Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989

by Edward Seidensticker

  The strip shows deserve a special word. Always rather demure from the outside, with perhaps no more than a sign saying “New Art Theater” surrounded by a stream of white lights, they were little affected by the police crackdown. They were and are uninhibited. The girl who stood in the picture frame as Venus can scarcely have dreamed what ways she stood there at the head of. Complete nudity and the most wanton of dances prevail. They are under the control of the gangs, some thirty of which, large and small, independent and cartelized, are said to operate in Kabukichō. What the arrangements are between them and the police only the one or the other can tell us.

  Many a thing goes on in Kabukichō that the laws of the land and the regulations of the prefecture do not permit. An obvious solution would be to bring the laws and regulations into better accord with what actually prevails; but righteous forces would rise up against that. Probably the police could not stop all these things if they had the will to. Their solution seems a sensible one: keep them out of sight as much as possible.

  The events of 1985 were known to American devotees of Kabukichō as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. It was on and near that day that the disappearance of the strip girls of Kabukichō seemed imminent—or at any rate their return to the frills and furbelows of an earlier era. Indeed, a certain hush and sense of caution did come over the scene for a while. The hush remained upon the streets, but behind doors things were soon as noisy and abandoned as ever.

  The political center of city and prefecture will soon shift to Shinjuku. Does this mean that a great reversal has taken place, comparable to the great shift through the first half of the Tokyo century from the Low City, the cultural center of Edo, to the High City, where almost everything of an original and “creative” nature is today? Has there been a great reversal, with Shinjuku—the leading one among the fukutoshin, or satellite cities—now the main center, and the old center—Marunouchi, Ginza, Nihombashi, and southward and westward into Minato Ward—now the satellite? It is a view that has been commonly argued since Kabukichō became so big and sinful and the cluster of supers went up at Westmouth.

  There is little evidence to support it. In only one field, or set of fields, related to sinning and toping, might it be asserted with some force that Shinjuku is ahead of the old center. It has most definitely not become the managerial and entrepreneurial center. That is still Marunouchi, somewhat broadly defined. Big insurance companies do have their headquarters at the Shinjuku Westmouth. The first considerable building to go up there, aside from the terminal department stores, was an insurance building. For the rest, headquarters have stayed mostly in the old center. The huge real-estate companies, Mitsui and Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, have stayed there, and rented out space in their Shinjuku supers to lesser companies, cultural institutions, and the like.

  In 1982 almost three-quarters of companies with capitalization of a billion yen and more had their headquarters in the three central wards, and the figure was 80 percent for those with capitalization of ten billion and more. Close relations between business and government make Tokyo offices essential even for companies (such as Toyoda) whose head offices are elsewhere. The Tokyo offices of the biggest among these are also in the central wards. All of the “metropolitan” banks, the ones held to be national in their operations, have their head offices in the central wards, most of them in Chiyoda (Marunouchi).

  Shinjuku is not a very cultural sort of place, unless “cultural” is defined as signifying all the things that make a culture what it is, which is to say, all the things that people do. Though people do many things in Shinjuku, it does not excel in high culture. Recently there have been reports of schools in Kabukichō to teach Japanese to foreign persons. These might in another place suggest culture and that yet higher cultural entity, international cultural exchange. Kabukichō is a curious place for them. They seem in fact to be arrangements to get easy visas for pretty Southeast Asian girls, especially Filipinos, and put them to work in the bars and cabarets and strip halls of the district.

  Kabukichō set out to become a dramatic center, and it did not. It does have its Koma Stadium and the largest cluster of movie theaters in the city. The Koma is the largest theater in the district for concerts, recitals, and stage performances. Popular entertainers are dominant. The “road show” movie houses are mostly in the Ginza district. The inner wards, with Ueno, a bit to the north, are where a symphony concert or an opera is most likely to occur, or a foreign performer to hold forth (sometimes commanding ticket prices that run to four hundred and more dollars at current exchange rates).

  None of the big newspapers—the national ones, to correspond to the metropolitan banks—has moved its offices to Shinjuku. They are no longer in the Ginza district proper, but they remain in the three central wards. There has been no tendency on the part of publishing houses to move to Shinjuku. Some big ones have their offices in Shinjuku Ward, but in places where they have been for many years, along the eastern or inner fringe of the ward. (The station and its Westmouth and Eastmouth are at the southwest corner, a couple of miles away.) One big television company has its studios in Shinjuku Ward, but they are in the center of the ward, at a considerable distance from the station. The others are all in the inner wards save NHK, the public broadcasting corporation, which is in Shibuya Ward. A great deal of printing occurs in Shinjuku Ward. That too is most of the way across the ward from the station and its mouths. The heart of the advertising business—the Madison Avenue of Japan—continues to be in the central wards. So it cannot be said that in this day of information the huge and growing information industry has done much to make Shinjuku the new center of the city.

  There is very little chance that Shinjuku or any of the other fukutoshin will ever replace Ginza in popular lore. According to a history of Chūō Ward published in 1980, there are almost five hundred Ginzas the country over—places of a more or less bustling nature that have taken the name This Ginza and That Ginza. There can be no doubt about the eponym. The history counted the name Ginza in the titles of fifty-one popular songs. Kyoto figures in thirty-two and Mount Fuji in thirteen. Shibuya and Shinjuku were not even in the running, as place names or as song titles. Where the characters for “new station,” which is to say Shinjuku, appear in a place name, the pronunciation is often different from that of the Shinjuku, and the origins are almost always independent. Ginza is a part of Chūō Ward and so the historians had an interest in establishing its preeminence. Yet allowance for exaggeration still leaves Ginza unique in the popular esteem. If no other part of Tokyo rivals it, neither does any part of any other Japanese city.

  The department stores of the private commuter lines that have their terminals at the Shinjuku Westmouth were renovated and expanded in preparation for the crowds to descend upon them from the super buildings, and the buildings themselves and the underground passages leading off toward them are full of expensive boutiques. At Eastmouth there has been no great change in the merchandising business since the years of recovery from 1945. The inner wards, meanwhile, have been adding much to the supply of slickness and opulence. The most conspicuous addition is a big merchandising and entertainment complex where the Nichigeki (Japan Theater) and the Asahi Shimbun used to be. Popularly called, in English, the Yūrakuchō Mullion, though it has a more formal name, Yūrakuchō Center, it does have a great many mullions. Indeed it is all vertical lines, metallic mullions and glass up and down the whole twelve storys of it. Theaters, one of them bearing the old name Nichigeki, and an assembly hall open from a central well with glistening escalators and hanging illumination. It is dizzying in its shininess and cold whiteness. On either side are two huge department stores, both belonging to private railway lines, the Hankyū of Osaka and the Seibu, which, having consolidated its initial hold on Ikebukuro, has moved on to acquire many other bases.

  If shadows and easeful ligneous surfaces were essential to the old Japanese notion of an interior, then it must be said the Mullion is about
as un-Japanese as a place can be (except perhaps for a few other places in Tokyo, and the Trump Tower). Doubtless it is also among the places that lead the way into the future. In this regard one can only conclude that Ginza is marching more boldly ahead than Shinjuku. The complex opened for business in 1984. In 1986 some two hundred thousand shoppers and viewers were said to enter it every day. Long before it accommodated the Nichigeki and the Asahi the site was that of one of the two Edo magistracies, the southern one. A history of it might without great exaggeration be taken for a history of the city this century and more.

  The two Mullion stores were not the only big ones that opened in the Ginza district in 1984. It was the year of what was called the Ginza-Yūrakuchō War. Earlier that year a big supermarket chain opened a most swanky and expensive department store and gave it a swanky French name, Ginza Printemps. It is only a few steps from the Mullion, although it is in Ginza proper and the Mullion is in Yūrakuchō. There were already a half dozen other big department stores in Ginza, three of them prewar, three of them (invasions by Kansai and Nagoya capital) postwar. So Ginza, with Yūrakuchō, has more than Shinjuku to draw the daytime, feminine shopping crowds.

  The Mullion must be given its due. It, more than any other force, has brought a rejuvenation of Ginza, which in the post-Olympic years had begun taking on a middle-aged look. (Middle age may be held to begin in Japan with the throwing off of blue jeans and with conversion to the religion that is the corporation.) The Ivy and Miyuki tribes were the last ones to have their main base in Ginza. The glitter of the Mullion had the effect of bringing young people back in the daytime, and there has been a rash of new beer halls, open later hours, to keep them from wandering off to Roppongi and beyond when the big Mullion stores and movie houses close.

  The Mullion complex and related complexes nearby have put Ginza more firmly in control of the first-run road-show business, which it has dominated since the war. The Mullion contained five theaters, including the old Nichigeki, when it opened in 1984. Two more have since been added. Tōhō has remade the block across the street from its Takarazuka (later the Ernie Pyle) into one of the slickest things in town. Along with the vast department stores, these vast spaces for sitting and watching things have brought youth back to Ginza.

  But in sex and drinking Shinjuku, especially Kabukichō, leads. A count in 1987 established that in Kabukichō alone there were not far from three thousand bars, clubs, cabarets, and other eating and drinking establishments. This is about equal to the count of permanent Kabukichō residents and larger than a similar count for the whole of Ginza, which has hovered at about two thousand. A count for the three central wards combined would outdo that for Shinjuku, but would be a misrepresentation, since it would be scattered over a much larger area. Roppongi and Akasaka in Minato Ward are a considerable distance from Ginza, and there is not much revelry in Shinjuku Ward that is not an easy walk from the station. So the preeminence of Shinjuku and especially its Eastmouth demands recognition. It may be added that Ginza continues to be the more elegant place in ample measure. Perhaps Shinjuku is the genuine successor in our day to Asakusa, a place of crowds in search of diversions varied but not of the most ethereal sort.

  The conclusion must be that the center holds. When the prefectural offices move to Shinjuku they will not be moving to a new center. They will be leaving a remarkably strong and durable old center behind. A city that has always been more decentralized than the American cities of the railway age has avoided becoming the doughnut that so many American cities of the automobile age are. It may be that in already decentralized cities the centrifugal pull of the lesser centers is weaker than in a centralized city such as Los Angeles once was. The center remains stronger in almost every regard than any of the bustling places along the outer circle. It is of course possible to view this state of affairs in more than one way. Those who first gave currency to the expression fukutoshin, “secondary center” or “satellite city,” thought that the center had accumulated too much and a distribution of its assets would be good. Charles Beard—it is true that he was not looking at the same city but at that of a half century before—thought that the outward-moving forces were too strong.

  Though concentration of any kind can be excessive, it does seem to be the case that vitality at the center of a city has a vitalizing effect on the whole city. The Ginza crowds, human and vehicular, can be maddening when one is in a hurry; but to have them all abandon the area in favor of the county part of the prefecture would be far worse.

  It may be, though precise measuring devices are not to be had, that Shibuya, with the adjoining Aoyama and Harajuku, outdoes Ginza in one respect, the chic and the ultra-European.

  Since the Olympics two things that Shibuya has done and had done to it are of importance. It has pushed out of its tight, constrictive valley, and it has come to seem less of a one-company town. It has acquired a Park Avenue (Kōendōri). Few Tokyo streets have official names; some have popular names. Insofar as it had any name at all, the street leading up the hill northward from Shibuya Station to the Meiji Shrine and what was Washington Heights and the Olympic Village used to be called the ward-office street. Now, because it leads up the hill to Yoyogi Park, the old Washington Heights, it is Park Avenue. The name is entirely popular and unofficial. It was part of a forceful advertising campaign, for a department store, and then several of them, called Parco. The English word “park” has established its place in the Japanese language, in both the Central Park and the parking-lot sense. Something with more tone was asked for, and so the Italian word was chosen. (Probably the French one was rejected because it would have been indistinguishable from the English.)

  The advertising campaign brought the two important new Shibuya developments together, for it was at the hands of the company that became genuine competition with the Tōkyū railways for hegemony over Shibuya. The Seibu enterprises, their groundings in another private railway system and in real estate, moved aggressively into Shibuya in the post-Olympic years. Both Seibu and Tōkyū opened stores in the direction of the park and at a remove from the main station complex, where Tōkyū had been supreme. It was the beginning of the climb out of the valley.

  Park Avenue in Shibuya

  Soon after the Seibu opened its Shibuya store it opened the first of its Parco places, also in Shibuya. The Parco slogan was: “Park Avenue in Shibuya, where the person you pass is beautiful.” The Parco places are not so much department stores as elegant and expensive bazaars. They have as concessionaires the elite in fashion and food. Affluent Tokyo was by these post-Olympic years becoming one of the ultra-chic places of the world, and Shibuya was becoming what Ginza long had been (and neither Asakusa nor Shinjuku ever was, really), the highest of the highly fashionable. “Shibuya” may here be understood to include the rest of the southwestern triangle, Harajuku and Aoyama. So few years had passed since women left behind the shapeless bags of the years of war and defeat.

  The Tōkyū enterprises were not slow or timid in fighting back. They opened elegant and ingenious bazaars of their own on the slope leading up the park, and gave them such names as Hands and 109. The good, solid English of the former suggests everything the amateur builder and engineer can possibly want, and that is what the stores by that name offer. The latter is a pun. Advertising renders it in Roman letters, One Oh-Nine. It is then divided in two, One-Oh or Ten, and Nine, and the Sino-Japanese readings for these figures are tō and kyū; and it becomes Tōkyū, the abbreviated name of the railway system.

  The Southwest, in the broad sense in which the expression was used in the previous chapter, designating the great shopping and entertainment complex from the outer moat to Shibuya, contains most of the places that are even slicker than the Yūrakuchō Mullion. Most striking among them, it may be, is the complex called Ark Hills, finished in 1986. The second word is English; the first might seem to be as well, but in fact is an acronym from Akasaka Roppongi Kaihatsu, “Akasaka Roppongi Dev
elopment.” A few steps from the American embassy, astride the boundary between Akasaka and Roppongi, or the old Akasaka and Azabu wards, it contains a concert hall, luxury apartments, office space, and a very shiny hotel. It seems to have succeeded in doing what it set out to do in one regard, attracting international finance. Highly advanced communications devices are available around the clock. The hotel is a marvel of shiny surfaces and bright lights. Like many shiny surfaces, it seems impenetrable. It seems to turn away all attempts at getting close to it.

  Ark Hills has not succeeded, apparently, in becoming one of the new sights of the city, a place to which all the bunches and buses must go, a magnet like the Yūrakuchō Mullion, drawing hundreds of thousands of people every day. Experts find the reasons for this failure in a certain want of integrity. It is concrete and pretends to be something else. This may possibly be true, though one doubts that the multitudes who have failed to show up are aware of such niceties.

  Whether or not it is popular today, Ark Hills has the look of what tomorrow is likely to be. Shinjuku is probably ahead of Ginza in sin and roistering, and Shibuya and the Southwest may be ahead in the shiny things of the future. They are most definitely in advance of Ginza and the land in offering advanced things for women to buy and put on. They also have a stronger hold on the adolescent crowds, despite the return of youth to Ginza and the Mullion.

  The Sunshine Building, sixty floors and two hundred forty meters, was finished in 1978 on the site of Sugamo Prison, near Ikebukuro Station. It is the highest building in Japan, though not as high as Tokyo Tower, and it requires getting used to. It may not be as forbidding as the prison was, but it does have a remote look about it. The routes of access from the station, which is a fifteen-minute walk away, are obscure; and, at the northwest side of the city, the direction whence cold winter winds blow in from Siberia, the building has, even more than the cluster of supers at the Shinjuku Westmouth, a lonely, unaccepted look about it, quite the opposite of the sunniness which the name seeks to call up.