Some streets were indeed widened, especially towards the end of Meiji, to make way for the trolley and to provide firebreaks. Others disappeared. The back alleys, the uradana of Edo, had been altogether too crowded and dark, and when it became possible to spread out even a little the townsmen quickly did so. Photographs and other graphic materials inform us that the extreme closeness of Edo was early, and happily, dispensed with. The most straitened classes, when they could put together the means, would rather be on a street, however narrow, that led somewhere than on a closed alley.
Yet even today, after numerous minor disasters and two huge ones, the Tokyo street pattern is remarkably like that of Edo. On the eve of the earthquake the traveler could still complain that the city was alternately a sea of mud and a cloud of dust. The surfaced street was still a novelty. In certain heavily commercial parts of the Low City the proportion of streets to total area actually declined in the last two decades of Meiji. Such widening as occurred was not enough to compensate for the loss of back alleys.
In 1915 the mayor found a curious excuse for inaction in the matter of parks, an excuse that tells much of life along the narrow streets. More than nine-tenths of the city was still wooden, he said, and most of the wooden houses were but one story high, each with its own little park. So public parks were not needed as in the cities of the West. It is good bureaucratic evasion, of course, but there must have been truth in it. Most of the streets had to be only wide enough for rickshaws to pass, and an occasional quarrel between runners when they could not was rather fun. The Edo townsman had long been accustomed to thinking of only the central portion of the street as public in any event. The rest could be devoted to greenery, especially to such plants as the morning glory, which gave a delicious sense of the season and did not require much room. The back streets may indeed have been like little parks, or fairs. Edo had always been the greenest of the large cities, and the morning glory might have been as good a symbol as the abacus of the Low City and its concerns.
Improved transportation had by the end of Meiji brought the Low City and the High City closer together. The aristocratic wife of Edo scarcely ever went into the plebeian city, though instances are recorded of well born ladies who attained notoriety by becoming addicted to the theater and actors. Now they commonly went shopping in Ginza or Nihombashi. Kabuki became an object of wealthy High City attention. Its base was more general. It was no longer the particular pride and treasure of the Low City.
In another sense, the division between high and low was accentuated. Class distinctions, measured in money and not pedigree, became clearer. The wealthy moved away from the Low City. Still in Tanizaki’s childhood, the mansion of the entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi was an object of wonderment, looking somewhat Moorish on a Nihombashi canal. The great flood of 1910 destroyed many of the riverside villas of the wealthy—which were not rebuilt—but the last such place did not disappear until after the Second World War. The process was one of gradual evacuation, leaving the Low City with vestiges of a professional middle class, but no one from the old military and mercantile elite or the new industrial elite. Wealth went away and the self-contained culture of the Low City went too.
The Shibusawa mansion, Nihombashi
This is not to say that the Low City and the High City became alike. The Shitamachi jōchō, the “mood of the Low City,” still existed, in the row upon row of wooden buildings and in the sense of neighborhood as community. But the creative energies had waned. The arts of Edo became respectable, and the lesser plebeian ranks, stranded in the Low City when the wealthy moved away, were not up to creating anything of a disreputability delicate and intricate enough to match the tradition. It was as in the old castle towns that had been cultural centers of some note: the new and original things were being done elsewhere.
In early Meiji, as industrialization got underway, factories were scattered over the city. By the end of Meiji a pattern had emerged: three-quarters of the factories were in the bay-shore wards, Kyōbashi and Shiba, and the two wards east of the river. Tokyo lacked the prominence in manufacturing that it had, by the end of Meiji, in finance, management, and (vague word) culture. Yet Meiji may be seen as a period of concentration, and the time when this one city emerged as a place of towering importance. Edo was important, having in its last century pulled ahead of its Kansai rivals, culturally at least. Tokyo by the end of Meiji was far more important.
On the eve of the earthquake the city had about a sixteenth of the population of the country and about two-fifths of the economic capital. Osaka had almost as many corporations as Tokyo, but less than half as much capital. A quarter of the total bank deposits were in Tokyo. Within the city, the wealth was concentrated in three wards: Kojimachi, which contained the palace and the Mitsubishi Meadow, and Kyōbashi and Nihombashi to the east. Four-fifths of all Japanese companies with capitalization of five million yen and more had their headquarters in one or another of three wards.
In one curious cultural respect Tokyo lagged behind the nation. There was far greater reliance upon private education at the primary level than in the nation at large. In 1879 Tokyo contained more than half the private elementary schools in the country. Despite its large population, it had fewer public schools than any other prefecture except Okinawa. The “temple schools” of Edo had the chief responsibility for primary education in early and middle Meiji. It was only towards the turn of the century that the number of pupils in public schools overtook the number in private schools. The reason would seem to be that the Meiji government could not do everything at once, and the system of private elementary education was so well developed in Edo that it could be made to do for a time. Ahead at the end of Edo, Tokyo was consequently neglected. The public schools had the greater prestige. Higuchi Ichiyō’s novella Growing Up, about a group of children on the edge of the Yoshiwara, informs us of the inferiority and resentment which the ordinary child felt towards the privileged ones in the public schools.
In higher education, Tokyo prevailed. The western part of Kanda was by the end of Meiji all students and universities, and so was a large part of Hongō. In more general cultural matters, the century since the Meiji Restoration may be seen as one of progressive impoverishment of the provinces, until eventually they were left with little but television, most of it emanating from Tokyo. This process was far advanced by 1923; Tokyo was big-time as Edo had not been. While the cities of the Kansai might preserve their own popular arts and polite accomplishments (and for reasons which no one understands have produced most of the Japanese Nobel laureates), it was in Tokyo that opinions and tastes were formed. It was because Tokyo was so much the center of things that Tanizaki’s decision to stay in the Kansai after the earthquake was so startling. All other important literary refugees quickly returned to Tokyo, and even Tanizaki in his last years was edging in that direction.
When, in 1878, the fifteen wards were established, they more than contained the city. They incorporated farmland as well. At the turn of the century two-thirds of the city’s paddy lands were in Asakusa Ward and the two wards east of the Sumida. Half the dry farmlands were in Shiba and Koishikawa, the southern and northern fringes of the High City. Farmland had virtually disappeared by the end of Meiji. Attrition was especially rapid late in the period. In 1912, the last year of Meiji, there was only one measure of paddy land within the fifteen wards for every two hundred fifty that had been present but a decade before, and one measure of dry farmland for every three hundred.
The situation was similar with fishing and marine produce. The last authentic “Asakusa laver” (an edible seaweed) had been produced early in the Tokugawa Period. In early Meiji most of the nation’s laver still came from outlying parts of Tokyo Prefecture. By the end of the period the prefecture produced none at all, save for the Izu Islands and beyond. The largest fishing community was at Haneda, beyond the southern limits of the city. Sushi is still described in restaurants as being Edo-mae, “from i
n front of Edo”—that is, from Tokyo Bay—but very little of it in fact was by the end of Meiji. None at all is today.
So a great deal changed in Meiji, and a good deal remained at the end of Meiji for the earthquake to destroy. In 1910, or whatever the chosen year, one could have joined all the sons of Edo in lamenting the demise of their city, and one could as well have rejoiced at all the little warrens of unenlightenment still scattered over the Low City. It is not possible to weigh change and tradition and decide which is the heavier.
To rejoice in what remained might, in the end, have been the less discommoding course. Recovering from his shock on perhaps the seventh or eighth of September, 1923, many a son of Edo must have lamented that he had not paid better attention to what had until so recently been all around him.
Chapter 3
THE DOUBLE LIFE
Civilization and Enlightenment could be puzzling, and they could be startling too.
In Japan one always hears about “the double life,” not as suggestive a subject as it may at first seem to be, and indeed one that can become somewhat tiresome. It refers to the Japanese way of being both foreign and domestic, of wearing shoes and sleeping on floors. The double life is at best an expense and an inconvenience, we are told, and at worst a torment, leading to crises of identity and such things.
Looking about one and seeing the calm, matter-of-fact way in which the Japanese live the double life, one can dismiss the issue as intellectual sound and fury. The world has been racked by changes, such as the change from the rural eighteenth century to the urban twentieth, and, compared to them, the double life does not seem so very much to be tormented by. Yet there can be no doubt that it lies beyond the experience of the West. The West went its own way, whether wisely or not, one step following another. Such places as Tokyo had to—or felt that they had to—go someone else’s way.
The playwright Hasegawa Shigure came home one day and found that she had a new mother. Had her old mother been evicted and a new one brought in to replace her, the change might have been less startling. What Shigure found was the old mother redone. “She performed the usual maternal functions without the smallest change, but she had a different face. Her eyebrows had always been shaved, so that only a faint blue-black sheen was where they might have been. Her teeth had been cleanly black. The mother I now saw before me had the stubbly beginnings of eyebrows, and her teeth were a startling, gleaming white. It was the more disturbing because something else was new. The new face was all smiles, as the old one had not been.”
The women of Edo shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth. Tanizaki, when in his late years he became an advocate of darkness, developed theories about the effect of the shadows of Edo upon the spectral feminine visages created by these practices. Whatever may be the aesthetic merits of tooth-blackening, it was what people were used to. Then came a persuasive sign from on high that it was out of keeping with the new day. The empress ceased blackening her teeth in 1873. The ladies of the court quickly followed her lead, and the new way spread downwards, taking the better part of a century to reach the last peasant women in the remotest corners of the land. If the Queen and the Princess of Wales were suddenly to blacken their teeth, the public shock might be similar.
E. S. Morse did not record that his rickshaw runner was other than good-natured at having to stop at the city limits and cover his nakedness. The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change itself is a tradition. Even in the years of the deepest Tokugawa isolation there had been foreign fads, such as one for calicos, originally brought in as sugar sacks, and later much in vogue as kimono fabrics. There had always been great respect for foreign things, which needed no justification. The runner probably felt no more imposed upon by this new vestmental requirement than by the requirement that he be cheerful and reasonably honest. There was, moreover, a certain sense of proportion. Hasegawa Shigure’s mother was shamed by the neighbors into thinking that she may have gone too far. She did not return to tooth-blackening, but she did return to a traditional coiffure. The pompadour that had been a part of her new image was a subject of hostile criticism. The neighborhood was not yet ready for it.
If they sought to do what was expected of them, however, the lower orders must have occasionally wondered just what the right thing was. So many acts that had seemed most natural were suddenly uncivilized. A tabulation survives of misdemeanors committed in the city during 1876. “Urinating in a place other than a latrine” accounts for almost half of them. Quarreling and nudity take care of most of the remaining five or six thousand. Not many people were inconvenienced by other proscriptions, but they suggest all the same that one had to tread carefully. Cutting the hair without permission seems to have been an exclusively feminine offense. There is a single instance of “performing mixed Sumō, snake shows, etc.” The same pair of miscreants was presumably guilty of both, etc. There are eight instances of transvestism, a curious offense, since it had long been a part of Kabuki, and does not seem to have troubled people greatly in more private quarters. Hasegawa Shigure tells in her reminiscences of a strange lady who turned up for music lessons in Nihombashi and proved to be a man. The police were not summoned, apparently, nor was the person required to discontinue his lessons.
Mixed bathing was banned by the prefecture in 1869. Indifference to the order may be inferred, for it was banned again in 1870 and 1872. Bathhouses were required to have curtains at their doors, blocking the view from the street. Despite these encumbrances, the houses were very successful at keeping up with the times. Few plebeian dwellings in the Low City had their own baths. Almost everyone went to a public bath, which was a place not only for cleansing but for companionship. The second floors of many bathhouses offered, at a small fee, places for games and for sipping tea poured by pretty girls. These facilities were very popular with students. From mid-Meiji, the nature of bathhouses seems to have become increasingly complex and dubious. The bathing function lost importance as private domestic baths grew more common, while second floors were sometimes converted to “archery ranges” (the pretty girls being available for special services) and drinking places. The bathhouse had earlier been a sort of community center for plebeian Edo, a relief from crowding and noise, or, perhaps, a place that provided those elements in a form somewhat more appealing than the clamor of home and family. Now it was a new and rather less innocent variety of pleasure center.
In the fiction of late Edo the barbershop, like the bathhouse, had been a place for watching the world go by. The new world spelled change here too. Western dress was initially expensive, but the Western haircut was not. The male masses took to it immediately; the other masses, as the example of Hasegawa Shigure’s mother tells us, more slowly. The Meiji word for the most advanced way of cutting the hair was zangiri or jangiri, meaning something like “random cropping.” The old styles, for aristocrat and commoner alike, had required shaving a part of the head and letting the remainder grow long, so that it might be pulled into a topknot. Already in 1873, the sixth year of Meiji, a newspaper was reporting that about a third of the men in the city had cropped heads.
“If you thump a jangiri head,” went a popular ditty of the day, “it sounds back ‘Civilization and Enlightenment.’” The more traditional heads echoed in a more conservative way, and some even carried overtones suggesting a revocation of the Restoration and a return to the old order.
The first new-style barbershop opened in 1869. It was in Ginza, which had new things even before the fire. The barber had learned his trade in Yokohama, and his first customer is said to have been the chief of a fire brigade. This seems appropriate. Firemen were among the more traditional of people, noted for verve and gallantry, and figuring prominently in the fiction and drama of Edo. So it often seems in Meiji: tradition and change were not at odds; the one demanded the other.
Up-to-date geisha, by Ogawa Isshin, 1902
By 1880, two-thirds of the men in the city had randomly cropped heads. The figure had reached 90 percent a scant six years later, and by 1888 or 1889 only the rare eccentric still wore his hair in the old fashion.
The inroads of the Western barber were far more rapid than those of the Western tailor. It was not until the day of the flapper that women really began to cut their hair and let it down. Liberated Meiji women went in for a pompadour known as “eaves,” from its way of projecting outwards in a sheltering sweep. A few geisha and courtesans adopted Western dress from mid-Meiji, and several wore what was known as the “shampoo coiffure,” from its resemblance to hair let down for washing and not put back up again. The first beauty school was opened early in the Taishō Period, by a French lady named Marie-Louise. Others quickly followed.
The English expression “high-collar” came into vogue from about the turn of the century. At first it was derisive, signifying the extremely and affectedly foreign. A lady’s coiffure was high-collar if it was thought to he too sweeping and eaveslike. A suggestion of dandyism still clings to the expression.
Some rather surprising things were high-collar, in the broad sense of innovative. Items and institutions which one might think to be very old and very Japanese have their origins in Meiji, under the influence of Civilization and Enlightenment. The word banzai is an old one, but the shouting of it on felicitous occasions seems to have occurred first with the promulgation of the Meiji constitution, in 1889. The popularity of Shinto weddings also dates from Meiji. The first marriage broker set up business in Asakusa in 1877. It may be that the police box, so much a part of Japan since Meiji, has its origins in certain Edo practices, but just as probably it began with the guards at the gates of the legations and the foreign settlements. The first private detective agency is believed to have been founded in 1891. Private detectives now seem to be everywhere, and they are so sophisticated that their relatively recent origins are cause for wonderment.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 11
