Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The Yoshiwara was not so docile about leaving the old business behind. A few of the more distinguished houses, proud of themselves and their past, quietly closed their doors and sold their land. A great many others became what were called Turkish baths until recently. A Turk objected. Now the standard though not universal designation is “soapland.” The Toruko (the Japanese metamorphosis of “Turk”) was, and the soapland is, a place, often expensive, where a man can go and have a ritual bath and massage and the undivided attention of a young lady. It is a brothel by another name. The count of soaplands in the Yoshiwara is now almost two hundred, and that of soapland ladies some twenty-five hundred.

  Exuberant architecture in the Yoshiwara. Once known as Turkish baths, the brothels are now called “soaplands”

  The Yoshiwara had since Meiji been noted for its architectural extravagances, often of a fancifully cosmopolitan kind. One may not come upon much that looks Turkish beside a Yoshiwara street, but the more ornate styles of Europe and the ancient Orient are most of them there, with an occasional touch of Egypt among them. It is all very interesting and amusing, but a result of anti-prostitution has been to make the Yoshiwara slip yet a bit further from the heights of other ages. The more dignified houses went away, and the less dignified ones stayed and became less dignified all the time.

  Many a den of unlicensed prostitutes followed the way of the Yoshiwara rather than that of Susaki and Pigeon Town. The view of the police seems to have been that the law was unenforceable from the outset. It is a view in keeping with that of the Supreme Court expert (see pages 462-463) who commented on the preceding disappearance of prostitution. Those who formed the association for the prevention of venereal disease may have felt themselves vindicated. Police detected a sharp rise among prostitutes during the post-anti-prostitution years.

  The years between the next-to-last and the last outlawing of prostitution were those of the akasen, the red line. The expression seems to have originated as police jargon, the prefectural police thus designating the districts to which the edict applied. The old distinction between licensed and unlicensed prostitution thus disappeared. The Yoshiwara and Pigeon Town were alike red-line districts. Another distinction now grew up to replace the old one, as if there were a reluctance to let anything go. Places such as the Golden Block of Shinjuku, in which prostitution was covert and somewhat secondary, came to be known as aosen or blue-line districts.

  In 1963 there came tacit recognition from reliable quarters that prostitution yet survived, and could be a problem. The style manual of NHK, the public broadcasting corporation, decreed that those who had hitherto been called BG would henceforth be OL. Both are acronyms from English expressions, “business girl” and “office lady.” Both signify working women, but NHK feared that the former might be taken to signify “prostitute.”

  The Yoshiwara has had no great fires on its own, none that it did not share with the rest of the city, in more than three-quarters of a century. The fire of 1910 was among the last great conflagrations of which the city has been a victim, save for the disasters of 1923 and 1945. Among postwar fires, one which occurred in the northern part of the city in April 1963 and destroyed thirty-six buildings is the most extensive given notice in the centennial history of the Tokyo Fire Department. The chronology appended to the centennial history of city and prefecture notes a fire that destroyed fifty-eight buildings east of the Sumida in 1957. It does not matter which was the larger. They were of generally the same proportions, and neither would have been much noticed during the full summer of the Flowers of Edo.

  The most sensational of postwar fires included one in a department store and one in a hotel. The former, which killed seven people, occurred on August 22, 1963, in the Ikebukuro Seibu. The day was a holiday for the store, but several hundred maintenance men, decorators, and the like were on the premises. Among them, in the seventh-floor dining room, was an anti-cockroach squad. One of its members, about to have a post-luncheon smoke, threw his match into a heap of paper impregnated with insecticide. In the scramble to extinguish the flames, a can of insecticide was knocked over. Though the store really had no one to apologize to, it took the occasion for an act of contrition, a big sale, which almost turned into another disaster. The crowds at opening time were so gigantic and threatening that the store closed its doors in less than an hour. It was not wholly cleared of crowds until noon. Many a housewife demanded repayment of her train fare, and was obliged.

  The toll was smaller than that of the Shirokiya fire, but still the third largest from any postwar fire in Tokyo. The hotel fire, in 1982, took thirty-three lives. In 1963 nineteen firemen died in a warehouse fire in the southern part of the city.

  Yanaka Pagoda, as it was before being burned in a love suicide in 1957

  The most lamentable fire of the postwar years was a case of arson. It wrought great damage upon the material heritage of a city that has never been very strong in that regard. One of three surviving wooden pagodas in the city stood in the Yanaka cemetery near Ueno. On July 6, 1957, it was damaged beyond repair by fire. A campaign to rebuild it is only now getting underway. The foundation stones remain, a few steps from the graves of the famous murderess Takahashi O-den and Nagai Kafū’s grandfather. Two bodies were found among the cinders. The proprietor of a tailoring establishment in the neighborhood and a woman employee less than half his age had chosen the pagoda as the place in which to carry out their suicide pact. The pagoda had been built late in the eighteenth century and is the subject of a famous and once widely read piece of Meiji fiction, Kōda Rohan’s “The Five-Story Pagoda” (“Gojūnotō”). Rohan made his hero, the master carpenter who built the pagoda, the embodiment of all the old virtues.

  In 1957 there occurred a double suicide that seemed to have as much potential for setting off a vogue as the Oiso suicides of the interwar years (see page 320). It did not, but, for reasons that quite defy explanation, a suicide in 1972 did. About a hundred fifty people have jumped from the roofs of the Takashimadaira apartment complex in the northwestern part of the city since, in that year, a woman first did so. The setting and circumstances of the 1957 suicides were far more romantic, and set off no vogue at all.

  On an early-winter day the bodies of a young boy and girl, dead of gunshot wounds, were found on Mount Amagi, on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture. It was established that the boy, in accepted fashion, had killed the girl and then himself. They proved to be schoolmates from Tokyo. The girl’s name was Aishinkakura Eisei, a most unusual one for a Japanese. The family name is the Japanization of Aishingyoro, the family name of the Manchu emperors of China. (Like Kim, the commonest of Korean names, it means “gold” or “money.”) She was the niece of Pu-yi, the last emperor of China and the only head of the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria. The Japanese wife of the emperor’s brother appears briefly in the movie The Last Emperor. She is conspicuously pregnant, and it is probably with this girl, who was very pretty and not, by all accounts, especially unhappy. The act was probably one of romantic abandon more in keeping with the Japanese half of her nature than the continental. The mystery remains that there were no imitators, while the altogether more pedestrian suicide at Takashimadaira had scores and scores.

  The burning of the Yanaka pagoda was the greatest loss by fire which the city has suffered since the war. And what was the greatest loss by death? Perhaps that of Nagai Kafū, late in April 1959. He was the writer among all modern Japanese writers who most particularly made Tokyo his subject, and he was the most industrious and among the best at evoking its moods and describing its places. Toward the end of his life he expressed a wish to be buried among the courtesans in a little temple north of the Yoshiwara. Had he known that the Sunshine Building, highest in the city and the land, would come to loom gigantically over the Zoshigaya cemetery, where he is buried, he might have insisted more strongly on the temple. He did not like such places as the Sunshine, or what it stands for.


  Takami Jun and Kawabata Yasunari, who wrote so well about Asakusa, died a few years after Kafū, the former in 1965, the latter, probably a suicide, in 1972. Neither was as faithful as Kafū in his attentions to Tokyo. Takeda Rintarō, who wrote so well about Ginza, died in the spring of 1946, a victim of the postwar confusion. Most biographical dictionaries say evasively that he died of a sudden liver attack. One or two hint at something nearer the truth. His death was indeed sudden, and it was from drinking methyl alcohol in a little place in Shibuya. Inexpensive beverages were not safe in those days.

  Tokyo has had no one like any of them since, no writer to express its individuality as his own. The trouble may be that, vast and inchoate, it no longer has much individuality.

  Along with its peculiar crimes and its voguish suicides, Tokyo has quirky deaths. On November 10, 1964, exactly a month after the opening of the Olympics, the paid announcement that the Rakugo monologuist Sanyūtei Kimba had died came out in the first person. “I am safely dead. You may put your minds at rest in that regard. It has been my wish all along that I receive no floral offerings, natural or artificial. Asking you to forgive my petulance, I mean to stand by it. We will meet again, perhaps, centuries hence, in the heavenly pavilion, or among the dew-drenched leaves on the banks of the stony river. In the meantime, have long lives, all of you. I thank you for your many kindnesses during my own lifetime. November 8. Sanyūtei Kimba.”

  The Buddhist writ contains many hells. In the one referred to here, children pile stones in heaps only to have the heaps knocked down by demons. The general sense is that we will meet again one century, in heaven or in hell.

  The dozen years between the cooling off from the white heat of 1960 and the “oil shock” of 1973 were years of rapid economic growth. It almost seemed during those summer months of 1960, so completely was the city under the control of the anti-treaty demonstrators, that all they had to do to consummate their revolution was march upon the television stations, the Tokyo equivalent of the Winter Palace. The cooling was rapid. Youthful factions went on fighting, but it was mostly with one another and with the universities. In a land where business has never been below second on the list of important things, it was first again.

  Among the loan words in vogue from the late fifties into the sixties were “glamour,” “vacance,” “leisure,” “topless show,” “otomee fujin,” and “instant.” Most of them tell of new and affluent ways, one or two ask for explanation. The next to the last is a hybrid, the first element being an abbreviation of “automated” or “automation,” the second a Japanese word for housewife. The last refers to instant food, making things easier for the automated wife.

  Among the tribes or zoku not already mentioned were the yoromeki, the kaminari, and the ereki. The first took its name from a very popular novel by Mishima Yukio called The Faltering of the Virtues (Bitoku no Yoromeki) and suggests wantonness and infidelity. The second is literally “the Thunder Tribe.” Its members raced about on motorcycles. They outraced the police, who were left to pretend that they were not there and to hope that they would go away. The last is another abbreviation, of “electric.” It signifies amplified music, and especially the electric guitar.

  In these tribes and their names is the spirit of the day. There were also an Anchūha and an Angoha. The first syllable in both cases signifies the Japanese-American Security Treaty, and the second is respectively “during” and “after.” The third is “faction.” So, in contrast to the faction that was all caught up in the disturbances, there was already by the early sixties a faction that had come to the fore after they subsided. For them 1960 was already ancient history.

  Pearl Harbor was prehistory. In 1959 a group of forty-five students at a Tokyo middle (or junior high) school was set without warning to the task of composing an essay about the significance of December 8, the anniversary of the attack, corresponding to December 7 in the United States, that day once expected to live in infamy. Only two knew the principal significance, and many another significance was attached: the day Christmas sales begin, the day on which a famous Sumō wrestler got married, the day Grandfather died. Probably a similar group of American students would not have done much better with Pearl Harbor, but it would most likely have spread its ignorance more impartially, offering little help as to the significance of August 6 (Hiroshima Day) either. This last day, when Japan could claim to be the injured party, is remembered.

  There were also the years of (in English) “my car.” The word doraibu was already in vogue by the beginning of the Olympic decade. It signifies a new pursuit, pleasure driving, and it is the Japanization of the English “drive,” used as a noun. At first most of the drivers out on the road for the fun of it were businessmen with expense accounts, and civil servants, but within a few years driving clubs with cars for rent made half their money from students.

  In the next decade private automobiles became so numerous that the parking-lot business began, the first Tokyo specimen opening in 1959. In 1963 it was made illegal to keep the family automobile in the street space in front of the family house. Little garden plots all over the city fell victim to the higher demands of the automobile. In general driving conditions were much improved from the days early in the century when Tanizaki was getting his nose bloodied against the roof of a taxicab. By the early eighties virtually all the streets in the wards had hard surfaces. Conditions were not quite so good in the county part of the prefecture, but the surfaced mileage passed 90 percent for the prefecture as a whole. Three decades before, it had been well under half.

  The so-called Jimmu prosperity of the mid-fifties recalled the semi-legendary founding of the Japanese nation, Jimmu being the legendary first emperor and the expression signifying that there had been no such prosperity in all the centuries since his reign. The sixties and seventies were not without their little setbacks, such as the one occasioned by oil shock, but the dominant note was of growth, prosperity, and increasing national confidence. The names given to periods of prosperity suggested that they were getting better all the time. There was the iwato or “cave” prosperity, and later, in the years after the Olympics, there was the Izanagi prosperity. Each took us further beyond Jimmu and back into the legendary origins of the nation. The “cave” referred to the one into which the Sun Goddess withdrew after a quarrel with her fractious brother, causing darkness to fall upon the land. Izanagi was an ancestor of the Sun Goddess a few generations earlier. Each of these periods of prosperity outdid the others in department-store sales. If there had been anything like them in the days of the Sun Goddess and Izanagi, there had not been since.

  The supermarket, almost everyone agrees, is an American invention. It is among the American ideas that have proved more exportable than American products. It has not developed in quite the same way in all the places to which it has been exported. In America supermarkets began during the depression, to provide food at low prices to the jobless and otherwise straitened. They appeared in Tokyo during the first postwar decade. One might have expected, in those years of the cod and the sweet potato, that supermarkets would have some relation to straitened circumstances; they did not. The first self-service food emporiums that could call themselves supermarkets opened in the southwestern wards where rich foreigners and rich Japanese alike were concentrated. They were expensive.

  The food departments of the big department stores had been similarly all-purpose, but they had not been arranged so that the customer could serve himself. As is in the nature of department stores, comestible items had been segregated, kept separate from noncomestible. The supermarket somewhat nearer the original American kind, purveying to the less than wealthy, did not make its appearance until the Olympic years, when almost everyone was wealthier. It put both kinds of commodities, comestible and noncomestible, in the same space, and caught on because of this not very startling innovation.

  In 1964 two supermarket chains, one native to the city and the other from O
saka, got started in Tokyo. Their competition, which was intense, took place at first in the western suburbs, where neither commuting husband nor automated wife wished to spend much time shopping. Sociologists associate the emergence of the supermarket with the emergence in those same western suburbs of the two-generation “kernel” family.

  The time came in the pre-Olympic years when the Japanese could no longer say with much conviction that they were poor. Consumption was becoming conspicuous. In 1962, to much publicity, an Asakusa clothing wholesaler offered a necktie for fifty thousand yen. It was snapped up. Every thread of the weft was different from every other, and an expert weaver spent three days weaving it. A reasonably expensive tie of the more ordinary sort would have cost no more than a thousand yen. A government survey in 1964 showed that 50 percent of Japanese thought themselves middle-class. The number was probably higher in Tokyo. Three years later a survey showed that 90 percent of Tokyo women thought themselves middle-class.

  Among the new words of 1964, the Olympic year, was kagikko, “key child.” It gives concise statement to the new realities of life in the High City (the Low City, as in most things, lagged behind): the nuclear family, the apartment, and, her numbers increasing, the automated wife. A key child is one who, the expectation being that no one will be at home when he or she returns, carries a key. The following year a newspaper remarked upon the growing number of fat children. Though the report was highly impressionistic and offered no statistical criteria for its findings, it confirms one’s own impressions. Eating habits were changing, in the direction of fatty foods. The key child, since he usually had money and no one to tell him he ought to stop eating and get some exercise, could spend all his time with the vending machines. The number of these the nation over increased a hundredfold during the decade of the seventies. In addition to junk food the key child could, if he wished, put money in the vending machines for whiskey, condoms, and pornography.