There continued to be, however, significant movement within the central wards, consistently away from Nihombashi, which in Edo and Meiji had been the unchallenged financial and retailing center of the city, and toward Marunouchi and Ginza. For retailing the new center was Ginza. In financial matters the transfer to Marunouchi was accomplished with finality during the Olympic years. The Bank of Japan and the stock exchange remained in Nihombashi, but twelve of the thirteen metropolitan banks moved across what had been the outer castle revetments to greater Marunouchi.
Only the Bank of Tokyo, postwar successor to the Yokohama Specie Bank, which had been such a help in financing Japanese expansionist policies, remained in Nihombashi. The metropolitan banks are the ones which, though privately owned, are deemed to be national banks, as distinguished from myriads of local banks. The departure in 1960 of the Mitsui Bank was symbolic. It had stood on its Nihombashi site, across the street from where the Bank of Japan had been since late Meiji, for more than eighty years. Its first building on the site, gloriously prominent among early Meiji exercises in “Western” architecture, was the subject of numberless ukiyo-e woodcuts. Now its main office moved to Yurakucho, just south of Marunouchi. (As the Imperial Bank, its name from 1945 to 1954, it provided the setting for the most interesting postwar mass murders; see pages 479-480.)
Retailing has not since the earthquake been as centralized as finance and management. Three very big department stores remain at Nihombashi. Two of them were the great competitors in the mercantile revolution of Meiji which produced department stores in the first place. Mitsukoshi still has its old name. Shirokiya now bears the name Tōkyū, from its new owner, the railway company that owns so much of Shibuya. (The Honolulu branch is still called Shirokiya. Perhaps Americans are thought to have stronger sentimental attachments to old names than Japanese.) Then there has been the great surge forward to the fukutoshin, the satellite cities along the Yamanote, as retail centers.
Members of the Miyuki Zoku, 1964
It may have been in the Olympic years that Ginza could for the last time confidently claim the fealty of that very important crowd: adolescents and those slightly older. Two other tribes came and went during the Olympic years, and Ginza was their base. The Miyuki Zoku took its name from the Miyukidōri, Street of the Royal Progress, in Ginza, along which the Meiji emperor passed on his way to the Hama Palace. It was also known as the Oyafukōdōri, Street of the Unfilial, or possibly Street of the Prodigal Son. The first element in Ivy Zoku is borrowed from English, indicating a presumed resemblance to the Ivy League style of the United States. The two came in such quick succession and were so similar that it is not easy to distinguish between them. Perhaps it is useless to try, since both designations were invented by the mass media. Both favored casual dress, plaids and stripes and tight high-water trousers for the boys, long skirts, sweaters, and blouses for the girls, big shopping bags without distinction as to gender. The dress could be rumpled and ill-shaped, but, frequently imported, it tended not to be inexpensive—hence the element of prodigality. Ginza has not had zoku since. The very young crowds have tended to favor the Southwest, though in recent years there have been signs that they may be coming back to Ginza.
The building that seems most representative of the Olympic years, the gymnasium at Yoyogi, is by Tange Kenzō. So is the main prefectural building, the one in which the governor now has his office. So is the building under construction in Shinjuku, where he will presently have his offices. The one in use today was begun in 1953 and finished in 1957. It is not the largest building in the prefectural sprawl occupying an expanse just south of Tokyo Central Station and on both sides of the railway tracks, where there would have been room for rebuilding, had there been a will. It is true that the governor and his people might have been inconvenienced during the rebuilding. A statue of Ota Dōkan, who built the first Edo Castle, had stood in front of the old city hall. A new statue was unveiled a year and two days after completion of the new city hall. At first it stood on the north or front side of the main building, as the old one had stood at the door of the old city hall. Now, because of diggings in the vicinity of the station, it is out in back. No place is set aside for Dōkan in Shinjuku.
The Olympic Stadium, designed by Tange Kenzō
The highest structure of the second postwar decade, and still the highest in the land, is Tokyo Tower, not really a building at all in the sense of an enclosed and roofed space that keeps off the elements. It is a big framework, a third of a thousand meters high, with observation towers at the hundred-twenty-five-meter and two-hundred-fifty-meter levels, and containing four thousand tons of steel. Finished in 1958, it so resembles the Eiffel Tower, though it is a bit higher, that the historian Umesao Tadao called it a monument to the Japanese lack of originality. One might indeed have wished that advances in the almost eight decades since the Eiffel Tower went up might have been put to more novel use; but perhaps it was good for the Japanese spirit, in those days when economic growth was barely getting underway and the spirit craved sustenance of any kind. The chief purpose of the tower, which serves few other purposes than sightseeing, may well have been to rise higher than the Eiffel. Hopes that it might be put to use in the electronics age came to little, but as a sight for seeing it was a success from the start. People waited in line two and three hours to take the elevators. If there was symbolism in the date chosen for the opening, it has not been remarked upon. General Tōjō and his fellows were hanged in Sugamo Prison a decade, to the day, before.
The Tokyo Tower
The site, on the hilly side of Shiba Park, is a storied one. There it was that the elite of Meiji had their Kōyōkan, House of the Autumn Colors, where they could invite foreign gentlemen to elegant dinners without having to patronize the quarters of the flower and the willow. There too it was that the last of the Kodaira murders occurred (see page 479).
Ota Dōkan is thought to have finished his castle in 1457. Although there had earlier been a fishing and farming village on the site, 1957 could therefore be taken as the quincentenary of the founding of the city. Among the undertakings to mark the event was the erection of a big concert hall in Ueno Park. Mostly for Western music, it was finished in 1961, of proportions not much inferior to the insurance building going up at about the same time at the Shinjuku Westmouth, and was widely regarded as a great step forward on the way of the city and the nation back into the esteem of the world. Certainly it was a great improvement on Hibiya Hall, until then the main concert hall in the city. The exterior of the Ueno Park hall may not be to everyone’s taste. Modern architecture has not yet come to grips with the fact that unfinished concrete soon begins to look nasty in a damp climate. The interior and the acoustics are good, however. So even before the Olympics the Japanese had technical accomplishments to show off to the world.
In another part of Ueno Park the National Museum resumed construction after a lapse of a quarter of a century. In 1962 a hall went up to house treasures from the Hōryūji near Nara, the greatest reliquary of early art in the land. It is similar in conception to the main hall, finished in 1937: traditional forms are added to modern materials. For its next and most recent building, finished in 1968, the museum discarded old forms. It is a glassy, flat-roofed building which incorporates old Japanese concepts, such as openness and an absence of supporting walls, even as it discards traditional forms.
So the National Museum is a sort of sampler for modern Japanese architecture, a record of the struggle to come to terms with the West. All that is missing is the “Western” architecture of early Meiji, the reverse of the main hall and the Hōryūji hall. In the beginning superficial Western details were added to traditional methods and materials. The oldest surviving building, from 1908, is of the day when reproduction of Western prototypes from start to finish was the thing. It is a handsome enough Renaissance building with a central dome and lesser domes at either end—in concept a little like Tokyo Central Station, t
hough it is in stone and not brick. Then come the buildings of 1937 and 1962, in a hybrid style. Then comes the most recent building, the hall of Oriental (as distinguished from Japanese) art. It was beginning to dawn on Japanese architects that modern architecture had come to them and they did not have to go to it. Modern architects, or some of them, were doing something not dissimilar to what the Japanese had been doing from time immemorial.
The Olympic decade was in some respects incoherent. Toward the end of it came the games themselves and the warm glow of cosmopolitanism. Midway through it came a great xenophobic rising, the protest demonstrations against revision of the Japanese-American Security Treaty.
They had the city paralyzed for several weeks during the summer of 1960, and produced one fatality—or two, if the principal assassination of the postwar period, that of the chairman of the Socialist Party, is attributed to anti-treaty unrest. It occurred at a public meeting in Hibiya Hall, but after the summer of discontent had passed and the city was back to something like normal once more. The assassin was a teenage boy of the radical right (he later killed himself in prison).
It was a most xenophobic time, and particularly an anti-American time. “Yankee go home” was among the things people were saying (in English). Even unintellectual, down-to-earth Asakusa was caught up in the mood. In April 1960 the Rokkuza (Sixth District Theater), where one of Nagai Kafū’s postwar skits was performed (see page 388), offered a play called The Tachikawa Base: Ten Solid Years of Rape. The Tachikawa base was American, a big air base out in the county part of the prefecture.
The play is largely flashback. At the outset a young man is being arrested for murder. The police accede to his request that he be allowed to explain his reasons for killing the young lady he loved. So the flashback begins. The young lady was doing welfare work among ladies who were doing the only thing a lady could do, aside from welfare work, in Tachikawa: selling themselves to American soldiers. The girlfriend was raped by an American and acquired a loathsome disease. That is why he had to kill her.
Such was the mood of the city in those days. The play was erotic entertainment, of course, but it had its message, not too remote from the “one of us will get one of them” principle on which the extremists of the interwar years acted. Japan being a peaceful country, the ladies of Tachikawa, in one of the little sermons with which the piece is studded, are exhorted to get one of them by nonviolent means, such as infecting them with loathsome diseases. It was rather marvelous, the way the people of Tokyo had of assuring one that nothing personal was intended. The dislike for smutchy outsiders seemed very genuine. They threatened the purity of the island nation, left to itself until they came along.
The cabinet fell, but not before the treaty revisions went through; and the left never again rose to such heights of militancy. Indeed it started going to pieces. Violence continued, but it was fragmented and largely internecine. The Communist Party came to seem mild and restrained compared with the factions that broke away from it and went about flailing at one another with pipes and staves and hijacking airplanes. They did great harm to the universities in the post-Olympic years, but this does not mean that they continued to be a significant political force. Universities are defenseless against bands of fanatics unless they call the police. When they refuse to do so and the police refuse to come unless called, they are in serious trouble. The next great rising should have come in 1970, and it did not. In that year either party to the treaty could legally renounce it.
Another sort of political or social violence, if these kinds may be distinguished from ordinary criminal violence, might have developed into something serious in another country. The fact that it failed to satisfy expectations may have to do with the imprecise language that raised the expectations. Loan words, most commonly from English, can be most misleading. News that there is unrest in the Detroit slums is cause for alarm. News that the big police box in the Sanya suramu, north of Asakusa and the Yoshiwara, is being stoned again is routine. Such things happen and no one need feel threatened. People go off to watch, as they would go off to a display of fireworks. The stoners may be genuinely indignant at the police, but the Sanya suramu is not genuinely a slum.
Sanya is, along with the Kamagasaki district of Osaka, the most famous of the “slums.” Purists draw a distinction betwen the Meiji slums, preeminent among them the Samegahashi or Sharkbridge one in Yotsuya, west of the palace, and Sanya. They assign the latter the designation doyagai, though “slum” is certainly much commoner. Doyagai is from the underworld argot that reverses the two syllables of a bisyllabic word. Kai or gai is “district” or “street,” and doya reverses yado, which is “inn” or other temporary lodging. “Flophouse” might be the best rendition.
Thus a slum is, to purists, a place where poor families dwell as families. Sharkbridge was for the least fortunate of provincial families who came flooding in upon the great city. A doyagai, on the other hand, is a place of cheap lodgings for single and transient lodgers. In the popular mind, Sanya is a slum for all that, and a stoning of the police box no different linguistically from a rising in Detroit.
Sleeping rough in the Sanya “slum”
In Edo and on into Meiji, Sanya accommodated people away from home. They were mostly of two sorts: travelers to and from the northern provinces, for Sanya lay where the main northern highway entered and left the city; and the staff and clientele of the Yoshiwara, for it lay on the canal that offered water access to the quarter from the Sumida. In 1976 the canal was filled in except for a hundred yards or so at the mouth. A Meiji edict regarding the operation of lodging places put Sanya in the lowest class. The opening in 1897 of what is still officially called the Sumida freight yards, though more popularly it is Shioiri, Tidewater, gave Sanya the particular character it has had ever since. It is just south of the freight yards, and it provided the most convenient lodgings for workers there.
Sanya has had a public employment agency since late Meiji, but access to work, in recent years mostly in what the Japanese call dirtwood business, which is to say roads and construction, has been overwhelmingly through less formal channels, brokers often under the control of underworld gangs. The system provides no security and no insurance, but it does provide freedom from embarrassing questions.
The doya of Sanya have improved. In the first years after the war they were tents, then there were large common rooms. These have mostly disappeared, though bunking arrangements with eight men in a room some twelve feet square are not unusual. Prices have risen, though not at rates greater than general inflation. Space in a shared room can still be had for under a thousand yen a night, and a man can have a tiny room with television for two thousand. Life in Sanya is not intolerable when there is work. It allows drinking, gambling, and inexpensive sex. Long rainy periods are the bad times.
A 1970 survey revealed that not many very young men lived in Sanya. Sixty percent of those polled were in their thirties and forties. More than half had been in Sanya for five years or more. So, although still a place of cheap, pay-by-the-night doya, Sanya was not exactly a temporary abode. The age of the residents has observably risen in the years since. The day may come when the doya business will disappear and Sanya will be little different from other residential districts in the northern and eastern parts of the city. The laboring population is well down from a peak of some fifteen thousand during the Olympic years. Even now, during most hours of the day, it looks little different from many another shabby neighborhood. The best hours for observing that it is in fact somewhat different are in the early morning, when crowds of men await transportation by bus and truck to the day’s working place, and others lie sleeping in the gutters. In the early-evening hours it can be rather jolly, somewhat like Piss Alley at the Shinjuku Westmouth.
Sanya may not be as grim as parts of Detroit, but it has reason for discontent. The nation started moving ahead in the fifties, and Sanya did not move with it; and there was a commo
n feeling that the police with their mammoth box, which went up in the summer of 1960, were arrogant and threatening. Indeed they are not the most friendly and helpful of police. The first big riot came that same summer, which was the summer of the treaty disturbances. There may have been a spillover. Three thousand men gathered at the mammoth box, and stoned it, and tried to set fire to it. A policeman was injured.
There have been frequent Sanya incidents since, the same police box being the main target. Perhaps because the early ones received much attention from the media, later ones came to seem random and ritualistic.
Ordinary criminal violence was not as big or as horrid as in the early postwar years. There was nothing to compare with the Imperial Bank case or the Kotobuki and Kodaira cases. Perhaps the most widely publicized Tokyo incident was one involving a television “idol,” as victim and not as culprit. On January 13, 1957, in the Kokusai (International) Theater in Asakusa, a nineteen-year-old girl flung hydrochloric acid in the face of Misora Hibari, among the most popular and perdurable of postwar entertainers. She appeared as a child at the Ernie Pyle. During her most vigorous period, the Olympic years, she was able to fill all three thousand seats at the Shinjuku Koma twice a day for a run of two months. (A month at the Koma is the cachet, the sign that a popular singer has reached the top.) Her popularity is unabated even now, though her vigor has been diminished by poor health. The girl said that she did it out of an affection so overwhelming that she wished it to be attached to a cicatrized visage. Miss Misora was laid up for three weeks and came back uncicatrized. Numbers of similar incidents have occurred in the years since.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 62
