Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

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  All three of the fukutoshin grew up as strategic points in the mass-transit system. These they have remained in the automobile age. Despite the Olympics and the building of freeways, the inadequacies of the street system have been an automatic limitation on the automobile. In 1947 forty thousand automobiles were registered in the city. By the end of the first postwar decade the number had reached a quarter of a million, and in the next two decades it was to increase another tenfold. Already by the mid-fifties the busiest intersection in the city was accommodating three times the number of vehicles considered the maximum for free and easy movement. This was Iwaitabashi, at the south end of the palace plaza and the north end of the Kasumigaseki bureaucratic complex. Thirteen other intersections at the heart of the city were accommodating traffic above the ideal maximum. Subsequently the “doughnut phenomenon” saw the worst congestion moving out to places like Shinjuku. Subsequently too there were freeways; but the problem is insoluble, and there are alternatives to the automobile, as there are not in most American cities. Trains on various levels go almost everywhere. The sensible person takes them.

  The number of trolley passengers rose rapidly in the years after the war. It reached a peak of more than six hundred thousand per day in 1955—and even this was a mere trickle compared with the clientele of the suburban railway lines, public and private. There was modest expansion in total trackage as well, and from 1960 it too began to decline. With the approach of the Olympics, as Tokyo was getting itself ready to appear before the world, there were rumblings about doing away with the trolley system; it was almost completely accomplished during the post-Olympic years.

  Meanwhile there had been an experiment with the trolleybus, making use of trolley wires but doing away with rails. Its career lasted from 1952 to 1968. The routes were predominantly in the northern and eastern parts of the city (the non-Olympic parts). The arc of its waxing and waning lagged somewhat behind that of the postwar trolley. The total mileage of the routes began to fall off from 1961, and the last route was discontinued in 1968. The trolleybus was the product of a gasoline shortage, and occupied an uncomfortable middle position, less of a drag upon the freedom of the automobile than the trolley, but more than the unattached bus.

  Public transportation on the streets was thus left to the bus and the taxicab. The fifties were a time when cabdrivers were uncommonly lawless even for a lawless breed. The refusal by cruising cabs to take passengers, quite without explanation and quite without legal sanction, became so common that the police staged roundups. One series of them, toward the end of the decade, netted two dozen miscreants, surely a tiny fraction of the total. All manner of contradictory explanations were given for the phenomenon, but it was chiefly a matter of too few cabs and inadequate incentives. At one time it was so bad that Ginza bars were hiring buses to take their employees home after work.

  The fifties were the time of the Kamikaze cabdriver, who acquired the designation from the suicide pilots in the last stages of the Second World War. The phenomenon had to do with fare and meters. When the meters were changed so that the fare mounted even during motionless intervals, drivers became more tolerant of them, and calmer. Until 1959 all drivers worked for companies. In that year for the first time owner-drivers were permitted, specifically for purposes of alleviating the abuses; and indeed it was from about then that things started getting better. Owner-drivers were older men with good records, and of course it was their own property they sent hurtling through the streets and their business that would suffer if they happened to be in the tiny minority caught in a roundup.

  Among the voguish words of 1955 was noiroze, from the German word for neurosis. Affluence was returning, and indispositions of affluence. The Japanese may have disliked giving names to typhoons, but each of the periods of especial prosperity that have come along has had its name. The earliest was Procurement Prosperity, following upon the outbreak of the Korean War. At the time of the first postwar decade there was the Jimmu Prosperity. Jimmu was the legendary first emperor of Japan, and the name implies that nothing like it had been seen in all the days since his reign.

  Then there were the zoku, the “tribes” or “breeds” that were in the news. The progression of zoku also tells of increasing affluence. Shortly after the war there was the Shayō Zoku, the Setting Sun Tribe, the name deriving from a novel about a ruined aristocratic family. The novelist, Dazai Osamu, was himself a ruinous type, but his malaise went back to his youth, long before the disaster that ruined so many once-eminent families. A couple of years later we have Shayō Zoku again, but written differently, to tell us that business is getting back on its feet. The tribe in question is the expense-account one. At the end of the decade, along with Jimmu and neurosis, we have the Taiyō Zoku, the Sun Tribe, whose designation is from the title of a short story about pampered and rebellious youth. The author, Ishihara Shintaro, may once himself have been a member of the tribe, but he is no more. He is a conservative member of the National Diet.

  The dispelling of darkness, from the busy entertainment districts at least, was becoming as nearly complete as human hands can make it. Tanizaki Junichiro may have deplored it in his famous eulogy to shadows, but only limitations on fuel cut down the voltage. In 1953 Ginza acquired the largest neon light in the world, a globe eleven meters in diameter which, set atop a building near the main Ginza crossing, advertised Morinaga sweets. Though it was turned off immediately after the “oil shock” of 1973, it came back again, and was for three decades among the marvels and symbols of Ginza. Finally in 1983 it was judged obsolescent and torn down.

  Toward the end of the first postwar decade the drug problem emerged. It was and continues to be mild compared to the American one, but transgressions were frequent, and profits huge. There were fourteen thousand arrests in Tokyo in 1954 for selling illegal pep pills, and profits were fifty and a hundred times costs.

  In 1951 tuberculosis slipped into second place as a cause of death. By the end of the first postwar decade it had fallen to tenth, and the fatality rate was only a quarter of the highest prewar rate. Midway through the fifties we started hearing complaints about how difficult it was to find domestic help, and how expensive, incompetent, and intransigent such help was when found. Tokyo had its first supermarket, not at all inexpensive, in 1953. We started hearing too of luxurious physical examinations known as ningen dokku, which might be rendered as “human dry dock,” and luxurious surgery. Young ladies would go to plastic surgeons with photographs of those they wished to be made over into. Wide, round eyes were especially popular.

  The day of the cod and the sweet potato was rapidly withdrawing into the past.

  Chapter 11

  OLYMPIAN DAYS

  Baseball may have helped to restore the shattered national morale, and the Korean War did much toward restoring the national economy. Yet strong feelings of inferiority persisted, and a sense of isolation. Japan continued to be something of an international pariah. Any sign of recognition was eagerly received. In 1957 an international literary gathering in Tokyo was front-page news. It would probably have taken a terrorist bomb to put such a gathering on the front pages of European and American newspapers.

  The Japanese seemed to take the view that any international notice is good notice. Arthur Koestler came to Tokyo in 1958 and denounced the literary organization (it was the Japanese branch of the International PEN) that had arranged the gathering of 1957. He thought, and he was right, that its attitude toward freedom of letters was tepid, not to say contradictory. This was the great day of easy left-wing solutions, when apology was made for most actions of the Soviet Union, including the obstacles interposed to Boris Pasternak’s receiving the Nobel Prize that same year. Koestler’s views were also front-page news.

  The first postwar Olympic games came and went, and Occupied Japan had no part in them. That Japan would have had a superb swimmer to show off if only it had been there was a matter
of great chagrin. He was a genius (and he had only nine fingers), the best swimmer Japan has produced since the thirties. He had blossomed and, as swimmers will, rapidly faded by the time the next Olympics came. He had to make do with a few international victories in America. No one but the Japanese paid much heed to them, but he probably did as much for the national morale as baseball.

  In 1951, the last full year of the Occupation and the first of the Korean War, and the year GeneraJ MacArthur went home, Japan was readmitted to the Olympics. A Japanese team went in 1952, and did less than brilliantly. But the important thing was being there—as the Olympic charter suggests. The next task was to repair the loss incurred when the games of 1940 failed to take place. London, the other city that lost Olympics because of the war, got the first postwar games.

  Already in 1952 the governor announced that Tokyo would bid for the 1960 Olympics. The bid was duly made, and was unsuccessful. There were seven candidates. Tokyo placed last in the vote. When the 1956 Olympics were over the prefecture set up a special office to entice the 1964 games. In January 1958 a commission went to work on particular and specific preparations. In May the bid for the Olympics was formally entered. The persuaders sent off to Munich, where the international Olympic Committee met in 1959, included the governor, his predecessor, and a prince of the blood who (unlike most of the imperial family) was a man of great personal charm. This time there were four candidates: Tokyo, Detroit, Vienna, and Brussels. They placed in that order on the first ballot. Tokyo had a solid majority. Literary gatherings could not again expect to make the front pages.

  The city and the prefecture took the games very seriously. A new governor, Azuma Ryūtarō, was elected in the spring of 1959 as if for the specific purpose of presiding over them. He was also chairman of the Japanese Olympic Committee. The only one not to run for a third term and the only one who utterly lost control of the prefectural council, he was perhaps (though some would give the nod to his successor) the least successful of the four governors the prefecture has had. His was the administration that had the best scandal of the postwar years, one which turned into a political fiasco. Yet the whole world seems to agree that the city, the prefecture, and the nation did a superb job of staging the Olympics. They were an opportunity to show the world what Japan had been up to since 1945. The opportunity was made good use of, and Japan regained much of its self-esteem and international standing.

  “Direct expenses” for the Olympics were a small fraction of those generally listed as indirect, perhaps as small a fraction, depending on definitions and categories, as a thirtieth. Direct expenses and indirect provided a good way to get money from outside the prefecture for solving a few prefectural problems. The national government took care of more of the direct expenses than the prefecture. There are no surprises on the list of these. The money went for athletic installations and accommodations for athletes and the like.

  As for indirect expenses, funds came overwhelmingly from borrowing. The “bullet express” to Osaka made up about a third of the total. Its relation to the Olympics was certainly very tenuous, although the showing of Japanese organizational and technical skills was among the main reasons for having the games in the first place. Another third, almost equally divided between the two, went into streets and subways. Had the games come at a later day the division might have been different. The traffic problem was at crisis proportions, and freeways and wide nonexpress avenues were seen as a solution. The system of freeways went on growing after the Olympics, but the time passed when it was seen as a solution to much of anything. The athletic installations, and especially the main stadium and the gymnasium, are some of them very imposing, but the “Olympic thoroughfares,” as they were and sometimes still are called, the freeways and the widened streets, were the most prominent change which the Olympics brought to the contours (as the regent’s post-earthquake proclamation had it) of the city. It would have been remarkable if the effects had been distributed evenly over the city. The concern was to get people from the airport, then in the farthest south of the wards and near the bay, to the downtown hotels and then to the Olympic installations. These were concentrated, though not exclusively, in the southwest, the athletes’ village and the gymnasium in Shibuya Ward, the main stadium in Shinjuku Ward, and a considerable complex in Setagaya Ward, out beyond Shibuya. Had someone been away for a couple of years before the Olympics and (sensibly) come back when the excitement had died down, and been asked, as the returning person always is, whether he did not find the changes in the city perfectly astonishing, he might with reason have replied, “In Shibuya, yes, perfectly.”

  In the old center of the city the freeway system was relatively inconspicuous because it used old public rights-of-way. Only a tenth of the land used for the whole system had to be wrested from private hands. The rest was in the public domain, as streets and canals. The original system passed discreetly by the bustling center of Shinjuku. Shibuya was the sakariba, the bustling place, which it cut uncompromisingly through, opening a way into and out of the very heart of the place which had not been there before. Dropped down at Shibuya Station and suddenly surrounded by the concrete and the roar, the returning person (and we are to assume that he knew the place well) might have wondered where he was.

  Minato and Shibuya wards, to the south and southwest of the palace and the old downtown district, were the wards in which the Olympic freeways were the most conspicuous. Among the most affluent of the wards, they were the ones upon which Olympic blessings, perhaps mixed, poured in the greatest profusion.

  A very small beginning toward a system of elevated and subterranean freeways had been made before it was even known that Tokyo would have the Olympics. After all the cinders had been dumped and such pleasure and consumer centers as Tokyo Spa and the Yaesu Mouth complex at Tokyo Central Station had been built, the filling in of canals went on. In Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa there is a boy who is the son of a boatman and whose home is the boat. His father drops him at Asakusa in the morning so that he may attend school on the temple grounds. He must wait until night and sometimes all through the night for the boat to come again, and so he becomes a child of the park and its gangs. It is a way of life that has quite disappeared. The filling in of canals brought a loss of channels and moorings, and a new law that had to do with longshoring brought complete extinction to life upon the waterways, so important in Edo and Meiji.

  The canal that had been the outer moat of Edo Castle was in the late fifties filled in along the border of Chiyoda Ward (which lay within the moats and the old castle revetments) and Chūō Ward (which lay without). This was the canal between Yūrakuchō and Ginza into which the American soldier threw the pimp (see page 459). The bridge from which the unfortunate man was thrown was Sukiyabashi, where all the modern boys and girls wanted to be photographed. It was especially famous in these years because it figured in a tear-provoking, Evangelinesque, and very popular radio serial called What Is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa), about love frustrated by the bombings and their aftermath. (Frank Nagai’s biggest hit was based on the serial.) The bridge was demolished in 1957, and at the site a wistful plaque now says, in the hand of the What Is Your Name? playwright, “Sukiyabashi was here.”

  The freeway, extending less than a mile from a point just north of Shimbashi Station along the filled-in canal, did not amount to much, and did scarcely anything toward relieving congestion on the main northsouth Ginza streets. Today it is joined at either end to the larger system of freeways and is used mostly for parking. In another respect it was put to better use than most of the newer freeways have been. Two shopping arcades went into business in 1957 and two more in 1958, making use of the space beneath. In two of them the shops occupy sequestered space, cut off by walls from neighboring spaces. The other two are more like the “blocks of famous shops” (meitengai) or “shopping centers” in the basements of the big department stores. Stalls share a common space.

  The city f
inanced the filling and the building and sold some of the space and rented out some at less than it was worth. The leases will soon expire. The site of the old bridge is at about midpoint through the complex, which is the boundary between the two wards. Except for a rare happening such as the pimp incident, which the police to the east of the canal initially took charge of, the canal area did not much matter while it was an expanse of mud and stagnant water. Now, with money coming in, the two wards started fighting for jurisdiction. A boundary line was presently drawn that runs now down one side of the old canal and now down the other, and sometimes down the middle.

  The system of Olympic freeways, which is to say, the freeways that were ready in time to serve the Olympics, extended for some twenty miles, and affected only the central district (Ginza, Marunouchi, and Nihombashi) and the wards to the immediate south and west. Freeways ran northward from the airport to the center of the city, and westward along two routes, to the heart of Shibuya and to the vicinity of the main Olympic stadium. The gymnasium and the athletes’ village lay between the two.

  It was not for some time that the northern and eastern parts of the city were favored with freeways. Early post-Olympic accretions were also in the central and southwestern wards. The first considerable extension to the north came only in 1969, when a freeway joined Ueno with Nihombashi. The northern and eastern parts of the city are in general the more slowly changing parts. Though slow to come, such improvements as freeways have had a more pronounced effect in uglifying the backward parts of the city than the advanced and affluent. It might almost be argued that freeways, clearing away some postwar shabbiness, have been an improvement for parts of the south and west. The argument would be quite impossible in the case of the freeway that runs along the east bank of the Sumida and onward to the north. It sits like a lid on the famous line of cherry trees. This is not to say that the freeways have not had unhappy effects elsewhere in the city. Nihombashi Bridge, the most celebrated in the land, is still there, and it still crosses a canal, but it has been sadly diminished by the freeway that passes overhead. Even the sacred view from the palace has been blemished by freeways. The mileage has grown to upward of four times what it was in 1964.