The year 1964 may also be counted as the Year 3 of the Mansion Age. “Mansion” is an example of a foreign word put to new use upon arriving in Japanese. “Barrack,” another instance, had already been a familiar word in Japanese for almost a half century when “mansion” came in. Given the principal significance which the former word had taken, one might have expected the latter to mean something very like the opposite, the one a flimsy and temporary hut, the latter a grand dwelling. The meaning of barakku does bear some resemblance to one of the two principal meanings of “barrack,” a large building in which large numbers of people live uncomfortable lives. It has no military significance. Other words fill that gap. The want of comfort is present in a barakku, even though the largeness may not be.
“Mansion,” in English, is different. In 1962 a developer first used the word to designate his developments, which were condominiums. A mansion became any condominium, large or small, plain or extravagant. (The word is still occasionally applied to apartments for rent.)
There were apartments for rent in Tokyo before the war. A public corporation put up apartment clusters, at least three of which survive, here and there over the city. The individual buildings were small and low. As early as 1910 there was near Ueno Station a wooden building, five storys high, with more than sixty units, that called itself an apartment house (an apaato). The first building said to be in the American style, a four-story one in fireproof materials, went up near Tokyo University in 1925. It survived as a sort of youth hostel until 1986. One might have guessed from its name, Culture Apartments, that it was from the interwar period.
Mostly such places were for unmarried persons. It was only in the postwar years that very large apartment houses started going up and people started flooding into them. The expression danchi, which scarcely a Japanese above infancy can be unfamiliar with, is postwar. It is an abbreviation of “public corporation housing,” or public housing in big apartment complexes. Tokyo contains some huge ones. They tend to be not very cheerful places, badly painted and maintained. (That famous suicide place, Takashimadaira, in the northwestern part of the city, is a danchi. See page 534.) Surveys have shown that there is even less intercourse among the tenants than in similar American suburban developments.
The Japanese run to extremes when a notion such as privacy grips them. The first danchi went up about a decade after the war. So there are second-generation danchi people who are now adults, have known no other residence, and think of the danchi as their hometowns, their “native places.” The advent of the mansion and other multi-unit dwellings with common entrances is something new to the Tokyo and indeed the Japanese experience. The “long house” or row house, in which the several dwellers under a common roof have their own individual entrances, is very old. Scarcely anyone wanted to move into the new Ginza brick buildings in early Meiji, and here everyone was moving into buildings little different from them in principle.
Mansions and danchi tend to combine American want of community with Japanese flimsiness. The traditional view of a building—that it will not last long in any event and so durability need not be a consideration—has persisted in the construction of multistory buildings. There are exceptions, especially in such places as Shinjuku and Marunouchi, but the life expectancy is far lower than for similar American or European buildings. The surviving apartment complexes from the post-earthquake period are historical curiosities. New York is full of apartment houses that are decades older. The problem of rebuilding has not been faced and is bound to be painful. If the owners do not have the means and the will to rebuild, Tokyo may for the first time have slums that bear comparison with Europe and America. It may have slums and not suramu.
The expression Capital District has had more than one meaning since, in 1956, it achieved legal status. A Law for the Ordering of the Capital District (Shutoen Seibihō) passed the National Diet in that year. It was modeled on the English plan for Greater London. A more specific plan drawn up two years later defined the expression to signify an area within a radius of a hundred kilometers from Tokyo Station. This includes the whole of Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa prefectures, bordering Tokyo on the north, east, and south; a part of the fourth prefecture with which Tokyo shares a boundary, Yamanashi, the old province of Kai, off beyond the mountains to the west; and parts of the three northern Kantō prefectures. In 1966 the district was redefined to include all of the seven Kantō prefectures and Yamanashi.
Faced with opposition from local agencies and developers, the system of green belts that is so important to the London plan may be deemed a complete failure. A pair of bedroom towns out in the county part of the prefecture and some bypass and loop highways are the chief tangible results to be detected from the big plans. Yet the concept is significant, for it tells us what Tokyo has become. So is another expression, Greater Tokyo, variously used. Most commonly it includes all of Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa prefectures and part of Ibaragi Prefecture, most importantly the new academic and research complex at Tsukuba. Greater Tokyo has thus grown to well over thirty million people, and the Capital District to not far from forty million. A third or more of the population of the land resides in a space which, were it not for all the motor vehicles, a vigorous marcher could march across in a long weekend. There are still farmlands between Tokyo and the population centers of the northern Kantō, and indeed there are farmlands within the Tokyo wards; but the area of unbroken urbanization includes the bay littoral from Yokosuka on the west shore to beyond Chiba on the east shore. The dwindling of farms means that if the day of the sweet potato comes again it will be worse than last time.
The Sumida was flushed for the Olympics, and has gradually accumulated oxygen and little fishes. In other respects it has not been treated well. The stroller along the banks cannot even see the river for considerable stretches because of high concrete retaining walls, and the boater upon the river can see little except the walls. The ultimate reason for these was a big storm a hundred fifty miles away. In September 1959 a storm called the Ise typhoon—since the center passed over Ise Bay, at the head of which Nagoya stands—left upward of five thousand dead. It was the worst storm to hit in either the Shōwa reign or the one preceding it. Ise Bay, unhappily at flood tide when the typhoon struck, rose by some five meters. The highest point in Chūō Ward (Ginza and Nihombashi) is not that high. The Sumida was already being walled in. Now the walls were made higher, against the possibility that a similar disaster might hit Tokyo. So by the end of the sixties concrete walls six to eight meters above water level stretched for some fifteen or sixteen miles along the two banks of the Sumida. During the following decade the two principal canals draining into the Sumida, the Nihombashi and the Kanda, were also walled in.
Doubtless the sort of vision that protects the lowlands of the city against a disaster which might come one of these centuries is laudable. It has not come yet, and meanwhile we may lament that the walls are so ugly.
The Sumida has been mistreated in other ways. An expressway, put through in the post-Olympic years, crosses it from Nihombashi and proceeds upstream along the left bank to well past Asakusa. Like the walls, it is not beautiful. The Sumida once flowed home to the sea past strands where the gathering of shellfish was among the popular diversions. Now it must pass bleak landfills extending as much as two miles beyond the old coastline. One of them is Dream Island, of the pestilence of flies (see page 526). Again the concept is laudable. The city must expand, it seems, and if it can do so over garbage dumps and not paddy fields, something is saved and nothing is lost.
It should not be impossible to convert reclaimed land into something pleasing. The old Low City demonstrates as much. Yet in recent years it has seemed impossible. The tract called a park on Dream Island is probably the best thing the prefecture has done over the whole reclaimed expanse. It is occupied almost entirely by athletic facilities, freight yards, and apartment complexes. The inability to make a garbage dump look like any
thing but a dusted-over garbage dump is among the reasons for misgivings about plans for a “city of the future” to occupy yet more of the bay.
All in all, the Sumida is an ill-used little stream. Probably the fact that it is little is the reason. The distance from wall to wall is no more than a couple of hundred yards. The Arakawa Drainage Channel, the artificial stream farther east, is more imposing. A little stream running through a great city is bound to get dirty. When it has the obstreperous ways of the Sumida it may expect to find itself walled in as well. Yet the lady who said “It ain’t the Grand Canal” had a point. The Grand Canal too is a narrow little strip of water, and it remains beautiful.
One of the few remaining geisha restaurants along the Sumida, squeezed between modern buildings
One of the great observances of Edo, the opening of the Sumida, was discontinued for a decade, beginning in 1937, because of the Crisis. It was resumed in 1948 and discontinued again in 1961, because it was thought to be a fire hazard and because the odor of the Sumida had so taken away from the pleasure. The opening came late in July and signified the advent of hot weather, when the river, before it got so dirty, added much to the beauty and pleasure of the city. It was the occasion for a huge display of fireworks, and that these could be dangerous was demonstrated in Kyoto when a display set fire to one of the buildings in the old palace compound. The cessation was presumed to be permanent, but in 1978 the fireworks were resumed, farther up the river, near Asakusa. They attract a million or so people each year, and are among the events most disliked by the police.
The million gather along the two banks near Asakusa, and not, as they once did, near Ryōgoku Bridge downstream. So the Yanagibashi geisha district lost a valuable drawing card. Its restaurants (“geisha houses”) had been much the best places for viewing the fireworks, and had commanded huge prices. Reservations had to be made literally years in advance. A place in a Yanagibashi restaurant on the night of the opening was the badge of membership in the Establishment.
Yanagibashi was far more grievously wounded by the walling in of the Sumida. All the indications are, indeed, that the wound is fatal. The river remains visible above the walls from upstairs windows, but mendicant musicians no longer come rowing up to Yanagibashi gardens. The gardens were extensions of the river bottom, and they are no more. Yanagibashi may have been doomed in any event. The geisha business has done badly in recent decades, and Yanagibashi, in the old Low City, is a part of town to which captains of government and industry do not go in the ordinary course of things. Among the once-great geisha districts Yanagibashi is the one that seems nearest to expiring. Aficionados hold that in its good years it was the most Edo-Iike of the districts, the worthiest successor to the Fukagawa district, which flourished across the river in late Edo.
There was no attempt to make Sumō, like judo, the other traditional sport with a mass following, into an Olympic event. It may have been too utterly Japanese. In most lands and sports, obesity and athletic prowess do not go together. Sumō was not having a bad time. The postwar “golden age,” opened by Wakanohana and Tochinishiki, went on. Taihō, the most accomplished wrestler since the departure of the above two, was arguably the most popular champion the sport has ever had. He had the television audience, not comparable to that of baseball and especially the Giants, but no small thing all the same. Although it did not make the Olympics, Sumō was becoming a little more cosmopolitan. The first non-Oriental to reach the top ranks, a Hawaiian, did so in 1967. It was also advancing technologically. In 1969 videotapes were used for the first time in settling challenged decisions. (Any one of several judges may challenge the decision by the referee.) There were technological failures. On September 20, 1960, a light exploded in the Hall of the National Accomplishment while a match was in progress. The two wrestlers, who had been locked in combat, fled. They returned and started wrestling again twenty minutes later, the damage having been repaired. One of them had been treated for burns, from fragments that lodged inside his loincloth.
In 1963 the famous writer Ishihara Shintarō, he whose second published story gave the Sun Tribe its name (see pages 494-495), complained publicly that a Sumō match had been fixed. The match took place in Fukuoka, but Tokyo, where all the wrestlers live, can be held responsible. The Sumō Association said that such things did not happen, and that was that. The common wisdom is that such things do indeed happen. Not exactly the fix, perhaps, but the friendly, warmhearted understanding between wrestlers has long been a part of the sport. A wrestler badly needs a win, or perhaps the association needs one to keep people interested, and the wrestler who is asked to lose would be unfeeling and disloyal, among the worst things a Japanese can be, if he did not oblige.
Somewhat later an accomplished wrestler made an uncommonly frank statement. “Wrestlers going into the last day of a tournament with seven wins and seven losses always win. Even when the matches are big ones you know who is going to win.”
A division remains between the northern and eastern parts of the city, not rich and not quick to change, and the southern and western parts, quite the opposite. It is a rough and generalized division, but not invalid for that fact. Those who are looking for old Japan, or unchanged Japan, or something of the sort, would be well advised to do their looking amid dirt and poverty, in Sanya rather than Shibuya. Shabbiness does not change, while the world of the rich and powerful seems to change by the minute.
The idea of having a baseball stadium that the Low City, the eastern flatlands, could call its very own was a delightful one. Geologically the Kōrakuen, home grounds for the Giants, is of the Low City, for it lies in a Kōshikawa valley only a few feet above sea level. Historically it is very much a part of the High City, for it stands on land which was the main estate of the Mito Tokugawa family; and in recent decades, because of the Giants, it has been chief among the jewels of commercial television and of advertising.
When plans were announced for a new stadium, to be home grounds for a less popular professional team, within an easy walk of Sanya, the possibility that the Low City baseball crowds might stay home and keep a little life there was buoying. Tokyo Stadium, as it was called, opened its gates in Arakawa Ward, just across the boundary from the old Asakusa Ward, in 1962, and waited for the crowds to come. It waited for some years, and was sold to the prefecture in 1977. Now it is used for sandlot baseball. The stands are gone. The crowds continued to go to the Kōrakuen.
For a time early in the Olympic decade a saying about television seemed almost as popular as television, and it was not a friendly one. It did nothing to diminish the power of television, which has grown and grown. Even the haranguers on the campuses, whose style was once stiff and jerky, have taken on the glibness of television newscasters and masters of ceremonies. The saying was the creation of the critic Oya Sōichi, and it had to do with the Japanese television audience: “A hundred million reduced to idiocy.” A neat half-dozen Chinese characters, it had its time of popularity in 1956.
Chapter 12
BALMY DAYS OF LATE SHŌWA
On a day in the spring of 1965, the portion of the Shōwa reign to occur after the surrender of 1945 became longer than that which had gone before. On a day early in the summer of 1970 the Shōwa emperor had been on the throne longer than his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, who had reigned longer than any of his predecessors whose reigns can be dated with any certainty. On Christmas Day 1976 the emperor became the first in Japanese history to greet a golden jubilee. On Christmas Day 1986 came his diamond jubilee.
The first of these four dates no one seems to have noticed at all though it would have been a good day on which to declare that elusive entity, the postwar period, finally over. The second received brief notice in the newspapers. The other two were occasions for formal observances, though in neither case did the observances occur on the precise Christmas anniversary. On November 11, 1976, to celebrate the golden jubilee, there was a gathering in the Hall of t
he Military Way, the Olympic building north of the palace in which the Japanese had won and lost those judo medals just over twelve years before. On April 29, 1986, the emperor’s eighty-fifth birthday, there was a gathering to celebrate the diamond jubilee, in the new Hall of the National Accomplishment east of the Sumida River. Both occasions were formal to the point of stiffness, as if those in charge felt that they must be held, but with limited fanfare. There is a strong and growing tendency to pretend that the first two decades of the reign never happened. Children learned astonishingly little about them in school. (For evidence of their nescience, see page 537.)
There had been a great deal of peace, and, though the war was still remembered on August 6, Hiroshima Day, and though the nation often found it convenient to go on being postwar, which is to say deprived, the bad days were beyond the memory of most Japanese, and further away each day. In the year of the golden jubilee the number of Japanese born after August 15, 1945, passed the number born before—and of course only those born no later than 1940 or so can have clear recollections of that day and its remarkable broadcast.
As the golden jubilee approached, several events took place that may be held to mark the end of one stage and the beginning of another. In 1968 the dollar started slipping. The exchange rate of three hundred sixty yen to the dollar had been set by the Occupation in 1949 and had come to seem almost sacred. Now it was a failing god. In 1973 came the “oil shock.” The international consortium of oil producers had made it certain that the price of imported oil, and Japan had scarcely any domestic oil, would rise.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 65