Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Edo culture was better than anything it left to posterity. Its genius was theatrical. The chanoyu, the tea ceremony, that most excellent product of an earlier age, was also essentially theatrical. In the hands of the affluent and cultivated, it brought together the best in handicrafts, in painting, and in architecture, and the “ceremony” itself was a sort of dance punctuated by ritualized conversation. The objects that surrounded it and became a part of it survived, of course, but, whatever may have been the effect on the minds and spirits of the participants, the occasion itself was an amalgam of beautiful elements put together for a few moments, and dispersed.

  So it was too with the highest accomplishments of Edo—and the likening of an evening at the Yoshiwara to an afternoon of tea is not to be taken as jest. In both cases, the performance was the important thing. The notion of leaving something behind for all generations was not relevant. Much that is good in the Occidental theater is also satisfying as literature, but writings for the Tokugawa theater, whether of Edo or of Osaka, tend not to be.

  The best of Edo was in the Kabuki theater and in the pleasure quarters, whose elegant evenings also wore a theatrical aspect. It was a very good best, a complex of elements combining, as with chanoyu, into a moment of something like perfection. The theater reached in many directions, to dominate, for instance, the high demimonde. The theaters and the pleasure quarters were in a symbiotic relationship. The main business of the Yoshiwara and the other quarters was, of course, prostitution, but the preliminaries were theatrical. Great refinement in song and dance was as important to the Yoshiwara as to the theater. There were many grades of courtesan, the lowest of them an unadorned prostitute with her crib and her brisk way of doing business, but letters and paintings by the great Yoshiwara ladies turn up from time to time in exhibitions and sales, to show how accomplished they were.

  The pleasure quarters were culture centers, among the few places where the townsman of affluence could feel that he had things his way, without censorious magistrates telling him to stay down there at the bottom of an unchanging social order. The Yoshiwara was central to the culture of Edo from its emergence in the seventeenth century as something more than a provincial outpost.

  The elegance of the Yoshiwara was beyond the means of the poorer shopkeeper or artisan, but he shared the Edo passion for things theatrical. The city was dotted with Yose, variety or vaudeville halls, where he could go and watch and pass the time of day for a very small admission fee. There he found serious and comic monologues, imitations of great actors, juggling and balancing acts, and mere oddities. At no expense whatever there were shows on festival days in the precincts of shrines and temples. A horror play on a summer night was held to have a pleasantly chilling effect; and indeed summer, most oppressive season for the salaried middle class of the new day, was for the Edo townsman the best of seasons. He could wander around half naked of a warm evening, taking in the sights.

  He did it mostly on foot. A scarcity of wheels characterized Edo, and the shift from feet to wheels was among the major revolutions of Meiji. The affluent of Edo had boats and palanquins, but almost no one but draymen used wheels. More than one modern Japanese city has been described as “the Venice of Japan,” and the appellation might have been used for Edo—it was not as maritime in its habits as Venice, and the proportion of waterways to streets was certainly lower, but there was a resemblance all the same. Edo had a network of waterways, natural and artificial, and the pleasantest way to go to the Yoshiwara was by boat. Left behind by movements and concentrations of modern power, Venice remained Venice. Not Edo. No Japanese city escaped the flood of wheeled vehicles, and there really is no Venice of modern Japan. Something more of the Edo canal and river system might have survived, however, if the city had not become the political center of the modern country, leading the way into Civilization and Enlightenment.

  Pleasure boats moored in the northern suburbs in winter, early Meiji

  In late Edo the resident of Nihombashi had to go what was for him a long distance if he wished a day at the theater or a night in the Yoshiwara. The theaters and the Yoshiwara were there side by side, leagued geographically as well as aesthetically in the northern suburbs. The Yoshiwara had been there through most of the Tokugawa Period. It was popularly known as “the paddies.” The Kabuki theaters were moved north only in very late Edo, when the shogunate had a last seizure of puritanical zeal, and sought to ease its economic difficulties by making the townsman live frugally.

  Asakusa was already a thriving center because of its Kannon temple, and it had long been the final station for wayfarers to the Yoshiwara. Now it had the Kabuki theaters to perform a similar service for. In the last decades of Edo, the theaters and the greatest of the pleasure quarters both lay just beyond the northeastern fringe of the city, and Asakusa was that fringe. The efforts of the shogunate to discourage indulgence and prodigality among the lower classes thus had the effect of making Asakusa, despite its unfortunate situation in watery suburban lands, the great entertainment district of the city. This it was to become most decisively in Meiji.

  The Kannon drew bigger crowds of pilgrims, many of them more intent upon pleasure than upon devotion, than any other temple in the city, and a big crowd was among the things the city loved best. Crowds were their own justification, and the prospect of a big crowd was usually enough to make it even bigger. When the Yoshiwara was first moved north in the seventeenth century, the Kannon sat among tidal marshes, a considerable distance north of Nihombashi, and beyond one of the points guarding access to the city proper. That is why the Yoshiwara was moved there. The shogunate did not go to the extreme of outlawing pleasure, but pleasure was asked, like funerals and cemeteries, to keep its distance.

  The same happened, much later, to the theaters. The Tempo sumptuary edicts, issued between 1841 and 1843, were complex and meticulous, regulating small details of the townsman’s life. The number of variety halls in the city was reduced from upwards of five hundred to fifteen, and the fifteen were required to be serious and edifying.

  Ladies in several trades—musicians, hairdressers, and the proprietresses of archery stalls in such places as the Asakusa Kannon—were held to be a wanton influence, and forbidden to practice.

  In 1842 the Kabuki theater was picked up and moved to the northern limits of the city, a five-minute walk nearer Asakusa than the Yoshiwara. Kabuki was enormously popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The more successful actors were cultural heroes and leaders of fashion and taste, not unlike television personalities today. When two major theaters burned down, permission to rebuild was denied, and the possibility was considered of outlawing Kabuki completely. There was disagreement among the city magistrates, and a compromise was reached, permitting them to rebuild, but far from their old grounds. The suburban villa of a daimyo was taken over for the purpose. There the theaters remained even after the reforming zeal had passed, and there they were when Edo became Tokyo, and the Meiji Period began.

  So Asakusa was well placed to provide the city of the new era with its pleasures. It has declined sadly in recent decades, and its preeminence in late Edo and early Meiji may have been partly responsible. People had traveled there on foot and by boat. Now they were to travel on wheels. The future belonged to rapid transit and to places where commuters boarded suburban trains. Overly confident, Asakusa chose not to become one of these.

  It is of course a story of gradual change. The city has always been prone to sudden change as well, uniformly disastrous. It cannot be said, perhaps, that disasters increased in frequency as the end of Edo approached. Yet they were numerous after the visit of Commodore Perry in 1853, an event which many would doubtless have listed first among them. A foreboding hung over the government and the city.

  The traditional system of chronology proceeds not by a single sequence, as with b.c. and a.d., but by a series of era names, which can be changed at the will of the authorities. I
n premodern Japan, they were often changed in hopes of better fortune; when one name did not seem to be working well, another was tried. The era name was changed a year after the Perry visit, and four times in less than a decade before the Meiji Restoration finally brought an end to the agonies of the Tokugawa.

  Half the Low City was destroyed in the earthquake of 1855. There were two great fires in 1858 and numbers of lesser but still major fires through the remaining Tokugawa years, one of which destroyed the Yoshiwara. The main redoubt of the castle was twice destroyed by fire during the 1860s. Rebuilding was beyond the resources of the shogunate.

  A lesser redoubt, hastily and roughly rebuilt after yet another fire, became the Meiji palace, and served in that capacity until it was destroyed again, early in the new era. A fire which destroyed yet another of the lesser redoubts was blamed on arson. The Meiji emperor spent most of his first Tokyo decades in a Tokugawa mansion to the southwest of the main palace compound. It later became the Akasaka Detached Palace and the residence of the crown prince, and is now the site of the guest house where visiting monarchs and prelates are put up.

  There were, as there had always been, epidemics. It was possible to see ominous portents in them too. A nationwide cholera epidemic in 1858 was laid to the presence of an American warship in Nagasaki.

  The opening of the ports meant the arrival of the foreign merchant and missionary, and the undisguised adventurer. The Tokugawa regime never got around to lifting the anti-Christian edicts of the seventeenth century, but Christianity was tolerated so long as the congregations were foreign. Inflation followed the opening of the ports. The merchant was blamed. On a single night in 1864, ten Japanese merchants were killed or injured, in attacks that must have been concerted.

  “Rice riots” occurred in the autumn of 1866 while the funeral of the fourteenth shogun was in progress. The coincidence was ominous. Indeed, everything about the death of the shogun was ominous, as if the gods had withdrawn their mandate. He had been a very young man, barely past adolescence, and his election had quieted factional disputes which now broke out afresh. He died of beriberi in Osaka, the first in the Tokugawa line to die away from Edo.

  Doughnut cloud forms above the Central Weather Bureau in Kōjimachi as fires sweep the Low City after the earthquake

  The riots began in Fukagawa, east of the Sumida River, as peaceful assemblies of poor people troubled by the high cost of food. In a few days, crowds were gathering in the flatlands west of the river, so large and dense as to block streets. There were lesser gatherings in the hilly districts as well, and four days before the climax of the funeral ceremonies violence broke out. Godowns (as warehouses were called in the East) filled with rice were looted, as were the shops of karamonoya, “dealers in Chinese wares,” by which was meant foreign wares in general and specifically the products beginning to enter the country through Yokohama. It was in the course of the disturbances that the American consul was stoned, at Ueno, where he was observing the excitement.

  What had begun as protests over economic grievances were colored by fright and anger at the changes that had come and were coming. The regime was not seriously endangered by the disturbances, which were disorganized and without revolutionary goals, but the anti-foreign strain is significant. Though the past may have been dark and dirty, the city did not, on the whole, want to give it up.

  Yet the Tokugawa regime had brought trouble upon itself, and upon the city. The population had begun to shrink even before the Restoration. In 1862 relaxation was permitted of an institution central to the Tokugawa system, the requirement that provincial lords keep their families and spend part of their own time in Edo. Families were permitted to go to their provincial homes. There was a happy egress. The Mori of Nagato, most aggressive of the anti-Tokugawa clans, actually dismantled their main Edo mansion and took it home with them. It had stood just south of the castle, where a vacant expanse now seemed to mark the end of an era.

  Widespread unemployment ensued among the lower ranks of the military, and a great loss of economic vitality throughout the city. An attempt in 1864 to revive the old system, under which the families of the daimyo were in effect held hostage in Edo, was unsuccessful. It may be that these changes did not significantly hasten the Tokugawa collapse, but they affected the city immediately and harshly. They plainly announced, as did the presence of foreigners, that things would not be the same again.

  In 1863 the fourteenth shogun, Iemochi, he whose funeral coincided with the rice riots, felt constrained to go to Kyoto, the emperor’s capital, to discuss the foreign threat. The dissident factions were clamoring for immediate and final expulsion. Iemochi was the first shogun to visit Kyoto since the early seventeenth century. Though he returned to Edo for a time, the last years of his tenure were spent largely in and near Kyoto. His successor Keiki (Yoshinobu), the fifteenth and last shogun, did not live in Edo at all during his brief tenure.

  The Tokugawa system of city magistrates continued to the end, but the shogun’s seat was for the most part without a shogun after 1863. The city could not know what sort of end it would be. The shogun was gone, and his prestige and the city’s had been virtually identical. Would someone of similar qualities take his place, or would Edo become merely another provincial city—a remote outpost, even, as it had been before 1600? The half-million townsmen who remained after the shogun and his retainers had departed could but wait and see.

  Chapter 2

  CIVILIZATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

  The fifteenth and last shogun, no longer shogun, returned to Edo early in 1868.

  Efforts to “punish” the rebellious southwestern clans had ended most ingloriously. The Tokugawa regime did not have the resources for further punitive expeditions. The southwestern clans already had the beginnings of a modern conscript army, while the Tokugawa forces were badly supplied and perhaps not very militant, having had too much peace and fun in Edo over the centuries. Seeing the hopelessness of his cause, the shogun resigned early in 1868 (by the solar calendar; it was late 1867 by the old lunar calendar). He himself remained high in the esteem of the city. Late in Meiji, when his long exile in Shizuoka was at an end, he would be invited to write “Nihombashi” for that most symbolic of bridges. Subsequently carved in stone, the inscription survived both earthquake and war. The widow of his predecessor was to become the object of a romantic cult. A royal princess married for political reasons, she refused to leave Edo during the final upheaval.

  Politically inspired violence persuaded retainers of the shogunate to flee Edo. The provincial aristocracy had already fled. Its mansions were burned, dismantled, and left to decay. Common criminals took advantage of the political violence to commit violence of their own. The city locked itself in after dark, and large sections of the High City and the regions near the castle were unsafe even in the daytime.

  The lower classes stayed on, having nowhere to go, and—as their economy had been based on serving the now-dispersed bureaucracy—little to do either. The population fell to perhaps half a million immediately after the Restoration. The townsmen could scarcely know the attitude of the new authorities toward the foreign barbarians and intercourse with barbarian lands. Yokohama was the most convenient port for trading with America, the country that had started it all, but if the new regime did not propose to be cosmopolitan, then placing the capital in some place remote from Yokohama would be an act of symbolic importance. Some did indeed advocate making Osaka the capital, or having Osaka and Edo as joint capitals.

  Even when, in 1868, Edo became Tokyo, “the Eastern Capital,” the issue was not finally resolved. By a manipulation of words for which a large Chinese vocabulary makes the modern Japanese language well suited, a capital was “established” in Edo, or Tokyo. The capital was not, however, “moved” from Kyoto. So Kyoto, which means “capital,” could go on performing a role it was long accustomed to, that of vestigial or ceremonial capital. The Meiji emperor seems to
have gone on thinking of Kyoto as his city; his grave lies within the Kyoto city limits.

  Some scholars have argued that the name of the city was not changed to Tokyo at all. The argument seems extreme, but the complexities of the language make it possible. The crucial rescript, issued in 1868, says, insofar as precise translation is possible: “Edo is the great bastion of the east country. Upon it converge the crowds, and from it one can personally oversee affairs of state. Accordingly the place known as Edo will henceforth be Tokyo.”

  This could mean that Edo is still Edo, but that it is now also “the eastern capital,” or, perhaps, “the eastern metropolitan center.” Another linguistic curiosity made it possible to pronounce the new designation, whether precisely the same thing as a new name or not, in two ways: “Tokei” or “Tokyo.” Both pronunciations were current in early Meiji. W. S. Griffis’s guide to the city, published in 1874, informs us that only foreigners still called the city Edo.

  The townsmen who stayed on could not know that the emperor would come to live among them in Tokyo, or Tokei. The economic life of the city was at a standstill, and its pleasures virtually so. The theaters closed early in 1868. Few came asking for the services of the Yoshiwara. Forces of the Restoration were advancing upon the city. Restoration was in fact revolution, and it remained to be seen what revolution would do to the seat of the old regime. The city had helped very little in making this new world, and the advancing imperial forces knew that the city had no high opinion of their tastes and manners. Gloom and apprehension prevailed.