The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  ‘Maybe we make it up in our heads,’ I said. ‘Maybe time isn’t real. Maybe there’s no such thing: Jikan ga nai.’

  ‘Thinking that way is what it means to conquer time. Hitori … Hitori … Hitori…’

  Japanese has different words for numbers. What the word is, depends on a thing’s shape: counting little objects like toy marbles, or dice, is different from counting machines, which is different from candles or plates. There are distinct number words for books, for birds, for bells. Daibo was using hitori, which means one human being.

  ‘If each of us has our own timeframe, it’s the same as time not existing. We would be so much happier if we did things by our own clock. Being forced to conform to what works for somebody else, well, that makes you crazy.’ Daibo smiled, faintly. ‘But when I think, “One instant is the same as eternity…” – When I think that, I feel alive.’

  市

  谷

  ‘Ichigaya’

  The Jetavana Temple bells

  ring the passing of all things.

  Twinned sal trees, white in full flower,

  declare the great man’s certain fall.

  The arrogant do not long endure:

  They are like a dream one night in spring.

  The bold and brave perish in the end:

  They are as dust before the wind.

  The Tale of the Heike

  Translated by Royall Tyler

  Ichigaya: Postwar Prosperity

  A city always keeps part of itself back.

  If Tokyo had been a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight – the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata – and I were strangers.

  These are the city’s northern wards, in what was the old High City. The gardens of Rikugi-en and Koishikawa. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and ‘soaplands’ – red-light districts – and apartment blocks for salarymen.

  I went once to Ōji, for the annual kite festival. If the Imperial Palace stands at the centre of Tokyo’s dial face, then at 12:00, almost due north, lie Ōji and its shrine to Inari the fox god, patron of rice and sake.

  The shrine was crammed with stalls selling paper kites, thick painted papers stretched over bamboo frames. Kites shaped like Japanese chess pieces. Kites painted with the faces of legendary warlords. Magical kites that could stop fires from starting. Some smaller than my hand, others wide as a hang glider. Each kite was luminous, colored with vivid, unearthly blues, vermilions, golds, imperial blacks.

  The crowds were so thick around the shrine that in some places passing was impossible, and I found myself jammed against a stall where an old monk was selling not kites but Buddhist prayer beads. The table shook.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said.

  The monk laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  A cone of incense was burning in a little tray arranged on the monk’s table, with a domed pilgrim’s hat made of woven rice straw slung alongside it. Six cups were lined up with rings scattered around them. Jade and agate prayer bracelets circled a small wooden Benzaiten.

  ‘Your hand,’ the monk said. ‘May I see it…’

  I was carrying a camera bag. I shifted it from my left to my right hand and held out the left one, but the monk shook his head.

  ‘Give me both hands,’ the monk said, so I put the bag down and stretched my left and right hands out toward him. He came around the table and stood beside me.

  I’d seen fortune-tellers before – women sitting at velvet-draped folding tables on Aoyama dōri in the early evenings. The fortune-tellers came out in the summer, and always looked like office ladies, or somebody’s mother, even the one who had a hollow where her right eye should have been. Not one looked like she could read the air for things that had already happened, or that hadn’t happened yet.

  The monk ran his fingers above my skin without touching it, glancing over the creases of my palms, my fingers, at the seam where the heel of my hand met the wrist. He might have been reading a newspaper. His look suddenly sharpened. He looked up at my face, then back down again.

  ‘… Interesting!’ he cried. ‘So interesting! Here! See –?’

  He said mother. He said father. He might have said strength. I had no idea what he was saying. I had never felt so locked out of the language, not since I first arrived in Tokyo and knew not a single word. The monk saw that I had not understood him; that I had not wanted to understand him. He was amused: not just that I was ignorant, but that I chose to be.

  I wondered if he could see deaths. I didn’t want to understand the words not because I thought the monk would lie, but because he might have told the truth. And because, whether he invented my life’s history, or whether, like a child reading a manga storyboard, he could really see everything I was and all the things I had ever done and ever would do, I couldn’t tell the difference between what might be real, and what was a lie.

  I pulled my hands away. The old monk went back to his table, still laughing.

  * * *

  A natural amphitheater. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward.

  In Ichigaya, I had passed concrete office block after drab office block – Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building – when suddenly the landscape cracked open. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss.

  A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema.

  What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again.

  I crossed the wide stretch of Yasukuni dōri and found a district map engraved on a metal signboard. The atlas’s empty space was Japan’s Defense Ministry.

  On 25 November 1970, the writer Mishima Yukio took a four-star general hostage here. Mishima then stepped out of the general’s window onto a parapet to address the base’s soldiers, thirty feet below. He threatened to kill the general unless the soldiers were assembled to hear him speak.

  Mishima called on the men to rise up and overthrow the constitution that the Americans had put in place after 1945, the peace constitution that ‘renounced war forever’ and made the emperor a symbolic ruler, a ruler without any real powers.

  Mishima was heckled and jeered, with the soldiers shouting at him to quit acting like an idiot, to shut up, to get down from his impromptu stage. Three helicopters clattered away in dizzy arcs overhead; between the rotors and the yelling, the audience could hear almost nothing Mishima said: he had miscalculated the acoustics of his stage.

  Mishima began, ‘Japanese people today think only of money! And politicians don’t care about Japan: they’re just greedy for power!’ He had planned to speak for half an hour, but gave up after just seven minutes (‘True men and samurai … Will no one join me?… Rise and die! Rise and die!…’). Finally, he climbed back inside the window of the general’s office. Then he knelt, drawing a short sword, and stabbed himself in the gut, slashing downward and to the left. The general, still gagged and bound to a chair, watched in horror. One of Mishima’s acolytes cut off Mishima’s head, and then was himself beheaded by another conspirator. It was a medieval death in the late twentieth century.

  I looked at the silent ring of buildings curving around the Defense Ministry’s gatehouse. The avenue was quiet as if it were late night, not almost noon. Standing on Yasukuni dori, I knew: it was not Mishima the would-be warrior, but Mishima the artist, the actor and director, who wanted to die in Ichigaya. He imagined a death broadcast live after he had addressed crowds scattered across the concrete fan below.

  There was space for thousands of listeners.

  * * *

  The 1930s building where Mishima addressed soldiers of the Self-Defense Force still exists; its broad parapet and wings are titanium-white, and overshadowed by the ministry’s newer reinforced-concrete blocks and a telecom turret studded with satellite dishes.

  James K
irkup described Ichigaya in the mid-1960s as a district of ‘willow-hung streets of neat shuttered houses, small hotels, and gardens round the little fox shrine.’ There was a coffee shop dedicated to the French writer Jean Cocteau; musical instrument repair shops for shamisen and shops selling go boards. Grilled chicken restaurants and blowfish restaurants and ‘girlie bars’ with names like Pleasure and Chanel. Akebonobashi, the Bridge of Dawn, which spanned a river that now flows beneath concrete. On one bank stood the Hon-jin, a love hotel rigged up like an ancient Japanese castle. Its tiered eaves were ‘strung with electric lights and its horned roofs outlined in delicate white and green neon.’

  On the bridge’s other bank were the Ichigaya Barracks, which during World War Two housed the Imperial War Ministry. After Japan surrendered, the victorious Allied powers used the site to convene the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. A military court, the Tribunal prosecuted individual military and civilian leaders on counts of crimes against peace; murder; and crimes against humanity.

  The trials were conceived primarily as history lessons for the Japanese public, an arena for disclosing facts about the war. The prosecution stated: ‘This is no ordinary trial; for here we are waging a part of the determined battle of civilization to preserve the entire world from destruction.’ The underlying symbolism of the trial’s staging in the old War Ministry was blunt: Japan’s old order was finished. Defeat was real.

  The poet James Kirkup, who lived in Ichigaya during the 1960s, claimed that the trials still haunted the district. Over this part of Tokyo hangs a dismal aura of perpetual execution. The court sat from 1946 until 1948, while Mishima was a law student at Tokyo University. He would have followed the judgment and sentencing of prime ministers and generals, admirals and diplomats.

  It was victory as spectacle, victory as theater. As a stage, Ichigaya was unrivalled.

  What was wanting, Mishima might have thought, were different actors. And another script.

  * * *

  There are various theories about why Mishima chose that particular death, from the purely political (it was a right-wing protest against the post-1945 constitution) to the aesthetic (he wanted to die at the height of his physical and intellectual powers, before any decline set in), or the psychological (one of the co-conspirators was his lover, and it was a double suicide). Mishima burnt his diaries, and after his suicide people who had thought themselves closest to him realized they had only known what he allowed them to see. Mishima was a man of parts that added up to more than one whole.

  The decade before Mishima killed himself was an era of ferment. In 1960, Tokyo was rocked by massive demonstrations against Japan’s security treaty with the United States. In May and June of that year, the capital’s streets were crowded with protesters every single day. In 1968 and 1969, university students took over their campuses, sometimes taking their professors hostage. The disputes were, in essence, over Japan’s post-1945 values and the intellectuals who defined those values: what was the ‘peace’ constitution worth if the country’s prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, was a rehabilitated Class A war criminal? And did Japan have no future beyond blind economic progress on the American model?

  Mishima’s contemporary and sometime adversary Terayama Shūji responded to Japan’s cultural crisis of the 1960s by arguing that only art could transform the world. The only real revolution, he said, was in the imagination. Mishima disagreed with this view profoundly. To back up his ideas, he formed a private militia – which he called the Shield Society – made up of university students who shared his right-wing values and his vision of a prelapsarian Japan. At the end of his life, Mishima claimed that writing had little value for him: he wanted to leave the world of words for a world of action. Mishima left instructions that he should be buried in his Shield Society uniform ‘with white gloves and a soldier’s sword in my hand. Then do me the favor of taking a photograph. I want evidence that I died not as a literary man but as a warrior.’

  The suicide embarrassed the Japanese political establishment, especially the right-wingers. It came just as the country was being recognized as a modern industrial power that could compete with the West on its own terms.

  Nor did Mishima’s death please the artistic establishment. The screenwriter Oshima Nagisa complained that his suicide ‘failed to satisfy our Japanese aesthetic’ because it was ‘too elaborate’. The writer and film director Terayama Shūji’s only comment was, ‘He should have killed himself at cherry blossom time.’

  Not everyone got the joke.

  * * *

  A year before he died in Ichigaya, Mishima began saying goodbye to his friends, though no one understood what he was doing until after the spectacular public suicide.

  The writer and film critic Donald Richie remembered his last meeting with Mishima, at the Tokyo Hilton a few months before the latter’s death. Mishima, Richie wrote, talked about ‘purity’ (a subject which bored Richie), and then mostly about how much he admired the nineteenth-century general Saigō Takamori. Saigō had wanted to re-establish Japan’s ancient virtues by deposing the shogunate and restoring power to the emperor; he killed himself after coming to believe that the revolution he led had failed, because the new Japan was full of rationalizing, pragmatic, conciliatory ways.

  Saigō’s suicide was, Mishima told Richie, ‘beautiful’: a single superb gesture in response to a country that was drunk on its post-war prosperity. The country was rich, yes, but had fallen into spiritual emptiness. Mishima told Richie that Japan in the late nineteenth century and Japan after 1945 were the same:

  — Japan, Mishima said, has gone, vanished, disappeared.

  — But, surely the real Japan must still be around, if you look for it?

  Mishima shook his head sternly.

  — Is there no way to save it, then? I asked, probably smiling.

  Mishima looked past me into the mirror: No, there is nothing more to save.

  * * *

  East of the Ministry of Defense, the waters of the palace moat flowed silent and unseen, muffled by the great cherry trees that overhang the canal banks. The buildings around Ichigaya were anonymous, interchangeable: built to be wrecked, built to be ephemeral.

  Hachimangū, shrine to the Shinto god of war, rose abruptly from the flat spaces around it. The hill was so steep that it might have been a perfect cone. In Japanese medieval towns, temples often stood as defensive lines around castles: Hachimangū guarded the western approach to Edo. Looking down from the highest stair, the stone lanterns on the first step below appeared close and distant at the same time, separated only by a vertiginous drop. One leap and the distance would close very fast.

  Under the Tokugawa shoguns, Ichigaya was crowded with tea shops and food stalls, a sumo ring, and Kabuki stages. During the great festivals at Hachimangū, there would have been fire-eaters, dragon dancers. Performing monkeys, acrobats, conjurors.

  * * *

  In the office at the top of the stone stairs I met Kaji Kenji, a priest of the Hachimangū shrine. He looked like an extra from an old black-and-white film about wandering samurai.

  ‘Yes, there was once a bell here,’ Kaji said. ‘Its tower was right where we are standing now. But during the early years of Meiji, an edict separating Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples came into force and we gave up the bell then. I have no idea where it is now.’

  Kaji showed me around the grounds of the shrine. A stone celebrating the accession of the Taishō emperor in 1912. A stone memorial for the great sword-makers of Edo, men whose blades were so sharp that they could cut leaves falling through the air.

  ‘So what was around Ichigaya, back when your bell tolled the hours?’

  Kaji glanced over my notes, reading them upside down. I had scribbled, Red Light District. Brothels.

  He laughed. ‘Not much. This area was like the places you find in Ikebukuro now. Or Shibuya. There were many soaplands, it’s true…’

  ‘I read that the shrine had a sign that said, When you enter the pre
cinct, all your ills will be taken away.’

  Kaji shrugged. ‘We probably lost that during early Meiji.’

  When the last Tokugawa shogun left Edo, and imperial forces took over the city, Hachimangū suffered more than almost any place except for Ueno. The shrine’s Noh stage was ripped apart, its new belltower torn down; the Buddhist temple beside Hachiman’s shrine was razed. The new imperial authorities made it clear that Tokugawa time was finished: temples were forbidden to sound the hours. There would be the noonday cannon, fired from the palace, instead. And by 1862, for only five ryō, anyone could have his own pocket watch. No one needed the melancholy notes of temple bells, lyrical but imprecise, like the world that had just passed away.

  The raucous spectacle around Ichigaya disappeared almost overnight. The area was replanted with trees.

  * * *

  Time fascinated Mishima.

  The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

  Time was like a whirlpool.

  Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

  The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

  Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.