Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  He was a successful politician. Whether or not he was a successful governor is open to argument. The city budget was in the red all through the Minobe years, and at the end of them the proportion of prefectural expenditures for debt management was twice the average for other prefectures. Many elaborate explanations are given for this state of affairs, and many external causes cited, such as the oil shock of 1973, which threw everyone’s plans out of joint. It is true that Minobe and his administration are not wholly to blame. The budget had already slipped into the red during the first term of Governor Azuma. Yet Minobe made things worse all through his tenure, and it is hard not to believe that prodigality and loose administration were chiefly responsible.

  Asked what was so wrong with Minobe, an eminent newspaperman replied. “Almost everything, I think, that he could have brought this rich city to the edge of bankruptcy.”

  Suzuki Shunichi, who had earlier been important in the national and prefectural bureaucracy, was elected governor in 1979, and continues to serve. The conservatives recovered well from 1965, their worst year. From 1969 they were only a dozen or so seats short of a council majority, and had more seats than the socialists and communists combined. Governor Suzuki immediately began a program of personnel retrenchment. During his first term, after two decades, the prefectural budget returned to the black once more. The matter of the black and the red is a technical one. Since the prefecture goes on issuing bonds, it cannot be said to be paying its way in full. Yet the current account is in balance.

  One expects mayors—and Minobe may be considered a mayor, though he was technically a governor—to face such problems as crime and drugs. But, though pep pills have been a nuisance and the occasion for numerous arrests, drugs have not been the problem in Japanese cities that they have been in American. The low incidence of random street crime, however matters may be with organized crime, is something in which Tokyo takes boundless pride. These in any event are police problems, and the prefectural police are not under the control of the governor. It may be that the most considerable problem Minobe faced was garbage. Certainly the “great garbage war” got much attention in the media. For a time it was as famous as the Minobe smile.

  It had been smoldering for some time. In 1971 it broke out angrily when the council of Kōtō Ward, east of the river, passed a resolution opposing the passage of garbage trucks through the ward on their way to the fills, such as Dream Island, off its bay shore. It was Dream Island whence all the flies came in 1965 (see page 526). Every ward, the council said, should take care of its own garbage, and Kōtō had no duty to be the dumping grounds for the wealthy and, it thought, irresponsible western wards.

  Some two-thirds of metropolitan garbage was then being disposed of along the garbage fills of Kōtō Ward. Nine of the twenty-three wards had no garbage-disposal facilities whatsoever. The governor agreed that this was an inequity, and that disposal plants should be built elsewhere. The indignation of Kōtō Ward was aroused chiefly by Suginami Ward, one of the westernmost and wealthiest of the twenty-three. The announcement in 1967 that a garbage-disposal plant of an advanced technological kind would be built in Suginami brought violent opposition from residents. There was similar opposition in Meguro, a rich southwestern ward that shared with Suginami the distinction of being chosen for the first new plants. Five thousand garbage trucks a day continued to pass through Kōtō Ward, trailing filth and bad smells behind them, and creating traffic jams. In 1973 the Kōtō council voted to use force to turn back trucks from Suginami.

  An agreement was finally reached in 1974 that in principle every ward would contain facilities sufficient unto its own garbage. The controversial Suginami plant was built, the feelings of the eastern wards were mollified, and the war was over. Dream Island became the park and athletic field, more the latter than the former, that it is today. In 1971 the twenty-three wards produced more than twelve thousand tons of garbage every day, and three wards in the High City accounted for a third of it. The total was three times what it had been a decade before. The population of the wards had in that decade risen by less than a twentieth. Among the things that the economic miracle produced was garbage. By 1977 the percentage of burned garbage had risen to almost 90 percent. So it may be said for the Minobe government that it did well by garbage.

  As for sewage, the whole population of only seven of the twenty-three wards had the use of sewers in 1986. The figure for all the wards was 83 percent, for the county part of the prefecture 64 percent. The easternmost wards were the poorest served. One of them, Adachi, had sewers for only 46 percent of its population, and for the other two the figure was under 60 percent. Kōtō Ward and Suginami Ward, the chief combatants in the garbage war, had sewers for more than 90 percent of their population. The goal of the prefecture is to have sewers for everyone in the wards by the turn of the century. There is still a city out in the county part of the prefecture that has no sewers at all.

  There are now ten sewage-disposal plants taking care of the wards. During the last years of the Olympic governor industrial wastes that had poured into the Sumida began going into one of the plants. The river has much improved in smell, color, and general livability.

  Tokyo and New York have been sister cities since before the Olympics, and Governor Minobe, despite his unfriendliness toward American systems and institutions, did nothing to change the relationship. It has for the most part seemed that Tokyo is the younger sister, since it has done New York the honor little sister accords big sister, imitating it in numerous superficial ways. Whether, with its new eminence, it will relax a bit and sit back and wait for others (who knows, even possibly New York) to imitate it remains to be seen.

  Certainly in the early sororal years imitation was quite open. Articles of clothing bearing the legend “I” and a heart and “New York” had counterparts in Tokyo with only the proper name changed. It almost seemed that “I-heart-Tokyo” might become the motto of the city. But then during his first election campaign, in 1979, Governor Suzuki came up with a new motto, if not for the city and prefecture, certainly for his administration. “My Town Tokyo” it is, and, as with the other, two of the three elements are borrowed from English. He promised a city free from fires, earthquake damage, and pollution. Much progress had already been made on the first and third freedoms before the governor took office, though perfection is unattainable. As for the second, a great earthquake will one day come to tell us how substantial the progress has been. Governor Suzuki also promised generous welfare programs for the aged, who are an increasingly serious problem in a land without adequate pension programs. By the mid-eighties a million residents of the city were sixty-five and more years of age.

  Tokyo is less heavily burdened in this regard, however, than the nation as a whole. Charts which divide the population by age show that it has a higher proportion than the nation at large for all ages between fifteen and fifty-five; for ages above and below the proportion is higher for the nation. For the early twenties, Tokyo has proportionately half again as many people as the nation. After twenty-five the figure drops, though not with complete regularity. So it goes on being, by national standards, a youthful city. People tend to return to the provinces when the time comes to face the end. Many youngish men leave their wives and children in the provinces.

  Whether or not the governor’s goals, as enumerated thus far, are capable of full realization, at least they are capable of definition. An altogether more enigmatic and elusive part of My Town has to do with its functions as a gathering place for and leader of the world. “Internationalization” has been one of the voguish words of recent years. If it means establishing the city as a financial center to rival London and New York, a place where a person can know instantly and always all that there is to know about the markets of the world, a twenty-four-hour place, then that too is capable of definition, and realization is certainly not beyond the capabilities of the ingenious Japanese. If, on the other hand, it means a m
agnanimous acceptance of people and their ways from all over, such as characterizes New York, then the matter is more doubtful.

  For all the huge physical changes that have come over it and all the talk of the “new people” of Harajuku and such places, Tokyo remains a very insular city. Its inhabitants are far from ready to accept the pluralism of a New York. It has not changed so very much since the centuries when the shoguns kept almost all foreigners out. No one would dream of excluding them today; yet in many ways they are effectively excluded. They are in no significant way a part of its life, and it sometimes seems that the workings of the international economy, making it possible for the Japanese to buy the world and next to impossible for the world to buy the tiniest part of Japan, may work toward seclusion every bit as successfully as the policies of the shoguns did. The permission of the Bank of Japan is required for any purchase of real estate by a nonresident foreigner. It is automatic when the purchase is small and there are no special considerations, such as the possibility of criminal activities; but the unrealistically high value of the yen on the foreign-exchange market discourages if it does not prohibit even small purchases.

  Its sufficiency unto itself, precluding the “Americanization” of which it has always been accused, has given the city the individuality that has made it interesting, and a refusal to abandon old values has been the chief strength of the land. It is the Japanese who say that they wish to internationalize, however, and the prefecture that puts internationalization among its goals, and so one is permitted to remark upon the unlikelihood that genuine internationalization will ever occur, to make Tokyo as calmly accepting of variety and eccentricity as New York is.

  * * *

  The population of the wards, which had been falling slightly since about the time Governor Minobe took office, began to rise in the early eighties.

  Then in 1987 it fell again. The fall, only a little more than one person in three hundred, hardly suggests a stampede to get out of the city, whose population may be termed stable. The population of the Tokyo region has continued to grow at a much more rapid rate than that of the nation. United Nations statistics now put Tokyo-Yokohama behind Greater Mexico City in population, but well ahead of Greater New York.

  Tokyo has most things thought useful and appropriate to the advanced society. The supply of old things diminishes all the while.

  The closing months of 1967 and the early ones of 1968 were a bad time for those who believe that old things should be saved even when they are not making money. Destruction of the “old” Imperial Hotel began in December 1967. The following month screens and scaffolds started going up preparatory to the destruction of the Mitsubishi Number One Building in Marunouchi.

  What was then called the old Imperial was not the oldest but the Frank Lloyd Wright building put up just before the great earthquake. A Society to Protect the Imperial Hotel was organized in the summer of 1967. It was not successful in its main endeavor, to keep hands off the Imperial, but that there was a movement at all is significant. Until then the populace of the city had accepted the destruction of old buildings in favor of more profitable ones as among the facts of life. Henceforth the profit-seekers must think of possible resistance if their destructive ways threaten something that may be called “cultural property.” The conservation movement continues to be erratic and uncertainly organized, however. Tokyo Central Station and the Bankers’ Club, both in Marunouchi and both Taishō buildings, are the objects of well-publicized preservation campaigns; and the last Queen Anne building of Meiji left in the center of the city was recently torn down. Originally the Imperial Hemp Building, it stood at the north flank of Nihombashi Bridge. A glassy thing will go up in its place. Nor were voices raised to save Mitsubishi Number One. It quite went away. Designed by the British architect Josiah Conder and finished in 1894, it too was Queen Anne, and a good if somewhat tattered example of the style. The rooms were dark and moldy and the three storys were unworthy of Mitsubishi’s next-to-priceless land. Yet one misses it. Fragments of the old Imperial survive, the largest in Meiji Village, near Nagoya. One need not go all the way to Nagoya to see lesser fragments, which are to he found in such Tokyo places as the new lmperial and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. The old Imperial closed its doors on November 15, 1967. Demolition began a little more than a week before the last trolley passed through Ginza. Things moved fast in the early Minobe years. In addition to fragments, reflections of the old Imperial survive here and there over the city. The tufaceous stone to which Wright took a fancy when he found it in garden walls and which gave his Imperial its pleasant brownish tinge had not before been used in buildings. It came much into vogue. The most conspicuous surviving example is the prime minister’s residence, done by a Wright disciple. A most marvelous Ginza beer hall, the Lion, erected in 1933, shows the Wright influence clearly.

  The facade of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, now standing in nonfunctional splendor in a theme park near Nagoya

  The city virtually did away with its trolley system during the years after the Olympics. Among the prides of Meiji, it had at its most extensive some two hundred twenty miles of trackage. There were minor additions until 1958, and stretches of track were from time to time put out of service through the postwar years down to the eve of the Olympics. In 1963 and 1966 two long stretches of about five miles each went out of service westward from Shinjuku and northward from Sugamo—outward, this is to say, from the Yamanote line.

  The Shinjuku one was troublesome, and in any event had not long been a part of the metropolitan system. A single-track line running west as far as Ogikubo, marketing center for an affluent residential district, it was bought from the Seibu system in 1951. Moving trolleys were a great annoyance for the automobile, and stationary ones were far worse. There were always stationary ones up and down the track, because they had to wait at sidings for moving ones to pass.

  Resolute abandonment of the system began in 1967 and was completed by 1971, with a single line remaining. Even before 1966 the prefecture had begun disposing of trolley cars. It might be thought that scrap would be the only fate for a trolley car without tracks, but numbers went to parks and playgrounds, where the nostalgic may still observe them and perhaps clamber aboard. The earliest trolley line in the city was among the first to go. Service was discontinued along twenty miles of track on December 9, 1967, and on that night the last trolleys ran along Ginza, the Number One route. There were outpourings of regret and affection. Thousands gathered to say goodbye to the very last Ginza trolley. Governor Minobe, in his first year of office, made some remarks. Much behind schedule, it passed southward through Ginza late in the evening. All-night operations began immediately to remove the tracks.

  The last remaining Tokyo trolley line

  By 1972 most of the trackage all through the system had been removed. A single route survived both because there was strong popular sentiment for keeping something, and the Minobe government was not cold and remote in this regard, and because it was a peculiar sort of line, planned and executed in such a way that it inconvenienced the automobile less than the others did. For much of its length it runs on its own right-of-way, and where it shares the way with the automobile there are relatively few of the latter. It runs in an arc through the northern part of the city, from just below Waseda University in Shinjuku Ward to Minowa in Arakawa Ward, not far from Sanya, the most successful of the “slums” in getting its name in the headlines and on the screens, and the unsuccessful Tokyo Stadium.

  Like the Seibu line west from Shinjuku, the surviving trolley was built as a private railway, to take fanciers of cherry blossoms and maple leaves to Asukayama, Asuka Hill, a famous place for those things. Now in Kita Ward but in the northern suburbs when the line was built, it was the only one of the original Meiji parks that lay beyond the city limits. The Oji line, as it was called (it is now called the Arakawa line), was put through westward most of the way to Waseda in 1911 and eas
tward to Minowa in 1913. It is very popular, and for some reason less expensive than the buses. On a fine Sunday afternoon one must be prepared to wait in line for several cars to depart if one wishes a seat.

  The trolleybus, that generally unsatisfactory compromise between the tracked vehicle and the freewheeling one, had a much shorter career, only sixteen years. The last trolleybus disappeared before the last-but-one of the trolley lines. The first line, from Ueno to Imai east of the river, was also the last. At 9:45 on a September evening in 1968 the last trolleybus left Imai for Ueno. It was crowded, though the event did not get the attention which had gone to the last Ginza trolley a few months before. Things of Meiji had been around long enough to be a part of everyone’s memory and a part of the city scarcely anyone had known it to be without.

  The subway system was all the while growing, and it continues to grow. Besides expansion of subway trackage proper, there has been huge expansion because of linkage between subway lines and suburban commuter lines. Though all four terminal stations for the earliest two lines, the only prewar one and the first postwar one, are at points whence lines depart for the suburbs, no effort was made, and indeed it would have been impossible because of incompatible gauges, to run trains through from the inner-city system to one or more of the suburban systems. The concept was slow to die that the inner system should be sealed off from the other and in the public domain.