It was in the late seventies that we started hearing the expression yukaihan, which might be rendered “fun crime.” The police seem to have been the inventors of the term. It refers to crimes that create a great stir and the pleasure which the stir gives to the agent of the crime. The most obvious such crime is arson. In 1977 it passed smoking as the chief cause of fire in the city.
The days when General and Mrs. Grant held the city in thrall are more than a century in the past, and they seem every bit that far away. Tokyo is no longer easily stirred. Among foreign dignitaries only the queen of England and the Pope have caught the public imagination with anything like the force of the Grants; and they are unique specimens, the only pope and the only monarch who still moves about with something like monarchical grandeur. Lesser royal personages come and go and few people notice. So it is too with former American presidents—which is what General Grant was in 1879. Incumbent American presidents would probably not much interest the Tokyo citizenry were it not for security measures thought by many to be at best exaggerated and at worst illegal. It would have been a great thing indeed if President Eisenhower had come in 1960. He did not, because of the anti-treaty disturbances. Today presidential visits are next to routine. These evidences of maturity and self-possession are doubtless good, but the eagerness of 1879 must have been good too.
Famous entertainers are another matter. They capture the city with no trouble at all. No one did for a dozen years after Marilyn Monroe, but that was because no one of adequate celebrity made the effort. Then in 1966 came the Beatles. Delayed by a typhoon, their airplane arrived in the dead hours of early morning. This was as well. The elaborate preparations made by the police proved unnecessary. A helicopter was to take the guests to the Ichigaya army (or self-defense) base if the crowds proved unmanageable, and from there to the Hilton Hotel in Akasaka patrol cars would serve. If it seemed clear in advance that the crowds would be unmanageable, the plane was to divert the Beatles to an American air base in the suburbs.
They gave five short concerts in the Hall of the Martial Arts, the Olympic structure north of the palace and near the Yasukuni Shrine. Two thousand policemen were on hand for the opening concert, and more than eight thousand policemen saw action during the five days of the visit. Thousands of overzealous young persons, mostly female, were taken into custody, but no further punishments were meted out. Ringo Starr said that he felt like a bug in a cage. (Prince Philip, also with reference to the elaborate security measures, asked the pearl divers at Toba, beyond Nagoya, whether they had been boiled.)
The Beatles made sixty million yen. Gross proceeds were a hundred million yen, and the impresarios made nothing at all. The security measures cost the prefecture ninety million yen. The sound trucks of the fundamentalist right were on the streets denouncing the event as a national disgrace. They seem to be among the institutions (motorcycle gangs are another) which the police are unwilling or unable to restrain. They make of the regions around the Soviet embassy a constant bedlam.
The city has been repeatedly captured in the years since, by such personages as Michael Jackson and Madonna. Whether the personage be male or female, the crowds are predominantly the latter.
In the realm of high culture and the intellect the French have prevailed. Sartre and De Beauvoir came in 1966, the Venus de Milo in 1964, a few months before the Olympics, and the Mona Lisa in 1974. France got credit for all four even though the last two are not exactly French products. The Mona Lisa was the biggest popular success. A million and a half people, or some two hundred thousand for each of the six-day weeks that she was on display, poured into the National Museum at Ueno and jostled and elbowed each other to have a glimpse of her. It was not much of a glimpse. Railings kept the crowds at a distance. Amplified voices told them in ceremonious but commanding terms that they must not dally.
Among the popular diversions, baseball has pursued its steady way. This is to say that for the Giants the ups have prevailed over the downs. They have gone on being far the most popular team in Tokyo and in most parts of the country (almost everywhere except Nagoya, Osaka, and Hiroshima) that do not have local teams to worship. They are the mainstay of the whole system. It would collapse if they were to.
The Kōrakuen in Tokyo is the baseball capital of the land. It has kept up with the times. We have seen that in 1950 it had the first night games (“nighters’’). In 1959 it acquired a baseball museum and hall of fame like those in Cooperstown. In 1976 it had the first artificial turf, a peculiar thing to have, one might think, in a city so rainy that the problem is not to grow natural turf but to keep it under control. Now it has the first covered stadium. This is Tokyo Dome, the second word in English. It is the air-supported kind. Giants fans are advised to come with mufflers and throat sprays. Not even the Seibu enterprises, so capable in most things, have prevailed in baseball. They have their team, heavily promoted, but it has nothing like the popular following of the Giants.
Sumo, the national accomplishment, goes on being at best second to baseball in the national regard. Efforts have been made to liven it up a bit. The ring has been widened so that matches have a chance of being over in less of a hurry, and preliminary rituals have been shortened so that they can get started in more of a hurry. The rituals were traditionally allowed to go on indefinitely, until some sixth sense told the wrestlers that they had gone on long enough. Radio broadcasting brought time limits, varying with the rank of the wrestlers, and television brought further reductions. Now the top wrestlers posture and glare for no more than four minutes. This still is not fast enough for the television audience, which is drifting away from Sumō. Baseball is also thought by many to be a slow sport, but not even a faltering pitcher takes four minutes for his windup. A gigantic Samoan-American has ascended to a higher rank than any non-Oriental had in the past. He weighs more than five hundred pounds.
Publicists and historians of Sumō tell us that it is having yet another golden age. Though there have been two or three very good wrestlers in recent decades, we may be suspicious of the fact that this golden age followed so close upon the last, and of the rate at which Yokozuna, wrestlers of the top rank, have come and gone. Of the sixty wrestlers who have held the Yokozuna rank in the not quite two and a half centuries since chronicles of the sport became reasonably precise, twenty-two have been promoted to it in the last four decades and a bit more. There must be Yokozuna and golden ages if the television audience is to be held. Some Yokozuna have been good neither at wrestling nor at holding the audience. Some have been downright unpopular. In 1987 the Sumō Association took the unprecedented step of stripping a Yokozuna of his rank and his right to compete. He had been behaving in a boorish, overbearing, and indeed violent manner. He had been much touted by the media and the agencies as a “new man.” This carries connotations of the liberated and the cosmopolitan. So it may be that the new has gone about as far as it can go if the old is not to disappear completely.
The chronicles of Sumō over the years have resembled those of phoenixes; but if each golden age is going to look more thinly plated than the preceding one, and if the advent of a new one is to be announced every decade or so, the prospects are not bright. At the very worst Sumō will survive vestigially, as do so many “cultural properties”; but that will be a sad survival for those who have known a genuine golden age or two.
A third sport, golf, may have overtaken Sumō as a national accomplishment, or at any rate as a popular diversion. It is participatory. Tournaments get their time on television and crowds follow popular heroes, even as at Pebble Beach and Augusta; but essentially it is the businessman’s sport, and that of the politician and the bureaucrat. It has not thrown off the moneyed origins which, as a Japanese sport, it shares with baseball. The first Tokyo golf club, founded in 1914, had among its members some of the most eminent businessmen and politicians of the time. One of them became finance minister and was assassinated. He had tried to teach the Japanese the
lesson they have learned so well since the war, that economic penetration is far more tenacious and durable than military. The links, at Komazawa in Setagaya Ward, later provided one of the Olympic sites. There had earlier been golf courses in Kobe and Yokohama. Early amateur tournaments were won by foreigners, but the Japanese came into their own in 1918, at the first one held in Tokyo. They posted the best five scores.
The popularity of golf among politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen may have something to do with the decline of yet another national accomplishment, that of the geisha, the “accomplished person.” That there has been a very sad decline is undeniable. Tastes and ways of life are changing. The traditional music and dance which were the geisha’s accomplishments do not interest the ruling classes as they once did, or provide the incentives they once did for a young girl to endure the severities of geisha training.
The “geisha house,” which is to say the expensive restaurant where the geisha holds forth, was once the place for concluding big deals, political and entrepreneurial. Increasingly, the golf course is. It has the advantage that electronic snooping is less of a problem. When a businessman or politician is playing golf, he is probably doing more than playing golf. He is making awesome arrangements which he might have made in a restaurant in another day.
The decline of the geisha may be dated from the second postwar decade, when rapid economic growth was beginning. So it would not seem to be true, as is often averred, that the geisha was simply too expensive. It takes dozens of evenings at an expensive geisha restaurant to dissipate a sum equal to the membership fee in one of the golf clubs important people belong to; and the expense-account crowd started turning away from the geisha just at the time when it was beginning to have more than ample money.
Local histories and official publications have become rather demure and coy in recent years. They do not pay the attention they once did to geisha. A Meiji guide to Tokyo published by the city in 1907 obligingly guides its readers to the pleasure quarters and tells them how many geisha they can choose from. It is a rare ward history in recent years that has anything at all to say on the subject. The talk is rather of schools and welfare and day care and the like. It may be that the bureaus and the historians responsible for all these documents are only a little in advance of the times when they treat the geisha as if she did not exist. Such bits of information as one comes upon suggest that it will not be long.
The history of Chūō Ward (Ginza and Nihombashi) published in 1980 is one of the exceptions, rare and refreshing. It tells us that “in the recent past” there came to be fewer than half as many Shimbashi geisha as in the fifties, fewer than two hundred as against more than four hundred. (It will be remembered that “Shimbashi” here really means Tsukiji, east of Ginza.) Matters were even worse with other districts in the ward. The Yoshichō district in Nihombashi and the Shintomichō district near Ginza had almost ceased to exist. In Shimbashi, the district clinging most pertinaciously to life, almost half the okiya consisted of an owner-geisha and no one else. An okiya is the residence of a geisha, typically, in better days, several of them. Okiya were becoming condominium apartments, and geisha restaurants were moving into high-rise buildings. Getting into an elevator to go to a “geisha party” represents a change indeed. Before the river wall went up one could enter a Yanagi-bashi restaurant by boat. A sense of the seasons and the elements has always been an important part of the geisha ambience.
All over the city, geisha quarters are disappearing. Shimbashi had been one of the three great quarters of modern Tokyo. Yanagibashi was another. Elegant restaurants once lined the right bank of the Sumida River north of the Kanda. Now only two are to be detected. Akasaka is probably the strongest of the three, because it is so convenient for politicians and bureaucrats, not in a part of town that takes them out of their way; but even there the decline has been marked. Akasaka had only a third as many geisha restaurants in 1984 as it had had a dozen years before. The Maruyama district on a hill above Shibuya had three hundred geisha at its postwar peak, during the years of the Korean War. In 1984 there were only seventy, and most of them were over fifty years of age. They still played the samisen, but few essayed to dance. Presumably the quarter will be extinct when the seventy die or retire. The fall in the count of geisha restaurants was even more striking than the fall in the count of geisha: down to eleven from a hundred forty. So not even the geisha who persisted in the business could expect many engagements.
The same history of Chūō Ward remarks upon the fact that even as the tides of popularity and prosperity withdraw from one part of the ward they flood in upon another. The bars of central Ginza flourished even as the geisha places to the east languished. The theaters and the pleasures of drink and sex always having been in a most intimate relationship, it also remarks upon changing tastes in the latter, corresponding to those in the former: from the stylized traditional forms to more realistic Westernized ones. It might have commented upon a yet deeper change, the decline of the popular theater as it was in the Asakusa of the interwar years.
This is not to be understood as saying that there is no theater. All the varieties, conservative and advanced, that are to be found in the West are in Tokyo, and some traditional, homegrown ones besides. There are more theaters than in New York. When, not long ago, a magazine carried photographs of what it thought to be the twenty most interesting theaters in the city, its trouble was not in finding interesting ones but in choosing among the large number of them. It came upon some that few people can have known of, in such unlikely parts of the city as Fukagawa, east of the Sumida River.
But fragmentation prevails, and in lamentable measure snobbishness. If any theater with its own troupe is as popular as the Asakusa reviews were during the interwar years, it is the Takarazuka of the all-girl troupe. The Koma Stadium in Shinjuku is the Big Apple of popular entertainment, but it does not produce its own performers as the Asakusa theaters did. They are big-time before they get there, and television makes them that.
There certainly are vulgar forms, in the several senses of the adjective. The more advanced and bold of the strip shows, however, are expensive and draw tiny audiences. Yose is not expensive, but it too draws small audiences, and, as we have seen, there are not many theaters left. The largest among them seats only two hundred and a score or two of viewers, and is seldom full save on Sundays and when several tourist buses happen to show up at once. There were until recently tiny theaters—“huts,” as the jargon has them—where strolling players held forth with a hybrid of the traditional and the modern. They have gone, though they are still to be found in the provinces. All of these lesser forms combined have less than the drawing power of a single Asakusa theater back when Enoken was playing there.
Television has replaced them all, and a good many other things besides. In place of the devoted local constituency that Asakusa had, there is a single national constituency—or there are as many constituencies as there are channels. Remote local audiences that before had scarcely anything now have something, which is probably good; and the big city has lost something.
Television has combined with another hugely popular form to be a threat not only to traditional forms but to the printed word. Television scenes speed by at such a great rate that no one has time to say much of anything, and there is very little room indeed for what may be called distinguished language. Manga dispense with words almost entirely. They are frighteningly popular. In 1987 one and two-thirds billion copies of manga magazines were sold. The word manga is generally rendered “comics,” but it is not a good rendition. The big Japanese-English dictionary has among its definitions “cartoon,” which is better. There is little humor in these magazines. The cartoon, humorous and bloodcurdling, has a venerable history in Japan. Of recent years the latter has come to prevail, along with the erotic. Such words as there are to slow the devotee down on his gallop through a manga magazine tend strongly toward the imitative or onomatopoetic. The
y do not convey a meaning so much as an immediate physical experience. They cut through the descriptive functions of language, and splash and splatter and otherwise seek, like Aldous Huxley’s feelies, to strike immediately at the senses.
The Japanese language has always been rich in such words. The argument has been made that because of them it is uniquely suited to such anti-rational modes of belief and conduct as Zen. They bear a much larger share of the burden in manga than in ordinary language. Some of them are rather amusing. A newspaper article in 1970 listed these: ashe, for cutting someone’s face open; zuzu-u-u zuzu-u-u, for slurping noodles; chu chuba, for a kiss; pattaan, for a punch in the jaw; murereri murumuru, for the impatience of a young lady awaiting her young gentleman. They are many of them sounds that would convey nothing at all independently of their manga, which is to say that they are outside of and beyond language.
These developments are of course not unique to Tokyo, and it cannot be said that Tokyo has always led the way. It certainly leads the way in television and advertising, but in sex and violence Osaka is often the pioneer. Many a subtle new direction in the cutting edge of manga can be traced to Osaka. Yet it is difficult to describe the city as it is and as it is coming to be without describing such spiritual changes as this, along with all the physical changes.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 71