Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Although Mitsukoshi was ahead in the matter of showcases and elevated shopping, Shirokiya was ahead in other respects. In 1886 it became the first of the old silk stores to sell Western clothes. It had one of the first telephones in the city, which, however, was kept out of sight, in a stairwell, lest it disturb people. It provided the country with its first shop girls. All the clerks in the old dry goods stores had been men. From about the time it became Mitsukoshi, which was registered as the legal name in 1904, Mitsui began selling hats, leather goods, and sundries. Then, having withdrawn to a back street because the main north-south street through Nihombashi was being widened, Mitsukoshi reopened on the old site in 1908, with the makings of a department store. Shirokiya replied with a new building, four storys and a tower, in 1911. It had game rooms and the first of the exhibition halls that give the modern Japanese department store certain aspects of a museum and amusement park. In 1914 Mitsukoshi completed a grand expansion, into the building that burned after the earthquake. The new Mitsukoshi was a five-story Renaissance building, not the highest in the city, but the largest, it was said, east of Suez, and very modern, with elevators, central heating, a roof garden, and even an escalator.

  The Mitsukoshi of 1914 was not a very interesting building, at least from the outside, but the Shirokiya must have been a delight, built as it was in an eclectic style that looked ahead to the more fanciful effusions of Taishō. The building of late Meiji does not survive, but in photographs it seems the more advanced and certainly the more interesting of the two. Yet Shirokiya was less successful than its rival in keeping up with the times.

  Shirokiya Department Store, Nihombashi, after 1911

  Mainly, Mitsukoshi was the better at the big sell. Already at the turn of the century, a life-size picture of a pretty girl stood in Shimbashi Station inviting everyone to Mitsukoshi. Early in Taishō the store joined the Imperial Theater in a famous advertising campaign. The slogan was the only one still remembered from the early years of Japanese advertising. “Today the Imperial, tomorrow Mitsukoshi.” Inviting the public to spend alternate days at the two establishments, it was very successful. In the Taishō period Mitsukoshi had a boys’ band known to everyone. It is said to have been the first nonofficial band in the nation. The boys wore red and green kilts.

  Despite all this innovation, the department stores were far from as big at the end of Meiji as they have become since. The old market was still healthy. Neighborhood stores offered most commodities and had most of the plebeian trade, the big Nihombashi stores still being a little too high-collar. Yet the department stores worked the beginnings of a huge cultural shift, so that the city of late Meiji seems far more familiar than the city of late Tokugawa. They were not the only enterprises of their kind in the city. Kanda and Ueno each had one, both of them to advance upon Ginza after the earthquake.

  Matsuzakaya Department Store in Ueno

  The problem of what to do with footwear was not solved until after the earthquake, and the delay was in some measure responsible for the slowness of the big stores to attract a mass clientele. Footwear was checked at the door in traditional fashion, sometimes tens of thousands of items per day, and replaced by specially furnished slippers. On the day of the dedication of the new Nihombashi bridge, still in use, Mitsukoshi misplaced five hundred pairs of footwear. For this reason among others the department store was a little like the Ginza bricktown: everyone wanted a look at it, but it would not do for everyday. It was on the standard tour for onobori, country people in for a look at the capital. The presence of Mitsukoshi, indeed, along with certain patriotic sites now out of fashion, is what chiefly distinguishes the Meiji Tokyo tour from that of today.

  There was another kind of shopping center, also new in Meiji, and the vexing problem of footwear has been offered to explain its very great popularity from late Meiji into Taishō. The word hankōba is a Meiji neologism that seems on the surface to mean, with exhortatory intent, “place for the encouragement of industry.” It actually signifies something like “bazaar” or “emporium.” Numbers of small shops would gather under a roof or an arcade and call themselves a hankōba. In the years when the old dry goods stores were making themselves over into department stores, the bazaars were much more popular, possibly because the customer did not have to remove his shoes or clogs. The great day of the bazaar was late Meiji. When the department stores finally emerged as a playground for the whole family, on whatever level of society, bazaars went into a decline.

  The first bazaar was publicly owned. It opened in 1878, selling products left over from the First Industrial Exposition, held at Ueno the preceding year. Its location was for the day a remote one, at the northern end of what would become the Mitsubishi Meadow, just east of the palace. Two bazaars dominated the busy south end of Ginza, near which the main railway station stood until early Taishō. The building of the present Tokyo Central Station displaced the crowds and sent the bazaars into a decline. In the fourth decade of Meiji, however, there were three bazaars in Kanda and seven in Ginza. By 1902 there were twenty-seven scattered over the city. Nine years later there were only eleven, and in 1913, the first full year of Taishō, only six.

  No establishment has called itself a kankōba since the 1950s, but the kankōba must have been not unlike the shopping centers that are a threat to the Nihombashi stores today. For all the newness of the word, the kankōba also had much in common with the neighborhood shopping district of Edo. There is continuity in these things, and what seems newest may in fact be tradition reemerging.

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  The department stores and the bazaars were in it to make money, but they also provided pleasure and entertainment. So it was too with the expositions. People were supposed to be inspired and work more energetically for the nation and Civilization and Enlightenment, but expositions could also be fun.

  The Japanese learned early about them. The shogunate and the Satsuma clan sent exhibits to the Paris fair of 1867, and the Meiji government to Vienna in 1873 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

  The Japanese experimented with domestic fairs early in Meiji, one of them in the Yoshiwara. The grand exhibition that called itself the First National Industrial Exposition occurred at Ueno in 1877, from late summer to early winter. The chief minister was chairman of the planning committee. He was a man of Satsuma, and the Satsuma Rebellion was just then in progress; and so the import of the exposition was highly political, to demonstrate that the new day had arrived and meant to stay, in spite of dissension. The emperor and empress came on opening day and again in October, a month before the closing. The buildings were temporary ones in a flamboyantly Western style, with an art gallery at the center and flanking structures dedicated to farming and machinery and to natural products. Some of the items on display seemed scarcely what the Japanese most needed—a windmill, for instance, thirty feet high, straight from the drylands of America. Almost a hundred thousand items were exhibited by upwards of sixteen thousand exhibitors. The total number of visitors was not much less than the population of the city.

  Other national exhibitions were scattered across Meiji. As a result of the second, in 1881, Tokyo acquired its first permanent museum, a brick structure designed by Josiah Conder, begun in 1878 and not quite finished in time for the exposition. The fourth and fifth expositions, just before and after the turn of the century, were held in Kyoto and Osaka. The sixth, in 1907, at Ueno once more, remains the grandest of the Tokyo series. Coming just after the Russo-Japanese War, it had patriotic significance, and therapeutic and economic value as well. Economic depression followed the war, and a need was felt to increase consumption. The main buildings, Gothic, in the park proper, were built around a huge fountain, on six levels, surmounted by Bacchus and bathed in lights of red, blue, and purple. Although the architecture was for the most part exotic, the prestige of Japanese painting had so recovered that the ceiling of the art pavilion was decorated with a dragon at the hands
of the painter Hashimoto Gahō, who was associated with such fundamentalist evangelizers for the traditional arts as Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin.

  A water chute led down to the lower level, on the shores of Shinobazu Pond, where special exhibitions told of foreign lands and a growing empire. There was a Taiwan pavilion and a Ryūkyū pavilion, the latter controversial, because ladies from the pleasure quarters were present to receive visitors and make them feel at home. They were considered an affront to the dignity of the Ryūkyūs, whose newspapers protested.

  It was the Sixth Exposition that inspired Natsume Sōseki’s famous remarks about illumination (see page 93). Indeed, all the expositions were makers of taste. The more fanciful architectural styles of Taishō derive quite clearly from two expositions, held at Ueno early and midway through the reign.

  Ueno, the place for expositions, is one of five public parks, the first in the city, established in 1873. The public park is another Meiji novelty introduced under the influence of the West. The old city had not been wanting in places for people to go and be with other people, but the idea of a tract maintained by the city solely for recreation was a new one. We have seen that at least one mayor thought such places unnecessary. He had a good case. The city already possessed myriads of gardens, large and small, and temples, shrines, cemeteries, and other places for viewing the flowers and grasses of the seasons.

  The fact that one such place, in the far south of the city, was chosen by the shogunate as the site for the British legation was among the reasons for public satisfaction at the destruction of the unfinished building. A succession of temples occupied most of the land from what is now Ueno Park to the Sumida.

  There were fewer such public spaces as time went by; and so the principle that the city had a responsibility in the matter was an important departure. The grandest of Edo temples are far less grand today. Had public parks not come into being, the loss of open space as religious establishments dwindled might have been almost complete.

  A foreigner is given credit for saving Ueno. Almost anything might have happened to the tract left empty by the “Ueno War,” the subjugation in 1868 of holdouts from the old regime. Before that incident it had been occupied by the more northerly of the two Tokugawa funeral temples, the Kan-eiji. With branch temples, the Kan-eiji (named for the era in early Edo when it was founded) extended over the whole of “the mountain”—the heights to the north and east of Shinobazu Pond—and low-lying regions to the east as well, where Ueno Station now stands. Six of the fifteen shoguns are buried on the Kan-eiji grounds. The grave of Keiki, the last, is nearby in the Yanaka cemetery.

  The attacking forces destroyed virtually the whole of the great complex. What is the main hall of the Kan-eiji today was moved in 1879 from the provinces to the site of a lesser temple. A gate is the only relic of the central complex, although a few seventeenth-century buildings, among the oldest in the city, still survive in the park. The public had been admitted to the Kan-eiji during the daytime hours. The precincts were, then as now, famous for their cherry blossoms.

  After the fighting of 1868, Ueno was a desolate but promising expanse, more grandly wooded than it is today. The Ministry of Education wanted it for a medical school. The army, the most successful appropriator of land in early Meiji, thought that it would be a good location for a military hospital. It was at this point that the foreign person offered an opinion.

  Dr. E. A. F. Bauduin, a Dutchman, had come to Japan in 1862. He was a medical doctor, and during his career in Japan served as a consultant on medical education in Nagasaki and Edo, and at the university in Tokyo. The Ministry of Education summoned him from Nagasaki for consultations in the matter of making the Ueno site a medical school. Quite contrary to expectations, he argued instead that Ueno would make a splendid park, and that the medical school could just as well go in some other place, such as the Maeda estate in Hongō, now the main campus of Tokyo University.

  This view prevailed. In 1873, Ueno became one of the first five Tokyo parks. The others were the grounds of the Asakusa Kannon, the Tokugawa cemetery at Shiba, some shrine grounds east of the river, and a hill in the northern suburbs long famous for cherry blossoms. Of the four parks in the city proper it was the only one that was not otherwise occupied, so to speak, and it has had a different career than the others. It was transferred to the royal household in 1890, and returned to the city in 1924, to honor the marriage of the present emperor. Today it is officially called Ueno Royal Park. Shinobazu Pond to the west, a remnant of marshlands that had once spread over most of the Low City, was annexed to the park in 1885.

  Ueno has not entirely escaped the incursions of commerce. Though the scores of little stalls that had established themselves in the old temple precincts were closed or moved elsewhere, the huge Seiyōken restaurant is the chief eyesore on an otherwise pleasing skyline. (An 1881 poster informs us that the restaurant is in Ueno Parque.) The original park now includes the campus of an art and music college. The Tokugawa tombs were detached from the park in 1885.

  Yet Ueno has remained very much a park, less greedily gnawed at than Asakusa and Shiba have been. For a decade in mid-Meiji, until 1894, there was a horseracing track around Shinobazu Pond, a genteel one, with a royal stand. The emperor was present at the opening. The purpose, most Meiji-like, was not pleasure or gambling but the promotion of horsemanship in the interests of national defense. Woodcuts, not always reliable in such matters, seem to inform us that the horses ran clockwise.

  Ueno Park had the first art museum in the land, the first zoo, the first electric trolley, a feature of one of the industrial expositions, and, in 1920, the first May Day observances. (There have been 53 as of 1982; a decade’s worth were lost to “Fascism.”) In a city that contains few old buildings, Ueno has the largest concentration of moderately old ones. It was saved by royal patronage, and, ironically, by the fact that its holocaust came early. The arrangements of early Meiji prevailed through the holocausts of 1923 and 1945.

  Besides Edo survivals, the park, broadly defined to include the campus of the art college, contains the oldest brick building in the city. It has just passed its centennial. The oldest concert hall, of wood, is chronically threatened with dismemberment. The oldest building in the National Museum complex, in a domed Renaissance style, was a gift of the Tokyo citizenry, put up to honor the wedding of the crown prince. The present emperor was already a lad of seven when it was finished. The planning, collecting of funds, and building took time. What has become the great symbol of the park, recognized all over the land, is also a relic of Meiji. The bronze statue of Saigō Takamori, on the heights above the railway station, was unveiled in 1898. The original plans had called for putting it in the palace plaza, but it was presently decided that Saigō, leader of the Satsuma Rebellion, at the end of which, in 1877, he killed himself, had not yet been adequately rehabilitated. His widow did not like the statue. Never, she said, had she seen him so poorly dressed.

  Huge numbers of people went to Ueno for the industrial expositions, and soon after it became a park it was again what it had been in Edo, a famous place for viewing cherry blossoms. Under the old regime the blossoms had been somewhat overwhelmed by Tokugawa mortuary grandeur, however, and singing and dancing, without which a proper blossom-viewing is scarcely imaginable, had been frowned upon. A certain solemnity seems to have hung over the new royal park as well. Blossom-viewing places on the Sumida and on the heights to the north of Ueno were noisier and less inhibited. Indeed, whether or not because of the royal association, Ueno seems early to have become a place of edification rather than fun.

  Asakusa was very different. The novelist Saitō Ryokuu made an interesting and poetic comparison of the two, Asakusa and Ueno. Ryokuu’s case was similar to Nagai Kafū’s: born in the provinces in 1867 or 1868 and brought to Tokyo as a boy of perhaps nine (the facts of his early life are unclear), and so not a son of Edo, he outdid the latter in his fondness for
the Edo tradition. His way of showing it was different from Kafū’s. He preferred satire to lyricism, and falls in the proper if not entirely likeable tradition of Edo satirists whose favorite subject is rustic ineptitude in the great pleasure palaces of the metropolis. He is not much read today. His language is difficult and his manner is out of vogue, and it may be that he was the wrong sex. Women writers in a similarly antique mode still have their devoted followings.

  Some of his pronouncements deserve to be remembered. Of Ueno and Asakusa he said: “Ueno is for the eyes, a park with a view. Asakusa is for the mouth, a park for eating and drinking. Ueno puts a stop to things. From Asakusa you go on to other things. In Ueno even a Kagura dance is dour and gloomy, in Asakusa a prayer is cheerful. The vespers at Ueno urge you to go home, the matins at Asakusa urge you to come on over. When you go to Ueno you feel that the day’s work is not yet finished. When you go to Asakusa you feel that you have shaken off tomorrow’s work. Ueno is silent, mute. Asakusa chatters on and on.”

  Ueno was the largest of the five original parks. Of the other four, only Asukayama, the cherry-viewing place in the northern suburbs, has managed to do as well over the years as Ueno in looking like a park. The notion of what a park should be was a confused one. The Edo equivalent had been the grounds of temple and shrine. The park system of 1873 tended to perpetuate this concept, merely furnishing certain tracts a new and enlightened name. Ueno was almost empty at the outset and presently became royal, and ended up rather similar to the city parks of the West.

  Asakusa, on the other hand, resembles nothing in the West at all. It was the third largest of the original five, more than half as large as Shiba and Ueno, and several times as large as the two smaller ones. What remains of the Edo temple gardens is now closed to the public, and of what is open there is very little that resembles public park or garden. The old park has in legal fact ceased to be a park. A decree under the Occupation, which liked to encourage religious institutions provided they were not contaminated by patriotism, returned the park lands to the temple. Yet the technicalities by which it ceased to be a park had as little effect on its career as those by which it had become a park in the first place.