The name Ernie Pyle does not seem to have suited Japanese taste. Takarazuka came back. Piccadilly did better. The British Commonwealth Occupation Force gave the name to a theater west of Ginza. and it was kept. We are not to understand, however, that American movies and the American movie business were held in low esteem. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio came visiting in 1954, to huge acclaim, more of it for Marilyn than for Joe. The pack of reporters and photographers at the airport was so huge that she was hustled off the plane through an emergency exit. They had a parade into the city and up Ginza.
It was a most advantageous thing in those days for an actor or actress to have a trip to Los Angeles on his or her record. The expression ameshon, a most graphic one, had some currency. It is another acronym, made of “American” and shomben, “urination,” and it refers to a sojourn in America just long enough for a good trip to a urinal. When the actress Tanaka Kinuyo returned from her ameshon in 1949, she too had an open parade up Ginza and on to the Mainichi Shimbun, from a balcony of which she blew kisses to the crowds, not at all a common or accepted thing for a Japanese lady to do. Her first word to the reporters upon disembarking from her plane is said to have been haro (“hello”). She was for a time an object of ridicule, but her career, a brilliant one, did not suffer. She gradually moved from ingenue to gerontic roles.
The two decades after the war may have been the golden age of Japanese moviemaking. The great directors, Ozu Yasujirō and the rest, were doing their best work. It was not, however, the best for box offices. That came between the wars. There was a boom in the building of movie houses during the first postwar decade, at the end of which there were four times as many such places in Tokyo as at the beginning. And then, with television, came the decline in audiences, and bankruptcies and closings. Ginza has dominated the age of the movie in decline. The big fashionable “road show” theaters are almost all near Ginza, if not precisely in it. Road shows (the expression is in English), chiefly of foreign movies, are offered in a single theater per city at a high price for an indefinite run. They have held their own as the cheaper domestic film has declined.
As the legitimate theater had its first undisguised kiss in 1946, so did the movies, in an otherwise forgotten film. The very first postwar commercial film has not been forgotten. It was made in what is now termed Greater Tokyo, and its name is Zephyr (Soyokaze). From it came the first postwar hit song, a swinging smash of a hit and a charming piece of nonsense after all the fustian and doctrine of the war years. Everyone was singing “The Apple Song” in that autumn of 1945. The lyrics are by Sato Hachiro, a well-known humorist and writer of light verse.
To this red apple
My lips draw near
The blue sky watches in silence
This apple
Is silent too
And yet I know how it feels
How agreeable is this apple
How agreeable
The utter want of a message, and indeed of meaning, may account for the huge appeal. The tune is agreeable as well, and, remarkable for a popular Japanese song, there is not a tear in sight, not a sob to be heard.
The age of television, both public and commercial, began in 1953. Those of us who thought television a luxury beyond the means of the Japanese could hardly have been more mistaken. Already in 1958, as rapid economic growth was getting underway, NHK had a million sets from which to extract fees. Early in 1962, the first full year in which the joys of color television were to be had, the figure passed ten million. It is hard to imagine today that commercial television could have gone with other than complete slickness, but the first commercial, in the sense of advertisement, was run silently backwards.
Such idols of the radio age as Dick Mine may have been required to change their names as being out of keeping with the contemporary Japanese spirit. He had many a successor in the television age, however, that spirit once more being receptive to exotic things. Tony Tani, Peggy Hayama, Frank Nagai—the list is a long one. Tony, on the staff of the Ernie Pyle for a time, was very popular as a master of ceremonies on radio and television. He invented new words, or catchy variations on old ones, such as o-komban wa, adding an honorific prefix to the standard expression for “good evening,” so that it becomes something like “estimable good evening.” They seemed to have entered the language for good, but one does not hear them today. The matter of which neologisms stay and which go, in this language so extremely fond of them, defies explanation.
Puritans disapproved of those first public kisses, on stage and on screen, both for what they were and for what they foreshadowed, and they were right that more was coming, on stage and on screen. Toward the end of the first postwar decade there was a vogue for sex films that professed to be educational. They contained a great deal of suggestive posing but not much that was very revealing. More and more has been revealed in the decades since, but not, on the screen, the ultimate, not even in movies with titles like Flesh Gate (see pages 459-460) and Women of the Night. The hard-core masterpiece about Abe O-sada has not been shown publicly in Japan except in an expurgated version.
The live stage has been bolder. It is more firmly under the control of the local police than the movies, and, for reasons which are not easy to grasp, they have been spottily permissive, not to say arbitrary, in deciding what may be staged and what may not. The strip show, in any event, was something new in popular entertainment. The shows that titillated and even shocked in the early postwar years would not be worth the trouble of producing today, so mild are they compared to what everyone over eighteen (in theory—practice seems more generous) can see. More and more has been stripped away.
January 15, 1947, is recognized by historians of the subject as the day on which the strip show was born. What was known popularly as “The Picture-Frame Show” and properly as “The Birth of Venus” had its premiere on that day on an upper floor of a Shinjuku theater. In the middle of the stage was a large composition resembling a picture frame. In it a girl posed as Venus being born. She was not completely nude; she wore panties and a brassiere, and the rest of her was enclosed in gossamer. She posed for some thirty seconds. It was all, witnesses say, very artless.
This public display of flesh was far more extensive than anything the Casino Folies had ever dared offer. The house was so silent that one could hear a pin drop. People came time after time for those few seconds, and the lines at the box office were as long as ration lines. The show ran until August 1948.
The performers who had such a quelling effect on the Shinjuku audience were at Asakusa slightly later in the season. In June, Asakusa had a completely nude performance, a young lady modeling a model, so to speak. The scene was a painter’s studio. It was very popular. Asakusa now proceeded to go wholeheartedly for the strip show, which expression referred at the outset not to the process of stripping but to the stripped condition. (The English word “strip” has always been used, though there are native expressions that would serve as well.) In the early years, when it was bringing comfort and diversion to large numbers of men, even as radio and television were bringing these things to large numbers of women, Asakusa had wider expanses of naked flesh than Shinjuku. Many were heard to lament the falling off which this represented from the days of the opera and Enoken.
The years immediately after the Shinjuku opening are known to cultural historians as the golden age of the strip show. Despite the strip theaters in Shinjuku and some time later in Ginza, Asakusa was the place for them. With bold competition from places beyond the prefectural boundaries and so beyond the jurisdiction of the prefectural police, Asakusa too became bolder. Posing moved into stripping, onstage and not in undressing rooms. Panties and brassieres went away, and even butterflies. In the early days of stripping (not mere posing), more than half the girls in Asakusa rid themselves of Japanese dress. In Ginza Western dress prevailed. Shinjuku occupied a point in between. Asakusa soon adopted the Ginza way. West
ern dress comes off more quickly than Japanese.
The strip show had its rivals. Light dramatic skits such as Kafū’s were still there and popular enough. For a time, midway through the postwar decade, Onna Kengeki, “women’s swordplay,” threatened to eclipse even the strip show. The form had its origins in the interwar period (see page 365). For a time a half-dozen troupes were performing simultaneously in as many Asakusa theaters. Somewhat erotic from the start, Onna Kengeki held its own in the competition by taking bold steps in the direction of the strip show. The latter prevailed. The early fifties were the best years for the Asakusa strippers. A “bathtub show,” replete with bubbles, made its appearance in 1951, and is credited with the triumph of the strip show. Tightrope strips and acrobatic strips also had their time of popularity.
Oe Michiko, the great star of female swordplay, 1959
The rebuilding of the Asakusa entertainment district was swift. One might have thought at the end of the post-surrender decade that it was in a position to hold its own against the upstarts out west. Only a dozen Asakusa theaters, a bit more than a third of the prewar number, survived the war intact. Some, including Kafū’s Opera House, which was never rebuilt, were torn down during the war to make firebreaks, others closed for other reasons; eight were either partially or completely gutted during the incendiary raids. By the mid-fifties the count of theaters, stage and screen, was almost back to the prewar level, and for a time a few years later it was even higher.
For one not armed with sociological statistics (see page 326), the Asakusa of the postwar years may well have been the part of the city with the strongest, warmest sense of life. Ginza and Shinjuku were already coming to seem impersonal by comparison. All the hum and bustle made the in-between light, coming after great darkness, seem like a dawn and not a dusk.
But the revival was illusory. A 1966 history of Taitō Ward, which includes the old Asakusa Ward, quotes a newspaper article with the headline: “Deserted Place, Thy Name Is Asakusa.” This is only a little extreme. The same history refers disparagingly to “Asakusa County, Chiba Prefecture.” By this is meant that sophisticated, urbane crowds have gone elsewhere, and such crowds as Asakusa still draws are predominantly rural ones from the prefecture to the east, held in low esteem. Chiba Prefecture lies within Greater Tokyo as legally defined, but that fact has not much helped the prefectural image.
Old Asakusa hands have blamed the filling in of the lakes for bringing on the decline. Kubota Mantarō, a poet, playwright, and novelist who was a native of Asakusa and wrote with great nostalgia about the old Asakusa, vowed that he would never return to see the place without its lakes. He cheated on the vow, for he was seen there by many a person; but the sorrow and anger ring true. Both lakes were filled in, or all three of them, if one thinks of the larger as divided in two by a causeway. When, in the declining months of the Occupation, Asakusa Park was returned to the big temple, the latter promptly started looking for buyers. The southernmost portion of the lakes went to a movie company, which excavated part and filled part, and put a movie theater on the excavated part and an amusement park on the filled. The northern part went to a syndicate which included the ubiquitous Mitsui and which put up a pleasure emporium, practically everything except bawdy houses under one roof. The amusement park and the emporium now are gone. The movie theater remains. The old hands cannot be completely correct, for such changes are never simple. Yet Asakusa was greatly altered by what the temple and its successors to title did with the old park; and it may well be that when even the topography of a place has changed people who knew it before the change will look for other places, where the wrench of memory is less painful.
Other explanations are possible for the fact that so promising a start came to so little. Kata Kōji thinks that Asakusa was doomed because no swarms of students have campuses nearby. Enoken thought that Asakusa made the mistake of trying to be all classy like Ginza. This is interesting, and it does have a certain applicability to Enoken’s Asakusa reviews. But if Asakusa imitated any of the other bustling places it was Shinjuku, and Shinjuku has not been much noted for its classiness. As for the Kata view, one may point out that Roppongi is not favored with campuses either. Students come from afar.
The essential facts can be stated simply. The Japanese seem to enjoy moving as if to the sound of a drum, and one of those sixth senses (there are many) of which they are proud seems to tell them in which direction everyone is moving. The great thrust of the city was westward, into the hills and away from the flatlands, and the best advice in the world from all the people who had explanations for the decline of Asakusa could not have done much to stop it.
Such first-run movie houses as the Tokyo Theater and the Japan Theater (the Tōgeki and the Nichigeki), to the east and west of Ginza, also had their strippers, with names like Mary Matsubara, Gypsy Rose, and Frieda Matsumoto. Early performances were elegant by comparison with what was going on in Shinjuku and Asakusa. The first performance at the Nichigeki Music Hall, in March 1952, had a pair of French artistes live from the Folies-Bergère, as well as Koshiji Fubuki, one of the great figures, and not at all a bawdy figure, in recent popular entertainment. The Music Hall loosened up a bit as time went by and it became apparent that much would be permitted which had not earlier been. Yet Ginza maintained a certain tone that the other places did not.
Even as the Meiji government had essayed to provide ladies of pleasure for early foreign visitors and residents, so the Japanese government thought to do it for the Occupation forces. Soon after the surrender there was a poster in Ginza inviting young ladies to join a “recreation and amusement association” for the entertainment of the Americans. It had a few gatherings in the basement of a Ginza department store, but soon became a cabaret for Japanese. The government early indicated a willingness to set aside a generous number of pleasure quarters for the exclusive use of the Occupation. Unfriendly to the idea, the Occupation responded by declaring houses of prostitution off-limits. So they remained. Even today the person who knows where to look can find off-limits signs on the crumbling tile and plaster fronts of what once were such houses, in districts left behind by economic growth.
Of the old licensed quarters, the two within the old city, Yoshiwara and Susaki, prospered. The Shinjuku quarter was doing well enough too. The Shinagawa quarter actually received public subsidies, because, pleasantly and conveniently situated beside the bay and the TokyoYokohama highway, it was popular with Americans. Under certain conditions they were permitted the company of geisha, held not to be prostitutes. The haughtier Shimbashi geisha quarter refused a proffered subvention.
The most famous of the “private” or unlicensed quarters, Tamanoi, did not come back after the bombings, but another such quarter east of the Sumida River was probably the most famous one of the immediate postwar years. Called Hatonomachi, “Pigeon Town,” it was the setting for a minor Kafū work, one of his burlesque skits (see page 388). Without having known Tamanoi, one may imagine that Hatonomachi was very much like it, though with the addition of an off-limits sign at every door.
A quite new kind of quarter also sprang up, becoming one of the things people went to see. Kafū went to see it on February 25, 1947.
Clear, and warm again. I enjoy cooking beside the well and eating under the eaves. In the afternoon I walked through the Koiwa district. Some five or six hundred yards to the west on the Chiba highway is a den of unlicensed prostitutes. The Kameido quarter picked up and moved itself en masse to an imposing complex which during the war was a Seikō factory and dormitory. At the cement gate is the name of the place, Tokyo Palace, and at the entrance is a clinic for diseases of the quarters. To one side is a dance hall which opens at five every evening and always has, I am told, thirty girls in attendance. There are five two-story dormitories, each with fourteen or fifteen rooms, and passageways joining them, and sellers of vegetables and repairers of footwear. One is initially startled at the size of the place. By the
gate and all through the grounds are signs: “Off Limits,” “VD.” Until October of last year American soldiers streamed in and out, but now the clientele is entirely Japanese. For a half hour, a hundred yen, I was told, and for an hour two hundred; eight hundred to spend the night from nine o’clock and six hundred from eleven o’clock. I bought an apple apiece for two or three women who were taking sweets at the confectioner’s and had them show me about. Then I walked back to the station by a different route.
The off-limits warning is reproduced in Roman letters. “Palace” is the Japanese phonetic representation of the English word. Both Kameido and Koiwa are east of the Sumida, the latter near the boundary with Chiba Prefecture. Kafū was then living in Ichikawa, on the Chiba side of the boundary. Kameido had a “den” of unlicensed prostitutes before the war, larger than Tamanoi. Bombed out, it seems to have done as Kafū here has it doing. Another such den grew up in the Koiwa district after the war. Seiko is of course the clockmaking enterprise famous the world over. Tokyo Palace, one of the sights along the Chiba highway in those early years, was a temporary expedient. The girls started moving to more central locations as soon as they could, and nothing was left in 1958 to outlaw.
These who had shelter were among the luckier ones. It was the day of the streetwalker. She was among its symbols, and her gradual disappearance, not that she has ever disappeared completely, was among the signs that a better day—not a day of improved morals but a day of material improvement—had come. Streetwalkers were everywhere in the early years, most conspicuous in places where the after-office crowds were densest and soldiers most numerous. Their paths as they plied their trade in Shinjuku were a factor (see pages 484-485) in changing the map of the place. In the golden age, so to speak, there were as many as five hundred girls in the vicinity of Yūrakuchō Station, just south of Tokyo Central, and immediately west of the main Ginza crossing. (Yurakuchō is often abbreviated Rakuchō, literally “Pleasureville.”) On a November evening in 1953 a drunken American soldier threw a pimp over the bridge that still ran across the outer castle moat between Yūrakuchō and Ginza. The fellow drowned, and the incident got much attention from the media. Anti-Americanism was strong in the days after the San Francisco Treaty. (“Yankee go home” was among the expressions that enjoyed great vogue. The English was used.)
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 54
