This was a city of poles, posts and wires: telegraph and telephone services had been installed in the 1890s, with street lighting and then domestic electricity following on behind. A constant stream of trams, workers and shoppers began to flow between ever more tightly packed buildings, vying for space on the street with noisy processions of fashion models, cars, singers and clapperboard men all advertising the latest products. Kirin Beer rose above it all with tethered advertising balloons and aeroplanes that showered leaflets onto the swarm of potential custom below.
As popular song transitioned from live performance art to vinyl record and radio – Asia’s first transmissions went out across Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya in 1925 – it became clear that Japan’s urbanites were utterly fascinated by their rapidly changing lives. They were willing to pay good money to have them celebrated and satirized, rendered in rich prose or picked apart by almost anyone with ‘gaku’ (‘-ology’) in their job title. ‘Tokyo March’, the theme song for a film of the same name, became a bestseller in 1929 for its racy depictions of love lives in four famous areas of the city: Shinjuku, Ginza, Asakusa and Marunouchi:
Dancing to jazz, drinking in the small hours
And with the dawn, a flood of tears for the dancer …
Vast Tokyo is too small for love.
Other music of the era took a more perverse pride in the city. ‘Tokyo Bushi’ (1919) pictured a place infested with ‘uppity intellectuals’, ‘crawling with 3 million people who live without making their own rice’, and home to ‘life-or-death’ struggles to board jam-packed public transport. Other city songs capitalized on the remarkably short memories of the recently arrived, waxing nostalgic over far-away home towns where life was simpler and sweeter.
‘Tokyo March’ was quickly blacklisted for its outrageous suggestiveness by Japan’s new national broadcaster, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). NHK’s reins were being held tightly by a state deeply anxious about its potential power over the masses. There was pre-censorship and a total ban on political discussion. Circuit-breakers could be used to cut a live transmission if it began to contravene the rules. Presenters were required to use a ‘coldly neutral’ voice, while avoiding potentially inflammatory words like ‘extremely’ or ‘absolutely’.
Film-makers had to put up with much of the same. There was to be no politics and no suggestion of class strife. No depictions of crime that might encourage it or tip people off about how to commit one. No material that ran counter to family values, and only the most sparing of references to the imperial family. America’s popular Keystone Cops films – slapstick silent comedies featuring an over-zealous, bungling constabulary – were banned in Japan, on the basis that they might damage respect for the police.
In trying to get music and popular culture to do their bidding, Japan’s leaders tried to use some elements of it proactively, setting out to shape the nation’s sensibilities at home and to advertise its special aesthetic qualities abroad. A memorable early experiment took place in 1872 at the opening of Shimbashi Station, the Tokyo terminus for Japan’s first railway line, linking the capital with Yokohama. The theme was Japan as a place where the eternal meets the ultra-modern. Presiding over the ceremony was the Meiji Emperor (whose official wardrobe ran from Shinto robes to the military uniforms of a European monarch), while wafting through the grand new pavilions of stone, glass and painted metal came the strains of two contrasting musical traditions. A gagaku recital – music for strings, wind instruments and voices, heard for centuries at religious sites and the imperial court – was intended to remind gathered Western dignitaries of the new nation’s continuity with the past and its refined, sacred aesthetic (for similar reasons, gagaku instruments and notation scrolls were sent for display at Expos in Paris and Vienna). Meanwhile, a tune from Japan’s new Naval Band, established by the bandmaster John William Fenton – on loan from the British Legation in Yokohama – announced Japanese intentions to emulate Europe’s successful marriage of musical pomp with military power.
But it wasn’t long before Japan’s new military bands were being criticized in the press for abetting – with polkas and quadrilles – the humiliating prancing and promenading of the country’s elites at the Rokumeikan. Modern musical tastes were not as straightforwardly governable as Japan’s leaders would have liked – and they themselves sometimes changed their minds about what they wanted for the country.
The pale-pigmented cypress masks and slow, minimalist movements of Nō theatre were first frowned upon as ‘backward’, and then later saved – along with their ensembles of drummers and flautists – when similarities were noticed between Nō and the respected tradition of European opera. In Hiroshima, the authorities at one point disapproved so strongly of the old-fashioned, ‘vulgar’ shamisen and koto that only geisha and blind people in need of work were permitted to touch them. But such strictures could not hope to survive these instruments’ renewed popularity out in the country, achieved thanks to their use in theatre and cinema productions of old Japanese tales of heroes, villains and lovers. Their players were amongst the first musicians to be herded into recording studios and required to condense their art into the three and a half minutes that a 78 rpm record could hold (a discipline with which one musician struggled so badly that he ended up asking a technician to just come in and knock him on the head when his time was up).
Here, then, were the real taste-makers: the men and women of Japan’s record industry. They understood that musical appeal was all about time, and timing. To early Meiji Japanese, the piano and the violin, along with songs like ‘Auld Lang Syne’, had sounded distinctly Western. For the next generation, they had been part of the fabric. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ had morphed into ‘Hotaru no Hikari’ (‘Glow of the Firefly’), while few ever knew that a second childhood classic, ‘Chōchō’, about a butterfly fluttering between leaves and cherry blossoms, was very well travelled: its melody had started life in Germany, as ‘Hänschen klein’ (‘Little Hans’), before journeying to Japan by way of the United States, where it was ‘Lightly Row’.
By the 1920s, shamisen and koto melodies rooted in the sophisticated sadness of the miyako bushi scale (E-F-A-B-C-E) were capable of evoking urban longing for a bygone era. An upbeat A-C-D-E-G-A folk scale, meanwhile, conjured the lost simplicity of furusato (hometown) life – now mired, for most record-buying city types, somewhere between dim anecdotal remembrance and pure fantasy. Songs addressing contemporary city work-lives, night-lives and love-lives made use of appropriately syncretic scales known as yonanuki: Western major and minor scales with fourths (yo) and sevenths (na) removed (nuki).
Even where the authorities went out of their way to crack down on certain sorts of music, their reach had its limits. Capitalism usually found a way, as it did with ‘Tokyo March’. The collective hand-wringing ended up being useful for newspaper circulation, while the record company Nippon Victor built on the free publicity by giving away a thousand copies of the song on record at cafés and bars across the city.
Some Japanese actively set out to develop music’s subversive potential. Meiji-era enkashi used narrative song to circumvent government restrictions on political speech, hawking as many copies of their lyrics as they could – satirizing the crony politics of the day and calling for popular rights – before the police appeared and they were forced to move on. Some accompanied themselves on guitar or violin. Others found that a cappella music made for a less encumbered get-away.
Industrialization, meanwhile, came with its own grim soundtrack, of protest and despair. Much of middle-class urban culture was driven by a search for orientation, in a place and time where everyday assumptions went swiftly out of date. How should I relate to my boss? How do I make friends? How should I meet and treat a lover? How do I furnish my home? What’s good – and not – to wear and eat these days? But while the average university graduate, working in education or finance or the state bureaucracy, might be able to afford the kind of life described in ‘Tokyo March’
– complete with the record-player required to sing along at home – it was rapidly clear that the rise of a mass society would be far less kind to others. Even the most committed of revellers would have struggled to tap their feet to ‘Song of the Living Corpses’:
My family was poor.
At the tender age of twelve
I was sold to a factory …
I was carried away by sweet-sounding words.
My money was stolen and thrown away.
Unaware of the hardships of the future,
I was duckweed in the wind.
Japan’s survival in a highly competitive early twentieth-century global economy relied to a considerable extent on industries like silk-reeling and cotton-spinning. These depended in turn on the labour of young girls, who often relocated across great distances from rural to urban Japan. The ‘sweet-sounding words’ of recruiters paid on a commission basis persuaded hard-up parents to part with a daughter. Sometimes the daughter herself decided that mill-work could be her contribution to dire family finances, or perhaps her ticket to freedom.
‘Song of the Living Corpses’ goes on to describe arrival at the gates of a cotton mill, a terrifying medical examination and a meal of ‘low-grade rice mixed with sand’. The girl in the song innocently asks what the side-dish will be. She laments her 4.30 a.m. starts, ushering in interminably long working days spent in vast, chairless machinery rooms, everyone wearing the same blue uniforms with blue-socked feet wedged into hemp-straw sandals.
At the end of their shifts, which could last for up to fifteen hours, girls returned to locked dormitories where the few with any energy left could ‘attend’ the school that they and their parents had been promised. It often turned out to be no more than a casual conversation held in a corridor. Meanwhile, cramped conditions proved ideal for the flourishing of tuberculosis, while other workers suffered beatings and sexual abuse (‘Let’s wrench the balls of the hateful men!’ ran another factory song of the era, ‘Mr Overseer, Mr Supervisor, you’d better watch out!’). Competition with rival manufacturers around the world dictated that the factory machines, and with them the whole sorry system, had to run twenty-four hours a day.
Around half of all workers ran away during the first few months of employment, even though they knew that their families could be made to repay the money offered by the recruiter. Most moved on to new factories, in the hope of better conditions. Others took work in urban offices or shops – the first, perhaps, of a string of jobs of the sort Hayashi had eventually escaped.
Strikes – of which there were hundreds annually during much of the 1910s and 1920s – were sometimes successful in achieving lower working hours and improvements in food or sleeping conditions. And in some industries, where technical training took time, managers found they would rather make deals with their employees than see them go elsewhere. These were some of the roots of a phenomenon for which Japan would later become known worldwide: labour–management relations based not on antagonism but on quasi kin-like cooperation in everything from job security to welfare benefits. From complaint boxes to good company housing, industrial giants like Mitsubishi found that fostering strong worker identification with their employer was clearly the way to go.
It was becoming clear in the 1910s that the old political status quo could not last for long. Japan’s 1889 Constitution had been crafted by a small revolutionary elite, with their own interests and talents in mind. Their personal relationships, spanning the Diet, civilian and military bureaucracies, and of course the Emperor himself, knitted the system together and helped it to run reasonably smoothly. But these men were beginning to leave the scene now, replaced by people who relied for their influence on more circumscribed – and therefore obsessively guarded – powerbases. Elected politicians were forced to strike a balance between conspicuous flag-waving on the one hand, helping a popular military to fill its coffers, and on the other consideration for the finances of their relatively wealthy and naturally tax-averse voter base. Politics gained, in the process, a reputation for factionalism and gridlock. Critics found it increasingly hard to distinguish between politicians running the system and gaming it for their own interests.
The new Emperor after 1912 was in no position to guide or mediate. His father and predecessor was revered as a great figurehead, who had successfully managed the transition to the role of a modern monarch and helped his era to live up to the hopes of those who named it at its outset: ‘Meiji’ – ‘enlightened rule’. But the man whose era was given the name ‘Taishō’ – ‘great righteousness’ – suffered serious physical and mental incapacitation, complicated by a drinking habit, which proved difficult to conceal from the public. On one occasion, when he was about to give a speech to the Diet, the Emperor rolled up his scroll and peered out through it at his audience, as though through a telescope. Turbulent times called for an emperor who would exude calm and continuity, albeit from an enigmatic distance. Emperor Taishō was poorly suited for the role.
Instead, the 1910s witnessed rising popular pressure for true parliamentary governance in Japan, as opposed to the all but advisory role initially envisaged for the Diet. Before his death in 1909, Japan’s great constitutional strategist Itō Hirobumi had advised fellow leaders that in order to safeguard the Meiji settlement they would need to hold their noses and work more closely with Diet members, allowing political parties to become a serious force in the country. Itō himself became president of a new party: Seiyūkai, or the Friends of Constitutional Government Party. Other elites and their protégés soon followed suit, forging new connections with business, agricultural and other interests.
Tokyo in the 1920s For a time, it looked as though these efforts would bring forth a new breed of canny, deal-making democrat. Hara Kei (or Hara Takashi), who helped Itō to set up Seiyūkai, was a man with personal experience of operating pretty much every lever of power that modern Japan had to offer. He had worked in the state bureaucracy, in business and as a journalist. And hailing from Iwate prefecture, in northern Japan, he was also well placed to understand the needs of regional leaders and businessmen for whom Tokyo often seemed a far-off place.
These connections, together with tax money that he managed to funnel towards the pet projects of political allies across the country – a harbour here, a new road there – helped Hara to make his way up towards the very top of national politics. Moving government personnel around to ensure for himself a loyal base of support in the civil service, Hara waited patiently throughout the 1910s – both in and out of Cabinet – for his eventual chance at the top job. It came in 1918, amidst just the sort of mass riots that Japan’s leaders feared.
Four years earlier, Japan had entered the First World War on the side of Great Britain, under the terms of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Imperial Japanese Navy escorted hundreds of Allied ships in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, while injured soldiers on the Western front occasionally found themselves being tended to by nurses from the Japanese Red Cross. But for the most part, Japan’s activities during the war were governed by the pursuit of its own strategic interests: edging the Germans out of China and the South Pacific (the major Anglo-Japanese action of the conflict was a successful attack on the German colony at Tsingtao in 1914), and further expanding its influence on the Asian mainland. With the lease on the Liaotung Peninsula coming up for renewal, Japan presented a list of ‘Twenty-One Demands’ to China in 1915. These included the extension of Japan’s lease on the South Manchuria Railway, recognition of temporary Japanese management of Germany’s former Chinese possessions, and joint control of key mining operations in the country. Chinese leaders were in no position to refuse, leading furious student activists to declare a ‘National Humiliation Day’.
Japan’s leaders probably did themselves more long-term harm than good with these wartime manoeuvrings. In the US, political and public opinion began to shift against Japan and towards China, setting the stage for a difficult international decade to come. At home, meanwhile, t
he disruption suffered by commercial rivals during the war helped Japan’s economy, as did contracts to produce arms and other goods for the conflict. But these economic gains brought inflation, and by the summer of 1918 public anger at rice prices – which had doubled since the previous year – turned into violence across the country.
Hara was no starry-eyed man of the people. He opposed calls for universal male suffrage, preferring instead to have the interests of lower-middle and working-class people voiced and dealt with cooperatively and out of the public eye, in worker–management councils. But he was adept at giving influential people what they wanted and had even managed to woo the stony senior statesman Yamagata, who now picked him, amidst the turmoil, as the country’s first ‘commoner’ prime minister – and the first to have come up through the ranks of a plain old political party.
It was a tremendous and celebrated achievement, but it did not in itself change the fact that with little official encouragement for ordinary Japanese to participate in politics – beyond paying their taxes and reading a newspaper – the country’s political parties remained relatively small, fee-paying clubs for the wealthy. Seiyūkai and their more progressive rivals in later years, Minseitō, were bankrolled by the Mitsui and Mitsubishi conglomerates respectively, with cooperation so close that it extended to inter-marriage between leading families on either side of the professional divide. Recognizing that the trend of the times ran in the direction of greater influence for the Diet, power-seekers from across the civil service, the military and big finance began to reinvent themselves as party politicians.
Japan Story Page 13
