The Sunshine Building, Toyko’s tallest, seen from the freeway
When one has overcome obstacles physical and mental and set foot inside the doors, it proves, with subordinate buildings, to be a city in itself. Sunshine City is the name of the whole complex, even as Sunshine Sixty, from the number of storys, is the full name of the biggest building. The complex contains galleries, a planetarium, an aquarium, all manner of shops, a hotel, a theater, a concert hall, a trade-promotion center (as if that sort of thing were really needed these days), government offices, a branch of the Mitsukoshi department store, which has another branch nearer the station, and many another facility. In a corner of the grounds is a melancholy piece of stone, a memorial to the “war criminals” who were hanged there late in 1948.
Open space yet remains at the Ikebukuro Westmouth. It belongs to the prefecture. This is in itself no obstacle to development, since the prefecture owned the lands at the bottom of the Shinjuku reservoir as well, and allowed a perfect frenzy of development to occur there. It has thoughts of something more cultural for the Ikebukuro Westmouth.
Despite the presence of Seibu, one of its Parcos, one of Tōkyū’s Hands, and Sunshine City, Ikebukuro goes on looking a little insubstantial. The bustle has subsided and the district seems to have exhausted its resources some time before one reaches Sunshine on the walk from the station. It asks for comparison not with Shibuya and Ginza but with Shinjuku. Like Shinjuku, it is somewhat wanting in class, and it is this with nothing comparable to the Shinjuku intensity, magnitude, and variety. The comparison is not to be understood as saying that Ikebukuro is dull and dreary. A want of finish brings a particular kind of vigor, not innocent, perhaps, but eager. A century or so ago Ikebukuro offered little promise indeed, and so it may be called the miracle among the bustling places. It is the boom town way out on the wild prairies.
The Seibu Parco in Ikebukuro
Greater Tokyo contains half the university students in the land, and there is only one four-year university, the Merchant Marine Academy, anywhere in the Low City. It has been said, probably truly, that many a provincial student goes through his four years of higher education in Tokyo without ever seeing the Sumida.
Some of the Low City wards have done brave and imaginative things of a cultural nature. One of the wards east of the river has established an ethnological museum devoted to the customs and physical aspects of the Edo Low City. It does its work well. Earlier there was a smaller museum, devoted to the same subject, beside Shinobazu Pond in Taitō Ward. This last ward, which has been energetic in preservation and restoration as few Japanese agencies are, has moved and restored a Meiji concert hall which was in danger of being torn down. It sends forth Occidental sounds once more in the setting in which Japanese first heard them. The ward has done the same for an apparently doomed sake shop, also of Meiji, in the Yanaka heights behind Ueno Park.
It has sought to bring drama back to its old center, Asakusa. Kabuki, on which Asakusa had almost a monopoly in late Tokugawa and early Meiji, has returned. So have more modern and realistic forms that got their start in Asakusa. They have only short runs, however.
Such accomplishments emphasize the hopelessness of the task. A decade and a half after the surrender, before television had really started having its tyrannical way over other dramatic forms, there were three dozen theaters in Asakusa. They were not very innovative, to be sure, but still there they were, in numbers worthy of the old Asakusa. By 1987 the number was down to sixteen, including two strip theaters and three movie theaters specializing in soft-core pornography (the hard-core thing is not yet to be had in any Japanese movie theaters, though it is present in the strip shows). For mildly serious theater there yet remained a pair of variety halls, one specializing in Yose and the other in concerts and light reviews. Of the eight nonpornographic movie theaters only one showed foreign films, and they were second-run. The point is worth remarking upon, not because foreign films are necessarily better than Japanese, but because new films that have attracted favorable notice abroad are the ones still capable of fetching good crowds and admission fees in greater Ginza. In 1976 the Denkikan, “Electricity Hall,” the oldest movie theater in the land, was torn down. In 1985 a hotel went up on the site of the International Theater (Kokusai Gekijō), once the largest in the Orient, and the home theater for the Shōchiku all-girl troupe, now disbanded. This had sought to compete with the Takarazuka company of the other big theater owner, Tōhō. The Takarazuka, its popularity undiminished (and its audience overwhelmingly feminine), still holds forth at its main theater in greater Ginza and at its original establishment in the Osaka suburbs as well.
The most extensive remains of prewar Asakusa—the three linked theaters between which one could move for the price of a single ticket
Ueno and Kinshichō, the other two somewhat prominent entertainment and shopping districts in the Low City, remain much as they were. This is to say that they have declined relatively. Kinshichō, the only sakariba or bustling place east of the river worthy of the name, is still a cluster of theaters with a thin coating of bars and restaurants. Ueno is bigger, but falling behind Shinjuku and the others all the same. It draws the biggest crowds in the city for the few springtime days when the cherries in the park are in bloom. In those days the Sumida embankment also draws crowds, but its famous cherries are sadly squeezed in between the concrete of the freeway above and the concrete of the river wall below.
Of bars and cabarets Ueno has many, but by no means as many as Shinjuku. In 1978 the count for Taitō Ward was only a third that for Shinjuku Ward. Since Taitō Ward also includes Asakusa and the Yoshiwara, the Ueno count was perhaps a quarter that for the Shinjuku Eastmouth. The Shinjuku number has grown more rapidly in the years since. And so, despite its pleasant and interesting ethnological museums, we may say that a blight has settled upon the Low City and will not leave.
There is a tendency to blame those third nationals, the Koreans, for the failure of Ueno to bustle as Shinjuku does. It is true that Koreans own many of the taller buildings in Ueno, but whether, like oak trees, they establish openings around themselves that discourage other life is doubtful. The largest concentrations of Koreans are not in places like Ueno but on the outskirts of the city, in the northeastern wards and the industrial south. They are spread fairly evenly over the city. In only four of the twenty-three wards are they other than the most numerous of alien residents. In these four they are second by only a short distance. There are a few more Americans in Chiyoda Ward (Marunouchi and the palace) and Minato Ward (Roppongi and Akasaka), and a few more Chinese in Chūō Ward (Ginza and Nihombashi) and Toshima Ward (Ikebukuro); and not many people of any description have permanent residences in Chiyoda Ward or Chūō Ward. The largest number of Chinese is not in Toshima Ward, where they slightly outnumber Koreans, but in Shinjuku Ward, where they are slightly outnumbered. The Chinese and American concentrations are certainly better placed, to harm or to benefit, than the Korean.
The street leading south from Ueno Park past the big department store was one of the hirokōji of Edo, the “broad alleys” widened as firebreaks, three of which became lively shopping and entertainment districts. The Asakusa district stagnates, and the Ryōgoku district has been quite left behind by the shifting currents of fashion. One of the great bustling places of Edo, even less apologetic for its vulgarity than Asakusa, it lies at the east flank to the earliest bridge across the Sumida. It now has again, as it had down to 1945, the Sumō arena, the Hall of the National Accomplishment. It was once a gateway to the provinces, minor compared to Ueno, for it served only the suburban regions east of the bay. The station is now almost deserted, because it has been bypassed. Trains go directly from the suburbs to Tokyo Central. A yet bigger ethnological museum having to do with the city and its past will go up on the expanse of concrete and weeds behind the new Hall of the National Accomplishment. That may help a little, but the prospect remains bleak. There has been t
alk of a fashion center east of the river, from Ryōgoku to the Kinshichō amusement district, to rival Shibuya. It is a brave idea and one wishes it well but cannot be optimistic. Affluent maidens and matrons do not live in that part of the city, nor are many of them likely to think that they can find something better at Ryōgoku than at Shibuya.
The literature of Edo was very much of Edo. In the last century or so of the shogunate it was so self-contained as to approach the autistic, and so happy with its own little part of the world as to approach the arrogant. Yet the best of Edo writing did have the power to make Edo a sensual presence. Something of the sort prevailed for parts of the city, Asakusa and to a lesser extent Ginza, down to the war. One feels Asakusa in the Asakusa writings of Kawabata, and a wider expanse of the Low City in the writings of Nagai Kafū. The intensity is much diminished in the Asakusa writings of Takami Jun, only a very few years later than Kafū’s curious tale of that bawdy house east of the river. In stories in which Ginza figures—by Kafū once more, and by Takeda Rintarō—one may get a glimpse of this and that place in Ginza, a bar, a café, a street corner, but one has little sense of what Ginza was and why people went there. Asakusa is dense and palpable, Ginza is diffuse and evasive. Asakusa is an individual presence, Ginza an abstraction.
Many a novel has been set in postwar Tokyo. One has no trouble finding descriptions of the black markets and the burnt-over wastes, or the sun and moon coming through the collapsed roof of Tokyo Central Station. The black market at Ikebukuro figures prominently in one of the best novels of the immediate postwar years, Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo), by Hayashi Fumiko. In others Tokyo Tower looms over things, to take on what one vaguely assumes to be symbolic functions, though what they are symbolic of may be in some doubt. Niwa Fumio’s Love Letter (Koibumi) gave its name to an alley near Shibuya Station. Tamura Taijirō and his streetwalkers have already been remarked upon. The part of the city in which they have their lynchings is a wasteland, as if to emphasize that they are primordial creatures, not part of any civic body. In a very popular novel called Free School (Jiyū Gakkō), by Shishi Bunroku, a husband and wife separate that they may have their freedom, and come back together again, having concluded that they can have it only with each other. The husband’s ambages take him to such places as the ragpicking village on the embankment above Ochanomizu Station and the company of such persons as a band of smugglers.
Many other examples could be cited. Sketches of this and that place in the city are often skillfully done. If Asakusa and Shinjuku stand in contrast to each other in terms of bustle and prosperity, however, Asakusa consistently getting the worse of it, so also, their positions reversed, they stand in literary contrast. Unless some fine author and his works wait to be discovered, we may say that no novel addresses the subject of Shinjuku as Scarlet Gang addresses Asakusa. No novel conveys a sense of Shinjuku as a place, no novel is suffused with affection for it. Shinjuku has no regional literature. It may be said indeed that Tokyo has had none since the war.
Not even prewar writings about Asakusa convey a sense of Tokyo as writings from the closing years of the shogunate convey a sense of Edo. In 1933 the critic Kobayashi Hideo wrote an essay called “Literature That Has Lost Its Home” (“Kokyō wo Ushinatta Bungaku”—the first word is more like “hometown” or, as the Japanese say, “native place”).
Looking back over my life and how I have lived it, I see that it is very much wanting in the concrete. I do not see there someone firmly emplanted, a member of a social entity. I do not see a native of Tokyo but an abstraction, someone who was not really born anywhere. Meditations upon this abstraction can doubtless be made into a kind of literature, but it wants a substantial, tangible backing. From it is likely to arise the peculiarly abstract wish of the weary heart to be free of society and back with nature. Nature set off from society is certainly a world of substance, but literature tends not to come out of it.
Mr. Tanizaki has spoken of “literature in which one finds a home [kokyō] for the spirit.” My own problem is not literary. It is far from clear that I really have a home.
Kobayashi was born in the far south of the Meiji High City to a family long in Tokyo. He did not, to be sure, have a very long life to look back over. He was but a little past thirty when he wrote the essay. He was always old for his years, however, and we need not make too much of the point. The essay contains an element of the prophetic. Already in 1933, when people like Kafū and Kawabata were finding in the Low City not home, perhaps, for neither of them lived or grew up there, but still a mooring place—even then Kobayashi felt that he had no home.
Almost all Japanese writers live in Tokyo today, and none of them write of it as if it were home; and so the problem has become general. Kobayashi was very much a part of the High City, while Kawabata and Kafū distributed themselves more widely, taking in the smells of the Low City along with the odorless rarefaction of the High City intellectual world. Perhaps what has happened to the High City, now so close to being the whole city, is among the things encompassed by that voguish expression “postmodern.” A city that is urban in the abstract may be what the future holds.
An element of the television and baseball age, probably a necessary and inexorable one, has been a diminution of street life. By this expression is here not meant the life, mostly very young, that floods the streets of Shibuya, but rather that which once flooded the streets of any ordinary neighborhood. People may fly up from Osaka to participate in a Sunday afternoon in Harajuku and Yoyogi. They do not pour out upon the streets of their neighborhoods as they once did on fine, warm summer evenings. This sort of street life was more important in the Low City than in the High. The salarymen and professors of the High City have always kept to themselves as the shopkeepers and craftsmen of the Low City have not. Then too there are class differences in the High City, with the fishmonger and the magnate living in close juxtaposition. Despite claims, perhaps in some respects justified, about the communal, consensual nature of Japanese working practices, classes do not mix any better in Japan than they do in most places.
In Edo and Meiji Tokyo, the Low City amused itself in the places that lay readiest, its streets. Especially on summer evenings, they became as much assembly places as corridors for passage. The poorer classes of the city did not have much money to spend and seldom went far from home, and the street in front of home was more interesting than home itself. So the streets of the city teemed far more evenly than they do now.
These tendencies still remained strong in the years just after the war, especially on clement evenings when there was a street fair, perhaps a garden fair or a shrine fair. With television and its nightly baseball game all through the summer, home (or, for the privileged myriads, the baseball stadium) became more interesting than the street, and the street began to lose its life. Now the ordinary and undistinguished street tends to be hushed in the evening and on Sunday, which has become an almost universal holiday. The big summer garden fairs by Shinobazu Pond in Ueno and behind the Kannon Temple in Asakusa attract fewer stalls and strollers each year. They may never quite dwindle to nothing, but they are ever more attenuated.
It may be argued that the people of Meiji and earlier poured forth into the streets because their lives contained so little by way of diversion. For most of them there were only the Yose house and the bathhouse in the cold months, and the street was an addition beyond pricing in the warm months. These things have been crowded out by more interesting things. A life that offered so little was a deprived one, and now life is richer. So it may be argued. Yet variety is lost, uniformity prevails, and for some this is a development to be lamented. Certainly a stroll through the Low City of a summer evening is not the fun it once was.
The Olympic governor still had more than half of his second term to serve when he got the Olympics out of the way. No governor of Tokyo has died in office or resigned since popular elections began in 1947. Governor Azuma decided, as none of the others have
, not to stand for a third term. Because of the scandals already remarked upon, he had lost control of the prefectural council.
Conservatives do not get voted out of the prime ministership of the land, but they do get voted out of important regional offices. The shock of the post-Olympic scandals was strong and lasting enough to lose them the governorship, which they had held for twenty years. Two university professors ran against each other in 1967. Minobe Ryōkichi, candidate of the socialists and communists, was the winner. It was not by a landslide. With four and a quarter million votes cast for the two main candidates, radical and conservative, Minobe led the other professor by about a hundred thirty thousand votes, and votes for lesser candidates were enough to keep him from a majority. There were no elections for the prefectural council that year, and so the situation after the 1965 elections prevailed. The socialists and communists did not have a majority. Minobe was able to arrange a working coalition, however, as his discredited predecessor had not been. In succeeding council elections during the Minobe years, the communists did better than the socialists, until, in 1977, both slipped badly, suggesting that the prefecture was ready for a change, which it had in 1979.
Despite the closeness of his initial victory, Minobe was a popular governor. He had no trouble being reelected twice. His popularity was in large measure due to his television personality, of which his famous smile was a crucial part. This is always referred to as the Minobe sumairu, and why a Japanese word would not have done as well as the English is mysterious. It would seem that the language requires a constant supply of loan words in order to maintain its vigor. “Talent” candidates (again the English word is used)—television personalities who use their exposure for getting elected to public office—are not in good repute with the media. The media blame them on the conservative rascals who cannot be voted out of power, and forget that Minobe was among the earliest.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 68
