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Chapter 3

THE DOUBLE LIFE

Civilization and Enlightenment could be puzzling, and they could be startling too.

In Japan one always hears about “the double life,” not as suggestive a subject as it may at first seem to be, and indeed one that can become somewhat tiresome. It refers to the Japanese way of being both foreign and domestic, of wearing shoes and sleeping on floors. The double life is at best an expense and an inconvenience, we are told, and at worst a torment, leading to crises of identity and such things.

Looking about one and seeing the calm, matter-of-fact way in which the Japanese live the double life, one can dismiss the issue as intellectual sound and fury. The world has been racked by changes, such as the change from the rural eighteenth century to the urban twentieth, and, compared to them, the double life does not seem so very much to be tormented by. Yet there can be no doubt that it lies beyond the experience of the West. The West went its own way, whether wisely or not, one step following another. Such places as Tokyo had to—or felt that they had to—go someone else’s way.

The playwright Hasegawa Shigure came home one day and found that she had a new mother. Had her old mother been evicted and a new one brought in to replace her, the change might have been less startling. What Shigure found was the old mother redone. “She performed the usual maternal functions without the smallest change, but she had a different face. Her eyebrows had always been shaved, so that only a faint blue-black sheen was where they might have been. Her teeth had been cleanly black. The mother I now saw before me had the stubbly beginnings of eyebrows, and her teeth were a startling, gleaming white. It was the more disturbing because something else was new. The new face was all smiles, as the old one had not been.”

The women of Edo shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth. Tanizaki, when in his late years he became an advocate of darkness, developed theories about the effect of the shadows of Edo upon the spectral feminine visages created by these practices. Whatever may be the aesthetic merits of tooth-blackening, it was what people were used to. Then came a persuasive sign from on high that it was out of keeping with the new day. The empress ceased blackening her teeth in 1873. The ladies of the court quickly followed her lead, and the new way spread downwards, taking the better part of a century to reach the last peasant women in the remotest corners of the land. If the Queen and the Princess of Wales were suddenly to blacken their teeth, the public shock might be similar.

E. S. Morse did not record that his rickshaw runner was other than good-natured at having to stop at the city limits and cover his nakedness. The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change itself is a tradition. Even in the years of the deepest Tokugawa isolation there had been foreign fads, such as one for calicos, originally brought in as sugar sacks, and later much in vogue as kimono fabrics. There had always been great respect for foreign things, which needed no justification. The runner probably felt no more imposed upon by this new vestmental requirement than by the requirement that he be cheerful and reasonably honest. There was, moreover, a certain sense of proportion. Hasegawa Shigure’s mother was shamed by the neighbors into thinking that she may have gone too far. She did not return to tooth-blackening, but she did return to a traditional coiffure. The pompadour that had been a part of her new image was a subject of hostile criticism. The neighborhood was not yet ready for it.

If they sought to do what was expected of them, however, the lower orders must have occasionally wondered just what the right thing was. So many acts that had seemed most natural were suddenly uncivilized. A tabulation survives of misdemeanors committed in the city during 1876. “Urinating in a place other than a latrine” accounts for almost half of them. Quarreling and nudity take care of most of the remaining five or six thousand. Not many people were inconvenienced by other proscriptions, but they suggest all the same that one had to tread carefully. Cutting the hair without permission seems to have been an exclusively feminine offense. There is a single instance of “performing mixed Sumō, snake shows, etc.” The same pair of miscreants was presumably guilty of both, etc. There are eight instances of transvestism, a curious offense, since it had long been a part of Kabuki, and does not seem to have troubled people greatly in more private quarters. Hasegawa Shigure tells in her reminiscences of a strange lady who turned up for music lessons in Nihombashi and proved to be a man. The police were not summoned, apparently, nor was the person required to discontinue his lessons.

Mixed bathing was banned by the prefecture in 1869. Indifference to the order may be inferred, for it was banned again in 1870 and 1872. Bathhouses were required to have curtains at their doors, blocking the view from the street. Despite these encumbrances, the houses were very successful at keeping up with the times. Few plebeian dwellings in the Low City had their own baths. Almost everyone went to a public bath, which was a place not only for cleansing but for companionship. The second floors of many bathhouses offered, at a small fee, places for games and for sipping tea poured by pretty girls. These facilities were very popular with students. From mid-Meiji, the nature of bathhouses seems to have become increasingly complex and dubious. The bathing function lost importance as private domestic baths grew more common, while second floors were sometimes converted to “archery ranges” (the pretty girls being available for special services) and drinking places. The bathhouse had earlier been a sort of community center for plebeian Edo, a relief from crowding and noise, or, perhaps, a place that provided those elements in a form somewhat more appealing than the clamor of home and family. Now it was a new and rather less innocent variety of pleasure center.

In the fiction of late Edo the barbershop, like the bathhouse, had been a place for watching the world go by. The new world spelled change here too. Western dress was initially expensive, but the Western haircut was not. The male masses took to it immediately; the other masses, as the example of Hasegawa Shigure’s mother tells us, more slowly. The Meiji word for the most advanced way of cutting the hair was zangiri or jangiri, meaning something like “random cropping.” The old styles, for aristocrat and commoner alike, had required shaving a part of the head and letting the remainder grow long, so that it might be pulled into a top-knot. Already in 1873, the sixth year of Meiji, a newspaper was reporting that about a third of the men in the city had cropped heads.

“If you thump a jangiri head,” went a popular ditty of the day, “it sounds back ‘Civilization and Enlightenment.’” The more traditional heads echoed in a more conservative way, and some even carried overtones suggesting a revocation of the Restoration and a return to the old order.

The first new-style barbershop opened in 1869. It was in Ginza, which had new things even before the fire. The barber had learned his trade in Yokohama, and his first customer is said to have been the chief of a fire brigade. This seems appropriate. Firemen were among the more traditional of people, noted for verve and gallantry, and figuring prominently in the fiction and drama of Edo. So it often seems in Meiji: tradition and change were not at odds; the one demanded the other.

Up-to-date geisha, by Ogawa Isshin, 1902

By 1880, two-thirds of the men in the city had randomly cropped heads. The figure had reached 90 percent a scant six years later, and by 1888 or 1889 only the rare eccentric still wore his hair in the old fashion.

The inroads of the Western barber were far more rapid than those of the Western tailor. It was not until the day of the flapper that women really began to cut their hair and let it down. Liberated Meiji women went in for a pompadour known as “eaves,” from its way of projecting outwards in a sheltering sweep. A few geisha and courtesans adopted Western dress from mid-Meiji, and several wore what was known as the “shampoo coiffure,” from its resemblance to hair let down for washing and not put back up again. The first beauty school was opened early in the Taishō Period, by a French lady named Marie-Louise. Others quickly followed.

The English expression “high-collar” came into vogue from about the turn of the century. At first it was derisive, signifying the extremely and affectedly foreign. A lady’s coiffure was high-collar if it was thought to he too sweeping and eaveslike. A suggestion of dandyism still clings to the expression.

Some rather surprising things were high-collar, in the broad sense of innovative. Items and institutions which one might think to be very old and very Japanese have their origins in Meiji, under the influence of Civilization and Enlightenment. The word banzai is an old one, but the shouting of it on felicitous occasions seems to have occurred first with the promulgation of the Meiji constitution, in 1889. The popularity of Shinto weddings also dates from Meiji. The first marriage broker set up business in Asakusa in 1877. It may be that the police box, so much a part of Japan since Meiji, has its origins in certain Edo practices, but just as probably it began with the guards at the gates of the legations and the foreign settlements. The first private detective agency is believed to have been founded in 1891. Private detectives now seem to be everywhere, and they are so sophisticated that their relatively recent origins are cause for wonderment.

Traffic on the left side of the street also appears to have been a Meiji innovation. There had not been much vehicular traffic in Edo, but bridge signs give evidence that such as there was had been expected to pass on the right. In early Meiji, police orders—probably under the influence of the British, at the forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment in so many ways—required carriages to pass on the left.

Reading a line of horizontal print from left to right was a Meiji innovation. Not imposed by authority, the practice gradually and uncertainly came to prevail. Two adjoining Nihombashi financial establishments might have signs reading in contradictory fashion, one in the old direction, right to left, the other in the new. On the same train the description of the route would read right to left and the no-smoking sign left to right.

Beer, which has now replaced sake as the national drink, even as baseball has replaced Sumō as the national sport, made its appearance early in Meiji. The first brewery was in Tokyo, just south of the Hibiya parade grounds, not far from where the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel later arose. The first beer hall opened in Kyōbashi on the Fourth of July in 1899, celebrating the end of the “unequal treaties.”

Until very recently, the system of house numbers was so chaotic that ancient uncodified custom seemed the most likely explanation. In fact, however, there were no house numbers at all until Meiji. The sense of place centered upon the machi or chō, which might be rendered “neighborhood.” A few streets had popular names and today a few have official names, but the neighborhood continues to be the central element in an address. Before Meiji there was nothing else. If more detailed information was required as to the site of a dwelling, only description could be offered—“two houses from the retired sealmaker in the second back alley,” and the like. House numbers were observed by early travelers to the West, and thought desirable, and assigned helter-skelter as new houses went up and old houses wished numbers too.

The want of system has been remedied somewhat in recent years, so that Number 2 in a certain neighborhood will usually be found between Number 1 and Number 3; yet the consciousness of place continues to be by tract or expanse and not by line. Though it provides its pleasures, and sometimes one has a delicious sense of adventure in looking for an address, a system of numbers along a line is without question more efficient than one of numbers scattered over an area. The chaos of the Meiji method was a product of Civilization and Enlightenment, however, and not of benighted tradition, which eschewed house numbers.

What is now the most ubiquitous of Japanese accessories, the calling card, is a Western importation. The first ones are believed to have been brought from Europe in 1862 by a Tokugawa diplomatic mission. In the 1903 edition of their guide to Japan, Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason describe Tokyo as having “a tranquil and semi-rural aspect owing to the abundance of trees and foliage.” Compared to most Japanese cities, and especially Osaka, Tokyo is indeed a city of greenery. Yet the planting of trees along streets is a modern innovation. In the premodern city there had been some public trees (as they might be called) along waterways. The Yanagiwara, the “Willowfield” along the Kanda River, even predated the Tokugawa hegemony. Virtually all the trees and grasses of the old city were in pots or behind walls, however, and the pines, cherries, maples, and oaks of Ginza were the first genuine street trees.

Western things tended to make their first appearance in the treaty ports. Yet many an innovation was first seen in Tokyo. Yokohama may have had the first lemonade and ice cream, but Tokyo had the first butter and the first Western soup.

The first artificial limb in the land was bestowed in Yokohama upon a Tokyo Kabuki actor, the third Sawamura Tanosuke. Dr. J. C. Hepburn, a pioneer medical missionary and the deviser of the Hepburn system of romanization (still in use despite modifications in detail), amputated a gangrenous leg and then sent to America for a wooden one, which arrived and was fitted in the last full year before Meiji. Tanosuke lost his other leg and a hand before he finally died, in 1878. He went on acting to the end.

Men were in most respects quicker to go high-collar than women. It was so in the cutting of the topknot, and it was so as well in the discarding of traditional dress. The phenomenon is to be observed elsewhere in Asia. It has to do, probably, with the decorative functions assigned to women, and also with somewhat magical aspects assigned to Western panoply and appurtenances. Whether or not the business suit is more businesslike than the kimono, people are bound to think it is, because the wearer has been better at business.

There may have been a few geisha with bustles and flounces and the shampoo coiffure, and these were the proper accouterments for a well-placed lady of the upper classes on her way to the Rokumeikan. Yet even for upper-class ladies the emphasis in the late years of the century shifted from Western dress to “improvement” of the Japanese kimono. Though hot-weather dress became Westernized more quickly than dress for the cooler seasons, most lady strollers in Ginza still wore Japanese dress on the eve of the earthquake. Some two-thirds of the men were in foreign dress, which was very expensive in the early years, and attainable only by the wealthy and the bureaucracy (for which it was mandatory). The military and the police were the first to go Western. The change had begun before the end of the shogunate. By 1881, there were two hundred tailoring and dressmaking establishments in the city, more than half of them in Nihombashi.

The emperor’s buttons and the empress’s bracelets and bodkins arrived from France in 1872. Traditional court dress was abolished by the Council of State that same year, though most court officials were still in traditional dress at the opening of the Yokohama railroad. Willingness to wear Western dress was more prevalent among men than among women, and among the upper classes than the lower.

Even at the height of the Rokumeikan era (for a description of that building see pages 82-83), when the world was being shown that the Japanese could do the Western thing as well as anyone else, there seems to have been more determination than ardor. Newspaper accounts inform us that the dance floor at some of the more celebrated events was dominated by foreigners, and Pierre Loti informs us that Japanese ladies, when coaxed out upon the floor, were correct but wooden.

Rokumeikan parties did not have much to do with the life of the city. They belonged in the realm of politics and the highest society, and if the sort of person who took his pleasures at Asakusa ever set foot in the place, it was doubtless as a servant or a delivery boy. Such affairs do not belong to the story of what happened to Edo and all its townsmen. Yet the Rokumeikan era was such an extraordinary episode, or series of episodes, that to dismiss it as political and really too high-class would be to risk letting the Meiji spirit, at its most ardent there in Tokyo whether of the city or not, disappear in an excessively rigid schema.

The building itself is gone, and historical treatment of the era runs towards dryness. The life of the place is best sensed in the works of wood-cut artists who, not themselves of high society, can have attended few if any Rokumeikan soirees. They make the best years of the Rokumeikan, and especially the ladies in their bright, bright dresses, seem utterly charming. Had one lived through those years, however, and been among the lucky few on the invitation lists, one might well have found the Rokumeikan hard work, no more charming than the doings of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society today. The flounces and bustles might not be so much fun had they been photographed rather than made into prints. They came when the art of the Ukiyo-e was having its last show of vigor, and lent themselves well to the bold pigments favored by Meiji artists.

The Rokumeikan seems to have been the idea of Inoue Kaoru. When Inoue became foreign minister in 1879, treaty reform was among the great issues. He was of the Nagato clan, which with the Satsuma clan had been the principal maker of the Restoration. In 1881 his good friend and fellow Nagato clansman, Itō Hirobumi, emerged as the most influential figure on the Council of State. Both were young men as politicians go, Itō in his late thirties, Inoue in his early forties. They had gone together some years before the Restoration to study in England. When, in 1885, Itō became the first prime minister with the title that office still bears, Inoue was his foreign minister. They saw Europeanization as the best way to get rid of the unequal treaties, and most particularly of extraterritoriality. Among the details of the movement was the Rokumeikan.

Whatever other ideas he may have had, Inoue is best remembered for conceiving of the Rokumeikan. The charm of the place, in addition to the bustles and flounces, lies largely in an element of fantasy. What politician, one asks, could possibly have thought that such a hardheaded person as the British minister would be so moved by a few Westernized balls at the Rokumeikan that he would recommend treaty revision to the home office? Yet that is what the Rokumeikan was about. In the episode is all the eagerness and wishfulness of young Meiji.

Records are not consistent as to the number of guests invited by Inoue for his opening night. There may have been upwards of a thousand, with several hundred foreigners among them. The facade was a great expanse of branches and flowers, dotted with flags and the royal crest. The garden glittered rather than blazed, with myriads of little lights, each shining chiefly upon a miniature stag. In the hallway were two stags formed from leafy branches. The great staircase was solidly embanked with chrysanthemums. Wishing to seem European in every respect possible, Inoue had the orchestra play to what would have been a fashionable hour in a European capital, but well beyond the hour when the son of Edo would have headed for home or settled in for the night. Accordingly, there was a special train to accommodate guests from Yokohama.

Almost everything for which the Rokumeikan provided the setting was new. Invitations addressed jointly to husbands and wives were an astonishing innovation—the son of Edo would not have known what to say. The Rokumeikan saw garden parties and evening receptions, and in 1884 there was a big charity bazaar. This too was very new. The old order had managed charities differently; it might have been thought proper to give largesse of some sort to a deserving individual who was personally known to the donor, but the trouble of a bazaar to benefit faceless strangers would have seemed purposeless. The 1884 bazaar lasted three days, and ten thousand tickets were sold. At the end of it all, the head of the Mitsubishi enterprises bought the unsold wares. The chief organizer was a princess (by marriage) belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family, and many another great lady of the land was on the committee.

Whether done easily or not, dancing was the main thing to do at the Rokumeikan. Ladies and gentlemen were expected to appear in foreign dress, so much less constricting than Japanese dress, and so flattering to the foreigner. Beginning late in 1884, ladies and gentlemen gathered for regular and studiously organized practice in the waltz, the quadrille, and the like. Two noble Japanese ladies were the organizers, and the teachers were of foreign extraction.

The grand climax of the Rokumeikan era did not occur at the Rokumeikan itself, but serves well by way of summing up. In 1885 Itō Hirobumi, still prime minister, gave a huge masked ball at his Western mansion. Again, reports on the number of guests vary widely, ranging from four hundred to over a thousand. Foreign dress was not required, and numbers of eminent Japanese guests took advantage of this fact. Itō himself was a Venetian nobleman, but Inoue was a Japanese buffoon, and the Home Minister a Japanese horseman. The president of the university came as the poet Saigyō, who had lived some seven centuries earlier.

Itō was involved shortly afterwards in an amorous scandal, an affair with a noble lady who was another man’s wife. The Itō cabinet became known—and the appellation is no more flattering in Japanese than in English—as “the dancing cabinet.” Itō held on as prime minister until 1888, but the fresh bloom of the Rokumeikan was passing. The antiquarian example of the university president seems to suggest that not everyone who went there was enthusiastic.

Strongly elitist from the outset, the Rokumeikan became the target of growing criticism, some of it spiteful and emotional, some of it soundly realistic. There were incidents, the Normanton incident of 1886 most prominent among them. The Normanton was a British freighter that sank off the Japanese coast. All the survivors were British, and all twenty-three Japanese passengers drowned. The captain was tried by consular court in Kobe and acquitted. He was later sentenced to a short prison term by the Yokohama consulate, but the sentence did not still public outrage. Extra-territoriality was becoming intolerable. The Rokumeikan and all its assemblies were accomplishing nothing towards the necessary goal.

The end of the decade approached, and it came to seem that the Rokumeikan had no friends anywhere. Itō’s political career did not end with the scandal and his resignation, but Inoue never really came into his own. Demagogues of the radical right and leaders of the “people’s rights” movement on the left were at one in thinking that the Rokumeikan must go. In 1889 it was sold to the Peers Club, and so began the way into obscurity and extinction that has been described. The name will not be forgotten. During its brief period of prominence the Rokumeikan was among the genuinely interesting curiosities the city contained. It has fascinated such disparate writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Mishima Yukio.

Though the enthusiasm with which the grand men of the land went out courting Europe and America had passed, the vogue for big parties did not pass. Three thousand five hundred guests were present at a party given by a shipowner in 1908, at what had been the Korakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family. Another shipowner gave a remarkable party in 1917, by which time the art of party-giving had advanced beyond mere imitation of the West. He had been tigerhunting in Korea, and his two hundred guests, assembled at the Imperial Hotel, were invited to sample tiger meat.

Government offices were first provided with chairs in 1871. Later that year it became unnecessary to remove the shoes before gaining admission. Shoes were quickly popular with both sexes. Schoolgirls in full Japanese dress except for what appear to be buttoned shoes are common in Meiji prints. Clara Whitney, an American girl who lived in Tokyo from 1875, was distressed to see, at the funeral in 1877 of the widow of the fourteenth shogun, a band of professional mourners in traditional dress and foreign shoes. In early Meiji there was a vogue for squeaky shoes. To produce a happy effect, strips of “singing leather” could be purchased and inserted into the shoes.

Student uniforms of the Western style were adopted for men in mid-Meiji, and so came the choke collars and the blackness relieved only by brass buttons that prevailed through the Second World War. At the outset, school uniforms were not compulsory. Rowdiness was given as the reason for the change. Curiously, there had been a period earlier in Meiji when students were forbidden to wear foreign dress. Rowdyism seems to have been the reason then too, and the fact that foreigners were distressed to see students wandering about in foreign underwear.

It was not until the Taishō Period that the masses of students, young and older, changed to Western dress. A graduation picture for a well-known private elementary school shows all pupils in Japanese dress at the end of Meiji. A picture for the same school at the beginning of Shōwa (the present reign) shows most of the boys and about half the girls in Western dress. The middy blouse that continues to be a standard for girl students on the lower levels did not come into vogue until after the earthquake.

At the end of Meiji, the old way of dress yet prevailed among students, though the enlightened view held that it was constricting and inconsistent with modern individualism. When male students chose Western costume, they often wore it with a difference. A flamboyant messiness became the mark of the elite, and a word was coined for it, a hybrid. The first syllable of bankara is taken from a Chinese word connoting barbarity, and the remainder from “high-collar,” signifying the up-to-date and cosmopolitan. The expression, still used though uniforms have virtually disappeared from higher education, means something like sloppily modern.

High-collar aspects of food had been present since early Meiji, especially the eating of meat, a practice frowned upon by Buddhist orthodoxy. It is recorded that Sumō wrestlers of the Tokugawa Period ate all manner of strange things, such as monkeys, but the populace at large observed Buddhist taboos. The beef-pot was among the radical Meiji departures, and among its symbols as well. Pigs, horses, and dairy products, almost unknown before Meiji, now entered the Japanese diet. So too did bread, which was not thought of as a staple until about the time of the earthquake. In Meiji it was a confection. A Japanized version, a bun filled with bean jam, was inexpensive and very popular among students.

The city had a slaughterhouse from late Tokugawa, first in the hills of Shiba, then, because of local opposition, on the more secluded Omori coast, beyond the “red line” that defined the jurisdiction of the city magistrates. The students at Fukuzawa’s Keiō University seem to have been inveterate eaters of beef, as was most appropriate to that Westernizing place. Yet they had their inhibitions. Reluctant to be seen in butcher shops, customers would receive their orders through inconspicuous windows. When a butcher entered the Keiō gates to make deliveries, he would be greeted with the clicking of flints that was an ancient cleansing and propitiatory ritual.

Chinese cuisine was also new to the city, though it had long been present in Nagasaki. It is so ubiquitous today, and in many ways so Japanized, that one might think it most venerable. The first Chinese restaurant in Tokyo opened for business only in 1883. It was the Kairakuen in Nihombashi, where Tanizaki and his friends played at whores and cribs. Where the beef-pot seems to have caught on without special sponsorship, the Kairakuen, like the Rokumeikan, had wealthy and powerful promoters, who thought Chinese cooking a necessity in any city worthy of the name.

There were pig fanciers. Pigs commanded high prices. The tiny creatures known as Nanking mice also enjoyed a vogue. But the rabbit vogue was more durable and more intense, a rage of a vogue indeed. Though it spread all over the country, its beginnings were in Tokyo, with two foreigners, an Englishman and an American, who, situated in the Tsukiji foreign settlement, offered rabbits for sale. They also offered to make plain to the ignorant exactly what a rabbit connoisseur looked for in a particularly desirable beast. The rabbits were to be patted and admired, as dogs and cats are, and not eaten. A society of rabbit fanciers was formed. Rabbits with the right points brought huge prices, far greater, by weight, than those for pigs. Large floppy ears were much esteemed, as was the sarasa, or calico coat. A person in Shitaya was fined and jailed for staining a white rabbit with persimmon juice.

Imports from distant lands increased the rabbit count, and encouraged speculation and profiteering. In 1873, a year in which the population of domestic rabbits in the central wards reached almost a hundred thousand, authorities banned a meeting of the society of rabbit fanciers. Later that year they banned the breeding of the rabbits themselves, and imposed a tax to discourage possession. The vogue thereupon died down, though foreigners were observed thereafter selling French rabbits in Asakusa. Newspapers regarded the consular courts as too lenient, and so the rankling issue of extraterritoriality came into the matter. So did one of the great social problems of early Meiji, because the lower ranks of the military aristocracy—who had great difficulty adjusting to the new day—were the chief losers from the profiteering.

The enthusiasm for foreign things waned somewhat in mid-Meiji. In the realm of personal grooming there was a certain vogue for “improving” Japanese things rather than discarding them for the Western. This nationalist reaction was by implication anti-Western, of course, but it was not accompanied by the sort of antiforeign violence that had been common in late Tokugawa. There were such incidents in early Meiji, but usually under special circumstances. When, in 1870, two Englishmen who taught at the university were wounded by swordsmen, W. E. Griffis was on hand to help treat them. Initially he shared the anger and fear of the foreign community, but eventually he learned of details that shocked his missionary sensibilities and caused him to put the blame rather on the Englishmen. They had been out womanizing. What happened to them need no more concern the God-fearing citizen of Tokyo than a similar incident at the contemporary Five Points slum need concern a proper citizen of New York. Two men from southwestern clans were executed for the assaults, some have thought on insufficient evidence. Sir Harry Parkes, the formidable British minister, was about to depart for home, and it was thought necessary (or so it has been averred) that something memorable be done for the occasion. One of the two condemned men retracted his confession, which did not in any event agree with the evidence presented by the wounds.

Out of fashion for some decades after Prince Itō’s masked ball, dancing became wild and uncontrolled, by police standards, in the years after the First World War. Another new institution of the Rokumeikan period, the coffee house, also left its early primness behind. A Chinese opened the first one near Ueno Park in 1888. Descriptions of it suggest that it may have been a sort of gymnasium or health club, with coffee offered as an invigorating potion. The transcription of “coffee” had a sort of devil-may-care quality about it. Today the word is generally written with two characters that have only phonetic value, but the founder of the Coffee House chose a pair signifying “pros and cons,” or perhaps “for better or for worse.” The English word has continued to designate the beverage, while the French came to signify a place where stylish and affluent gentlemen (without their wives) went to be entertained by pretty and accommodating young ladies. It was among the symbols of the Taishō high life.

Though sea bathing was not completely unknown in Meiji, ladies’ bathing garments became good business only in Taishō. Immersion in natural bodies of cold water has long been a religious observance, but it was not until recent times that the Japanese came to think it pleasurable. When Nagai Kafū describes a summer beach of late Meiji it is notable for its loneliness, even a beach which now would be an impenetrable mass of bodies on a hot Sunday afternoon. In his memoirs Tanizaki describes an excursion to the Shiba coast, to a beach situated almost exactly where the expressway now passes the Shiba Detached Palace. The purpose of the outing seems to have been more for clamdigging than for bathing. In late Meiji there was an advertising campaign to promote the district and induce people to come bathing in its waters (then still clean enough for bathing, even though the south shore of the bay was becoming a district of factories and docks). Among the points made in favor of sea bathing was that it was held in high esteem by foreigners.

Eminent foreigners began coming to Tokyo at an early date. They were on the whole treated hospitably. An exception was the czarevitch of Russia, who was wounded by a sword-swinging policeman, though not in Tokyo, when he paid a visit to Japan in 1891. The very earliest was the Duke of Edinburgh, who came in 1869. Others included German and Italian princes, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and a head of state, the King of Hawaii. William H. Seward called in 1870. The Meiji government felt more immediately threatened by Russia than by any other nation. Seward suggested an Alaskan solution to the Russian problem: buy them out. Pierre Loti was probably the most distinguished literary visitor of Meiji, but such attention as he received—his invitation to the Rokumeikan, for instance—had less to do with his writing than with his diplomatic status as a naval attaché.

The eminent foreigners most lionized were without question General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. On a round-the-world journey, they reached Nagasaki by cruiser in June, 1879, and were in Tokyo for two months, from early July to early September. They were to have visited Kyoto and Osaka, but this part of their schedule was canceled because of a cholera epidemic. The guard along the way from Yokohama was commanded by Nogi Maresuke, who became, in the Russo-Japanese War, the leading military immortal of modern times, and demonstrated the extent of his loyalty to the throne by committing suicide on the day of the Meiji emperor’s funeral. For the Grants there was a reception at Shimbashi Station, before which a display of hydrangeas formed the initials “U.S.G.” Japanese and American flags decorated every door along the way to the Hama Palace, where the party stayed, and where the governor honored them with yet another reception. Receptions were held during the following weeks at the College of Technology and Ueno. The former is said to have been the first soiree essayed by the Japanese, whose ways of entertaining had been of a different sort. There were parades and visits to schools and factories, the sort of thing one gets on a visit to the New China today. The general planted a cypress tree in Ueno. It came through the holocausts of 1923 and 1945, and yet survives, providing the background for an equestrian statue of the founder of the Japanese Red Cross. Mrs. Grant planted a magnolia, which survives as well. There was classical theater, both Kabuki and Nō, and there was the most festive of summer observances, the “opening of the Sumida” in July. The general viewed it in comfort from an aristocratic villa, it being a day when there were still such villas on the river. The crowds were twice as large as for any earlier year in Meiji, despite the fact that the weather was bad. Fireworks and crowds got rained upon. All manner of pyrotechnical glories were arranged in red, white, and blue. The general indicated great admiration.

A parade during General Grant’s visit in 1879. Woodcut by Kunichika (The Metropolitan Museum of Art: gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1962)

The general and the emperor saw a good deal of each other. The general paid a courtesy call on the Fourth of July, the day after his arrival. They had breakfast together after a troop review on July 7, and met again at the great Ueno reception in August. Also in August, they had a long and relatively informal meeting in the Hama Palace. The general argued the virtues of democracy, though with a caution against too hasty adoption of this best of systems. He expressed the hope that the Japanese would be tactful and considerate of Chinese sensibilities as they took over the Ryūkyū Islands, claimed by both countries. A few days before his departure, he took his leave of the emperor.

Though overall the visit was a huge success, there were a few unpleasant incidents. Clara Whitney overheard a catty Japanese lady remark “that General Grant is treated so much like a god here that a temple should be erected immediately.” Towards the end of his stay there were rumors of an assassination plot, but they proved to be the inventions of a jealous Englishman. The 1879 cholera epidemic, by no means the only such epidemic in Meiji, had led to the building of the first isolation hospitals in the city. Rumors spread similar to earlier ones about telegraph poles (see p. 65): the hospitals were for purposes of snatching livers, General Grant being ready to pay a handsome price for a liver.

These were minor details, however. On the whole, the city seems to have loved the general and the general the city.

The high point of the visit, for the historian of the event if not for the general himself, was his evening at the Kabuki. He went to the Shintomiza near Ginza, the most advanced theater in the city. Carpets and lacquered chairs had been carried in from the Hama Palace. Three royal princes were in attendance, as was the prime minister. The play was called The Latter Three Years’ War in the North. Minamoto Yoshiie, the victorious general in that war (a historical event), resembled the visiting general in a most complimentary manner: he behaved with great courtliness and magnanimity towards his defeated adversary.

The theater manager, accompanied by Danjūrō, the most famous actor of the day, stepped forth in frock coat during an entr’acte to thank the general for a curtain he had donated. The climax was a dance performed against a backdrop of flags and lanterns. Some of the musicians wore red and white stripes, others stars on a blue ground. Then appeared a row of Yanagibashi geisha, each in a kimono of red and white stripes drawn down over one shoulder to reveal a star-spangled singlet. Japanese and American flags decorated their fans.

“Ah, the old flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes!…” Clara Whitney wrote in her diary. “It made the prettiest costume imaginable… We looked with strong emotion upon this graceful tribute to our country’s flag and felt grateful to our Japanese friends for their kindness displayed not only to General Grant but to our honored country.”

Next to General and Mrs. Grant, the foreigner who got the most at tention from the newspapers and the printmakers was probably an Englishman named Spencer, who came in 1890, bringing balloons with which he performed stunts, once in Yokohama and twice in Tokyo. The emperor was present at the first Tokyo performance. Parachuting from his balloon, Spencer almost hit the royal tent, and injured himself slightly in his efforts to avoid it. He drew huge crowds at Ueno a few days later, and this time landed in a paddy field. An American named Baldwin tried to outdo him the following month, with aerial acrobatics and a threatening smoky balloon. Spencer is the one who is remembered, to the extent that he was given credit by the printmakers for stunts that apparently were Baldwin’s. The following year the great actor Kikugorō appeared on the Kabuki stage as Spencer, in a play by Mokuami. Coached by a nephew of Fukuzawa Yukichi, he even essayed a speech in English. There was a vogue for balloon candies, balloon bodkins, and, of course, balloon prints. Since the Japanese had been launching military balloons for more than a decade, it must have been the parachuting and stunting that so interested people—or perhaps they enjoyed seeing a foreigner in a dangerous predicament.

W. E. Griffis, who felt that those two grievously wounded Englishmen (see page 113) deserved what they got, said that the same judgment applied to all attacks upon foreigners of which he was aware. It may be true. The attack on the czarevitch may not seem to fit the generalization as well as it might, but the assailant could have argued that Russia itself was behaving provocatively. Violence was also directed at Salvation Army workers, and much the same justification might have been offered—the army itself was provocative.

An American colonel of the Salvation Army arrived and set up an office in the summer of 1900. Very soon afterwards he published a tract called Triumphant Voice (Toki no Koe), addressed to the ladies of the Yoshiwara. It exhorted them to flee their bondage, and offered help to those who responded positively. The brothel keepers attempted to buy up all copies. A Japanese worker for the Salvation Army was pummeled by a Yoshiwara bully boy as he hawked Triumphant Voice. Two men tried to rescue a lady from the Susaki quarter, and they too were attacked. This charitable endeavor attracted the attention and support of the newspapers. A reporter succeeded in rescuing a Yoshiwara lady, whereupon fleeing the quarters became something of a fad. The Salvation Army announced that during the last months of 1900 there were more than a thousand refugees in Tokyo alone. The figure is not easy to substantiate, but publicity was enormous. The vogue presently passed, and the Salvation Army was not afterwards able to match this initial success.

The “double life,” that mixture of the imported and the domestic, was certainly present from early Meiji and indeed from late Tokugawa, for people to enjoy and to be tormented by. Eminent foreigners came, objects of admiration and emulation, and once Civilization and Enlightenment had been accepted as worthy, it must have been difficult to see pinching shoes and injunctions to urinate indoors as other than important. Through most of Meiji, however, the cosmopolitan part of the double life was the part added, the frills attached somewhat selfconsciously and discarded when a person wanted to be comfortable. The big change, the domestication of the foreign, began in late Meiji, at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and the advertising man and the retail merchant may have been responsible for it. Perhaps it would have occurred without their aggressive urgings. Yet the old drygoods store became the modern department store in late Meiji, and in the change we may see how the double life itself was changing. Civilization and Enlightenment were no longer much talked of in late Meiji, but it was hard for anyone, in the dingiest alley east of the river, not to know what the Mitsukoshi and the Shirokiya were offering this season.

Advertising is a modern institution. The canny merchant of Edo had been aware of its merits, and there are well-known stories of Kabuki actors who promoted lines of dress. Edo was a closed world, however, in which vogues, led by the theater and the pleasure quarters, spread like contagions. People knew their stores, and stores knew their people. Even the largest and richest were highly specialized. Faster transportation led to the development of a wide clientele, gradually becoming something like national. At the same time came the idea of offering everything to everyone.

Through most of Meiji, the old way prevailed. The big shops specialized in dry goods. The customer removed his footwear before stepping up to the matted floor of the main sales room. There was no window shopping. If the customer did not know precisely what he wanted, the clerk had to guess, and bring likely items from a godown. Aristocratic ladies from the High City did not go shopping in the Low City. Clerks came to them from the big “silk stores,” or from smaller establishments that would today call themselves boutiques.

The Mitsui dry goods store, presently to become Mitsukoshi, had a fixed schedule of prices from early in its history. Haggling seems to have been common in early Meiji all the same, and a mark of cultural differences. The clans of the far southwest had made the Meiji revolution, and were the new establishment. Their ways were frequently not the ways of Edo and Tokyo. Their men took haggling as a matter of course, and the shopkeepers of Edo resisted it or acceded to it as their business instincts advised them. At least one old and well-established dry goods store bankrupted itself by the practice. Mitsui held to its fixed schedule, and survived.

The last decades of Meiji saw the advent of the department store. In many of its details it represented the emergence of a Western institution and the retreat of the traditional to the lesser realm of the specialty store. Certainly there was imitation. The big Mitsukoshi store of the Taishō era, the one that burned so brightly after the earthquake, was an imitation of Wanamaker’s. If the department store symbolized the new city, however, it remained a Japanese sort of symbol. Department stores sold their wares by drawing crowds with culture and entertainment as well as merchandise. They were heirs to the shrine and temple markets, shopping centers ahead of their time.

Mitsukoshi’s famous glass display cases

Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, at opposite approaches to the Nihombashi bridge, led the way into the great mercantile transformation. Edo methods predominated until about the turn of the century. They did not disappear even then, but the big dealers quickly moved on to mass sales of myriad commodities.

Mitsui, or Mitsukoshi, had entered Edo from the provinces in the seventeenth century. Shirokiya had opened for business in Nihombashi a few years earlier. Mitsukoshi has fared better than Shirokiya in the present century, but it would be facile to see in this the commonly averred victory of the provincial trader over the son of Edo. Both enterprises had been a part of Edo from its earliest years. Mitsukoshi was better at advertising and “image-making” than Shirokiya. Though purveying almost everything to almost everyone, it has preserved a certain air of doing so with elegance. In late Meiji, standing face to face across the bridge to which all roads led, the two sought to outdo each other with bold new innovations. Shortly after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 Mitsui added a second floor, with showcases. These were innovations so startling that they were for a time resisted. Edo had done its shopping on platforms perhaps two or three feet from the ground, with no wares on display.

Although Mitsukoshi was ahead in the matter of showcases and elevated shopping, Shirokiya was ahead in other respects. In 1886 it became the first of the old silk stores to sell Western clothes. It had one of the first telephones in the city, which, however, was kept out of sight, in a stairwell, lest it disturb people. It provided the country with its first shop girls. All the clerks in the old dry goods stores had been men. From about the time it became Mitsukoshi, which was registered as the legal name in 1904, Mitsui began selling hats, leather goods, and sundries. Then, having withdrawn to a back street because the main north-south street through Nihombashi was being widened, Mitsukoshi reopened on the old site in 1908, with the makings of a department store. Shirokiya replied with a new building, four storys and a tower, in 1911. It had game rooms and the first of the exhibition halls that give the modern Japanese department store certain aspects of a museum and amusement park. In 1914 Mitsukoshi completed a grand expansion, into the building that burned after the earthquake. The new Mitsukoshi was a five-story Renaissance building, not the highest in the city, but the largest, it was said, east of Suez, and very modern, with elevators, central heating, a roof garden, and even an escalator.

The Mitsukoshi of 1914 was not a very interesting building, at least from the outside, but the Shirokiya must have been a delight, built as it was in an eclectic style that looked ahead to the more fanciful effusions of Taishō. The building of late Meiji does not survive, but in photographs it seems the more advanced and certainly the more interesting of the two. Yet Shirokiya was less successful than its rival in keeping up with the times.

Shirokiya Department Store, Nihombashi, after 1911

Mainly, Mitsukoshi was the better at the big sell. Already at the turn of the century, a life-size picture of a pretty girl stood in Shimbashi Station inviting everyone to Mitsukoshi. Early in Taishō the store joined the Imperial Theater in a famous advertising campaign. The slogan was the only one still remembered from the early years of Japanese advertising. “Today the Imperial, tomorrow Mitsukoshi.” Inviting the public to spend alternate days at the two establishments, it was very successful. In the Taishō period Mitsukoshi had a boys’ band known to everyone. It is said to have been the first nonofficial band in the nation. The boys wore red and green kilts.

Despite all this innovation, the department stores were far from as big at the end of Meiji as they have become since. The old market was still healthy. Neighborhood stores offered most commodities and had most of the plebeian trade, the big Nihombashi stores still being a little too high-collar. Yet the department stores worked the beginnings of a huge cultural shift, so that the city of late Meiji seems far more familiar than the city of late Tokugawa. They were not the only enterprises of their kind in the city. Kanda and Ueno each had one, both of them to advance upon Ginza after the earthquake.

Matsuzakaya Department Store in Ueno

The problem of what to do with footwear was not solved until after the earthquake, and the delay was in some measure responsible for the slowness of the big stores to attract a mass clientele. Footwear was checked at the door in traditional fashion, sometimes tens of thousands of items per day, and replaced by specially furnished slippers. On the day of the dedication of the new Nihombashi bridge, still in use, Mitsukoshi misplaced five hundred pairs of footwear. For this reason among others the department store was a little like the Ginza bricktown: everyone wanted a look at it, but it would not do for everyday. It was on the standard tour for onobori, country people in for a look at the capital. The presence of Mitsukoshi, indeed, along with certain patriotic sites now out of fashion, is what chiefly distinguishes the Meiji Tokyo tour from that of today.

There was another kind of shopping center, also new in Meiji, and the vexing problem of footwear has been offered to explain its very great popularity from late Meiji into Taishō. The word hankōba is a Meiji neologism that seems on the surface to mean, with exhortatory intent, “place for the encouragement of industry.” It actually signifies something like “bazaar” or “emporium.” Numbers of small shops would gather under a roof or an arcade and call themselves a hankōba. In the years when the old dry goods stores were making themselves over into department stores, the bazaars were much more popular, possibly because the customer did not have to remove his shoes or clogs. The great day of the bazaar was late Meiji. When the department stores finally emerged as a playground for the whole family, on whatever level of society, bazaars went into a decline.

The first bazaar was publicly owned. It opened in 1878, selling products left over from the First Industrial Exposition, held at Ueno the preceding year. Its location was for the day a remote one, at the northern end of what would become the Mitsubishi Meadow, just east of the palace. Two bazaars dominated the busy south end of Ginza, near which the main railway station stood until early Taishō. The building of the present Tokyo Central Station displaced the crowds and sent the bazaars into a decline. In the fourth decade of Meiji, however, there were three bazaars in Kanda and seven in Ginza. By 1902 there were twenty-seven scattered over the city. Nine years later there were only eleven, and in 1913, the first full year of Taishō, only six.

No establishment has called itself a kankōba since the 1950s, but the kankōba must have been not unlike the shopping centers that are a threat to the Nihombashi stores today. For all the newness of the word, the kankōba also had much in common with the neighborhood shopping district of Edo. There is continuity in these things, and what seems newest may in fact be tradition reemerging.

The department stores and the bazaars were in it to make money, but they also provided pleasure and entertainment. So it was too with the expositions. People were supposed to be inspired and work more energetically for the nation and Civilization and Enlightenment, but expositions could also be fun.

The Japanese learned early about them. The shogunate and the Satsuma clan sent exhibits to the Paris fair of 1867, and the Meiji government to Vienna in 1873 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

The Japanese experimented with domestic fairs early in Meiji, one of them in the Yoshiwara. The grand exhibition that called itself the First National Industrial Exposition occurred at Ueno in 1877, from late summer to early winter. The chief minister was chairman of the planning committee. He was a man of Satsuma, and the Satsuma Rebellion was just then in progress; and so the import of the exposition was highly political, to demonstrate that the new day had arrived and meant to stay, in spite of dissension. The emperor and empress came on opening day and again in October, a month before the closing. The buildings were temporary ones in a flamboyantly Western style, with an art gallery at the center and flanking structures dedicated to farming and machinery and to natural products. Some of the items on display seemed scarcely what the Japanese most needed—a windmill, for instance, thirty feet high, straight from the drylands of America. Almost a hundred thousand items were exhibited by upwards of sixteen thousand exhibitors. The total number of visitors was not much less than the population of the city.

Other national exhibitions were scattered across Meiji. As a result of the second, in 1881, Tokyo acquired its first permanent museum, a brick structure designed by Josiah Conder, begun in 1878 and not quite finished in time for the exposition. The fourth and fifth expositions, just before and after the turn of the century, were held in Kyoto and Osaka. The sixth, in 1907, at Ueno once more, remains the grandest of the Tokyo series. Coming just after the Russo-Japanese War, it had patriotic significance, and therapeutic and economic value as well. Economic depression followed the war, and a need was felt to increase consumption. The main buildings, Gothic, in the park proper, were built around a huge fountain, on six levels, surmounted by Bacchus and bathed in lights of red, blue, and purple. Although the architecture was for the most part exotic, the prestige of Japanese painting had so recovered that the ceiling of the art pavilion was decorated with a dragon at the hands of the painter Hashimoto Gahō, who was associated with such fundamentalist evangelizers for the traditional arts as Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin.

A water chute led down to the lower level, on the shores of Shinobazu Pond, where special exhibitions told of foreign lands and a growing empire. There was a Taiwan pavilion and a Ryūkyū pavilion, the latter controversial, because ladies from the pleasure quarters were present to receive visitors and make them feel at home. They were considered an affront to the dignity of the Ryūkyūs, whose newspapers protested.

It was the Sixth Exposition that inspired Natsume Sōseki’s famous remarks about illumination (see page 93). Indeed, all the expositions were makers of taste. The more fanciful architectural styles of Taishō derive quite clearly from two expositions, held at Ueno early and midway through the reign.

Ueno, the place for expositions, is one of five public parks, the first in the city, established in 1873. The public park is another Meiji novelty introduced under the influence of the West. The old city had not been wanting in places for people to go and be with other people, but the idea of a tract maintained by the city solely for recreation was a new one. We have seen that at least one mayor thought such places unnecessary. He had a good case. The city already possessed myriads of gardens, large and small, and temples, shrines, cemeteries, and other places for viewing the flowers and grasses of the seasons.

The fact that one such place, in the far south of the city, was chosen by the shogunate as the site for the British legation was among the reasons for public satisfaction at the destruction of the unfinished building. A succession of temples occupied most of the land from what is now Ueno Park to the Sumida.

There were fewer such public spaces as time went by; and so the principle that the city had a responsibility in the matter was an important departure. The grandest of Edo temples are far less grand today. Had public parks not come into being, the loss of open space as religious establishments dwindled might have been almost complete.

A foreigner is given credit for saving Ueno. Almost anything might have happened to the tract left empty by the “Ueno War,” the subjugation in 1868 of holdouts from the old regime. Before that incident it had been occupied by the more northerly of the two Tokugawa funeral temples, the Kan-eiji. With branch temples, the Kan-eiji (named for the era in early Edo when it was founded) extended over the whole of “the mountain”—the heights to the north and east of Shinobazu Pond—and low-lying regions to the east as well, where Ueno Station now stands. Six of the fifteen shoguns are buried on the Kan-eiji grounds. The grave of Keiki, the last, is nearby in the Yanaka cemetery.

The attacking forces destroyed virtually the whole of the great complex. What is the main hall of the Kan-eiji today was moved in 1879 from the provinces to the site of a lesser temple. A gate is the only relic of the central complex, although a few seventeenth-century buildings, among the oldest in the city, still survive in the park. The public had been admitted to the Kan-eiji during the daytime hours. The precincts were, then as now, famous for their cherry blossoms.

After the fighting of 1868, Ueno was a desolate but promising expanse, more grandly wooded than it is today. The Ministry of Education wanted it for a medical school. The army, the most successful appropriator of land in early Meiji, thought that it would be a good location for a military hospital. It was at this point that the foreign person offered an opinion.

Dr. E. A. F. Bauduin, a Dutchman, had come to Japan in 1862. He was a medical doctor, and during his career in Japan served as a consultant on medical education in Nagasaki and Edo, and at the university in Tokyo. The Ministry of Education summoned him from Nagasaki for consultations in the matter of making the Ueno site a medical school. Quite contrary to expectations, he argued instead that Ueno would make a splendid park, and that the medical school could just as well go in some other place, such as the Maeda estate in Hongō, now the main campus of Tokyo University.

This view prevailed. In 1873, Ueno became one of the first five Tokyo parks. The others were the grounds of the Asakusa Kannon, the Tokugawa cemetery at Shiba, some shrine grounds east of the river, and a hill in the northern suburbs long famous for cherry blossoms. Of the four parks in the city proper it was the only one that was not otherwise occupied, so to speak, and it has had a different career than the others. It was transferred to the royal household in 1890, and returned to the city in 1924, to honor the marriage of the present emperor. Today it is officially called Ueno Royal Park. Shinobazu Pond to the west, a remnant of marshlands that had once spread over most of the Low City, was annexed to the park in 1885.

Ueno has not entirely escaped the incursions of commerce. Though the scores of little stalls that had established themselves in the old temple precincts were closed or moved elsewhere, the huge Seiyōken restaurant is the chief eyesore on an otherwise pleasing skyline. (An 1881 poster informs us that the restaurant is in Ueno Parque.) The original park now includes the campus of an art and music college. The Tokugawa tombs were detached from the park in 1885.

Yet Ueno has remained very much a park, less greedily gnawed at than Asakusa and Shiba have been. For a decade in mid-Meiji, until 1894, there was a horseracing track around Shinobazu Pond, a genteel one, with a royal stand. The emperor was present at the opening. The purpose, most Meiji-like, was not pleasure or gambling but the promotion of horsemanship in the interests of national defense. Woodcuts, not always reliable in such matters, seem to inform us that the horses ran clockwise.

Ueno Park had the first art museum in the land, the first zoo, the first electric trolley, a feature of one of the industrial expositions, and, in 1920, the first May Day observances. (There have been 53 as of 1982; a decade’s worth were lost to “Fascism.”) In a city that contains few old buildings, Ueno has the largest concentration of moderately old ones. It was saved by royal patronage, and, ironically, by the fact that its holocaust came early. The arrangements of early Meiji prevailed through the holocausts of 1923 and 1945.

Besides Edo survivals, the park, broadly defined to include the campus of the art college, contains the oldest brick building in the city. It has just passed its centennial. The oldest concert hall, of wood, is chronically threatened with dismemberment. The oldest building in the National Museum complex, in a domed Renaissance style, was a gift of the Tokyo citizenry, put up to honor the wedding of the crown prince. The present emperor was already a lad of seven when it was finished. The planning, collecting of funds, and building took time. What has become the great symbol of the park, recognized all over the land, is also a relic of Meiji. The bronze statue of Saigō Takamori, on the heights above the railway station, was unveiled in 1898. The original plans had called for putting it in the palace plaza, but it was presently decided that Saigō, leader of the Satsuma Rebellion, at the end of which, in 1877, he killed himself, had not yet been adequately rehabilitated. His widow did not like the statue. Never, she said, had she seen him so poorly dressed.

Huge numbers of people went to Ueno for the industrial expositions, and soon after it became a park it was again what it had been in Edo, a famous place for viewing cherry blossoms. Under the old regime the blossoms had been somewhat overwhelmed by Tokugawa mortuary grandeur, however, and singing and dancing, without which a proper blossom-viewing is scarcely imaginable, had been frowned upon. A certain solemnity seems to have hung over the new royal park as well. Blossom-viewing places on the Sumida and on the heights to the north of Ueno were noisier and less inhibited. Indeed, whether or not because of the royal association, Ueno seems early to have become a place of edification rather than fun.

Asakusa was very different. The novelist Saitō Ryokuu made an interesting and poetic comparison of the two, Asakusa and Ueno. Ryokuu’s case was similar to Nagai Kafū’s: born in the provinces in 1867 or 1868 and brought to Tokyo as a boy of perhaps nine (the facts of his early life are unclear), and so not a son of Edo, he outdid the latter in his fondness for the Edo tradition. His way of showing it was different from Kafū’s. He preferred satire to lyricism, and falls in the proper if not entirely likeable tradition of Edo satirists whose favorite subject is rustic ineptitude in the great pleasure palaces of the metropolis. He is not much read today. His language is difficult and his manner is out of vogue, and it may be that he was the wrong sex. Women writers in a similarly antique mode still have their devoted followings.

Some of his pronouncements deserve to be remembered. Of Ueno and Asakusa he said: “Ueno is for the eyes, a park with a view. Asakusa is for the mouth, a park for eating and drinking. Ueno puts a stop to things. From Asakusa you go on to other things. In Ueno even a Kagura dance is dour and gloomy, in Asakusa a prayer is cheerful. The vespers at Ueno urge you to go home, the matins at Asakusa urge you to come on over. When you go to Ueno you feel that the day’s work is not yet finished. When you go to Asakusa you feel that you have shaken off tomorrow’s work. Ueno is silent, mute. Asakusa chatters on and on.”

Ueno was the largest of the five original parks. Of the other four, only Asukayama, the cherry-viewing place in the northern suburbs, has managed to do as well over the years as Ueno in looking like a park. The notion of what a park should be was a confused one. The Edo equivalent had been the grounds of temple and shrine. The park system of 1873 tended to perpetuate this concept, merely furnishing certain tracts a new and enlightened name. Ueno was almost empty at the outset and presently became royal, and ended up rather similar to the city parks of the West.

Asakusa, on the other hand, resembles nothing in the West at all. It was the third largest of the original five, more than half as large as Shiba and Ueno, and several times as large as the two smaller ones. What remains of the Edo temple gardens is now closed to the public, and of what is open there is very little that resembles public park or garden. The old park has in legal fact ceased to be a park. A decree under the Occupation, which liked to encourage religious institutions provided they were not contaminated by patriotism, returned the park lands to the temple. Yet the technicalities by which it ceased to be a park had as little effect on its career as those by which it had become a park in the first place.

The original Asakusa Park was expanded in 1876 to include the gardens and firebreak to the west. There was further expansion in 1882, and the following year “the paddies,” as the firebreak was called, were excavated to make two ornamental lakes. The reclaimed wetlands were designated the sixth of the seven districts into which the park was divided. In the Meiji and Taishō periods, and indeed down to Pearl Harbor, “Sixth District” meant the music halls and the movie palaces and the other things that drew mass audiences. The Sixth District had its first theater in 1886, and, in 1903, Electricity Hall, the first permanent movie theater in the land. Among the other things were a miniature Mount Fuji, sixty-eight feet high, for the ascent of which a small fee was charged, and a rope bridge across the lakes, to give a sense of deep mountains. The Fuji was damaged in a typhoon and torn down the year the Twelve Storys, much higher, was completed, on land just north of the park limits. Among those who crossed the bridge was Sir Edwin Arnold, the British journalist best remembered as the author of The Light of Asia. Several urchins tried to shake him and a lady companion into one of the lakes. The workmanship of the bridge reminded him of the Incas.

By the turn of the century, the Sixth District was a jumble of show houses and archery stalls—the great pleasure warren of a pleasure-loving city. It may be that the change was not fundamental, for the “back mountain” of the Asakusa Kannon had already been something of the sort. The Sixth District was noisier, brighter, and gaudier, however, and its influence extended all through the park. Remnants of the old Asakusa, shrinking back into it all, spoke wistfully to the few who took notice.

Kubota Mantarō, poet, novelist, playwright, and native of Asakusa, wrote of the change wrought by the cinema:

Suddenly, it was everywhere. It swept away all else, and took control of the park. The life of the place, the color, quite changed. The “new tide” was violent and relentless. In the districts along the western ditch, by the Kōryūji Temple, somnolence had reigned. It quite departed. The old shops, dealers in tools and scrap and rags, the hair dresser’s and the bodkin and bangle places—they all went away, as did the water in the ditch. New shops put up their brazen signs: Western restaurants, beef and horse places, short-order places, milk parlors. Yet even in those days, there were still houses with latticed fronts, little shops of uniform design, nurseries with bamboo fences, workmen from the fire brigades. They were still to be observed, holding their own, in a few corners, in the quiet, reposed, somehow sad alleys of the back districts, in the deep shade of the blackberry brambles behind the grand hall.

Asakusa had its gay and busy time, which passed. The lakes grew dank and gaseous in the years after the surrender, and were filled in. The crowds ceased to come, probably more because of changes in the entertainment business and new transportation patterns than because of what had happened to the park. It might be argued that Asakusa would have fared better if it had not become an entertainment center. If the old park had gone on looking like a park, then Asakusa, like Ueno, might still have its lures. As to that, no one can say—and it may be that if we could say, we would not wish the story of Asakusa to be different. It was perhaps the place where the Low City had its last good time. Nowhere today is there quite the same good-natured abandon to be found, and if people who remember it from thirty years ago may properly lament the change, the laments of those who remember it from twice that long ago are, quite as properly, several times as intense.

It is another story. Asakusa is an instance of what can happen to a public park when no one is looking, though the more relevant point may be that it never really was a park. As an episode in intellectual history, it illustrates the ease with which words can be imported, and the slowness with which substance comes straggling along afterwards. In 1873 Tokyo could face the other capitals of the world and announce that it too had public parks; but it was not until two decades later, when the city acquired land suitable for a central park (if that was what was wished) that the possibility of actually planning and building a park seemed real. The double life, in other words, was gradually reaching down to fundamentals. What had happened at Ueno had happened more by accident than forethought, and not much at all had happened at Asakusa—except that the purveyors of pleasure had had their cheerful and energetic way.

Since the rise of Marunouchi, Hibiya Park, along with the public portion of the palace grounds abutting it on the north, has been the central park of the city—perhaps more important, because of easy access to Ginza, than Ueno. In early Meiji it was not a place where a townsman would have chosen to go for a pleasant walk, and it did not become a public park until thirty years after the original five. Lying within the outer ramparts of the castle, it was at the end of the Tokugawa regime occupied by mansions of the military aristocracy. While the castle grounds nearby were being put to somewhat helter-skelter use by the new government and ultimately, after their time of providing homes for foxes and badgers, were left as public gardens or turned over to the commercial developers, Hibiya was a parade ground. It was cleared for the purpose in 1871, and there, a year later, the emperor first reviewed troops. It seems to have been fearfully dusty even after the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel were built to the east, for a scorched-earth policy was deemed in accord with modern military methods. In 1893 the army, which had acquired more suitable spots on the western fringes of the city, announced its intention of turning Hibiya over to the city by stages. Hibiya Park was opened in 1903.

Initially it was thought that the present Hibiya park lands would become the bureaucratic center. Planning to that effect began after the burning of the palace in 1872. There was no hesitation about rebuilding the palace on the site of the old castle, and in 1886 a government planning office proposed a concentration of government buildings on the parade grounds. The advice of the Germans was invited. Two eminent architects arrived and drew up plans for a complex of highly ornate buildings. A big hole was dug, at great expense, before it was concluded that the soil would not really bear the weight of all that echt Western brick and stone, and that lands farther to the west might be more suitable. Though German prestige slid, we may be grateful for the results. Without the excavation Tokyo might lack a central park (as Osaka does). The German plans, modified in the direction of simplicity, found use in the government complex that did presently come to be. The original plans have been described as seven parts Nikkō (with reference to the most florid of the Tokugawa tombs) and three parts Western.

Some liked the new park, some did not. Nagai Kafū, on his return from France in 1908, found it repellently formal. It became so favored a trysting place, however, that the Kōjimachi police station felt compelled to take action. On the summer night in 1908 when a dozen or so policemen were first sent into the park, they apprehended about the same number of miscreant couples, who were fined. Hibiya is usually referred to as the first genuinely Western park in the city and in Japan. That is what Kafū so disliked about it—he did not think that Westernization worked in any thing or person Japanese but himself.

In fact a good deal of the park is fairly Japanese, and it contains relics of all the eras—trees said to be as old as the city, a fragment of the castle escarpment and moat, a bandstand that was in the original park, a bronze fountain only slightly later. The bandstand has lost its original cupola and the park has changed in matters of detail; yet of all the major parks it is the one that has changed least. Perhaps the fact that it was Western in concept as well as in name may be given credit for this stability.

The area officially devoted to parks grew slightly through Meiji and Taishō, but remained low compared to the cities of the West with which comparison is always being made. (It is high compared to Osaka.) In the last years of Taishō, the total of open spaces, including temples, shrines, and cemeteries, offered each resident of the city only one four-hundredth as much as was available to the resident of Washington. Even New York, whose residents were straitened in comparison with those of London and Paris, boasted forty times the per-capita park area that Tokyo did.

Yet there is truth in the excuse given by that Taishō mayor for the shortage of tracts officially designated as parks. While public parks were not pointless, they may have seemed much less of a necessity than they did in Western cities. Besides the tiny plots of greenery before rows of Low City houses, there continued to be a remarkable amount of unused space, especially in the High City, but in the Low City as well.

Kafū could be lyrical on the subject of vacant lots.

I love weeds. I have the same fondness for them as for the violets and dandelions of spring, the bell flowers and maiden flowers of autumn. I love the weeds that flourish in vacant lots, the weeds that grow on roofs, the weeds beside the road and beside the ditch. A vacant lot is a garden of weeds. The plumes of the mosquito-net grass, as delicate as glossed silk; the plumes of foxtail, soft as fur; the warm rose-pink of knotgrass blossoms; the fresh blue-white of the plantain; chickweed in flower, finer and whiter than sand: having come upon them does one not linger over them and find them difficult to give up? They are not sung of in courtly poetry, one does not find them in the paintings of Sōtatsu and Kōrin. They are first mentioned in the haiku and in the comic verse of plebeian Edo. I will never cease to love Utamaro’s “Selection of Insects.” An ukiyo-e artist sketched lowly grasses and insects quite ignored by Sinified painters and the schools of Kyoto. The example informs us how great was the achievement of haiku and comic verse and the ukiyo-e. They found a subject dismissed by aristocratic art and they made it art in its own right.

Far more than the plantings in all the new parks around the outer moat and behind the Nikolai Cathedral, I am drawn to the weeds one comes upon in vacant lots.

An important addition was made in Meiji to the lists of shrines, some of them not so very different from parks. Kudan Hill, to the west of the Kanda flats and northwest of castle and palace, was once higher than it is now. It once looked down over the swampy lands which the shogunate early filled in to accommodate merchants and artisans. The top half or so was cut off to reclaim the swamps. Barracks occupied the flattened top in the last Tokugawa years. In 1869 it became the site of a shōkonsha, a nationally administered “shrine to which the spirits of the dead are invited,” or, in a venerable tradition, a place where the dead, and the living as well, are feasted and entertained. The specific purpose of several such shrines scattered over the country was to honor those who had died in line of duty “since the Kaei Period.” This is a little misleading. Commodore Perry came in the Kaei Period, and there may seem to be an implication that he was resisted with loss of life, which he was not. The real intent was to honor those who died in the Restoration disturbances. As other conflicts and other casualties occurred, the rosters expanded. They include three Englishmen who died in the battle of Tsushima, at the climax of the Russo-Japanese War, as well as other surprises. Not many now remember that Japanese lives were lost in the Boxer Rebellion. It is of interest that Tokyo names on the growing rosters ran consistently below the national average.

The son of Edo was not as eager as others to die for his country. In 1879 the Kudan shōkonsha became the Yasukuni Jinja, “Shrine for the Repose of the Nation.” It was in the Edo tradition, combining reverence and pleasure. There was horseracing on the grounds before the Shinobazu track was built. In 1896, the grandest equestrian year, 268 horses participated in the autumn festival. The last meet took place in 1898, and the track was obliterated in 1901. The shrine continued to be used for a great variety of shows, artistic and amusing, such as Sumō tournaments and Nō performances. A Nō stage built in 1902 survives on the shrine grounds, and a lighthouse from early Meiji. The latter served to guide fishing boats—for there were in those days fishing boats within sight of the hill.

A military exhibition hall was put up in 1882, a grim, Gothic place. It contained a machine gun made by Pratt and Whitney and presented to the emperor by General Grant. The Yasukuni had ten million visitors annually during and just after the Russo-Japanese War. Though the figure fell off thereafter, it continued to be in the millions. The shrine was more of a park, as that term is known in the West, than Asakusa. To those Japanese of a traditional religious bent it may have seemed strange that expanses of protective greenery extended to the southeast, southwest, and northwest of the palace—Hibiya Park, the Sanno Shrine (a very old one), and the Yasukuni Shrine—while the businessmen of the Mitsubishi Meadow were custodians of the most crucial direction, the northeast, “the devil’s gate.”

Tokyo grew the most rapidly of the large Japanese cities. At the close of Meiji, there can have been few foxes and badgers left in the Mitsubishi Meadow, lined all up and down with brick, and not many weeds can have survived either. Yet the fact remains that Tokyo was, by comparison with the other large cities of Japan, even Kyoto, the emperor’s ancient capital, a place of greenery. Tanizaki’s wife, a native of Osaka, asked what most struck her on her first visit to Tokyo, replied without hesitation that it was the abundance of trees. The paddies had by the end of Meiji withdrawn from the gate of the Yoshiwara, and they have been pushed farther and farther in the years since; but it was still a city of low buildings, less dense in its denser regions than late Edo had been. So it has continued to be. Perhaps, indeed, it contains the most valuable unused land in the world—the most luxurious space a weed, and even an occasional fox or badger, could possibly have.

There is another sense in which the city was still, at the end of Meiji, near nature, and still is today. The rhythm of the fields and of the seasons continued to be felt all through it. Everywhere in Japan Shinto observances follow the seasons. (It may be that in the United States only the harvest festival, Thanksgiving, is similarly bound to nature.) In deciding which among the great Japanese cities is, in this sense, most “natural,” subjective impression must prevail, for there are no measuring devices. When Tanizaki’s Makioka sisters, from an old Osaka family, wish to go on a cherry-blossom excursion, they go to Kyoto. They might have found blossoms scattered over Osaka, of course, but Osaka, more than Tokyo, is a place of buildings and sterile surfaces. From one of the high buildings, it is an ashen city. Having arrived in Kyoto, the sisters seem to have only one favored blossom-viewing spot near the center of the city, the grounds of a modern shrine. All the others are on the outskirts, not in the old city at all.

One is left with a strong impression that Tokyo has remained nearer its natural origins, and nearer agrarian rhythms, than the great cities of the Kansai. This fastest-growing city did remarkably well at preserving a sense of the fields and the moods of the seasons. At the end of Meiji the Tokyo resident who wished to revel under the blossoms of April might have gone to Asukayama, that one among the five original parks that lay beyond the city limits, but he could have found blossoms enough for himself and several hundred thousand other people as well at Ueno or along the banks of the Sumida. Nothing comparable was to be had so near at hand in Osaka or Kyoto.

Places famous in early Meiji for this and that flower or grass of the seasons did less well at the end of Meiji. Industrial fumes ate at the cherries along the Sumida, and clams, the digging of which was a part of the homage paid to summer, were disappearing from the shores of Shiba and Fukagawa. (The laver seaweed of Asakusa, famed in Edo and before, had long since disappeared.) Even as the city grew bigger and dirtier, however, new places for enjoying the grasses and flowers came to be.

Every guide to the city contains lists of places to be visited for seasonal things. Going slightly against the natural pattern, these things begin with snow, not a flower or a grass, and not commonly available in quantity until later in the spring. The ornamental plants of midwinter are the camellia and a bright-leafed variety of cabbage, but neither seems to have been thought worth going distances to view. The Sumida embankment was the traditional place for snow viewing. There were other spots, and in the course of Meiji a new one, the Yasukuni Shrine, joined the list. Probably snow has been deemed a thing worth viewing because, like the cherry blossom, it so quickly goes away—on the Tokyo side of Honshu, at any rate.

At the beginning of Meiji, the grasses and flowers of the seasons were probably to be found in the greatest variety east of the Sumida. One did not have to go far east to leave the old city behind, and, having entered a pastoral (more properly, agrarian) village, one looked back towards the river and the hills of the High City, with Fuji rising grandly beyond them. These pleasures diminished towards the end of Meiji, as the regions east of the river fell victim to economic progress. Kafū seems prescient when, in a story from very late Meiji, he takes a gentleman and a geisha to view some famous peonies in Honjo, east of the river. They are disappointed, and the disappointment seems to tell us what the future holds for the peonies and indeed all these regions east of the river. Yet as the peony lost ground in Honjo it gained elsewhere: famous peony places have been established nearer the center of the city.

Another generous disposition of blossom-viewing and grass-viewing places lay along the ridge that divided the Low City from the High City. From here one looked eastwards towards the river and the fields. At the southern end of the ridge was the site of the British legation that never came to be. Ueno and Asukayama, famous spots for cherry blossoms, both stood on the ridge.

The viewing places along the ridge fared better in Meiji than did those east of the river. Ueno gradually ceased to intimidate, as it had under the shoguns, and so moved ahead of Asukayama and the Sumida embankment as the favored place for the noisiest rites of spring. The part of the ridge that lay between Ueno and Asukayama, inside and outside the city limits, was the great Edo center for nurseries, for potted chrysanthemums and morning glories and the like. The pattern has prevailed through the present century. These establishments have been pushed farther and farther out, so that not many survive today in Tokyo Prefecture, but the northern suburbs are still the place for them.

Early in the spring came the plum blossom. To admire it in early Meiji one went to Asakusa and Kameido, a slight distance beyond Honjo, east of the Sumida. Kameido is also recommended for wisteria in May. The Kameido wisteria have survived, but there are plums no longer, either in Kameido or in Asakusa. The plum is the personal blossom, so to speak, of Sugawara Michizane, a tragic and quickly deified statesman of the tenth century, who is the tutelary god of the Kameido Shrine. If his flower has gone from Kameido, a plum orchard has since been planted at another of his holy places, the Yushima Shrine in Hongō. So it is that the flowers and grasses cling to existence, losing here and gaining there. Towards the end of The River Sumida Kafū has his sad hero go walking with an uncle to Kameido, and the poignancy of the scene comes in large measure from an awareness already present, then in late Meiji, of what progress is doing to the district. It lies in the path of economic miracles.

In April came the cherry, which might be called the city’s very own blossom. It has long been made much of, for the swiftness of its blooming and of its falling appeals to the highly cultivated national sense of evanescence. In the years of the Tokugawa hegemony the cherry became the occasion for that noisiest of springtime rites. Goten Hill, overlooking the bay at the southern edge of the Meiji city, is no longer found on early Meiji lists of blossom-viewing places. That was where the British legation had been put up and so promptly burned down. The most popular Meiji sites for the cherry blossom were Asukayama, remotest of the original five parks; Ueno; and the Sumida embankment. Two of the three have declined as the city and progress have engulfed them, while Ueno, nearest of the three to the center, thrives. It still draws the biggest crowds in the city and doubtless in all of Japan.

The peach and the pear come at about the same time, slightly later in the spring. They are dutifully included in Meiji lists of things to see, but the Japanese have not made as much of them as the Chinese, whose proverb has the world beating a path to a door with a blooming peach or pear. It would be easy to say that they are too showy for Japanese taste, but the chrysanthemum and the peony, both of them showy flowers, are much admired. Perhaps observance of the passing seasons was becoming less detailed, and the peach and the pear are among the lost details. There were no famous places within the city limits for viewing either of the two. In the case of the pear, one was asked to go to a place near Yokohama (the place where, in 1862, Satsuma soldiers killed an Englishman, prompting the British to shell Kagoshima). There were other flowers of spring and early summer—wisteria, azaleas, peonies, and yamabuki, a yellow-flowering shrub related to the rose.

Certain pleasures of the seasons were not centered upon flowers and grasses, or upon a specific flower or grass. For plucking the new shoots and herbs of spring, the regions east of the river and the western suburbs were especially recommended. For the new greenery of spring there were Ueno and the western suburbs. For the clams of summer there were the shores of the bay, at Susaki and Shibaura, where Tanizaki and his family went digging. Insects were admired, and birds. Fireflies, now quite gone from the city save for the caged ones released at garden parties, were to be found along the Kanda River, just below Kafū’s birthplace. They were also present in the paddy lands around the Yoshiwara, to the north of Ueno, and along the banks of the Sumida, where no wild fireflies have been observed for a very long time. Birds were enjoyed less by the eye than by the ear. Two places in the city are called Uguisudani, Warbler Valley, one in Shitaya and the other in Koishikawa. Horeites diphone, the warbler in question, may still be heard in both places. For the cuckoo there was a listening point in Kanda, near the heart of the old Low City, and another near the Maeda estate in Hongō, to which the university presently moved. For the voice of the wild goose one went beyond the Sumida, and also to the Yoshiwara paddies and to Susaki, beside the bay in Fukagawa. For singing autumn insects, the western suburbs were recommended.

In high summer came morning glories, lotuses, and irises. The Meiji emperor’s own favorite iris garden, on the grounds of what is now the Meiji Shrine, was opened to the public a few years after his death. The morning glory has long had a most particular place in the life of the Low City. It was the omnipresent sign of summer, in all the tiny garden plots and along the plebeian lanes, a favorite subject, as principal and as background, in the popular art of Edo. The place to go for Meiji morning glories was Iriya, to the east of Ueno Park. It still is the place to go, but it has suffered vicissitudes in the century since its morning glories first came into prominence. In early Meiji, Iriya was still paddy land, and among the paddies were extensive nurseries. One looked across them to the Yoshiwara, the great houses of which kept villas in the district. The last of the nurseries left Iriya, no longer on the outskirts of the city, in 1912, and so too, of course, did excursions for viewing and purchasing morning glories. They have returned in the last quarter of a century. For the morning-glory fair in early July, however, the plants must be brought in from what are now the northern outskirts of the city.

A famous lotus-viewing spot was lost in the course of Meiji. Tameike Pond in Akasaka was allowed to become silted in, and presently built over. Shinobazu Pond, the other Meiji place for viewing and listening to lotuses (some say that the delicate pop with which a lotus opens is imagined, others say that they have heard it), survived Meiji, despite expositions and horse racing, and yet survives, despite the years of war and defeat, during which it was converted to barley fields. In Meiji and down to the recent past there were extensive commercial tracts of lotus east of the river, grown for the edible roots. They too were recommended in Meiji for lotus-viewing, and today they have almost disappeared.

Shinobazu Pond, Ueno

The eastern suburbs were, again, the place to go for “the seven grasses of autumn,” some of them actually shrubs and only one a grass as that term is commonly understood in the West. The chrysanthemum, not one of the autumn seven, was featured separately. Dangozaka, “Dumpling Slope,” just north of the university in Hongō, was a famous chrysanthemum center that came and went in Meiji. Chrysanthemum dolls—chrysanthemums trained to human shape—were first displayed there in 1878. They figure in some famous Meiji novels, but by the end of Meiji were found elsewhere, first at the new Sumō stadium east of the river, and later in the southern and western suburbs. (Also, occasionally, in a department store.) The grounds of the Asakusa Kannon Temple were famous for chrysanthemums early in Meiji, but are no longer.

Asuka Hill, noted for its cherry blossoms, was the best place near the city for autumn colors. At the end of the year there were hibernal moors to be viewed, for the wasted moor ended the cycle, as snow had begun it. Had nature been followed literally, the sequence could as well have been the reverse; but an ancient tradition called for the wasted and sere at the end of the cycle of grasses and flowers. For the best among sere expanses, one went to Waseda, in the western suburbs.

It is not surprising, though it is sad, that so many famous places of early Meiji for the things of the seasons are missing from late-Meiji lists. Gone, for instance, are the night cherries of the Yoshiwara, popular in the dim light of early Meiji. It is more surprising that many places remain, in a larger, smokier city. A guide published by the city in 1907 gives a discouraging report on the Sumida cherries, even then being gnawed by industrial fumes and obscured by billboards. Yet it has a ten-page list of excursions to famous places in and near the city. Arranged by season, the list begins with felicitous New Year excursions, “all through the city,” and ends with New Year markets, “Nihombashi, Ginza, etc.” Snow-viewing tides the cycle over from one year to the next, and the Sumida embankment is still preeminent among places for indulging. Most if not quite all of the flowers and grasses are covered, from the plum (twenty-nine places recommended, all in the city and the suburbs, with a new place, the Yasukuni Shrine, at the head) to wasted moors (none left in the fifteen wards—only the western and northern suburbs). The twenty-three places for viewing cherry blossoms are headed, as they would have been at the end of Edo, by Ueno and the Sumida embankment. The sixty-page section on “pleasures” includes cemeteries and graves. They are chiefly for those of an antiquarian bent, of course, but a Japanese cemetery can also be pleasant for observing the passage of the seasons.

A person of leisure and some energy could have filled most of his days with the round of annual and monthly observances. The same guide contains a five-page list of monthly feast days at shrines and temples, and only on the thirty-first day of a month would there have been nowhere to go. In this too, tradition survives. No month in the lunar calendar had thirty-one days, and no thirty-first day in the solar calendar has been assigned a feast. Besides monthly feast days, most shrines had annual festivals, boisterous to the point of violence, centering upon the mikoshi “god-seats,” portable shrines borne through the streets and alleys over which the honored god held sway. The god-seat sort of festival was among the great loves of the son of Edo, who, it was said, would happily pawn his wife to raise the necessary funds. Some of the god-seats were huge. Weaving down narrow streets on the shoulders of manic bearers who numbered as many as a hundred, they could go out of control and crash into a shopfront. Sometimes this happened on purpose. In Asakusa, especially, such assaults were welcomed: it was thought that if a god in his seat came crashing through the front of a shop, the devils must depart through the rear.

Some shrines and temples had annual markets, perhaps the most remarkable of them being the Bird Fair, the Tori no Ichi, on the days in November that fell on the zodiacal sign of the bird. It was held at several “eagle shrines” throughout the city, the most famous and popular of them just outside the Yoshiwara. Bird days occur either twice or three times in a month, and when they occurred in November the throngs at the Yoshiwara were enormous. They threatened the pillars of heaven and the sinews of earth, said Higuchi Ichiyō in the best of her short stories. It was believed that years in which November contained three bird days were also years in which “the flowers of Edo,” the conflagrations, flourished.

Though obviously the motives were mixed for crowds so great and boisterous, it was essentially a shopkeepers’ fair, and a part of the towns-man’s culture. The day of the bird was chosen from among the twelve because the Japanese love a pun. Tori, “bird,” also means “taking in” or “reaping,” and ornamental rakes were purchased at the market, as a means of assuring a profitable year. The rake merchants added a pleasant twist: to insure the flow of profits, a larger rake must be purchased every year. Bird fairs have declined in recent years, largely because the traditional business of the Yoshiwara has been outlawed. They have not, however, disappeared.

But many observances that must have been very amusing are gone. One no longer hears, for example, of “the watch of the twenty-sixth night.” On that night in the Seventh Month under the lunar calendar (which would generally be August under the solar), people would gather along the coasts and in the high places of the city, waiting for the moon to rise. If it emerged in a triple image, presently falling back into a single one, it presaged uncommonly good luck. The watch lasted almost until dawn, since the twenty-sixth is very near the end of the lunar cycle. Devices were therefore at hand for enhancing the possibility of the triple image.

Annual observances were closely tied to the agrarian cycle even when they did not have to do specifically with the flowers, the grasses, the birds, and the insects. A sense of the fields has survived, despite the expansive ways of the city that had driven wasted moors from the fifteen wards by the end of Meiji, and eaten up most of the paddy and barley lands. Spring began in two ways, the lunar and the solar. The lunar way is now hardly noticed, but the solar way survives, with spring beginning, to the accompaniment of appropriate ritual, midway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. So it was that the city was awaiting the Two Hundred Tenth Day when the earthquake came.

Lists of “great festivals,” the boisterous shrine affairs centering upon god-seats, always come in threes. The Kanda festival and the Sannō festival in Akasaka, to the southwest of the palace, are to be found on most Edo and Meiji lists of the big three.

The Sannō festival has fared badly in this century. Certainly it was among the great festivals of Edo, accorded condescending notice by Lord Tokugawa himself. The Sannō was the shrine to which baby Tokugawas were taken to be presented to the company of gods. It seemed to lose vigor as Tameike Pond, above which the shrine stood, silted in and was developed. Akasaka became a wealthy residential district and a place of chic entertainment, much patronized by the bureaucracy. The affluent bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy do not have much truck with shrine festivals, affairs of the Low City and the lower classes.

The Kanda festival had a troubled time in Meiji, for curious reasons, telling of conservatism and traditionalism. Two gods had in theory been worshipped at the Kanda Shrine. One of them was a proper mythological deity whose name scarcely anyone knew. The other was Taira Masakado, a tenth-century general who led a rebellion in the Kantō region. Unlike most Japanese rebels, he attempted to set himself up as emperor; the usual way has been to take the power but not the position. In 1874 the shrine priesthood, in somewhat sycophantic deference to the emperor cult of the new day, petitioned the governor to have Masakado removed, and another proper mythological entity brought from the Kashima Shrine in Ibaragi Prefecture. The festival languished. The demotion of Masakado, for whom a secondary shrine was presently built, is thought to have been responsible—this despite the fact that the arrival of the new deity, the other proper one, was boisterous. Resentment does seem to have been strong. Everyone had thought of the Kanda Shrine as belonging to Masakado, and he had a devoted following in his own East Country, whose inhabitants had for centuries been victims of Kyoto snobbishness. By 1884 old divisions and resentments were thought to have sufficiently healed that a good old-fashioned festival might be held. It was, and there was a typhoon on the second day, which the newspapers attributed to Masakado’s anger. The press was frivolous, but one reads serious intent behind it. The Kanda festival never quite came into its own again.

If some observances disappeared in Meiji, others emerged into prominence, some quite new, some revivals, some revisions of the old. New Year celebrations culminated in a military parade, something new, and a review of the fire brigades, something old given a new turn. The latter had been banned for a time as dangerous. The danger was to the firemen who, dressed in traditional uniforms, did daring things high upon ladders. The old brigades were losing their practical significance, although it was not completely gone until after the earthquake. The New Year review was becoming show and no more, albeit exciting show, and aesthetically pleasing as well. It has survived, and seems in no danger now of disappearing.

Observances now so much a part of the landscape that they seem as venerable as the landscape itself frequently turn out to be no older than Meiji. The practice of taking small children to Shinto shrines in mid-November is an instance. Its origins are very old indeed, for it grew from the primitive custom of taking infants to a shrine at a certain age to confirm that a precarious bit of life had taken hold. It had been mainly an upper-class ritual in Edo, and did not begin to gain popularity in the Low City until mid-Meiji. The flying carp of Boys’ Day must unfortunately be associated with militarism. They came into great vogue from about the time of the Sino-Japanese War. Boys’ Day, May 5, is now Children’s Day, and the first day of summer by the old reckoning. Girls’ Day, March 3, is not a holiday.

Some of the god-seat festivals were very famous and drew great crowds, but they were essentially local affairs, gatherings of the clan (the word ujiko, “member of the congregation,” has that literal significance) to honor its Shinto god. There were other Shinto festivals of a more generally animistic nature, affairs for the whole city. The two biggest occurred in the summer, in the Sixth Month under the old calendar, transferred to July under the new. Both honored and propitiated the gods of nature, Mount Fuji in the one case and the Sumida River in the other, upon the commencement of the busy summer season, when both would be popular and a great deal would be asked of them.

The Sumida and Fuji were not the only river and mountain that had their summer “openings,” but they were the most famous and popular. Besides honoring animistic deities, the observances had practical significance. The opening of the Sumida meant the beginning of the hot weather, and of the pleasures associated with seeking coolness upon the waters. The opening of Fuji, or any other mountain, was the signal for the summer crowds, less of a religious and more of a hedonistic bent as time went on, to start climbing. It was not considered safe earlier in the season, because of slides and storms. Both openings are still observed, the Fuji one now at the end of June, the Sumida one at a shifting date in July. Boating upon the Sumida is not the pleasure it once was, of course. The throngs upon Fuji are ever huger.

In the Edo and early Meiji periods there was a strongly religious element in an ascent of Fuji. The mountain cult was important from late Edo. The opening of the mountain was and is observed at several Fuji shrines through the city. Some may be recognized by artificial hillocks meant to be small likenesses of Fuji. Believers could with merit ascend one of them if an ascent of the real mountain was impractical.

The most popular of the Fuji shrines is just north of Asakusa, to the east of the Yoshiwara. Several days in early summer (a single day is not incentive enough for moving the giant trees and rocks that are offered for sale) there are garden fairs north of Asakusa, and great crowds.

The Sumida had always had a special significance for the city. All the wards of the Low City but one either bordered it or fell but a few paces short of it, and the elegant pleasures of Edo could scarcely have done without it. The summer opening, at Ryōgoku Bridge, was a time of boats and splendid crowds and fireworks. Purveyed by two venerable and famous makers, each of which had its claque, they were of two kinds, stationary displays near water level, and rockets. General Grant joined the crowds in 1879. E. S. Morse was there earlier, and described what he saw with delight:

At the river the sight was entrancing, the wide river as far as the eye could reach being thickly covered with boats and pleasure barges of all descriptions. We had permission to pass through the grounds of a daimyo, and his servants brought chairs to the edge of the river for our accommodation. After sitting for a few minutes we concluded to see the sights nearer, and at that moment a boat came slowly along the bank, the man soliciting patronage. We got aboard and were sculled into the midst of the crowds. It would be difficult to imagine a stranger scene than the one presented to us; hundreds of boats of all sizes—great, square-bottomed boats; fine barges, many with awnings and canopies, all illuminated with bright-colored lanterns fringing the edge of the awnings… It was a startling sight when we got near the place to see that the fireworks were being discharged from a large boat by a dozen naked men, firing off Roman candles and set pieces of a complex nature. It was a sight never to be forgotten: the men’s bodies glistening in the light with the showers of sparks dropping like rain upon them, and, looking back, the swarms of boats, undulating up and down, illuminated by the brilliancy of the display; the new moon gradually setting, the stars shining with unusual brightness, the river dark, though reflecting the ten thousand lantern lights of all sizes and colors, and broken into rivulets by the oscillations of the boats.

Clara Whitney went too, and had mixed feelings:

The Sumida stretched out before us, and for nearly a mile up and down it was covered by myriads of boats, from the clumsy canal boat to the gay little gondola dancing like a cockle shell on the tiny wavelets… Millions of lanterns covered the river as far as we could see until the sober Sumida looked like a sea of sparkling light… It was altogether a very pretty sight—the brilliantly lighted houses, the illuminated river, the gay fireworks, and crowds of lanterns held aloft to prevent their being extinguished… Like a stream of humanity they passed our perch and Mama and I spoke with sadness of their lost and hopeless condition spiritually.

There were, of course, changes in the festive pattern through Meiji and on into Taishō. New Year celebrations were less elaborate at the end of Meiji than at the beginning. Certain customs quite disappeared, such as the use of “treasure boats” to assure a good outcome for the “first dream of the year,” which in turn was held to augur good or ill for the whole year. Treasure boats were paintings of sailing-boats manned by the Seven Gods of Good Luck or other bearers of good fortune. A treasure boat under a pillow, early in the New Year, assured the best sort of dreams. Conservative merchants paid particular heed to such matters, and so the simplification of the New Year may be taken as a sign of emergent modernism in commercial affairs. Meiji New Year celebrations lasted down to the “Bone New Year” on the twentieth of January, so designated because only bones remained from the feasts prepared late in the old year. They have gradually been shortened, so that little now happens after the fourth or fifth. In late Meiji there was still a three-day “Little New Year” centering on the fifteenth. The fifteenth is now Adults’ Day, vaguely associated with the New Year in that it felicitates the coming of age. Under the old system New Year’s Day was, so to speak, everyone’s birthday. Reckoning of age was not by the “full count,” from birthday to birthday, as it usually is today, but by the number of years in which one had lived. So everyone became a year older on New Year’s Day.

Still, with all the changes, the flowers and grasses, the god-seats and the shrine fairs, survived. New Year celebrations became less prolonged and detailed. The advent of spring became less apparent in the eastern suburbs as industrial mists replaced natural ones. Nurseries were driven farther and farther north, and presently across the river into another prefecture. Yet the city remained close to nature as has no other great city in the world. In midsummer, for the festival of the dead, people returned in huge numbers to their villages, and those who could not go had village dances in the city. It was the double life at its best. Civilization and Enlightenment had to come, perhaps, but they did not require giving up the old sense of the earth. It is a part of Japanese modernization which other nations might wish to emulate, along with managerial methods and quality control and that sort of thing. No one can possibly have attended all the observances that survived from Edo through Meiji. It is a pity that no record-keeper seems to have established who attended the most.

The moods of a place will change, whatever its conscious or unconscious conservatism. The exotic and daring becomes commonplace, and other exotic and daring things await the transformation. Tolerance grows, the sense of novelty is dulled, and revolutions are accomplished without the aid of insistent revolutionaries. The old way did not go, but more and more it yielded to the new. The shift was increasingly pronounced in the last years of Meiji, after two ventures in foreign warfare.

If a native who departed Tokyo in 1870, at an age mature enough for clear observation and recollection, had returned for the first time forty years later, he would have found much to surprise him. He might also have been surprised at how little change there was in much of the city. The western part of Nihombashi and Kanda had their grand new banks, department stores, and universities, while fires played over the wooden clutter to the east. So too with trendier, more high-collar Kyōbashi: the new Ginza went as far as the Kyōbashi bridge, where the shadows of Edo took over.

He would have found ample changes, certainly: the new Ginza, the government complex to the south of the palace, the financial and managerial complex to the east. Scarcely a trace remained of the aristocratic dwellings that had stood between the outer and inner moats of the castle. He would have found department stores in place of the old “silk stores” (though he would still have found silk stores in large numbers as well), and an elevated railway pushing into the heart of the city, through what had been the abode of daimyo, badger, and fox.

He might have been more aware of a change in mood, and had more trouble defining it.

There was great insecurity in the early years of Meiji. Nagai Kafū describes it well in an autobiographical story titled “The Fox.” The time is the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion. The place is Koishikawa, the northwest corner of the High City, above the Kōrakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family.

The talk was uniformly cruel and gory, of conspirators, of assassinations, of armed robbers. The air was saturated with doubt and suspicion. At a house the status of whose owner called for a moderately imposing gate, or a mercantile house with impressive godowns, a murderous blade could at any time come flashing through the floor mats, the culprit having stolen under the veranda and lain in wait for sounds of sleep. I do not remember that anyone, not my father or my mother, gave specific instructions, but roustabouts who frequented our house were set to keeping guard. As I lay in my nurse’s arms through the cold winter night, the wooden clappers of the guards would echo across the silent grounds, sharp and cold.

Some of the disorder was mere brigandage, but most of it was obviously reactionary, directed at the merchant and politician of the new day, and reflecting a wish to return to the old seclusion. Of a piece with the reactionary radicalism of the 1930s, it suggests the gasps and convulsions of the dying. Already the Rokumeikan Period was approaching, and the high-water mark of Civilization and Enlightenment. The serving women in the Nagai house read illustrated romances of the old Edo variety, and we know that their children would not. At the beginning of the Rokumeikan Period the revolution known as the Restoration was not yet complete and thorough. The violence was nationalistic in a sense, stirred by a longing for the secluded island past, but it suggests an afterglow rather than a kindling.

The Meiji Period was sprinkled with violence. It was there in the agitation for “people’s rights” and the jingoism that inevitably came with the first great international adventure, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. The sōshi bully-boys of the eighties and nineties were a strange though markedly Japanese combination of the expansive and the narrow. They favored “people’s rights” and they were very self-righteous and exclusive. “The Dynamite Song,” “The Chinks,” and “Let’s Get ‘Em” were among their favorite militant songs. Not many voices were raised against the xenophobia, directed this time at fellow Orientals, save for those of a few faltering Christians. The disquiet of Kafū’s boyhood was probably more serious, in that people lived in greater danger, but it was less baneful, something that looked to the past and was certain to die. The mood of the city at the end of the century was more modern.

Despite economic depression, it would seem to have been festive during the Sino-Japanese War. We hear for the first time of roistering at Roppongi, on the southern outskirts of the city, and so have the beginnings of what is now the most blatantly electronic of the city’s pleasure centers. Roppongi prospered because of the army barracks it contained. What is now the noisiest playground of self-indulgent pacifism had its beginnings in militarism. The ukiyo-e print, also more than a little militarist and nationalist, had its last day of prosperity. Anything having to do with the war would sell. The great problem was the censors, who were slow to clear works for printing. Great crowds gathered before the print shops, and pickpockets thrived. The Kyōbashi police, with jurisdiction over the Ginza district, sent out special pickpocket patrols. No Japanese festive occasion is without its amusing curiosities. A Kyōbashi haberdashery had a big sale of codpieces, strongly recommended for soldiers about to be exposed to the rigors of the Chinese climate.

There was ugliness in the “Chink”-baiting and perhaps a touch of arrogance in the new confidence, and one may regret that Roppongi ever got started, to drain youth and money from less metallic pleasure centers. Yet, despite casualties and depression, the war must have been rather fun for the city.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a more somber affair. The boisterous war songs of the Sino-Japanese War were missing. Nor were the makers of popular art as active. Pounds and tons of prints survive from the Sino-Japanese War; there is very little from the Russo-Japanese War. It may be said that the ukiyo-e died as a popular form in the inter-bellum decade. Dark spy rumors spread abroad. Archbishop Nikolai, from whom the Russian cathedral in Kanda derives its popular name, felt constrained to request police protection, for the first time in a career that went back to the last years of Edo.

The rioting that followed the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905 was a new thing. It was explicitly nationalist, and it seemed to demand something almost the opposite of what had been demanded by the violence of Kafū’s boyhood. Japan had arrived, after having worked hard through the Meiji reign, and now must push its advantage. The politicians—the violence said—had too easily accepted the Portsmouth terms. The war itself had of course been the first serious engagement with a Western power. That it should have been followed by a burst of something like chauvinism is not surprising. Yet rioting could more understandably have been set off by the Triple Intervention that followed the Sino-Japanese War and took away some of the spoils. The early grievance was the greater one, and it produced no riots. The mood of the city in 1905 was even more modern.

On September 5, 1905, the day the Portsmouth Treaty was signed, a protest rally gathered in Hibiya Park. For the next two days rioting was widespread, and from the evening of the fifth to the evening of the sixth it seemed out of control. The rioters were free to do as they wished (or so it is said), and the police were powerless to stop them. Tokyo was, albeit briefly, a city without government. There were attacks on police boxes, on government offices, on the houses of notables, on a newspaper, and on the American legation. (Today the American embassy is an automatic target when anything happens anywhere, but what happened in 1905 was unprecedented, having to do with Theodore Roosevelt’s offices as peace-maker.) Ten Christian churches were destroyed, all of them in the Low City. Casualties ran to upwards of a thousand, not quite half of them policemen and firemen. The largest number occurred in Kōjimachi Ward, where it all began, and where the largest concentration of government buildings was situated. Some distance behind, but with enough casualties that the three wards together accounted for about a third of the total, were two wards in the Low City, Asakusa and Honjo, opposite each other on the banks of the Sumida. It would be hard to say that everyone who participated did so for political reasons. Honjo might possibly be called a place of the new proletariat, now awakening to its political mission, but Asakusa is harder to explain. It was not rich, but it was dominated by conservative artisans and shopkeepers.

In some ways the violence was surprisingly polite. None was directed at the Rokumeikan or the Imperial Hotel, both of them symbols of Westernization and right across the street from Hibiya Park. Too much can be made of the attack on the American legation. It was unprecedented, but mild, no more than some shouting and heaving of stones. So it may be said that the violence, though widespread and energetic, was neither as political nor as threatening as it could have been. There was an element of the festive and the sporting in it all. There usually is when violence breaks out in this city.

Yet the Russo-Japanese War does seem to mark a turning point. Edo had not completely disappeared in the distance, but the pace of the departure began to increase. Our old child of Edo, back in 1910 after forty years, might well have been more surprised at the changes had he gone away then and come back a decade later. The end of a reign is conventionally taken as the end of a cultural phase, but the division between Meiji and Taisho would have been clearer if the Meiji emperor had died just after the Russo-Japanese War, in perhaps the fortieth year of his reign.

The Russo-Japanese War was followed by economic depression and, for the city, the only loss in population between the Restoration disturbances and the earthquake. Kōjimachi Ward, surrounding the palace, lost population in 1908, and the following year the regions to the north and east were seriously affected. When next a war came along, it brought no surge of patriotism; the main fighting was far away, and Japan had little to do with it. In an earlier day, however, there would have been huge pride in being among the victors. The city and the nation were getting more modern all the time.