The Low City lived with the threat of fire. Only the wealthy had fireproof godowns. The lower classes kept emergency baskets ready in conspicuous places, and dug pits under their floors with ingenious arrangements that caused flooding when heated, and so, it was hoped, preserved such valuables as had been put away in time.
The young Tanizaki and his friends found an interesting use for the baskets.
They were oblong and woven of bamboo, about the size of a small trunk, and they were kept where everyone could see them, awaiting an emergency. In the Kairakuen they were kept in a storeroom that had been the Chinese room. For us, as we played at our games, they became the cribs of the courtesans. Three and four of us would take turns in a basket as ladies and their companions. Gen-chan and I were lady and companion any number of times. I do not remember that we did much of anything but lie face to face for a few minutes. Then it would be the turn of another lady and companion to produce staring and snickering.
I think that the origin of the game was probably in reports that Gen-chan had from the cooks about the Susaki quarter. The game delighted us, in any event. Day after day we would play it, the fire-basket game, as we called it.
“Let s have another go at the fire baskets,” someone would say.
E. S. Morse, the American zoologist who taught at the imperial university in early Meiji, was a great connoisseur of fires and firefighting methods.
Nearly every house has a staging on the ridge-pole with a few steps leading to it. Here one may go the better to observe the progress of a conflagration… When endangered by the approach of a conflagration the heavy window shutters and the doors of the fireproof building are closed and clay is then plastered over the cracks and chinks. Before closing it up, a number of candles are placed in a safe spot on the floor within and are lighted, thus gradually consuming all the oxygen and rendering ignition less likely.
Morse was initially contemptuous of Tokyo firefighting methods, but moved towards admiration as he became more knowledgeable. Of the first good fire to which he was witness, he said, among other things:
The stream thrown was about the size of a lead pencil and consisted of a series of independent squirts, as there was no air chamber as with our hand engines. The pumps were square instead of cylindrical and everything so dry, having hung in the sun for weeks, that more water spurted up in the air from the cracks than was discharged through the pipe… The fire companies are private and each company has a standard-bearer… These standard-bearers take a position as near the fire as possible, on the roof even of a burning building, and the companies whose standard-bearers are in evidence get a certain amount of money from the owners of the buildings saved.
In a note added for publication, he provided more sophisticated information, to the effect that the chief work of the firemen was not to put fires out but to prevent their spreading, and that the purpose of the little streams of water was not to extinguish the fire but to preserve the firemen.
By 1879, when he ran two miles at five o’clock one April morning to observe a fire, admiration was predominant.
The extent of the conflagration showed how rapidly it had spread, and the wooden buildings partly burned indicated that the work of firemen was not so trivial as foreigners supposed it to be; at least to check the fire in a high gale must have required great effort and skill. The fact is that their houses are so frail that as soon as a fire starts it spreads with the greatest rapidity, and the main work of the firemen, aided by citizens, is in denuding a house of everything that can be stripped from it… It seems ridiculous to see them shoveling off the thick roofing files, the only fireproof covering the house has; but this is to enable them to tear off the roofing boards, and one observes that the fire then does not spring from rafter to rafter. The more one studies the subject the more one realizes that the first impressions of the fireman’s work are wrong, and a respect for his skill rapidly increases.
Given the fact that the fire brigades were largely manned by carpenters, a certain conflict of interest might be suspected; but they seem to have done their work bravely and, within the limits of the materials they had to work with, well.
Fire losses declined as Meiji gave way to Taishō. An accompaniment, or so the children of Edo often saw it, was a loss of harmony in traditional architecture. Kafū lamented it, and so did the novelist, playwright, and haiku master Kubota Mantarō, who may be numbered among Kafū’s disciples. Kubota was a true son of Edo, born in 1889 in Asakusa (Tanizaki was born in Nihombashi three years earlier) to a family of craftsmen and shopkeepers. He stayed in Asakusa until the fires of 1923 drove him away, and, though he never moved back, spent most of the four decades that remained to him in various parts of the Low City. Sadness for the Low City and what the modern world did to it dominated his writing in all the several forms of which he was master. He had the right pedigree and unswerving devotion to the cause; and so he may be called the most eloquent spokesman for that loquacious band, the sons of Edo. Tanizaki was a better novelist, but he spoke on the whole grouchily of his native Low City. Writing in 1927, Kubota lamented the disappearance of the hinomi, the “firewatcher” or staging noted by Morse on the ridges of Tokyo houses.
Among the things that have disappeared from all the blocks of Tokyo is the hinomi. I do not mean the fire ladder or the firewatch tower. I mean the hinomi itself. I do not know about the High City, but in the Low City, and especially on the roofs of merchant houses in busy and prosperous sections, there was always a hinomi. It was not only a memento of Edo, so ready with its fires. In the days when the godown style was the ideal in Japanese architecture, the hinomi was, along with the board fence, the spikes to turn back robbers, and the eaves drains, an indispensable element giving form to a Japanese house. And such fond dreams as the thought of it does bring, of Tokyo under willows in full leaf.
It may seem silly to mourn for appurtenances that proclaim a building, and indeed a whole city, to be a firetrap. Yet Kubota’s remarks, and similar remarks by other mourners for Edo such as Nagai Kafū, have substance. Despite the failure of the city to take advantage of the Ginza model, it gradually made itself more resistant to fire, and the result was a great increase in ugliness. “Fair to look at is the capital of the Tycoon,” said Sir Rutherford Alcock, who was in Edo during the last years of the Tycoon, or shogun. No one could call the Tokyo of our day a fair city, though it contains beautiful things. Coming upon a surviving pocket of Edo or Meiji, one sees in the somber harmonies of tile and old wood what has been lost.
The domestic and commercial architecture of Tokugawa Japan varied with the region. Except for warehouses, it was almost always of wooden frame construction, one or two storys high. The Kansai region favored paints and stains much more than did the Kantō and its greatest city, Edo. In Edo there were several kinds of roofing. The more affluent merchant houses were heavily roofed with dark tiles, while humbler dwellings had thatched or shingled roofs, the best kind of fuel for the fires that were always getting started. The wooden fronts of the unpainted houses and shops of Edo, often with delicate lattices over the windows, turned to rich shades of brown as they aged, and the roofs were of neutral tones to begin with.
Only an eye accustomed to austere subtleties could detect the reposeful variations upon brown and gray which a Low City street must have presented. That is probably why one looks in vain through writings by early foreign visitors for descriptions of what the Low City looked like (as distinguished from its effect upon the other senses). Even E. S. Morse, the most discerning and sympathetic of them, is far better at street cries and the buzz of life and quaint curiosities than he is at the expanses of wood and tile that he must have passed every day. Isabella Bird went through the wards east of the river in her quest for unbeaten tracks. She tells us nothing about them, though they must have been among the urban places of early Meiji where the old harmonies were least disturbed. Perhaps if she had known that they all were
to go (and to do so more rapidly than unbeaten tracks), she might have tried a little to describe them.
The very first Western buildings, such as the British legation and the Hoterukan, were not fireproof. They were built by Japanese, accommodating old Japanese techniques to what were presumed to be Western needs and sensibilities. The first period of pure Western building may be held to begin with the new Ginza. It is often called the English period. Thomas Waters gave advice for Ginza, and Josiah Conder, the most famous of foreign architects active in Meiji Japan, put up buildings all over the city. The work of Japanese architects, inconspicuous during the English period, began to appear again in mid-Meiji. The most eminent were Conder’s pupils. A Japanese architect designed the first Imperial Hotel, which opened on a part of the present site in 1890. The grandest buildings of late Meiji and early Taishō—the Bank of Japan, the Akasaka Palace, the Imperial Theater, Tokyo Central Station—were by Japanese.
Conder, born in 1852, came to Japan early in 1877, retained by the Ministry of Technology. He taught architecture at the College of Technology and later at the university. A student of Japanese painting, he was especially good at fish.
He was a very important man. No other foreign architect who worked in Japan, not even Frank Lloyd Wright, was as influential as Conder, and probably none will be. He was a highly eclectic and not particularly original architect, but he was enormously successful as a teacher. The grand style in public building derives from him. His most famous work was an early one, the Rokumeikan, which gave its name to a span of years in mid-Meiji. Begun in 1881 and finished in 1883, the Rokumeikan was a state-owned lodging and gathering place for the cosmopolitan set. It was also, in those days when the “unequal treaties” were the great sore to be healed, a means of demonstrating to the world that the Japanese were as civilized and enlightened as anyone else, and so need not put up with such indignities as extraterritoriality.
The Rokumeikan
The name means “House of the Cry of the Stag.” It is a literary allusion, to a poem in the oldest of Chinese anthologies, the Shih Ching, and it signifies a hospitable summons to illustrious guests, and the convivial gathering that ensues. The Hama Palace, which had a semi-Western guest house even before the rebuilding of the Ginza, had earlier provided lodging for such guests, among them General Grant; it was in a bad state of repair, however, and otherwise considered unsuited to the needs of foreigners. So the Rokumeikan was put up, on the site of a Satsuma estate in Hibiya, by then government property, across from what was to become Hibiya Park.
It was a two-story structure of brick, in an Italianate style, most splendid for the time, with about fifteen thousand square feet of floor space. It had a ballroom, a music room, a billiard room, a reading room, suites for illustrious guests, and a bathtub such as had never before been seen in the land: alabaster, six feet long and three feet wide. Water thundered most marvelously, we are told, from the faucets.
Pierre Loti, who attended a Rokumeikan ball on the emperor’s birthday in 1885, thought that, all flat, staring white, it resembled a casino at a French spa. He may have been dazed. He was taken by rickshaw, he says, from Shimbashi Station through dark, solitary streets, and arrived at the Rokumeikan about an hour later. One can easily walk the distance in ten minutes.
The great day of the Rokumeikan must be discussed later. It became the Peers Club once its vogue had passed (though the unequal treaties had not yet disappeared), and then the offices of an insurance company. After further changes it was torn down, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, to make way for a cluster of temporary government buildings. A far more delicate structure than the Imperial Hotel (the second one, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) on the same Satsuma lands, it too survived the earthquake.
Perhaps the best notion of what it was like is to be had from a still-surviving Conder building, the Mitsui Club in Mita near Keiō University. Finished in 1915, the Mitsui Club is larger, but it is similarly provided with wide verandas and colonnades. Pictures suggest that the Rokumeikan, at least its front elevation, was more ornate—busier—than the Mitsui Club. Verandas do not run the whole length of the Mitsui Club as they apparently did that of the Rokumeikan, columns are fewer and farther apart, and the eaves and the roof do not, as with the Rokumeikan, call attention to themselves. Yet the Mitsui Club is probably of all buildings in the city the one most like the lost treasure. The first Imperial also echoed the Rokumeikan. A part of the same panorama, it must have seemed very much what it was, the work of the faithful and reverent disciple.
Conder put up many buildings, only a few of which remain. He supervised the building of the Nikolai Cathedral in Kanda, which was finished in 1891, after the design of a Russian professor. Seriously damaged in the earthquake, the Nikolai is now squatter and solider than it was before the disaster.
The Imperial and the Ryōunkaku, the “cloud scraper” of Asakusa, opened for business within a week of each other. Popularly called the Asakusa Twelve Storys, the Ryōunkaku was the building that lost its top storys in the earthquake and was then demolished by army engineers.
If the Rokumeikan was the great symbol of the Meiji elite and its cosmopolitanism, the Twelve Storys was in late Meiji the great symbol of the masses and their pleasures. Asakusa was by that time the busiest center of popular entertainment. The Twelve Storys symbolized Asakusa. Kubota Mantarō wrote:
In days of old, a queer object known as the Twelve Storys reared itself over Asakusa.
From wherever you looked, there it was, that huge, clumsy pile of red bricks. From the roof of every house, from the laundry platform, from the narrowest second floor window, there it was, waiting for you. From anywhere in the vastness of Tokyo—the embankment across the river at Mukōjima, the observation rise at Ueno, the long flight of stone steps up Atago Hill, there it was, waiting for you, whenever you wanted it.
“Look—the Twelve Storys.”
So we would say, at Mukōjima or Ueno, or on Atago Hill. There was quiet pleasure in the words, the pleasure of finding Asakusa. That was what the Twelve Storys meant to Asakusa, a new pleasure each time, the pleasure of knowing Asakusa and its temple.
And yet how clumsy, in illustrated guides, in prints of the Eastern Capital … how clumsy, above cherries fairly dripping with blossoms.
Those cheap prints bring nostalgia for Asakusa as it was, the Asakusa of memory. In memories from my childhood it is always even thus, in the bosom of spring. The rich sunlight, the gentle winds, the green willow shoots, they speak always and only of spring; and as my eyes mount in pursuit of a wavering dragonfly or a stray balloon, there it is, the Twelve Storys, dim in mists.
The Twelve Storys was built by Japanese with the advice of an Englishman named William Barton. Some sources say that it was 320 feet high, some 220. The latter figure seems the more likely. It was in any event the highest building in the city, almost twice as high (even if the lower figure is accepted) as the Nikolai Cathedral. It contained many interesting and amusing things, and, along with a tower on Atago Hill, was the place to go for a view of the city.
The Asakusa Twelve Storys
Octagonal, of red brick, the Twelve Storys had the first elevator in the land, imported from the United States; it took passengers, twenty of them at a time, to the eighth floor. The elevator was thought dangerous, and shut down after two months. On the second to eighth floors, wares from the world over were for sale. There was a Chinese shop with goods from the China of the Empress Dowager and sales girls in Chinese dress. The ninth floor contained diversions of a refined sort, such as art exhibitions. The tenth floor served as an observation lounge, with chairs scattered about. All of the floors were well lighted—the building was described as a tower of light—but the eleventh floor especially so. It had rows of arc lights inside and out. The top floor, also for observation, was provided with telescopes. For all these delights the entrance fee was a few pennies.
Panoram
ic photograph by Ogawa Isshin, taken from atop the City Hall: northeast quadrant
The Twelve Storys may have boasted the first elevator, but the first one to continue operating seems to have been in Nihombashi, some sources say in the Bank of Japan, some in the Mitsui Bank. Nihombashi was itself both progressive and conservative, enlightened and benighted. It divided cleanly in two at the main north-south street, the one that crossed the Nihombashi Bridge. In early Meiji the place for Civilization and Enlightenment would of course have been the Ginza Bricktown. At the end of Meiji it might well have been the western portions of Nihombashi. The Bank of Japan, under construction there for eight years and finished in 1896, was the grandest of piles. To the east was the Mitsui Bank, south of which lay the Mitsukoshi department store, stone-built and several floors tall by the end of Meiji.
The main Nihombashi street passed to the east of them, and across it and a few paces towards the bridge lay the fish market. The conjunction was remarkable; nowhere else in the city was the sudden leap back into the past, or, if one preferred, the leap in the other direction, into the new world, more apparent than here. (For the problem of the fish market, see below, pages 94-95.) The view eastwards from the Mitsukoshi was over an almost unbroken expanse of low wooden buildings and the dark back streets of Tanizaki’s boyhood. Change had come to them, in the form, for instance, of rickshaws, but not much else; if one did not like brick, stone, and bright lights, one could turn eastwards up one of the narrow streets and walk to the river and beyond, and be scarcely troubled at all by modern contrivances.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 9
