Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The new people of Ginza were not such huge successes as the Mitsui, or the Iwasaki, with their Mitsubishi Meadow, but they were perhaps more interesting. Their stories have in them more of Meiji venturesomeness and bravery, and help to dispel the notion, propagated by Tanizaki Junichirō among others, that the children of Edo were lost in the bustle and enterprise of the new day.

  All up and down Ginza were Horatio Algers, and possibly the most interesting of them was very much a son of Edo. Hattori Kintarō, founder of the Seiko Watch Company, was born to the east of the Ginza district proper, the son of a curio dealer, and apprenticed to a hardware store in the southern part of what is now Ginza. Across the street was a watch shop, in business before the Restoration, which he found more interesting than hardware. Refused apprenticeship there, he became apprenticed instead to a watch dealer in Nihombashi. He also frequented the foreign shops in Yokohama, and presently set up his own business, a very humble one, a street stall in fact. (Ginza had street stalls until after the Second World War.) The watch was among the symbols of Civilization and Enlightenment. An enormous watch is the mark of the Westernized dandy in satirical Meiji prints. Hattori had come upon a good thing, but only remarkable acumen and industry thrust him ahead of enterprises already well established. Within a few years he had accumulated enough capital to open a retailing and repair business of a more solidly sheltered sort, at the old family place east of Ginza. In 1885, when he was still in his twenties, he bought a building at what was to become the main Ginza crossing, the offices of a newspaper going out of business. The Hattori clock tower, in various incarnations, has been the accepted symbol of Ginza ever since. The same year he built the factory east of the river that was to grow into one of the largest watch manufacturers in the world.

  It is not a story with its beginnings in rags, exactly, for he came from a respectable family of Low City shopkeepers. All the same, there is in it the essence of Ginza, spread out before the railway terminal that was the place of ingress and egress for all the new worlds of Meiji, and their products, such as watches, which no high-collar person of Meiji could be without. If the Rokumeikan, a few hundred yards west of Ginza, was the place where the upper class was seeking to make political profit from cosmopolitanism, the Hattori tower, there where the two trolley lines were to cross, marked the center of the world for mercantile adventuring.

  Other instances of enterprise and novelty abounded. Shiseidō, the largest and most famous manufacturer of Western cosmetics, had its start in a Ginza pharmacy just after the great fire. The founder had been a naval pharmacist. He experimented with many novel things—soap, toothpaste, ice cream—before turning to the task, as his advertising had it, of taking the muddiness from the skin of the nation. His choice of a name for his innovative enterprise contained the Meiji spirit. It is a variant upon a phrase found in one of the oldest Chinese classics, signifying the innate essence of manifold phenomena. Today a person with such a line for sale would be more likely, if he wished a loan word, to choose a French or English one.

  It was not only the great houses in Nihombashi that profited from an alliance with the bureaucracy. In early Meiji there were in Kyōbashi Ward two confectioneries with the name Fūgetsudō, one in what is now Ginza, the other north of the Kyōbashi Bridge. It was a model contest between the new and the old. The northern one sold traditional sweets, the southern one cookies and cakes of the Western kind. During the Sino-Japanese War the latter received a huge order for hardtack, upwards of sixty tons. The traditional Fūgetsudō admitted defeat, and the innovative Fūgetsudō, House of the Wind and the Moon, became the most famous confectioner in the city. The most successful of early bakeries, also a Ginza enterprise, had General Nogi among its patrons, and he helped bring it huge profits during his war, the Russo-Japanese War.

  July 4, 1899, was a day to remember for several reasons, one of them being the end of the “unequal treaties,” another the opening of the first beer hall in the land, near the Shimbashi end of Ginza. Very late in Meiji, Ginza pioneered in another institution, one that was to become a symbol of Taishō. This was the “café,” forerunner of the expensive Ginza bar. Elegant and alluring female company came with the price of one’s coffee, or whatever. The Plantain was the first of them, founded in 1911 not far from the Ebisu beer hall, at the south end of Ginza. The region had from early Meiji contained numerous “dubious houses” and small eating and drinking places, mixed in among more expensive geisha establishments. The Plantain was still there in 1945, when it was torn down in belated attempts to prepare firebreaks. Shortly after it opened it began to have competition. The still more famous Lion occupied a corner of the main Ginza crossing, and had among its regular customers Nagai Kafū, the most gifted chronicler of the enterprising if somewhat trying life of the café lady. One of them tried to blackmail him.

  The lobby of the Kōjunsha

  Ginza had the first gentlemen’s social club, the Kōjunsha, founded in 1880. The name, a neologism compounded of elements suggesting conviviality and sincere, open discussion, was coined by Fukuzawa Yukichi, a great coiner of new words and the most important publicist for Westernization. He was the founder of Keiō University and the builder of its elocution hall, towards that same end. Japanese must learn public speaking, argued Fukuzawa, and they must also become capable of casual, gentlemanly converse. The Kōjunsha was Fukuzawa’s idea, and the money for it was provided by friends. It opened near Shimbashi in 1880 and is still there, just a hundred years old, in a building put up after the earthquake and already a period piece in the newness of Ginza.

  The emperor himself was stumped by one enterprising Ginza merchant. On his way to Ueno in 1889 to open an industrial exposition, he saw in the northern part of Ginza a shop sign which he could not read. The name of the owner was clear enough, but the article purveyed was not, and the emperor was a man well educated in the classics. A courtier was sent to make inquiry. He came back with the information that the commodity in question was the briefcase. The shopkeeper had put together the characters for “leather” and “parcel,” and assigned them a pronunciation recently borrowed from China and indicating a container. Awed by the royal inquiry, the shopkeeper inserted a phonetic guide. The shop sign became famous, and the word and the character entered the language and have stayed there. The sign was burned in 1923.

  Some of the most famous modern educational institutions had their beginnings in the southern part of Kyōbashi Ward. The first naval college occupied a site near the foreign settlement. The commercial college that became Hitotsubashi University was founded in 1875 by Mori Arinori, most famous of Meiji education ministers, assassinated for his Westernizing ways on the day in 1889 when the Meiji constitution went into effect. Fukuzawa drafted the statement of purpose, a somewhat prophetic one: the coming test of strength would be mercantile, and victory could not be expected without a knowledge of the rules. His disciples learned the rules very well. Opened as Mori’s private school in very modest quarters, the second floor of a purveyor of fish condiments, the college moved in 1876 to Kobikichō, east of Ginza proper. It was taken over by the city, and in 1885 by the Ministry of Education, which moved it to Kanda.

  The middle school and girls’ school that were the forerunners of Rikkyō or St. Paul’s University had their origins in the Tsukiji foreign settlement, and by the end of Meiji had not moved far away. The origins of another famous missionary school, the Aoyama Gakuin, also lay in the foreign settlement of early Meiji, but by the end of Meiji it had moved into the southwestern suburbs.

  Ginza did not, in this regard, stay for long at the forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment. The foreign settlement was gone as a legal entity by the end of Meiji, though foreigners continued to live and preach and teach there until the earthquake; but the missionary schools were moving elsewhere and all would soon be gone, leaving only the naval college as a place of higher education.

  * * *

  In another f
ield of modern cultural endeavor Ginza quickly began to acquire a preeminence which it still in some measure maintains. Though not on the whole very popular, the Ginza brick buildings early caught the fancy of journalists. The newspaper is a modern institution, with a slight suggestion of ancestry in the “tile-print” broadsheets of Edo. The first daily newspaper in Japan was founded in 1870, moving from Yokohama to Ginza in 1879. Originally called the Yokohama Mainichi (the last half of the name meaning “daily”), it became the Tokyo Mainichi in 1906, after several changes of name between. It is not to be confused with the big Mainichi of today, which had a different name in Meiji, and was, with the Asahi, an intruder from Osaka.

  The earliest Ginza newspaper—it occupied the site of the Hattori clock tower—seems to have been founded in the Tsukiji foreign settlement by an Englishman, J. R. Black. He was somewhat deceitfully treated by the government, which wished to purge Japanese-language journalism of foreigners. Offered a government job, he accepted it, and as soon as he was safely severed from his newspaper, the job was taken away. Late in Meiji an English performer in the variety halls had a certain vogue. He was the son of J. R. Black. The vogue did not last, and the son died in obscurity shortly after the earthquake.

  In mid-Meiji, the Ginza contained as many as thirty newspaper offices. It was at this point that Osaka enterprise moved in, and, by its aggressive methods, reduced competition. At the end of Meiji, there were fewer papers in the city and in Ginza than there had been two or three decades before. Two of the big three had their origins in Osaka, and all three were, at the end of Meiji, in Ginza. The Yomiuri, the only native of Tokyo among the three, stayed longest in Ginza, and now it too is gone. Large numbers of regional newspapers still have Ginza offices, but middle and late Meiji was the great day for Ginza journalism.

  Nihombashi may have had the most romantic of Meiji murders, but Ginza had an equally interesting one, of a curiously old-fashioned sort. What is believed to have been the last instance of the classical vendetta reached its denouement just north of the old Shimbashi station in 1880. The assassin, who avenged the death of his parents, was of military origins, his family having owed fealty to a branch of the great Kuroda family of Fukuoka. His parents were killed during the Restoration disturbances—victims, it seems, of clan politics. No attempt was made to punish their murderer; he was in fact treated well by his lord and then by the Meiji government, under which he made a successful career as a judge. After duty in the provinces he was assigned to the Tokyo Higher Court. The son of the murdered couple came up from Kyushu and spent his days stalking. On the chosen day, having failed to come upon his prey outside the court chambers, the vengeful son proceeded to the Kutoda house in what is now Ginza, and made polite inquiry as to the judge’s whereabouts. The unhappy man chanced upon the scene and was stabbed to death. The son received a sentence of life imprisonment but was released in 1892, whereupon he went home to Kyushu to live out his days. Though vendettas had been frowned on by the old regime and were considered quite inappropriate to Civilization and Enlightenment, a certain admiration for this sturdy fidelity to old ways may account for the leniency shown in this instance. The Kuroda family moved away from Kyōbashi two years later and took up residence in the High City, not far from Keiō University. They would doubtless have left soon enough even if the incident had not sullied the old residence. It was the pattern. The area is today thrivingly commercial.

  The prominence of the Ginza district in the theater was partly a result of things that happened in Meiji, when both the Shintomiza and the Kubukiza went up a few paces east of Ginza proper. It had an earlier theatrical tradition, from the very early years of the shogunate down to the Tempō edicts of the 1840s. It was the setting for a most delicious bit of theatrical impropriety: A lady in the service of the mother of the seventh shogun fell madly in love with an actor. Pretending to do her Confucian duty in visits to the Tokugawa tombs, she arranged assignations. When it all came out, the actor and the theater manager were exiled to a remote island, and the theater closed. The lady was sent off into the mountains of central Japan. One may still view the melodrama on the Kabuki stage.

  Many are the delights in reading of Meiji Ginza. The ardor with which it pursued the West is infectious, and the mercantile adventuring of which it was the center has brought the land the affluence and the prestige that military adventuring failed to do. Both kinds of adventuring inform us persuasively that in modern Japan the realm of action has been more interesting than that of contemplation. Of the two the mercantile kind has certainly been the more effective and probably it has been the more interesting as well. Doubt and equivocation have characterized the realm of thought, whose obsessive themes are alienation and the quest for identity, not so very different from the sort of thing that exercises the modern intellectual the world over. It also dwells at great length on helplessness, the inability of tiny, isolated Japan to survive on its own resources and devices. Meanwhile the manufacturer and the salesman, by no means helpless, have been doing something genuinely extraordinary. The beginning of the way that has brought us to semiconductors and robots is in Meiji Ginza. Gimbura beneath the neon lights of a spring or summer evening is still such a pleasure that one looks nostalgically back to the day when Ginza was the undisputed center of the city and of the land. Yet Ginza and Gimbura have taken on a patina. There are noisier and more generously amplified entertainment and shopping centers to the south and west, and it is to them that the young are inclined to swarm. Gimbura has the look of a slightly earlier time. When it was all the rage, the person who now feels nostalgia for the Ginza of old might well have been drawn more strongly to conservative Nihombashi, where it was still possible to wander in the Edo twilight.

  Had one gone about asking townsmen at the beginning of Meiji to define the northern limits of the Low City, there would probably have been a difference of opinion. Some would have said that it ended at the Kanda River or slightly beyond, and so included only Nihombashi, the flat part of Kanda, and perhaps a bit more. Others might have been more generous, and extended it to include the merchant quarters around the Asakusa Kannon Temple and below the Tokugawa tombs at Ueno. These last were essentially islands, however, cut off from the main Low City by aristocratic and bureaucratic lands.

  At the end of Meiji everyone would have included Asakusa and Shitaya wards, the latter incorporating Ueno. These wards had filled up and the upper classes had almost vanished, along with many of the temples and cemeteries. Except for a few remaining paddy lands, the Low City reached to the city limits, and in some places spilled beyond.

  “The temple of Kuanon at Asakusa is to Tōkiō what St. Paul’s is to London, or Nôtre Dame to Paris,” said W. E. Griffis. It was a place that fascinated most foreigners, even Isabella Bird, who did not for the most part waver in her determination to find unbeaten tracks. Griffis was right, though Asakusa was more than a religious center—or rather it was a Japanese sort of religious center, one which welcomed pleasure to the sacred precincts.

  Griffis’s description was perhaps more telling than he realized. “At the north end are ranged the archery galleries, also presided over by pretty black-eyed Dianas, in paint, powder, and shining coiffure. They bring you tea, smile, talk nonsense, and giggle; smoke their long pipes with tiny bowls full of mild, fine-cut tobacco; puff out the long white whiffs from their flat-bridged noses; wipe the brass mouth-piece, and offer it to you; and then ask you leading and very personal questions without blushing… Full grown, able-bodied men are the chief patrons of these places of pleasure, and many can find amusement for hours at such play.”

  The description suggests “places of pleasure” in a more specific sense, and indeed that is what they were. The back rooms were for prostitution—right there in the yard (the back yard, but still the yard) of the great temple. More than one early foreign visitor remarked, with a certain not unpleasant confusion, upon a very large painting of a courtesan which hung in the main hall,
but no one seems to have noted the true nature of the archery stalls.

  Griffis’s description extends over more than a chapter of his memoirs. It is lively and it is sad. Today some tiny outbuildings and a stone bridge survive from Edo, and nothing else, save a few perdurable trees. The melancholy derives not only from physical change; if most of the buildings are gone, so too is most of the life. The main buildings, which had survived the earthquake, were lost in 1945. Asakusa continued even so to be a pleasure center. Then, gradually, people stopped coming. Troops of rustic pilgrims still visit the temple, but the urban crowds, and especially the young, go elsewhere. Asakusa was too confident. With its Kannon and its Yoshiwara, it had, so it thought, no need of railroads, and it was wrong.

  Asakusa and Shitaya, from what is now Ueno Park to the Sumida, were a part of the zone of temples and cemeteries extending in a great sweep around the Tokugawa city. One could have walked from where the northernmost platforms of Ueno Station now stand nearly to the river, passing scarcely anything but temples. Plebeian houses, waiting to be flooded every two or three years, lined the river bank itself. (The riverside park of our own day was laid out after the earthquake.) Edo was a zoned city, and among the zones was one for the dead. Not wanting them too near at hand, the shogunate established a ring of necropoles at the city limits. Many temples remained at the end of Meiji and a scattering remains today, making Asakusa and Shitaya the most rewarding part of the city for the fancier of tombstones and epitaphs. A late-Meiji guide to the city lists 132 temples in Asakusa Ward and 86 in Shitaya. Temple lands shrank greatly, however, as the region became a part of the main Low City, and the pressure on lands near the center of the city led to the closing and removal of cemeteries.