The breakthrough came in 1962. Two suburban lines began running trains directly from their own tracks via subway tracks into the central wards. Today every one of the suburban systems has connections with the inner system. The commuter seldom has to exert himself further than a stroll across a platform between trains. It is a splendid system, some will say the best in the world. If land prices prevent the average salaryman from living near his place of work, commuting over considerable distances has been made as easy as one can conceive of it being.
It might seem that the old transfer points, Shinjuku and the rest, had lost their reason for being. The commuter need not pause in them. Old habits do not die easily, however. The old sakariba continue to bustle furiously during the after-work hours. Many a salaryman, we may infer, prefers to spend in Shinjuku time that might otherwise go into discussing the household budget and disciplining the children.
The subway system (more properly the two subway systems) carries huge numbers of passengers. The public corporation carries far more than the prefecturally owned system, both in absolute numbers and relative to trackage. The former has some eighty-two miles and so outdoes the latter by only about two and a half to one, and carries more than four times as many passengers. It would be easy to blame public administration for this state of affairs, but the essential fact is that the corporation was in business earlier and got the best routes. The two oldest lines, neither of which is connected to suburban commuter lines, carry the largest number of passengers, the one about nine hundred thousand and the other about seven hundred thousand per day.
The number of automobiles grows, but there are incentives, such as are lacking in American cities, not to drive. Frequent trains, underground and otherwise kept beyond reach of automobiles, departing at predictable intervals, see a person to or through the heart of the city in less time than automotive transportation, even by freeway, can be counted upon to do. The freeways choke up frequently, and so have proven to be what at the outset they might have been expected to be, no solution at all to the congestion problem.
The “pedestrian paradise” in Harajuku on a Sunday afternoon
The Minobe administration found a new use for a few of the streets that seems completely laudable. It established the institution of the hokōsha tengoku, the “pedestrian paradise.” There had been experiments in the United States with closing streets to automobiles and giving pedestrians free use of them, and there had been a brief experiment in Yokohama as early as 1960. The first regular and systematic program of pedestrian paradises began in Tokyo and several lesser cities, the largest of them Kobe, in the summer of 1970—toward the end of the first Minobe term.
On a Sunday afternoon early in that season the main streets of Ginza, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Asakusa, and, out in the county part of the prefecture, Hachiōji were closed to automobile traffic. Pedestrians poured forth in huge numbers to enjoy their new hegemony. This was good, for if they had not the experiment would probably have been deemed a failure. In the event the pedestrian paradise became for Tokyo an apparently permanent institution, and it has spread all over the country. Retail sales actually rose on paradise days along the streets affected. There are now paradises in Tokyo places other than the earliest ones, such as Ueno and Harajuku.
Bus and taxi drivers may complain about the pedestrian paradises, which are an inconvenience to them. There are not many success stories that do not inconvenience someone, and the pedestrian paradises are a success story. They have brought new street life to the city, which means a new accession to its supply of life in general. For several hours each week some of the busiest streets turn into parks.
The Minobe administration need not be blamed, at least not in full, for another pedestrian innovation, the overhead crosswalk. This is in theory an increment to the convenience and security of the pedestrian, for it gets him or her across busy intersections without having to wait for traffic lights and without the risk of being run down. Many a pedestrian thinks it a scarcely tolerable nuisance.
The first one went up in the southern part of the city in 1962. By the beginning of the Minobe administration there were more than thirty, and by the end of it they were everywhere. A welcome sign of the Japanese capacity, minute, perhaps, but not completely absent, for civil disobedience was the marked rise in jaywalking. People would march across a forbidden intersection (crossing at street level is generally forbidden when there is an overhead crosswalk) rather than climb all those stairs. If the walks fall in considerable numbers when the next big earthquake comes, fire trucks will be unable to get through, and the fires after an earthquake have a way of being worse than the earthquake itself. We are assured that they are quake-proof. Of that we cannot yet be sure.
Another sort of pedestrian crosswalk, to the theory of which scarcely anyone could object, is the pedestrian bridge across a watery place. The most considerable one is Sakurabashi, Cherry Bridge, across the Sumida north of Asakusa, opened in 1987. It is a pretty bridge, pleasant to stroll across, and it was meant to bring a bit of life back to the Low City. For this it is unfortunately placed. Off to the right as one crosses from the Asakusa side is the famous sweep of cherry trees, one of the most famous since the centuries of the shoguns. Though the trees are confined by the freeway above and the Sumida wall below, they are certainly very handsome when in bloom. The trouble is that they are all of them on the right or downstream side. Cherry Bridge is out of things. Not many people are likely to go out of their way to cross a bridge. It must be at a point where they wish to cross anyway. Not even the soaplands of the Yoshiwara draw people north of Asakusa in great numbers these days, and the flank at the left or east bank is even more remote. Yet Cherry Bridge is pleasant, and the fact that it is there makes the district a little more conspicuous.
It may be that there has been some abatement in the parade of zoku, “tribes,” in recent decades. One has not heard so much of them. In the post-Olympic years the parade, mostly in Shinjuku and the Southwest, was bewildering. Among those not yet mentioned was the Angura Tribe, which had its main though not exclusive base in Shinjuku. Angura is an abbreviation of the Japanese pronunciation of “underground,” and it signifies the flamboyantly unconventional young people who frequented the little underground or avant-garde theaters, the most famous of which held forth in a bright red tent on the grounds of the Hanasono Shrine in Shinjuku. The Shinjuku Golden Block (see page 485) nestles in against the walls of the shrine. Performances in the Hanasono tent were most conspicuous for their lurid colors. Another “tribe” that went in for lurid colors was the Saike. Saike is from the first two syllables of “psychedelic.” They dabbed psychedelic paints over their clothes and the exposed parts of themselves. In 1969 there was a conflict with the law when the shrine closed its grounds to the red tent. Without permission, the troupe moved to the new Central Park at the Shinjuku Westmouth. The riot police took speedy care of the infraction and arrested several people, including the manager, who, however, has continued to prosper. In 1982 he won the most coveted prize for new writers with a story based upon an actual incident, the murder and cannibalization of a Dutch girl by a Japanese boy in Paris.
The Harajuku pedestrian paradise, the closing of the main Harajuku street to vehicular traffic (except stunting motorcycles), has brought a very special kind of street life, associated with one of the more recent tribes to come into prominence, the Takenoko or Bamboo Shoot Tribe. Takenoko had an unpleasant connotation during the years of the cod and the sweet potato. It signified shedding one’s belongings layer after layer in order to buy the necessities. Beginning about 1980 or a little before, it acquired a more cheerful connotation, even though it was not necessarily pleasing to everyone. The name came from the Harajuku boutique which provided the baggy, haremlike dress that was the mark of the tribe. It already had Yoyogi Park in which to do its things, but the Harajuku pedestrian paradise provided more exposure and presumably more exhilaration, a street being a some
what unconventional place for performances.
The Bamboo Shoot Tribe is still there, but the larger and later Harajuku Tribe dominates things. The Harajuku phenomenon has been likened to the spasms of dancing that have swept the country in times of crisis (see page 320). Since there has been no discernible crisis in recent years, it is more likely rebellion against the boredom of peace, prosperity, and the life of the office worker and spouse. One senses something like a longing for insecurity. The mass media, active in such things as never before, have also played a big part in keeping Harajuku noisy.
The expression “tribe” has become so broad and imprecise in recent years that its meaning is in danger of dissolving. There is the Silver Tribe, which some Americans might call “senior citizens.” The appellation derives not, as one might expect, from the color of elderly hair or from silver anniversaries, but from the silver-colored seats set aside on public vehicles for the elderly and disabled. There is the High Yen Tribe, people who take advantage of the high price of the yen as against the dollar, etc., to do things which they would not have dreamed of doing in other years, such as buying Parisian frocks and paintings and weekending in Honolulu.
Tokyo holds itself, and is commonly held by others, to be a model among the cities of the industrialized noncommunist world for its freedom from street crime. The claim is a valid one: but there are other kinds of crime. The elusive nature of organized crime and the police attitude toward it have already been adverted to. Another kind of crime has many apologists and yet remains crime: politically and ideologically motivated violence. The apologists assign sincere motives, and these are not to be gainsaid in Japan.
After the treaty disturbances of 1960 factions of young people first broke with the Communist Party, then started fighting with one another. At first uchigeba referred to fights between the Communist Party and the noncommunist (often called Trotskyite) left. Then, the party image having become a peaceful, cuddly one, it became chiefly fighting among nonparty factions, and sometimes fighting for control of a faction. It grew more murderous. The goal was to wound and maim, and eventually to kill. The staves and pipes and even axes of the attackers were aimed directly at the heads of the attacked. There have been scores of fatalities, and the count continues to rise. Extremists in Europe may have been more successful at killing politicians and bankers, but none have been more successful than the Japanese at killing one another. The most murderous incident took fourteen young lives. It was a factional purge which occurred in 1972 at a mountain lodge to the northwest of the Kantō Plain, in a faction whose headquarters (like those of most of them that have not gone overseas) were in Tokyo.
By no means may all violent incidents in public places be blamed on uchigeba. There was always the fight against authority and the state of the world. The demonstrations of 1960 were unlawful but nonviolent, except for the occasional use of bare fists against the police. From the late sixties staves and rocks started being used, and then homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails. The argument from sincerity went on being invoked. The first bombing occurred in the Meiji Gardens in 1969. Thirty-seven people were injured. The Molotov cocktail had become a weapon in the anti-Establishment struggle as early as 1952, the year the Occupation ended. The first really damaging one was flung in Ginza in 1968. Sixteen people were injured. This was also the time when assaults upon universities were reaching their high point.
The announcement in 1966 that a new Tokyo International Airport would be built at Narita, in Chiba Prefecture, offered a new outlet for the sincerity of the young. After the fall of Yasuda Castle in 1969 academic turmoil subsided, and so, in Tokyo, did large-scale violence in general. Much of it was exported to Chiba. The airport was not finally opened until a dozen years later. Numbers of violent incidents occurred in the interval, and the airport must still be among the most closely guarded (and inconvenient) in the world. The fact that some of the farmers on the site did not want to give up their land provided a cause.
So did rumors, which may one day prove true, that the airport was really a military base in disguise.The planting and throwing of small bombs reached a climax in about 1971, when several factions used them against police boxes and the riot police. On Christmas Eve of that year a Christmas tree exploded behind a Shinjuku police box, injuring eleven people. Also in 1971, the wife of an important police official was killed by a bomb that came in the mail.
In 1974 there was a much bigger bombing, the first of a series. In August a bomb exploded in the Marunouchi offices of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Eight people were killed. The eight people convicted of the bombings belonged to a faction which called itself the Anti-Japanese Armed East Asian Front (Higashi Ajia Hanhichi Busō Sensen). Divided into working parties with far more vivid names—Wolf, Scorpion, Fang of the Continent—it proved to have had its origins among a group of classmates at a private university in Tokyo and was dedicated to rectifying the baneful effects of Japanese imperialism. The faction had no relations with other factions, which is to say that it was not a product of the fragmentation that followed upon the disturbances of 1960. The members passed as quite ordinary office workers and housewives. So discontent may be deeper than one fancies it to be in the conformist middle class.
The bombing of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters, Marunouchi, 1974
Public and political crime has overshadowed private, personal crime in recent years. It may be a mark of maturity, of having caught up with the world and shed feudal vestiges. There was much public crime in early Meiji, but there were also picturesque and popular murderesses. The interwar years had assassinations, including those of three prime ministers, but they also had O-sada. Perhaps the absence of women from recent annals of crime has made the annals less interesting.
The most talked-of kidnapping was political, and international as well. On the afternoon of August 8, 1973, Kim Dae-jung, the most prominent leader of the South Korean opposition, was abducted from his hotel room just below the Yasukuni Shrine. Spirited off to Osaka by automobile, he was put aboard a ship and released at his home in Seoul five days later. He seems to have come very close to being murdered at sea. The culprits were Korean intelligence agents. The evidence is that they were not acting on orders from the top levels of the Korean government.
The prime minister of Japan, Tanaka Kakuei, who would later be convicted of bribery, told reporters that the incident struck him as kiki kaikai, which might be rendered “weirdo.” Though the media expressed great indignation, the two governments reached a “political settlement,” which meant that the not very adequate explanations by the Korean government were accepted by the Japanese. The Japanese government has never been very skillful in its dealings with truculent Korea. (It does better with fatherly America.) Later, during his American exile, Kim said that he considered the incident still unresolved. He put much of the blame for this fact on the Japanese.
On a less political and more private level, white-collar crime has continued to flourish. The sōkaiya, those who specialize in disrupting general meetings (see pages 524-525), are most if not all of them high-class extortionists. Laws have been passed to thwart them, and occasionally a hapless businessman receives unwelcome publicity and a dressing down for having had dealings with them, but they are a resourceful lot and have found ways to persevere. They become publishers of periodicals, for instance, and solicit “advertisements” from the companies that are their targets. They have also made use of a device of which politicians are fond, the coerced sale of very expensive tickets to “parties.” Just as American insurance companies find it easier to raise their rates than to fight mischief suits, Japanese companies find it easier to pay off than to face a showdown in the stockholders’ meeting. Of some thirteen hundred sōkaiya thought to be in business the country over, more than nine hundred do their work in Tokyo.
In 1968 there was a robbery of unprecedented magnitude. It is interesting in itself, and just as interesting for the failure
of the police to solve it. The choice of a site suggests that the robbers had a sense of humor. It occurred right beside Fuchū Prison, in the western suburbs of Tokyo. On the morning of December 10, a man on a motorcycle who looked for all the world like a policeman stopped a bank truck and said that explosives were alleged to be planted aboard. The truck contained the year-end bonuses for a Tōshiba plant in Fuchū. Four other men got out of an automobile, and, using the automobile, the party made off with not quite three hundred million yen, which at the exchange rates of today would convert to not far from two and a half million dollars. The automobile and the locker which had contained the money were found in another suburb the following spring, but the robbers were never apprehended. No suspects were announced and no arrests were made, even though the robbers must have been insiders of some description, and the mystery should have lent itself to relatively easy solution. Under the statute of criminal limitations, prosecution became impossible in December 1975. Civil redress ceased to be possible on December 9, 1988.
There was one of those heartwarming incidents, though one over which a suspicion of misdoing hangs heavily. A poor man struck it rich, and, as the newspapers put it, he did so in a fashion so improbable that it was the stuff from which meruhen (which word, from the German Märchen, “fairy tales,” is preferred to anything English has to offer) come. On a drizzly spring evening in 1980 a truck driver noticed a parcel wrapped in a kerchief on a guardrail just east of Ginza. He stopped, picked it up, took it to his residence in one of the poor wards east of the river, and found that it contained a hundred million yen. The money became his when no claimants turned up during the next half-year. The most likely explanation for the absence of claimants is that there was something wrong with the money. It was not counterfeit, but its sources must have been such that it was worth a hundred million yen to someone not to have them revealed. The truck driver sensed something amiss about his trove. He quit his job, resorted to disguises, brushed up on his martial arts, took to wearing a bulletproof vest, and hired himself three bodyguards for twenty-four-hour duty.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 70