Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Tokyo bound far the largest number of books, printed far the largest number of pieces of paper, and made far the most pencils in the country. It excelled in what might be called the literate industries. Early in the thirties, chemicals were the largest Tokyo industry. By the end of the decade, with the war approaching, machine tools had emerged as the largest. Of the five wards with the largest industrial output, only one, Honjo east of the river, was in the old city. The largest of all was Kamata, a part of the Tokyo-Kanagawa industrial belt. The district east of the river continued to be one of light industry, while the south was heavy. Most of the printing was done in the old city, because that is where the newspapers were.

  The burgeoning of the suburbs has not, as in many American cities, meant the withering away of the center. Ginza, at least, and to an extent Ueno have held their own against the growth of the suburbs and the places—Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro—where office workers on their way to and from suburban cultural dwellings change trains. Because centers yet farther east, prosperous in Edo and Meiji, have declined with the general decline of the Low City, Ginza may no longer be at the center of a cobweb; but the westward movement of the city has not emptied it. Westernmost among the lively centers of Meiji, it is now, with Ueno, the easternmost. It is still a place upon which rapid-transit lines converge, bringing crowds. We hear of a “doughnut effect” in Tokyo. It unquestionably is there, but the doughnut is an eccentrically shaped one, not exactly penannular, but far puffier to the left, as we face the top of the map, than the right. The center is not merely a hole.

  If we think of the center as a larger complex than Ginza proper, including Nihombashi to the north and Marunouchi to the west, there has been a shift. This has been remarked upon above. Nihombashi is relatively less important than it was as a retail center, having lost ground to Ginza, and as an entrepreneurial center, having been the victim of a shift to Marunouchi. Yet few people would have been inclined during the interwar years to think of Shibuya or Shinjuku or Ikebukuro as the center of the city. Some might incline toward Shinjuku today, but Ginza would probably come at worst second.

  These were the great years of Gimbura, another of the acronyms of which the Japanese are so fond and for which they have such a gift. The first syllable is from Ginza, and the other two are from burabura, a mimetic word which indicates an aimless wandering or an idling away of time. “Fooling around in Ginza” might do for a translation. The Gimbura crowds were young. They may not have had much to spend in the newly risen Ginza department stores, but they were an animating presence. More than any other part of the city. Ginza was the place to be. Yet it was first among peers. Tokyo has always been a city with several centers. That is why it is often called not a city but a collection of villages. “A collection of cities” might better catch the truth.

  The Shōwa reign was a year and five days old when, late in 1927, the first Tokyo subway line began service. It was the first in the land, and in Asia. The route was a short one, less than a mile and a half long, between Ueno and Asakusa. Four companies had franchises to dig; only one started digging. The same company extended the line to Shimbashi in 1934. The entrepreneur who owned all the land around Shibuya and brought the private commuter line into it saw his opportunity. Shimbashi must not remain the terminus. So he started digging from Shibuya, and his line was opened to Shimbashi in 1939. There were two Shimbashi stations, without free transfer between them. The two companies were brought together, and the stations united, in 1941, under a public corporation whose capital came from the National Railways and the prefecture. Remnants of the other Shimbashi subway station can be detected a short distance toward Shibuya from the one now in use.

  The two halves of the Ginza line, as it is now called, show a certain difference in spirit. The northern half, from Shimbashi to Asakusa, was dug by a company specializing in transportation and interested in pleasing its customers. Some of the stations are rather charming, in Art Deco and traditional styles. The station next south and west from the Asakusa terminus was decorated with the family crests of famous actors. That was deemed in keeping, and one must heartily agree that it was, with the nature of the district served. The stations south and west of Shimbashi are uniformly drab and boxlike, the product of an entrepreneur whose chief interest was in getting hordes of people as rapidly as possible into the Tōyoko department store, on the third floor of which the line ends. So we might say that the Ginza line symbolizes transition. The northern half belongs to the past, the southern half to the emerging future.

  The earliest section, Ueno to Asakusa, was a huge popular success. It had turnstiles adapted from New York ones. People would go in and out, in and out. They could not do it on Sundays and holidays, however, when a wait of as much as an hour was required to get aboard for a five-minute ride. Stories of subway picnics seem a little unlikely, given the shortness of the route.

  Entrance to the new subway in Asakusa

  The subway company put up high buildings at each of its two original terminuses, Asakusa and Ueno. (For the Asakusa terminus, see page 353.) The Ueno terminus had a department store, on its front a clock, illuminated at night, said to be the largest in the world. It was some twenty meters in diameter. Both buildings have been torn down in the years since the war. Subway people do not seem to have had the heads for retailing possessed by the people of the surface railways.

  The Ginza line, not quite nine miles long, was the only line in existence during the war years. Construction did not begin on a second line until 1951, when another reconstruction of the city was underway. Thus well over 90 percent of the splendid system we have today is postwar. Though not badly planned, insofar as it was planned at all and not given over to mercantile ambitions, the Ginza line was not ideally planned to alleviate congestion on the National Railways. Shinjuku was growing more rapidly than Shibuya and would have been a better terminus.

  The National Railways continued to provide faster transportation from all commuter transfer points except Shibuya than did the subway. Yet it probably helped to keep Ginza at the center of things, and for this we must be grateful. Rapid transit had terminated just south of Ginza when the railway line to Yokohama opened in early Meiji and skirted it when, early in Taishō, the National Railways began service through to Marunouchi. Now it ran north and south under the main Ginza street. Another change in the transportation system favored the suburbs. Buses grew numerous and important, and, most naturally, the trolley system entered upon the decline that has in recent years brought it near extinction. With the trolley system and the railways heavily damaged by the earthquake, large numbers of little companies sprang up to take people to and from the suburbs—almost two hundred of them, mostly short-lived, in two months. Motorized public transportation was in much confusion. In the mid-thirties there were still several dozen private bus lines, in competition with one another and with the municipal buses.

  The private railways, enterprise at its boldest and most aggressive, were getting into the bus business. They still are in it, most profitably. They were also in the department-store business and the real-estate business. In both of these they were anticipated by the Hankyū Railway in Osaka, which was the first company to open a terminal department store. In one Tokyo instance, the real-estate business came first, the railway afterward. A land company that owned huge tracts in the southwestern suburbs and on into Kanagawa Prefecture built a railway, the Tōyoko, to push development and, incidentally, to make Shibuya the thriving center it is today. The Tōyoko also developed a garden city, a “city in the fields,” which is today one of the most affluent parts of Tokyo. It gave Keiō that new campus, out in Kanagawa Prefecture beyond the Tama River.

  With the completion of the Yamanote line in 1925, Tokyo Central Station may have become the front door to the nation, but it did not itself have a back door. The throngs poured forth on Marunouchi, where Mitsubishi had built its brick “Londontown,” a showplace of Meiji. As early as t
he thirties it was beginning to tear Londontown down, and today almost nothing remains; and Mitsubishi was beginning also to lose its monopoly. The proportion of non-Mitsubishi offices in the district rose from a tenth to two-fifths between the wars. We need not pity Mitsubishi, however. Marunouchi had by then become the undisputed managerial and entrepreneurial center of the land.

  In 1929 Tokyo Central got its rear or east entrance, facing Kyōbashi and Nihombashi. The new entrance was a limited one. For long-distance tickets people still had to go around to the front, or south to Shimbashi. It was only after the Second World War that the rear entrance began to offer full services. Nihombashi has never recovered from its earthquake losses, but the new entrance has brought a turnabout. The east side of the station, known as Yaesuguchi or “the Yaesu Mouth,” has become a much livelier place for shopping and revelling than the older Marunouchi Mouth.

  The name Yaesuguchi is an interesting one, and a somewhat mobile one. A Dutchman named Jan Joosten Loodensteijn had his residence and business on an inlet of the bay near what is now Hibiya Park. By the familiar acronymic process and by assimilation with an old word for “fish weir,” Jan Joosten’s strand became Yaesu. The inlet disappeared in the seventeenth century and so of course did the strand, but the name survived and moved northward and eastward to where it now reposes. Together with the more famous Englishman Will Adams, Loodensteijn served the first Edo shogun.

  Unlike most of the High City and the suburbs, Shinjuku suffered heavy damage in the fires of 1925. A part of the district had been incorporated into the city in 1920, but the vicinity of the railway station still lay beyond the city limits. The station, the car barn, and the Musashino, the largest and most popular movie palace in the High City and beyond, were all destroyed. This was probably good for Shinjuku, famous earlier for its horse manure, clouds of which would blow up on windy days like the yellow dust storms of Peking. With wartime prosperity and the beginnings of suburban growth, it was ready to take off. Buses began to run from Shinjuku into the suburbs, and the trolley line westward from the palace was extended to Shinjuku Station. A new station was completed in 1925. It too produced a turnabout. The main entrance had faced south, on the highway westward to the mountains and the province of Kai. The new one faced northward, in the direction of the postwar and post-earthquake boom.

  Mitsukoshi opened several emergency markets throughout the city just after the earthquake. In 1924 its Shinjuku market became its Shinjuku branch, the first Shinjuku department store. After a move or two it settled where it is now, a few steps east of the east entrance to the station. The forerunner of the Isetan store was in Shinjuku, on the present Isetan site, in 1926. Two big private railways had come into Shinjuku by 1930. One of them set up a retail business, called the Keiō Paradise, the second word in English, in the upstairs of its Shinjuku terminus.

  Old shops were rebuilding and transforming themselves, with an eye to the sophisticated and literate sorts who had to set foot in Shinjuku every working day. The Kinokuniya, an old lumber and charcoal dealer, moved westward from Yotsuya and made itself over into a bookstore, the biggest now in Shinjuku and one of the biggest in the city. A greengrocer near the station became the Takano Fruits Parlor, one of the places everyone knows. The last two words of the name are in English. An insistence upon putting “fruit” when used as an adjective into the plural is a little idiosyncrasy of Japanese English. “Fruits punch” has long been a standard item on the menus of such places everywhere.

  A jumble of the old and the new, Shinjuku was already a traffic nightmare in the twenties. Automobiles and construction projects blocked the main streets, stalls and crowds blocked the back streets, lines of sewage wagons backed up each evening. Growth continued even with the panic and depression. Shinjuku took business from such places as Kagurazaka in the old High City. By about 1930 Shinjuku was second only to Ginza as a retail center.

  It was one of the “mouths,” the last of the old post stations on the way into and the first on the way out of Edo. Pleasure quarters grew up at all of the “Five Mouths.” The old Shinjuku quarter straggled along the Kai highway. Shortly before the earthquake it was brought together into a more compact and easily definable and controllable neighborhood, just at the city limits after the 1920 annexation of a part of Shinjuku. Like Kagurazaka, it benefited from the destruction in 1923 of the Low City pleasure quarters. It was the noisy, bustling center of Shinjuku until things began to get lively near the main entrance to the new station.

  The Shinjuku of the interwar years, like Asakusa, is often referred to as second-rate, and again the standard of comparison is Ginza. According to such members of the Ginza congregation as the novelist Ooka Shōhei, Shinjuku ran altogether too easily and giddily in pursuit of the modern and “high collar,” two expressions meaning very much the same thing. The modern boy and modern girl went to extremes thought unseemly and in bad taste by high Ginza. Certainly it was the place where the Marx boys gathered, as to a lesser degree were the stations along the Chūō line of the National Railways. From precisely these regions was to emerge the new intelligentsia that dominated the media in the years just after the San Francisco Treaty of 1952. The phonograph was far more conspicuous in Shinjuku roistering places than the samisen, and these places were known for their large, ribald women, with limbs such as foreign women were thought to have. Street stalls made the narrow streets yet narrower. By the early years of Shōwa, Shinjuku was probably the most crowded place in the city, at least during the prime evening hours. It had more street musicians than Ginza. It had flower women and children, their wares both real and artificial, and fortune-tellers and beggars, a constant stream through the evening hours.

  Shinjuku had all of these in the twenties, and, except that the street stalls are gone, must have been rather as it is today. In the thirties it became a sort of western capital some distance behind the eastern one at Ginza-Nihombashi-Marunouchi. It had a famous slum too, even as Asakusa had one, just north of the temple. The Shinjuku slum was just south of the department stores, a place of cheap inns, bedbugs, and a transient population of day laborers, peddlers, street musicians, hawkers.

  The liveliest part of post-earthquake Shinjuku, near the old licensed quarter

  The Shinjuku quarter was one of six licensed ones. Two, including the venerable and once-glorious Yoshiwara, now fallen sadly, were within the limits of the old city. Three lay beyond, at three of the old “mouths,” or stations. The Shinjuku quarter straddled the city limits. After 1932 they all lay within. Then there were the unlicensed quarters, the “dens of unlicensed whores” (shishōkutsu), the most famous of them beyond the city limits. At about the time Japan went to war with China (the Japanese have preferred to call the war an incident), Nagai Kafū wrote one of his best works about the Tamanoi quarter, by then within the city limits but before 1932 in the northeastern suburbs. A lady there reminded him of Meiji and his youth, and gave the lie to his contention that Meiji quite disappeared in 1910 or so. Because of Kafū, Tamanoi was the most famous of the unlicensed quarters, but it was second in size to Kameido, a bit to the south. The Kameido district, on the north or back side of the Kameido Tenjin Shrine and its splendid wistaria, gave sustenance to some seven hundred ladies. Tamanoi had fewer than six hundred. Prostitution was quite open in both places. There was little to distinguish them from the licensed quarters, except perhaps that in the latter procedures for obtaining employment were more complicated, hygienic facilities were better, and the ladies did not have to work as hard. The Kameido quarter had been there from late Meiji. Like Tamanoi, it had its best years after the earthquake.

  Shinjuku may at certain hours of the evening have had a greater press of bodies than Ginza, and certainly that is one of the things the city loves best, but it was still second-rate Ginza. The high life of the years after the earthquake centered upon the cafés. In these Ginza was preeminent, the place that other places looked up to. The early interwar period was
the full summer of the cafés, and this word almost demands the qualification “Ginza.”

  Shibuya had about it much more the look of the one-company town than Shinjuku. It was quite dominated by the Tōkyū Railway system. As a place for reveling it has always been some distance behind Shinjuku, though polls have shown that the teenage crowd prefers it. In one respect it was at the very forefront of progress. Along with Asakusa, it offered a multilevel transportation, entertainment, and retail complex. Representations of the future as seen from the thirties, with rocket-like objects shooting off in all directions and shooting back again, look as if Shibuya might have been the inspiration.

  The Shibuya complex has been described as very Tokyo-like. If by this is meant that it is very crowded and cluttered and difficult to find one’s way about in, then the characterization is apt. Shibuya has the only subway station all along the Ginza line that is not underground. Indeed the tracks are high above the ground, the highest of all the tracks in the complex. The Tōyoko department store is mazelike and inescapable. Perhaps that is what the founding magnate had in mind. The arrangement of the station is in another respect not wholly irrational. The use of the hill beyond as a turnabout station and car barn makes it possible to run subway trains in very quick succession. The assumption that everyone will benefit once he or she gets the hang of it all (a little time and study may be required) also seems very Tokyo-like.