The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  The earthquake’s dead are not numbers, will never be numbers.

  Miyajima looked at his watch and said goodbye. Then he left, still smiling.

  After he had gone, I sat alone, sipping my own muddy tea, which was cold. I was surprised that the andon floor lamps were on. They radiated in ordered rows throughout the vast Rendez-Vous bar. I called the waiter and asked when the bar switched the lights on. ‘At three o’clock? Or was it four…?’

  The waiter looked at me as if I had asked a question of sinister simplicity: What country are we in? What year is it?

  ‘From eleven in the morning, when we open.’

  The lights had been burning from the moment I came into the Imperial, and I hadn’t noticed.

  Edo was imagined as a place that could not be entered, or might not be left.

  Katō Takashi

  The rooms where I had lived were empty. Not even a coat hanger was left. There were marks on the walls – great gashes where a bookcase had sheared away to the floor during the 2011 earthquake – but except for that scar, nothing remained.

  Outside my windows stood what was left of an old greenwood: maples and gingko trees. There was the appearance of stillness, indolence, an unbreakable pause. But the leaves are opening out, growing, and even the stones are disintegrating, slowly.

  Nothing ever rests.

  Light and Shade.

  Time.

  Notes

  The Bells of Time

  Across Japan, the tunes vary, but Tokyo stations usually play the song ‘Yūyake Koyake’ I have adapted this translation from Hector Garcia’s ‘A Geek in Japan’ blog (‘Yuyake Koyake’, 9 May 2007).

  the Bell from Zōjō-ji For temple bells and their origins, see Eta Harich-Schneider’s A History of Japanese Music (Oxford University Press, 1973): ‘Temple bells were imported from China and Korea. They are large bronze bells, masterfully cast and adorned with decorative reliefs, frequent motifs being musical instruments and music-making Bodhisattvas. These bells, called tsurigane (hanging metal), are suspended in a separate wooden building, called shōrō, to the side of the temple. The note is produced by pushing the bell from the outside with a wooden pole. The oldest of these bells, and also the most perfect in form, is in the Kwanzeonji, Kyūshū, and dates from 698. The material of the wooden striker is shuro-no-ki. The tone is extraordinarily pure and rich, with an incredible range of harmonics, and with the fundamental note clearly discernible…’ (pages 67–8 and plate 8b).

  He could build an entire universe Yoshimura Hiroshi, Ō-Edo toki no kane aruki (Shūnjusha, 2002). The passages quoted come from the Introduction, pages 4–5. For ‘kinpo shohatsu’, the lotuses’ first opening, pages 6–7. For the preservation of Edo’s ‘soundscape’, page 11.

  A circle has an infinite number of beginnings See Judith Ryan’s essay ‘“Lines of Flight”: History and Territory in The Rings of Saturn’, in W. G. Sebald: Schreiben ex patria/Expatriate Writing (Gerhard Fischer, editor, Rodopi, 2009), pages 45–60; in particular its reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1986): ‘We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems like an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon. We will be trying to discover only what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enters by another point.’ The journey becomes what W. G. Sebald called an ‘extensive, disorderly, fragmented web’ (‘“Lines of Flight”,’ p. 56).

  Daibo Katsuji was famous See Daibo’s Coffee Manual, translated by Eguchi Ken and Kei Benger (Nahoko Press, 2015). This thin little book is less a how-to than what the Japanese call a zuihitsu: an essay on Daibo’s philosophy of coffee.

  For a history of Japan’s urban coffee culture, see Merry White, Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) and Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Eckhart Derschmidt, ‘The Disappearance of the Jazz-Kissa: Some Considerations about Jazz Cafes and Jazz Listeners’. Derschmidt writes that in mid-1960s Tokyo:

  Jazu-kissa [jazz cafes] began more and more to resemble temples, as the jazz following began to resemble [Neil] Leonard’s notion of ‘cult,’ by which he means ‘a loose group almost without organization not so much a brotherhood as a transient, fluctuating collection of individuals drawn together by ecstatic experience…’ The darkness, the tremendous volume of the music, the motionlessly listening guests, and the frequently strict and authoritarian master, who not only placed the records on the turntable but also checked that his shop rules were being obeyed, all added to the impression that one entered a very special, almost religious room, a completely different world.’ (The Culture of Japan as Seen Through its Leisure, Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück, editors, State University of New York Press, 1998, page 308.)

  Hibiya

  Hibiya contains relics of all Tokyo’s eras Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923 (Allen Lane, 1983), page 123.

  setsuna See Bjarke Frellesvig’s A History of the Japanese Language (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Section 4.2.3, pages 148–9. See also William LaFleur’s essay, ‘Shunzei’s Use of Tendai Buddhism’: ‘The act of observation comes to an end at the same moment that it begins – in the unit of time the Buddhists called ks.ana (setsuna); thus, the observer is no more permanent than what he or she observes’ (The Karma of Words, University of California Press, 1983, pages 42–3).

  Japanese time is told in animals, in the Zodiac The Zodiac sequence runs: Rat (11 p.m.), Ox (1 a.m.), Tiger (3 a.m.), Rabbit (5 a.m.), Dragon (7 a.m.), Snake (9 a.m.), Horse (11 a.m.), Sheep (1 p.m.), Monkey (3 p.m.), Rooster (5 p.m.), Dog (7 p.m.) and Boar (9 p.m.).

  See Yulia Frumer’s ‘Translating Time: Habits of Western-Style Timekeeping in Late Edo Japan’, for commentary on this so-called ‘Zodiac’: ‘Twelve animal signs designated the hours – with midnight associated with Rat and noon with Horse – as did numbers, to allow bell strikes to mark the hour.’ A pre-modern Japanese hour was a double hour, so there was no direct equivalent with our ‘midnight’ – that spanned 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. Noon was the moment the sun was at its zenith: the one incontestable moment (except on cloudy days).

  Frumer adds that ‘although the twelve animal signs are often mistakenly referred to as “signs of the [Chinese] zodiac,” they have no relation to constellations on the zodiac belt.’ During the Edo period, ‘The day in Japan was divided into two parts: daylight and darkness, defined by dawn and dusk. (As both dawn and dusk are naturally continuous processes rather than clearly distinguishable moments, astronomers made the decisions as to which moment to consider to be a turning point. Criteria changed throughout the period and varied by region.)

  ‘Each of the periods lasted six “hours”, but since the relative length of light and darkness changed throughout the year, the relative length of these “hours” changed too.’ (Technology and Culture, volume 55, #4 (October 2014), pages 789–90.)

  See also J. Drummond Robertson: ‘It has been suggested that, as certain hours were lucky whilst others were unlucky, a glance at the clock would at once show whether the time for an action was propitious or not.’ (The Evolution of Clockwork: With a Special Section on the Clocks of Japan, Cassell, 1931, page 199.)

  Philipp Franz von Siebold wrote that dawn and twilight were defined as ‘that moment when one begins or ceases to be able to recognize a printed character held in the hand, or when in the morning the stars disappear; and when in the evening they appear once more’ (Nippon (Leyden, 1852), vol. iv, part iii, page 117). Quoted in Robertson, The Evolution of Clockwork, page 276.

  In Tokugawa Japan, the animal signs also indicated directions on maps. ‘[T]here was also a spatial association between hour-digits a
nd directions … In ancient Chinese cosmology, the animal signs were identified not only with months and hours … but also with directions. Thus, the sign of the Horse, associated with the summer solstice and with the noon hour, was also associated with south … the Rat represented winter solstice, midnight, and north.’ (Yulia Frumer, Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan, University of Chicago Press, 2018, page 42.)

  For the origins of this framework, see ‘The Concept and Marking of Time’, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, volume 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (William Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom, editors, Columbia University Press, 1999), pages 351–2. ‘Dates in Chinese history are customarily recorded in terms of the years of the reigning monarch. But by Han times, there was already in use an additional system of cyclical signs for designating years, days, and hours. The origin of these signs, one a set of ten known as the “ten heavenly stems,” another of twelve called the “twelve earthly branches,” remains today a mystery, though it is apparent that they are very ancient…’

  the hour of the cow For an early example of the Hour of the Ox, as that time of night is more often known, and its appearance in ghost stories, see The Tale of the Heike 4.15, ‘The Nightbird’ (Royall Tyler, translator, Viking Press, 2012). ‘Night after night His Majesty was assailed by crushing fear. By his order, great monks and mighty healers worked the most powerful and most secret rites, but to no effect. His suffering came on him at the hour of the ox … A black cloud would rise, approach, and settle over His Majesty’s dwelling. Then his agony always set in…’ (page 242).

  Coffee houses were like London’s clubs in the days of Dr. Johnson James Kirkup’s Tokyo (Phoenix House, 1966), pages 68–9; 129–30. Kirkup writes of Shinjuku’s Fugetsudo, an ‘artistic’ coffee shop ‘displaying very deliberately avant-garde paintings and specializing in classical music of the drier type – Bach, Vivaldi, Buxtehude, Palestrina and Pergolesi, with occasional gushes of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Grieg. When you enter the shop, write down your request for Chopin, Scarlatti or Debussy; you may have to wait nearly two hours to hear it played … as Tokyo has no Soho or Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village, this place deserves one visit if you want to see a bit of pseudo-Left Bank atmosphere in Japan … Again, as with restaurants, it is best just to wander round and drop into one coffee-shop after another. I prefer the rip-roaring modern jazz coffee-shops, particularly Dig, Village, Pony, Mokuba and a number that just call themselves Modern Jazz. Here, listening to Art Tatum or John Coltrane, one can strike up friendships with the jazz-mad Japanese and the more soberly appreciative Negro customers. Nearly all bars and coffee-shops are decorated with palms and tropical plants, goldfish or tropical birds…’ For postwar coffee culture, see also Jean Raspail’s satire Welcome, Honourable Visitors (Jean Stewart, translator, Hamish Hamilton, 1960), pages 10–11.

  That man was rumored to throw out anyone who dared ask for milk or sugar with the holy liquid without warning him first Sekiguchi Ichiro, the owner of Café de l’Ambre, was born in 1913. He opened his coffee shop in 1948 using Indonesian beans that had been stored for shipment to Germany before World War Two. Merry White relates the story in the ‘Masters of Their Universes: Performing Perfection’ chapter of Coffee Life in Japan. Sekiguchi, writes White, ‘has no compunctions about evicting customers who do not understand or who resist his authority. Sekiguchi serves [his coffee] without accompaniments; if you ask for sugar or milk after you receive the cup you may be denied them or even asked to leave … If you had wanted them, you should have asked while ordering, because the coffee is made for drinking a certain way: he would make it stronger or hotter, or with different beans, if sugar or milk were needed. One senses that these additives are actually a test: you shouldn’t want them, and the coffee shouldn’t need them…’ (page 71).

  Nihonbashi: The Zero Point

  Nihonbashi was the zero point Theodore C. Bestor, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004), page 98.

  like Zen ensō See Audrey Yoshiko Seo’s Ensō: Zen Circles of Enlightenment (Weatherhill, 2007) and Stephen Addiss’ ‘The Calligraphic Works of Fukushima Keidō,’ in Zen no Sho: The Calligraphy of Fukushima Keidō Rōshi (Jason M. Wirth, editor, Clear Light Publishers, 2003). ‘There is some debate on whether ensō are paintings or calligraphy. On one hand, they are almost always created by a single calligraphic line, but on the other hand, they do not directly represent a word. Perhaps they form a category of their own’ (Stephen Addiss, page 28). See also page 68: ‘Its emptiness is the source of fullness: the ensō is a common expression of Zen mind, and Zen mind is not just the experience of the fullness of the self’s own emptiness, but the emptiness of all things.’

  The jail was older than the Tokugawa shogunate and outlasted it too Edo’s first jail stood nearby in Tokiwabashi; Tokugawa Iemitsu founded it around 1590–92, and then moved it to Kodenmachō at some point between 1596 and 1615. Hiramatsu Yoshirō, ‘A History of Penal Institutions: Japan’ (Law in Japan, volume 6 (1973), pages 1–2).

  Judgments were not subject to appeal and death sentences were carried out immediately Hiramatsu Yoshirō, ‘A History of Penal Institutions: Japan’, above, page 3.

  One inmate described the prison’s atmosphere as ‘reminiscent of the Warring States period’ See Daniel Botsman’s excellent but harrowing Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, 2007), page 66.

  Edo also had two public execution grounds Daniel Botsman, Punishment and Power, pages 18–19; for the locations of the execution grounds, pages 20–4.

  ‘The creation of a horrifying spectacle was more important Daniel Botsman, ‘Politics and Power in the Tokugawa Period’, in East Asian History, #3 (June 1992), page 3. Also, Punishment and Power, page 19, where Botsman notes: ‘If we are to come to a better understanding of Tokugawa society, we must look beyond [its] brutality … Tokugawa punishments were as much products of peace as of war, and while they could indeed be cruel, they did not take the form of arbitrary or unrestrained violence.’

  Botsman also argues: ‘There were no prisons in Tokugawa Japan,’ but rather only prison-like institutions, because long-term imprisonment was rare, ‘used as an official punishment only when there were extenuating circumstances that prevented the application of another penalty’ (‘Politics and Power’ in East Asian History, above, page 9, and Punishment and Power, page 28).

  kegare ‘In the medieval period, crime itself was also seen as a form of pollution: criminals were driven out of their communities and their houses burned to the ground not just to punish them but also to purify and cleanse the place that had been sullied by their actions.’ (Botsman, Punishment and Power, page 23.)

  The writer Hasegawa Shigure See Hasegawa’s auto-biography: Hasegawa Shigure sakuhinshū, Fujiwara Shoten, 2009.

  The Golden Light Sutra See Asuka Sango, The Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2015).

  Everyone always came back Not quite everyone. The nineteenth-century physician Nakano Chōei bribed a laborer to set fire to one of the prison buildings so that he could escape Kodenmachō. He eluded arrest for six years before being caught and killed.

  In a late play about a samurai caught stealing from the shogun’s vaults Botsman writes: ‘Mokuami set the final scenes of the play [Shisen ryō koban no ume no wa, or Four Thousand Gold Pieces, Like Plum Leaves] inside the old jail-house, using descriptions from former guards to recreate for the public this previously hidden world’ (Punishment and Power, page 246 note 17). For a description of the Far Road, see Botsman, Punishment and Power, page 66. For Four Thousand Gold Pieces, see Mokuami, Kawatake Mokuami shū (Tokyo Sōgen Shinsha, 1968).

  See also James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter in Kabuki Plays on Stage: Restoration and Reform, 1872–1905 (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). ‘Mokuami was deeply interested in, and very skilled at writing about, people caught up in the stressful life of the times
… Individual freedom of choice was a new ethical concept learned from the West. Liberal and democratic social structures based on individualism were competing head-on with deeply entrenched feudal ideals that had not disappeared simply because the old political system had been abandoned…’ (page 20).

  Alan Cummings’ doctoral thesis, Kawatake Mokuami and Kabuki Playwriting, 1850–1893 (SOAS, 2010), has a very interesting passage on Mokuami’s Edo and its ‘romantic unreality’: ‘thieves speak in stylized verse instead of just picking your pocket’ (page 74). Cummings adds: ‘Mokuami preserved kabuki’s essential escape from reality by creating his own stage version of an alternative Edo. This “other” Edo, while it certainly possessed many restrictive aspects of the real city, crucially allowed for flights of fantasy and wish fulfilment. It is against a recreated map of locations familiar to his audience that Mokuami’s heroes are permitted, briefly, to dream of wealth, love and happiness. That these fantastic dreams are invariably shown to be crushed by the force of fate is a telling commentary on the popular bakumatsu [shogunate] mentality’ (pages 57–8).

  a distorted mirror Daniel Botsman has an interesting passage about the organization of the prison’s inmates as representing in ‘microcosm the overall structure of Tokugawa society.’ He links the cityscape of Edo and the prison’s interior (‘Politics and Power’, page 15).

  an ordinary prisoner who had arrived without money For what tortures a penniless man might suffer on the Far Road, see Botsman: ‘In the winter an inmate might be forced to stand for hours in a bucket of icy water … or deprived of food and water, or suddenly force-fed with hot peppers or excrement from the latrines. Some inmates were simply beaten to death or smothered in their sleep.’ (Punishment and Power, page 64.)