Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  Western popular music, so strongly under the influence of the American beasts, virtually disappeared. It did disappear as public performance, and people had to keep their gramophones low if they wanted to listen to records. Classical music was another matter. There was an inherent contradiction in the great campaign to purify Japanese culture: two of the most musical of peoples, the Germans and the Italians, were Japanese allies, and the Japanese went on hoping that the Russians would stay out of the tiff with the A, the B, the C, and the D. Russian and German music were performed almost to the end. Hibiya Hall survived the May 1945 raids that destroyed almost everything in the vicinity, including the prefectural library. The Japan Philharmonic had its last concert there in June. It presented Beethoven’s Ninth, a remarkable achievement in a city many of whose musicians had gone to war and whose communications and transportation had broken down. The exhortation in the last movement that the masses hug and kiss may have been taken as another way of inviting the eight directions to assemble under one roof.

  The more expensive and elegant restaurants, such as those with geisha, had all closed their doors before the heavy bombings came, but lesser establishments in large numbers—some three thousand of them, the best estimate is—remained in business all through the war. Then there were drinking places known as “people’s saloons” (kokumin no sakaba), which provided rather chilly comfort. Takami Jun, in his diary, described a visit to one, in Ginza. Each customer was allowed a bottle of beer, a glass of draft beer, or a flagon of sake. Discipline was not good. Customers were divided into parties of ten for admission, but when the time came for Takami’s party to be admitted it contained eleven people. Someone had sneaked in. It was possible to get special favors if you knew the manager. This information Takami had from a Yose performer who did know a manager.

  The Crisis had some benevolent aspects. It brought, as we have seen, a fall in the suicide rate. Whether or not the closing of gambling establishments is benevolent, it too occurred. Takami reported that until the beginning of the China Incident the regions north of the Asakusa Kannon were dotted with little gambling places, each with a lookout patrolling the street. Their patrons were such people as the wives of the neighborhood greengrocers. Then the Incident began, and they all closed down. The war was a good time for those who wished to get married. If the Japanese were a superior race and if the eight directions were to do the wise thing, why then they must be numerous. They must increase and multiply. So a metropolitan wedding hall was opened, for the inexpensive and efficient production of weddings. During its best times, midway through the Pacific War, it produced some two or three hundred a month.

  The Ueno Zoo had its happy events and its great sorrow. A baby giraffe born in May 1942 was named Minami, “South,” by way of encouraging the Japanese push into Southeast Asia and the islands. Then the time came, in August and September 1943, to kill dangerous animals. The corpses were dissected at an army veterinary hospital and the notable ones were stuffed. The remains were buried under a memorial stone in the zoo. In a search for funds to maintain what was left, a third as many birds and beasts as in 1940, the zoo took to breeding and selling chicks, ducklings, and piglets. At the end of the war there were vegetable patches on the grounds. The largest animals left were three camels, two giraffes (including Minami), and a water buffalo. A hundred forty firebombs, more or less, fell on the zoo on April 13, 1945. The saddest stories one hears are of the elephants. The animals were to be disposed of by poisoning. The elephants refused to eat the poisoned food. The keepers could not bring themselves to shoot their charges, which went on begging until they starved to death. The most vigorous and truculent died first. There was talk of sending the smaller of the remaining two off to Sendai, but this was rejected by the chief keeper as impractical. In their cages, out of sight behind black-and-white drapes, the two struggled to get to their feet as ceremonies for the repose of their spirits proceeded. They seemed to think that if they did tricks they would be fed.

  The first American air raid, the raid commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James A. Doolittle, came just after noon on a fine spring day, April 18, 1942. Thirteen carrier-based B-25 bombers flew in low enough for strafings, earlier and from a greater distance than had been planned. A Japanese patrol boat spotted the carrier that morning and sent off a wireless message before it was sunk. The message arrived in Tokyo and was treated carelessly. The view was that there might or might not be a raid and in any event it would not come for a while. Ten minutes elapsed after the planes were sighted before an alarm was sounded. A similar insouciance, having to do perhaps with the myth that the Japanese spirit would prevail over all, is to be observed in later and far more serious raids. Three of the thirteen aircraft dropped their bombs on Kanagawa Prefecture to the south of Tokyo, and three of the sixteen that took off from the carrier went to bomb Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. Nagoya got more than its intended share, because the Osaka flight bombed it by mistake.

  In Tokyo the damage was chiefly along the northern and southern fringes of the city, although there was also damage in Ushigome Ward, just to the west of the palace. The palace itself was not damaged. The casualty total was 364, including thirty-nine dead. About two hundred fifty buildings were damaged.

  Two-thirds of the deaths were in the southern part of the city, but the single one in Katsushika Ward, at the far northeast, aroused the greatest indignation. It was the one the newspapers settled upon. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy was killed by strafing. Probably he would not have died had he not lived in a district notorious for its want of medical facilities, but evidence of what the American beasts were capable of was there for everyone to see.

  So was evidence of fibbing by Japanese military authorities. The first announcement from the Tokyo army command was that nine planes had been downed. It was, as we have noted, a fine, clear spring day, and no one in the city had observed the downing of a single plane. Perhaps, the joke had it, the defenders of the city meant that they had succeeded in shooting empty air. The Japanese are great punsters, and the words for “nine planes” and “thin air” are homophonous. In fact the Japanese downed none of the planes. All sixteen flew safely across Japan and on to or just short of the Asian mainland. There the crews had varied experiences. Eight men were captured by the Japanese and three among them were put to death. The largest number fell into the hands of Chinese guerrillas and made their way home through India. General Tōjō, the prime minister, chanced to be in the air that afternoon, flying off on a military inspection. He had a close brush with the raiders.

  Hibiya Park, which had lost its palmettos and become an artillery emplacement in February 1936, now lost the tops of all its trees in the direction of the palace and became an antiaircraft emplacement. Certain of the Doolittle pilots had been so brazen as to fly over His Majesty, although they had done him no harm. This must not happen again. Things got worse and worse for the park, as for other parks. The lawns and parterres presently became vegetable patches. Iron artifacts were stripped away. Some bronze remained, to meet the hostility of the Americans, who found certain of its applications warlike.

  The first serious raids, on the southern island of Kyushu, were mounted from China. The Saipan landings occurred in mid-June 1944. When next, on November 1, American planes were sighted over Tokyo, they came from the Marianas. They were for reconnaissance and dropped no bombs. Bombs came on November 24. The early raids, through February, by both island-based and carrier-based planes, were heavy ones aimed at military targets, mostly in the northern part of the city and in the counties. There were waves of planes all through February 16 and 17. The chief targets were air bases in the suburbs. The Japanese loss of planes was heavy, and the ability to defend the city was grievously reduced.

  The Hama Detached Palace, by the bay just south of the Tsukiji fish market, may be called a military target because, like Hibiya Park, it had been devastated to make antiaircraft emplacements. Originally the bayside villa of t
he shoguns, it was until 1916 the place for large royal receptions, and until the late nineteenth century it provided lodgings for eminent foreign guests. General and Mrs. U. S. Grant stayed there in 1879, though the building in which they stayed was demolished in 1899. All of the central buildings went in the raids of late November 1944.

  The incendiary raids began in March. The most dreadful of them, on the night of March 9-10, did very much what the fires after the earthquake had done: destroyed the Low City. Waves of bombers came in for two and a half hours from just past midnight. The planners of the raids had hit upon what may have been the urban concentration most hospitable to fires in the whole world, and they had hit upon the proper season. As is so often the case in early spring, strong winds were coming down that night from the north and west. The progress of the war had probably made the decision for the planners. The capture of Iwo in February and March and the decimation of the Kantō air defenses in the heavy raids that preceded the incendiary attacks made mass, low-level runs as nearly safe as they could be.

  Nagai Kafū’s house in Azabu was among the hundreds of thousands burned that night (the damage was not limited to the Low City). Having finally found refuge in the house of a relative, he lay down to sleep, his diary entry concludes, with columns of sparks in his eyes and the shriek of the wind in his ears. No incendiary bombs landed near his house. Sparks were blown in from a considerable distance away. We have vivid descriptions of what it was like to be in a rain of incendiary bombs. It was like “a fox’s wedding,” a profusion of fox fires or will-o’-the-wisps. Many of the bombs burst in midair and sent out hissing blue tendrils.

  Some two-fifths of the city went up in flames. The four wards between the Sumida River and the Arakawa Drainage Channel almost disappeared. Between seventy and eighty thousand people are believed to have died that night. This is some three-quarters of the death count from all raids on the city.

  It was a night of horror, and the Americans and their bombers were the agents. Yet a few words may be slipped in by way of mitigation for what they did. The wards east of the river were, along with the wards nearest Yokohama, the most heavily industrialized parts of the city. The pattern of industrialization beyond the Sumida was so fragmented that it would have been impossible to separate implicitly military targets from purely civilian ones. Foresight was, moreover, lamentably bad, and measures to prevent the disaster scarcely existed. Through the first months of 1945 people were actually discouraged from leaving the city. Their patriotic duty was to stay at their posts. The contrast between the March raid and the August one on Hachiōji, out in the county part of the prefecture, is telling. Warned by handbills and quite prepared to believe them, the people of Hachiōji fled. There were only two hundred twenty-five deaths, and the number and weight of the bombs were higher than in the March raid.

  Looking eastward across the Sumida after the major air raids of 1945

  Defenses were totally ineffective, even though there had been defense drills from as early as 1943 and though the bombers came in low and along predictable courses. The first alarms were not sounded for the March raid until several minutes after the first bombs fell. A false alarm would have had a bad effect on morale—and who would have taken the blame if the emperor and his lady, to no purpose, had been required to dress themselves in the middle of the night and move to a shelter?

  Along with most of Asakusa, most of the great Kannon Temple was destroyed that night. It had survived the earthquake. In 1923 the temple precincts had been for Kawabata a field of flowers, bright with refugees from regions to the north. Several bombs fell on the main hall at about one-thirty in the morning. It was consumed in about two hours. The pagoda went too, though some outbuildings and one gate survived. A common view was that it had been a great mistake on the part of the authorities to requisition the statue of the great Meiji actor Danjūrō that stood on the grounds and send it to war. The statue had been given credit for turning back the flames in 1923. The innermost sanctuary, a small, portable shrine or feretory, was removed and brought back to a temporary hall late in 1945, and, a decade later, to a partially rebuilt main hall. Almost no one knows whether or not it contains, as averred by the clergy, a small golden image of almost indescribable antiquity, because almost no one has been allowed to look inside. The lost buildings, from early in the Tokugawa Period, were among the oldest in the city.

  Because the corpses had to be disposed of speedily and neither fuel nor manpower was available in large enough measure for cremation, most were given temporary burial. The parks along and east of the river became cemeteries. Of some ninety thousand reburials in the years after the war, eighty-five thousand were in a mass grave at the Earthquake Memorial Hall (see page 299). Identification was next to impossible. Only the remaining five thousand had claimants. Wandering through cemeteries, one is always coming upon tombstones that bear the date March 10, 1945. Few of the graves beneath contain bones.

  The next big raids came in April, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth. They did great damage in the northern and western parts of the city and along the industrial belt from Tokyo into Kanagawa Prefecture. Among the casualties were the main buildings of the Meiji Shrine, southwest of the old city limits. Raids in late May took away about half of what remained of the old city, chiefly in and around Ginza and southward and westward into the High City. The main building of the palace was destroyed on May 25, and the royal family moved to a secondary building. There had earlier been talk of moving the royal residence across the Tama River into Kanagawa Prefecture. Now there was talk of moving it to the mountain fastnesses of central Japan. The move would doubtless have taken place if the army had had its way and the nation had fought to the end. It would have meant moving the capital, for the capital is where the head of state resides.

  Several newspaper offices were gutted, as were the Kabukiza and the Shimbashi Embujō. Two large universities, Keiō and what was to become the University of Education, suffered heavy damages. The great Zōjōji, the southern of the two Tokugawa mortuary temples, was almost completely destroyed. The May raids also did great damage to the public transportation system. The trolley lines were virtually incapacitated. These were the last important raids on the ward part of the city. The raid on Hachiōji, the main population center of the county part, has already been mentioned.

  The total number of American flights over Tokyo in 1944 and 1945 was upward of four thousand. The number of bombers in the March raid was smaller than in the major raids of mid-April and late May. There were about three hundred, as against more than five hundred on May 24 and almost as many on the two following days. If the term “casualties” is taken to include homeless as well as dead and wounded, then the effects of the April and May raids, though far behind those of March, were to some degree comparable. More than half as many people were affected in both cases.

  The air raids produced rumors and magic. The rumors tended to be wishful. One of the grander ones held that Japan had developed a fleet of bombers powered by pine resin and capable of flying off to bomb America and flying back again. The Shiseidō, the most prominent maker of cosmetics and the like, active since Meiji in the endeavor (as its advertising said) to give Japanese women pellucid skins like Western women, had a big order in 1944 for expensive perfumes. Everyone learned about the transaction, which produced ominous rumors. The Russians were coming. The perfumes were to please the wives of their elite. Actually they seem to have been traded for Chinese metals.

  Just as today there are magic potions, such as bean soup or a brew made from pine cones, for warding off the AIDS virus, so there were charms for keeping bombs at a distance. One was a very simple breakfast of rice and pickles—but it would not work unless others were let in on the secret. Goldfish also did good service in fending off bombs. The owners of houses that survived sometimes had a bad time. People would move in on them uninvited. Since everyone had a share in the disaster, what could be more natural than
that housing should be common and undivided as well? Pilferers and looters had the same justification.

  A program of offering temporary shelter to victims of the raids was abandoned as hopeless after the March attack. Thereafter the emphasis was on relocation. For the weak and obscure much of it was forced. Fearing that they might never be allowed to return, people were reluctant to leave. Those who wanted to go and were not part of mass relocations could find it difficult. The novelist Satomi Ton, in an autobiographical story called “Putting the Old Woman Out to Die” (“Obasute”), described the undignified process of obtaining tickets. “Bribery at the market rate seemed to him a nearer thing to honesty and a more manly thing than mingily going from acquaintance to acquaintance of acquaintance, finally getting an introduction to a railway functionary, and escaping with only a modest gift.”

  Between February and August more than four million people left Tokyo, both voluntarily and under various degrees of duress. A great many of the three million or so who stayed were without adequate shelter. The police estimated that on September 1, 1945, one in ten among the Tokyo citizenry was living in an air-raid shelter or some other sort of temporary abode.

  The main municipal library had since late Meiji been in Hibiya Park. Plans for relocation in a remoter part of the prefecture took shape after the Doolittle raid. At first it was by truck, then (one is reminded of the Chinese under Japanese attack) by handcart and knapsack. It was not completed in time for the May raids. The library building and some two hundred thousand volumes fell victim to the bombs. The Hibiya library opened temporary offices in the Kyōbashi library, the only one among the branch libraries that escaped damage, and did not return to Hibiya until 1947.

  Maps of the areas affected by the fires show much wider destruction than in 1923. The pattern was similar: far worse damage to the east than to the west. One of the fifteen wards of 1923 escaped fire. None of the thirty-five of 1945 did, though the scattering is sparse around the fringes, save to the south, where the northern extension of the Tokyo-Yokohama industrial belt had grown up. If a line is drawn north and south a bit to the east of Ueno and Tokyo stations, then almost everything east of it as far as the Arakawa Drainage Channel—farther east than the eastern limits of the Meiji city, this is to say—is gone. To the west large pockets were spared in the vicinity of Ueno Station. As in 1923, the flat part of Shitaya Ward disappeared and the hilly part remained. This last was suburban when Tokyo was Edo and a part of the Meiji High City distinguished for its intellectual and artistic sorts, and today it is probably the part of the city in which we can best sense what mercantile Edo and Meiji were like. It would not have survived if the wind had been blowing in the opposite direction that night in March.