Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  To accommodate the electric trolleys of late Meiji, a street was put through almost directly south from the castle to the old Tōkaidō highway, which it joins some distance north of Shinagawa. It bisected the Zōjōji grounds. The portions east of the new street were those earliest given over to development, which has today quite engulfed them, leaving scarcely a trace of park. Yet farther east was what might be called the southernmost extremity of the old Low City, and along the bay-shore was an early center of heavy industry.

  Tokyo Shibaura has been a leading manufacturer of machinery ever since its founding in 1875 by a man from Kyushu. Shibaura means “Shiba coast.” Its main factories on land reclaimed by the shogunate, the company was an early manufacturer of telegraphic equipment. In spite of all these industrial endeavors, Shibaura remained the most popular of watering places. The young Tanizaki went there gathering clams.

  Shibaura had clams in spring and cooling breezes in the summer, and a view up the Sumida to Ryōgoku Bridge for the “opening of the river.” Meiji graphic art tends, except in certain erotica, to emphasize the clams. It was only at the end of the period that the youth of the land turned with enthusiasm to sea bathing. Advertisements from middle to late Meiji recommend it as something which, since foreigners find it pleasant and healthful, Japanese might try too. The places where pretty clam-diggers posed for photographers, skirts tucked up to reveal sturdy legs, now lie beneath a freeway, and already at the end of Meiji reclaimed lands were creeping eastwards.

  Just north of the Tokyo Shibaura plant was, at the end ot Meiji, the Number One Gashouse of the Tokyo Gas Company; and just north of that, to remind us that it was not only the lower classes who had factories for neighbors, the Shiba Detached Palace, a salubrious retreat for royalty.

  “Twenty years ago,” wrote the novelist and playwright Osanai Kaoru, some years after the earthquake, Shibaura was a place with flair. There the geisha came, the genuine sort, for delicious assignations.

  “I went the other day for a look at it, the first in I do not know how many years. I was shocked, at the wide expanses of reclaimed land, at the big new docks along the shallow bay, where there once had been beaches, at the warehouses, at the utter disappearance of the old restaurants and inns.

  “Only the black pines of the Flama Palace, across the canal, remained from other years.”

  In its shady western hills, Shiba Park had perhaps the most famous Japanese restaurant of Meiji. Called the Koyokan, House of the Autumn Colors, it does not survive. It was built in 1881 as a sort of club for the elite, who in the Rokumeikan period saw the need for a good Japanese restaurant not associated, as most of them then were, with the demimonde. The improving spirit of the day is here again to be noted. No one under the old regime, except perhaps for a few of the more unbendingly puritanical bureaucrats, would have seen a need for the separation. Some of the most prominent names in the land were on the list of stockholders. Radically innovative in one sense, the Kōyōkan sought to be traditional in another. Kyoto food was served, and the waitresses were asked to have Kyoto accents, whether they came naturally or not. Much frequented by bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals, the Kōyōkan figures more prominently in Meiji literature than does the Rokumeikan.

  Shiba was the most hapless of the three large early parks. We have seen how Saitō Ryokuu contrasted Ueno and Asakusa, the latter noisy and down-to-earth, the former sternly edifying. Shiba was neither the one nor the other, and since the most recent destruction of its temple, in 1945, it has seemed almost unpeopled, as that word may be understood in Tokyo. Already in Meiji it was being left behind. From a short distance south of the Tokugawa tombs a branch of the Tōkaidō led northwards into the High City—it is the route Sir Rutherford Alcock seems to have taken—while the main road led to Nihombashi. The tombs lay between the two, and on either side was a flourishing district of the sort described by Sir Rutherford. The railroad passed them by. As they declined, it was the far north of Shiba, by Shimbashi Station, that thrived.

  Shimbashi, always called Shibaguchi, “the Shiba Mouth,” by such cognoscenti as Kafū, did not get modernized after the great Ginza fire. It is where the old merchant and artisan city narrowed from the spread of Nihombashi and Kyōbashi to a constricted corridor leading southwards towards the city limits and Shinagawa. Before the Meiji ward boundaries were drawn, separating Ginza and Shimbashi, it could be distinguished from its northern neighbor by little save its greater remoteness from the center of things—a remoteness and a lack of affluence which made it the proper breeding ground for children of Edo. If Shimbashi had become a part of the new Ginza Bricktown it might also have become, like Ginza, the sluice through which the delightful new things of the West came flooding. It was immediately in front of the station, while Ginza was a bit removed. After the trauma of the rebuilding, Ginza did eventually retrieve its standing as a place of revelry, of tiny drinking and lechering establishments, but through most of Meiji that function was assumed by Shimbashi. It was as if, having had their look at Ginza, which of course everyone wished to see, people turned back and relaxed in Shimbashi, where they felt at home. One is reminded of the typical estate of a Meiji plutocrat, consisting of a grand Western building (by Conder, perhaps) for garden parties and foreign dignitaries, and a Japanese wing somewhere in the background for everyday use. Ginza had its broad streets and colonnades, and Shimbashi was a warren, where one felt snug and secure. A part of Shimbashi was known as Hikagechō, “Shadyville,” which seems just right.

  The Shimbashi geisha district, with Yanagibashi the greatest of them through most of Meiji, has been the most peripatetic. It was named from its proximity to Shimbashi, the New Bridge on the Tokaidō, and moved northwards and then eastwards. Today, though still called Shimbashi, it is largely in the Tsukiji district, where the foreign settlement was and the fish market is. In the decades since Meiji it has done better than Yanagibashi, but it may be that the geisha profession is a dying one. Elegance and ritual survive, if perhaps the old standards in song and dance have fallen.

  The original Shimbashi Station, northern terminus of the railway from Yokohama and later from Kobe, is said by experts on Meiji architecture to be something of a mystery, though it was endlessly photographed and made into woodcut prints. The original plans, by an American, have been lost, and no detailed description survives. So it was observed by millions of eyes (some three million passengers got on and off in 1907 alone), and drawn and photographed countless numbers of times—and yet we cannot know exactly what was seen by all those eyes. Among stations in the West, it seems to have resembled the Gare de l’Est in Paris most closely.

  Some places have a way of coming back from hard blows, others do not. Yanagibashi is being destroyed by the ugly wall that cuts it off from its river. Shimbashi lost its station, and did not seem to notice. After 1914, when Tokyo Central Station was completed, Shimbashi was no longer the terminus and the old station was no longer used for passengers. A new and less important station was built some slight distance to the west, right on top of Shadyville. Shimbashi might have languished. Because the Low City was made to feel rejected by the new central station, however, people from Kyōbashi and Nihombashi preferred to board their trains at the new Shimbashi Station. So in the warrens of Shiba Mouth there was revelry as never before. Ginza moved northwards and Shimbashi went on doing the old thing, more intensely.

  The Shimbashi Station, 1881

  At the end of Meiji, Nihombashi was no longer a center holding the Low City together. The genuine child of Edo may have been born in Shiba and reared in Kanda, but from both places, while Edo was still Edo, he looked towards Nihombashi as a height or a hub. Wonders of power and progress were achieved in Meiji, but these things do not happen without cost. The Low City was no longer what it had been through the last century or so of Edo, the cultural capital of the land, and Nihombashi, still the geographic center of the Low City, looked about it at a scattering rathe
r than a system.

  There was no reason for modern ward lines to follow the ridge line that separated the hilly half of the city from the flat half; and they did not. Each of the wards along the western fringe of the flatlands reached into the hills, and the eastern portion of Hongō, largely in the hills, lay beyond the ridge and in the flats. The boundary is somewhat imaginary in any case. The two halves were and continue to be different from each other, but the ridge line is no more than a convenience for dividing them.

  The line entered the Meiji city north of Ueno and left it near the present Shinagawa Station, where the hills came almost down to the bayshore. Had one walked through Edo generally following the ridge line, there would have been only one stretch of the route where the division between High City and Low City seemed quite clear, and even so one would have had to stray eastward from the precise topographical line. There was a cultural chasm along the outer ramparts of the castle.

  In Meiji it became the line separating Kōjimachi Ward and especially the Marunouchi business district, within the circle, from the several wards, notably Kyōbashi and Nihombashi, that lay outside it. Before the fall of the shogunate, the highest of the bureaucracy and the military aristocracy dwelt within the circle, to the west of the moat. To the east lay the heart of the Low City, Nihombashi and Kyōbashi.

  The outer moat survived through Meiji and down to the recent past, but it was early decided that His Majesty’s abode did not require such defensive works as Lord Tokugawa’s had claimed. So the outer gates were quickly dismantled, and the district between the outer and inner moats put to several uses.

  Great changes have come over Nihombashi and Ginza, to the east of the chasm, and Marunouchi, to the west; but on a holiday in particular the old difference is still to be observed. The outer edge of the circle teems with shoppers and pleasure seekers, the inside is dead. The former continues to be the land of the merchant and his customer, the latter is the land of the office worker, who withdraws to the suburbs on holidays, or perhaps steps across the line into Ginza for something self-indulgent.

  Mention has been made of the late-Meiji photographs taken by Ogawa Isshin from the roof of the City Hall. They are striking for the unfinished look of the Marunouchi district, but among specific objects the most remarkable is perhaps the great wall that is being put up to the east, as if to keep off barbarian hordes, or to keep a restless populace at home. It is the elevated railroad to the new central station, and it did have the effect of emphasizing divisions, even though no guard was present to enforce them. As of old, the lines of commerce and passage went north and south, from the Nihombashi bridge to the Kyōbashi bridge and the Shimbashi bridge, and the station was rather for the accommodation of the executive and the office worker. The division still survives.

  The mansions and government buildings near the palace, on what was to become Mitsubishi Meadow, did not all disappear at once. Some did disappear but some were for a time put to the uses of the new bureaucracy; but by the end of Meiji all were gone. The lands immediately east of the palace became public park (though not a part of the municipal park system), and Mitsubishi presently took over and began to develop its Londontown when the bureaucracy withdrew from lands farther east. In search of relics by which to remember the old castle complex, one would at the end of Meiji have come upon stones and trees, a scattering of gates and bridges, and no more. Parts of Kanda or Nihombashi repeatedly destroyed by fire would have been more redolent of Edo than Marunouchi.

  To the west of what in late Meiji became Hibiya Park, still in the Kōjimachi flatlands, was the main bureaucratic complex. It was chiefly brick by a variety of foreign architects in a variety of styles, on the whole more up-to-date, from the foreign point of view, than the Classical Revival styles that were to prevail among Japanese architects. A single building, the Ministry of Justice, remains from the bureaucratic center of late Meiji. Though several German architects are usually given credit for the design, the original one seems to have been revised in the direction of simplicity. The Germans seem to have been fond of traditional frills, and it was these that were disposed of.

  The first Diet building rose south of Hibiya Park, not far from the Rokumeikan. It promptly burned down, a victim of electric leakage, and was rebuilt in 1891, in a half-timbered Renaissance style, far less imposing than, for instance, the highly Italianate General Staff Headquarters, which occupied a much more imposing site somewhat to the west, perhaps the finest in all the city. In front of it was the palace moat, and beyond that the grassy embankment and the venerable pine trees beyond which a new residence had been built for the emperor. Although the symbolism cannot have been intentional, it seems to put Meiji democracy in its place.

  Kōjimachi was also the diplomatic ward. At the end of Meiji it contained most of the legations and embassies, although the American embassy stood on the land it still occupies, in the northeast corner of Akasaka Ward, and two legations still remained in the old Tsukiji foreign quarter, near which there was a lesser bureaucratic center. The German embassy and the British embassy stood grandly on the inner moat. The former was the grander, and the most frequently photographed of all the embassies, part of an impressive row with the War Ministry and General Staff Headquarters. The embassies have followed the movement of the city to the south and west, and only the British, among the old ones, remains in what was Kōjimachi Ward. When in late Meiji land was chosen for the American legation and embassy, it was eccentrically far south, but the flow of the city has left it nearer the pulsing bureaucratic heart than any of the others.

  Though the foreign settlement still contained hotel accommodations at the end of Meiji, the big hotel in the Western style was the Imperial. A Tokyo Hotel had been put up some years earlier in the same part of Kōjimachi, but foreign relations were proceeding briskly and treaty negotiations arriving at a hopeful stage. Something more elaborate was thought to be needed. With government encouragement and a grant of land (and some of the most successful entrepreneurs of the day among the investors), the Imperial opened for business in 1890. Almost immediately the Diet burned down, and the Imperial became temporary accommodations for the House of Representatives.

  It was a three-storey wooden building with verandas and arches not at all out of keeping with the Rokumeikan, its neighbor. Sources vary on the number of guest rooms, but there were not above a hundred. So perhaps two or three hundred guests would have filled all the exotic hostelries in the city. One senses what a pleasantly remote and isolated place Tokyo continued to be, despite its emergence into the great world, and its prospect of brilliant successes in the art of war.

  The first Imperial Hotel, with one of the old castle moats in foreground

  A lounge inside the Imperial Hotel

  Prince Itō, the prime minister of the “dancing cabinet,” he who was host to the masquerade ball at the climax of the Rokumeikan period, regularly took meals at the Imperial. The hotel replaced the Rokumeikan as the gathering place of the international set. Over the years it has moved back and forth across its ample public domains, a new one being put up on one half and itself becoming “the old Imperial” when yet another new one is put up on the other half. The first Imperial was destroyed by fire while the second one, by Frank Lloyd Wright, was under construction.

  The southern and eastern parts of Kōjimachi had yet more monumental piles in the Western manner. The Imperial Theater was finished at the very end of Meiji, across from the palace plaza. Beside the outer moat of the palace as it crossed the ridge line and entered the High City was the Akasaka Detached Palace, finished in 1908. It was built on the site, expanded by gifts and purchases, of the main Edo mansion of the Wakayama Tokugawa family. There it was that the Meiji emperor, left homeless by the palace fire of 1873, spent roughly the first half of his reign. The mansion became the crown prince’s residence upon completion of a new main palace. The new Akasaka palace was put up for the crown prince, who, whether he
wished it or not, had a far grander residence than his father. Now serving as the guesthouse for visiting queens, popes, and the like, the Akasaka Palace consists of three floors of brick and granite in the Versailles manner.

  The Imperial Theater and the Akasaka Palace were designed by Japanese architects. It is an indication of the distance come. After the first hybrid curiosities, built by Japanese “master carpenters,” came the foreign period dominated by such people as Josiah Conder. Beginning with the Bank of Japan, Japanese architects commenced doing the big foreign thing for themselves. Although Wright was summoned to build the second Imperial, foreign architects would never again be so important. No one would say—as it was said in early Meiji—that Japanese foreign architecture was foreign to any known style. It could not, on the other hand, be said that there was anything very original about the Gallic exercises of late Meiji (although the Imperial Theater did, until the earthquake, bear atop its dome a large statue of a Kabuki actor). Amateur exuberance gradually gave way to a professional discipline that was perhaps too tightly controlled.

  The flat parts of Kōjimachi Ward, within the outer moat and to the east and south of castle and palace, may have had no geographic features to distinguish them from the flatlands beyond the outer moat, but no son of Edo would have thought them a part of the Low City—his city. Today they are the most national part of the city, where financial and productive endeavors are regulated, and from which the land is governed. As one crosses the ridge line, following the inner moat or the avenue where the outer moat once was, one is clearly in the High City. The British embassy has perhaps the best address in the whole city, but it is more isolated than the American embassy, because the system of rapid transport has until recently been reticent about intruding upon affluent residential neighborhoods.