Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  To the west, the new Bank of Japan looked grandly towards the palace ramparts over the almost empty spaces of “Mitsubishi Meadow.” The original bank building survived the earthquake and survives today, the southwest portion of a much larger complex. A domed central hall runs east and west and two colonnaded wings extend to the south. It was to have been entirely of stone, but the Nagoya earthquake of 1891 persuaded the architect that brick would be safer. Two other buildings by the same architect survived the earthquake and down to our day—Tokyo Central Station and the Daiei Building, originally Imperial Hemp, a thin triangle somewhat reminiscent of the Flatiron Building in New York.

  Southeast quadrant of panorama from City Hall

  The Bank of Japan complex is held to mark the beginning of a new phase in Meiji architecture—the design and construction of buildings by Japanese architects, quite without foreign assistance, in the courtly and classical styles of Europe. This is probably true enough in a general way, though not absolutely so. There is a tiny building in front of the National Diet, put up in 1891, and thought to be the earliest stone structure designed by a Japanese. Though scarcely monumental, it is certainly classical. It is no more than four yards square, and looks like a tomb that is trying to look like a Roman temple. It houses the prime bench mark for measuring elevation, a bench mark that was two hundred eighty-six millimeters lower after the 1923 earthquake than before.

  Great changes were coming, meanwhile, to the Mitsubishi Meadow, also known as Gambler’s Meadow. The meadow (the Japanese term might also be rendered “wasteland”) lay within the old outer moat of the castle, or palace. Such of its buildings as survived the Restoration disturbances served as the bureaucratic center of early Meiji. The offices gradually moved out, and in 1890 the meadow was sold as a whole to the Mitsubishi enterprises. The army, which then owned the land, needed money for installations on the outskirts of the city, and first proposed selling the tract to the royal household. This body, however, was in straitened circumstances, and unable to pay what the army asked. So the land went to Mitsubishi. It is the present Marunouchi district, where the biggest companies strive to have their head offices. When such early visitors as Griffis remarked upon the great expanses of empty lands in the city, Marunouchi (which means something like intramuros, “within the walls’’) must have been among the places they had in mind. The Mitsubishi purchase was considered a folly. If the government did not want the place, who would? In very late Meiji it was rejected as a possible site for a new Sumō wrestling stadium. The children of Edo who provided Sumō with its spectators could not be expected to go to so desolate and forbidding a place. It was a day, wrote the poet Takahama Kyoshi,

  when people spoke of the row-houses, four in number, on the Mitsubishi Meadow, otherwise the abode of foxes and badgers. Here and there were weed grown hillocks from aristocratic gardens. The murder ot O-tsuya was much talked about in those days…

  Marunouchi was a place of darkness and silence, of loneliness and danger. If one had to pass the Meiji Life Insurance building, a black wilderness lay beyond, with only the stars to light it. Darkness lay over the land on which Tokyo Central Station now stands, and on towards Kyōbashi, where a few lights were to be discerned.

  The murder of O-tsuya dates the description. It occurred in 1910, and was indeed talked about, one of the most famous of Meiji crimes. The corpse of a young lady, identified as Kinoshita O-tsuya, had been found one November morning near the prefectural offices. Her murderer was apprehended, quite by accident, ten years later.

  Late in Meiji, Ogawa Isshin, one of the more famous of Meiji photographers, took panoramic photographs from the City Hall, on the site of the present prefectural offices in Marunouchi. On most sides of the City Hall appear empty expanses, very unlovely, as if scraped over by some landmover ahead of its time. In a southwesterly direction, scarcely anything lies between the City Hall and the Hibiya crossing, at the southeast corner of the palace plaza. The aspect to the north is even more desolate. There are a few barracks-like buildings, but for the most part the City Hall and the Bank of Japan, off on the western edge of Nihombashi, face each other across an expanse of nothing at all. To the northwest are the first of the new Mitsubishi buildings. Yet at the end of Meiji, Marunouchi still looked very hospitable, on the whole, to foxes, badgers, and gamblers. Only the view to the east towards the Ginza district, beyond the arches for the new elevated railroad, is occupied, most of it in what seems to be a rather traditional way. The remains of Ginza Bricktown do not show.

  Mitsubishi was even then filling in the emptiness. In 1894, Conder finished the first of the brick buildings for what came to be known as the Mitsubishi Londontown. More than one architect worked on the district, and suggestions of more than one style were to be detected while Londontown yet survived. The first buildings lay along the street that runs past the prefectural offices from the palace moat. When this thoroughfare had been imposingly lined with brick, there were extensions to the south and then the north, where at the end of Meiji the new Tokyo Central Station was going up. Marunouchi took a quarter of a century being filled, and the newest buildings of Londontown did not last much longer than a quarter-century more. No trace survives today of the original rows of brick. Mitsubishi tore them all down in the years after the Second World War, perhaps a little too hastily. A surviving Conder building would be splendid public relations.

  The preeminence of Marunouchi as a business district was assured by the opening of the new station in 1914, at which point it replaced Ginza as “the doorway to Tokyo.” Goto Shimpei, director of the National Railways, he who was to become the mayor with the big kerchief, told the architect to produce something that would startle the world. The brick building, three towers and joining galleries said to be in a French style, is not very startling today. It was once more ornate, however, and grander in relation to its surroundings. The central tower, now topped by a polyhedron, was originally domed; the dome was badly damaged in 1945. In 1914 the station looked off towards the palace over what had been finished of Londontown. Perhaps the most startling thing about it was that it did front in that direction, rather than towards the old Low City, which, thus eloquently told that it might be damned, was separated by tracks and a moat from the station.

  This curious orientation has been explained as a show of respect for the palace and His Majesty. Certainly Mitsubishi and its meadow benefited enormously from the arrangement. There was nothing explicitly corrupt about it, but the smell of collusion is strong. So it is that economic miracles are arranged. To many it seemed that the naming of the station was itself an act of arrogance, implying that the other stations of the city, including Shimbashi, were somehow provincial. Kyōbashi and Nihombashi, east of the station, felt left out of things, and continued to board their trains at Shimbashi. It was friendlier and almost as convenient. In 1920 a decision was finally reached to give Tokyo Central a back or easterly entrance, but at this point the Low City proved uncooperative. Quarreling between Kyōbashi and Nihombashi about the location of the necessary bridge was not settled until after the earthquake, which destroyed most of both wards.

  Only after the earthquake were tracks laid from Tokyo Central to Ueno, whence trains depart for the north. By then Tokyo Central was unshakably established as the place where all trains from the south stopped and discharged their crowds. Even today, one cannot take a long-distance express from the north through Tokyo and on to the south and west without changing trains. It is rather as Chicago was back in the days when Americans still traveled by rail. The traveler from San Francisco had to change in Chicago if he wished to go on to New York. The traveler southwards gets off at Ueno and boards again at Tokyo Central. Economic reasons can be offered to explain the tardiness with which Tokyo and Ueno were joined. The right-of-way passes through densely populated regions laid waste by the earthquake and fire, far more heavily used in Meiji than those between Shimbashi and Tokyo Central or north of Ueno; but
the effect was to assure that Mitsubishi Meadow would become worth approximately its weight in gold. The governor of Tokyo has recently announced his opposition to a new express line from the north extending all the way to Tokyo Central. Thus a curious gap yet remains in one of the best railway systems in the world.

  Tokyo Station from Nihombashi, about 1915

  Another Meiji revolution was that which dispelled the shadows of Edo. It has happened everywhere, of course—dark medieval corners have become rarer the world over—but it happened more rapidly in the Japanese cities than in Europe and America. There are those, Tanizaki among them, who have argued that dark places were central to Japanese aesthetics, and that doing away with them destroyed something of very great importance. In his famous discourse on shadows, a subject dear to him, Tanizaki speculated on the course modern inventions might have taken had the Japanese done the inventing. Shadows would not have been done away with so brusquely.

  Edo already had the kerosene lamp. Tokyo acquired gaslights sixty years later than London, and so the gaslit period was that much shorter. A leading Meiji entrepreneur named Shibusawa Eiichi proposed that the first gaslights be in the Yoshiwara. His reasons seem to have been aesthetic and not moral, and certainly it would have been appropriate for that center of the old, shadowy culture to lead the way into the new. But before this could happen the great Ginza fire intervened, and the rebuilt Ginza became the obvious place for the new brightness. In 1874 eighty-five gaslights flared, and became the marvel of the city, from Shiba along the main Ginza street as far north as Kyōbashi. By 1876 there was a line of gaslights all the way from Ginza to Asakusa, and westwards from Ginza towards the palace as well.

  The first experiments with electric lighting were not entirely successful. The main attraction at the opening of the Central Telegraph Office in 1878 was an electric bulb, which burned out in fifteen minutes, leaving the assembly in darkness. In 1882 an arc light was successfully installed before the Ginza offices of the Okura enterprises. The crowds seen gazing at it in Meiji prints give not the smallest sign that they share Tanizaki’s grief at the extinction of shadows. (It was, to be sure, only much later that he wrote his essay; in his youth he too loved lights.)

  The effect upon the arts was profound, and probably most profound upon the theater. By at least 1877 Kabuki was gaslit, and a decade later had its first electric lights. Today it is dazzlingly bright, and to imagine what it was like in the old shadowy days is almost impossible.

  Having left shadows behind, Tokyo seemed intent upon becoming the brightest city in the world, and it may well have succeeded. A series of industrial expositions became the ground for testing the limits.

  “Sift civilization to the bottom of your bag of thrills,” wrote the novelist Natsume Sōseki in 1907, “and you have an exposition. Filter your exposition through the dull sands of night and you have blinding illumination. If you possess life in some small measure, then for evidences of it you go to illumination, and you must cry out in astonishment at what you see. The civilized who are drugged with civilization are first aware that they live when they cry out in astonishment.” It is the late-Meiji view of someone who was himself becoming weary of Civilization and Enlightenment; but it is not wrong in identifying “illumination” (the English word is used) with the soul of Meiji. Turning up the lights, much more rapidly than they had been turned up in the West, was indeed akin to a quest for evidence of life. Freed from the black Edo night, people gathered where the lights were brightest, and so at nightfall the crowds commenced heading south to Ginza from a still dark Nihombashi.

  Tanizaki did not become a devotee of shadows until his middle years. In his boyhood Nihombashi was more amply provided with them than he wished. “Even in the Low City there were few street lights. The darkness was rather intimidating. I would return after dark from my uncle’s house a few blocks away, scampering past certain ominous places. They were lonely places of darkness, where young men in student dress would be lurking in wait for pretty boys.” Tanizaki himself was abducted by an army officer who had the “Satsuma preference,” as it was called, and taken to the Mitsubishi Meadow, where he made a perilous escape.

  Like the trolley system, the electric power system advertized the confusion of a city growing and changing too rapidly, and the inadequacies of private enterprise. In late Meiji the city had three power companies, in sometimes violent competition. Charges were not for power consumed but for the number of bulbs, which system of course provided encouragement for keeping all bulbs burning at all times. The same house might have a power supply from more than one company, and there were fistfights among linemen when a house changed from one company to another. Two mayors, one of them the famous parliamentarian Ozaki Yukio, were forced to resign because of their inability to impose order in this situation. Proposals for public ownership came to nothing. Finally, in 1917, an accord was reached dividing the city and the prefecture among the three companies. The city did presently buy a part of the system, and was providing power to extensive regions in the High City at the time of the earthquake.

  Enlightenment was not immediately successful in dispelling shadows, and smells proved even more obstinate. In 1923 the central fish market stood where it had for almost three hundred years, right beside the Nihombashi Bridge, almost across the street from the Mitsukoshi Department Store and only a few steps from the Mitsui Bank and the Bank of Japan.

  As early as the opening of Shimbashi Station, there were earnest endeavors to beautify the main street leading north through Nihombashi. The market was forbidden to use the street, and every effort was made to keep dealers out of sight. Yet the establishment sent its odors through much of Nihombashi and Kyōbashi. There were only two latrines, at the eastern and western ends of the market, remote from the convenience of busy fish dealers. Fish guts were left for the crowds to trample. Each time there was a cholera epidemic the market was blamed, and a clamor arose to move it where it might have the space (should it choose to use it) to be more sanitary and less smelly. Cholera germs were in fact traced to the market in 1922, and authorities closed it for several days.

  It had been proposed in 1889 that the market move eastwards to the river, the move to be accomplished by the end of the century. There was strong opposition. A complex system of traditional rights stood in the way of expeditious removal. Nothing happened. In 1923 almost four hundred persons are thought to have died there in the post-earthquake fires that finally decided the matter. The market reopened, first in quarters by the bay and a few months later on the site it now occupies in Tsukiji, a short distance south of where the foreign settlement would be had it survived the earthquake. Most of the fish sold in the last years of the Nihombashi market were brought there by land. What came by water had to be reloaded for transport up the canal. The new site, by the harbor and only a short distance from the freightyards where the old Shimbashi terminus had been, was far more convenient. It was just across a canal from the Hama Palace, but the day was long past when eminent foreigners stayed there. The present emperor, an uncomplaining man, was then regent.

  Sewers scarcely existed at the end of Meiji. Kanda had a tile-lined ditch for the disposal of kitchen wastes, but body wastes were left to the owaiya with his dippers and buckets and carts and his call of owai owai as he made his way through the streets. It was still a seller’s market at the end of Meiji; the owaiya paid for his commodity. The price was falling rapidly, however, because the growth of the city and the retreat of farmlands to greater distances made it more and more difficult for the farmer to reach the inner wards. The problem grew to crisis proportions in the Taishō Period, as the seller’s market changed to a buyer’s and in some parts of the city it was not possible to get rid of the stuff. Shinjuku, on the western edge of the city, was known as the anus of Tokyo. Every evening there would be a rush hour when great lines of sewage carts formed a traffic jam.

  The water supply was more sophisticated. It lon
g had been. The Tokugawa magistracy had done virtually nothing about sewers, and the Meiji governors and mayors did little more, but there was a venerable system of reservoirs and aqueducts. The Low City was still heavily dependent on wells at the end of Meiji, however, making the problem of sewage disposal not merely noisome but dangerous as well. Water from wells was murky and unpalatable, and so water vendors made the rounds of the Low City, buckets hanging from poles on their shoulders, a wooden Boat in each bucket serving as a simple and ingenious device to keep the water from spilling.

  It has been customary, this century and more, for the person who sees the city after an absence to remark upon the dizzying changes. W. E. Griffis, back in Tokyo a few weeks before the Ginza fire and after about a year in the provinces, found the city “so modernized that I scarcely recognize it… Old Yedo has passed away forever.” Edo has gone on passing away ever since.

  Certainly a comparison of the central Ginza district at the beginning and end of Meiji, of the Mitsubishi Meadow east of the palace, or the western part of Nihombashi, tells of devastating (if one wishes to call it that) change. Scarcely anything present at the beginning of the period, apart from streets, canals, and rivers (or some of them), is present at the end. Not only the visitor, but the native or old resident could remark upon the devastation.

  “Bridges were rebuilt, there were evictions after fires, narrow streets were widened,” said the novelist Tayama Katai in 1917. “Day by day Edo was destroyed.”