Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The horse trolley arrived in 1883. The first route followed the old omnibus route north from Shimbashi to Nihombashi, and eventually to Asakusa. In the relentless advance of new devices, horse-drawn transportation had a far shorter time of prosperity than in Europe and America. There was already experimentation with the electric trolley before the horse trolley had been in use for a decade. An industrial exposition featured an electric car in 1890. In 1903 a private company laid the first tracks for general use, from Shinagawa to Shimbashi, and later to Ueno and Asakusa. The electric system was very soon able to carry almost a hundred thousand passengers a day, for lower fares than those asked by rickshaw runners, and so the rickshaw withdrew to the suburbs. Initially in private hands, the trolley system was no strong argument for private enterprise. There were three companies, and the confusion was great. In 1911, the last full year of Meiji, the city bought the system.

  Horse-drawn buses in Ginza Bricktown, from a print by Hiroshige III (Courtesy Tokyo Central Library)

  The confusion is the subject of, or the occasion for, one of Nagai Kafū’s most beautiful prose lyrics, “A Song in Fukagawa” (Fukagawa no Uta), written in 1908. The narrator boards a trolley at Yotsuya and sets forth eastwards across the city. As it passes Tsukiji, an unplanned but not unusual event occurs, which sends him farther than he has thought to go.

  The car crossed Sakura Bridge. The canal was wider. The lighters moving up and down gave an impression of great activity, but the New Year decorations before the narrow little shops and houses seemed punier, somehow, than in Tsukiji. The crowds on the sidewalks seemed less neat and orderly. We came to Sakamoto Park, and waited and waited for a sign that we would be proceeding onwards. None came. Cars were stopped in front of us and behind us. The conductor and motorman disappeared.

  “Again, damn it. The damned powers gone off again.” A merchant in Japanese dress, leather-soled pattens and a cloak of rough, thick weave, turned to his companion, a redfaced old man in a fur muffler.

  A boy jumped up, a delivery boy, probably. He had a bundle on his back, tied around his neck with a green kerchief.

  “A solid line of them, so far up ahead you can’t see the end of it.”

  The conductor came running back, change bag under his arm, cap far back on his head. He mopped at his brow.

  “It might be a good idea to take transfers if you can use them.”

  Most of us got up, and not all of us were good-humored about it.

  “Can’t you tell us what’s wrong? How long will it be?”

  “Sorry. You see how it is. They’re stopped all the way to Kayabachō…”

  Caught in the general rush for the doors, I got up without thinking. I had not asked for one, but the conductor gave me a transfer to Fukagawa.

  So Kafū finds himself east of the river, and meditates upon the contrast between that backward part of the city and the advanced part from which he has come. He yearns for the former, and must go back and live in the latter; and we are to suppose that he would not have had his twilight reverie if the trolley system had functioned better.

  The rickshaw changed patterns of commerce by speeding people past boat landings. The trolley had a more pronounced effect, the Daimaru dry-goods store being a case in point. It was one of several such establishments that were to develop into department stores. Established in Nihombashi in the eighteenth century, it was in mid-Meiji the most popular of them all, even more so than Mitsukoshi, foundation of the Mitsui fortunes. “The Daimaru,” said Hasegawa Shigure, “was the center of Nihombashi culture and prosperity, as the Mitsukoshi is today.” In her girlhood it was a place of wonder and excitement. It had barred windows, less to keep burglars out than to keep shop boys (there were no shop girls in those days) in. Sometimes a foreign lady with foxlike visage would come in to shop, and the idle of Nihombashi would gather to stare. But the Daimaru did not lie, as its rivals did, on a main north-south trolley line. By the end of the Meiji it had closed its Tokyo business and withdrawn to the Kansai, whence only in recent years it has returned to Tokyo, this time not letting the transportation system pass it by. It commands an entrance to Tokyo Central Station.

  For some, Nagai Kafū among them, the trolley was a symbol of disorder and ugliness. For others it was the introduction to a new world, at once intimidating and inviting. The novelist Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō, a university student from the country, took the advice of a friend and dashed madly and randomly about, seeking the rhythms of this new world.

  Construction of a railway, financed in London, began in 1870. The chief engineer was English, and a hundred foreign technicians and workers were engaged to run it. Not until 1879 were trains entrusted to Japanese crews, and then only for daylight runs. The first line was from Shimbashi, south of Ginza, to Sakuragichō in Yokohama, a stop that still serves enormous numbers of passengers, though it is no longer the main Yokohama station. The Tokyo terminus was moved some four decades later to the present Tokyo Central Station, and the old Shimbashi Station became a freight office, disappearing in 1923.

  Daimaru Department Store, Nihombashi. Woodcut by Kiyochika

  The very earliest service, in the summer of 1872, was from Shinagawa, just beyond the southern limits of the city, to Yokohama. The Tokyo terminus was opened in the autumn, amid jubilation. The emperor himself took the first train He wore foreign dress, but most of the high courtiers were in traditional court dress; Western dress was still expensive and very difficult to come by. Among the notables present was the king of Okinawa.

  The fare was higher than for a boat or horse-drawn bus. Everyone wanted a ride, but only the affluent could afford a ride daily. Eighty percent of the passengers are said to have been merchants and speculators with business in Yokohama. The first tickets carried English, German, and French translations. From 1876 on, there was only English.

  It was in 1877 that an early passenger, E. S. Morse, made his famous discovery of the shell middens of Omori, usually considered the birthplace of Japanese archeology. The train took almost an hour to traverse its twenty-five kilometers, and Omori was then a country village offering no obstructions, and so, without leaving his car, Morse was able to contemplate the mounds at some leisure and recognize them for what they were.

  The Tokyo-Yokohama line was the first segment of the Tokaidō line, put through from Tokyo to Kobe in 1889. Unlike the Tokaidō, the main line to the north was built privately, from Ueno. It was completed to Aomori, at the northern tip of the main island, in 1891. By the turn of the century private endeavor had made a beginning at the network of suburban lines that was to work such enormous changes on the city; in 1903 Shibuya Station, outside the city limits to the southwest, served an average of fifteen thousand passengers a day. When it had been first opened, less than two decades before, it served only fifteen.

  Shimbashi Station possessed curious ties with the Edo tradition. The Edo mansion of the lords of Tatsuno had stood on the site. Tatsuno was a fief neighboring that of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers of the most famous Edo vendetta. The Forty-seven are said to have refreshed themselves there as they made their way across the city, their vendetta accomplished, to commit suicide.

  If the railroad caused jubilation, it also brought opposition. The opposition seems to have been strongest in the bureaucracy. Carrying Yokohama and its foreigners closer to the royal seat was not thought a good idea. If a railroad must be built, might it not better run to the north, where it could be used against the most immediately apparent threat, the Russians? Along a part of its course, just south of the city, it was in the event required to run inland, because for strategic reasons the army opposed the more convenient coastal route.

  Among the populace the railway does not seem to have aroused as much opposition as the telegraph, about which the wildest rumors spread, associating it with the black magic of the Christians and human sacrifice. People seem to have been rather friendly
towards the locomotive. Thinking that it must be hot, poor thing, they would douse it with water from embankments.

  By the eve of the earthquake there were ten thousand automobiles in the city, but they did not displace the railroad as railroad and trolley had displaced the rickshaw. In one important respect they were no competition at all. When the railroad came, the Ukiyo-e print of Edo was still alive. The art, or business, had considerable vigor, though many would say that it was decadent. Enormous numbers of prints were made, millions of them annually in Tokyo alone, almost exclusively in the Low City. Few sold for as much as a penny. They were throwaways, little valued either as art or as investment. Nor were technical standards high. Artists did not mind and did not expect their customers to mind that the parts of a triptych failed to join precisely. Bold chemical pigments were used with great abandon. Yet Meiji prints often have a contagious exuberance. They may not be reliable in all their details, but they provide excellent documents, better than photographs, of the Meiji spirit. Losses over the years have been enormous. Today such of them as survive are much in vogue, bringing dollar prices that sometimes run into four figures, or yen prices in six figures.

  The printmakers of early Meiji loved trains and railroads. Many of the prints are highly fanciful, like representations of elephants and giraffes by people who have never seen one. A train may seem to have no axles, and to roll on its wheels as a house might roll on logs. Windows are frivolously draped, and two trains will be depicted running on the same track in collision course, as if that should be no problem for something so wondrous. The more fanciful images can seem prophetic, showing urban problems to come, smog, traffic jams, a bureaucracy indifferent to approaching disaster.

  Train on Takenawa embankment. Woodcut by Kiyochika

  Sometimes the treatment was realistic. The manner of Kobayashi Kiyochika, generally recognized as the great master of the Meiji print is both realistic and effective, as beautiful a treatment of such unlikely subjects as railroads, surely, as is to be found anywhere.

  Kiyochika was born in Honjo, east of the Sumida, in 1847, near the present Kyōgoku Station and not far from the birthplace of the great Hokusai. The shogunate had lumber and bamboo yards in the district. His father was a labor foreman in government employ. Though the youngest of many sons, Kiyochika was named the family heir, and followed the last shogun to Shizuoka. The shogun in exile was himself far from impoverished, but many of his retainers were. Kiyochika put together a precarious living at odd jobs, one of them on the vaudeville stage. Deciding finally to return to Tokyo, he stopped on the way, or so it is said—the details of his life are not well established—to study art under Charles Wirgman, the British naval officer who became Yokohama correspondent for the Illustrated London News. Missing nothing, Kiyochika is said also to have studied photography under Shimooka Renjō, the most famous of Meiji photographers, and painting in the Japanese style as well.

  His main career as a printmaker lasted a scant five years, from 1876 to 1881, although he did make an occasional print in later life. In that brief period he produced more than a hundred prints of Tokyo. The last from the prolific early period are of the great Kanda fire of 1881, in which his own house was destroyed. (That fire was, incidentally, the largest in Meiji Tokyo.)

  All the printmakers of early Meiji used Western subjects and materials, but Kiyochika and his pupils (who seem to have been two in number) achieved a Western look in style as well. It may be that, given his Westernized treatment of light and perspective, he does not belong in the Ukiyo-e tradition at all.

  The usual Meiji railway print is bright to the point of gaudiness, and could be set at any hour of the day. The weather is usually sunny, and the cherries are usually in bloom. Kiyochika is best in his nocturnes. He is precise with hour and season, avoiding the perpetual springtide of his elders. His train moves south along the Takanawa hill and there are still traces of color upon the evening landscape; so one knows that the moon behind the clouds must be near full.

  The prints of Kiyochika’s late years, when he worked mostly as an illustrator, are wanting in the eagerness and the melancholy of prints from the rich early period. The mixture of the two, eagerness and melancholy, seems almost prophetic—or perhaps we think it so because we know what was to happen to his great subject, the Low City. His preference for nocturnes was deeply appropriate, for there must have been in the life of the Low City this same delight in the evening, and with it a certain apprehension of the dawn.

  Shrine near the Yoshiwara. Woodcut by Inoue Yasuji, after Kiyochika

  The lights flooding through the windows of Kiyochika’s Rokumeikan, where the elite of Meiji gathered for Westernized banquets and balls, seem about to go out. Lights are also ablaze in the great and venerable restaurant outside the Yoshiwara, but they seem subdued and dejected, for the rickshaws on their way to the quarter do not stop as the boats once did. In twilight fields outside the Yoshiwara stands a little shrine, much favored by the courtesans. Soon (we know, and Kiyochika seems to know too) the city will be flooding in all around it. Other little shrines and temples found protectors and a place in the new world, but this one did not. No trace of it remains.

  Kiyochika had a knack one misses in so many travel writers of the time for catching moods and tones that would soon disappear. Other woodcut artists of the day, putting everything in the sunlight of high spring, missed the better half of the picture. Kiyochika was a gifted artist, and that period when Edo was giving way to Tokyo provided fit subjects for the light of evening and night. He outlived the Meiji emperor by three years.

  The importance of the waterways declined as the city acquired wheels and streets were improved. The system of rivers, canals, and moats had been extensive, drawing from the mountains to the west of the city and the Tone River to the north. Under the shogunate most of the produce brought into the city had come by water. At the end of Taishō, or three years after the earthquake, most of it came by land. This apparent shift is something of a distortion, since it ignores Yokohama, the international port for Tokyo. The decline of water transport is striking all the same. There was persistent dredging at the mouth of the Sumida, but Tokyo had no deep harbor. It could accommodate ships of not more than five hundred tons. All through the Meiji Period the debate continued as to whether or not the city should seek to become an international port. Among the arguments against the proposal was the old xenophobic one: a harbor would bring in all manner of foreign rogues and diseases. What is remarkable is that such an argument could still be offered seriously a half-century after the question of whether or not to have commerce with foreign rogues had presumably been settled.

  The outer moats of the palace were filled in through the Meiji Period, and the Tameike reservoir, to the southwest of the palace, which had been among the recommended places in guides to the pleasures of Edo for gathering new herbs in the spring and, in high summer, viewing lotus blossoms and hearing them pop softly open, was allowed to gather sediment. Its military importance having passed, it became a swamp in late Meiji, and in Taishō quite disappeared.

  The system of canals was still intact at the end of Meiji, and there were swarms of boats upon them and fish within them. Life on the canals and rivers seems to have been conservative even for the conservative Low City. An interesting convention in the woodcuts of Meiji is doubtless based upon fact. When bridges are shown, as they frequently are, the roadway above is generally an exuberant mixture of the new and the traditional, the imported and the domestic; on the waters below there is seldom a trace of the new and imported.

  Pleasure-boating of the old sort almost disappeared. Advanced young people went rowing on the Sumida, and the university boathouse was one of the sights on the left bank. A 1920 guide to Japan, however, lists but a single funayado in the city. The funayado, literally “boat lodge” or “boating inn,” provided elegant boating for entertainment on the waters or for an excursion to the Yoshiwara. The boa
ts were of the roofed, high-prowed sort, often with lanterns strung out along the eaves, that so often figure in Edo and Meiji woodcuts. Since the customer expected to be entertained as well as rowed, the funayado provided witty and accomplished entertainers, and so performed services similar to those of the Yoshiwara teahouses. As the network of canals disappeared, some of them made the transition into the new day and became the sort of restaurant to which geisha are summoned, but a great many merely went out of business. Ginza and Kyōbashi were the southern terminus for passage to the Yoshiwara. The funayado of that region were therefore among the ingredients from which the Shimbashi geisha district, still one of the finest in the city, was made.

  Connoisseurs like Nagai Kafū said that Edo died of flood and fire, but it may be that the loss of boats and waterways had an even more destructive effect on the moods of Edo. Kafū himself implies as much when, in an elegiac evocation of late Edo, he has a famous writer set forth from a funayado and take stock of events. He is a victim of the puritanical edicts of the 1840s, and a quiet time on the Sumida is best for surveying the past and the future. The wheels of Meiji disrupted old patterns and rhythms. There was no longer the time or the inclination to put together a perfect outing, and so the arts of plebeian Edo were not in demand as they once had been.