A prominent instance of possible political violence remains a mystery. Was the violence wrought by the victim upon himself, or was it at the hands of others? We do not know. In the spring of 1949 the National Railways began a drastic personnel retrenchment. On July 4 the railway offices announced plans to dismiss forty thousand workers. The president, Shimoyama Sadanori, was last definitely seen alive on the morning of July 5, near the main Mitsukoshi department store in Nihombashi. The next morning his dismembered body was found on a track of his own National Railways in the northeastern part of the city. The finding of the official autopsy was that he was dead before being run over, but there was expert opinion to the contrary, holding that he had placed himself upon the tracks and been killed by a train. There were also those who averred that someone very like him had been seen near the fatal spot on the night of July 5. No arrests were made. If Shimoyama was indeed murdered, then his murderers were most likely radical unionists. They were much inflamed in those days, both because of the layoffs and because of a hint from General MacArthur on that same July 4 that the Communist Party might be outlawed.
Through the month of July there were literally thousands of instances of sabotage and obstruction throughout the National Railways system. The most famous incident occurred not in Tokyo but at Matsukawa in Fukushima Prefecture, on the main line of the National Railways to the far north. Three train crewmen died on August 17 in a derailment. The union members taxed with the act were not finally acquitted until 1963. Some weeks earlier there had been a bloodier though less celebrated incident at Mitaka, in the western suburbs of Tokyo. On July 15 seven railway cars ran loose down a sloping track from the Mitaka railway yards. They crashed into a house, killing six people. The suspicion was strong that the runaway was not accidental. Two union men were arrested and one was sentenced to death. The sentence was never carried out. He died in prison.
If the Matsukawa defendants were guilty (they were acquitted for want of evidence) and if Shimoyama was murdered, then the most likely explanation for all three incidents is union unrest. The thought that Japan once had militant unionism is like a faint echo from a legendary past; but indeed there was such a time. A strike against the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1945 brought a brief period of democratization, by which is meant control of editorial policy by the labor unions. General MacArthur interdicted plans for a general strike in 1947. Concerning the most celebrated instances of violence, the railway cases, there have been theories that someone else did everything, some strongly anti-union entity wishing to make it seem that the unions were responsible. The Occupation is prominent among the suspects. In the Shimoyama instance, it is said that a peculiar grease used by Americans in ministering to their weaponry was found on the dead man’s shirt.
The train wreck at Mitaka, 1949
The Mitsukoshi department store figured peripherally in the Shimoyama incident, possibly a product of labor strife, and it had some strife of its own which was rather amusing and showed how quickly the militancy was subsiding. This occurred during the year-end rush of 1951. A popular saying resulted: “You can find anything at Mitsukoshi, even a strike.” Management, with the help of nonunion and part-time clerks, was prepared to open the store on the morning of December 18, but some two thousand pickets from the Mitsukoshi union and others sealed the entrances. They were joined by thirty concerned clergymen from the aggressive Nichiren sect, who marched up and down banging on ritual drums. The police informed the pickets that they would not be allowed to interfere with business, and that was that. By noon customers were pouring in.
A history of labor strife in Tokyo over the past third of a century would surely be among the shortest histories ever written. It has consisted mainly of ceremonial stoppages of which the public is informed in advance. They can be fun. Office workers who know that they cannot get back to the suburbs disport themselves later than usual and sleep in the city.
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The hardships of the first winter after the war caused the death in March 1946 of the eminent Kabuki actor Kataoka Nizaemon. He was the twelfth in a line of actors bearing that name, its origins in Kyoto in the seventeenth century. He was murdered, along with four members of his family. The murderer was a young man who lived with the family. His complaint was that he was cheated on rations, given less to eat than members of the family. Having been scolded by Nizaemon s wife for stealing food, he seized an ax with the intention of punishing only her, and was surprised into attacking the rest of the family.
(In the case of the other postwar Kabuki actor of eminence to die in extraordinary circumstances, the circumstances were much more luxurious. The seventh Bandō Mitsugorō died of fugu poisoning in 1975. Certain parts of the fugu—blowfish—are poisonous. Much prized by gourmets, it is safe when prepared by professionals. Real gourmets, however, approach close to the poisonous parts and, it is said, experience a delightful tingling of the palate. Mitsugorō seems to have approached too close.)
Some of the crimes and misdemeanors of the postwar years, though they produced pains and losses, seem in retrospect chiefly amusing. On the evening of November 22, 1948, the chief of the prefectural police, off having a look at Ueno Park, a most disorderly place, was beaten up by a male prostitute. The following month the park was declared closed at night to everyone but policemen. In September 1950 a teenage chauffeur for Nihon University made off with a large sum of money, stolen from a university functionary, and also with the daughter of a university professor. The two were apprehended in bed. In the two days between their absconding and their capture they had spent some twenty-five times the beginning monthly salary of an office worker. As the police entered the room they had taken, the boy sat up in bed and said, in English, “Oh, mistake.” He never explained himself, and there were several theories as to what he meant. Probably he wanted the officers to think, back in those Occupation days, that he was an American. “Oh, mistake” was among the new expressions that went the rounds that year, along with “nighter” signifying an after-dark baseball game.
Some crimes were dreadful. A man named Kodaira took advantage of the postwar hardships to rape and murder women, ten of them. He would lure them to secluded spots with promises of food and work, and there do it. The body of the last victim was found in Shiba Park on the heights behind the Tokugawa tombs, where Tokyo Tower was later to go up (see pages 517-518). He was apprehended in August 1946. Then there was what is known, with black irony, as the Kotobuki affair. Kotobuki means something like “good luck.” In this instance it was the name of a lying-in hospital, in what was before 1947 Ushigome Ward, to the west of the palace. In January 1948 the police apprehended an automobile taking a dead infant from the hospital. Investigation revealed that the man and wife who ran the hospital had since 1945 been taking in unwanted infants for money. They had disposed of more than a hundred in several ways. Some had been allowed to die of exposure and pneumonia, some had starved to death. The largest number had been quietly suffocated.
There was a young man named Yamazaki who was eminently representative of nihilistic postwar youth. He was a member of the elite, a student at Tokyo University. He set up a usury business. It failed, and he committed suicide, in November 1949. Life is an empty play, he said, and death is nothing at all. The affair caught the fancy of Mishima Yukio, who a few months later began serialization of the novel The Green Years (Ao no Jidai), based on Yamazaki’s brief career.
It may be that the crime most celebrated the nation over during those postwar years was the Matsukawa derailment mentioned above. That is because it aroused intense political passions, and won the services of an eminent writer, Hirotsu Kazuo, who thought of himself as a Japanese Emile Zola and made it his mission to establish the innocence of the defendants. Probably the most celebrated Tokyo crime was the Imperial Bank robbery. (The Imperial, or Teikoku, subsequently reverted to its earlier name, the Mitsui Bank.) On the afternoon of January 26, 1948, just at closing time, a man of perhaps
fifty wearing what seemed to be an official armband entered the branch of the bank at Shiinamachi, on the Seibu Ikebukuro line a short distance west of Ikebukuro. He said that he had come to administer a dysentery preventative and that all the employees must drink it. They did, all sixteen of them, and twelve died. What they had drunk was potassium cyanide. He too had a drink of the liquid, by way of demonstration, but seems to have drunk only from the layer of water on top. He made off with a considerable sum of money and a check.
A painter named Hirasawa was sentenced to death for the crime. The sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1955, and numerous petitions to reopen the case were dismissed. The sentence was never reversed, nor was it carried out. In 1985 Hirasawa was returned to Tokyo from Sendai Prison, where capital punishments are carried out for Tokyo criminals. He died in a prison hospital in 1987, at the age of ninety-five. He had heen imprisoned for almost forty years, and had lived with the death sentence for almost a third of a century. All that was required to carry it out was the seal and signature of the minister of justice, and no minister ever signed and sealed. Since 557 executions did occur between 1947 and 1985, believers in his innocence have found support for their position. There had been more than thirty justice ministers during the more than thirty years between Hirasawa’s final conviction and his death. Every one of those many ministers—who replaced each other at a dizzying rate so that all manner of politicians might have their time— apparently had doubts about his guilt.
The devices which led to Hirasawa’s arrest, on the island of Hokkaido in August 1948, were certainly very ingenious. There had earlier been two similar incidents, one late in 1947 at a bank in the southern part of Tokyo, one a few days before the Imperial affair at a bank very near its Shiinamachi branch. Both of the latter banks were within walking distance of Hirasawa’s residence. In both of the earlier cases a man of great assurance had said that, by way of disease prevention, the bank employees must drink of the liquid he offered. He was thwarted in both instances. The similarity among the three led the police to suspect the same culprit, and their attention was drawn to the name cards he (if indeed it was a single person) had left at the two earlier banks. One of them bore a fictitious name, but the other bore the unusual name of a physician living in Sendai.
Certain peculiarities in printing, having to do with the unusual name, established that the card indeed belonged to the physician. So he was set to the task of remembering the people he had exchanged cards with. Among those he remembered was Hirasawa. The two had met and exchanged cards in 1947, on the ferry from Hakodate on Hokkaido to Aomori. Hirasawa was singled out as the most suspicious, and arrested. It was all very ingenious, but it did not, in itself, prove much of anything.
Interrogation was intense. Initially it revealed nothing about the Imperial affair, but it did seem to reveal something else of interest. As the time approached for Hirasawa’s mandatory release, evidence emerged that he might be guilty of fraud. At yet another bank he had, or so it was suspected, taken advantage of loose procedures and made off with a sum of money intended for another customer. So he was arraigned for fraud, and the interrogation continued. He signed a confession in the Imperial Bank matter. He later retracted it. Most of it was composed by the detectives, he said, and mental torture caused him to sign. All three of the courts that imposed or upheld the death sentence accepted the validity of the confession.
It was not quite the only evidence, though we are often told it was. A large amount of money that went into Hirasawa’s bank account shortly after the crime was never adequately explained. His statement that it was in payment for a work of pornography which someone had commissioned him to do was not a part of the sworn testimony and is not convincing. Several of the experts summoned, though not all of them, said that the endorsement on the check, which was cashed on the day after the murders, was in Hirasawa’s hand. Like the handwriting experts, the four Imperial Bank survivors were not in agreement. Neither were the employees of the other two banks. Some were certain that the criminal, or the would-be criminal, was Hirasawa, some were not.
Many a court would in these circumstances have held that there was reasonable doubt as to his guilt; and many a person has held that a third of a century awaiting the seal and signature of one of those justice ministers constitutes unusual and inhuman punishment.
Detectives inside the Imperial Bank after the robbery
It was a fascinating case, and not the least fascinating element is the air that hangs over it of postwar confusion and deprivation. Even the bank in which the crime occurred has a make-do look about it, not at all a Mitsui look. To judge from photographs, it was a quite ordinary dwelling house made to do until something more banklike could be put up. One cannot imagine the cool clerks and branch managers in the glossy banks of our day accepting an unidentified drink from a stranger; but epidemics raged in those years, and the faculty called common sense had come unmoored.
Another line of investigation proceeded parallel to that of the name card. It is much favored by the radical left because it brings in the possibility of American skulduggery. The police thought it possible that the criminal was skilled in the use of chemical poisons. The biggest pool of expertise was in the Japanese army, and particularly a chemical-warfare unit once active in Manchuria. This second investigation was frustrated by the Americans, its supporters aver, because they took the unit under their protection. The Korean War broke out a few weeks before the first Hirasawa conviction was handed down, and, with a mind to launch chemical warfare against the Koreans, the Americans wished to use Japanese skills to reinforce their own inadequate ones. Rumors of chemical-warfare were rife in those days. One can say for the case that it might possibly be true, but that the evidence is flimsier than that which led to Hirasawa’s conviction.
The child of Edo, who had nothing to compare his city with except the cities of the Kansai, which were not worth the time of day, may not have noticed something that early foreign visitors were quick to discern. They thought the city a cluster of villages. They were right in the sense that it was a scattered city with more than one center. What they remarked upon has been among the unchanging elements in a city of violent change. The city has gone on having not one “downtown” but several. It did not have to start decentralizing when decentralization came into vogue among planners. The process was already well advanced.
In the fifties we started hearing the word fukutoshin. It is literally “secondary heart of the city,” and it might also be rendered “subcenter” or “satellite city.” In 1960 it entered specifically into the official plans of a city that has never (and it is among the pleasures of the place) really done much effective planning. A commission presented and the prefectural council approved a plan that had specific reference to Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro. They were to be the first fukutoshin, dispersing the oppressive strength of the traditional center. The plan and the concept are notable for their westerly inclination, which is realistic, that having been the inclination of the city ever since it became Tokyo.
Shinjuku was well ahead of the other two in those days, and it is well ahead now, the only one among them that can seriously challenge the old Ginza-Nihombashi-Marunouchi center. How successful the challenge has been is a matter that must be treated later. Shinjuku grew up at the point where one of the main highways out of the city, that to the province of Kai, crossed the railroad which in 1885 commenced service from Shinagawa through the western suburbs to a point near the northern prefectural boundary. The inland road to the Kansai had in premodern times departed the city in a northwesterly direction, through Itabashi. The railroad that was to replace it began service as far as Hachiōji in 1904. It headed uncompromisingly westward from Shinjuku. Itabashi languished. Already in the early decades of this century two important private commuter lines, one of them the Odawara Express of lyric fame (see page 352), terminated in Shinjuku. Their commuter clientele fell into the habit of taki
ng a few cups and other pleasures at Shinjuku before resuming the outward passage. Shinjuku was the place in the western suburbs that drew the biggest crowds.
In the years when the word fukutoshin was gaining currency, Shinjuku saw the possibility of widening its lead yet further. Indeed the possibility was becoming a certainty that it would in the near future have a big piece of land to develop. The Yodobashi Reservoir (Yodobashi was the name of one of the three wards which in 1947 were amalgamated to form Shinjuku Ward) covered a tract of more than eighty acres just to the west of the Shinjuku Nishiguchi, the “Westmouth” to Shinjuku Station. From the Taishō Period there had been talk of moving the reservoir farther west. The move actually took place in 1965, and so the story of what was done with the land can be left to later.
The Westmouth was in those years the neglected, backward one. It was not without its places for reveling. We have seen that immediately after the war underworld gangs opened markets at all three of the mouths, west, south, and east. Traces of that at Westmouth yet survive, in the cluster of one and two-story “barracks” known popularly and affectionately as Piss Alley (Shomben Yokochō). It would much prefer that the public call it Chicken Alley, for skewered chicken is, along with alcohol, the commodity it chiefly purveys, but the public does not oblige. Piss Alley it is and will be so long as it survives. It may not smell very good, but it is an object of great nostalgia for those who wish that the city had not rebuilt itself quite so thoroughly in the four decades since the war.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 57