Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Many professors dwelt in the vicinity of the university, and many literary persons as well, including Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ogai, the two of them the most revered of all Meiji novelists. Nagai Kafū has a memorable description of a visit to Ogai’s “Tower of the Tidal Vista,” not as fanciful a name as it may seem. Ogai lived north of the university, and the Hongo and Ueno rises were still much acclaimed for the views they offered over the Low City, low then in skyline as in elevation, towards the Sumida and the bay.

  There was a gakusha-machi, a “professorial neighborhood,” which has since disappeared. The Abe family, lords of Fukuyama in what is now Hiroshima Prefecture, had an estate very near the main gate of the university. Late in the Meiji Period they undertook to sell parcels at very low rates to professors, and to lend half the money needed for building houses upon them. Because the Abe had surrendered title, and the current holders could dispose of it as they wished, this admirable endeavor was defeated. In the years after the earthquake addresses to the west of the old city became fashionable among intellectuals. The professors moved there, and the Abe lands went to others. It is another episode in the westward movement of the city. Intellectuals may have had antibourgeois tendencies in some respects of intellectual import, but a good address for the businessman has been a good address for the professor too.

  In Koishikawa, the ward to the west, the Iwasaki family attempted a similar endeavor in the years after the earthquake. Their main estate straddled the boundary between Hongō and Shitaya, and so graced both High City and Low. The Western house had been placed by Conder upon the ridge, and the main gate down at the Shitaya end. The house survives. The Iwasaki estate is probably the best place in the whole country for acquiring a sense of how the Meiji plutocracy lived. A few of the Japanese rooms that once stretched all along the west verge of the garden survive. The Western mansion was of course for show, and the lawn, more like an English park than a traditional Japanese garden, must have provided a grand setting for parties; the Japanese rooms were where the family chose to live.

  The story of the survival is interesting. The holocaust of 1923 destroyed another Iwasaki mansion by Conder in Fukagawa, but spared the Hongō one, as did the holocaust of 1945. The tract and the buildings on it passed to the government as a result of American efforts to disperse the assets of rich families. Most of it was presently entrusted to the Supreme Court, which decided to clear the site for a legal institute and housing for judges. Destruction was proceeding briskly and had overtaken most of the Japanese wing when the Cultural Properties Commission intervened and declared the remainder, and the Western mansion, an Important Cultural Property under the protection of the state. The Supreme Court acceded; had it wished to have the designation revoked, it would have had to go to court like anyone else.

  The Iwasaki mansion in Hongō, designed by Conder. A survivor from Meiji

  Life has at times been difficult for the very rich of modern Japan. The head of the Yasuda enterprises, now Fuji, was assassinated in 1921. There are subterranean passages on the Iwasaki property. Many sinister things are said to have occurred in them, while the house was used by Americans for counterintelligence operations. Earlier occupants had in fact dug the passages, because they could never be sure when they might have to flee. From such details one may sense what life was like for the Rokumeikan set.

  It would seem that even before the earthquake professorial and intellectual sorts were beginning to move westwards. A 1918 work, one of large numbers describing the “prosperity” of the city, offers brief characterizations of each of the fifteen wards. Those for the Low City are rather obvious. It may be that, compared to the High City, the Low City was static and simple to classify, not the place of the future. Kyōbashi is “high-collar,” Nihombashi “Japanese.” The several directions in which the High City seems to be moving are apparent, as is the divergence between the north and the south. Akasaka is the place of the aristocracy, Azabu that of “the voices of insects,” suggesting wide gardens and tracts still awaiting development, there at the southern edge of the city. Hongō is the place of the student (as is Kanda, but of the sort of student who must work for his board), and Koishikawa, in the northwest corner of the Meiji city, is the place of the gakusha, the professor or scholar.

  Koishikawa produced Nagai Kafū, the most sensitive and diligent chronicler of the city, but on the whole it was the less distinguished of the two wards on the northern tier of the High City. It had very little, in the days before a baseball stadium and an amusement park came to occupy the site of the old Mito estate, that people would wish to go out of their way for. The circle of temples along the outskirts of Edo extended westwards and southwards through Koishikawa and Ushigome. Koishikawa contained two very solemn temples, both close to the Tokugawa family, and having none of the popular appeal of the Asakusa Kannon. There were also gardens of some note, including the university botanical garden, founded in the seventeenth century as the shogun’s own medicinal gardens. The oldest educational building in the city, once the university medical school, is in the botanical garden.

  Koishikawa contained pockets of industry, one of them dear to chroniclers of the proletariat. The valley behind the Denzūin, one of the two grand temples in the district, was a printing center. Being somewhat better educated than most members of the proletariat, printers early acquired class consciousness, and so provided Japanese counterparts of Joe Hill. On the whole, however, Koishikawa was a region of solid if not high bourgeoisie. For some reason this northwesterly direction was not the one in which people who could go anywhere chose to go; nor was it a quarter of the city that was being pushed under in the rush to the suburbs. The outer boundary of Koishikawa was still not far from the real limits of the city.

  Ushigome and Yotsuya, the wards to the west of Kōjimachi and the palace, had that same air of the modestly bourgeois. They did, from time to time, show more distinguished things to the world. Kagurazaka, in Ushigome, was for a time the only High City district of flowers and willows that rivaled Akasaka. Kafū thought it had High City sleaziness in uncommon measure, but he was difficult to please. The best time for Kagurazaka was immediately after the earthquake. Ushigome was the only ward among the fifteen that suffered no fire damage. So it drew people who, in a happier day, would have preferred the older and more conservative quarters of the Low City. Presently Kagurazaka was left behind in the great rush to the western suburbs.

  Still in mid-Meiji the least populous of the fifteen wards, Yotsuya was on the most frequented of the migratory routes westwards. Just before the earthquake it was enlarged to include a part of the Shinjuku district, the most rapidly growing of the western suburbs, presently to excel Ginza as a place for shopping and pursuing pleasure.

  The Arishima family bought a hatamoto house in Kōjimachi, and Ikuma was still living in it after the earthquake. Nagai Kafū’s father bought two hatamoto places in Koishikawa, and tore them down to have a house and garden more suited to the new day. Only traces of the old gardens, dread places inhabited by foxes, remained in Kafū’s boyhood. It would seem to have been typical. The rows of hatamoto houses in Kōjimachi supported one another and gave the place its tone, and so they remained. In the wards farther north and west the larger estates were broken up or put to public use, and the hatamoto lands in among them attracted people who were not of an antiquarian bent. So the outer wards must, at the end of Meiji, have looked much less like Edo than did Banchō.

  The southern wards were lacking in places one might wish to show a country cousin. Azabu was the ward of the singing insects, but of course he had quite enough insect voices at home. Akasaka had its detached palace, through whose iron gates it was possible, at the end of Meiji, to gaze upon the Gallic pile where dwelt the crown prince.

  There were extensive barracks in the southern wards, and from them the Roppongi section of Azabu got its start as a pleasure center, the only major one in the present city that is not also
a transportation center. The military origins of Roppongi are not commonly remembered in our day. It is a place where pleasure-seeking pacifists assemble.

  The other place for military revelry in late Meiji was Shibuya, beyond the city limits to the southwest, one of the directions in which the city was pressing most urgently. Famous for its tea in early Meiji, Shibuya was by late Meiji becoming richly suburban, the chief rival of Shinjuku in its power to draw people and money from the center of the old city.

  On Meiji maps, Akasaka “of the aristocracy” looks as if it might have had noisier insect voices than Azabu. It was not the principal abode of the highest aristocracy, the court stratum. Of fourteen houses recognized as princely in late Meiji, seven were in Kōjimachi, between the inner and outer moats of the old castle, and five were scattered through the southern wards of the city, only one of them in Akasaka. One remained in the old capital, Kyoto, and one was still in the Low City, beside the Sumida above Asakusa. None were in the northern wards of the High City, which were distinctly less titled and moneyed.

  Yet Akasaka had great tracts of public and royal land, and the princeliest personage among them all, the next emperor. Had one been good at scaling walls and evading guards, one could have walked the whole of the way across the ward, from the city limits to the outer moat, without setting foot on private, nonroyal land. Across certain wide expanses singing insects may have been hard pressed to survive. The new Akasaka parade grounds, to be the site of the Meiji emperor’s funeral and then to become public gardens in his memory, were as dusty as the old Hibiya grounds. A scorched-earth policy thought to be good for instilling a soldierly mood prevailed in both places.

  Though it did not have the smallest population, Azabu must in late Meiji have seemed the most rustic of the fifteen wards. Indeed we have the testimony of rickshaw runners that they preferred to stay away from it, and had no great difficulty doing so, for it had little need of their services. Its streets and lanes wandered their own way with little regard for the ways of their fellows, and the runner was likely to suffer the professional humiliation of getting lost.

  The main thrust of the city, as it spilled over its limits in late Meiji, was directly to the west, past Yotsuya to Shinjuku. The next most powerful was to the southwest, past Akasaka towards Shibuya. So the pattern at the end of Meiji was as it had been at the beginning, energetic commerce along the radial strands of the cobweb, and residential districts of varying density and greatly varying affluence scattered among them.

  The great shift of Meiji and since has been more than a matter of population. The High City was accumulating the money, the power, and the imagination. Culture tends to go where money goes, and so the Low City was ceasing to be original in this important regard. It may seem strange to say that power was leaving the Low City, since under the old regime absolute power had been concentrated in the shogun’s castle. Yet, as we have seen, the aristocracy was scattered all over the Low City (especially in places with water frontage and pleasant prospects), and the wealthy of the merchant class, such as the Mitsui family, had much more power than Tokugawa theory permitted.

  Today there is an illuminating confusion in defining the boundaries of the Low City. The affluent of the southern and western wards tend to think that all of the poorer northern and eastern wards are Low City. In fact, however, they straddle the ridge line that originally divided the two, and the Hongō and Yanaka districts were significant artistic and intellectual centers in Meiji, most definitely a part of the High City. The confusion is illuminating because it informs us that the great division today, especially in the minds of the high bourgeoisie, is between the richer and poorer halves of the city. It was not so in Edo and early Meiji. Then, if any generalization held, it was that the High City was the more patrician of the two, and the Low City the more plebeian.

  Today, poring over rosters of literary societies, one may come upon an occasional address in the northern wards, but scarcely any in the flatlands east of the Ueno rise—in the classical Low City. Writers and artists were moving out all through the Meiji Period, as were the old military aristocracy and the mercantile elite. Few stayed behind after the great flood, and by the time of the earthquake the withdrawal was almost complete. Nagai Kafū loved the Low City, but it would not do for everyday. He lived in Tsukiji, near the foreign settlement and even nearer the Shimbashi geisha district, for a time in mid-Taishō, but several years before the earthquake he built himself a house in wealthy, hilly Azabu. His diary for the Tsukiji time is a grouchy document. The Low City was noisy and dusty.

  The Low City was the home of the literature and drama of late Edo, insofar as those pursuits had to do with the new and not the traditional and academic. The drama changed gradually, because of the improvers and because of inevitable influences from abroad, and its base in the Low City was dissipated. The literature of Edo continued to be popular until about midway through Meiji, when the modern began to take over.

  Of the difference between the traditional and the modern in literature, many things can be said. The popular literature of Edo had not been very intellectual. The literature known as modern, with its beginnings in the Rokumeikan decade, the 1880s, is obsessively, gnawingly intellectual. If a single theme runs through it, that theme is the quest for identity, an insistence upon what it is that establishes the individual as individual. The importance of Christianity in Meiji thought and writing, an importance which it has not had since; the rebellion against the family and the casting of the authoritarian father into nether regions; the strong autobiographic strain in modern fiction: all of these have in common the identification of modernism with individualism.

  They were concerns of the High City. The Low City went on for a time reading and producing the woodcut books beloved of the Edo townsman. The leaders of modernity had utter contempt for these, and as the afterglow of Edo faded, the Low City offered no serious competition with modernity. Nor was it remarkably steadfast in its devotion to the old forms. Not many people of Taishō could, and almost no one today can, make out their antiquated, ornate language and quirkish calligraphy.

  A strong sense of locale was present in the literature of Edo. One can with no great exaggeration say that Edo had its literature and Tokyo does not. Modern literature is altogether more national and cosmopolitan than Edo literature, which is not to be understood and appreciated without reference to very specific places—from Shiba on the south to Kanda, Shitaya, and the Asakusa-Yoshiwara complex on the north, and eastwards beyond the Sumida. Though people like Kafū and Kubota Mantarō made the changing city their chief subject, they were exceptions. Modern literature calls to mind not specific places like Shiba and Kanda but that great abstraction “suburbia.”

  To say that the Low City was the cultural center of Japan in late Edo and Meiji is to say that it created the most interesting culture. This is different from being a cultural capital, the products of which are purveyed all through the land. The boundaries of the Low City as we see them on a late-Edo map defined a cultural region. The boundaries of the High City today do not. It is bigger than it looks. The story of modern literature is, like the story of prime ministers, philosophers, and the like, a national one, something that has happened in Tokyo but is not of it.

  All these several stories are interesting, certainly. Giving them a few lines and then moving on, I may seem to be dismissing the grander story, that of the transformation of a small and isolated country at a far corner of the earth into a modern technological giant, and of the intellectual and emotional processes that accompanied the transformation and made it possible. Yet it may after all be less a story of change than one of survival. The modern novelist and thinker have been dedicated evangelists for individualism, and yet the great strength of modern Japan may be in the willingness of most Japanese, even in the absence of authoritarian precepts, to suppress their individuality.

  The growth of the High City in size and influence has mad
e Tokyo more of an abstraction and less of a community. Beginning in Meiji and continuing all through the century since Meiji began, the change is a profound one. The baseball-and-television culture of the Low City of our day is an altogether lesser entity than was the culture of the Low City a century ago; and the culture of the High City is much more considerable. The High City still has poor people enough, but it has all of the exceedingly rich people. The other elements, literary and artistic and philosophical and the rest, have followed money, even when they have thought of themselves as constituting a resistance.

  The High City gets higher and higher. The Low City is still the warmer and more approachable of the two, but the days of its cultural eminence are gone. They are for elegists and threnodists.

  Chapter 6

  THE TAISHŌ LOOK

  July 20, 1912, was the day scheduled for the kawabiraki, the opening of the Sumida (see pages 143-144), most delightfully crowded of Low City observances. It was called off, for on that day came the announcement that the Meiji emperor was grievously ill. He had been ill for a week, and had fallen into a coma from uremic poisoning.

  The rest of the summer was hushed. The street festivals for “taking in coolness,” which made the oppressive heat of August a happy thing, were subdued, as was the mood of the pleasure quarters. Geisha who found it necessary to go about their business did so in ordinary dress, lest they attract attention. Even the stock market reacted, pessimistically, for there was an instinctive feeling that the end of an age had come, and no one could be certain about the one that was to follow.