Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  What is now the busiest part of Shibuya, still countrified after reconstruction

  At the beginning of Meiji “the flower and the willow” quite dominated the high demimonde. The former was the courtesan and the latter the geisha. It is not easy to say just what a geisha is. The expression is a vague and complex one covering a broad range of prostitutes and performing artists. Geisha of the more accomplished sort, and the literal significance of the word is something like “accomplished sort,” were the ones the affluent merchants of Edo and Meiji looked to for elegant and expensive entertainment. Their accomplishments were in traditional music and dance, at their best in the pleasure quarters, whether licensed or “private,” and in the theater.

  There came Western incursions. Opinions will differ as to whether the nightclub entertainer and the bar girl of our day are as accomplished as was the geisha of old, but the geisha has gradually yielded to them. The story of the high life of this past century might be told as the retreat of the one and the advance of the others. If Nagai Kafū had been a century younger and, as Tanizaki was, a true son of the merchant class, he would probably have spent his bachelor nights among the flowers and willows, to the extent that he could afford them. Being a man of conservative tastes, he did not forsake these people, but far more of his nights during the post-earthquake years were spent among the tinselly flowers of the Ginza cafés.

  Ginza, not Shinjuku, would have been recognized by almost everyone—and certainly by Kafū, who did not often go to Shinjuku—as the place for them. The number of drinking spots in Kyobashi Ward, which included Ginza, was twice in 1930 what it had been in 1920. This is to say that in one decade the accumulation of such places equaled what it had become through all the decades before. The big buildings of Ginza came through the earthquake and fire fairly well, but not the little ones along the back streets; so building and rebuilding were feverish in the half dozen years after. Each day the Ginza of the cafés must have indeed been as the old gentleman of During the Rains saw it, not the Ginza of yesterday.

  Crowds on the main Ginza street

  These years also had bars, dance halls, and cabarets, all of these words from either French or English. Distinctions among them, though cultural historians tend to treat them as obvious, are not always clear. In a general way a café was a place, sometimes small and intimate, sometimes big and noisy, but always, when it was doing well, crowded, whose clientele drank, took light refreshments, and enjoyed the company of pretty girls. We have the testimony of Kafū, among others, that many of the girls were scarcely distinguishable from the courtesans, those other flowers of Edo. Their company could be made, if the conditions were right, to last through the night. Café ladies in Kafū’s fiction have a way of complicating things for themselves by accepting too many after-hours engagements.

  In a Ginza café

  An Osaka influence is discerned in the gaudier of the Ginza cafés. (It was just before the earthquake that Ginza became what it is today, the district on either side of the old Edo-Kyoto highway that lay between two bridges, the Kyōbashi on the north and the Shimbashi on the south. Before then only the northern part had, strictly speaking, been Ginza.)

  The Osaka-style bars of northern Ginza were very gaudy and very big, illuminated in many colors with neon lights and flashing bulbs and dancing spotlights. The smaller and more modest Tokyo sort prevailed to the south. Predictably, Tanizaki Junichirō, having departed Tokyo in 1923 and turned vociferously against it, preferred the Osaka version.

  All up and down the back alleys of Ginza are tiny, intimate cafés…. To be sure, Osaka cafés with their noisy bands are somewhat vulgar; but no one could possibly call these cramped little places in the smallest degree elegant. It is not as if there were only a scattering of them. They are numberless, each with its own steady little clientele. The Osaka kind may be vulgar, but they do at least require a certain investment. These Tokyo ones do not. Five or six tables crowded together in a tiny room, nondescript furnishings thrown together from nothing, dim indirect lighting to conceal the tatters, a French name to attract ambitious young literary types: such places have sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rain.

  It is peculiar for an aesthete like Tanizaki to distinguish between good and bad in terms of money spent, and the passage perhaps does damage to the impression he assiduously cultivated of the quiet classical repose to be found in the Kansai. One may suspect, moreover, that had the Osaka version and the Tokyo version been reversed, he would have preferred the former then too. There was little that he liked, or professed to like, about Tokyo in those years. Yet it does seem to be the case that Osaka capital was quicker than Tokyo to plunge into the entertainment industry—and that little cafés sprang up like (as we would say) weeds.

  The principal character of Kafū s During the Rains, written in 1931, is a promiscuous café lady. She works in a place called the Don Juan, so crowded in among other cafés that one must be attentive to avoid going in the wrong door. It is in the northern, “Osaka” part of Ginza, and fairly large, the main downstairs room covering an area of some seven or eight hundred square feet. Stepping through the front door—over which, in Roman letters, is the name of the place supported by two naked feminine statues, or paintings, it is not clear which—one has chiefly an impression of clutter. Screens and booths and tables are everywhere, lights and artificial flowers hang from the ceiling, genuine greenery is like thickets on the Kabuki stage. One does well not to enter by the alley and through the kitchen. Bluebottle flies buzz among garbage cans, and an odor of stale cooking oil pours from a hut of corrugated metal that might have been put up just after the earthquake.

  Kafū loved dressing rooms. Here is the Don Juan one:

  You kept your shoes on to climb the steep stairway from the earthen floor of the kitchen. At the head of it was a room maybe a dozen feet square all along the walls of which were mirror stands, fourteen or fifteen of them. It was a few minutes before three, the hour of the change of shifts, the morning one to the evening one. The place was so crowded that you could not find a place to sit down. The girls jostled one another as they pushed their faces forward into the mirrors.

  The Don Juan seems to have kept long hours. At midday it must have been more like a European than a Tokyo café, and the ladies on the early shift must have had more of the night for sleep than did Kimie, our heroine.

  A striking thing about descriptions of Ginza cafés is how familiar they look. Gentlemen with a taste for the high life gather now in Ginza and Shinjuku bars, and gathered then in Ginza cafés. The two seem very much alike. One may find it a little hard to imagine what a “milk bar” of Meiji may have been like, but not a Ginza café of early Showa. (Milk bars were places where intellectual and literary people went to read difficult publications and discuss constitutionalism and such things.)

  The novelist Takeda Rintarō describes a café in his novel The Eight Ginza Blocks (Ginza Hatchō), written in 1934. The title is an up-to-date one, referring to the newly expanded Ginza, eight blocks of it from Kyōbashi to Shimbashi. The café is making its way through a dull Sunday evening.

  From time to time the door would open. Everyone would look up in anticipation of a customer; but always there would be, and in considerable numbers, children selling flowers, and imitators of famous actors and singers, and mendicant priests with boxes inviting contributions to the Church of Light and Darkness, and violinists, and sketchers of likenesses, and lutists, and solemnfaced young men in student uniform selling pills and potions, and, with babies tied to their backs, women selling horoscopes. They would all of them glance inside and, seeing that there were no customers, be on their way.

  The priests, wandering adherents of Zen, would be uncommon today in Ginza and Shinjuku bars, and guitars and accordions would be more likely than violins and lutes. The Ginza café of 1930 or so, however, does not seem so very different from the Ginza bar of today.

  Er
oguro, sometimes eroguro nansensu, is the expression held to capture more than any other the mood of early Shōwa. It is the Japanese equivalent of “Flapper Age.” Nansensu is the English “nonsense.” Eroguro is another product of the Japanese talent for acronyms and abbreviations. It is compounded of the first two syllables of “erotic” and the first of “grotesque,” the latter made into two syllables by the Japanese dislike of consonant clusters. The radical reactionaries of the thirties were against eroguro nansensu, even as they were against money-grubbing. Already before the earthquake there were cries for a return to the solid and austere old ways. After the earthquake, voices were raised telling the city that it was Sodom, punished by the heavens for being so. Tsubouchi Shōyō, a distinguished man of letters and a leader of the avant-garde theater, heard a Diet member remark in London that divine punishment had come for all the looseness and frivolity, all the moral laxness. Shōyō asked why divinity had chosen to punish those tens of thousands of people east of the river who did not have enough money to be frivolous and loose. The reply is not recorded.

  As it concerns the cafés, the erotic half of the word is easier to apprehend than the grotesque. Suggestions as to what the latter half signified in their regard are mixed and contradictory. Also in The Eight Ginza Blocks, Takeda Rintarō describes a Ginza bar as dark and spooky in an outmodedly grotesque style. This suggests something crepuscularly Gothic; yet the eroguro that came from Osaka would seem to have had noise and light as its most conspicuous qualities. We may conclude that “grotesquerie” refers very generally to what made a new cabaret distinctive.

  When we turn to the sideshows at Asakusa and their tendency toward what anyone would recognize as grotesque, it does not seem so very new. In the Asakusa park of Meiji there were, among others, a spider man and a woman who smoked through her navel. These we may describe as reasonably grotesque. In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Kawabata Yasunari describes a worthy successor in the post-earthquake years to the woman who smoked without troubling her respiratory tract. The scene is one of the little huts in the park.

  “That it may be of use to medical science,” cries the man on the stage, “we will show you right before your eyes how he eats through the mouth in his stomach.

  “The man with the hole in his stomach was born in Asahigawa on the island of Hokkaido. The liquor with which he fended off the snow and the cold was pure alcohol. It produced strictures of the esophagus. So the doctors at Hokkaido Medical College opened this hole in his stomach.

  “Unfortunately there were no teeth in the mouth the doctors made. So he has this bill, like a bird’s.”

  It was true. The man in white untied the cord of the cloth around the bill, an object like a tobacco pipe inserted into his stomach.

  Putting a glass funnel into the pipe, he poured milk and bread crumbs inside.

  “Even in his pitiful condition he seems unable to forget the taste of sake. Occasionally he has a cup. He tastes it with the mouth in his face and drinks it through the one in his stomach…. Are not the advances of medical science marvelous?”

  In another story from Kawabata’s Asakusa period a young man back in Asakusa after an absence for his own safety gives a quick impression of how it has changed: “It’s gotten to be just like Osaka.” Which, if we turn again to Ginza, brings us back to lights and noise.

  The grotesquerie is more elusive than the eroticism. It may be that they were put together because they sounded good together, and the first is the dominant half of the eroguro pair. This does not seem so very new either, although the borders of the erotic were pushed constantly back as the years passed. It took more to arouse a person. Primly dressed young women who played and sang traditional music were erotic in Meiji, as we may judge from the crowds of young men who poured in to look at them and perhaps listen to them as well. Now a certain expanse of flesh was asked for.

  In a society dominated by men, it is most natural that women should dominate the world of sensuous pleasure. The girls in the big, flashy Osaka cafés are said to have had “It,” the Clara Bow thing. They were becoming more aggressive and less inhibited. In the early days, when Kafū was frequenting Ginza cafés with English names like Lion and Tiger, the ladies stayed in the background, pleasant to look at and not expected to make much noise. Men went for masculine companionship, much as they must have gone to the coffeehouses of Dr. Johnson’s London.

  Now the ladies emerged to take charge of the conversation. The age of the waitress gave way to that of the hostess. We are still in the latter age.

  There was a “Hostess’s Song,” the lyrics once more by Saijō Yaso. Here are the first two of four stanzas. The other two are similarly damp and aggrieved.

  I am a bar flower

  That blooms by night.

  Rouged lips,

  Gauze sleeves,

  Mad dancing

  By neon light,

  A flower watered by tears.

  I am a bar flower,

  A sad flower,

  By evening a girl.

  By day a mother.

  Tear-dampened sleeves

  Concealing the past.

  They are heavy as the night wears on.

  And not with dew.

  Japanese popular music is so flooded with tears that we need not take them very seriously. Though such a world is bound to have its sorrows and uncertainties, Takeda Rintarō tells us, again in The Eight Ginza Blocks, that the world of the Ginza cafés was tight and snug.

  The same people worked all the numberless places of the Ginza back streets. They moved from place to place, rarely staying long in any one of them; they all knew all the others. They knew everything about one another: foibles and general disposition, of course, and very private matters as well. It was the same with the customers. If each stronghold had its own little troop, it was a rare customer who limited himself to one place. They moved about, and so customer and hostess and manager were all of them acquaintances. The drinking places of the back streets were one world. For the clientele it was like a club, for management it was like a chain store.

  Many if not all hostesses were, like Kimie of During the Rains, accommodating. Prices rose as the ladies came forward to dominate the scene, and so did tips. The ordinary “salaryman” could afford to go to one of the fashionable places perhaps once a month, on payday. Takeda Rintarō tells us that students were not welcome at the café of The Eight Ginza Blocks. They did not have enough money. Though they were not refused admission, it was hoped that they would sense the chill in the air and depart.

  So another institution, the kissaten, literally the tea shop, emerged to fill the gap. An impecunious student could spend a whole afternoon for the price of a cup of coffee, and look at pretty girls who did not say much of anything after they had brought the cup. This meant essentially, on the simpler levels of the entertainment and pleasure business, a reversion from the age of the hostess to that of the waitress. It is a remarkable business, leaving no need unfulfilled, providing every commodity and service, and it is what the puritan radicals of the thirties objected to; and the product of their activism has been a society in which they would find much more to object to.

  Tanizaki may have been right that the tiny Tokyo-style places all had French names, to attract customers with literary ambitions and pretensions. The bar that is the main setting for The Eight Blocks of Ginza is called L’Automne. Some of the famous tea shops also had French names: Colombin, Mon Ami. More had English or American: Columbia, Olympic, Eskimo, and Europe, the last pronounced in a way that established it as English and not French or German. Kafū was fond of a place called Fuji Ice, half of the name a Japanese proper noun and half an English common one.

  For a time after 1923 Osaka may have been the first city of Japan. Artists and intellectuals fled to the Kansai district, of which Osaka was the center, in great numbers. They started coming back once To
kyo was comfortable again. Tanizaki was the great exception. He stayed not far from Osaka for most of his remaining years, although he never lived in the city. We have already seen an Osaka influence on the Ginza cafés and on the media. Osaka was largely responsible for the growth of monster newspapers. Only the Yomiuri among Tokyo natives stood out successfully against Osaka incursions.

  And Osaka may be blamed in part for the decline of the Rakugo comic monologue. Both Osaka and Tokyo had monologues, marvels of versatile mimicry. Even before the earthquake a form called Manzai was replacing Rakugo in Osaka. Dominant in the closing years of the Taishō reign, it advanced upon Tokyo. Not all Osaka influences can be described as baneful, but this one surely was. Manzai performers come in pairs and crack jokes, sometimes funny. The difference between Manzai comedians and good Rakugo performers is that between the stand-up comic and the actor. The latter has skills and devices and puts himself into multiple roles. The former chatters, and if he is successful people sometimes laugh at the chatter. It is perhaps the difference between art and life, the one creating a world of its own, recognizable and persuasive but apart, the other being merely itself. Manzai has not raised the quality of popular culture.

  Probably through Manzai, Osaka speech began lending words to Tokyo speech, the national standard. Tourists may not be aware that when they call the traditional livery jacket a “happy” they are using an Osaka word, happi. Many Tokyo people are similarly unaware that shōyū, almost universal now to indicate the soybean condiment, is an Osaka loan word.