Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  There were other marks of enlightenment in the quarters. An 1874 newspaper reported that the young men who traditionally patrolled the night with wooden clappers, urging vigilance against fires, had taken to using trumpets. Not well received, the practice was soon abandoned. A fad for Western dress coincided with the Rokumeikan period. An enterprising bawdy house had Western beds in some of its rooms. The same house had a somewhat cosmopolitan staff, which included the first Okinawan courtesans active in Tokyo.

  With liberation, the old brothels became karizashiki, literally “rooms for rent,” and the crisis passed. The old trade was permitted under a new jargon, the ladies now in theory being free agents. They were permitted to do business in the rented rooms, so long as they were licensed. Six centers in and around the city had rooms for rent: the four “post-stations,” Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Itabashi, and Senjū, which were the points of entry into the old city; and the Yoshiwara and Nezu (just north of Ueno). Prosperity returned as the new system proved as functional as the old. “A thousand houses, four thousand women, seven districts,” went a saying of mid-Meiji, declaring the proportions of the trade. (Senjū had traditionally been counted as two post-stations, because roads from the north converged there as they entered the city; hence “seven districts.”)

  The Yoshiwara, the largest district, dwindled alarmingly in early Meiji, and after a decade or so began to revive. The number of houses on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War was still smaller than in the last years of Edo, though some of them were larger and more ornate houses by far than Edo had ever seen, grand edifices, indeed, of four and five storys, with chandeliers, stained glass, and the like.

  The quality of the several districts may be gauged from the importance to each of its teahouses. It was considerably higher at the Yoshiwara than at Nezu, the next largest district. Of the old post-stations, Shinagawa maintained the highest ratio of teahouses to brothels, though it was lower than at the Yoshiwara and about the same as that at Nezu. Shinagawa had been the most particular of the Edo post-stations, because it commanded the most important point of access to the city, from the south and west, and the most demanding clientele, from the Kansai. What these facts tell us is that the old forms were more perdurable at the Yoshiwara than elsewhere. While there were teahouses there was at least a possibility that an evening at the Yoshiwara would not be given over entirely to fleshly things.

  By the end of Meiji there were no teahouses at all in Itabashi, where the inland road from the Kansai entered the city. It was the smallest of the districts, notably unsuccessful at coming to terms with the new age. At Shinjuku, the most triumphantly successful of the old post-stations in this regard, there were only nine teahouses serving fifty-eight establishments with “rooms for rent.” At the Yoshiwara the number was a dozen times as large. The Yoshiwara was, after all, in its fashion, a guardian of tradition.

  It had its own cycle of festivals, closely tied to the seasons. Observances were less punctilious and elaborate in Meiji than during the last years of Edo, and less still so as Meiji progressed. In late Edo there had been grand processions of courtesans, so laden with robes and ornaments and elevated upon pattens to such heights that they had to be supported. These processions honored the flowers of the seasons, and especially the cherry blossoms of the third day of the Third Month under the lunar calendar, the iris of the fifth day of the Fifth Month, and the chrysanthemums of the ninth day of the Ninth Month. A curious custom known as “heaped bedding,” tsumi yagu, was still to be seen in Meiji, though less frequently and less elaborately than in Edo. The great courtesans demonstrated their popularity and the wealth of their patrons by public displays of bedding. It was a curious custom, and it must have been very erotic as well. The bedding, especially commissioned for display, was in gold and silver brocades and colored silks of extreme gaiety.

  At least three Yoshiwara events still attracted whole families, men, women, and children. The main business of the quarter prospered, of course, but could hardly account for the throngs. More innocent amusements included the “night cherry blossoms,” which the whole quarter turned out to view, and much of the city, and especially the Low City, as well. In late summer and early autumn the quarter set out lanterns in memory of an eighteenth-century courtesan of great popularity and sensitivity and high attainments, while dances known as Niwaka were performed on wheeled stages that moved up and down the main central street. They were sometimes humorous and sometimes solemnly dramatic, and the performers were the geisha, male and female, of the quarter. For obscure reasons, the observance declined sadly in late Meiji. Then on the two or three “bird days” of November came the Bird Fair, observed throughout the city but with an especial crowding at the Eagle Shrine just outside the quarter. On the days and nights of the fair the back gates of the quarter were opened to roisterers and the curious in general—on other days the main north gate was the only point of egress and ingress. The press and the stir were wondersome. Higuchi Ichiyō thus described them in her novella “Growing Up.”

  Not given to letting such chances pass, young men poured into the quarter from the back gates. The main gate was quiet, and so it was as if the directions had suddenly reversed themselves. One trembled lest the pillars of heaven and the sinews of the earth give way in the roar. Gangs pushed arm in arm across the drawbridges and into the Five Streets, plowing the crowd like boats plowing their way up the river. Music and dancing, shrill cries from the little houses along the moat, and samisen in the more dignified heights, a delirious confusion of sounds that the crowds would not soon forget.

  The Yoshiwara Main Gate as it was in late Meiji and early Taishō

  In the spring of 1881, when the cherry blossoms were in their greatest glory, a new main gate of wrought iron was dedicated. The inscription was a Chinese poem by Fukuchi Genichirō, president of the Tokyo prefectural council. He was paid the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars, thought by some excessive. No one in the quarter, male or female, failed to attend the dedication. The poem, two lines of eight Chinese characters each, may be rendered thus:

  The deepening of a springtide dream. A teeming street overcast by cherry blossoms.

  First tidings of autumn. Twin rows of lanterns down the street.

  It refers, of course, to the first two of the three great annual Yoshiwara observances.

  So the old pleasure quarter, greeting the visitor with Chinese poetry from an eminent hand, was still in mid-Meiji a place of some culture; but it was declining. The great fire of 1911, the last full year of Meiji, dealt a grievous blow. On April 9, just one day short of three decades after the dedication of the iron gate, the Yoshiwara was almost completely destroyed. Two hundred brothels and teahouses were lost, within a few score of the total number. The quarter was rebuilt, but in a manner that appeared to demonstrate what may be expected in such cases, or to illustrate the proposition that the worst thing the West did was to make things easy and inexpensive. Old methods were discarded. They were too dear and too troublesome. The results of the rebuilding had a certain charm when they were in the whimsically ornamental style of Taishō, but when simple and utilitarian, tended to be merely dull. With what remained of the old they formed a rather motley stylistic triad. The loss of the teahouses left a permanent scar. Very little of high culture remained. The Yoshiwara became what it was to be until the outlawing of prostitution on April Fool’s Day, 1958, a place of just that and nothing more. Kafū exaggerated when he said that the Low City of Edo died in the flood of 1910 and the Yoshiwara fire of 1911, but the old Yoshiwara never really recovered its earlier, if decadent, glory.

  None of the Five Mouths, as the post-stations fringing the city were called, lay within the fifteen wards of the Meiji city. A part of Shinjuku was incorporated into Yotsuya Ward just before the earthquake, and Shinagawa lay just beyond the southern tip of Shiba, the southernmost ward. The other two were more remote. (As has been noted, there were actually only four “mouths,�
�� Senju at the north being counted twice.) Though not central to the culture of Edo as the Yoshiwara was, they provided essentially the same pleasures and services. Each made its way through the Meiji era in a different fashion, and so they offer interesting variations upon the theme of change.

  Shinagawa was the busiest of the four (or five), and second in size only to the Yoshiwara among the quarters of greater Edo. Very conservative, the Shinagawa station and quarter sought to remain apart from the new day. In this endeavor it was perhaps too successful. It was left alone, and dwindled to insignificance.

  There was strong opposition in Shinagawa to the Shimbashi-Yoko-hama railroad. It ran along the coast, partly on fills, to the present Shinagawa Station, in Shiba Ward. Had it continued on the coast it would have passed very near the quarter. Instead it passed some distance inland. The quarter itself doubtless had less influence than the army on these arrangements, but a result was that the district around the new railway station prospered, and the old post-station, the “mouth,” was isolated. It survived as a pleasure quarter, but a certain determination was required to get to it. This was true also of the Yoshiwara, and doubtless had something to do with the decline of that place as a cultural center. The rashness of choosing to stand apart from new traffic patterns was apparent earlier, however, in the case of Shinagawa. Where the Yoshiwara had always had its own very special attractions, Shinagawa had flourished only because it was beside the main Tōkaidō highway. The Shinagawa district lost population in late Meiji. It grew again in Taishō, but pleasure centers for the new city were by then emerging elsewhere. A private railway put through the district in the early years of this century was not enough to relieve the isolation, because there was no transfer to and from the main government line. This did not come until after the earthquake. The automobile age brought traffic back to Shinagawa, for the highway to Yokohama followed the old Tōkaidō, but by then it was too late. There were other places to go. In late Meiji and early Taishō the old Shinagawa station presented the curious picture of a bawdy district, with a few geisha to give it tone, cut off from the world by an encirclement of temples.

  The case of Shinjuku was quite the opposite. It had been a relatively unimportant way station in the Tokugawa period, and even in mid-Meiji, when Shinagawa was being left behind, it was the smaller of the two quarters. It lay on the road to the province of Kai, the present Yamanashi Prefecture. The principal inland route to the Kansai now passes through Yamanashi, but did not then. The number of customers who might be expected to wander in from the highway or pass one last night on the road before venturing into the city was small. Shinjuku, meaning “New Station,” was the parvenu among the Five Mouths, put together when the older Takaido station came to seem a bit too far out to serve as a first stop on the way to Kai.

  Shinjuku was a lonely place under the Tokugawa. It did not immediately spring into prosperity with the beginning of the new day. Like Shinagawa, it was circumvented by the new transportation system. The railway that ran north and south along the western fringes of the city passed slightly to the west of it, even as the Tōkaidō line passed west of the Shinagawa quarter. There were two important differences, however: the old station, the “mouth,” lay between the new station and the city, and within easy walking distance, and so the stroller need not have such a strong sense of purpose to get there as to reach Shinagawa; and the new station was to become an extremely important transfer point for commuters, the most important, indeed, in all the land. A private railway line, later bought by the government railways, was opened from Shinjuku westwards to Tachikawa in 1889.

  The growth of Shinjuku as a residential district proceeded so briskly that it was the only significant annexation to the city through the Meiji and Taishō Periods. Its prosperity brought the decline of such geisha districts, nearer the city, as Yotsuya and Kagurazaka. The old pleasures of the way station also got lost in the prosperity. The bawdy houses, very conspicuous on the main highway westwards from the city, embarrassed the bright new Shinjuku. There were plans, very long in the formulation, to put them out of sight on back streets. With the assistance of fires, the plans were well on the way to fruition when the earthquake came, making relocation easier. The old quarter gradually dwindled, though it survived long enough to be outlawed on that memorable April Fool’s Day of 1958.

  Itabashi was the earliest of the Five Mouths to fall into a decline. By the middle years of Meiji it had fewer houses and ladies than Shinjuku, and no teahouses at all. The old highway on which it stood, the inland route to the Kansai, had been important; especially in the years after Perry, it accommodated grand processions fearful of the exposed seashore route, among them that of the royal princess who traveled east to become the wife of the fourteenth shogun. Itabashi fell in the revolution that put everyone on wheels. There are still traces of the old post-station, but one has to hunt for them. Most of the old quarter was destroyed by fire in 1884. Though it was partly rebuilt, the old business continued to decline. After the earthquake Itabashi began to attract commuters and developers, not customers for the old quarter. It does not, like Shinagawa, seem to have striven to be left behind by the new day, but somehow it was.

  Senjū provided two of the Five Mouths. There were two clusters for pleasure and lodging, known as the Upper Station and the Lower, on either bank of the Arakawa River (as the upper reaches of the Sumida are called) and Senjū did more than double duty as a way station. Three important roads converged upon it: from Mito, seat of one of the “three Tokugawa houses”; from the far north; and from Nikkō, mortuary shrine of the first and third shoguns. Of all of them, it best gives a sense today of what an old way station was like. Senjū never languished like Itabashi nor throve like Shinjuku, and it did not, like Shinagawa, seek to reject the swift new wheels. In between, it has kept more of its past than any of the others.

  The traveler from Edo usually proceeded northwards on foot, having arrived at Senjū on foot or by boat, as the great poet Bashō did in the seventeenth century. The modern road to the north does not follow the old road, which, therefore, escaped widening. There was another road, farther to the west, for grand official processions to Nikkō, and so Senjū did not get exceedingly important people, as Itabashi and Shinagawa did. Probably nothing made by man is old enough to have been seen by Bashō as he set out on his narrow road to the north, but there are yet patches of richly brown latticework and heavily tiled roofs, to suggest the sort of road it was. To reach Asakusa and Shitaya, the first considerable areas of dense population, the traveler still had to pass extensive farmlands. Senju was thus fairly safe from the fires that so frequently afflicted the city.

  The last of the districts, Nezu, on the fringes of Hongō, was an inconvenience in early Meiji, for it lay just down the hill from the old estate of the Maeda, lords of Kanazawa, which became the campus of the Imperial University. The proximity was not thought appropriate, since the young men of the university were the future of the nation. They must be kept from temptation, at least within walking distance. The Nezu quarter could simply have been closed, but that posed another problem: Such facilities were necessary to a city absorbing great floods of unattached young men from the country. Edo always contained more men than women, and Tokyo continues the pattern. So in 1888 the Nezu quarter was moved bodily to Susaki, which means something like “sandbar,” filled land in Fukagawa near the mouths of the Sumida. Great celebrations on the occasion of the removal let everyone know where the quarter had gone. Through the remainder of Meiji and indeed down to the outlawing of prostitution, the transplanted quarter was the chief rival of the Yoshiwara as a “nightless city.” After the fires of early Meiji, it may have looked more like the Yoshiwara of Edo than did the Yoshiwara itself. Photographs and prints show low buildings in good traditional taste, comparing well with the Yoshiwara and its tendency towards the flamboyant. The old customs seem to have survived better at Susaki than at the post-stations.

  As Meiji cam
e to an end and Taishō began, the flower and willow of the old system were drifting apart. The flower was the more carnal of the two, the willow or geisha the more artistic and spiritual. The flower came to dominate the licensed quarters, while the willow was preeminent in the geisha quarters. Machiaijaya, literally “rendezvous teahouse,” is what is usually referred to by the English term “geisha house.” A Japanese word exists that may be literally rendered “geisha house,” but it is not commonly used, and is more likely to be found in bilingual dictionaries than in the purely Japanese sort. The inference is strong that it is a translation from English for the convenience of foreign persons. The rendezvous teahouse, in any event, developed into an elegant restaurant to which geisha were summoned. Lest it seem that the music and dance of Edo declined absolutely as they declined in the six licensed quarters, the geisha districts ask to be looked at.

  Edo had its “geisha of the town,” distinguished from the geisha of the licensed quarters. Some of the “town” districts still present through Meiji were very old, going all the way back to the seventeenth century. Some of the most flourishing quarters, on the other hand, had their beginnings only in Meiji. A census of geisha, both those attached to the licensed quarters and those of the town variety, shows that they were concentrated, not surprisingly, in the Low City. Three-quarters were in four of the fifteen wards: Nihombashi, Kyōbashi, Shiba, and Asakusa. Geisha quarters were scattered over the flatlands, and in the hilly regions at least one, Kagurazaka, commenced operations at about the time Commodore Perry arrived. Other districts grew up in the High City of Meiji. They were neither as expensive nor as elegant, on the whole, as the best of the Low City districts.