Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The widening of nonexpress streets was also most evident in the southwestern wards. Aoyama Avenue, as it is called from a district through which it runs, is much the most conspicuous instance. A street was widened to twice its earlier width all the way from the outer castle moat to Shibuya. The expense was huge. On charts of indirect Olympic expenditures the cost of nonexpress streets runs to some five times that for freeways. Low buildings had to be bought up one by one and moved back into the somewhat higher buildings that line the widened street. So we came to have “pencil buildings,” several storys high, thin as pencils. They are said to be earthquake-proof, but they do not look it.

  Less than a month before the Olympics began, a monorail was opened from the airport to Hamamatsuchō, some distance south of Ginza and Shimbashi. Neither the worst nor the best location that could have been chosen, Hamamatsuchō is not within easy walking distance of anything except the park on the site of the old Hama Palace. Not many people can get there without changing a time or two from some other mode of transportation. Despite this disadvantage and despite initial unpopularity—people may have been frightened at the Olympic crowds—it has been a commercial success. It is the best way to get to the old airport, whence domestic flights still depart, and it is fun. In 1980 it was carrying more than two million passengers a month. It was not the city’s first monorail; several years earlier one had been put through joining two sections of the Ueno Zoo. But it was the most ambitious in Japan and, indeed, the whole world.

  Diggings for new subway lines began at about the time the Korean War began, and much digging had been accomplished in time for the Olympics. It has gone on since and is still going on. Besides its freeway Shinjuku now had a subway line to the center of the city. The same line, the first postwar one, sweeps southeastward through the center of the city and then westward, and had earlier joined Ikebukuro with Ginza. By 1962 it had pushed on past Shinjuku to Ogikubo, near the western limits of the ward part of the prefecture.

  It encountered an interesting difficulty as it made its way past Ginza. Near Hibiya Park the diggers came upon great boulders, which had to be demolished, at a great cost of time and money. It was established that they were underground foundations for the outer revetments of Edo Castle, most probably abutments for the Sukiya Gate from which Sukiyabashi took its name. They were probably put there in the seventeenth century by Date Masamune, most famous of the lords of Sendai. Not many old things remain above the Tokyo ground, but under it many an archaeological specimen is yet to be discovered.

  A new and most imposing Ginza subway station was ready just in time for the Olympics. It joined the new line with the prewar Ginza line. Probably more than the underground complex at the Yaesu Mouth of Tokyo Central Station, to which few visitors from distant lands were likely to go, it showed the world what marvelous diggers the Japanese are.

  It cannot be charged that the northern wards were left out in the building of subways as they were in the building of freeways. They were present at the creation of the subway system, and the earliest trackage of the second line (the first postwar one) ran to the north and northwest of the palace. The farthest northern wards were linked to the center of the city by Olympic time, and work had begun on yet another line, its eastern stretches aboveground, which would in the post-Olympic years cross the city east and west from beyond Shinjuku to well beyond the border with Chiba Prefecture. It too passes north of the palace. The increment to the system between 1954 and October 1964, the Olympic month, was almost a hundred kilometers, or upward of sixty miles.

  As if by way of confusing Olympic visitors, the subways were complicated in those years by the founding of a new system. The prefecture had long wanted to take over the old system, which, though a public corporation, was not under prefectural control, and among the most striking attributes of which was that it was very profitable. Failing in this endeavor, the prefecture started its own system. Digging began in 1958, and when the first stretch of tracks was opened, in 1960, it offered service to the wards east of the Sumida River, untouched by earlier diggings. The first city-owned line was in operation through the center of the city and on to the vicinity of Shiba Park in time for the Olympics. Transfer between the two systems is possible but not easy, and it is expensive. The city-owned system has higher fares and does not show a profit. It got started too late, and for that reason might better not have started at all, though it did serve the neglected eastern wards. The old system had already dug its way through the best routes on several levels in the Ginza-Marunouchi district.

  The expansion of the trolleybus system in the years before the Olympics looked ahead to dispensing with the clumsy old trolley cars. The latter were among the things Tokyo would as soon not have shown the world, but it could not do everything. The Olympics had trolleys as well as the proud new freeways and subways. The almost complete demolition of the system was left to the Olympic governor’s successor, who set aggressively to work on it in 1967. Trolleybuses had their largest passenger load in 1965, and, as the trolleys went, they went too.

  After streets and transportation, the largest items on compilations of indirect Olympic expenditures are for water and sewers, the latter slightly larger than the former. The Tokyo region had a severe drought in the summer of 1964, and a water shortage. For a time in August, seventeen of the twenty-three wards had water only nine hours a day. Parts of the High City were completely dependent on water trucks. The national government, prudently, had a special minister of state in charge of Olympic affairs. He turned so energetically to the drought problem that he became known as the minister of the waterworks. The present governor of Tokyo, Suzuki Shunichi, had made a career in the national bureaucracy before the Olympic governor appointed him vice-governor and assigned him particularly to Olympic preparations. He too was much concerned with the waterworks.

  Tokyo did not at the time have access to the Tone River, the largest in eastern Japan, but water was coming across Saitama Prefecture from the Tone to the Higashimurayama Reservoir, in the county part of Tokyo Prefecture, in time for the Olympics. Water continues to be a problem which the prefecture has not really solved. Farming has prior rights to a considerable portion of the water that flows into the city supply when farmers do not need it. When they do they get it and the city does not.

  There was a serious water shortage in 1987. The governor would like to dam the Shinano River, which flows into the Sea of Japan, and bring water across the mountains to the Tone, whence it would flow into the Tokyo system. The governor of Niigata Prefecture is understandably in the opposition, for the main mouth of the Shinano is right there in the main city of his constituency. The project is not one which the governor and the government of Tokyo can see to by themselves.

  The major part of the sewage effort was directed at hiding the most obvious manifestations of what was still a very inadequate system. In 1964 only about a third of the population of the wards had the use of sewers. Obviously not much could be done to put a bright modern face on the matter, and Olympic visitors would probably not have the inclination or the means to inquire deeply. Something could be done, however, to render the kumitoriya, the carters of night soil, less of an assault upon the senses. Vacuum trucks replaced the old cart-and-dipper arrangements in most parts of the city likely to be on display. Statistics released by the city, however, showed that two decades after the Olympics kumitoriya had not disappeared from the eastern wards, where fewer than a quarter of the population had the benefit of sewers.

  The year of the Olympics brought the opening of the last bridge across the Sumida, from east of Ginza to the oldest bit of filled land at the river mouth. This occurred six weeks before the games began. So the last ferry across the river was discontinued, and Tokyo became a bit more what it seemed to wish to be, no different from other cities. The ferry had been in service for three hundred years. Meiji Village near Nagoya wanted the last boat, but an elderly boatman who had worked the ferry
for forty years was successful in his insistence that it remain in Tokyo. This was a most striking success in a day when no one seemed to care much whether anything of historic interest remained in Tokyo.

  Also by way of preparation for the Olympics, the Construction Ministry and a public corporation charged with the nurturing and development of water resources undertook to flush out the Sumida River, which was in such a state that the expensive restaurants along its west bank smelled like sewers (and indeed it was a sewer) when the wind was right. In August a channel was completed, expressly for flushing purposes, from the new Higashimurayama Reservoir to the upper reaches of the river. Fresh reservoir water poured through for about a month just preceding the games. An announcement came toward the end of October that the results had not been disappointing. The algae content at Ryōgoku Bridge, just below the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, was down by half, and farther upstream it was down by as much as three-quarters. Oxygen had scarcely existed before, and now was up to a half gram per ton at Ryōgoku, as much as two grams upstream. This was still far from enough to keep fish alive, but it was better than nothing. The smell of the river was much improved. Delicate incenses in the restaurants could overcome it.

  During the Olympic years the city began to do something for itself in the matter of parks. In earlier postwar years it had waited for windfalls such as the Hama Palace. In 1958 it bought a famous iris garden at Horikiri, some distance east of the Sumida, a relic of the nurseries that once fringed Edo. The site has changed radically over the centuries, but there it still is, never built upon except for small pleasure pavilions through the three centuries of its history.

  The clearing away of beggars and vagrants from the parts of the city the world was likely to notice has a little of the scent of authoritarianism about it. Many went into institutions; harassment caused many to pick up and move to places held by their intelligence network to be more friendly. Such harassment would not have been possible in a litigious city like New York. A few years later, after the “oil shock” of 1973, they all came back (or perhaps they were different ones), and life was somewhat easier for them, with so many more diggings to sleep in and so many vending machines to obviate unpleasant encounters with shopkeepers and waitresses.

  Preparation for the Olympics was a big effort, national and local, and the Japanese did most of it by themselves. Such was the distance they had come. To point out that they asked for just a little help is not to belittle the effort and the success. Since there were contingency plans for an athletes’ village, something would doubtless have been put up somewhere in the couple of years at Japan’s disposal even if the decision had been against letting them have the American military housing complex called Washington Heights. The complex, in Shibuya Ward, just beside the Meiji Shrine, close to the freeways, and offering space for installations besides the village, was certainly the best of possible sites. It was returned less than a year before the Olympics, with the proviso that the Japanese provide substitute housing for Americans. There is an item on the list of indirect expenses, a small item, less than 1 percent of expenditures on most lists, that is designated “construction of American military housing in the Chōfu paddies.” Chōfu is a city out beyond Setagaya Ward in the county part of the prefecture.

  So, the degree of readiness very high, the Olympics began, on the Double Ten, October 10, 1964. Rain threatened on the day of the opening ceremonies, but forbore. The general view is that the games were a huge success and marked a great step forward in the emergence of Tokyo as one of the grander cities of the world. Japan won sixteen gold medals, the third-largest number, after the United States and the Soviet Union. A certain amount of arranging was required to achieve this result. Japan had a remarkable women’s volleyball team thanks chiefly to the efforts of a relentless coach known as “the demon,” and of course it enjoyed a certain advantage in judo. Both of these sports became Olympic events for the first time.

  The gold medal won by the volleyball team was only the second to be won by Japanese women, the first having been won at Berlin in 1936. There were sad happenings afterward, signifying that such events can be taken too seriously. A Japanese marathon runner who had been thought a possible winner was in second place, well behind the great Ethiopian Abebe (who this time ran with shoes on), as he came into the stadium. He was overtaken in the last two hundred yards by an Englishman—and right there before the stadium multitudes. A woman hurdler who had been expected at the very worst to win a bronze medal came in fifth. Both later killed themselves.

  Aerial smoke rings mark the opening of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

  Perhaps when everything was over some Japanese wished that the arranging had never taken place, for it brought a great national embarrassment. The volleyball team duly won its gold medal on the last day of competition. On each of the three preceding days Japanese won gold medals in the three weight divisions of judo, but on this day, in the contest that really mattered, the open-weight division, a Dutchman, Anton Geesink, took the medal. There was weeping in the streets. He said afterward that the struggle against the hostile crowd was worse than that against his Japanese opponent. That there should be weight divisions in the first place rather damaged the mystique of judo, which held that the little fellow, the Bruce Lee, uses the big fellow’s weight to defeat him.

  The famous director Ichikawa Kon was commissioned to do the official film document. The minister of the waterworks did not like it. He said it may have been art but it was no document.

  The 1956 games were the first ones held in Oceania, one of the five Olympic circles. They had not yet been held in Asia, another of the five. That the prostrate country of 1945 should have held them made it feel that it had, perhaps, something which the rest of the circle did not have. National feelings of inferiority did not disappear in 1964, but the emergence of confidence was striking. That year is sometimes put beside 1867, 1923, and 1945 as the momentous ones in the history of the city.

  This is surely an exaggeration. Yet the Olympics were an event of great moment in the life of the city, spiritual and material.

  “The Tokyo Olympics were not merely a sports festival. They were a ritual marking the fact that for the first time since the defeat Japan had formally been accepted by the world. For a time on opening day, traffic in the city came to a stop. A happy excitement welled up that the nations of the world were extending their hands in congratulation. And then, after a time, all the noise and confusion of people and vehicles came back again.” So wrote one observer of the scene.

  The nation gave voice to its happiness in what might be called poetry, but would more safely be called verse. It has been much given to expressing itself thus, in joy and in sorrow.

  Seventy thousand see Abebe into the stadium,

  No change upon his face or in his pace.

  And again:

  One and then another, ninety-four flags.

  Some, perhaps, have met on battlefields.

  The “perhaps” may be taken as a mark of the Japanese tendency to soften things a bit.

  On December 8, in Japan the twenty-third anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, though the choice of date can hardly have been intentional, the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro had a big sale of furniture and utensils from the athletes’ village. It sold out in an hour.

  Tokyo acquired its first important hotel since the thirties in 1951, and then there was a pause, and then a great rush in preparation for the Olympics. A half dozen big new hotels went up near the palace and along or near the avenue that had replaced the outer castle moat. One of them, with seventeen floors, was for a time the highest building in the city. Another, the new Imperial, went up on a part of the land occupied by the old, or second, Imperial. The management did not get around to destroying this second building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, until several years after the Olympics. Wright’s niece, the actress Anne Baxter, stayed in the then newest Imp
erial, which has since been replaced by a glossy tower, and delighted in it. She said that it made her uncle’s work look better than ever.

  A new pattern was emerging, in which the Japanese home market, reserved almost exclusively for Japanese, made foreign businessmen bilious with envy. It quickly became apparent that all these new hotels would rely very heavily on the home clientele to keep themselves profitable. The building of hotels did not stop when the Olympics were over. In 1986 there were well over twice as many hotel rooms in the city as in the Olympic year.

  There was another indicator, initially somewhat disheartening. Retail business actually suffered from the Olympics. In Ginza and Shinjuku sales during October 1964 were well below the average for the run of Octobers preceding it. Japanese customers stayed away, even as they at first stayed away from the monorail. They did not want to get caught in the press of foreigners. Cameras were almost the only items that sold well, but not the more expensive ones. Shopkeepers found the tendency of customers to haggle over prices not to their taste. The important matter, the drop in sales, had its sunny side. It showed that the Japanese custom, which would come back when all those foreigners had gone away, was the one that mattered. Japanese retailing has not suffered perceptibly from foreign competition. The growth of a huge Japanese domestic market skillfully shielded from foreign incursions is among the important developments of our time.