The Bells of Old Tokyo

by Anna Sherman

  The past was invoked to affirm the present: the mythic Emperor Jimmu’s accession marked ‘the beginning of time, history, or narrative’ (Fujitani Takashi, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan, University of California Press, 1996).

  The city’s most beautiful incarnation I discovered this Tokyo quite by chance, in the volume Asakusa no misemono shūkyōsei erosu (Wada Hirofumi, Ichiyanagi Hirotaka, et al., editors, Yumani Shoppō, 2005). The book’s plates include theaters and staircases, bridges and buildings that did not last long enough to become landmarks. Not everyone was so enamored of that city, though; Kafū referred to it as ‘a sham hallway, a grand façade with nothing behind it’ (Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, Edward Seidensticker, editor, Stanford University Press, 1965, page 108).

  the splendid achievement of completing the reconstruction of the Capital This rescript was reprinted in The Reconstruction of Tokyo (Tokyo Municipal Office, 1933).

  six thousand Koreans and the eight hundred Chinese The knowing eye here is Gennifer Weisenfeld’s. See her Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012), especially pages 171–3 and 306. ‘The complicity of the quake’s “innocent” victims and national saviors in the savage retribution visited upon Japan’s resident colonial subjects and political dissidents has yet to be fully acknowledged…’ Weisenfeld observes: ‘There was a proliferation of rumors and gossip that accused “subversive” or “malcontent” resident Koreans of sedition, indicating that they had set off explosions and poisoned well water, and these rumors incited widespread retributive violence, particularly among self-appointed vigilante squads organized by local neighborhoods through the region … Scholars have argued that Koreans were not just the victims of bigoted xenophobia in chaotic times but were specifically targeted as threatening colonial subjects who had been voicing desires for national independence from Japanese rule and evoking intense fear in the Japanese imagination. Despite the army’s and police force’s claims to be protecting this vulnerable population, the press later revealed these authorities to be organizers, instigators, and cohorts of the vigilantes in the persecution.’

  Weisenfeld adds: ‘Strict censorship laws prohibited representations of dead bodies and other potentially disturbing subjects, including the massacre of Koreans (although these measures could not stem the tide of contraband images available on the street that featured burned and bloated corpses in neighborhoods throughout the city). Visual culture both reveals and conceals in its visualizations. Although the photodocumentary images of the earthquake appeared to be displaying the bodies’ stories so transparently, they in fact conflated the widely divergent histories of the mangled corpses into one generic narrative. Hidden beneath the surface of the earthquake presentations, visible only to the knowing eye, is an alternative history…’ (pages 67–8). The media’s visual authority ‘perpetuated notions of resilience, unity, and innocence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary’ (page 69).

  ‘You thought it was perfectly normal Kawabata follows this description with a deadpan segue into a description of the new city risen from the earthquake. ‘But now, in the spring of 1930, there are big festivals celebrating the reconstruction of Tokyo…’ (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, translated by Alisa Freedman, University of California Press, 2005, pages 63–4).

  The reckoning of time in Japan is tethered to the emperor’s body ‘The nengō system is said to have originated in imperial China around the second century AD. It had spread throughout the Chinese cultural world and started to be used in Japan between the mid seventh and the eighth century. The adoption of nengō in written records was a means by which the imperial family represented itself as the ruler of the country domestically as well as internationally in the wider East Asian world order … Before the Meiji era (1868–1912), the emperor adopted and changed nengō at critical moments during his reign. Nengō, which always consisted of two Chinese characters, were changed upon a new emperor’s enthronement as it was seen to symbolically mark the start of the new era. Nengō were also changed after an earthquake, flood, famine, epidemic, fire, the appearance of a comet in the sky, or war. After natural as well as man-made catastrophes, a new era name was given and within it the first year started anew. This act was thought to nullify the polluted time and to bring in new time and order.

  ‘In any social organization, time is one of the most fundamental organizing principles. Those who regulate time have power to rule, and for this reason, there have been fights over the power to control time. Many attempts were made by the shogun as well as other warriors to obtain the power to regulate time. For example, in the early part of the Tokugawa period, when the shoguns came to their post, the nengō was changed even though the shogun’s accession to power should not have brought a change of nengō.’ (Iwatake Mikako, ‘From a Shogunal City to a Life City: Tokyo Between Two Fin-de-Siècles’, in Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo, Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley, editors, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pages 235–6.)

  ‘Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, a new emperor and nengō system were created. The emperor served for life and was no longer to be threatened by political power games, and on his death, he was to be succeeded by his oldest son. A nengō was to start at the time of the new emperor’s enthronement and remain unchanged until his death. The significance of this system is that time is fixed to the emperor’s body…’ (Iwatake Mikako, cited above, page 237).

  M. William Steele notes that the introduction of the nengō ‘Meiji’ was controversial. ‘A mocking rhyme popular in Edo at the time laughed at the new name: “Read from above it may mean ‘bright rule,’ but read from below, it means, ‘ungoverned by anyone [osamarumei].’” The pun is often interpreted to demonstrate residual pro-Tokugawa sentiment among the people of Edo. To be sure they resented being under imperial control, especially as it in effect meant under the control of boorish men from Satsuma and Chōshū. At the same time they had lost faith in the Tokugawa family. In saying, “We are not under the control of anyone,” Edo commoners were expressing their contempt for any form of political authority.’ (Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 45 #22 (1990), page 150.)

  For an example of nengō changes in ancient Japan, see Delmer Brown and Ishida Ichirō, The Future and the Past: A Translation and Study of the Gukanshō: An Interpretive History of Japan Written in 1219 (University of California Press, 1979), page 67: ‘Following Ichijō’s enthronement in 986 at the age of seven, a comet streaked across the sky in the last third of the sixth month of 989. The era name was changed to Eiso in the eighth month of that year. Then came the incomparable disaster known as the Eiso typhoon. And in the following year the era name was changed to Shōryaku…’

  For a single instance when an era changed to reflect an auspicious event rather than a calamity, see Herbert E. Plutschow’s Matsuri: The Festivals of Japan (Japan Library, 1996). ‘Time was also renewed to reflect auspicious events. One of these was the discovery of a white heron in the imperial gardens in Kyoto…’ (pages 34–5).

  When Emperor Hirohito died in 1989, ‘tens of millions of calendars were discarded’ Gunter Nitschke, From Shinto to Ando: Studies in Architectural Anthropology in Japan (Academy Editions, 1993), pages 9–10. Quoted in Vinayak Bharne, Zen Spaces and Neon Places (ORO Editions, 2014), page 102. In the weeks before the Shōwa Emperor died, the media referred to the future day of his death in katakana, as X-day (Leo J. Loveday, Language Contact in Japan: A Socio-linguistic History, Clarendon Press, 1996, page 197).

  Shōwa was always Shōwa After the Pacific War, the Occupation authorities decided to keep the nengō system, which ‘continued unbroken, a calendrical declaration of fundamental continuity with the past’ (John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Norton, 2000, pages 279, 401 and 592 note two).

  emperor Jimmu See Ben-Ami Shillony, Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Sub
servience in Japanese History (Global Oriental, 2005): ‘The belief that Japan is basically different from other countries because its royal house has never changed is almost as old as the dynasty itself … The [eighth-century] chronicle Nihon shoki traces its beginnings to the foundation of the empire by the first “human” sovereign, Emperor Jimmu, on the first day of the first month of the year that corresponds to 660 BC. This date was first announced by Prince Shotoku in the early seventh century. Wishing to emphasize the antiquity of the imperial dynasty, he extrapolated backwards twenty sexagenary cycles from the year AD 601 … and arrived at the date of foundation (kigen). Although this date has no historical basis, and the actual foundation of the state probably occurred nearly one thousand years later, it was accepted for most of Japanese history, and was often quoted as proof of the immutability of Japan’s political structure…’ (pages 5–6).

  Ironically, the concept of anniversaries is a Western one, so the foundation was not celebrated until the nineteenth century (Shillony, page 8). For the invention of Kigen, and its public reception, see Jessica Kennett Cork, The Lunisolar Calendar: A Sociology of Japanese Time (MA dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2010), pages 54–5, on Hayashi Wakaki’s essay ‘Kaireki no eikyō’ (‘The Effect of Calendar Reform’ in Shūko kaishi). Cork also quotes Miyata Noboru: ‘Important festivals such as the fire festival and O-bon were abolished and replaced with holidays like … Kigen-setsu, which no one had ever heard of’ (Miyata Noboru in Koyomi to saiji: Nihonjin no kisetsu kankaku, Tokyo Shōgakkan, 1984, page 19).

  The first emperor Jimmu’s mother was the daughter of the sea god This passage is adapted and condensed from W. G. Aston’s version of The Nihongi chronicles, first published in 1896. For Fujitani Misao’s quote, see Kenneth J. Ruoff’s Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary (Cornell University Press, 2010), pages 21 and 49–50. For the Kigen celebrations as seen from the American perspective, see Joseph Grew’s Ten Years in Japan: A Contemporary Record Drawn from the Diaries and Private Papers of the US Ambassador to Japan 1932–1942 (Simon and Schuster, 1944). For the Japanese imperial army and its losses in China, see Imperial Japan at its Zenith (pages 17 and 215). Ruoff argues that Jimmu served as a figurehead for Japanese fascist ideology: while noting that even during wartime, Japan held parliamentary elections, he stresses the importance of ‘the cult of the unbroken imperial line’ in mobilizing the country. Though Emperor Hirohito did not ‘give rousing speeches from balconies or behave in a manner that was similar to the charismatic styles of Hitler and Mussolini, and Japan at that time certainly did not produce another leader whose charisma remotely approached that of Ger-many’s Fuhrer or Italy’s Il Duce’, Emperor Jimmu became ‘a surrogate in this area’ (page 19).

  For more on Jimmu, see also Gustav Heldt’s translation of The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters (Columbia University Press, 2014). First written down in AD 712, this ‘intensely political’ text invented the past by tracing ‘the genealogy of the ruling family back to the very beginnings of the world. It does so largely in mythical style, telling its tale through vignettes and poems.’ The Kojiki narrative explains ‘the greatest conundrums of existence: why the sun and moon; why death; how does life begin; what is our place in the order of things … The lack of creator is marked and there is no attempt to identify an absolute origin.’ (Richard Bowring’s The Religious Traditions of Japan 500–1600, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pages 46–50.)

  For a sardonic account of imperial Japan’s timekeeping, see Dazai Osamu’s eerie short story ‘December 8th’, which was written during World War Two (Modern Japanese Literature, J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel, editors, Columbia University Press, 2005, volume 1, pages 660–67). Japanese historians were only free to critique the Jimmu myth after the end of World War Two. In February 1946, the president of Tokyo Imperial University ‘called for critical analysis of imperial history, territory that largely had been off limits previously: “Until quite recently, we have held to the beliefs of our fore-fathers that the Japanese people had lived, from time immemorial, with immutable reverence toward the Imperial House as the founders of our nation, their unbroken line with an everlasting destiny. Today, however, may not be the year of twenty-six hundred and something as has been believed. How much of this is real historical fact? How much is myth and legend? Such questions must be solved by positive and comparative historical study…”’ (Imperial Japan at its Zenith, page 185).

  Kigen Anniversary nationalistic events were held For the party itself, see Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins, 2000): ‘One day before the start of the official commemorative events, on November 9, a government regulation established an “Office of Shinto Deities” within the Home Ministry to further the “spiritual mobilization” of the nation in preparation for total war … At the peak of the celebrations, on November 10 and 11, an estimated five million people attended banquets. Food prepared as military field rations, in remembrance of the troops on the front lines, was consumed by celebrants in the palace plaza’ (page 384).

  One of the emperor’s poems was set to music Many thanks to Kaori Ungerer for help with this translation.

  Chris Drake writes: ‘The Shōwa emperor’s poem was composed in 1933. Its words were slowly sung during a newly created Shinto dance performed all over the empire during the 1940 Kigen celebrations. A historical vortex of contested meanings makes translating and explicating this poem very difficult, since it is actually two poems, one antebellum and early war (when it was written) and one post-war (when it was popularized and performed).

  ‘The poem is a tanka: five lines and thirty-one syllables. The emperor reversed normal prose word order (which would have positioned the verb at the very end); this reversal created a powerful tension within his tanka. It’s as though the emperor, as a kami (deity) himself, were using the poem to (re)create the cosmos.

  ‘The first line refers to the realm of the invisible kami and the realm of visible nature and humans. It’s an immense, cosmic image that matches the hugeness of the 2600-year imperial line.

  ‘The emperor is not praying to a single god of heaven and a single god of earth. He’s praying to all the myriad gods: Shinto has innumerable (yaoyorozu) deities, with more always possible since new things are always appearing in the world.

  ‘A translator must also note the (probably unconscious) conflation of the word “peace” with “pacification” implied in the original version: “May the empire be at peace with no problems or unfortunate unrest or violence by misguided rebellious ruffians anywhere.” Any scholarly translation of the tanka needs to deal with its double meaning in a way that doesn’t simply flatten out or dismiss history’ (Chris Drake, in private correspondence).

  141 a Shinto dance See Terauchi Naoko’s article in Tōyō Ongaku Kenkyū #81 (2016): ‘Sounds of “War and Peace”: New Bugaku Pieces Yūkyū and Shōwa raku Created for the Kigen nisen roppyakunen in 1940’: ‘The dances were the embodiment of the nation-state of Japan as imagined by the Ministry of the Imperial Household. The presentation was in fact made a deliberate negotiation between contrasting concepts such as “the ancient and the contemporary,” “Japan and the West,” centralization within Japan and “expansion throughout Asia,” and “purity and diversity.” … The dances pursued images of both a “strong Japan” by using “patriotic” old lyrics composed in the thirteenth century and a “pure, ancient Japan” by designing costumes based on warrior attire in the eighth century and older.’ During the 1964 Olympic Games, Yūkyū was revived, in a style changed ‘from a men’s military dance to an elegant dance employing young women.’

  David Hughes, who provided the reference to Terauchi’s research, notes that in 1940 the composer (who was also the head of the palace court music ensemble) set the emperor’s poem to the most appropriate music: ‘the one most related to the emperor’s [divinity] … No evidence that such music or dance existed 2,600 years ago, but never mind’ (b
y e-mail).

  Kitasuna: The Firebombs of 1945

  Running/On the road of fire Sō Sakon’s poem ‘Running’ from Mother Burning (Modern Japanese Literature, J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel, editors, Columbia University Press, 2007, volume 2, pages 427–31) gives one of the most haunting accounts of the bombings’ human cost. Leith Morton translates.

  My English sources for the firebombings are Robert Guillain’s I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (William Byron, translator, Doubleday, 1981). Hoito Edoin’s The Night Tokyo Burned: The Incendiary Campaign Against Japan, March–August 1945 (St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Fire from the Sky: A Diary over Japan (Ron Greer and Mike Wicks, 2013). In Japanese, oral histories and written testimonials at the Tokyo Air Raid Museum, including that of Nihei Haruyo. Also, the NHK 1978 documentary on the 9 March air raid; and Katsumoto Saotome’s Illustrated Tokyo Air Raid (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2003). The research of Cary Karacas, cited above, is invaluable.

  the smell of death followed us Ron Greer and Mike Wicks, Fire from the Sky, cited above, page 115.

  Yamato damashii! ‘Japanese spirit’. A phrase appropriated by nationalists in modern Japan. It appears first in Genji Monogatari, where it means only ‘Japanese wit’ as opposed to ‘Chinese learning’. (Royall Tyler, translator, Penguin, 2002, page 381 note 9.)

  a young night watchman See especially Inoue’s Tokyo Air Raid, a ‘dream journal’ found among his papers after his death (Iwanami Shoten, 1995).