Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The two great geisha districts of Meiji were Yanagibashi and Shimbashi. The Yanagibashi district, on the right bank of the Sumida south of Asakusa, was the Meiji quarter most esteemed by the connoisseur of old ways, and much reviled, as well, by those who thought that it was squandering its legacy. Narushima Ryūhoku’s New Chronicle of Yanagibashi (Ryūkyo Shinshi) is a classic among satirical writings of the new age, as Ryūhoku himself was a classic son of Edo, one of the professionals. Ryūhoku, an “elegant sobriquet, suggests affinities with Yanagibashi. Literally, “North of the Willows,” it derives from Yanagiwara or “Willowfield,” the banks of the Kanda River near its confluence with the Sumida. Born in Asakusa in 1837, of a family of minor bureaucrats, Ryūhoku lived for some years to the north of Yanagiwara, and a slight distance to the west of Yanagibashi, “Willowbridge.” Yanagibashi is thought, though without complete certainty, to have taken its name, as Ryūhoku took his sobriquet, from Yanagiwara.

  He was in attendance upon two shoguns. Though he was for a time under house arrest because of critical remarks about persons in high places, he was given important assignments, such as seeking to keep the blue-eyed peril at bay. He served in a capacity roughly equivalent to that of Foreign Minister. With the collapse of the shogunate he was of course out of work and, like so many other men of the losing side, he went into journalism.

  The first part of New Chronicle of Yanagibashi was written in 1859 and expanded in 1860. The Yanagibashi district had been in existence since the late eighteenth century, but its best age was in the last decades of Edo. The first section of the chronicle, starting with the premise (which must have had great immediacy in those years after the arrival of Perry) that we cannot be certain of the morrow, chronicles the standards and practices of the quarter in great detail. It is of a genre common and popular in late Edo, a display of connoisseurship that may have been helpful to the adolescent son of Edo embarking upon a career as a spendthrift, but may seem a touch self-satisfied and even pretentious to the outsider.

  The work would probably be forgotten, save among specialists and bibliographers, had it not been for the advent of Meiji, a development not pleasing to experts on pleasure among the sons of Edo. Ryūhoku wrote a second installment in 1871. Both installments were published in 1874. A third installment, written in 1876, was banned, and Ryūhoku spent a time in jail because of it. The acerbity of the satire apparently passed limits. Only the introduction survives. Ryūhoku continued his journalistic career after his release, and died in 1884, securely established among the Edokko.

  The chief interest of the Chronicle is in its account of what Meiji did to Yanagibashi. The first section tells us what it was like in the days of good taste and deportment. Then came the depredations of the new establishment. There are accounts of the violent and boorish ways of the new men, of parties at which people talk politics and ignore the geisha and her accomplishments, of speakers of English, of liberators and improvers. The geisha of the old school has no place in the new world, and the new variety is more interested in money than in art, and not easy to distinguish from the prostitute. She buys copies of the official gazette to determine how much her clients make, and has trouble identifying the father of her child. Thus has the corruption advanced, the decay of the decadent, even so early in Meiji. The son of Edo can only lament, and remember.

  Ryūhoku’s chronicle was extremely popular, although it is written in a highly sinified and ornate prose, remote from the tastes of our day. It is one of several works which were said to have forced up the price of paper. However valid his strictures may have been, Yanagibashi boasted famous and accomplished geisha through Meiji and beyond. Among the prosperous quarters of Meiji, it continued to be the one that had the closest ties with the old mercantile elite. Shimbashi and later Akasaka were the haunt of the new bureaucrat and businessman, while it was to Yanagibashi that the danna went, the Low City shopkeeper or wholesaler. (If he was really successful he probably no longer lived in the Low City, but that was another matter.) Yanagibashi was still the nearest of the quarters to Edo. It was favored by its situation, on the Sumida, just above Ryogoku Bridge, where that finest of summertime observances, the opening of the river, took place. Fukagawa, most storied of the quarters of late Edo, lay on the opposite bank. Only at Yanagibashi could a singer of amorous balladry be expected to come rowing his way up to a machiai, or a geisha and her customers to go boating among lanterns and samisen. The Sumida was in those days still fairly odorless.

  Yanagibashi was the principal geisha quarter of very late Edo and early Meiji. With the rebuilding of Ginza, Shimbashi came to rival it. The new people, bureaucratic and entrepreneurial, formed the Shimbashi clientele. A concentration of government buildings lay just to the west, and the big companies had their offices to the north. Shimbashi was among the places where the modern league of business and government, admired by some and reviled by others, took shape. It served the new establishment.

  There had been “town geisha” in Shimbashi and Ginza from about the time of the Perry visit, and that watery region was a center for the funayado (see page 69). Shimbashi had its tradition then, but its great day began some twenty years after the Restoration. In late Meiji it was the quarter most favored by persons of money and power. The Shimbashi archetype was the country girl with energy and ambition, and a certain ruthlessness as well, in contrast to the Yanagibashi geisha, who inherited, or so it was said, the self-sacrificing pluck and verve of the Fukagawa geisha.

  There were other geisha quarters, and they suffered vicissitudes. Old ones went, new ones came. The count of such quarters (as distinguished from the licensed quarters that deteriorated so grievously through Meiji) ran to almost thirty from Meiji into Taishō. Osanai Kaoru, in his novel about the banks of the big river, caught the last days of the big spenders from the Low City. There were still big spenders, but they were far less likely to be from regions near at hand. In what happened to the quarters, licensed and otherwise, is a measure of what was happening to the old mercantile culture in general. It was being scattered, dissipated.

  The two disasters at the end of Meiji, the flood of 1910 and the fire of 1911, certainly worked great damage on the Low City. If one is intent upon finding a date for the death of Edo, one could do worse than follow Kafū and set it in the last years of Meiji.

  It may be, however, that we are too easily disposed to see the death of a much-honored head of state as the end of an era. Events at the end of his reign or early in the next are taken as watersheds and given a prominence in cultural history that they might not otherwise have had. Kafū himself went on finding remnants of Edo to almost the end of his life, usually near the banks of the Sumida. His native High City interested him much less. There remained a difference between the two divisions of the city, for all the dilution and dispersal of Edo culture. He may have been wiser when he sought evidences of life than when he professed to know exactly the date of the demise of Edo.

  The weakening of its old pleasures has been more pronounced in the last half of the Tokyo century than it was in the first. The son of Tokyo who had money to spend continued to do it as the son of Edo had, on the theater and closely allied pursuits. The Imperial Theater opened late in Meiji, of course, and then there were the movies, and Pavlova, but the pastimes that took his money continued to be largely traditional. If the Yoshiwara offered fewer of them on the eve of the fire than on the eve of the Restoration, and fewer after the fire than before, they were still to be had in places like Yanagibashi. Even today it is an insensitive person who, wandering the Low City of a long spring evening, does not come upon intimations of Edo.

  It may be objected that the life of Edo and Meiji was not all pleasure. If a son of Edo spent himself into bankruptcy at the theater and in the pleasure quarters, his family did not really think that he had done the city and the family honor. The proper merchant had a severe code, and disinheritance was likely to come before bankruptcy. To insist u
pon pleasure as central to the culture of the city, and upon the decay of the way of pleasure as symptomatic of wider decay, may therefore be a distortion.

  Yet a sense of evanescence hung over Edo in its finest day even as it hung over the Heian capital of a millennium before. The best things did not last. They were put together of an evening and vanished in the morning sunlight. The difference was that the Heian aristocrat had things his way. If he wished to fuss over perfumes and tints, there was no one to gainsay him. The merchant risked rebuke and even seizure, neither of them happy eventualities. His pleasures had to be more clandestine. He had his way only when he patronized actors and went to the pleasure quarters. This did not mean that he was a person whose taste was inferior to that of the Heian noble.

  Meiji had its two sides. One cannot believe that Hasegawa Shigure dissembled when she described her father’s exultation at the removal of the Edo stigma. Boundless new energies were liberated. To dwell upon inequity and repression is to miss this very important fact. Perhaps, facing braver and broader worlds, the son of Edo was ashamed that so much of his attention had gone into things so small. The big new things were often coarser things, however. The pleasure quarters presently lost their geisha, and the geisha presently lost their accomplishments.

  The world of the geisha may have been a cruel one, as the world of the dedicated Kabuki actor was. No one should be sentenced to involuntary service in such a world. Yet it is a pity that people ceased submitting, and that no one was left to appreciate the sacrifice. The son of Edo knew a good geisha and an accomplished actor when he saw one. Less art and discrimination go into the making and appreciating of a Ginza bar girl and a first baseman.

  Chapter 5

  LOW CITY, HIGH CITY

  The old Tōkaidō highway from Kyoto and Osaka ran through Ginza and crossed one last bridge, Kyōbashi, “Capital Bridge,” before it came to its terminus at the Nihombashi bridge. The boundary between the two wards, Nihombashi and Kyōbashi, crossed the old highway at a point halfway between the two bridges. They have since been combined to make Chūō Ward, which means Central Ward, and indeed they were central to the Low City, the only two wards that lay completely in the Low City by any definition.

  Seen together they have an agreeably solid and stable shape, from the Hama Palace at the southwest to Ryōgoku bridge at the northeast. When they are separated into the two Meiji wards, a difference becomes apparent. Because it keeps reaching out into lands reclaimed from the bay, the southern half, the Kyōbashi half (with Ginza inside it), has the more expansive look today. In early Meiji and in Edo it was the constricted half.

  Both districts were largely cut off from the Sumida and the bay by bureaucratic and aristocratic establishments. Yet it would have been possible at the beginning of Meiji to walk the mile or so northeastwards across Nihombashi from the outer moat of the palace to the river and see no aristocratic walls. Only two or three hundred yards eastwards, across the Ginza district in southern Kyōbashi, one would have bumped into the first of them. Whether so planned or not, the Tokugawa prison in the center of Nihombashi was as far removed on all sides from the aristocracy as any point in the city. On land-use maps of late Edo, Nihombashi seems the only district where the townsman had room to breathe. By the end of Meiji the upper classes, whether of the new plutocracy or the old aristocracy, had almost completely departed the Low City, and so Nihombashi, solidly plebeian from the outer moat to the river, looks yet more expansive. So does Kyōbashi, filled out by reclamation and largely relieved of the aristocracy.

  A new distinction took the place of the old. Nihombashi was rich and powerful (though the shogunate in theory granted no power to merchants), the heart of commercial Edo. There the rich merchant lived and there the big stores were, Mitsui and Daimaru and the like. Kyōbashi was poorer and more dependent on the patronage of the aristocracy, a place of lesser shopkeepers and of artisans.

  This was the historical difference. In Meiji the difference was between the new and the old, the modern and the traditional. After the opening of the Tokyo-Yokohama railroad and its own rebuilding, Ginza, in southern Kyōbashi, emerged as the part of the city most sensitive and hospitable to foreign influences. Nihombashi remained the center of the mercantile city, though toward the end of Meiji Marunouchi had begun its rise.

  The Mitsui Bank in Nihombashi

  It is a simplification. The northern part of Kyōbashi, beyond the Kyobashi Bridge, did not plunge into the new world as eagerly as Ginza to the south did, and Nihombashi was at once conservative and the site of the modern buildings most celebrated by ukiyo-e artists. The Hoterukan in Tsukiji, the southeastern part of Kyōbashi, was the earliest such building and certainly much celebrated, but it lasted a very short time. Blocks of brick, not individual buildings, were what the artists liked about Ginza. Nihombashi provided them with their best—and largest—instances of Civilization and Enlightenment.

  So it is a simplification. Yet if one had wished a century ago to wander about in search of what it was that Meiji was departing from, one would have been wise to choose Nihombashi. If the quest was for the city of the future, Kyōbashi would have been the better choice. At a somewhat later date one could have gone to the Rokumeikan, in Kōjimachi to the west, but that was an elite sort of place, not for everyone every day. One needed an invitation, and social ambitions would have helped too.

  Much about the Meiji Ginza, and the Rokumeikan as well, is charming in retrospect. One would have loved being there, and one must lament that nothing at all survives, save those willow trees out by the Tama River. Much of the charm is in the fact that all is so utterly gone, and if to the person with antiquarian tendencies Ginza is today pleasanter than certain other centers of the advanced and the chic, that is because it is less advanced and chic than they. A century ago it would have been the most extremely chic of them all. Nihombashi on the contrary was the place with the coziest past, and, except for the parts nearest the palace and later the central railway station, the place most reluctant to part with that past. Today one must go farther to the north and east for suggestions of the old city that in Meiji were within a few minutes’ walk of the foreign settlements.

  At the proud forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment, the inner, affluent side of Nihombashi was later blessed with the new Bank of Japan, finished in 1896, and said to be the first genuinely foreign building of monumental proportions put up entirely by Japanese. Nihombashi was thus the financial center of the country, more modern, in a way, than Ginza even after Bricktown was built, because it was there and in government offices that the grand design for modernity was put together.

  These modern structures, and the big department stores as well, were within a few paces of the Nihombashi bridge. Right there northeast of the bridge was also the fish market. It is striking in late Meiji how little of the modern and Western there is in a northeasterly direction from the bridge, off towards the Sumida. When, after the earthquake, Tanizaki rejected Tokyo and moved to the Kansai, he did it in a particularly pointed manner because he was rejecting his native Nihombashi, the very heart of the old city.

  The Nihombashi Fish Market, about 1918

  The First National Bank in Nihombashi

  Nihombashi occupies the choice portion of the land earliest reclaimed from tidal marshes, the first Low City. It looks ample on Meiji maps, right there at the Otemon, the front gate of castle and palace. It is bounded on the north and east by water, and cut by the Nihombashi River, the busiest canal in the city. All this water suggests commerce. It is less watery than the wards east of the river, but the latter look, on maps of the Meiji city, as if they were still in process of reclamation, while Nihombashi looks as if reclamation had been accomplished long ago, and the canals left from the marshes for good, productive reasons. Very little of Meiji remains in Nihombashi, and scarcely anything of Edo. Already in Meiji the wealthy, liberated from old class distinctions and what had in effe
ct been a system of zoning, were moving to more elegant places. Already, too, Ginza and Marunouchi were rising to challenge its entrepreneurial supremacy. Yet there is something conservative about the air of the place. It has welcomed grand commercial and financial castles in the modern manner, but it has not welcomed glitter. It has never flashed as Ginza has, or been a playground like Asakusa.

  In photographs looking eastwards from the Mitsukoshi Department Store, across the main north-south street, there is little on the eve of the earthquake that could not have survived (whether after all those fires it did or not) from Edo. There are modern buildings on the east side of the street, which was the great dividing line, and there is a financial cluster north of the Nihombashi River, where the Yasuda Bank, now the enormous Fuji, started growing; there too, at the juncture of the Nihombashi and the Sumida, the Bank of Japan had its first building, designed by Condor. For the most part, however, low roofs and wooden buildings in the grid pattern of the earliest years stretch on to the Sumida. It was among the parts of the Low City that had a smaller proportion of streets to buildings at the end of Meiji than at the beginning, and it looks that way. It is as if the snugness of Edo were still present, even though one knows that it could not have been. Vast numbers of country people had moved in and people like the Mitsuis had moved out, and the diaspora of the children of Edo (made so much of by people like Tanuaki) was well underway. Still the sense one has of conservatism is not mistaken.