The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  * * *

  On the western ridge, above Konjō-in’s roof, is a grave, a grave without ashes. The stone honors the rebel samurai Marubashi Chūya. In 1651, Chūya organized a force of masterless samurai in a plot to overthrow the Tokugawa. According to legend, Chūya himself betrayed the conspiracy, after raving about his plans during a high fever.

  Chūya’s history was retold in the puppet theaters and in novels, though the circumstances and character names were tweaked to get around the Tokugawa censors, who wanted the man forgotten as if he had never existed. But the story survived, somehow, and two hundred years later, just after the shogunate collapsed, the kabuki playwright Mokuami wrote Chūya’s story: Keian Taiheiki (The Keian Incident). The production was wildly popular, and ran for years.

  The Keian Incident opens with a child’s song. Chūya longs for grandeur, for a chance to avenge his father, who was executed by the first Tokugawa shogun. The play ends when Chūya, betrayed by his wife’s family and outnumbered, almost fights off an entire battalion sent to arrest him, before the shogun’s men capture him. It is one of the most famous fight scenes in Japanese literature.

  When Chūya was alive, the roofs of Edo Castle would have been visible even from distant Mejiro: the citadel was clad in gleaming white tiles made of lead. It was ‘delicately sculpturesque in appearance, with multiple gables and rich gold-leaf decoration highlighting the eave ends and the ridge…’ The lesser towers had copper tiling, which turned green, and dolphin finials made of gold. The entire complex was painted with black lacquer, which was – wrongly, as it turned out – believed to be fireproof.

  The castle, which towered eighty-five meters above the plain, was the tallest structure ever built in Edo. The main keep had reception and residence halls almost past counting: the Thousand Mat Hall. The White Audience Hall. The Black Audience Hall. And a clock room, which set the official time for the entire city.

  The castle evolved in a whirlpool design, with the main keep ringed by compounds radiating out to the east, north and west. A spiral of canals surrounded the citadel. Its perimeter was ringed by thirty-two massive fortified gates, while inside their walls the inner citadel had ninety-nine more gates, most at right angles to disorient outsiders and bottle up attacking forces. During the castle’s entire history, no one tried a frontal attack.

  Beyond the citadel, Edo itself was also laid out to confound invaders: the city had twice as many T-junctions and dead-ends as crossroads. Everything – from the number of bridges to the gates to the castle design – underpinned Tokugawa power.

  It was this complex, this city, that Chūya wanted to burn. He calculated that in the chaos that followed the fires, his army of masterless samurai could depose the shogun. When he was caught, Chūya tried to kill himself but was prevented; his life was preserved so he could be tortured and crucified. Nor was death the end of Chūya’s punishment: the grotesque stump of his body, all that was left of the man, was displayed so anyone else would think twice about challenging the shogunate.

  Chūya’s memorial was put up a hundred years after his torture and crucifixion. Konjō-in built a plain bronze roof over the stone marker, to stop the stone inscription from eroding.

  Edo Castle lasted only five years after Chūya’s execution. It burned to the ground during the Great Meireki Fire of 1657. It was never rebuilt.

  * * *

  In the courtyard below the pilgrims had rung for Konjō-in’s monk, who was writing the temple’s formal name in their goshuin books. His calligraphy was exquisite. The monk was young, and had a beautiful face. He raised his eyebrows when I leaned over the sill. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

  I asked if the temple had a Bell of Time.

  The monk began speaking to me in keigo, the formal Japanese used for extremely important people. Keigo has its own distinct vocabulary, words almost never used in ordinary life. The monk talked for several minutes. I recognized the word war. Transfer. He suggested that I ask at a neighboring temple, Nanzō-in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t quite understand…’

  The monk smiled, faintly contemptuous, and answered again, briefly, quickly, enunciating each syllable in a clipped voice. I looked at him, blank. When he finished talking, the monk bowed with elaborate, disdainful courtesy. Then he slid the paper-and-wood door shut.

  The pilgrims crowded around me, asking what I was looking for, and what the monk had said. I explained that I was looking for Bells of Time.

  ‘I’m not sure … he said something about the bell being gone. Maybe that it was requisitioned for scrap metal during the war?’

  ‘Ah, the war,’ the woman sighed. ‘… I was young, then. We lost so much!’

  ‘That’s not what he said!’ another pilgrim burst out. He had overheard the monk talking while he waited for his pilgrimage book to be stamped with the temple’s seal. ‘He said the bell has been gone – long before the war. All the monk knows is that it was once here.’

  ‘So you’re looking for the Time Tolling Bells,’ the woman said. ‘I bet the neighbors used to complain about those! What a racket they would have made! And such a gloomy sound!’

  ‘You think they’re gloomy?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, bells make us think about death, and we’d really rather not, you know!’

  ‘I wonder who makes those bells,’ the third pilgrim asked, thoughtful. ‘If they’re even made at all now.’

  ‘Nobody needs them anymore,’ the woman said. ‘After all, we have watches!’

  I left the pilgrims, who watched me go, smiling to themselves. Opposite Konjō-in was an abandoned house. Wild strawberries and ferns grew in the cracks between its stone steps; vines grew over the porch and even on the roof. The ink tracing out the owner’s name plate had almost eroded away: Shimoda Katsujirō.

  I could hear cars and motorcycles and trucks passing along Meiji dori, and the sound beat at me like breakers on a great shore. I followed the Kanda River’s north bank southward. I thought about Konjō-in’s bell. It would have rung out here, and north past the rice fields that were not yet Zōshigaya cemetery, before the writers Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Lafcadio Hearn and Nagai Kafū were buried there; a hundred years before the grave to Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tōjō Hideki, was laid out.

  The bell’s absence somehow gave it a weight, a solidity, that the object itself would never have had, if I could have seen it or heard it ringing or even touched it. The bell had been melted down, maybe, and become part of something else – a car’s engine, a radio. It might have become a hair pin, a pair of secateurs. Or an anti-aircraft shell.

  I stopped walking, and looked around. I could no longer hear the traffic on Meiji dori. The waters of the Kanda River were loud.

  Across the path I saw an old woman whose hair was dyed a rich, almost peacock blue, the blue of the Wisdom King himself, of the lapis parchments that ancient painters once used for copying sutras, or celestial landscapes. The old woman turned slightly away, looking down into the canal. I thought of a song about two lovers, popular forty years before.

  The Kanda River flowed past

  Our little boarding house.

  You looked at my fingertips –

  ‘Are you sad?’

  At that time, we were so young

  There was nothing to be afraid of

  I was wary only of your tenderness

  I walked blindly, happy to be lost.

  * * *

  Later I wrote to Konjō-in, asking about its history. The monk wrote back in that same formal Japanese, using the glittering cousins of simple words. I needed a dictionary even to read the word for thing.

  The incendiary bombs of 1945 destroyed all records belonging to the temple and its neighbor Hase-dera, the monk wrote. Its most sacred object, the Fudō Myōo, survived, although the flames ate almost everything else, even the graves.

  The current abbot, Onozuka Ikuzumi, says that in 1935, when he was a very young child, the bell had already gone. The
monk wrote: On the first shores of his memory, the bell no longer hung in Nanzō-in. In 1895 it had appeared in a magazine called the Arts Review, under ‘Famous Scenic Spots from the Old Capital’. The bell disappeared during the forty-year interval.

  And as for Marubashi Chūya, I think – and this is my own guess – the memorial was set up to mark the hundredth anniversary of Marubashi’s death. We have no records, but it would have been erected discreetly, so as not to attract attention. And as for the man himself, you may think of him as a traitor to the Shogunate, or as a hero who had mastered his art: both views are correct. Be careful to balance each reality.

  And the Bell of Time – if it escaped the fires after the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 bombings, it may still exist. Somewhere it could ring again.

  根

  津

  ‘Nezu’

  Those who watched never knew exactly how the clock’s pieces worked; they were left with a sense of wonder at the seemingly magical quality of the movement. The insides were canny and opaque. The human heart is like this, too.

  ‘Clock Metaphors in Edo Period Japan’

  Timon Screech

  Nezu: Tokugawa Timepieces

  When the shoguns ruled Japan, a day had twelve hours. Each hour was named after one of the Chinese Zodiac animals, so dawn was the Hour of the Rabbit, and dusk was the Hour of the Rooster. Noon was Mid-Horse, and the Hour of the Tiger was just before sunrise, when journeys began and lovers left each other.

  And in Edo the hours changed with the seasons: a winter daytime hour was much shorter than a summer daytime hour. A night hour was long in winter, and brief in summer.

  Then, in 1872, the Emperor Meiji abolished the old clock and brought in timekeeping and the calendars used in the United States and Europe: ‘Hereafter, day and night will be equal.’ No longer did clocks adapt to the seasons, the weather, and the tides. The moon had no connection with the beginning of the month anymore. New Year’s Day fell in mid-winter, not at the beginning of spring. Nothing is the way it should be. Time was torn away from nature.

  The government announced that no longer would temple bells sound the hours; that was forbidden. Time would be told with the noonday gun, fired from the palace.

  There were riots over the changes, riots which the government quickly put down.

  * * *

  In northern Tokyo, just east of the university, there is an island of old clocks.

  From Nezu Station I began climbing, past wooden shops selling sembei grilled over sunken stone fireplaces; old-fashioned cafes; a karaoke bar. I angled off down a side street that led past a shop selling wood and paper sliding screens, and crossed through the Dragon Erupting Mountain temple. Its courtyard was chilly and the garden in disorder; there was an ancient plum tree, its crooked gnarled trunk split into three, held together with coarse black twine.

  A vast parking lot flanked the temple alongside houses where laundry fluttered on little plastic merry-go-round racks. One house was plastered with posters for the conservative LDP party; across the alley, another house was thick with signs for the Communists. The LDP candidates had fixed grins (‘We’re not crooks!’), while the Communist candidate looked worried (‘We’ll never be elected!’). Beyond the crisp poster portraits of the politicians was a faded metal sign advertising lessons for ‘classical electric guitar’.

  The hill got steeper. Beside the road, the whitewashed clay walls rose ten feet high on both sides: tarmac, stones, sky. Nothing else: no doors, no gates. Finally, beyond the hill’s rise, there was a temple, and just before it a sign for the Daimyo Clock Museum. The museum’s stone pillar gates, and even the walls, were fading into green: moss, ferns, vines.

  Two motorcycles were parked at the gate: a shiny red Yamaha Corsa and a grubbier white Yamaha Serow painted with blue and pink stripes. A Nissan Largo, its license plate ripped off, stood under a crude corrugated-zinc roof tacked onto an old-fashioned brick storehouse, built to outlast even the hottest fires. The path, part cobbles, part flagstones, curved past a stone lantern and a stand of dwarf bamboo.

  The museum’s sign read OPEN but its door was still locked. A handwritten note attached to a small buzzer read If nobody answers, press this button.

  I pushed on the bell hard, and a woman arrived, flustered, smiling. She wore an oversized dark mustard quilted jacket and navy tracksuit bottoms. Her feet were bare, in plastic sandals. She might have been in her mid-fifties but she had a muted gaiety like a girl’s.

  I told her I wanted to understand how time was measured before factories and trains, before timetables. I said I was sorry, but I hadn’t brought a name-card.

  The woman smiled. ‘Your face is your name-card,’ she said.

  She unlocked the museum door, switching on the lights. Inside, the room was cold, far colder even than the wintry garden. Fluorescent bulbs flickered into bleak, greenish light that flowed over the divans and the clocks behind glass panels.

  The room was hushed, every sound muffled by the brown carpets and a long ruby velvet loveseat that faced the clocks. The place had the quiet of an airport chapel. Nothing moved. Even the dust was still.

  All the clocks had belonged to her father-in-law, the woman said: the collector Kamiguchi Sakujiri. ‘Guro’ was his nickname: it was short for grotesque. In 1916, Guro founded a boutique, Kamiguchi’s Ultra-Stylish Common Western Clothing Shop. He built a log cabin where he worked and fitted clothes for his clients; the neighborhood called the building The Grotesque. The shop even had mail delivered under the name. What he made, Guro spent – not least on the old clocks that everyone else was throwing away, because they were hard to look after and couldn’t keep the time.

  Except for the ruby red loveseat, the room’s only color was a framed, hand-painted letter, sent to Guro just before he died. Its author portrayed the collector with one arm thrown over a friend’s shoulder; laughing. Both men wear indigo robes, with a cloudburst of ocher, leaf green and yellow spattered behind them; a cluster of characters crowds the paper, like a flock of birds startled into flight. Get Well Soon. Everywhere around the little painting, the dial faces were motionless.

  Jesuit missionaries brought the first clocks to Japan; they were objects of wonder. Unlike temple bells, which sounded at intervals, the new clocks registered permanent time. The ceaseless and visible movement of the clocks’ hands was something altogether new. The idea of time itself changed: it became mechanical.

  Guro’s oldest clocks are iron copies of clocks missionaries brought. Later clocks are brass. They are painted in gold, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, adorned with coral. The hands might feature a snail, or a crescent moon, or a monkey. A carp climbing a waterfall. The numbers on the night face sometimes glitter darkly, damascened. The numbers for day might be silver.

  Clocks built for a temple bore lotuses etched onto their cases, and Buddhist vajras on their domes. Clocks for the nobility might be adorned with dewdrops or passion-flowers, which the Japanese called tokei-hana: ‘clock flowers’.

  On old Japanese clocks the hours were counted backwards. The clocks have no number greater than nine, which marked midday and midnight; then eight, seven, six, five and four counted off the following hours, then back to nine. Nine was the one moment of the day that never varied, when the sun stood at its zenith.

  I asked Mrs. Kamiguchi if it were true that only nobles – daimyō – were allowed to own clocks. Were there laws that barred commoners from owning them?

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘My husband … my husband could have answered anything you asked. When he was a child, these old clocks were all around him. But I just keep the displays, now. That’s all I can do.’ Tears welled up, but she didn’t rub her eyes. The tears looked unable to fall; frozen, like the room itself. ‘My husband died ten years ago. It was so sudden. We didn’t have any warning. He hadn’t taught me anything about the clocks, and he hadn’t taught our children what they needed to know, either.’

  She showed me her husband Hiroshi’s favorite. I
t was made in the spring of 1816. The clock’s face moves, but its hands are fixed. We looked at it through the glass.

  ‘In the shoguns’ time, the city was quiet,’ Mrs. Kamiguchi said. ‘So quiet, that when this clock chimed, you could have heard it from a long way off.’

  Near the room’s only door is the museum’s oldest clock. It is made of iron, and has a lantern dome, and only one hand. The Zodiac animals, which would once have marked the hours, have all worn away. The hand’s rotation had polished the face, and polished it, and polished it, until the mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and wild boar all disappeared.

  ‘Does anyone wind these clocks?’

  ‘Nobody. They’re just … decoration.’

  ‘What about that one? Why does it work?’ I asked, pointing to a small lantern clock on the floor. It was the only clock not behind glass. It had two foliot balances, which looked like see-saws.

  Mrs. Kamiguchi considered the little clock. ‘My husband thought that there should be one that actually showed the time. That way people would get the sense of what these clocks were really like, back when they were used.’

  I got down on my knees to look at the case, which had a delicate pattern of grasses and rippling waters around a drifting skiff.

  ‘Your husband knew how to make this run? All by himself?’

  ‘He could.’ She paused. ‘I just keep it oiled.’

  Mrs. Kamiguchi turned a key and shifted the cluster of iron weights on the clock’s foliot arms. Her movements were abrupt, all gaiety gone. When she twisted the gears that set up the clock’s striking train, I imagined her hands remembering other hands, his hands, showing her what to do – thirty, forty years before.