Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The “moderately busy” part of Honjo was the vicinity of the Ekōin Temple, at the eastern approaches to Ryōgoku Bridge, one of five put across the Sumida during the Tokugawa Period. The Ekōin was founded to console the victims of the great “fluttering-sleeve” fire of 1657, so called from a belief that it was spread by a burning kimono. It was among the great temples of Edo, though Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Morse thought it less than elevating. They said of it, in the 1903 edition of their guide to Japan, that it “might well be taken as a text by those who denounce heathen temples. Dirty, gaudy…the place lacks even the semblance of sanctity.”

  The Ekōin attracted places of refreshment and entertainment, solace to the living as well as the departed, less varied and on the whole shabbier than those of Asakusa. The “broad alley” of Ryōgoku fared badly in Meiji and after. At the end of Edo it was one of the three famous “broad alleys” of the Low City. Ryōgoku continued until the Second World War to be the Sumo center of the land. There it was that the big tournaments were held from late Edo down to the Second World War, but they moved away. The gymnasium was requisitioned by the American Occupation and then sold to a university, and the Sumō center of the city and the nation has for three decades now been on the right bank of the river.

  Not much remains at Ryōgoku. It became a commuter point when a railway station was finished in 1903, but a minor one, serving some of the poorest parts of the city and only the Chiba Peninsula beyond. So it may be said that Honjo, once unpeopled, is now crowded and subdued. No part of the city is without its pockets of pleasure and entertainment, but Honjo has none that would take the pleasure-seeker out of his way.

  On a single evening every year, something of the old joy and din came back. It was the night of the “river opening,” already described, admired by U. S. and Julia Grant, E. S. Morse, and Clara Whitney, among others. The crowds were so dense at the 1897 opening that the south rail of the bridge gave way, and people drowned.

  Still in late Meiji the district from northern Honjo into the northern and eastern suburbs was much recommended for excursions. It enjoyed such excursions in perhaps the greatest variety in all the city, though they were becoming victims of material progress. The 1907 guide put out by the metropolitan government thus describes the state of affairs: “Under the old regime the district was occupied by townsmen and the lower ranks of the aristocracy. It was also the site of the official bamboo and lumberyards. Today it is mostly industrial. To the north, however, is Mukōjima, a most scenic district, and in the suburbs to the east are such attractions as the Sleeping Dragon Plum and the Hagi Temple, for especially pleasant excursions.” The temple survives, but the hagi (Lespedeza bicolor) of autumn does not. Neither do the plum blossoms of spring. Kafū’s description, in The River Sumida, is of joyous springtide, out beyond the blight; but the blight was advancing.

  “They who make the count of the famous places of Tokyo,” says the guide a few pages later, “cannot but put a pair of scenic spots, Ueno and Mukōjima, at the head of their lists.”

  Cherries had from the seventeenth century lined the left bank of the Sumida, from a point generally opposite Asakusa northwards into the suburbs. Though gnawed at by industrial fumes from late Meiji, they still attracted throngs during their brief period of flowering that were second only to those of Ueno. The Sumida was still clean enough for bathing—or at any rate no one had yet made the discovery that it was not.

  Grassy banks led down to the river on the Honjo side, and small houses lined the Asakusa bank, waiting resignedly for the next flood. The river was open, no bridges in sight north from Asakusa, with at least four ferry landings well within sight on either bank. As the city took to wheels, bridges came into demand, but the ferry must have been the pleasanter way to cross, especially in cherry-blossom time. The last of the Sumida ferries, much farther downstream, did not disappear until after the Second World War.

  Tokyo is today, and it must have been in late Meiji, a city where one learns to gaze only at the immediate prospect, blotting out what lies beyond. Crossing Azuma Bridge at Asakusa, one would have had to do this, unless a background of chimneys and smoke and utility wires could be regarded as pleasing. Yet the foreground must have been very pleasing indeed.

  The view across the Sumida from Honjo to Asakusa was quiet urban harmony, and that in the other direction was pastoral calm, broken by those noisy vernal rites when the cherries were in bloom. In the one direction was the “old Asakusa” of Kubota Mantarō, low wooden buildings at the water’s edge with the sweeping roofs and the pagoda of the Asakusa Kannon beyond, and Matsuchi Hill, the only considerable rise in the Low City, slightly upstream. In the other direction was the Sumida embankment, surmounted by cherry trees that blocked off all but the top portions of the industrially productive regions beyond, still suggesting that over there somewhere a few old gentlemen of taste and leisure might be pursuing one or several of the ways of the brush.

  Beyond the city limits on the left bank, in what was to become Mukōjima Ward, was a pleasant little cove much heard of in amorous fiction of late Edo and Meiji. It was watched over by the Shrine of the River God, tutelary to the Sumida, and it was a good place, remote and serene, to take a geisha. No trace of it remains. The Sumida has been rationalized and brought within plain, sensible limits, with a view to flood control.

  Honjo in the Great Flood of 1910

  Another view of Honjo during the Great Flood

  A victim of pollution, Honjo was also subject to natural disasters. It suffered most grievously among all the wards, perhaps, not in terms of property losses but in terms of wounds that did not heal, from the Great Flood of 1910. Most of the wealthy who had maintained villas beside the river withdrew, hastening the end of the northeastern suburbs as a place of tasteful retirement. The flood-control devices of Taishō and since have been very successful, but they have also been somewhat unsightly. It may be that not many in our day would wish to view the sights and smell the smells of the Sumida (and only stuntsters venture to swim in it). Even if the wish were present, it would be frustrated by cement walls.

  On maps of Edo, northern Fukagawa, the southern of the two wards east of the river, looks very much like Honjo, but the watery south is different, solidly plebeian, as no part of Honjo is. Across the river from Nihombashi, Fukagawa was nearer the heart of the Low City. Though not among the flourishing geisha quarters of Meiji, Fukagawa did in the course of Meiji get something that was just as good business, the Susaki licensed quarter (see page 181). Fukagawa was among the better heirs to the great tradition of Edo profligacy.

  The Susaki quarter did not, like the Yoshiwara, have a round of seasonal observances, but it was at times a place for the whole family to visit. Shown on certain maps from late Edo as tidal marshes, the strand before the Susaki Benten Shrine was rich in shellfish, and clam raking was among the rites of summer. This very ancient shrine had stood on an island long before Fukagawa was reclaimed. All through the Edo centuries it was presided over by the only feminine member of the Seven Deities of Good Luck. So the quarter had an appropriate patroness, well established. In certain respects Susaki was more pleasing to the professional son of Edo than the Yoshiwara. Not so frequently a victim of fire, there in its watery isolation, it was not as quick to become a place of fanciful turrets and polychrome fronts. Indeed it looks rather prim in photographs, easily mistaken, at a slight remove, for the Tsukiji foreign settlement.

  The Fukagawa of late Meiji had more bridges than any other ward in the city, a hundred forty of them, including those shared with Honjo and Nihombashi. Only two were of iron, and a hundred twenty-eight were of wood, suggesting that the waterways of Fukagawa still had an antique look about them.

  The beginnings of industrialization, as it concerned Tokyo, were at the mouth of the Sumida and along the Shiba coast. The Ishikawajima Shipyards, on the Fukagawa side of the Sumida, may be traced back to public dismay over t
he Perry landing. A shipbuilding enterprise was established there by the Mito branch of the Tokugawa clan shortly after that event. It followed a common Meiji course from public enterprise to private, making the transition in 1876.

  Over large expanses of the ward, however, Kafū’s “Fukagawa or the waters” yet survived, canals smelling of new wood and lined by white godowns. Kafū was not entirely consistent, or perhaps Fukagawa itself was inconsistent, a place of contrasts. On the one hand he deplored the changed Fukagawa which he found on his return from America and France, and on the other he still found refuge there from the cluttered new city (see pages 61-62). His best friend, some years later, fled family and career, and took up residence with a lady not his wife in a Fukagawa tenement row. There he composed haiku. In Fukagawa, said Kafū approvingly, people still honored what the new day called superstitions, and did not read newspapers.

  The grounds of the Tomioka Hachiman were in theory a park, one of the original five. Much the smallest, it had a career similar to that of Asakusa. It dwindled and presently lost all resemblance to what is commonly held to be a public park. The Iwasaki estate in Fukagawa, now Kiyosumi Park, is far more parklike today than this earlier park. The history of the two is thus similar to the history of Ueno and Asakusa. It was best, in these early years, to keep the public at some distance from a park. Deeded to the city after the earthquake, Kiyosumi Park was the site of the Taishō emperor’s funeral pavilion. The beauties of the Fukagawa bayshore are described thus in the official guide of 1907:

  One stands by the shrine and looks out to sea, and a contrast of blue and white, waves and sails, rises and falls, far into the distance. To the south and east the mountains of the Chiba Peninsula float upon the water, raven and jade. To the west are the white snows of Fuji. In one grand sweep are all the beauties of mountain and sea, in all the seasons. At low tide in the spring, there is the pleasure of “hunting in the tidelands,” as it is called. Young and old, man and woman, they all come out to test their skills at the taking of clams and seaweed.

  One senses overstatement, for the guide had its evangelical purposes. Yet it is true that open land and the flowers and grasses and insects and clams of the seasons were to be found at no great distance beyond the river. When, in the Taishō Period, the Arakawa Drainage Channel was dug, much of its course was through farmland.

  Among the places for excursions, only the Kameido Tenjin Shrine and its wisteria survive. Waves of blue, mountains of raven and jade, are rarely to be seen, and the Sumida has been walled in. Yet the more remarkable fact may be that something still survives.

  There is the mood of the district, more sweetly melancholy, perhaps, for awareness of all the changes, and there are specific, material things as well, such as memorial stones and steles. Some of the temple grounds are forests of stone. Kafū’s maternal grandfather and Narushima Ryūhoku are among those whose accomplishments will not be completely forgotten, for they are recorded upon the stones of Honjo and Mukōjima. The great Bashō had one of his “banana huts” in Fukagawa. It too is memorialized, though finding it takes some perseverance.

  A mikoshi (god-seat) at the Fukagawa Hachiman Shrine festival

  The other industrial zone was along the bayshore in the southernmost ward, Shiba, which was also the ward of the railroad, the only ward so favored in early Meiji. The Tokyo-Yokohama railroad entered the city at the southern tip of Shiba, hugged the shore and passed over fills, veered somewhat inland, and came to its terminus just short of the border with Kyōbashi. Closely following the old Tōkaidō, it blocked the plebeian view of the bay (or, it might be said, since Meiji so delighted in locomotives, provided new and exciting perspectives). It may or may not be significant that the line turned inland to leave such aristocratic expanses as the Hama Palace with their bayshore frontage.

  Shiba at the south and Kanda at the north of the Low City were honored in popular lore as makers of the true child of Edo. The fringes were not as wealthy as the Nihombashi center, and so their sons, less inhibited, had the racy qualities of Edo in greater measure. Most of Shiba is hilly and not much of it was plebeian at the end of Edo. Edo land maps show machiya, “houses of townsmen,” like knots along a string. There was a cluster at the north, around Shimbashi, where the first railway terminus was built, a string southwards to another knot, between the bay and the southern cemetery of the Tokugawa family, and another string southwards to the old Shinagawa post-station, just beyond the Meiji city limits.

  It was through Shiba that the foreigner and his goods entered Tokyo. Had it not been for the Ginza fire, its northern extremes might have become preeminent among places for the purveying of imported goods. The region did in fact prosper. The southern cluster, by the Tokugawa tombs, did not do as well. It came to harbor one of the quarters commonly called slums, though it may be doubted that Tokyo knows what a real slum is—in that regard, it has never quite caught up with the rest of the world. Since Kanda, the partner of Shiba in producing the true son of Edo, contained no “slums,” its flatlands were probably more prosperous in Meiji than those of Shiba.

  Shiba was the earliest legation quarter. When Sir Rutherford Alcock, the first British minister, went to call upon the shogun, his way lay almost entirely through what was presently to become Shiba Ward. It seems to have taken him around the western or hilly side of the Tokugawa cemetery, where also there was a plebeian fringe. He makes it sound like a lesser Asakusa.

  After a mile of the Tocado, our road turns off into a side street, narrower and more crowded. A Daimio’s residence extends the greater part of its length on one side, with a large and imposing-looking gateway in the center, from which stretches a long line of barred windows…. A small, narrow, and very muddy moat, little more than a gutter, keeps all intruders from too close prying. But these outbuildings are only the quarters of the numerous retainers…. In many cases these extend for a quarter of a mile on each side of the main entrance, and form in effect the best defence for their lord’s apartments….

  We soon emerge into an open space in front of the Tycoon’s Cemetery, and through it a small river runs, fringed with fresh green banks, and a row of trees…. Here, in open space above, forming a sort of boulevard, Matsuri, or public fairs, are often held, and, in their absence, storytellers collect a little audience. A few noisy beggars generally take up their position by the wayside…. Here a party of jugglers may often be seen too, collecting a crowd from the passers-by. Blondin and the Wizard of the North might both find formidable rivals here—for the Japanese performers not only swallow portentously long swords, and poise themselves on bottles—but out of their mouths come the most unimaginable things…flying horses, swarms of flies, ribbons by the mile, and paper shavings without end.

  On crossing the bridge, we traverse one of the most densely populated of the commercial quarters, through which, indeed, we can only ride slowly, and in single file, amidst pedestrians and porters with their loads. Bullock-cars, Norimons, and Kangos are all here, jostling each other in contending currents. Over a gentle hill, then sharp round to the right, through a barrier gate, we approach the official quarter, in the center of which, within three moats of regal dimensions, the Tycoon himself resides. But we are not yet near to it. We pursue our way down some rather steep steps—a Daimio’s residence on one side, and the wall and trees of the Tycoon’s Cemetery, which we are skirting, on the other. As we emerge from this defile, we pass through a long line of booths, where a sort of daily bazaar is held for the sale of gaudily-colored prints, maps (many of them copies of European charts), story books, swords, tobacco pouches, and pipes, for the humbler classes; and in the midst of which a fortune-teller may habitually be seen…. Something very like the gambling table of our own fairs may also be seen in the same spot; but, judging by the stock-in-trade and the juvenile customers, the gambling, I suspect, is only for sweetmeats. Their serious gambling is reserved for teahouses, and more private haunts, where the law may be better
defied. On festive occasions, a row of dingy booths divided by curtains into small compartments is often seen, provided for the lowest class. The Social Evil is here a legalized institution, and nowhere takes a more revolting form.

  In later years a place along the other side of the tombs, the east side, was known to Clara Whitney and her friends as “the thieves’ market.” It also contained one of the lesser geisha districts of the time. So the old pattern may be seen once more, places of pleasure and commerce accumulating around places of worship, in this case the great Zōjōji Temple, the southern equivalent of the Kan-eiji at Ueno.

  The circle of temples and cemeteries that started at the Sumida and fringed the old city came through Shiba and ended at the bay. The Zōjōji was the grandest of Shiba temples, though today the most famous is probably that which contains the ashes of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers (see page 64). The grounds of the Zōjōji were one of the five original parks. There it was, on a moonlit night, that a moping Kafū, back from France and hating everything Japanese, had his first mystical experience of traditional beauty.

  Virtually nothing remains of the old Zōjōji. As for the park, it is enough to say that the remains of the shoguns and their ladies, including the sad princess who became the bride of the fourteenth shogun, have been squeezed into a narrow walled enclosure, so that commerce may thrive. Hibiya Park, newer and some slight distance to the north, is today more open.

  The hilly sections of Shiba Park were so heavily wooded, we are told, that there was darkness at noon. Today they are dominated by Tokyo Tower, of Eiffel-like proportions, while the graves of the shoguns lie naked under the midday sun. In 1873 arsonists destroyed the main hall of the Zōjōji, around which the graves were once disposed. The culprits, self-righteous young men of the military class, resented the temple’s failure to separate itself from Shinto, which must be pure, uncontaminated by foreign creeds. Rebuilt, the hall was destroyed again on April Fool’s Day, 1909, this time by accident. A beggar built a fire under it to warm himself in that chilly season.