The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  The samurai/warrior class were not, however, guaranteed more lenient treatment inside Kodenmachō. Botsman notes that they would instead be ‘held to a higher standard of behavior than their social inferiors … they were also less likely to receive pardons and more likely to be punished severely for relatively minor crimes…’ This punishment differential reflected the fact that ‘warrior rule and the privileges that went with it were justified and legitimized in part through the claim that warriors were morally superior.’ (Punishment and Power, pages 72 and 75.) There were ‘special punishments (junkei) applied to people according to their social position. There were appropriate junkei for bushi [warriors], Buddhist priests, commoners and women; members of the [outcast] hinin class were subject to an entirely different system of punishment again’ (‘Politics and Power’, page 6).

  Asakusa: The Mythic Kantō Plain

  Sensō-ji demarked the border between this world and another world Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensō-ji and Edo Society (Harvard University Press, 2000), page 90. See also Royall Tyler, ‘Buddhism in Noh’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14/ 1, 1987: ‘The margin of water, where human beings suffer from the simultaneous pull of the heights and the depths’ (page 27).

  It is rare to hear this Law The Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (Soka Gakkai, 1993). ‘We do not know where or when the Lotus Sutra was composed, or in what language,’ writes Watson in his Introduction. ‘We have left the world of factual reality far behind. This is the first point to keep in mind in reading the Lotus Sutra. Its setting, its vast assembly of listeners, its dramatic occurrences in the end belong to a realm that totally transcends our ordinary concepts of time, space, and possibility. Again and again we are told of events that took place countless, indescribable numbers of kalpas or eons in the past, or of beings or worlds that are as numerous as the sands of millions and billions of Ganges rivers. Such “numbers” are in fact no more than pseudo-numbers or non-numbers, intended to impress on us the impossibility of measuring the immeasurable. They are not meant to convey any statistical data but simply to boggle the mind and jar it loose from its conventional concepts of time and space. For in the realm of Emptiness, time and space as we conceive them are meaningless; anywhere is the same as everywhere, and now, then, never, forever are all one’ (page xvi).

  See also Royall Tyler, ‘Buddhism in Noh’, cited above, pages 23–4: ‘There was a particularly intimate connection between the Lotus Sutra and the spirits of the dead as they hovered about the places where they were bound to earth. The sutra promised release to the lowliest and most lost of beings, and it affirmed at the same time the sanctity of the place where it was spoken…’

  The melancholy of the entire city flowed beneath that bridge Kawabata Yasunari, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, translated by Alisa Freedman (University of California Press, 2005), page 5.

  a village in a landscape empty but for grasses and a labyrinth of rivers See David Spafford, A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013). The Kantō region’s medieval history (mostly) lacks a clear plot and has neither obvious climax nor charismatic protagonists. The Kantō’s political landscape was made up of points, not areas (pages 263 and 236).

  During its medieval wars, the Kantō never had a coherent front line. ‘No linear front could form because the lands of the various contenders were thoroughly intertwined … Nothing like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China could be built along the line delimiting a threshold between “us” and “them,”’ (page 236). Every journey across the Kantō was a kind of crossing, ‘through the lands of followers, allies, collaterals, neutral parties, and occasionally, enemies’ (page 233).

  For Spafford, the Kantō always ‘referred to a space “beyond” rather than a place.’ As immortalized in poetry, and in travel writings, it was ‘untamed, unsettled, and timelessly peaceful. It was remote, programmatically so, for it was a distant land imagined as beyond the pale of civilization by those aristocrats in Kyoto who had collectively established the rules for writing about the world beyond the capital and its environs’ (pages 18–19).

  Much of the Kantō remained remote well into the seventeenth century: see the Musashi Den’enbō, a record of Tokugawa land surveys on the plain. Many villages were deemed too inaccessible to merit entries; others were so small that they were not recorded. (Kitajima Masamoto, editor, Kondō Shuppansha, 1977.)

  For a discussion of modern Tokyo as a city with ‘no clear boundaries, no defining walls,’ see page 27 of Tokyo: Form and Spirit (Walker Art Center, catalogue, 1986).

  One medieval traveler, a nun from Kyoto David Spafford, A Sense of Place, pages 39ff. Extracts from The Diary of a Sarashina Lady, see Ivan Morris’ As I Crossed A Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh Century Japan (Penguin, 1989).

  In the Middle Ages, the trope of the wayfarer hemmed in – even submerged – by the grasses, deprived of sight, became ubiquitous in travel literature about Musashino. The desolate landscape, featureless but for its grasses, empty of almost all human presence, was confined to a curious placelessness, given purchase on the world beyond the grasses by its poetic status … (Spafford, A Sense of Place, pages 39ff).

  This isolated world survived into the Shōwa Era and beyond: see Maki Fumihiko’s beautiful essay ‘My City: The Acquisition of Mental Landscapes’ in his Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City (MIT Press, 2008). ‘Unlike a village, Tokyo was an endless series of overlapping scenes, and [as a child] I could even imagine a frontier starting just beyond my vision. It was not so much a physical world as a world of the imagination, a world that could expand at any time in new directions. The twisting passageway through a display of figures created out of chrysanthemums, the dim interior of a German circus tent, the mazelike spaces in a foreign ship moored in Yamashita Wharf in Yokohama…’ (page 82).

  Beauty was first, in the year 628 Nam-lin Hur’s exquisite Prayer and Play includes plates depicting the discovery of Benten’s statue (pages 6–7). The object’s dimensions are discussed (page 232 note 16), and the account for how the statues were treated during fires: ‘They were transferred to a boat standing by on the Sumida River. In every case, the statues contained in the receptacles were placed intact into a palanquin, and their secrecy was strictly maintained’ (page 245 note 90).

  Tokyo Bay, which then didn’t even have a name See Roderick Ike Wilson’s ‘Placing Edomae: The Changing Environmental Relations of Tokyo’s Early Modern Fisheries’ for context (Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 3 (2016), pages 242–89).

  the thousandth traveler heard a reed flute The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, cited above, page 82. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play, pages 192–4: ‘The people of Edo welcomed ghosts and evil spirits because they embodied the unpredictability of survival. The townspeople were fascinated with the topsy-turvy world of underground creatures and their volatile and violent energies. The fierce-faced deities and evil creatures meant disorder, hallucination, gloom, and indecency: things that slaked the townspeople’s thirst for an upside-down society. These creatures gave anger, unhappiness, and frustration a form.’

  all the spirits (kami) have ascended to heaven; the Buddhas have left for the Western Paradise The anonymous author of An Account of Things Seen and Heard, published in 1816, quoted in Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play, page 203.

  what the Japanese call a koffeemaniakku (‘coffee maniac’) or coffee otaku Definition taken from Hashimoto Miyuki, ‘Visual Kei Otaku Identity – An Intercultural Analysis’ (Intercultural Communication Studies XVI: 1 (2007), pages 88–9). For the term ‘coffee maniac’, see Merry White, Coffee Life in Japan, cited above: ‘koffeemaniakku – a fetishistic, obsessive, “maniac” eccentric, a dictatorial connoisseur’ (page 72).

  Japan suddenly became a nation composed entirely of otaku Quote from Jonathan Abel’s translation of Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Un
iversity of Minnesota Press, 2009). From Abel’s Notes, page 117. ‘Japan in the 1980s was entirely a fiction. Yet this fiction, while it lasted, was comfortable to dwell in … This lightheartedness virtually disappeared in the 1990s, which began with the collapse of the Bubble Economy, and was followed by the Kobe Earthquake, the Aum sarin gas incident, and the emergence of issues like “compensated dating” and the breakdown of classroom order. Yet it would appear that the world of otaku culture is an exception; there the 1980s illusion has remained alive and well’ (page 19).

  For origins of the word ‘otaku’ see Hashimoto Miyuki, ‘Visual Kei Otaku Identity – An Intercultural Analysis’, pages 87–99. Hashimoto tracks the evolution of otaku until it ‘is used interchangeably with the word “nerds.”’ By 1991, Basic Knowledge had amended the definition to be ‘a new type of consumer … Otaku nowadays not only means just being a fan of cartoons and comics but generally characterises people who have curious hobbies and indulge in intensive preoccupation with these objects of interest’ (page 89). To differentiate between otaku and general juvenile culture, there must be, Hashimoto argues, moe. Role-playing-game players created this word; moe conveys the sexual implications of otaku. As a noun, ‘it is used to characterize the love for a particular cartoon or comic character by emphasizing the idiosyncratic aspects of their appearance and behavior, such as glasses, school uniforms and a Lolita way of acting…’

  I knew someone who studied the effect of caffeine on monkeys ‘Behavioral Dependence on Caffeine and Phencyclidine in Rhesus Monkeys: Interactive Effects’ (Carroll, M. E., Hagen, E. W., Asencio, M., and Brauer, L. H. in Pharmacology, Biochemistry, & Behavior, December 1988, 31 (4), pages 927–32).

  Akasaka: The Invention of Edo

  Rat Mountain amazed no one Chris Drake translates the monk Gensei’s poem; I owe him a great debt for his work.

  For the original Japanese, see Toda Mosui’s A Sprig of Purple (Suzuki Jun, editor, Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū 82 (Shōgakkan, 2000), page 239).

  In his notes on this cryptic poem, Chris Drake writes: Rat Mountain, or Bird-Rat Mountain, ‘is in Gansu in Weiyuan Province in China. It was famous as a strange place, because rats and birds there lived together in the same holes or lairs. Here the image seems to be of generalized chaotic, precivilized existence, similar to the indiscriminate lairs on Rat Mountain.’

  Bull king is a ‘common epithet of Buddha, suggesting power and invincibility.’ A horned rabbit is something that doesn’t exist: a metaphor, in other words; allegory, fiction, parable.

  The reference to a Buddhist prince is probably ‘Shōtoku (574–622), who was known as Prince of the Stables. One legend claims that he was born in front of a stable. He became a passionate believer in Buddhism, and with his power he firmly established Buddhism in Japan despite opposition from Shinto groups. He himself is said to have written three commentaries on major Buddhist sutras.’

  Goat, deer, and ox carts: ‘One of three kinds of beautiful carts used as metaphors in Chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra. There a man sees his children playing inside his burning house, which symbolizes existence in the world. His children are interested only in playing with toys, so, in order to lure the children outside to safety, that is, salvation, he promises them three kinds of carts. In the parable, the goat carts are a metaphor for the teachings and actions of the Buddha’s original disciples, models who can lead suffering humans toward enlightenment. Gensei may be suggesting that such simple metaphors are no longer needed after Prince Shōtoku established and explained Buddhism in Japan.’

  The rooster-man: ‘A court official whose job was to call out to tell the court that dawn had come and to inform the court of the passing of the hours.’

  Rājagrha: ‘A town in northern India that is a holy site for Buddhists. Here Buddha meditated and gave several important sermons, and after the Buddha’s death or Parinirvana, the first Buddhist sutras were edited here.’

  Gold Mountain: ‘A mountain that appears in Chapter 30 of the Mahā-prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, where it is a symbol of learning and virtue. Thus the mountain grows higher and more sublime as people study and practice Buddhism.’

  the mathematical concept of chaos Yoshimura Hiroshi, Ō-Edo toki no kane aruki (Shūnjusha, 2002), page 97.

  The words make up a labyrinth, a secret code The Zodiac poem was written by a seventeenth-century monk called Gensei. For a useful introduction to his writing, and an explanation of his highly academic kanbun style (Chinese poems written by Japanese), see Burton Watson’s Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Monk Gensei (Columbia University Press, 1983). ‘Well-educated Japanese in the Tokugawa period … learned to read and write in classical Chinese, in somewhat the same manner as American and European students during the same period learned Greek and Latin … Their ability to write poetry in Chinese gave Japanese poets more possibilities for expression than did the thirty-one-syllable Japanese waka or tanka, and the seventeen-syllable haiku.’ (Thomas J. Rimer and Van C. Gessel, editors, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, volumes 1–2, Columbia University Press, 2005, 2007.)

  he was perfectly placed to invent Toda was the first writer to give Edo its own literary identity. Irreverent, witty, urbane, Toda Mosui is almost unknown in English translation. Jurgis Elisonas’ wonderful chapter (‘Notorious Places’) in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and State in the Early Modern Era, James L. McClain, John M. Merriman and Ugawa Kaoru, editors (Cornell University Press, 1997) gives a greatest hits version of A Sprig of Purple, Toda’s account of Edo in the late seventeenth century. Before Toda, Elisonas writes, Edo was ‘written’ as a ‘sterile landscape.’ But with Toda, ‘whimsy, not orderly method, dictated the selection of what to discuss’ (page 286).

  For A Sprig of Purple, see Suzuki Jun, editor, Kinsei zuisō shū, Shinpen Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū 82 (Shōgakkan, 2000), pages 29–242. In classical literature, ‘sprig of purple’ is a ‘metaphor for being “stained with passion.”’ (Royall Tyler, The Ise Stories, University of Hawaii Press, 2010, page 15 note 1.)

  Not a bad name for a writer Elisonas writes: Iitsu is ‘the first word of a classical maxim meaning “discarded but not resentful”’ (‘Notorious Places’, page 285).

  Tokyo is a city of darkness, a city of light ‘Culturally, samurai society represented, in Kurimoto Shin’ichiro’s words, a “sunshine city” (hikari no toshi), where hierarchy, subordination, status, privilege, and orthodox ideology were valued. As far as cultural politics was concerned, the “sunshine city” was supposed to subjugate commoner society. Over time, however, commoner society gradually evolved in a “shadow city” (yami no toshi) with its own autonomy, where liberation, anti-order, cultural expression, individuality, and practical learning were passionately sought.’ (Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play, page 175.) See also Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1995), pages 206–7.

  Lucky Hole See the photographer Araki Nobuyoshi’s 1990 collection of this name (Tankobon Softcover) and Joan Sinclair’s sublime Pink Box: Inside Japan’s Sex Clubs (Abrams, 2006).

  The Japanese language has a modest number of words for the English word penis This section is taken from Peter Constantine’s Japanese Slang: Uncensored (Yen Books, 1994). The book should be read as a fantasia of mid-twentieth-century Japanese cinematic vocabulary, rather than as an academic lexicon.

  Even if their lives were bound by strict ancient rules A direct quote from Peter Constantine’s Japanese Slang: Uncensored, cited above; pages 154, 156 and 164.

  The themes change … but certain elements remain the same All information here is condensed from Sarah Chaplin’s Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2007). In the love-hotel business, she writes, ‘Time is more keenly felt. Partly because all the arrivals and departures, the cleaning and replenishing are performed at accelerated speeds – this despite the perception of the love hotel as a respite from work.’ Chaplin’s study is more than a schematic map of the average love ho
tel; she also considers the philosophical implications of ‘the small inner world … concealed in solid concrete buildings with a hard-surfaced geometry [that] provides the conditions for moments of silence in which the individual could recreate himself physically and spiritually’ (page 95). And: ‘The emergence of selfhood requires the pornographic act’ (page 200, note 40).

  See Japanese Love Hotels page 181 for the love hotel’s ‘one-way valve’, and pages 185–7 for a hilarious diversion into bedside reading at these establishments, which include diagrams of kata: the ‘correct’ erotic protocols. On page 95, Chaplin analyzes how the space ‘turns inward’, and the importance of threshold depths on page 76. A discussion of how technology can extend desire (pages 92–4). See page 44 for the zones of unnamed space around love hotels and 24–5 for the love hotel’s absence from conventional maps. ‘The lack of cartographic information in the public domain has not only given rise to love hotel guidebooks, which literally fill the gap for those wishing to find their location graphically represented, but more importantly, constructs a kind of black market social imaginary, in which the only maps which feature love hotels are mental maps in city dwellers’ heads’ (page 25).

  Chaplin quotes, however, the novelist Goto Aiko, who complained:

  Sex was originally something to be done while bathed in sunlight in the middle of a field. The need to seek stimulation behind closed doors shows how weak people have become. Young people don’t need stimulations like that! Young people should be doing it in the park: it’s much more pleasant (page 61).

  Chaplin’s book was published in 2007, so doesn’t cover trends like the Love Hotel iPhone app and blogs rating new establishments.

  Yoshiwara See Angelika Koch-Low’s evocative essay in Kronoscope (17/1, 2017, pages 61–93): ‘Timing the Pleasure Quarters in Early Modern Japan’. Koch-Low notes that in the 1807 book Elegant Phrases from the Pleasure Quarter for Haikai Poets (a guide ‘to the connoisseur’s language of prostitution for aspiring poets’), there was a complete section on words for ‘hour’.