Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The city waited, and the Meiji armies approached from the west. One of the songs to which they advanced would be made by Gilbert and Sullivan into the song of the Mikado’s troops. It was written during the march on Edo, the melody by Omura Masujirō, organizer of the Meiji armies. The march was halted short of the Hakone mountains for conferences in Shizuoka and in Edo. It was agreed that the castle would not be defended. The last shogun left the city late in the spring of 1868, and the transfer of city and castle was accomplished, bloodlessly, in the next few days. Advance parties of the revolutionary forces were already at Shinagawa and Itabashi, the first stages from Nihombashi on the coastal and inland roads to Kyoto.

  Resistance continued in the city and in the northern provinces. Though most of the Tokugawa forces scattered through the city surrendered, one band took up positions at Ueno, whence it sent forth patrols as if it were still in charge of the city. The heights above Shitaya, now Ueno Park, were occupied by the great Kan-eiji, one of the Tokugawa mortuary temples, behind which lay the tombs of six shoguns. The holdouts controlled the person of the Kan-eiji abbot, a royal prince, and it may have been for this reason that the victors hesitated to attack.

  In mid-May by the lunar calendar, on the Fourth of July by the solar, they finally did attack. From early morning, artillery fire fell upon Ueno from the Hongō rise, across a valley to the west. It was only late in the afternoon that the south defenses were breached, at the “Black Gate,” near the main entrance to the modern Ueno Park, after a fierce battle. Perhaps three hundred people had been killed, twice as many among the defenders as among the attackers. Much of the shelling seems to have fallen short, setting fires. Most of the Kan-eiji was destroyed, and upwards of a thousand houses burned in the regions between Ueno and the artillery emplacements. The abbot fled in disguise, and presently left the city by boat.

  * * *

  If we may leave aside linguistic niceties and say that Edo was now Tokyo and the capital of Japan, it was different from the earlier capitals, Nara and Kyoto. It was already a large city with a proud history. Edo as the shogun’s seat may have been an early instance of a fabricated capital or seat of power, but it had both Chinese and Japanese forebears. Nara and Kyoto had been built upon rural land to become capitals; there had been no urban class on hand to wish that the government had not come. So it had been with Edo when it first became the shogun’s seat, but when it became the emperor’s capital there were the centuries of Edo to look back upon. The proper son of Edo had acquired status by virtue of his nearness to Lord Tokugawa, and when he had the resources with which to pursue good taste, he could congratulate himself that he did it impeccably. Now came these swarms of bumpkins, not at all delicate in their understanding of Edo manners.

  Destroyed, my city, by the rustic warrior.

  No shadow left of Edo as it was.

  This is Tanizaki Junichirō, speaking, much later, for the son of Edo. It is an exaggeration, of course, but many an Edo townsman would have echoed him.

  The emperor departed Kyoto in the autumn of 1868. He reached the Shinagawa post station, just south of the city, after a journey of some three weeks, and entered the castle on the morning of November 26. Townsmen turned out in huge numbers, but the reception was reverent rather than boisterous; utter silence prevailed. By way of precaution against the city’s most familiar disaster, businesses requiring fires were ordered to take a holiday. Then the city started coming back to life. Despite its affection for Lord Tokugawa, it was happy to drink a royal cup. Holidays were decreed in December (the merchant class of Edo had allowed itself scarcely any holidays); two thousand five hundred sixty-three casks of royal sake were distributed through the city, and emptied.

  The emperor returned to Kyoto early in 1869, after the pacification of the northern provinces. He was back in Tokyo in the spring, at which time his permanent residence may be said to have begun. He did not announce that he was leaving Kyoto permanently, and the old capital went on expecting him back. It was not until 1871 that the last court offices were removed from Kyoto, and most of the court aristocracy settled in Tokyo. Edo castle became what it is today, the royal palace, and Tokyo the political center of the country. Until 1923 there was scarcely a suggestion that matters should be otherwise.

  The outer gates to the palace were dismantled by 1872, it having early been decided that the castle ramparts were exaggerated, and that the emperor did not need such ostentatious defenses. Several inner gates, though not the innermost, were released from palace jurisdiction, but not immediately dismantled. The stones from two of the castle guard points were used to build bridges, which the new regime favored, as the old had not.

  Initial policy towards the city was cautious, not to say confused. In effect the Edo government was perpetuated, with a different terminology.

  The north and south magistrates, both with offices in the flatlands east of the castle, were renamed “courts,” and, as under the Tokugawa, charged with governing the city in alternation.

  A “red line” drawn in 1869 defined the city proper. It followed generally the line that had marked the jurisdiction of the Tokugawa magistrates. A few months later the area within the red line was divided into six wards. The expression “Tokyo Prefecture,” meaning the city and larger surrounding jurisdiction, had first been used in 1868. In 1871 the prefecture was divided into eleven wards, the six wards of the inner city remaining as before. In 1878 the six were divided into fifteen, covering an area somewhat smaller than the six inner wards of the city today and the two wards immediately east of the Sumida. There were minor revisions of the city limits from time to time, and in 1920 there was a fairly major one, when a part of the Shinjuku district on the west (not including the station or the most prosperous part of Shinjuku today) was brought into Yotsuya Ward. The fifteen wards remained unchanged, except in these matters of detail, until after the Second World War, and it was only in 1932 that the city limits were expanded to include thirty-five wards, covering generally the eleven wards, or the Tokyo Prefecture, of 1872. The red line of early Meiji takes some curious turns, jogging northwards above Asakusa, for instance, to include the Yoshiwara, and showing in graphic fashion how near the Yoshiwara was, and Asakusa as well, to open paddy land. The Tokyo Prefecture of early Meiji was not as large as the prefecture of today, and the prefecture has never been as large as the old Musashi Province in which Edo was situated. The Tama district, generally the upper valley of the Tama River, which in its lower reaches was and is the boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures, was transferred to Kanagawa Prefecture in 1871. Because it was the chief source of the Tokyo water supply and an important source of building materials as well, there was earnest campaigning by successive governors to have it back. In 1893 it was returned, and so the area of the prefecture was tripled. The Izu Islands had been transferred from Shizuoka Prefecture in 1878 and the Ogasawara or Bonin Islands from the Ministry of the Interior in 1880. The Iwo Islands were added to the Ogasawaras in 1891, and so, with the return of the Tama district two years later, the boundaries of the prefecture were set as they remain today. Remote though they are, the Bonin and Iwo Islands, except when under American jurisdiction, have continued to be a part of Tokyo. It is therefore not completely accurate to say that Okinawa was the only prefecture invaded during the Second World War.

  A still remoter region, the Nemuro district of Hokkaido, was for a time in early Meiji a part of Tokyo Prefecture. The economy of the city was still in a precarious state, because it had not yet been favored with the equivalent of the huge Tokugawa bureaucracy, and the hope was that these jurisdictional arrangements would help in relocating the poor.

  Tokyo Prefecture was one of three fu, which might be rendered “metropolitan prefecture.” The other two were Osaka and Kyoto. Local autonomy was more closely circumscribed in the three than in other prefectures. They had their first mayors in 1898, almost a decade later than other cities. Osaka and Kyot
o have continued to be fu, and to have mayors as well as governors. Tokyo became a to, or “capital district,” during the Second World War, the only one in the land. Today it is the only city, town, or village in the land that does not have a mayor.

  On September 30, 1898, the law giving special treatment to the three large cities was repealed, and so October 1 is observed in Tokyo as Citizens’ Day, the anniversary of the day on which it too was permitted a mayor. He was chosen through a city council voted into office by a very small electorate. The council named three candidates, of whom one was appointed mayor by imperial rescript, upon the recommendation of the Ministry of the Interior. It became accepted practice for the candidate with the largest support in the council to be named mayor. The first mayor was a councilman from Kanda Ward, in the Low City. Tokyo has had at least two very famous mayors, Ozaki Yukio, who lived almost a century and was a stalwart defender of parliamentary democracy in difficult times, and Gotō Shimpei, known as “the mayor with the big kerchief,” an expression suggesting grand and all-encompassing plans. Though it cannot be said that Gotō’s big kerchief came to much of anything, he is credited by students of the subject with having done more than any other mayor to give the city a sense of its right to autonomy. He resigned a few weeks before the great earthquake to take charge of difficult negotiations with revolutionary Russia, but his effectiveness had already been reduced considerably by the assassination in 1921 of Hara Takeshi, the prime minister, to whom he was close. Before he became mayor he had already achieved eminence in the administration of Taiwan (then a Japanese possession) and in the national government.

  The first city council was elected in 1889, the year other cities were permitted to elect mayors. There were three classes of electors, divided according to income, each of which elected its own councilmen.

  Some very eminent men were returned to the council in that first election, and indeed lists of councilmen through successive elections are worthy of a body with more considerable functions. The Ministry of the Interior had a veto power over acts of the city government and from time to time exercised the power, which had an inhibiting effect on the mayor and the council. Fukuzawa Yukichi, perhaps the most successful popularizer of Civilization and Enlightenment, the rallying call of the new day, was among those elected to the first council. Yasuda Zenjirō, founder of the Yasuda (now the Fuji) financial empire, was returned by the poorest class of electors.

  The high standards of the council did not pervade all levels of government. There were scandals. The most sensational was the one known as the gravel scandal. On the day in 1920 that the Meiji Shrine was dedicated (to the memory of the Meiji emperor), part of a bridge just below the shrine collapsed. Investigation revealed that crumbly cement had been used, and this in turn led to revelations of corruption in the city government. The gravel scandal coincided with a utilities scandal, and the mayor, among the most popular the city has had, resigned, to be succeeded by the famous Gotō Shimpei. Tokyo deserves the name it has made for itself as a well-run city, but City Hall does have its venalities from time to time.

  The Meiji system, local and national, could hardly be called democratic, but it was more democratic than the Tokugawa system had been. It admitted the possibility of radical departures. Rather large numbers of people, without reference to pedigree, had something to say about how they would be governed. Meiji was a vital period, and gestures toward recognizing plebeian talents and energies may help to account for the vitality. The city suffered from “happy insomnia,” said Hasegawa Shigure, on the night the Meiji constitution went into effect.

  Her father made a speech. The audience was befuddled, shouting, “No, no!” when prearranged signals called for “Hear, hear!” and vice versa; but it was happy, so much so that one man literally drank himself to death. It is an aspect of Meiji overlooked by those who view it as a time of dark repression containing the seeds of 1945.

  The Meiji emperor, photographed in 1872

  The population of the city increased from about the fifth year of Meiji. It did not reach the highest Edo levels until the mid-1880s. The sparsely populated High City was growing at a greater rate than the Low City, though in absolute terms the accretion was larger in the Low City. The new population came overwhelmingly from the poor rural areas of northeastern Japan. Despite its more stable population, the Low City had a higher divorce rate than the High City, and a higher rate than the average for the nation. But then the Low City had always been somewhat casual toward sex and domesticity. It had a preponderantly male population, and Tokyo continues to be one of the few places in the land where men outnumber women. The High City changed more than the Low City in the years between the Restoration and the earthquake, but when sons of Edo lament the death of their city, they refer to the dispersal of the townsman and his culture, the culture of the Low City. The rich moved away and so their patronage of the arts was withdrawn, and certain parts of the Low City, notably those immediately east of the palace, changed radically.

  Change, as it always is, was uneven. Having heard the laments of the sons of Edo and turned to scrutinize the evidence, one may be more surprised at the continuity. The street pattern, for instance, changed little between Restoration and earthquake. In his 1874 guide to the city, W. E. Griffis remarked upon “the vast extent of open space as well as the lowness and perishable material of which the houses are built.” Pictures taken from the roof of the City Hall in the last years of Meiji still show astonishing expanses of open land, where once the mansions of the military aristocracy had stood. Photographs from the Nikolai Cathedral in Kanda, taken upwards of a decade earlier, show almost unbroken expanses of low wooden buildings all the way to the horizon, dissolving into what were more probably photographic imperfections than industrial mists.

  One would have had to scan the expanses carefully to find precise and explicit survivals among the back alleys of Edo. Fires were too frequent, and the wish to escape the confines of an alley and live on a street, however narrow, was too strong. Yet one looks at those pictures taken from heights and wonders what all those hundreds of thousands of people were doing and thinking, and the very want of striking objects seems to offer an answer. The hundreds of thousands must have been far closer to their forebears of a hundred years before than to the leaders, foreign and domestic, of Civilization and Enlightenment.

  Even today the Low City is different from the High City—tighter, more conservative, less given to voguish things. The difference is something that has survived, not something that has been wrought by the modern century.

  It was considered very original of Charles Beard, not long before the earthquake, to characterize Tokyo as a collection of villages, but the concept was already familiar enough. John Russell Young, in attendance upon General and Mrs. Grant when they came visiting in 1879, thus described a passage up the river to dine at an aristocratic mansion:

  The Prince had intended to entertain us in his principal town-house, the one nearest the Enriokwan, but the cholera broke out in the vicinity, and the Prince invited us to another of his houses in the suburbs of Tokio. We turned into the river, passing the commodious grounds of the American Legation, its flag weather-worn and shorn; passing the European settlement, which looked a little like a well-to-do Connecticut town, noting the little missionary churches surmounted by the cross; and on for an hour or so past tea houses and ships and under bridges, and watching the shadows descend over the city. It is hard to realize that Tokio is a city—one of the greatest cities of the world. It looks like a series of villages, with bits of green and open spaces and inclosed grounds breaking up the continuity of the town. There is no special character to Tokio, no one trait to seize upon and remember, except that the aspect is that of repose. The banks of the river are low and sedgy, at some points a marsh. When we came to the house of the Prince we found that he had built a causeway of bamboo through the marsh out into the river.

  The city grew almost w
ithout interruption from early Meiji to the earthquake. There was a very slight population drop just before the First World War, to be accounted for by economic disquiet, but by the end of Meiji there were not far from two million people. Early figures, based on family registers, proved to be considerably exaggerated when, in 1908, the national government made a careful survey. It showed a population of about a million and two-thirds. This had risen to over two million by 1920, when the first national census was taken. The 1920 census showed that almost half the residents of the city had been born elsewhere, the largest number in Chiba Prefecture, just across the bay; and so it may be that the complaints of the children of Edo about the new men from the southwest were exaggerated. In the decade preceding the census (the figures are based upon family registers) the three central wards seem to have gained population at a much lower rate than the city as a whole. The most rapid rate of increase was in Yotsuya Ward, to the west of the palace. The High City was becoming more clearly the abode of the elite, now identified more in terms of money than of family or military prowess. Wealthy merchants no longer had to live in the crowded lowlands, and by the end of Meiji most of them had chosen to leave. Asakusa Ward stood first both in population and in population density.

  Tokyo had been somewhat tentatively renamed and reorganized, but it passed through the worst of the Restoration uncertainty by the fourth or fifth year of Meiji, and was ready for Civilization and Enlightenment: Bummei Kaika. The four Chinese characters, two words, very old, provided the magical formula for the new day. Bummei is generally rendered as “civilization,” though it is closely related to bunka, usually rendered as “culture.” Kaika means something like “opening” or “liberalization,” though “enlightenment” is perhaps the commonest rendering. Both words are ancient borrowings from Chinese. As early as 1867 they were put together and offered as an alternative to the dark shadows of the past.