Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  A more delicate vestige remains at Southmouth. A few paces east of the south entrance to the station, in against the revetment where the broad, constantly jammed successor to the old Kai highway crosses the railroad tracks, is a cluster of “barracks,” shabby wooden buildings with that postwar look about them. They were once drinking places. The Construction Ministry has announced its intention to make the tract a decorative public plaza. Something of the sort is probably needed, for the pedestrian crowds at rush hours spill over onto the highway; but the owners of the buildings, or some of them, will have nothing of it. They say that the ministry does not own the land and has no right to expel them, even though it has effectively rendered most of the buildings derelict. They squatted on land that belonged to the National Railways and now belongs, in their view, to the successor company, and they themselves claim obscure rights. A court battle is in prospect. Rights are clearer in the Westmouth case. If the decorative plaza ever comes to be, it is not likely to be remotely as interesting as the vestige. In a corner of the tract is a public latrine less than ten feet square. The value of the land is estimated at not far from two million dollars at the current exchange rate. Piss Alley has no latrines. That is why it is that.

  Piss Alley, Shinjuku

  Westmouth and Southmouth were not without their reveling places, then, but Eastmouth was the really bustling part of Shinjuku. The center of the bustle had shifted in the modern century. Shinjuku, like the others of the “mouths” on the main highways out of the city, had its licensed quarter. It lay just to the north of what is now the Shinjuku Royal Garden. The railway station, somewhat to the west, pulled shopping and other pleasures toward it, and in the interwar years the busiest part of Shinjuku, and the center of its café culture, was a short distance east of the station, where two roads to the west forked. With its big department stores, this is still the part of Shinjuku where women have the most fun shopping. Men came to have places farther north.

  There was what was first called the Hanasono Block, from the name of the shrine against which it nestled, and then the Golden Block, the first word in English. It has never been very golden. With the clearing away of black markets from the eastern approaches to the station, a snug little pocket between shrine and trolley line became jammed with tiny drinking places, accommodating no more than a dozen customers and occupying a space no more than perhaps that many feet square. Up a very steep flight of stairs would be space for more private drinking and other activities. The district began calling itself the Golden Block from about the time of the Olympics. Even with the disappearance of the trolley line, it remained a little apart from and a little different from the much brighter and larger district that grew up to the west, and it has shown great powers of survival. The indications are that it will not survive much longer. The Seibu enterprises are buying it up, and a warren of little two-story wooden buildings is not in the Seibu class.

  The story of how that brighter, larger district came to be is a most remarkable one of industry and enterprise, with a strong admixture of luck as well. Kabukichō may today be—the matter is arguable—the liveliest part of the city. It is without doubt the leading center in the city and quite probably the land for what is called “the sex industry.” The industry is not quite as open, perhaps, as in Times Square, but it is more varied. There can be few proclivities to which Kabukichō does not minister. And until 1948 the name Kabukicho, much less the fact, did not exist.

  Until it was reduced to cinders in 1945, the district was a nondescript one of small shops and dwellings. Noting the regularity and apparent inevitability with which the paths of the ladies of the night, as they plied their trade in the aftermath of the war, led through the district, a man named Suzuki had a dream. He had in his youth been a cook in the British and American embassies, apparently a good one. (His teacher was a man who later became head chef at the Imperial hotel.) At the end of the war he was in the food-processing business and the head of the neighborhood association of a district to the north of Shinjuku Station. His dream was that the district might be made over into a cultural center, with a variety of theaters, including a Kabuki one. It did certainly become a center, and it does have one big theater and numbers of lesser ones, but “cultural” might not be the word that best characterizes it. “Raunchy” might do better.

  Suzuki and others busied themselves, and their labors seem to have been enormous, with such matters as providing utilities for and assigning lands to the owners of establishments, mostly eating and drinking ones, that would cater to the theater crowds. A new name was needed, for easy reference, because the district with which the planners were concerned extended over two of the older districts in what from 1947 was Shinjuku Ward. This gave it a divided and scattered look, when identity and integrity were required. In elaborate ceremonies in 1948, attended by such dignitaries as the first elected governor of the prefecture, it became Kabukichō.

  The new name does undeniably have style, and it was expected to have a certain talismanic function as well. It was to break a jinx regarding Kabuki, to refute the old notion that Kabuki was an art form particular to and inseparable from the old Low City. Like a wildflower, it could survive only on its native grounds. As a matter of fact Shinjuku Ward had had instances supporting the generalization. A theater in the old Yotsuya Ward had what historians call second-rate Kabuki from 1917. It also had the usual history of burnings and rebuildings, and a brief period of prosperity just after the earthquake, when it was back in business before any of the Low City theaters could be. It declined as they returned and had its last Kabuki in 1937, although it survived in other capacities, to be destroyed just after the war as unsafe. A Shinjuku theater called the Shinkabukiza, the New Kabuki Theater, opened in 1929. The name having changed to Shinjuku Daiichi Gekijō, or First Shinjuku Theater, it gradually became less a place for Kabuki than for concerts, reviews, and theatrical performances of a more modern and exotic sort: for a brief period after the Second World War, when so many of the Low City theaters were gutted shells, it was again among the main places for Kabuki. It does not survive.

  Possibly, depending on definitions, the jinx has been broken by the National Theater, which stands on one of the most awesome expanses of land in the High City, just across the moat from the palace. It was not, in any event, broken by Kabukichō, which never got its Kabuki theater. The first movie theater opened in 1948 and closed a decade later. It was popular with the chic left, whose great decade its one decade approximately coincided with. Kabukichō was becoming all the time more strategic, and did not really need Kabuki. The Shinjuku line of the metropolitan trolley system was rerouted in 1949 so that its Shinjuku terminus was at the southern edge of the district. The Seibu railways extended one of their lines to Shinjuku in 1952. The Shinjuku terminus was at the western edge of Kabukichō.

  There was an exposition. When in doubt have an exposition: this seems to be a part of Japanese folk wisdom. In the Meiji Period there was a series of national expositions, most of them at Ueno, designed to rally the nation in the endeavor to catch up with the world. They do seem to have had an enlivening effect. Suzuki decided that Kabukichō would have one. It was held at three sites in the spring and early summer of 1950. It was a complete disaster—or would have been if good luck had not come upon the scene at this point. The fact that it was such a fiasco attracted attention, and Kabukichō was, so to speak, on the map. In 1951 Suzuki was able to arrange a land transaction between the largest landowner in the district and a movie company. It included the site of the biggest and most famous of Kabukichō theaters, the Koma Stadium. The Koma opened as a movie house in 1956, and a year later changed over to stage. The most popular entertainers in the land, such as Enoken, performed there.

  Kabukichō emerged as the most bustling part of Shinjuku. The district of the interwar café bustle did not languish, but it was rather lost in the glare of Kabukichō. The pleasure quarter that was attached to the old post station
did well in the years just after the war. The count of its ladies was in 1951 ten times what it had been at the end of the war. Some of the houses modernized themselves by becoming joint-stock companies and by arranging exchanges with the Yoshiwara, the most venerable of the licensed pleasure quarters. The advantage of this arrangement was that a girl could have more than one debut, and debuts were highly profitable. The two quarters had the most expensive brothels in the city.

  With the second postwar outlawing of prostitution in sight, that of 1958, many a little drinking place emerged as a cover for the old business. By the time Shinjuku Ward had been in existence long enough to publish a history of its first thirty years, almost a half million people were partaking of Kabukichō each day. As many as 80 percent of them were under thirty. It is the young crowds that give a bustling place its life and its future, and so Kabukichō was doing well.

  But if Kawabata thought that Asakusa had nothing really first-rate to offer, what would he have said of Kabukichō? Being of the crowd which commuted south from Ginza rather than that which commuted west from Shinjuku, he does not seem to have paid much attention. The Koma did offer performances of some quality, but, except for first-run movie houses, it was the only place all up and down Eastmouth that can have been said to do so. Shinjuku has in this respect never been a rival of Ginza. Nor does it offer the variety of stage performances that interwar Asakusa did. Eastmouth is essentially a purveyor of drink and sex. It has been increasingly that ever since it became Kabukichō. One does not wish to sound censorious, for it is all very interesting and amusing; but one would have liked to have, while it was still possible, a comparison of Eastmouth and Asakusa from Kawabata.

  If Suzuki and the others who worked so hard to get Kabukichō going had a sense of where it would go, they did not say so. Perhaps those initial observations about the habits of the ladies of the night pointed in an inevitable direction.

  Shibuya, a glance at a map may inform one, is so like Shinjuku that its failure to grow as rapidly, though it grew quite rapidly enough, may seem puzzling. Like Shinjuku it grew around a point where a road out of the city crossed the first railway line through the western suburbs. The highway, to a sacred mountain in the Kantō hinterlands, was not, however, as important as the two that forked at Shinjuku. Nor did Shibuya, like Shinjuku, stand at a crossroads of the National Railways. Private railway systems were slower to take shape. Shibuya had its subway line into the heart of the city a quarter of a century before Shinjuku did, but Shinjuku had its railway connection decades before Shibuya had its subway.

  Perhaps the most important difference is in the lay of the land. Both Shinjuku and Ikebukuro are on tablelands and look as if they could sprint off in any direction. Shibuya is hemmed in by hills which have had a confining effect.

  When, in 1883, the forerunner of Aoyama Gakuin University moved to the campus it still occupies, there was not much below it in the Shibuya valley. In those days the city limits more than encompassed the city, and the new Aoyama Gakuin, founded by missionaries in the Tsukiji foreign settlement, was in open countryside. The first Shibuya Station, a private one later nationalized, opened in 1885. It was with the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, and especially the latter, that Shibuya began to turn into something more than a sleepy country village. Army training grounds lay in the countryside beyond. The road that crossed the railway tracks at Shibuya was much used by military conveyances. So the army is back at the beginning of all the bustle, today so little martial and spartan. As with Shinjuku, rapid growth came after the earthquake. What in 1932 became Shibuya Ward had a far larger population than that legally required for incorporation as a city.

  As the Olympics drew near, it came to seem that Shibuya would have a large, open tract of land with which to do as Shinjuku did with its reservoir. A place called Washington Heights was returned to the Japanese in time for them to make it over into the athletes’ village. It lay just north of Shibuya and adjacent to the Meiji Shrine. The American Occupation had used the old Yoyogi parade grounds for family housing and called them Washington Heights. The Olympics past, the land was put to other use, but it never did for Shibuya quite what the Westmouth reservoir did for Shinjuku. The story of what it did do may be left for later.

  Shibuya has continued to lag behind Shinjuku. Until the subway went through to Shimbashi in 1939 it had no direct link with the heart of the city, and until 1932 only one private railway ran from Shibuya into the suburbs. That one is today a minor part of the Tōkyū system that dominates the district. Shibuya has until recently had more the look of a one-company town, if town it may for convenience be called, than Shinjuku. It had that look even more during and immediately after the war. The two private railway systems were amalgamated in 1942. In 1948 they resumed independent operations.

  So Shibuya would seem smaller even if it were not. In fact it is. The count of persons passing through the complex of mass-transit stations is much smaller than that for Shinjuku. One crucial indicator, however, suggests that Shinjuku may not always be dominant among the fukutoshin. The very young today prefer Shibuya, and vaguely distrust Shinjuku. It is dirty and it has gangsters. Someone might come up and accost a young gentleman, or sell a young lady into prostitution.

  Of the thriving centers along the western arc of the Yamanote loop, Ikebukuro seems the accidental one. Highways from Edo passed through Shinjuku and Shibuya, and any speculator would have seen them as promising places when railway stations went up beside the roads. It was not so with Ikebukuro, which was boggy, as the name, Lake Hollow, suggests. No significant road led through it, though a very important one, the inland road to Kyoto, along which many a noble procession made its way during the Tokugawa years, passed through Sugamo, just to the east, and the Itabashi way station, where travelers could rest and indulge themselves.

  If the development of the railway system had been different, our speculator might have looked to Sugamo or Itabashi as the place to plunge. The first railway station in the district was put at Mejiro, to the south of Ikebukuro, on the line that passed through Shibuya and Shinjuku and continued northward past Ikebukuro. Had the loop line gone through before the north-south one, Sugamo would have been the obvious place for the germination of a fukutoshin, but it was not until 1903 that the loop began its turn to the east. The original plan was for the two lines to fork at Mejiro. Not as alert as it might have been to the speculative possibilities which this proposal opened, the local populace opposed it vehemently. So the forking was placed at Ikebukuro, too insignificant for a local clamor to be heard, and a station was built there, and so began the third of the fukutoshin.

  It was slower to develop than the other two. Until a subway line went through to Tokyo Central Station in 1956, there was no direct and rapid transportation to the center of the city, and Ikebukuro had no surface link until a freeway went through in 1969. One had to wander back and forth on this and that street or take the roundabout sweep of the Yamanote if one wished to get to Ikebukuro from Ginza or Marunouchi.

  Ikebukuro, like Shibuya, acquired a missionary school, but much later, when rapid urban growth was beginning. St. Paul’s or Rikkyō, another product of Tsukiji, moved there at about the time of the earthquake. Also like Shibuya, it has been dominated by a single railway company. In 1915 what is now the Seibu Railway opened a line from Ikebukuro to a town in Saitama Prefecture. It has greatly expanded, and now goes into Shinjuku as well as Ikebukuro.

  Inevitably, the Seibu went into the department-store business, though it was late in doing so. Ikebukuro was the natural place (not that there was anything very natural about the growth of Ikebukuro) for it to choose. A Musashino Food Company began business just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. It became the Musashino department store, and in 1949 the Seibu. Musashino was the original name of the Seibu. It means Musashi Plain, Musashi being the province in which Edo was situated. Seibu, more modestly, is Western Musashi.

 
; The Seibu enterprises, one of which is headed by the man named by Forbes magazine in 1987 as the richest nonroyal person in the world, are very big all over the city, and they loom over Ikebukuro. One may complain in both Shinjuku and Ikebukuro about the impediment which the railroads and their stations present, requiring a detour for anyone who wishes to go from Westmouth to Eastmouth or the reverse; but in the case of Ikebukuro one’s complaints might better be directed at the Seibu department store, which blocks off the eastern approaches to the district like the Kremlin or the Berlin Wall.

  The stroller through the Ikebukuro Eastmouth has the Seibu department store to the west of him, and until 1971 there was an even more darkly glowering fortress to the east. Had Sugamo Prison been built in later years it might better have been called Ikebukuro Prison, for it was much nearer Ikebukuro Station than Sugamo Station. The reason for the name is that the institution dates back to a time when Ikebukuro was but an inconspicuous part of the rural expanse called Sugamo. Several prisons occupied the site from 1895. The last of them, the Tokyo Detention Center (Tokyo Kōchijō), was put up in 1937. It replaced the Ichigaya Prison, where such celebrated Meiji criminals as the murderess Takahashi O-den were beheaded. The last persons to be executed at Sugamo were seven Class A war criminals, including the wartime prime minister, Tōjō Hideki, who were hanged two days before Christmas in 1948.

  Sugamo Prison

  The prison was returned to the Japanese in 1958, and seemed prepared to go about its old business. Opposition was intense, and powerful, having commerce behind it. Ikebukuro was by then emerging as one of the great shopping and entertainment centers along the Yamanote. A person could look right down on the prison grounds from the Seibu or the Mitsukoshi, which has a branch at the Ikebukuro Eastmouth. This was altogether too grim a prospect, and the prison was torn down in 1971. The site resembling all that newly opened space which Shinjuku had at its Westmouth, the debate was intense as to what should be done with it. Some favored recreation, some favored commerce, and the latter won. The highest building in the city, if Tokyo Tower (see page 517-518) be excluded as not quite a building, now occupies the site.