Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Already in decline before the earthquake, Edo cooking surrendered the realm of high and expensive cuisine to Osaka. The most famous riverside restaurant of Edo was a victim of the earthquake, or, more precisely, the reconstruction. It stood on land marked for the new Sumida Park. Rebuilding elsewhere would have been possible, but the owner took a good price for the land and withdrew. His clientele came in from the river, and, with wheels replacing boats, the river was not what it once had been. Today Edo cooking survives in a few proud old restaurants surrounded by Osaka ones. Here the Osaka influence is not to be called baneful. Osaka cooking is more subtle and imaginative than that of Edo. So is Nagasaki cooking, which also has spread.

  But the share of the blame which Osaka must take for the decline of such popular arts as Rakugo is small compared with that which may be assigned to the rise of mass entertainment, whose day had come. Audiences had been small in Edo. Even the biggest Kabuki theaters and the Sumo wrestling tournaments had drawn only a few hundred. Now they swelled to millions.

  Charlie Chaplin tries a Japanese snack during his visit

  Among the celebrities who came visiting, to great acclaim, were some whom the new age had created. They were products of the twentieth century and its mass culture, and Japan was part of the twentieth century even as it had been trying hard to be a part of the nineteenth. Entertainers had come from abroad in Meiji, but they had had limited audiences in their native places and had similar audiences in Japan. Without question the foreign visitors who raised the greatest stir in Meiji were General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. Next, perhaps, was an Englishman named Spencer, who did aerial stunts. Possibly the nearest equivalents in early Shōwa to the general and his lady were representatives of high technology and high culture. The Graf Zeppelin flew over the city in 1929 and was moored over water some miles to the east. George Bernard Shaw came in 1933. It would be hard to say that either quite captured the eager attention of the nation as the Grants did. They did not pay it as great an honor, and the nation would probably not have been as alive to the honor if, say, Calvin Coolidge had come. All people had to do was look up as the Graf Zeppelin flew over; they did not jam the streets for a look at its crew. They did for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who came the same year. Charlie Chaplin was in town on the day in 1932 when the prime minister was assassinated, the third prime minister to be so dealt with in this century, and the second in less than two years. The prime minister’s son was supposed to take Chaplin across the river to the Sumō tournament on that beautiful late-spring Sunday. Chaplin went anyway.

  The mass audience is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, of course. It was not something the Japanese did for themselves. Though one could not reasonably say that it was forced upon them, the way had not been prepared in Tokyo as it had in London and New York. Baseball did not give way to Sumō in New York as Sumō gave way to baseball in Tokyo.

  The decline of Sumō is a relative matter. Baseball did not replace it immediately and has never replaced it completely. The only spectator sport in Edo, it has had its ups and downs in the century and more since Edo became Tokyo. The years before and after the earthquake were fairly good ones. There were popular wrestlers. The Kokugikan, “Hall of the National Accomplishment,” the Sumō stadium near the earthquake memorial east of the Sumida, was badly damaged in the earthquake. Money for repairs flowed swiftly in. The national accomplishment, which is to say Sumō, has gone through periodic spasms of reform and modernization.

  The major one in the years after the earthquake led to the formation of a legally incorporated Sumō association. The Tokyo and Osaka bands of wrestlers came together, on the understanding that tournaments would be held alternately in the two cities. This was thought admirably in the spirit of Taishō democracy, but was not sufficient to prevent new crises. Another split came in 1932, a few kantō defectors going off to Osaka with the Osaka stalwarts to form a new band. The tournaments that resulted were not popular. Neither band had enough celebrated wrestlers to fill the top ranks. A reunion was arranged in 1933, though holdouts sulked in Osaka until 1937.

  The crowds that gathered for Sumō, even in the kokugikan, were small compared with those that were to gather for baseball, which may not call itself the national accomplishment, but is. Among the very young. Sumō was probably still more popular than baseball in the years just after the earthquake. It had a radio following and presently would have a television audience as well. Newspapers did a good business in Sumō extras. It may be that radio audiences for Sumō were as large as for baseball when popular wrestlers were doing well, but here conjecture must prevail. There were no commercials and no ratings, and NHK, the public radio corporation, had a monopoly. But if Sumō was sporadically popular, baseball has been consistently and increasingly so. Sumō is no competition at all when it conies to television huckstering.

  Japanese baseball began in Tokyo, and Tokyo has been the baseball capital ever since. The early period was ambiguously amateur. The big teams belonged to the universities. A tourist guide published by the National Railways in 1933 could still say that “the biggest attractions are the matches organized by the leading universities in the spring and autumn.” The big baseball universities, Waseda and Keiō, did not stint in their support of promising players. A game in 1905 raised animosity between them to such a pitch that it was thought better for them not to see each other again. They resumed play in 1925, the last full year of Taishō. The best baseball stadium was in the outer gardens of the Meiji Shrine, often called Meiji Park. The shrine and gardens are a memorial to the Meiji emperor. The gardens, complete with stadium, were finished in October 1926, when the reign of Meiji’s successor had only two months to go. A three-university league, all of its members in Tokyo, was formed early in Taishō, and by the end of the period, with the accession of the perpetual cellar team, Tokyo University, it became what it is today, a six-university league.

  The semiprofessional status of the celebrated university players aside, there were already in late Taishō the beginnings of professional baseball. An organization called the Shibaura Society, named for filled land by the bay where it had its grounds, assembled nonstudent players for whom the game was more than sport. Its first games were with Waseda, which won. Waseda received the larger part of the credit for the sizable crowds. Ahead of its time, the Shibaura Society moved to Osaka. Professional baseball did not really get underway until the mid-thirties. It was not the Shibaura team but a Tokyo one, Shōriki’s Yomiuri Giants, named by Lefty O’Doul, that was to become the national team. Wherever they go nowadays the Giants draw crowds, as no Osaka team does except in Osaka, and Osaka teams do better even in Osaka when playing the Giants.

  Shibaura is at the southern edge of the Low City, but the Meiji Gardens are on the far southwestern fringes of the old High City. An attempt after the Second World War to give the Low City a baseball park of its own was not well received. Only teams from the non-Giant league played in it, and the crowds did not come. The Giants have their home park on the edge of the High City. So baseball and television, which fill the spare hours of the Low City, do not come from there.

  March 22 is “founding day” for radio. On that day in 1925 experimental broadcasts went forth from Atago Hill in Tokyo, the high place just north of the Tokugawa tombs in Shiba Park that had been popular for its view of Edo and of Meiji Tokyo. There were also broadcasts in Osaka and Nagoya. The first program was elevated and eclectic: Beethoven, classical Japanese music, a play by Tsubouchi Shōyō which sought to bring Kabuki and Shakespeare together.

  The three regional radio companies were amalgamated the following year into Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, a public corporation that has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, NHK. Through the war years NHK had a monopoly on broadcasting. Commercial broadcasting came only in 1951, a few months before the first television. Tokyo Rose’s popular wartime bro
adcasts were over NHK.

  Movies were first among the forms of popular mass entertainment. So they continued to be until television began having its day. When old people, the lucky few who are able to, reminisce upon good times in Asakusa, they are likely to be talking of the music halls, and the “opera” they offered before the earthquake and the “reviews” after. They do not speak of Asakusa as the great center for movies. That is probably because live, legitimate forms were very much of Asakusa, and movies were everywhere.

  Yet Asakusa was the center. In 1930 it had fourteen movie theaters. The next-largest concentrations were on or beyond the city limits, at Shinjuku and Shibuya, with four each. A quarter of a century later, when television was beginning to bring bad days for the movie business and turn Asakusa theaters into game parlors, Asakusa had fallen a little behind the Ginza-marunouchi complex in number of theaters (it was still ahead in the number that showed Japanese films) and was ahead of Shinjuku by a bit.

  Kawabata did a survey of Asakusa in 1930 which showed theaters with live performances to outnumber movie theaters. There was a variety of styles of the former, but no single kind had as many places in which to show itself as did the movies. Asakusa still had a half-dozen Yose, or Rakugo variety halls, not as grievous a decline as one might have expected from the dozen or so of late Meiji. It had a single Kabuki theater, a small one, whereas it had had almost a monopoly on Kabuki when the shogunate fell. Then there were review places, to be discussed, places offering traditional music of more than one kind, and places whose chief attraction was swordplay, masculine and feminine, the latter the more popular because somewhat erotic.

  The Asakusa Sixth District in the great age of the movies and music halls; the three theaters shown were joined together, and they still srivive—see above

  But mostly there were the movies. Asakusa drew its crowds from all over the city. The High City and suburban places, Shibuya and Shinjuku and the like, got few people from the Low City. Asakusa had a “theater department store.” Three houses under the same management stood side by side along the main Asakusa theater street. Passageways joined the three, and for the price of a single ticket the devotee could make a day of it, wander back and forth among them, and enjoy the offerings of all. Not much remains of the street from its best days, but, thanks to their continuing to be under the same management, all three houses survive, all with yellowish brick fronts, one surmounted by battlements, one with a plain-bellied front broken only by windows, the third with decorative windows in an Art Deco style. The connecting passageways also survive, but they have been left to spiders and rats for almost half a century. The survival of the middle theater, the plain-fronted Tokiwaza, is a modest triumph for the conservation movement. Until 1965 it was devoted to stage productions. Then it became a movie theater, and in 1984 it closed entirely and demolition was in prospect. Local pressures and donations from wealthy persons with attachments to Asakusa persuaded the Shōchikyu entertainment company, owner of the three, to keep it open for recitals and short-run performances.

  One Asakusa motion-picture theater was famous for a noisy ceiling fan. It was very popular. The attention the fan called to itself made people feel cool. The benshi must have been rather sorely tried, however. These remarkable and very Japanese performers were like Rakugo monologuists. Without the use of amplifiers, they declaimed all the parts on the streen above them, male and female, and told the story as well, so that the audience might be informed. They even spoke in measured phrases, alternating syllable counts of seven and five, like balladeers of old. There were benshi contests, one performer per reel. The advent of the talkie brought bad times. The man known as the last of the benshi died in the summer of 1987. He was only in his mid-sixties, and so he was a child when talkies came. It may be that others like him still preserve the art somewhere.

  The first talking pictures from abroad required benshi. Between 1929, when the first one came, and 1931, when subtitles were first affixed (to Morocco) and when also the first Japanese talkie appeared, the benshi went on doing what he had been doing all along, a little more loudly perhaps. A Japanese audience viewing a foreign film had a benshi talking away in front of it while Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper were talking away on the screen. Garbo, noisy fan, no amplifier: it must have called for a durable voice, and kept people awake.

  A strike by benshi against technical progress was in vain. Such strikes always seem to be, and one may wonder why. If it is true, and we are assured by those who remember the good benshi days that it was, that people often went to movies as much to hear the benshi as to watch the movie, why did there not continue to be a demand for silent movies? The very notion of technical progress seems to disarm resistance except on the part of those whose livelihood is immediately affected. It seems inevitable and it seems good, and those who prefer silent movies, like those who prefer silent radios and television sets, are ashamed to admit the preference.

  Silent movies had background music too, and theme songs. The most popular song of very early Shōwa was from a movie, Tokyo March (Tokyo Kōshinkyoku), which is also the name of the song. It is by the Nakayama-Saijō combination of “Tokyo Dance” (see pages 320-321). There are four stanzas, about Ginza, Marunouchi, Asakusa, and Shinjuku. Here is the Ginza one:

  The Ginza willows bring thoughts of the past.

  Who will know the aging, fickle woman?

  Dancing to jazz, liqueur into the small hours.

  And in the dawn a flood of tears for the dancer.

  There is at least one foreign word per stanza. In this one “jazz,” “liqueur,” and “dancer” are all in English (the transcription into the Japanese syllabary suggests strongly that the second is not French). The fourth stanza, the Shinjuku one, advocates running away from it all via the Odakyū, the Odawara Express, a private railway line opened between Shinjuku and Odawara, at the foot of the Hakone Mountains in Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1927. The railway objected to the recording company that if the name was to be used at all it must be used in full, Odawara Kyūkō Denki Kidō Kabushiki Kaisha. This did not fit the music very well, and the abbreviation Odakyū prevailed. The song was a huge piece of free advertising for the railway. Today no one calls it anything but the Odakyū. The invitation to flee via it has a stylish, up-to-date ring, for it runs through wealthy suburbs to what in another culture might have been called a hill station.

  Some of the Asakusa theaters offered more than benshi and music to go with their movies. One burned incense in its pits during funeral scenes, which were frequent, bereavements being frequent. Movies were rated according to the number of handkerchiefs they made sodden with tears. One little theater jiggled and chugged as the view from an observation car passed on the screen.

  During his Asakusa period, Kawabata was living just behind Ueno Park, within easy walking distance of Asakusa. He said in 1934 that he went there almost every day for three years. Sometimes he wandered about all through the night. Asakusa was a nightless place, the only part of the city with all-night restaurants. The best chronicler of Asakusa during those years, Kawabata found the crowds interesting even at the most unpromising of hours, the morning ones. Men who had passed the night in the Yoshiwara quarter north of Asakusa were on their way home, and geisha on their way to matins at the great Kannon Temple.

  Yet, he said, Asakusa produced nothing of the really highest order. There had been a decline, certainly, since the last years of Edo, when Asakusa had had the best of the theater and, in the Yoshiwara, some of the best chamber performances as well. It may be that Kawabata’s most famous Asakusa piece, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, is a little like Asakusa itself. Mannered, diffuse, obscure, inconclusive even as Kawabata novels go, it is second-rate Kawabata; but it is interesting. Asakusa may have been second-rate by Ginza standards, but it too was interesting.

  In Scarlet Gang, Kawabata quotes a famous songwriter approvingly:

  “Asakusa is the pulse of Tokyo. />
  Asakusa markets humanity.”

  These are the words of Soeta Azembō.

  “Asakusa of the myriads flings everything forth in the raw. All manner of desire dances there naked. All classes and all races mix into one great flow, limitless, bottomless, not distinguishing day from night. Asakusa is alive. The masses edge forward. Asakusa of the masses, melting down old forms to be cast into new ones.”

  In early Shōwa, Asakusa was still what it had been in Meiji, the most bustling among the sakariba, the “bustling places,” of the city. It was the great purveyor of inexpensive entertainment. For centuries the grounds of the temple had been a place where people went to amuse themselves, often in coarse and vulgar ways. The doctrine of the temple was easygoing. From Meiji into Taishō there were new entertainments, notably the movies and the Twelve Storys, the brick tower that fell apart in the earthquake.

  The Twelve Storys acquired a successor in early Shōwa. Here too, as in so many things and ways having to do with Asakusa, there was a falling off. The Twelve Storys, when it was put up, was the highest building in the city. The tower that arose over the new subway station was by no means the highest. It was only six storys, or some hundred thirty or forty feet high. Yet from the observation platform on the top floor one could see, on a clear winter day, Mount Tsukuba in the east and Mount Fuji in the west, and in the near distances a great deal of smoke, from factories, from trains, and from the brewery built on the site of the old Tokugawa estate. One riverside villa yet remained on the far bank. The new tower, Kawabata said, was in the Osaka style. All the floors except the top observation one were occupied by eating places.

  The movies attracted the biggest audiences, but it was the legitimate theater that interested Kawabata, and is likely to interest us a half century and more later, when the crowds have gone the way of Kabuki and the geisha. Before the earthquake there was the Asakusa opera, and after the earthquake the Asakusa review. We learn in local histories of an opera period and a review period, as if these forms were clearly distinguished from each other. A catastrophe came between, to give the impression of a cultural break, with a conclusion on the one side and a beginning on the other. (So it was to be with the catastrophe of the forties. Before it were the reviews and after it the strip shows.) The reviews had a longer period to die in than did the opera. The reactionaries of the thirties did not approve of such things and the war years brought an end to almost all theatrical performances. Yet the several genres are not discrete. They blend into one another.