Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  In one respect things became easier for the office worker—or at least the messenger boy who ran from office to office. In the original Mitsubishi Londontown, the complex spread out before the station, the pattern had been vertical, with a company renting several floors of a segment of a building. Now it became horizontal. A company that did not have a building of its own would rent a whole floor or two from Mitsubishi or someone else.

  The Nikkatsu building

  In 1951, the second year of the Korean War and the year in which the boom in office building began, the city received the first considerable increment to its hotel space since the Daiichi of 1938, built for the Olympics that never took place. The Nikkatsu Building, with shops at ground level and below, offices on the next several levels, and hotel rooms at the top, rose at the Hibiya crossing. The hotel space is now gone, and would scarcely be noticed in any event among all the huge hotels the city possesses. The builder was a movie company later done in by television. Great was the wonder in those days at the daring. Would enough foreign tourists and businessmen come to fill the rooms? They never had before. Not many seers guessed that the foreign clientele would be of so relatively little importance in keeping all the hotels filled.

  Until the completion of the Daiichi, hotels, in contrast to inns, had catered almost exclusively to alien tourists and businessmen. Despite its Olympian origins, the Daiichi wished to attract Japanese businessmen and even an occasional family group, and in a measure succeeded. The tiny rooms and especially the tiny bathtubs seemed meant for them, a way of luring them gradually into something new. This new adventure in lodging lasted but briefly. The war came and hotels were destroyed, and the remaining ones, led by the Imperial and the Daiichi, were taken over by the Occupation, either for its own personnel or for “foreign traders,” as they were called. When the Occupation ended, the adventure was resumed with enthusiasm, and by the time of the 1964 Olympics five times more hotel rooms were available. The clientele, especially for lavish receptions, was increasingly Japanese.

  The distinction between a hotel and an inn has never been very clear. (It is a little like that between a geisha and a prostitute.) The earliest hotel in the city, the Tsukiji Hoterukan, which was of wood and went up in flames in 1872, seemed to think itself both, since the first three syllables of the generic part of the name are “hotel” and the last is a part of the commonest Japanese word for “inn.” There has recently gone up in the Ueno district a place that calls itself the Hoteru Yado, to show that this ecumenical tradition perseveres. Yado, another reading of the juku of Shinjuku, “New Station,” signifies a traveler’s lodging.

  One cannot say that hotels are in the Western style and inns in the Japanese, since many places that anyone would call an inn have beds and chairs, and numbers of large hotels have rooms in which one sleeps on the floor. Nor can it be said that hotels are expensive and inns are cheap, since either can be both. Perhaps the most definitive statement that can be made is that a hotel tends to be big, high, and fire-resistant, and an inn tends to be small, no more than two or three storys high, flimsily built, and often rather combustible.

  By the end of the first postwar decade there were almost four thousand inns in the city and a dozen or so hotels. There were scores of rooms at an inn for every one at a hotel. Of the inns, more than three-quarters were of the “dubious” (aimai) kind, their mark the “upside-down jellyfish.” It is the mark of the hot spring, the jets of steam from the water resembling a jellyfish supine, its tentacles in the air. Their business was sex, and ladies of the night were an important part of their clientele.

  There is dispute as to when and where a Japanese establishment first took for itself the American designation “motel.” Some say that it was in Atami in 1963, others that it was as early as 1957 at a rather remote place on the “back side” of Japan, the coast of the Sea of Japan. In any event it does not seem to have been in Tokyo, and it does seem to have been in the pre-Olympic years. Soon Tokyo had numerous specimens, and soon the secret was out in the open. The expressions “upside-down jellyfish” and “motel” had been suggestive but not explicit; “love hotel,” in English, was very explicit.

  Yet there remained something furtive about love hotels. A night at the Yoshiwara, in another age, had an open, rather companionable quality about it. A night in a love hotel does not. The Edo wife had no right to complain if her husband went off occasionally to the Yoshiwara. The wife of our day and days recently past thinks herself much put upon if she or a gossipy friend sees her husband emerging from a love hotel. A good part of the furtiveness has to do with arrangements for making as sure as possible that he is not detected. Family life has changed.

  Officially, the recovery of Tokyo from the great earthquake was accomplished in less than a decade. There were no observances after the surrender corresponding to those in 1930 that felicitated recovery from the earthquake. In another way the reconstruction was different from that of 1923 and after. It did not stop. Building did not of course come to a complete stop in the Tokyo of the Crisis years, but depression and Crisis kept the city from changing greatly after the 1930 celebrations. It was as if they announced the end of a period of great constructive endeavor and the coming of a less active period in which to await the next storm.

  Nothing of the sort has happened since the war. The building has gone on and on. There have been recessions, but there has been no major depression. Japan has been free of international involvements as probably no other major nation in modern times—free to manufacture, to export, and to build. One may expect to see from time to time in the newspapers and magazines the announcement that the postwar period is finally over. They are like announcements that Edo has finally died. Even as we may expect them, we may be sure that the most recent one will not be the last. “The postwar period,” an expression for practical purposes interchangeable with “the period of reconstruction,” will probably go on as a cultural and economic era until the next disaster brings it to a close.

  Yet we may say that by the middle or late fifties Tokyo was essentially back where it had been in 1940 or so, and everything that has come since has been new growth. It took about a decade to recover from 1923, and it took about a decade to recover from 1945. In the middle fifties one started hearing Japanese say that their standard of living had returned to the prewar level.

  Affluence is never evenly distributed, and the growing affluence of the city was not. Some wards had ampler housing than others. Besides taking over most of the Marunouchi business district, the Occupation requisitioned houses, more than six hundred of them in Tokyo Prefecture. With all the houses in the city and the prefecture to choose from, it naturally chose the most luxurious, and so the pattern of requisitioning follows the pattern of the domicile of wealth. A quarter of the requisitioned houses were in what is now Minato Ward and before 1947 was the three southern wards of the old city, Shiba, Akasaka, and Azabu. The American embassy is at the northern edge of it. The addition of two other wards—Ota, southernmost of the new 1932 wards, and Shibuya, centering on the bustling place of that name in the southwestern part of the city—brings the total to more than half. No houses at all were requisitioned in six wards along the northeastern and eastern fringes of the city. Scarcely any would have been left along the inner fringe even if the Occupation had wanted to have places there, but the three wards along the outer fringe were not badly damaged. Nothing in them caught the Occupation eye.

  In 1956 Edogawa, one of the two easternmost wards, had the lowest per capita income. It was in those days still heavily agricultural. Of the thoroughly urbanized wards, the two immediately east of the Sumida River had the lowest income. In 1957 the weight of vegetables brought into the Kanda wholesale produce market was twice that of those brought to the Kōtō market east of the river (the two were among seven wholesale markets in the city), but the sales value was three and a half times as much. Kanda was where the expensive Ginza retailers and
restaurants went for their supplies. Kōtō had no such clientele. (In 1956 Kanda sold, by value, 14 percent of the vegetables and 26 percent of the fruits for the whole nation. The value of the fruits was higher than that for any single city other than Tokyo itself, and that of vegetables higher than for any other city except Osaka.)

  The population of the prefecture, which had risen above seven million in 1939 and stayed there until 1944, fell to about three and a half million in late 1945. It climbed by about a fifth during each of the following two years. Thereafter the rate of growth fell off sharply. The population once more passed seven million in 1952, and in 1962 it passed ten million. Of the seven and a third million inhabitants of the prefecture in 1940, six and three-quarters million lived in the thirty-five wards. Of about eight million inhabitants in 1955, fewer than seven million lived in the wards. This is to say that the population of the old “county part,” beyond the limits of the 1932 city, had doubled, while the population of the wards had risen only by some two hundred thousand people.

  The population of the wards rose to almost nine million in the late sixties, and never passed that figure. The ward part of the prefecture was saturated, while the population of the county part continued to grow. Since 1967 the population of the wards has been stable, though in slight decline over the long run. The population of the central wards and some wards in the eastern and northeastern parts of the city has, in the long view, been in decline since before the disaster of 1945. In all the wards there was an increase in population after 1945, but in the wards in question the population has never returned to the highest prewar figure.

  Chiyoda Ward and Chūō Ward, the former including the Marunouchi business district and most of the government bureaus, and the latter Ginza and Nihombashi, both declined in population between the census of 1955 and that of 1960. Minato Ward had more people in 1960 than in 1955, but declined thereafter. The same was true of Taitō Ward, including Ueno and Asakusa, and Bunkyō Ward, including the haughtiest of the national universities and the Kōrakuen baseball stadium. (Estimates for noncensus years suggest that the last two wards may have been growing at a very slight rate for a year or two after the 1960 census.) Setagaya Ward, at the southwestern limits of the ward part, lost less than a tenth of its population from 1944 into 1945, and already in 1946 had more people than in 1944. It has not flagged on its way to becoming the most populous ward in the prefecture. If we combine the populations of the thirty-five antebellum wards into the twenty-three of today, then Setagaya was in 1935 fourteenth among the twenty-three, and Taito and Sumida, which face each other across the Sumida River and neither of which has returned since the war to its highest prewar population, were the most populous.

  Eight of the twenty-three wards, among them all the wards that lay entirely within the old city (the city as it was to 1932), lost population between the censuses of 1960 and 1965. Two that straddled the old city limits, one of them Shinjuku, gained slightly, but estimates for noncensus years suggest that they too were already in decline by 1965. All of the new wards outside the 1932 city limits were with a single exception gaining population. The exception was Arakawa Ward, that district to the north of Asakusa where the very poor went when disaster and rising costs drove them out of Asakusa.

  So it is that Tokyo moves away from Edo. The new wards grew as the old ones declined, the county part continued to grow as the ward part (seen as a bloc) declined, and when the prefecture in general started to lose population, the neighboring prefectures went on growing enormously. Inevitably there was diffusion, as the tight heart of Edo emptied and the circle around it widened, and the mass of people who might be expected to be paying attention to the same thing at the same time grew enormously. The marvel is that the city has gone on having a center at all. The daytime population of the central wards is several times the nighttime population. That is true, however, of many a large city whose center is incapable of attracting people for any purpose other than making money. People still swarm to the center of Tokyo to dissipate their money and their energies, and to consume.

  The average term of governors since, in 1947, the first one was popularly elected has been ten years and a little more. This figure is certain to rise, since the incumbent has most of his third four-year term yet to serve. Such longevity in office, as has been noted (see page 368), is in sharp contrast to the breathless comings and goings of the prewar years.

  Japanese local government since the war has followed the American presidential pattern, with popular election both of chief executives and of legislative bodies. The national government has followed the British parliamentary pattern. The Japanese example does not provide strong arguments in favor of either system, since both have produced stability. The mayor before the war had endless trouble with what were in effect two city councils. The prefectural council since the war has been on the whole manageable, though since 1965 no single party has had a majority of the seats. Only one governor has completely lost control. That was the Olympic governor, most of whose attention went into staging a model sporting event. A larger part of his attention should perhaps have been on a scandal that broke shortly after the event was triumphantly staged. Since the war, scandals have been neither as frequent nor as interesting, for the most part, as before the war.

  One powerful force in the workings of the city and the prefecture is not entirely under the control of the prefectural government: the police. The chief of the Tokyo prefectural police is appointed by a national police agency with the approval of the prime minister and upon the advice of a prefectural police commission, which is ineffectual. None of these agencies is under the control of governor and council. Tokyo becomes a police city when it is thought necessary to guard against the embarrassment of having someone shoot at a president or a queen or a pope. It has more than twice as many policemen as Osaka, though it is less than twice as large in population. The problem of police excesses is by no means limited to Tokyo—it was in Kanagawa Prefecture that a case of illegal eavesdropping was uncovered in 1986—but it is most conspicuous in the prefecture in which national embarrassments are most likely to occur. People complain that most of the police budget is provided by the prefecture, which does not control the size of the force. Much of it would come from Tokyo even if it were routed through the national government. The richest prefecture naturally contributes the most to national revenues. In 1946 the Tokyo police, under the influence of the Americans, had policewomen for the first time. It still has them, though many another American idea, such as decentralization, has long since been forgotten.

  Even before 1947, when for the first time a governor was popularly elected, the view had come to prevail that the ward boundaries were ill drawn. They had since 1932 varied greatly in size, with the old fifteen wards on the average much smaller than the twenty new ones of that year. Now, with bombings, evacuation, and the return from evacuation, population differences were also extreme. Sources do not agree as to whether the initiative in the matter of reducing the number and the inequalities came from the Americans or from the prefecture. The best evidence is that the prefectural government brought the Americans into a matter of little concern to them as a way of making sure that it would have its way.

  In 1946, in any event, the Occupation indicated that some of the wards should be amalgamated. The chief executive set up an advisory commission in the summer of 1946. Having obtained the approval of the prime minister, he submitted a report later in the year that called for reducing the number of wards from thirty-five to twenty-two. Eleven wards would retain their present names and boundaries. They were all among the twenty new wards of 1932. The old fifteen of 1932 would all be amalgamated either with other old wards or with new ones. In a single instance, Shinjuku, two old ones were combined with a new one. All would most probably lose their old names.

  The probability brought resistance, for there was great pride in the old names. Only four among the councils of the old fifteen wards ind
icated immediate approval. Six of the nine new ones facing amalgamation approved, for with these the pride was less considerable. Palaver ensued. It was a foregone conclusion that all thirty-five would, when talked out, agree, and all presently did; and this was despite the fact that popular opinion was in several obvious cases ignored. Thus a small residential ward in the northern part of the city wanted to join the residential ward bordering it on the south, but was joined instead to a very dissimilar industrial ward to the east. The history edited and published by the new ward, Kita, tells us that the decision was carried out quickly and without publicity.

  In March 1947, very shortly before the first gubernatorial elections, the chief executive, with the consent of the prefectural council, proclaimed the reduction from thirty-five to twenty-two wards. All of the old wards did in fact lose their names, and here too public opinion was little respected. Early in 1947 the Tokyo Shimbun conducted a poll among residents of the twenty-four wards to be amalgamated. They were asked what names they would prefer for their eleven new wards. Only four of the names finally adopted were even mentioned. Some of the new names seem appropriate. The time did seem right for Shinjuku, that principal rival to the old business district, to become the name of a ward. Others seem merely fatuous. The worst is Bunkyō. It means something like “literary capital” or “cultural capital,” probably with reference not to the Kōrakuen baseball stadium but to Tokyo University. The name has that bureaucratic ring to it.