Central Tokyo’s Westernising facelift, impressive though it was, was less than what some reformers had initially wanted. Should not the European or American visitor be as impressed by Tokyo as the men on Iwakura Tomomi’s tour of the world had been by what they saw in Paris, London or Berlin in the 1870s? Grand plans were drawn up to reshape the city as a whole into a Western metropolis, inspired above all by the transformation of Paris under Baron Haussmann. In the 1880s Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru pushed a plan by German architects Wilhelm Böckman and Hermann Ende to turn Tokyo into a grand city of ceremonial avenues.18 Tokyo was an imperial city – run essentially as an adjunct of the central state – should it not now be rebuilt to reflect the growing power and glory of the empire?
But however splendid such plans looked on the drawing board, they faced formidable obstacles on the ground. Unlike some other growing cities of the late nineteenth century, Tokyo already covered a large area. Edo had, after all, been the biggest city in the world. As a consequence, any new development required pulling down existing buildings – perhaps in the face of the opposition of owners and residents. And then there was the small issue of finance. Already weighed down by the costs of railway construction and military development, the government could not afford to redevelop the city at its own expense, in one dramatic all-encompassing move. In the event, therefore, changes to the fabric of the city occurred more opportunistically, district by district. Fire, flood and earthquake (as in 1894) were often the handmaidens of redevelopment, but these could only be relied upon to destroy parts of the city at irregular intervals. When they did, the government would have to move fast, decisively, either ignoring or co-opting local interests.
Tokyo, a hybrid Asian and Western metropolis, 1913.
Such was the history of the Ginza district. In February 1872 a fire destroyed 3,000 buildings in the area. Within six days of the fire being put out, senior officials had presented their plans for the area’s reconstruction, with wider roads, pavements and brick buildings.19 But it was not until 1888 that an ordinance covering the whole city was enacted – providing for the widening of 315 streets, new bridges, public parks, and new crematoria and cemeteries for the city’s dead – and this was itself eventually scaled back due to financial constraints at the beginning of the twentieth century.20 Priorities shifted over time. In the 1890s, attention was focused on getting clean water into the city, identified as the best means of reducing outbreaks of cholera. After 1900, emphasis shifted to building tram lines, a sore point with Tokyo’s 46,000 rickshaw drivers, who saw the new vehicles undercutting their livelihood.21 The following decade, a hundred miles of electric trams having now established the sprawling modern geography of the city, the time had finally come to address sewerage of the city’s residential areas, some of which still got by with bucket, horse and cart.
As a consequence of uneven developments, driven as much by opportunity and expediency as any grand plan, by 1913 the so-called High City, the Yamanote, which occupied the area north and west of the imperial palace, came to look more and more like a hybrid Japanese-American-European city. It was here that the ministries were located in the new government quarter near Hibiya Park. It was here that the richer citizens of the city now lived, in grand houses with gates and porches in the Japanese style. It was here that most of the amenities for foreign visitors were concentrated. From Shimbashi station, the Handbook for Travellers in Japan noted, one could reach the Imperial Hotel in five minutes by rickshaw, the Tokyo Club and American Embassy in ten minutes, and the British Embassy in eighteen. The Mitsukoshi department store provided a Japanese variation on a European and American theme. The Home Ministry building looked every bit as imposing, and as forbidding, as the justice ministry in any European capital – designed to impress citizens and foreigners alike with the weighty power of the state.
But not all of Tokyo had been transformed in quite this way. And even in areas which had an outward European or American appearance, the interior reality could be different. The home was relatively untouched, wrote Jukichi Inouye in his account of Home Life in Tokyo in 1910. ‘Globe-trotters who advise their friends to visit this country with as little delay as possible for fear that in a few years Old Japan would cease to be, do not reckon with our domestic life’, he wrote, explaining that ‘woman is in Japan as elsewhere the greatest conservative element of national life and within her sphere of influence tradition reigns as supreme as ever’.22 These would be places the casual European or American visitor would be unlikely to see, allowed to imagine that the inner and outer life of the city were the same. And while the newer parts of Tokyo were indeed radically different from what had gone before, the old low-rise Edo – and its inhabitants, the Edokko – was still embedded within the new Tokyo, a little off the beaten track perhaps, but never far.
South and east of the imperial palace lay Shitamachi, the Low City, historically the poorer part of the city, a large, mixed and illdefined area. Although regularly ravaged by floods and by fires, most recently by the great flood of 1910 and a fire in 1911, large parts of the area had nevertheless miraculously survived. In the inner quarters of the Low City the memory of old Edo lived on in a maze of lanes and streets dotted with shrines and temples where Edokkos had worshipped since the foundation of the city 300 years previously. It was in the Low City that kabuki theatre was born. This was where the art of wood-block printing had been refined. This was where the traditional festivals of Edo would still be celebrated, and where women would still wear Japanese-style clothing rather than the modern European equivalent. Here, shops were open to the street and there were no pavements. However grand the central business and government districts of the city many felt that the soul of Tokyo was still here, amongst these wooden houses, less sturdily built than the brick buildings of Ginza perhaps but more traditional, more Japanese.
The artisans and merchants of Tokyo still lived in the inner parts of the Low City, alongside the odd sentimental aristocrat who had not bothered to move. A newer class, born from Japan’s economic transformation, lived in the outlying parts, particularly to the east: Tokyo’s 80,000 factory workers.23 Although Yokohama was far more industrialised, with its easy access to the sea and open flat land available for building factories, Tokyo had not been immune to the rise of industry over the last few decades. In Honjo, on the far side of the Sumida river, lay the Sapporo brewery and a string of much smaller factories involved in everything from electroplating to the manufacture of rubber tyres. Conditions here were poor, wages low and job tenure was brief. It was not until 1911 that Japan had passed its first law properly regulating such places of work. In 1913, a hundred girls who lived and worked at the Fuji Gas Spinning Company came down with what looked like typhus.24 In the same year, the novelist Shusei Tokuda had a novel published, set in Honjo, describing the life of a former prostitute and bearing the inimitable title Festering. The everyday realities of life in the more industrial areas of the Low City of Tokyo worried the government. Concerned at the political potential of urban discontent, they occasionally sought to mobilise nationalism as a handy means of turning the populace away from outright criticism of the state. But these were areas that foreigners would be unlikely to see, well off their itineraries of temples, shrines and tea houses.
More familiar, at least by reputation, would be Yoshiwara, the old courtesan district of the Low City, where prostitution had traditionally been licensed, shocking and fascinating Western sensibilities, particularly those of American Christian missionaries. Though Edo had passed into history, Yoshiwara, perhaps the area of Tokyo most closely associated with the drama and licence of the old Edo, had survived. It had lost some of its poetry over the years, some said. ‘The courtesan has degenerated into a tasteless chalk drawing’, Japanese writer Osanai Kaoru complained, ‘the stylish clientele has given way to workmen’s jackets and flat-top haircuts and rubber boots, and mendicant musicians’.25 The brothels were now subject to medical inspections and to government regulation, taking
away something of Yoshiwara’s old style, and some of its panache. More to the point, complained Osanai, it had also lost its attraction as a place in which to set plays:
One had no trouble seeing why playwrights of Edo so often set their plays in Yoshiwara … The daimyo with his millions, the braves of whom everyone was talking, robbers in the grand style who aimed at aristocratic houses, all of them gathered in Yoshiwara. When an accidental meeting was required, therefore, the Yoshiwara was the obvious place to have it occur. No playwright would be silly enough to put the Yoshiwara of our day to such use. A chance encounter under the lights of the beer hall at the main gate would most likely involve a person with a north-country accent and a home-made cap, and his uncle, in the city with a petition to the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture.
But then perhaps that was a kind of modernisation too, and a suggestion of the future: a Tokyo less enchanted than in the days of Edo, but a city more in keeping with its times, a city not of bards and poets but of salarymen and newspapers, a city not of whispered sweet nothings but of slogans and headlines, stock reports and naval displays.
‘Be a success!’, ran a Meiji-era slogan – and Japan surely was, by any modern measure, a success as a nation-state, demonstrated by the naval display at Yokosuka, confirmed by the bustling port of Yokohama and by the goods available in shop windows of the Ginza. Still, the mood of the country in 1913 was not one of easy pride and self-satisfaction, able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of its labour. Japan had become modern, it had become powerful, it had even become rich – but this did not always seem to translate into respect abroad, nor stability at home, nor even into comfortable material prosperity. The Japanese mood in 1913 was strident: proud of the nation’s achievements, but sensitive as to its proper placement amongst the nations of the world, alive to any suggestions of inadequacy, its old political hierarchies questioned more vigorously than before.
Crown Prince Taisho. In 1912, he succeeded his father as Emperor of Japan. Over the previous half-century Japan had emerged onto the world stage, adopted Western technologies, and become a Great Power.
Some might have put it down to the passing of an emperor. Emperor Meiji, guardian of Japan for the dramatic four decades of Japan’s rise, had died only the previous year, in July 1912, plunging the country into mourning. The immediate impacts of his death in Tokyo were substantial enough, but temporary: shops closed their shutters, theatres cancelled productions, economic activity drew to a respectful halt. More significant was the psychological shock. In an era of dramatic change since 1868, Emperor Meiji had been a constant focus for national adulation, and a constant and reassuring presence in his country’s life. The emperor had not only given his name to an era – Meiji meaning ‘enlightened rule’ – he had embodied it. Now he was gone. His successor Emperor Taisho inspired little of the blind faith that his father had. At a time when the country needed reassurance about Japan’s direction, a symbol around which the nation could unite, the young Taisho was better known for drinking and womanising than for governing. He might be surrounded with familiar faces and names – Prince Katsura, the premier at the beginning of 1913, amongst them – but this seemed to confirm the weakness of the Emperor himself and the reassertion of oligarchical power, rather than instilling confidence in the dynamism and intentions of the regime. The year 1913 was the first of the new Taisho era. But what would the era bring?
The Meiji narrative – of Westernisation and modernisation driven forward by an enlightened government – had run its course. The slogans of the past could not be endlessly recycled. The old loyalties could not be relied on forever. Having built a modern nation, Japan would now need to live with its creation. At the beginning of 1913 the country found itself in a deep crisis revolving around the key question of the country’s political development: should Japan continue to be governed by a political oligarchy cloaked in the constitutionalism of 1889 – with premiers such as Katsura effectively chosen by the genro, Japan’s unelected elder statesmen – or should Japan’s government be a true popular democracy, however fractious that might be, with members of the Diet calling the shots?
For most of the Meiji period premiers, nominally appointed by the Emperor, had emerged from the deliberations of the genro oligarchs, often alternating with one another when things got difficult. Political courtesy dictated that a premier should never be embarrassed by abject failure but rather given a face-saving means of withdrawing from office – most probably to return a few years later. Such premiers did not bother with political parties, even after the establishment of the Diet under the constitution of 1889, indeed political parties were looked down upon by the genro oligarchs. They emerged nonetheless. Indeed, because the Diet held the nation’s purse strings, party support had increasingly become a political requirement for any effective ministry, whatever the genro might have wanted. With the accession of the Emperor Taisho in 1912 the old structures of politics, as much defined by cultural practice as by constitutional niceties, were up for grabs. In early 1913 a simmering conflict between the new party politics and the old oligarchy came to a head.
The proximate cause of the crisis was the resignation of the army minister over the government’s refusal to push for two new divisions for the army. Under Japanese law, both army and navy ministers were required to be serving officers, giving both forces key influence at the centre of government. Now, with no officer willing to become army minister, the cabinet as a whole was forced to resign. Long-time oligarch Prince Katsura – a military commander in the Sino-Japanese war and premier during the Russo-Japanese war, now serving at court – returned a third time as premier, persuading the Emperor to issue the necessary order for his transfer from court, and to prorogue parliament while he built a support base. This, his detractors claimed, was to bring the Emperor more directly into politics and to treat parliament with high-handed disrespect. ‘They pay lip service to loyalty and patriotism as if it were their monopoly’, former Tokyo mayor Yukio Ozaki told the Diet, criticising Katsura and his allies, ‘but just look at how they behave’:
They hide behind the throne, lying in wait to ambush their political foes. They have made the throne their breastplate, and the rescript [imperial orders] their bullets to destroy their enemy!26
Crowds gathered to protest Katsura’s political manoeuvrings, and against what they saw as the oligarchs’ arrogant manipulation of Japanese politics. Eventually, the crowd’s anger spilled over into violence. On a single day in February 1913, in a string of events across the city, the offices of the government-supporting Miyako Shimbun newspaper were attacked and burned, two men were crushed underfoot by mounted police protecting the offices of Japan Times, a transportation worker was shot dead from an office of the besieged Kokubim Shimbun and another wounded in the shoulder. The drawn swords of the police ‘glittered terribly in the dark’.27 Police stations were attacked, fire trucks pelted with stones and trams were stopped in their tracks. Troops were put on alert. Katsura was forced to resign. Admiral Yamamoto, a key player in Katsura’s downfall, replaced him – not a full step towards a premier chosen by parliament perhaps, but a powerful demonstration that the age of the oligarchs was drawing to a close. Was this, then, to be the new pattern of Taisho politics – a politics of crisis and protest?
In some respects, life in Japan seemed not to be getting easier, but more difficult. ‘One frequently hears it said that business in Japan is played out’, wrote a British diplomat in the annual report back to London, ‘that the “good old days” when it was possible in a few years to make enough money on which to retire, have gone, never to return’.28 As a result of the glorious but expensive Russo-Japanese War – from which Japan won no indemnity under the terms of the controversial American-backed peace – Japan had run up substantial debts, a large part of which were owed to foreigners. Besides increasing military expenditures, which allowed for a massive expansion of the Imperial Japanese Navy in particular, financial retrenchment was the order of the day. Empero
r Meiji had spent his last ten years urging frugality upon his people. Taxes had risen three-fold since 1897.29
Worse, while Japan had spent decades scrimping and saving and struggling her way towards joining the elite circle of Western nations, it increasingly seemed that that club was closing ranks against her. Many Japanese reasonably felt that they deserved the world’s respect for what they had achieved as a nation. Yet abroad too often they found that they were belittled, as in the light comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, or else presented as a mortal threat to the very ideals of Western civilisation from which Japan had sought to learn. Apparently a weak Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime exhibit for the existence of a ‘Yellow Peril’. Might Japan be forever stuck in a kind of no man’s land between East and West, not allowed to assimilate into the international order of the Western nations as an equal, forever grouped with the countries of the East amongst which she felt herself superior, and respected fully by neither group?
In the 1880s the question of whether Japan should be a Western or Eastern nation had only one answer. The path of Japanese independence was clearly marked. It led west. ‘Our basic assumptions’, Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote in the 1880s, ‘could be summarized in two words: “Good-bye Asia”’:
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