The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  I asked the groundskeeper what the writing on the stones read.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he answered. ‘Got no interest in them.’ He turned away from me and went back to raking up cigarette butts, dry leaves, trash. The broom’s bristles left round swirls in the pale grit: a circle, a zero, traced backward. The groundskeeper was surrounded by these swirls, like Zen ensō, those almost-complete circles that represent the emptiness of all things.

  A salaryman in suit and shirtsleeves walked over to the concrete pavilion and said a few words, his voice low, to the sleeper, who woke up, slowly.

  Beside the climbing frame stood three worn playground animals mounted on springs: a panda, a koala, a red creature that became invisible if you looked at it head-on.

  When I glanced back at the bell, the homeless man had moved away from the tower, and was lashing his possessions onto a wooden dolly which he covered with a light blue tarp. Then he threw his weight against the handle and dragged everything off toward Dai-Anraku-ji, a temple founded in the 1870s ‘to comfort the souls’ of the tens of thousands who had died at Kodenmachō from the 1610s, when the jail was first built, until 1875, when it closed.

  The salaryman threw down a cigarette and stamped it out. He leaned backward against one of the bell tower’s pillars and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  The jail was older than the Tokugawa shogunate and outlasted it too. For more than two hundred years, Kodenmachō housed the city’s prison: home to pickpockets and arsonists and murderers, troublemakers and gamblers and dissidents. Judgments were not subject to appeal and death sentences were carried out immediately. One inmate described the prison’s atmosphere as ‘reminiscent of the Warring States period – with desperate men spurring each other on and learning to laugh in the face of impending doom.’

  Edo also had two public execution grounds, which stood at its northern and southern gateways. As the city grew, so over time the execution grounds relocated further outward, following the city limits as they moved: from Shibaguchi to Shinagawa and then Suzugamori in the south; in the north, from Asakusabashi to Kotsukappara on the Sumida River’s eastern bank. But the walled city within a city that was Kodenmachō remained where it was. Outside its Great Gate, criminals were flogged; inside the condemned were tattooed, or waited for judgment; or for exile on the penal islands to the south and west; or for death.

  Public punishment in Tokugawa Japan, Daniel Botsman has written, was a form of popular drama. ‘The creation of a horrifying spectacle was more important than [inflicting] pain on an individual wrongdoer.’ The shogunate was careful, though, to hold open-air executions only for the most terrible crimes, lest the crowd sympathize with the condemned, and riot.

  In 1876, eight years after the last Tokugawa shogun left the city, the jail was moved westward to Ichigaya. But even after the prison disappeared, Kodenmachō was still considered unclean. The earth itself was believed to be contaminated by kegare, the spiritual pollution brought on by blood and crime.

  The writer Hasegawa Shigure grew up near the Kodenmachō district; within the sound of its blacksmiths’ forges and the smells of frying sea snails and camellia-oil shops. In her memoirs, she wrote that the prison was believed to be filthy, which she thought unfair, since ‘innocent people were locked up there as well as the guilty.’ When the jail shut in 1875, the buildings were razed and Hasegawa’s father was offered part of the block where they had stood, but he refused: Absolutely not. Ya da kara, na. He was not a weak man, Hasegawa wrote: he was a samurai, and carried a long sword and guarded Edo Castle in the months after the shogun left and the emperor’s new capital was almost lawless. But for no amount of profit would he overcome his aversion to the site.

  Hasegawa’s mother pleaded that he reconsider – we could be land-rich! – but her father was adamant: ‘I heard the shrieks of people being tortured there, tortured for nothing. And men about to be executed. I saw one dragged by his hair to the execution ground. He kept trying to escape. Even after his head was lopped off, his hands were still bound behind his back. And the body was twitching even though he was dead. – I want no part of that place.’

  * * *

  ‘Did you come here because you’re a Christian?’ the priest Nakayama asked. ‘I can always tell when a Christian has just visited. They leave white lilies for the Jesuit who was tortured and executed in that jail.’

  ‘I’m looking for the Bells of Time.’

  ‘Oh.’ The priest glanced back toward the bell tower. ‘That one used to be in Edo Castle, but it was moved to the prison because the noise irritated the shogun. We only ring it on New Year’s Eve now. It doesn’t have the best tone. Though the more often you strike it, the better it sounds.’

  The priest – Nakayama Hiroyuki – was around eighty years old, and had lived at Dai-Anraku-ji since he was fourteen, when his family moved from Kyoto.

  Dai-Anraku-ji’s courtyard is a tidal pool, filled with objects brought from other temples, other places and other eras.

  A polished stone block considered sacred by the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. Inside that stone are the calcified remains of a snake. The sick come to run their palms over the snake’s diamond-shaped head and its scales, and pray for healing. The fossil curves like a whip, or a letter in some unknown alphabet.

  A wooden image of the goddess of literature and music: eight-armed Benzaiten. She has enamel eyes, and a smoke-darkened face; in the late nineteenth century she was brought to Dai-Anraku-ji during the Meiji restoration when all across Japan Buddhist temples were being ransacked and destroyed.

  ‘This Benzaiten is a thousand years old. She was made for the warrior wife of a shogun.’ Nakayama smiled. ‘Four of the goddess’ arms were repaired recently – it cost twelve million yen for each! – and when the craftsmen went to work, the neck wobbled. The woodcarver removed the head and found a tiny copy of the Golden Light Sutra inside. When the sutra was unscrolled, the paper stretched twenty-five meters. There were nine more sutras like that one inside the Benzaiten.’ Nakayama held up his thumb. ‘This was how big it was.’

  The Golden Light Sutra is named for its tenth chapter, in which a bodhisattva dreams of a golden drum that ‘lights up the sky like the circle of the sun’. A holy man appears to beat the drum, which calls on those who hear it to repent. The ruler who copied this sutra could ensure that he would flourish and his realm be rich and peaceful; that there would be no sickness or disasters during his reign. In medieval Japan, copies of the Golden Light Sutra were hidden in ceilings to protect a house against lightning, and against bad luck.

  The image of Benzaiten had her own tiny red and gold shrine just beside Dai-Anraku-ji, and across from the place where the condemned were executed. The shrine was shaped like a moon gate; the shrine was all door, and almost no building. In the darkness inside, electric candles flickered, picking out the gold leaf on Benzaiten’s slippers, her spangled robes, the eyes of the dragon on her breastplate, the fruit in one of her eight hands. The goddess’ eyes gleam, reflecting all the light there is.

  * * *

  ‘The color of the earth near the well was different,’ the priest Nakayama said. ‘Darker.’

  It was the place where executioners once washed severed heads before displaying them on pikes at the southern and northern gates into the city. The well was used until 1964. Nakayama watched as the waters, and the capped stones above them, were sealed off.

  We were sitting on the floor of a back room in the temple, and drinking tea from Kyoto. Nakayama had said that he might have made coffee, but ‘it would take an hour to roast the beans.’ He was sorry.

  The room was empty except for a low red lacquered table, a scroll and a pale wooden go gaming board. Paper screens filtered the light.

  ‘In 1875 a priest passed by the old Tokugawa prison at Kodenmachō. The jail’s prisoners had just been moved to Yotsuya and the place was being used as a storehouse for food.

  ‘And at the exact spot where the condemned were beheade
d, he saw phosphor rising.’

  ‘Phosphor…?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s believed that phosphor arises from the souls of the dead.’

  Nakayama was as still as the main hall’s image of Kōbō Daishi, the monk who founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Nakayama appeared to have no trouble sitting in the seiza position, his legs tucked underneath him. Meanwhile I was trying not to squirm, and failing: my knees were stiff and my calves and ankles hurt. We had been sitting for more than two hours.

  ‘Did the priest have any family who had been jailed in Kodenmachō? Did he have a connection here?’

  ‘He was just a priest – from a temple near Azabu and Roppongi. He happened to walk by and saw the strange glow I told you about. He had no relationship with anyone who was executed.’

  I asked if Nakayama thought what the priest had seen reflected his shock – that the old order had changed after two hundred and fifty years; that suddenly anyone could speak about what had happened inside the jail.

  Nakayama paused. ‘Well, people now don’t understand what “phosphor burning” even means. Seeing it is a skill, like reading palms is a skill – although some can understand what is written on the hand, there are very, very few who still can.’

  The darkness of Tokyo a hundred and fifty years ago, in the last years before electric lights: every night the city would have been black. In the twenty-first century’s dazzle of headlights and streetlamps and LEDs and vertical neon signs and halogen bulbs, if phosphor drifted up from the asphalt, no one would notice.

  The priest had gone into a restaurant nearby and asked two men he met there for a donation to found the temple. Nakayama smiled. ‘One was Ōkura Kihachirō. The other was Yasuda Zenjirō.’

  Both Ōkura and Yasuda created business empires which were among Japan’s first zaibatsu, the influential business conglomerates that dominated Japanese industry before World War Two. The founder of Dai-Anraku-ji was lucky or canny or both.

  ‘So you think the temple’s first priest really saw something?’

  Nakayama toyed with the prayer beads around his wrist. ‘I wasn’t there. I can’t say.’

  * * *

  The children’s school opposite would be torn down soon, Nakayama told me. The district did not have enough children to fill its classrooms. The building that would be constructed in its place would be a nursing home.

  During renovation, construction crews uncovered the foundations of the old prison. Nakayama wanted the stones listed as a World Heritage site.

  ‘You could see where the prisoners got their drinking water and the tiny spaces where they slept. You could see the kitchens that fed them and where they took their baths – that’s when they got a chance to bathe. The condemned were always executed in the same place. That spot was never moved. I wanted the connection – between this time and that – preserved.’

  After the ruins were unearthed, the construction company pushed that the nursing home not just go ahead, but that its construction should speed up.

  ‘I went to the Metropolitan Government to ask that the prison be preserved, but the government said they were powerless to protect what remained, that it was up to the district ward. Archaeologists came to study the ruins, and two Nobel laureates backed preservation, but when the ward held a vote, it went 40:1 in favor of the old folks’ home.’

  It was Nakayama who cast the lone dissenting vote.

  ‘You were up against terrible odds!’ I said, wondering how to say crushing loss in Japanese. There are many words for defeat, if not so many as words for time. The way you lose, and how, matters.

  ‘Yes.’ Nakayama said. ‘Looking down at the ruins, you could see, in just one glance, how people lived!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I circulated a petition and the ward decided to preserve the stone walls. You’ll be able to look down and see them through a glass floor.’

  ‘How did you get the ward to agree to that?’ I asked, thinking of Nakayama’s 40:1 opposition.

  He looked pleased. ‘Well, the head of the ward wanted – really wanted – to retire at a certain rank, with certain honors. But if there’d been just one complaint against him, he wouldn’t have gotten them.’

  I looked across the lacquered table at Nakayama.

  ‘Just one complaint?’ I said.

  Nakayama nodded. I looked away from him to his go board in the corner. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had seen in Japan or anywhere else: both luminous and severe. Go, the game of strategy in which a player tries to surround an opponent’s stones with his own.

  ‘I’d really hate to play against you,’ I said.

  ‘That board is too good to use,’ he shrugged. He was still smiling. I almost felt sorry for the old head of the ward.

  ‘It’s a board only to use when you dream, then.’

  ‘It’s a shame that we couldn’t have preserved the old prison. You could see what it had been in the early 1600s. It burned twelve times, and after each fire, it was rebuilt, just as it had been, from a map.’

  ‘Fires…’ I thought of the guards, the walls, the iron locks. ‘The people jailed there, did they…?’

  Nakayama stopped smiling. ‘When the city was burning, the warders would open the doors and let everyone out. When the fires were put out, the prisoners had three days to come back.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, yes, they came back. Everyone always came back. If you didn’t come back … they would find you. And they’d kill you. It was better just to turn yourself in.’

  * * *

  The nineteenth-century Kabuki playwright Mokuami grew up in Nihonbashi, only ten minutes’ walk from Kodenmachō. In a late play about a samurai caught stealing from the shogun’s vaults (Four Thousand Gold Pieces, Like Plum Leaves), Mokuami takes his audience inside the old prison. He interviewed men who had been inside as guards or convicts, and wrote about the inmates’ secret language and their routines, about their hierarchies and their honor codes. The play’s jail sequence opens with a poor country actor being forced into ‘the naked dance’, so the men around him can forget their hunger. With an extra stroke of cruelty, Mokuami has the man dance to the beat of a candy vendor’s call from beyond the walls – Kodenmachō was famous for its sweet shops. ‘Better things are coming! Better things are coming!’ sings the actor, weeping.

  For two hundred and fifty years, the prison had been a place of terror and mystery. Mokuami depicted newcomers arriving in the western wing (‘the most infamous’), crawling through the door and then between another inmate’s spread legs so every new prisoner would understand that, whatever his status had been outside, now he was nothing. Mokuami portrayed the room’s boss overseeing the prisoners from a tower of tatami mats taken from the weaker among them, the less important convicts, who were mashed together into a space called the Far Road. He wrote about the illness and hunger, pretty boys seeking to defend themselves from the strong, old grudges being settled with beatings, new arrivals punished for failing to bring protection money into the prison. ‘Your fate in hell depends on your cash,’ Mokuami writes, in one of the play’s most quoted lines. ‘This is Hell Number One. There is no Second Place.’

  As Mokuami portrayed it, Kodenmachō was a distorted mirror of the city beyond its moat: its rituals and hierarchies and protocols. Inmates were separated according to class and status: samurai whose rank entitled them to an audience with the shogun lived in special quarters above the ground floor. Buddhist monks, Shinto priests and women were also housed in those upper rooms. But below, on the Far Road, an ordinary prisoner who had arrived without money might be forced to share a single tatami mat with six or seven other men and would often have nothing to eat at all.

  In Four Thousand Gold Pieces, Mokuami’s Vault-Breaker is admired for his daring, for his panache. The prison boss offers him a fine kimono and sash to wear to his execution. ‘You must die in beautiful clothes,’ the boss says. ‘You deserve them, because of the brilliance of your cr
ime.’

  * * *

  ‘It’s very silent,’ Nakayama said. ‘Living here, we have no sense that we’re actually in the heart of a city.’

  I followed Nakayama along the corridor, where shadows muffled light and sound and the ceilings rose up so high that they might have opened out onto the sky, though it would surely always have been night, the wood was stained so dark. The corridor angled around a little rock garden – stones and sasanqua trees set around a pool of carp that glided and splashed through the water. It was more Kyoto than Tokyo.

  ‘Before you enter into the sanctuary, you must purify yourself,’ Nakayama said. He opened a small lacquered disc, and took out a pinch of incense, which he dusted into my hands, motioning me to rub my palms together. ‘And this, please eat,’ he said, passing me a little caddy filled with cloves. I took one tiny spike, and chewed it. I was surprised at how easy the clove was to swallow, and at the sweet bitter taste it left in my mouth.

  We stepped up into the Buddhist hall, which though not beautiful, had the venerability of age; over almost a century, smoke has darkened the gold leaf of its rafters. Nakayama switched on a huge LED flashlight and let its beam play over the hall’s sacred image, a Kōbō Daishi, whose face a thousand years of incense had turned the matte color of wet bark.

  ‘During the 1923 earthquake, people from this area loaded the carving onto a wagon and dragged it to Tokyo Station.’

  Crowds, screaming and shoving against each other; the believers piling the heavy wooden figure onto a wooden wagon, and straining with it through smoke, around abandoned cars and carts, around crevasses that had opened in the road surface.