The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  ‘They didn’t say anything.’

  ‘They said nothing?’

  ‘Whatever they might have felt, they never talked about it. A lost thing is lost. If you try to chase it, that’s a mistake. Being sentimental about the past leads to darkness.’

  築

  地

  ‘Tsukiji’

  Tsukiji regulars call the marketplace the uoichiba, the fish market, or uogashi, the fish quay; or simply gashi, the quay. Only Tsukiji habitués (and only older ones at that) stroll the gashi, mostly in golden memories. Tourists visit the Tsukiji uoichiba, with the sense that a fleeting glimpse of the gashi may be just around the next corner.

  Theodore C. Bestor

  Tsukiji: The Japanese Empire

  This is the district of theaters – the Kabuki-za, the Enbujō, the Hakuhinkan, the Tōgeki – all built on reclaimed land. It is the Tokyo of interstices between the skyline and the Sumida River, between back alleys and the man-made islands of Tokyo Bay.

  Japan’s biggest fresh market was once here, famous for its fish but selling fruit and vegetables, too. Mornings at Tsukiji: men dragging carts heavy with squid; an auctioneer jerking and twitching as he invited bids; the zircon glint of ice blocks; blowfish; carp thrashing in black tubs; eels rippling in buckets; mussels, scallops, sea slugs, giant blue-fin tuna sparkling with frost. Bells and buzzers. Electric saws cutting into frozen tuna. Sun shining through the Art Deco skylights and flooding the wet pavements and the runners flying over them.

  The market’s elegant Bauhaus curve stood on what was once one of Edo’s grandest estates: Senshū-kaku, the Turret of a Thousand Autumns, the home of Matsudaira Sadanobu, a man who might have been shogun. Matsudaira’s garden was sublime but had a humorless name: Yokuon-en (‘the Bower of Bathing in Obligation’). Like Edo’s other great gardens, Yokuon-en evoked travel; the landscapes of greater Japan and of China and India beyond. ‘There were paths,’ Timon Screech has written, ‘that wound among trees and rocks designed to lead into spaces of mental remoteness.’ There were waterfalls, beaches by lakes, cliffs. An hour-glass pond called the Lake of Autumn Winds, which faced Edo Bay and its masts. Another pond called the Lake of Spring Winds, which faced Mount Fuji. Guests would climb a bridge ‘to be lost in the blossoms, as if floating, with only Fuji visible above.’

  The Turret of a Thousand Autumns burned in 1829, and all that remains of the estate and its gardens is a single crude sketch.

  * * *

  To the northeast, the green bronze roof of Tsukiji Hongan-ji soars in an improbable curve. Japan’s Buddhist temples are almost always made of wood, but Hongan-ji is white marble. Its arches and stupas echo the repeating lines of the prayer halls carved out of rock faces in southern India’s caves and cliffs. Where Japan’s traditional temples depict elephants and giraffes that the carvers, not having seen, had to imagine from imperfect descriptions in books, Hongan-ji’s animals are perfect simulacra. No longer creatures of the imagination, the stone elephants look like the beasts that were housed in Ueno’s Imperial Zoo. Somehow those correct shapes look more otherworldly than the elephant that is unrecognizable as an elephant, the giraffe that is cousin to the unicorn, the manticore.

  Hongan-ji temple belongs neither to the glass and steel boxes of Ginza to its west, nor to the Sumida to its east. It is an anachronism that jars the viewer out of time and out of Tokyo itself.

  The history of Tsukiji Hongan-ji is about the search for identity. Japan, having embraced the West in the late nineteenth century, rejected it in the mid-twentieth. Built when the imperial army was storming through northern China, Hongan-ji is a hymn to Japan’s empire.

  The white marble evoked the earliest Buddhist structures in ancient India; Buddhism unified an imperial Japan with its Asian colonies: ‘Asia is One.’ But the temple was not just a simple imitation of ancient Buddhist sites in India; it was cosmopolitan, too, built in the Indo-Saracenic pastiche that the British Empire employed everywhere from New Delhi’s Secretariat Building to the Brighton Pavilion. In the same way, Japan’s foreign policy was justified in Tsukiji Hongan-ji’s stones.

  Golden peonies and gilded apsaras. Gilt phoenixes and hollyhocks. Huge gold taiko drums, gold panels. Flat-screen televisions are bracketed to the columns, alongside speakers shaped like silver bento boxes.

  On the sanctuary’s north wall is a forlorn shrine to the glam singer Matsumoto Hideto (‘hide’ to his fans), who hanged himself in 1998. A few spent votive candles, brilliant origami cranes strung on a thread, wilting roses. A framed photograph of the star, with his fountain of scarlet candyfloss hair, the ice-white powdered face, the liquid eyes.

  When hide’s coffin left Hongan-ji’s Main Hall, thousands of fans, shrieking and crying, surged against metal crowd-control barriers. Police on the other side threw their entire bodies against the railings to keep them upright. Teenage girls shoving against middle-aged men. Otaku Japan and conformist Japan crashed together.

  The balance held.

  * * *

  In Tokugawa Japan, the metallurgical formulae for casting a temple bell were kept as a secret tradition; a master would teach his disciples, but no one else. Consequently, knowledge disappeared both by design and by accident.

  Hongan-ji’s architect, Itō Chūta, loved old bells. Because records were fragmentary or non-existent, Itō made a formal study of existing temple bells, trying to recover what was lost: how thick the best bells were, and the ideal distance between their striking point and the mouth. He also analyzed the alloys that made the finest sounds. A high tin to copper ratio meant a sweeter note, but a weaker structure: the bell might crack. Balance was all.

  Itō wanted a bell that would have a velvet tone. He discovered the correct ratio was one kamme of copper mixed with 170 momme of tin.*

  Itō found for his new temple one of Edo’s old time-telling bells. The bell had once sounded the hours at Ichigaya, a northwest Tokyo shrine to Hachiman, the god of war. The bell rings out over a shore that once curved like a bow, one that’s now broken into jigsaw segments.

  * * *

  ‘Where is the bell?’

  ‘In the tower.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  ‘No. Come back when we ring it at New Year’s.’

  ‘But I won’t be in Tokyo then.’

  ‘What a shame.’

  ‘Does the bell have an inscription?’

  The woman disappeared and returned with three photographs printed on ordinary paper. ‘It doesn’t look like anything’s written on it.’

  The first photograph caught the bell from below: the image looked wrong, ugly. The lens and the shot’s angle distorted everything: the stupa tower, seen from the inside, was paneled with varnished boards like a sauna. Its windows stretched upward like fun house mirrors. Seen from below, the bell was not a green dome, but a dark cavity.

  I angled the paper one way and then another in the dim light.

  ‘But – look! – words! What do they say?’

  I traced the columns of characters, row after row. The writing was almost invisible.

  ‘The photographs were only taken on a phone, not with a good camera. I can’t read it.’ The woman glanced up at me. ‘Sorry.’

  * * *

  I stepped outside, looking toward the northern tower. It was shaped like a stupa and featured the ogee windows so beloved by architects of the British Raj.

  The bell hung inside; invisible, silent.

  I left the temple precinct, looking back until Hongan-ji’s green bronze roof and the tower disappeared.

  * * *

  At an overpass, a steel signboard depicting an engraved landscape gave vital statistics of a vanished bridge: The Turtle Well – Kameibashi. Height, 36.2m. Width 15m. Walkway, 3.5m².

  ‘The name probably originates with the man who built the bridge in 1872. It was renovated in 1928. Below is a sketch of what the bridge looked like in 1957. It used to span the Tsukiji River. In 1964, the bridge turned into a highway.’

  On the eng
raving, a scattering of human figures are crossing the Turtle Well Bridge; frozen in the act of walking. A car from the late 1950s. Phantom trees and eddies in the river. And the three thick arches, with their coping stones and squat spandrels, of the demolished bridge itself.

  Beyond Kameibashi is an old house the film director Kurosawa Akira’s family have turned into a teppanyaki restaurant. Wooden panels, sliding screens; curving tiled roof and carved transom: flammable and fragile, it is surrounded by concrete boxes. The building is an orphan.

  St. Luke’s Hospital, with a delicate sky bridge linking its two towers.

  Mammy’s Paw Dog and Cafe: ‘Relaxation and the Hand of Magic’. Mammy’s Paw offered teeth cleaning (though ‘without anesthesia’) for pets. Yellow glass lined with chicken wire. In purple stenciling, a dog, a coffee cup, and twinkles without teeth.

  On one of the backstreets of Irifune, off Shin-Ōhashi dōri – New Great Bridge Street – was an old rice cracker shop. A Noh mask of a demon, an old red lacquer water bucket. The sembei were ready to be sold, wrapped in crisp white paper and tied with silver ribbon. Printed sheets detailing the season’s sumo matches were taped to the windows.

  A shop selling pianos. A shop selling ribbons. Bars: The Black Dog. Jack Lives Here. One diner had set a tray of glasses half-filled with ice near the door. Each tumbler had a glittering meniscus of melted ice at its base.

  Music seeped out into the street; luminous tanks were filled with tender whelks in their ancient battered shells.

  North, past Sintomi, Hatchōbori, Hakozakicho. And – briefly – I knew where I was; near the site of the shogun’s jail and Nakayama’s temple Dai-Anraku-ji. I kept walking northeast, and in a few minutes, nothing was familiar again.

  Darkness was falling. Suitengumae, Ningyōchō. Night deepened, and the windows of restaurants and bars became all the color that existed in the world. Vast scarlet paper lanterns that a grown man could almost stand up inside.

  The streetlamps picked out a house surrounded by stone troughs where fish small as eyelashes swam beneath brilliant green lotus leaves. Ancient yuzu trees growing in wooden buckets ringed the house, unripe fruit clustering their branches. Orchard and ocean.

  By Asakusabashi, the steel shutters had already come down.

  One Tokyo was going to sleep while the other was waking up. The two cities share the same space, but never meet.

  The year I moved back to England, Daibo invited me to his apartment for lunch. The rooms were as austere as the coffee shop: in Daibo’s study, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books. Six fedoras hung on one wall, arranged two by two.

  The apartment was on the building’s ground floor, and a green, almost marine light filled the rooms, flowing in from Daibo’s garden: ferns, hydrangeas, moss on the flagstones. The summer’s worst heat was still coming. It was May, the season of warm rains. Nothing had burned yet.

  Mrs. Daibo served Japanese powdered tea – matcha – in a bowl, one of the ivory-white ones that Daibo knew I liked. She whisked an espresso cup’s worth of hot water, and less than a thimble of tea, into a brilliant green froth that filled half the bowl.

  The tea was light and rich and bitter and after I drank it all, a little ring was left at the bottom. The bowl looked like a peony: white petals and green at the center.

  I wrote Daibo a poem, later, to thank him –

  緑の縁

  しゃくやくちゃわんを

  ふきけさない

  The circle of green

  From the peony bowl

  Will never be erased

  It was half a joke (‘Don’t wash the bowl because the tea stain is pretty’) and half a promise (‘I won’t forget you, ever’), because of the pun on the word 縁 (en), which means not just ‘circle’ but also ‘connection’, a tie that binds one person to another.

  I wrote the words, but I never thought that what I wrote would be true; that the circle would hold. What circle holds?

  横

  川

  本

  町

  ‘Yokokawa-Honjo’

  Of all Edo’s beauties, the river is paramount; its face changes from morning to evening.

  Blossoms on the Sumida

  Terakado Seiken

  Translated by Andrew Markus

  Yokokawa-Honjo: East of the River

  I stood in a police box near Kōtōbashi. No one seemed to have any idea where the easternmost Bell of Time was.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said a policeman behind the counter. He wore an official cap with a little pink flower embroidered on its brim, and carried a tiny nightstick and a holster with a walkie-talkie.

  ‘She has a photograph, so it must be here somewhere,’ another policeman said, flipping open a district atlas. His finger lingered on the neighborhoods north of Kameido. I tried to read the map upside down: the piano wires where the train rails passed through; the Yokojukken canal, whose waters run impossibly straight.

  ‘It was supposed to be on the banks of a river,’ I said. ‘In a place where three rivers ran together.’

  ‘Ages and ages ago, a river did run through here,’ the policeman murmured. ‘What was the river called?’

  ‘I don’t know. The story didn’t say. It was just, “the bell stood where three rivers met”.’

  The policeman’s fingers skidded off the paper, and he looked up. ‘The place you want doesn’t exist. Not on this map.’

  * * *

  The earth is without memory.

  ‘The city called “Tokyo” is always destroying itself,’ said Tsuchiya Kimio. ‘Destroying itself and rebuilding again. That’s what makes “Tokyo” different from a place like London.’

  We were in Yokoami, on the Sumida’s eastern bank, and though we couldn’t see it, the river flowed around us; in the pale sunlight blurred by the water, in the smell of wet concrete and stones, in the hidden gutters under our feet.

  Yokoami holds Tokyo’s sorrows. The city’s memorials for those who died in the 1923 earthquake, and in the 1945 firebombings, are both here.

  Tsuchiya and I looked at the narrow oblong lined with white granite stones. He had designed the Air Raid Monument.

  There was a shallow pool that kept everyone out, blocked any approach. For two days a year, the water is drained and a walkway stretches into the dark crescent beyond the door. Inside are printed volumes recording the names of people who died in the city’s firebombing. Their ages. Where they had lived.

  ‘The surface of Tokyo is so crowded with memorials that I wanted to put this one deeper into the earth, but I couldn’t do it,’ Tsuchiya said. ‘If you dig below the riverbed, water seeps into the walls.’

  Tsuchiya is a tall man, with a tenor voice and gold wire spectacles. When we first met, he was dressed like an English gentleman inspecting his estate: canary yellow waistcoat, white Oxford cloth shirt, jeans, battered but expensive brogues. He even had a neatly pressed handkerchief tucked into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But you could still see the strength of the welder he’d once been.

  ‘When we started, we took Polaroids of the construction site,’ Tsuchiya said, ‘– and I saw … faces.’

  ‘Faces?’ I looked up at Tsuchiya to see if he was joking, but he didn’t smile. His face was intent, serious.

  ‘… Of people who died, whose names we don’t know. They were waiting. For the memorial. They wanted people to remember that they had existed in the world.’

  A light rain began to fall; there was also the staccato of hammer blows. Incense drifted out of the Hall to Great Disasters, and then disappeared. In one breath, it was there, the next gone. Then the perfume was back again. It was November and wind pulled the gingko leaves from their branches, and their golden eddies filled the air.

  Tsuchiya and I crossed the empty pool and went inside.

  * * *

  In its thousand years of written history, the Sumida has been moved and merged, its channels drained and diverted from one riverbed to another. Its waters were diverted so of
ten – into canals, into gutters – that no one knows where the original channel once lay.

  The river has had many names. What it was called depended on where you were. It was the Asakusa River near Asakusa, and Sumidagawa near the village of Sumida. The shoguns called the river the Ara, and the Meiji emperor retained that name, although his was an era for rebranding almost everything else, including the city itself. People living near Tokyo Bay knew it simply as Ōkawa: Big River.

  The Sumida is not the river it was a thousand years ago, or when the first Tokugawa shogun turned the fishing village of Edo into a great city. It is not even what it was before World War Two, just as in English the same word – water – can describe a raindrop, or a lake, or an ocean. Every era has its own Sumida. The river’s looks match its time. Today the Sumida has concrete banks and the buildings along its banks turn away from the river, as if it weren’t even there.

  No one knows what the name Sumida means. One nineteenth-century gazetteer claimed that the word is older than the first Japanese settlements on the Kantō plain, that it is related to an indigenous Ainu word that means rough waters. Almost drown.

  Or: wash away.

  * * *

  The city east of the river has always been a realm unto itself. Here the shoguns’ city lived on longest and died last, in the 1923 earthquake.

  Under the Tokugawas, the east bank was ‘the equivalent of Greenwich Village or Montmartre … Restaurants, teahouses, gardens, and historical sites beguiled the wanderer for hours on end.’ In the spring people would leave Edo for blossom-viewing on the eastern embankment. Cherry trees and flowering peaches and willows lined this stretch, which stood twelve feet above the river’s marshes. When the trees were in bloom, the crowds were ‘as dense as threads in cloth’, according to the satirical poet Terakado Seiken.