There went on being curious little incidents to suggest that Japanese criminals rather enjoy getting caught and so render the role of the police less difficult than in most places. In September 1961 a man came into the detective offices at the Ueno police station. He wished to say hello to the detective who had sent him up for extortion two years before and to report how well he had been behaving himself since his release from prison. An old man came in to report that someone had taken his watch over by the railway station. He recognized the earlier caller as the thief.
In 1965 a man in Meguro, in the southwestern part of the city, killed his common-law wife and entombed her in cement. Several months later—he had been living with the cement block all the while—he was arrested trying to peddle his interesting story to a weekly magazine.
Crime was becoming more white-collar and intellectual. It was in the sixties that the sōkaiya came into prominence. Though their business is rarely thuggish enough to attract the intervention of the police and the public procurators, at its heart are extortion and intimidation. The expression shows how concise the Japanese language can be when it wishes to. The literal meaning is “general-meeting business,” but the big Japanese-English dictionary must go to these lengths to make the real meaning quite clear (and thus tells us implicitly that the European languages have no need for such a word): “a person who holds a small number of shares in a number of companies and attempts to extort money from them by threatening to cause trouble at the general meeting of the stockholders.”
It is a somewhat longer definition than necessary. The words “attempts to” are superfluous, for the sōkaiya have been very successful at getting hush and protection money from the biggest and most highly esteemed companies in the land.
In part the companies have themselves to blame. The underworld and people who occupy the twilight zone between the underworld and the great radiant world of finance and industry might not have noticed how profitable a thing it could be to own a few shares if they had not been called in for union busting and the stilling of protests against pollution and such things. The general willingness to buy off sōkaiya must inevitably suggest to the outsider that the great ones of finance and industry have things which they would prefer to keep out of sight. The general-meeting business, in any event, is more subtle than even a subtle bank robbery, such as the robbery of the Imperial Bank, and tells of a day when a certain margin to think things over and make a few calculations had returned.
In the post-Olympic years English-speaking sōkaiya began making their appearance at meetings of foreign companies. The most capable among them was a former intelligence interpreter for the American army who had studied in the United States. The labors of the sōkaiya have not been limited to Tokyo, but Tokyo, where most of the big companies have their headquarters, offers far the best opportunities. Like all Japanese, the sōkaiya are very industrious, to remind us of an important and neglected truth, that industriousness is not in itself necessarily a virtue.
In the summer of 1965 the Olympic governor, Azuma Ryūtarō, announced that he would not run for reelection. He was then midway through his second term. He had ample reason, aside from the fact that the Olympics, the occasion for his seeking office in the first place, had been accomplished. Both his predecessor, the first elected governor, and his successor, the radical governor, served three terms, or twelve years. The present governor, another conservative, is effective and popular, and, now in his third term, may well seek an unprecedented fourth one (unprecedented in Tokyo, though by no means unheard of in the provinces).
The main reason for the decision not to run was a scandal and its effect upon the conservative base. They might have prevented reelection in any event.
The metropolitan government had an aura of scandal hanging over it most of the time. The prefectural government of the postwar years has not been without scandals, though they have for the most part not been as big or as interesting as the prewar ones. A scandal surrounded the election of Azuma to his second term. Then came the biggest one of the postwar years.
The prefectural council elected a president in March 1965. It was a very dirty election, involving bribery and intimidation. The president himself was arrested, as were almost a score of others. Dissolution of the council was obviously called for, but it had to await amendments to the Local Autonomy Law. In June, pursuant to provisions of the new law, the council unanimously voted its own dissolution. New elections were called.
While the campaign was in progress, from late June into July, a huge plague of flies descended on the wards east of the Sumida River. The skies and the earth were black with them. They came from a spot of land out in the bay called Yume no Shima, “Dream Island.” Dream Island is a garbage fill. Initial efforts of the Self-Defense Force (the Japanese army by another name) to exterminate the flies seem initially to have had only the effect of spreading them. Finally a scorched-earth policy worked. Dream Island was for a time a cinder on which not even flies could live. It is doubtful that the governor could have done much to foresee or forestall the scandal, though he might possibly have guessed what garbage fills are capable of. The timing, in any event, was unfortunate.
The election, which occurred late in July, was a free-for-all, great fun to watch, however one may have felt about the results. Councilmen awaiting trial ran for reelection. Several known gangsters were among the candidates. The results were a thorough renunciation of the Olympic governor and his administration—less than a year after they had acquitted themselves so nobly of their main task. The conservatives, who had a majority of the council after the 1963 elections, lost almost half their seats and were left with a third of the total. No single party has since had a majority. Coalitions have been the rule. All of the other parties gained, and the socialists became the first party, with seven more seats than the conservatives.
This fiasco for the conservatives looked ahead to the next gubernatorial elections, when the socialists and communists offered a persuasive candidate, Minobe Ryōkichi, son of the professor whose ideas found so little favor with the radical right of the interwar years (see page 404). Minobe was a television personality with a large following, particularly among women. The problem of garbage disposal, which had such an unfortunate effect on the Azuma administration, was among the consuming interests of the Minobe administration.
The matter of addresses and place names in Edo and Tokyo has always been such a complicated one that efforts to improve it often bring new complications. The theory of the address is two-dimensional rather than, as in the West, unidimensional. A huge effort would be required to change from the former system to the latter, and one of the complexities would only become more complex, the fact that place names are always changing. In possession of a slightly outdated map and an up-to-date place name, a person can find the effort to reconcile the two utterly bewildering. So it can be too with tracing a place name from a century or so ago. Several changes have probably occurred before it at length arrived at the designation which it has today (but may not have tomorrow).
By a two-dimensional system is meant one in which addresses are scattered over a tract of land. In a unidimensional system they are dots along a line. Complications become formidable when there is no perceptible ordering to the numbers here and there over the tract.
Attempts at simplification and rationalization have taken dual form, reducing the number of separately named tracts (which means of course that many houses acquire new tract designations) and bringing some order to the arrangement of numbers within each tract, so that there is at least a reasonable chance that adjacent spots will have consecutive numbers. The amalgamation of tracts to reduce the number has gone on sporadically through the century and more since Tokyo became Tokyo. It became systematic during the Olympic years, and it cannot yet be thought finished. There is still a welter of small tracts in what before 1947 was Kanda Ward, and there is one in the old Ushigome Ward, to th
e west of the palace. Yet, though the problem of how to match an address with an outdated map has if anything become worse, the endeavor accomplished something. One can often find a new address without the help of the police. It is often true that numbers move back and forth along traverse lines, rather as if the lines of a book were to read alternately left to right and right to left, but one does get the hang of the system, and at least it is a system. The old one was that only in a very primitive way, having to do with the order in which buildings went up, and the outsider could scarcely be expected to know that.
One may carp at the ordering of numbers, and find ways in which it can be improved; but that it is an improvement seems hard to deny. The other half of the endeavor, the amalgamation of tracts (the old machi or cho), is more controversial. It is here as it was with the 1947 reduction in the number of wards. Old names go, and a coating of history goes with them.
“Reminded that the district around the Shirahige Shrine was known in the old days as Terajima Village, I might once have thought first of the country villa of Kikugorō.”
So writes Nagai Kafū at the beginning of A Strange Tale from East of the River. On his first visit to the Tamanoi quarter that is the site of the principal action, he passes a secluded villa, and has this thought. It is a little disingenuous, because the region surrounding Tamanoi was still known as Terajima. It would be more to the point today. Terajima is among the place names that have disappeared. It was an old and famous one, giving a family name to a celebrated line of Kabuki actors, the Kikugorō. Today Kafū would not have to pretend that he is reminded of a name now gone. Its going makes the history of the place seem remoter.
Not all places were unhappy about the change of names. The Yoshiwara and Sanya thought that new names might improve their images, and got them. In neither case has the new name been accompanied by great social improvement, but that is another matter. Suzugamori, at the far south of the Meiji city even as the Yoshiwara and Sanya were at the far north, was similarly pleased. It was known chiefly as one of the places where the Tokugawa magistrates had people’s heads lopped off.
One place felt so strongly about its name that its citizenry brought an administrative action suit, in 1965, to keep it. The action was successful. A part of Bunkyō Ward continues to be called Yayoichō. Why the authorities should even have thought of tampering with so great a name is difficult to understand. It was in Yayoichō, in mid-Meiji, that artifacts were found which gave the name Yayoi to a great cultural epoch, some five centuries straddling the beginning of the Christian era.
Most attempts at resistance were unsuccessful. Sometimes the citizenry was divided. Kobikichō, east of Ginza, where the Kabukiza stands, was as important as any part of the city in the history of the Edo theater. Romantics and antiquarians wanted to keep the name. Businessmen thought that having the element “Ginza” in the name would be better for business. So it became East Ginza. (Actually this happened before the systematic rationalization of addresses. In the course of this last, the “East” was dropped, and the district became simply Ginza.)
Sometimes an old name was assigned to a larger district, so that if an old name disappeared at least it was subsumed under another old name. Often the new name was merely arid and bureaucratic. The city is dotted with Easts and Wests and Outers and Middles and Inners. Devotees of the Yose variety theaters used to greet favored performers not with their names but (so much better a way of showing that one was a real connoisseur) with the names of the districts in which they resided. It sounds nothing like as good, one of them pointed out recently, when the names must be Outer A and Middle B.
Simplification produced complication both because many old addresses had to be changed and because sometimes the old names remained in certain capacities. The subways and railways have declined to change the names of their stations merely because at street level the old name has been canceled. The two subway stations between Ueno and Asakusa bear names no longer to be found in the regions above. Shiinamachi, where the Imperial Bank murders took place, no longer exists, but it is the name of a station on the Seibu Ikebukuro line. This can be puzzling. Simplification itself becomes a complication.
August 1, 1965, was a sad day for Asakusa. The name Rokku, Sixth District, signifying the section of the old park where show business flourished, ceased to exist. On the same day the Tokiwaza closed its doors for stage performances and became a movie place. Most of the big Asakusa names from Taishō and early Shōwa had appeared upon its banners.
What was surely among the big events of the second postwar, or Olympic, decade was one in which city and prefecture played no part. Prostitution was again outlawed, this time by the National Diet. Four years after the end of the Occupation, in May 1956, an anti-prostitution law was enacted. It took effect on April 1, 1958. The previous outlawing was at the instance of the Occupation. This time the feminine electorate and women Diet members, both of them postwar institutions, were instrumental. It might never have happened without woman suffrage, and it certainly would not have happened so soon, a mere decade after the much-ignored Edict 9 (see pages 462-463). Men, such as brothel keepers, were certainly behind the opposition to the new law (the anti-antiprostitution movement), but the openest and most outspoken opposition was feminine. It was an amazonian battle—not that the conclusion was other than foregone. More than one opposition movement took shape early in 1956 as passage of the law, which had languished in the Diet for several years, seemed imminent. Two socialist members of the Diet were expelled from the party for being active in organizing a movement, in Asakusa. The Socialist Party may have wobbled and tergiversated on some issues, such as the need for revolution, but it was firm about prostitution.
There was even a grand coalition against anti-prostitution. It was called the Tokyo Federation of Unions of Women Workers. But the law was passed, of course. In the interim before its tentative application, still clinging to a hope, brothel keepers organized a National Autonomous Association for the Prevention of Venereal Disease. A Diet member was arrested for taking bribes from it. The 1958 date is the one generally accepted for the disappearance once again of prostitution, but the law theoretically went into effect a year earlier, on April 1, 1957. The following Aprils Fools’ Day was the one on which the meting out of punishments was to begin.
Even as it was a foregone conclusion that the law would pass, it was a foregone conclusion that prostitution would not disappear. More than a hundred thousand women the country over were affected by the new law, and they and their associates would find ways. Yet to say that the new law made no difference would most certainly be in error. The great and venerable world of the flower and the willow, so central to the arts of Edo and early Tokyo, had over the years fallen into a malaise, and the new law made it even sicker. Of the two licensed quarters within the old city limits, the newer one, Susaki, went out of business. The Yoshiwara shifted over to a closely related business.
The Yoshiwara and Susaki had both been destroyed in 1945. Susaki rebuilt in a quiet, conservative, and, given the materials at hand, not at all tasteless fashion. The Yoshiwara began its convalescence with the shacks called “barracks,” but within a half-dozen years after the war was its gaudy old self again. It had some of the most expensive pleasure palaces in the city, charging the equivalent of thirty dollars a night, a very large sum of money in those days. The architecture of the brothels was as eclectic and uninhibited as it had been before the war. The lavish courtesan processions of an earlier day were resumed, by way of advertising.
Which would have prevailed, the Yoshiwara way or the Susaki way, if the first Tokyo century had not been so rich in disasters? These are usually blamed when someone from outside remarks upon the hodgepodge which the city for the most part is—an eminent European intellectual referred to it as “this tortured use of space.” What else can a place be, retorts the son of Tokyo, when it is twice wiped out, and subjected to many a lesser disaster betwee
n the two major ones? It is true that such a place has to work hard even to survive. Yet, though we can only speculate, the eclectic and uninhibited Yoshiwara way seems the genuine Tokyo way.
Wandering through Susaki today, one still comes upon a scattering of house and shop fronts that announce what the places once were. Blocks and blocks of nondescript landfills had in any event removed Susaki from the bay shore that had been among its principal charms. It may have been the newcomer among the licensed quarters in and on the edges of the city (it opened only in Meiji), but the Fukagawa district in which it is situated was prominent among the “hilly places,” the unlicensed flower-and-willow districts of Edo. (There is disagreement as to why they were called hilly places, though the word “hill,” oka, is an element in a number of expressions indicating remoteness from the place where the action is, in this case the Yoshiwara.) People like Nagai Kafū could go there and linger with melancholy pleasure over vestiges of Edo. The going of Susaki brought a sense of loss.
Hatonomachi as it appears today. The small mosaic tiles are among the identifying signs of a bawdy house
Some of Kafū’s “dens of unlicensed whores” went too, including what was probably, along with the Tokyo Palace, the most famous postwar one, Hatonomachi, Pigeon Town (see page 458), east of the Sumida River. The houses of Pigeon Town all closed their doors late in January 1958, some two months before the date from which they could all in theory be fined. Stenciled “Off-Limits” warnings to the men of the Occupation grow fainter and fainter as the years go by, but even today they are to be found in the district that still calls itself Pigeon Town, if one knows where to look for them.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 63