when, at the end of 1951, street stalls disappeared.
Electronics emerged dominant at Akihabara for another reason. Penniless young men back from the war were trying to get ahead with their schooling, and Akihabara was near the Kanda-Hongō university district. Many stood on the sidewalk and sold peanuts. A much better way to do it, for those who could, was to build radios. So they combed the Akihabara shops for parts the shopkeepers themselves often did not know the functions of, and built.
Thus began the Akihabara market, assuredly a wonder. Many of the makeshift devices and institutions of the postwar confusion have gone away, and some have stayed and prospered. Chiyoda Ward still has the largest volume among the twenty-three of retail sales in electronics equipment. It is peculiar that that place of big-time managers should lead in retail sales of anything at all, but we must remember that Chiyoda is a mating of two very unlike wards, Kōjimachi, where the managers are, and Kanda, a place of students, universities, and small enterprises.
On April 28, 1952, the great actor Kichiemon led the audience at the Kabukiza in three cheers. It was the day on which the Occupation ended and the San Francisco treaties—the peace treaty and the Japanese-American Security Treaty—went into effect. The undoing of the Occupation, the reassembling of the old combines and the like, is a long and complex story, and of course not limited to Tokyo. Neither is the story of what happened to “summertime.” This last is an instance, however, of an American miscalculation that could be and was swiftly repaired. The expression is in English, and it signifies daylight-saving time, which was imposed by the Americans in April 1948 and abolished just four years later, in the month in which the treaties went into effect. It was something American that could be readily disavowed, though more rational arguments were offered. Better to have an innocent and healthy extra hour in the morning, went one of them, than an extra hour in the evening to waste on drinking and mah-jongg. Just a year later the American practice of giving women’s names to typhoons was discontinued. Since then they have had only numbers. Kitty, which struck in the autumn of 1947, did more damage to Tokyo than any other typhoon in all the years since the war.
Though he cannot have intended them so, Kichiemon’s three cheers might have been taken to announce the beginning of the radical years. Those who read only the newspapers during the Occupation years cannot have been prepared for what happened immediately afterward. The newspapers had suggested little except delight with the Americans and their Occupation and ways, and a resolve to move upward into the light, equal partners (in an expression much favored by a later ambassador) with the United States. Those who went occasionally to the university campuses and saw what was on the student posters may have been vaguely aware that another current was waiting to burst forth.
It did, explosively, on the third day of Japanese independence. May Day had been among the annual festivals of Taishō democracy. Laborers and progressive thinkers got out and marched. With an estimated halfmillion people in attendance, the observance was resumed in 1946. The seventeenth May Day rally, after the loss of a decade’s worth to the Crisis, was held in the palace plaza. In succeeding years that was the place for it. Then, in 1951, the last year in which the Occupation had a say in the matter, the use of the plaza was banned. This happened again in 1952.
Riots in the palace plaza, May Day 1952
Progressives and laborers assembled in the Meiji Gardens. After a big rally there they set forth on marches over five approved routes. The march that was supposed to end at Hibiya Park was seized with an urge to go on to the plaza, just across the street. Erstwhile headquarters of the Occupation lay across another street from the plaza, and a few paces up from the intersection between the two. So General MacArthur, if he had been there, would have had among the best views in town of what happened. The marchers crossed the street and poured into the plaza, and there were met by the police, who used truncheons, tear gas, and even pistols. As they retreated back across the street the demonstrators overturned and set fire to a few American automobiles. A large proportion of the automobiles in the city in those days were American, and they still were allowed to park along main streets.
Initial announcements had one young man killed, by pistol fire. Actually two were killed. More than a hundred, more of them policemen than demonstrators, were seriously injured. More than a hundred demonstrators were arrested on the spot, and eventually more than a thousand.
Of the two hundred or so brought to trial, more than half were declared innocent by the Tokyo District Court—in 1970. Not quite eighteen years had passed. Justice grinds more slowly in Japan than in most places that have it. In 1972 the Tokyo Higher Court declared most of the convicted ones innocent. Fewer than twenty sentences were served.
Such clear-eyed witnesses as the novelist Umezaki Haruo, not of strongly radical inclinations, put the blame on the police. The first acts of violence, he said, were on their side. It may be true. The police, not the well-oiled machine they are today for containing such manifestations, may well have been overzealous. Whatever the rights and wrongs, May Day 1952 stands symbolically at the beginning of a remarkable period. Those who controlled the media seemed intent upon making th
e nation accept a most simpleminded orthodoxy. Every unpleasant question had a simple answer: blame it on capitalism and imperialism, and join the peaceful socialist force. Many an explanation has been given for the phenomenon, but the sudden clap of pacifist, socialist thunder after the quiet of the Occupation was certainly very startling.
The rioters of 1952 still had another dozen years to go with their court travails when it all began to quiet down. In 1960 the attempt to prevent revision of the Security Treaty failed, and showed that the media were not after all omnipotent and that the movement may have been more sound than substance. There followed fragmentation and (as in the thirties) apostasy, and the golden radical years did not return. Today they are (as the saying has it) a dream within a dream. They were remarkable while they lasted, and Tokyo was where the noise was made. Having a demonstration in Osaka or Nagoya would have been like marching on the wrong Washington.
There had been numerous instances under the Occupation of violence with political origins. In 1946 there was an occurrence the likes of which had not often, perhaps never, been heard of in earlier Japanese history, a demonstration not against evil, corrupt ministers surrounding the emperor but against the emperor himself. In the spring of 1946 a “give us rice” rally in the western part of the city was turned into a march upon the palace by the communist firebrand Nosaka Sanzō, recently back from China. Only a direct confrontation with the emperor would serve, he said. The rally marched upon the palace and breached one of the palace gates before it was dispersed. A demand was presented: that the contents of the royal pantry immediately be communized. “I have plenty to eat. You people can starve,” said one placard. The first-person pronoun was the sacred chin (see the ribaldry on page 445), reserved for the emperor alone. A result was arraignment for lèsemajesté, the last before that crime ceased to exist. The Occupation was less sure thereafter that communist agitation was a welcome part of the new democracy.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 56