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THE LOW CITY

The Low City, built on the delta of the Sumida River, is what is left of old Edo.

A handcrafted bamboo ladle rests on the simple bamboo-and-rope cover of a water basin at Toshogu Shrine, located inside Ueno Park.

A Buddhist monk patiently awaits alms from passersby while chanting on Chuo-dori Avenue near Ueno Station.

JUST AS EDO WAS TRADITIONALLY divided into the High City on one hand and the Low City on the other, so the inhabitants are thought of as classified into the samurai class (aristocratic) and the plebian (commoner) class—with perhaps the merchant class forming a kind of mid-class in between.

Class differences, based on Confucian concepts imported from China, were strongly reinforced during the reign of the bakufu, the Tokugawa shogunate’s government. Whatever its other virtues, such doctrine creates a malleable populace, easy to intimidate and to control. Early Edo was like a military camp.

Status, rank, was everything and the resulting classes were to be defined and separated. Everyone was to have his or her place, and there was no leaving it. Samurai must live apart from merchants, craftsmen were to be assigned housing by trade, farmers stayed on the farm, and travel permits were needed to visit even neighboring provinces.

Officially, the most powerful and privileged were the samurai and their daimyo leaders. Beneath them was ranked the peasant class, though in actuality the farmers had little power. Nonetheless, as in most militaristic societies, “the people” were offered official respect. Beneath them were the artisans and at the very bottom (though above the various proscribed classes) were the merchants. Though this lowly merchant class eventually controlled much of the country’s cash and many a samurai was in debt to many a wealthy merchant, as a social category this class was officially denied the power and privilege that it actually held.

Given such top-down cultural control, it is not surprising that Edo’s class structure should have emerged in the strata-like formation still culturally visible. The pyramid looked like this: On top, the samurai (shi), just under this, the farmers (no), below them the artisans (ko) and near the bottom, the merchants (sho).

The upper layer (samurai culture) contains many of those traditional things that foreigners now associate with Japaneseness: the formal kimono, official architecture, fine calligraphy, the Noh drama, ikebana flower arranging, almost all of the martial arts, and much more. This could be called the official culture of the High City folk.

Pigeons fill the sky above Senso-ji Temple.

A resident keeps an eye on his Yanaka neighborhood

A geisha slips out of a backstreet residence in Asakusa.

Contrasted to this would be that of the people of the Low City. These would have been the artisans (and, increasingly, the merchant class), since peasants by definition are not credited with having much culture at all.

Low City culture was also traditional to the extent that here were created many of the objects of daily use: tools, utensils, pottery, lacquer work, fabrics, etc. At the same time, however, since these were all for sale, there was a cultural current visible in the Low City, a continual infusion of the new—including new money—which was perhaps lacking in High City culture.

From our point of view, most “samurai” culture is now stationary, petrified, though often very beautiful. Low City culture, however, was initially the home of change, and remains so, even now, despite the fact that the Shitamachi itself appears old-fashioned.

The reason for the contemporary continuation of Low City vitality is that it now informs the whole of the city, indeed, the whole of the country. Though its most famous early products— the kabuki, the wood-block print, the various folk festivals— now seem just as traditional as anything that the aristocratic High City culture produced, there is a difference.

To understand this one might look at the evolution of Low City culture. It is a continuing process. New and hopefully “improved” models constantly appear, distribution outlets are arranged, advertising is addressed, fashions push the product, and profits can be made.

A yakatabune ex-cursion houseboat slips down the Kanda River.

Young majorettes await their cue at the Asakusa Samba Festival.

Vendors hawk their wares in the narrow Ameyoko market street, Tokyo’s last surviving public market, located alongside the train tracks near Ueno Station.

At the same time, the popular arts exhibit no conservative urge to retain the time-honored or to respect any perceived integrity in the original. Here is an aesthetic example: The rules for fine calligraphy (much esteemed in High City Edo) were not relaxed and, indeed, still aren’t. In the “better” parts of Tokyo, a fine calligraphic hand is still considered an indication of a sterling character. In Low City Edo, an accommodation of standards was the rule. When color-saturated if oily aniline paints were imported from abroad, most ukiyo-e printmakers adopted them without a qualm, even though this meant dropping the time-honored vegetable-based colors.

Change is always with us. The popular arts are always vital and it is this vitality that keeps them popular. There is thus a continual tide of the new that, frivolous as it often is, agitates the culture that produces it because it is this that is salable.

The vermilion-colored Tsutenkyo Bridge arches gracefully over a small tributary inside Koishikawa Korakuen, an Edo-era garden.

An elegant visitor admires the cherry blossoms at Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens.

A lotus blossom is sprinkled with raindrops from a summer shower at Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park.

There is another factor also to be considered when contemplating Low City Edo culture. When something is forbidden an appetite for it is created. In the military atmosphere of Edo—one we might now consider, with its various sumptuary laws, a near police-state—citizens were attracted to such alternatives.

Edo scholar Nishiyama Matsunosuke has indicated how the principles of warrior rule governed the rank or status of individuals and families in the feudal hierarchy. His examples are all from the daimyo level. “Social rank determined the shape and size of the Edo residence, the kind of vehicles, furnishing, and clothing he was allowed. Distinctions included the colors and designs of clothing … even the borders of the tatami in Edo castle varied according to the rank of the officials who sat on them.”

If proscriptions were this severe at the top of the social pyramid, one may imagine what it was like for those at the bottom. Everything was to be indicative of ranking: hair styles, length of kimono sleeves, the colors permitted, the right to two swords, to one sword, to none. And not only was the recommended enforced, but innovations were forbidden.

One result was that Edo popular culture (as distinguished from official culture) based itself firmly upon the proscribed. The new product, the latest import, was searched out. Fashion was based on what was worn in the licensed quarters of the city: a certain color worn by a courtesan, a new way of tying one’s sash by an actor; woodblock prints made the likenesses of geisha and sumo athletes alike known to all and eligible for imitation; the outlawed and otherwise proscribed were often the heroes of the kabuki.

Another result was the inordinate attraction of the shin hatsubai, the “new product.” It still demands much attention in the media—and the parade of popular enthusiasms which stretch all the way from the Edo period until now: beige-striped kimono material, the craze for ornamental rabbits, the yo-yo, the hula-hoop, the tamagochi simulated pet, and on to the latest in smartphones and anime characters.

Nishiyama goes on to tell us that the strength of this Low City culture lay “in its spectacular breadth and diversity.” Even the general public took part in leisure pursuits as best it could and played an active role in the creation of new cultural forms.

This public formed the bulk of the population of Edo (by 1780 estimated at one million at a time when London held only two-thirds of that) and formed a new category, the chonin, a term often translated as townspeople. They were initially there to serve the needs of the samurai, but in time developed needs of their own. There were certainly more of them. Over half of this million living in Edo were some kind of chonin. Many were poor, but many were getting richer. This included the growing merchant class.

In fact the term chonindo (“the way of the merchants”) was heard as frequently as bushido (“the way of the warrior.”) Tales were told of rich but socially inferior merchants who lined their kimono with precious brocade, though outwardly exhibiting only the prescribed colors they were traditionally obliged to wear.

Sumida River fireworks glimpsed from Kaminarimon Gate in Asakusa.

The Goju-no-to Pagoda at Senso-ji Temple is a marvel of traditional architecture and sublime expression.

A statue of Matsuo Basho (Japan’s most esteemed haiku poet) overlooks the Sumida River and Kiyosubashi Bridge from the Basho-An Garden.

Though what we would now call their lifestyle was regulated by various sumptuary laws, and conspicuous extravagance was supposed to bring summary punishment, wealthy chonin lived in a way unthinkable for not only the average citizen but for most samurai as well. At the same time, this Low City culture presumed an ideal much at odds with that of the stern Confucian castle in the middle of the city. It was seditious, though its subversive intent was disguised.

In the same manner, other offenses against official decorum were described as mere fashion. In the Shitamachi— particularly in the popular plazas at either end of the Ryogoku Bridge, in the pleasure grounds of Asakusa, and in the licensed quarters of the Yoshiwara—life was not the stretch of hard labor prescribed by the authorities. Rather, the ideal was drifting as elegantly as possible along life’s river, free (in the words of an Edo poet) “as a gourd floating downstream,” a part of the ukiyo, the floating world.

An attitude cultivated among merchants and artisans was known as iki, a term which we might variously translate. “Cool” comes close, it suggests being “with it” and the Japanese term incorporates an assumed insouciance that refused to assign any particular importance to the stern edicts from the castle. To be sure, the castle was where the power was. Peasant uprisings were put down with brutality, and the kabuki is still full of stories of what happens to those who got caught—often young lovers mating across the social gap and ending up as double suicides.

Koi (carp) appear to swim inside delicate hand-painted laquerware bowls on a reed tray.

A vendor cooks fresh ayu sweetfish over charcoal at a traditional summer street fair.

Businessmen in conservative dark suits stroll beneath maple trees in bright autumn colors at Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens.

A dancer shares a smile at Asakusa’s Samba Festival.

Samurai were forbidden the pleasures of the pleasure-quarters and were subject to discipline if apprehended. The problem was solved when a special kind of hood-like headgear was put on sale. By purchasing and wearing one of these, the errant aristocrat indicated that he was incognito. This was a very Low City-like solution, one which satisfied the aristocrats and the authorities as well.

The authorities themselves were not immune to the charms of this proscribed popular culture. The novelty-loving shogun, Tsunayoshi, in 1682 went to see the first Korean circus to come to Japan. When an enormous whale beached itself in Shinagawa in 1798, the whole carcass was considered so exotic that it was lugged into the gardens of the palace to be examined by the upper classes.

Thus, culture high and low early merged in Edo and the result informs the distinctive flavor of Tokyo even now. There are, in actuality, two Japans. There is the “official” version (tea ceremony, subservient kimono-clad women) which is also the exported version and the one shown visitors. It is also the way that Japanese society likes to view itself, whether or not it happens to be accurate.

Then there is the other Japan, one which might be called the “real” one. Its people, as has been often noted, do not behave like “Japanese” because none of the rules of order and decorum insisted upon by the official version apply. An example might be the people shown in the comedies of kyogen, in the wood-block caricatures of the Edo period, or—in our own time—those shown in pop-lit, in manga cartoons, and in the works of filmmaker Imamura Shohei.

These people, almost always from the lower classes, do not recognize the meaning of fidelity or loyalty, they are completely natural and are to that extent “uncivilized” if civilization means (as it does) an avoidance of the natural.

Imamura himself said that “I happen to be more interested in the Japan that flourished before the artistic decadence fostered by political isolation in the feudal period,” later adding: “The Japanese did not change as a result of the Pacific War … they haven’t changed in thousands of years.”

An elevated expressway and a fast-moving couple cross the Nihonbashi Bridge.

A classic costume is worn with fashionable flair at Asakusa’s Sanja Festival.

Tokyo Skytree and Senso-ji Temple’s pagoda rise above Dembo-in Garden.