The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.

  * * *

  Kaji and I were standing under Hachimangu’s copper torii gate, the metal streaked and weathered to green, looking toward the Ministry of Defense. The torii was inscribed with the names of people who had given money to rebuild the shrine in 1804; the copper has survived every fire, every earthquake. During the 1945 fires, it would have glowed white-hot.

  ‘Mishima Yukio,’ I said. ‘Was he here before he died…?’

  ‘The Ministry of Defense is just next door: lots of soldiers visit us,’ Kaji said. ‘Mishima came here too. I still remember all those helicopters making a great racket overhead the day he killed himself.’

  ‘Did you understand what had happened?’ I asked. ‘You must have been very young then.’

  ‘My parents explained…’ Kaji looked down at me, smiling faintly. ‘… That Mishima had slit his belly open.’

  Silent, we both looked off toward the screen of cherry trees and the backdrop of buildings that hid the place where Mishima had died.

  ‘He was a beautiful writer,’ I said at last.

  ‘He was.’

  * * *

  In his novel Runaway Horses, Mishima writes about a young extremist who is planning a coup in the 1930s. ‘He himself had become a character in a romance. Perhaps he and his comrades were on the verge of a glory that would long be remembered.’ The man prays but has no revelation as to what he should do; the gods will not speak to him, and provide no indication of the date or time he should choose. It is as if ‘the gods have abandoned the decision’. The would-be assassin decides to act anyway.

  Mishima planned his own coup in a Roppongi sauna bath house called the Misty. He acted with four young students who belonged to the Shield Society, the group that he had formed on the pretext of guarding the emperor from left-wing radicals.

  The Misty was an odd setting for Mishima’s plans to restore ‘purity’ to the Japanese state: somewhat louche, based in what then and now was a district of nightclubs and hostess bars. But it was at the Misty that Mishima asked his co-conspirators, on his signal, to swear that they would cut off his head. And it was here that he drafted the Manifesto that he distributed to the Ichigaya soldiers and the press the day he died: ‘We will restore Japan to her true form, and in the restoration, die. Will you abide in a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only a reverence for life? In a few minutes we will show you where to find a greater value. It is not liberalism or democracy … Are none of you willing to die by hurling yourselves against the constitution that has torn the bones and heart from that which we love?’

  At the bath house, Mishima and his students precisely choreographed their movements for 25 November 1970:

  10.50 Arrive at the Eastern Army Headquarters.

  11.20 The base commandant gagged and bound.

  11.35 Soldiers told to assemble below commandant’s office.

  12.00 Address Self-Defense Forces.

  If the Self-Defense soldiers agreed to join him – though he privately told his Shield Society acolytes that he didn’t expect any to – Mishima planned to march on Japan’s Houses of Parliament at 12.30. But no one could hear what he was saying, or if they heard, no one agreed with his vision, and at 12.07 Mishima abandoned his speech.

  By 12.20, he was dead.

  Mishima didn’t need fortune-tellers. For some men, nothing is written. Mishima wrote his own story, and he wrote it in blood.

  新

  宿

  ‘Shinjuku’

  Shinjuku sits at the intersection of perception and reality. What you have been experiencing for the last twenty-four hours is not supernatural, nor hallucination. It is the intersection of parallel dimensions. Perception is all that separates these parallel worlds.

  Christopher ‘Mink’ Morrison

  Daibo and I got out of our taxi on Yasukuni dori, near the Isetan Department Store.

  In a shop selling artists’ paints on the second floor a crowd of white plaster casts – heads, torsos – floated over the crossing.

  I was telling him about my pilgrimage between bells.

  ‘“Stars and frosts”! “Light and shade!”’ Daibo cried, jubilant, reeling off different words for time. ‘Beautiful! Of course, your grammar isn’t perfect, and you don’t know as many words as you could. Those things matter less, though, than you thinking about, really thinking about, such words.’

  Daibo was laughing, and pointing his heavy umbrella at the sky, the pavement, the stoplights.

  ‘Stars and frosts!’ he shouted. ‘Light and shade!’

  It was as though he were summoning Shinjuku itself into being: its neon banners, its streets, the taxis that moved past like comets burning up in the atmosphere, the crowds of drinkers and wanderers.

  Time! Time! Time!

  The Clock of the Future

  Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicts that time slows down near anything heavy.

  On earth, clocks run more slowly at sea-level, which is nearer the earth’s massive core, than on mountaintops. Clocks on satellites run faster still.

  In 1922, the publisher Kaizōsha invited Einstein to lecture in Japan. When the liner carrying him docked in Kobe, an Einstein frenzy seized the entire country. The German ambassador wrote Berlin: ‘When Einstein arrived in Tokyo, such multitudes thronged the station that the police could only look on with folded arms at the waves of humanity which made one fear for one’s life. The whole Japanese populace, from the highest dignitaries down to the rickshaw coolies, participated spontaneously and without any preparations or compulsion…’

  Einstein’s car couldn’t leave Tokyo Station; it was mobbed.

  There were fierce arguments in the government Cabinet Council over whether the Japanese public would understand Einstein’s lectures on relativity:

  Mr. Kamada, Minister of Education, rather rashly said, of course they would. Dr. Okano, Minister of Justice, contradicted Mr. Kamada, saying they would never understand. Mr. Arai, Minister of Commerce, was rather sorry for Mr. Kamada, so he said they would perhaps understand – vaguely. The Minister of Justice insisted that there could be no midway between understanding and not understanding. If they understood, they understood clearly. If they did not understand, they did not understand at all. He had ordered a book on the theory of relativity when it was first introduced into Japan, and tried. On the first page, he found higher mathematics, and he had to shut the book.

  Whether most Japanese understood his theories or not, Einstein was received with adulation. An epic poem was composed to celebrate his equations. Academics wanted to call him Father. And confusion over how to pronounce the word for ‘relativity’ (sōtai-sei) meant that it was mixed up with a word for ‘sex’ (aitai-sei). In the pleasure quarters that year, many versions of the song ‘Einstein Aitai-sei Bushi’ were played over and over again: they were all love songs. ‘Working out the Aitai-sei theory’ meant being in love.

  The rapturous reception embarrassed Einstein himself: ‘No living person deserves this.’ When he left the country six weeks later, there were tears in his eyes.

  * * *

  At Tokyo University, Katori Hidetoshi builds clocks that demonstrate Einstein’s idea that space–time warps near massive objects. The atomic lattice clock: an instrument accurate to within a second of the birth of the universe.

  Katori’s clocks are housed like animals in cages; like the menagerie in a mechanical zoo. In his labs, each zone has its own taste; its own music, the bass thrum of its cooling systems. In a single clock, trellised black jumper-wires vaulted between breadboards, a small colony of blue lasers, an oven where the atoms are trapped. Inside the porthole window, which was the size of a human heart, a violet blue haze: strontium atoms, fluorescing.

  The day I met Katori, he was wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a cream knitted waistcoat over a pin-striped shirt, jeans, and trendy New Balance trainers. I noticed the trainers as I bowe
d. I studied them for some time.

  Inside Katori’s office a print of Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory hung opposite the door: pocket watches drooping – one over a withered branch, another over a block of stone, and a third over skin-covered bone. A fourth watch faces downward, spattered with jet-black ants. Katori gestured toward a round table, where we sat. His secretary poured tea from a Royal Albert porcelain service.

  I had brought a diagram of a cesium fountain clock (also known as ‘the single ion clock’), the instrument that is still used for setting the international definition of time: the ‘second’ is currently defined as the time it takes for a cesium atom to move between two energy levels.* But cesium fountain clocks rely on a technology that dates back to the 1950s. Even the best fountain clocks are slower, and far less accurate, than the optical lattice clocks Katori is building.

  Katori frowned at my diagram.

  ‘In the abstract, the single ion clock is excellent, but in reality it takes ten days to tell the time.’ Katori paused, delicately, raising his eyebrows. ‘That’s not so impressive. But when we can measure relativistic time within a minute, then we can feel time as it is actually happening, not ten days later. With optical lattice clocks, I get millions of atoms ready, and I measure them in a single second.’

  ‘Are you nostalgic?’

  Katori seemed to feel that question made no sense; I had to repeat it several times. ‘But I want to surpass old technologies! I’ve never wanted to chase somebody else’s ideas.’

  Katori twisted around to look at The Persistence of Memory. ‘We’re on the brink of realizing Dalí’s vision.’

  I glanced up at The Persistence of Memory: the eroded escarpments, the barren plain, the ants swarming over a watch’s case. The watch’s face, if the watch even had a face, was invisible.

  ‘The way those clocks droop is sinister. They don’t scare you?’

  Katori laughed. ‘No! I want people to have a new way of seeing reality. Right now nobody cares about relativity: only scientists understand how gravity can change time and space. My dream is to change that, to make everyone understand Einstein’s concept of time.’

  ‘How would you do that?’

  ‘If you put two of my clocks, far apart from each other, and something heavy moves, the two clocks could detect it—’

  ‘Because the clock nearer the heavy thing would run slower—’

  ‘Yes! Or think about the magma chamber under Mount Fuji: if lava moved, my clock could see what was happening. It’s like how radar works, but in this case, we are observing disturbances, the distortions, of space–time.’

  I glanced back at Dalí’s print.

  ‘So in the future, one of the two clocks would be able to tell time before things happen; but yet, that clock would still be a clock, just … not a clock … of the present moment…’

  Katori smiled. ‘Today’s clocks show us how we share time. But my clocks will show that we don’t share time: my clocks show that every person’s space–time is different.’

  ‘Your clock doesn’t sound like a clock anymore!’

  Katori grinned. ‘I want to put my clocks in gas stations, and in antennae for mobile phones…’

  An invisible web stretching like ganglia all over Japan, over Asia, the world. The clock would become one vast organism, something almost alive.

  Shinjuku: Tokyo Tomorrow

  In Shinjuku, the viewer and the view are one. What you see is what you are.

  Shining in Shinjuku’s eye, the port city of Yokohama in the distance, the mica glitter of Tokyo Bay, mountains to the northeast and Fuji to the west, and the great three-dimensional circuit board of Tokyo itself, with its white legend of avenues and alleys.

  Shinjuku is a fragmented mirror. What it reflects, looks back outward.

  Shinjuku is a monster, a chimera, a storm of light.

  The woodblock artist Honma Kunio once said that at Shinjuku’s crossroads, and in the nearby red-light districts, Color is a different shade than at the center of Tokyo. Shadows are paler here.

  Shinjuku was originally famous as a collection point for nightsoil and horse manure, which was shipped out to the farms around Edo. When Hiroshige painted the district in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 1857, he chose to foreground a pack horse’s backside and its dung. The animal and its droppings dwarf the graceful line of background shops. The stink of excrement almost rises off Hiroshige’s print. But by the early 1900s, a thriving rail station had made the area rich. After the 1923 earthquake, Shinjuku became avant-garde, even fashionable.

  Shinjuku is vertigo, and always has been. In the 1930s, Hayashi Fumiko described the view from the famous Nakamuraya curry house, where over lukewarm tea and mediocre pastries, the intelligentsia gathered to write and to argue with each other about socialism:

  The bookshop opposite used to be a black shop selling coal. It was once completely dark. The coal shop was one sort of space, but today that space has become white, and divided itself into two. You can’t believe your eyes at the transformation: black to white, small to big.

  Tokyo is always and everywhere destroying itself, and then creating new landscapes out of the empty lots and ruins, but in Shinjuku that process is extreme.

  Shinjuku is a hot-air balloon, floating upward, Hayashi wrote. A clock shop, a jeweler’s, a bakery, a launderette, a bank: each shop had its own background music. In front of Shinjuku Station, a store narrow as an eel’s nest, selling records: a clerk, his head ringing from the cacophony of sounds. Whenever I want to calm myself down, the clerk told Hayashi, I go up to the roof of Mitsukoshi Department Store. I look out at the open spaces in the far distance.

  * * *

  I was lost in a train station so vast that I began to think that the station had only entrances, but no exits. A space that by the laws of geometry shouldn’t exist, but somehow does.

  The British artist Raymond Lucas has created a schematic diagram of Shinjuku Station, mapping the stages of disorientation: Locate exit sign. Move in the direction indicated. Find an open space. Move in the direction indicated – move in the direction indicated. Move away from the crowd. Does this exit lead out? Have you tried other options? Does this exit lead out?

  After almost an hour of going the wrong way though I was always in sight of the station, I found a walkway that led over the tracks of the Chūō Line, and the Times Square shopping complex, toward Shinjuku Park. I took one of the open-air escalators down to Meiji dōri, with its parking lots and tanning salons and Chinese medicine shops. Past the Antik Nook, a subterranean bar whose cold air seeped out into the humid street. The stairwell was plastered with flyers for indie bands: Gold Joke. Snatcher. Hot Apple Pie. Loyal to the Grave.

  Tenryū-ji lies near the Antik Nook, standing on a narrow triangle of land wedged between Meiji dōri and the old Kōshū-kaidō Road, which led northwest out of Edo.

  The temple had only one entrance. It is wealthy, wealthier than any I had seen in Tokyo and maybe even in Kyoto. A Jaguar was parked just outside the main hall and hand-crafted bamboo mud guards arced between the walls and the street. The Tokugawa family crest blazed on its heavy wooden gate, the three paulownia leaves thickly painted in gold.

  * * *

  The temple priest’s wife was standing in the thin strip of garden between the graves and the walk under the eaves of the main hall. Some tourists had wandered into the precincts, and she was showing them a musical stone resting in a shallow well. She took a bamboo dipper and let water fall in a thin stream onto the rock. Its sound came low and faint, like notes plucked on the strings of a koto. The priest’s wife passed the dipper to the tourists and then turned to me.

  ‘Yes, that’s the Bell of Time,’ she said, nodding to the bell hanging by itself among the graves. ‘Our bell was different from the other bells, because it rang half an hour before the other ones did. That way the samurai who came to Naitō Shinjuku to play around in the pleasure quarters could get back to Edo Castle before the curfew sounded. It
was called Oidashi O-Kane: the Get Back Home Bell.’

  ‘Is it the original bell?’ When the priest’s wife nodded, I asked, ‘Did you have to hide it during the war?’

  ‘Yes, we have the original!’ she said, indignant. ‘And no, we didn’t hide it! Of course lots of metal things were requisitioned during the war. But not our bell: it was too famous, too fine. No one dared touch it.’

  * * *

  Shinjuku is like a scroll painting of some Chinese mountain: the stony peaks visible, and the earth and sea, but the air between erased, hidden behind clouds.

  From the atrium of the Park Hyatt Hotel, I watched twilight settle over the city, and the lights opening their eyes. On the peaks of Shinjuku’s skyscrapers, the red glow of aircraft-warning beacons blinked on and off, on and off: systole and diastole.

  A thousand feet below is the little district called Golden Gai, a grid of streets filled with concrete cubbyhole bars that look like ancient barracks. The Blue Dragon, Orange, Pickles, WHO, Golden Dust. Lonely.

  Ceramic dwarves perch over entrance signs alongside Buddhas, polished pebbles, porcelain bodhisattvas, collections of miniature cacti and money-beckoning cats made of plastic gold. The canvas screens that once shielded doorways from rain and sun have burned or rotted, or been torn off, and the folding metal arms that held the awnings have rusted. Weeds and wild ferns grow in the balconies.

  Beside each door stood crates crammed with last night’s empty wine and beer and sake bottles.

  * * *

  Shinjuku the city of reflections, of ladders on water tanks and antennae on top of buildings, blanked-out windows, rusting fire escapes. The tangle of wires, graveyards crowded onto narrow terraces, zebra crossings, the huge columns of a post-Bubble atrium. Filmy curtains and what’s beyond them, a lighter someone dropped in the street. Mirrors and clocks in love hotels and the time they tell, the translucent sheeting over building sites, the streetlamps, the slopes, the signs I can read and the ones I can’t. Entrances to underground parking lots and station exits. The chain-link fences and crazy paving outside bars, the vacant lots, the circle and slit of DO NOT ENTER signs and TV screens. The city of shadows.