Читать книгу History of Tokyo 1867-1989 - Edward Seidensticker - Страница 14

Chapter 4

THE DECAY OF THE DECADENT

People like to think themselves different from other people; generally they like to think themselves superior. In the centuries of the Tokugawa seclusion, the Japanese had little occasion to assert differences between themselves and the rest of the world, nor would they have had much to go on, were such assertion desired. So the emphasis was on asserting differences among various kinds of Japanese. The son of Edo insisted on what made him different from the Osakan. He did it more energetically than the Osakan did the converse, and in this fact we may possibly find evidence that he felt inferior. Osaka was at the knee of His Majesty, whereas Edo was merely at the knee of Lord Tokugawa. Today it is Osaka that is more concerned with differences.

Aphorisms were composed characterizing the great Tokugawa cities. Some are clever and contain a measure of truth. Perhaps the best holds that the son of Kyoto ruined himself over dress, the son of Osaka ruined himself over food, and the son of Edo ruined himself looking at things.

This may seem inconsistent with other descriptions we have heard of the son of Edo, such as the one holding that he would pawn his wife to raise funds for a festival. There is no real inconsistency, however. What is meant is that Edo delighted in performances, all kinds of performances, including festivals and fairs. Performances were central to Edo culture, and at the top of the hierarchy, the focus of Edo connoisseurship, was the Kabuki theater. On a level scarcely lower were the licensed pleasure quarters. So intimately were the two related that it is difficult to assign either to the higher or the lower status. The great Kabuki actors set tastes and were popular heroes, and the Kabuki was for anyone (except perhaps the self-consciously aristocratic) who had enough money. The pleasure quarters, at their most elaborate, were only for male persons of taste and affluence, but the best of what its devotees got was very similar to what was to be had at the Kabuki. The difference between the two might be likened to the difference between a performance of a symphony or opera on the one hand and a chamber concert on the other.

It has been common among cultural historians to describe the culture of late Tokugawa as decadent. It definitely seemed so to the bureaucratic elite of the shogunate, and to eager propagandists for Civilization and Enlightenment as well. That it was unapologetically sensual and wanting in ideas seemed to them deplorable. They may not have been prudes, exactly, but they did want things to be edifying, intellectual, and uplifting, and to serve an easily definable purpose, such as the strengthening of the state and the elevating of the commonweal. If certain parts of the Edo heritage could be put to these purposes, very well. Everything else might expect righteous disapproval.

There is a certain narrow sense in which anything so centered upon carnal pleasure ought indeed to be described as decadent. However refined may have been the trappings of the theater and of its twin the pleasure quarter, sex lay behind them, and, worse, the purveying of sex. Perhaps something of the sort may also be said about the romantic love of the West. The high culture of Edo, in any event, the best that the merchant made of and for his city, is not to be understood except in terms of the theater and the pleasure quarters. What happened in these decadent realms is therefore central to the story of what happened to the Meiji city.

We have seen that General and Mrs. Grant visited the Kabuki in the summer of 1879. Probably the general did not know that he was participating in the movement to improve the Kabuki. It had already been elevated a considerable distance. Had he come as a guest of the shogunate, no one would have dreamed of taking him off to the far reaches of the city, where the theaters then were, and having disreputable actors, however highly esteemed they might be by the townsmen of Edo, perform for him and his Julia. His aristocratic hosts would not have admitted to having seen a performance themselves, though some of them might on occasion have stolen off to the edge of the city to see what it was like. It belonged to the townsman’s world, which was different from theirs. Making it a part of high culture, which is what “improvement” meant, had the effect of taking it from the townsman and his world.

The Shintomiza, which the Grants visited, was managed by Morita Kanya, the most innovative of early Meiji impresarios. The Kabuki had been removed from the center of the city to Asakusa in that last seizure of Tokugawa puritanism, a quarter of a century before the Restoration. There, remote, the three major theaters still stood when the Restoration came. All three were soon to depart, and none survives. The Nakamuraza, which stayed closest to the old grounds, was the first to disappear. It was still in Asakusa Ward, near the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, when in 1893 it was destroyed by fire one last time. The Ichimuraza stayed longest on the Asakusa grounds, and survived until 1932, when one of repeated burnings proved to be its last.

The Moritaza left Asakusa most swiftly and with the most determination, and led the way into the new day. It took the new name Shintomiza from the section of Kyōbashi, just east of Ginza, to which Kanya moved it.

He had long harbored ambitions to return his theater to the center of the city. He thought to make the move in stealth, because he wanted none of his Asakusa colleagues to come tagging after him. He preferred to be as far as possible from the old crowd, and especially from such sponsors of the Kabuki as the fish wholesalers, who were likely to oppose his reforming zeal. The Shintomi district was his choice for a new site because it was near Ginza and because it was available, nothing of importance having come along to take the place of the defunct New Shimabara licensed quarter. There were bureaucratic difficulties. His petition would be approved, he was told, only if it was presented jointly by all three theaters. By guile and determination he was able to obtain the seals of the other two managers. He moved just after the great Ginza fire, the rebuilding from which put Ginza at the fore front of Civilization and Enlightenment.

The first Shintomiza looks traditional enough in photographs, but certain architectural details, such as a copper-roofed tower, were a wonder and a pleasure to the Kabuki devotee. In the pit (though they are not apparent in woodcuts) were several dozen chairs, for the comfort of those who chose to attend in Western dress. Kanya’s first Shintomiza burned in 1876. The theater visited by General Grant was opened in 1878.

Kanya was an enthusiastic improver—in content, in techniques, and in managerial methods. He introduced bright new lights, and theater evenings. Kabuki had been staged only during daylight hours, on moral grounds, it seems, and also for the practical reason that the fire hazard increased as darkness came on. With the opening of his second Shintomiza he greatly reduced the number of theater teahouses, with a view to eliminating them altogether. The teahouse functioned as a caterer and ticket agency, monopolizing the better seats. Kanya’s endeavor to get rid of the teahouses was in the end a complete success, although it took time.

The Shintomiza

Only complete control of the box office would permit a rationalization of managerial methods. With little exaggeration, it might be said that he looked ahead to the impersonal efficiency of the computer. Old customs can be slow to disappear, however, when people find them a little expensive and time-consuming, but not unpleasant. That they should die was probably more important to entrepreneurs like Kanya than to the Low City Kabuki devotee. (Traces of the old system survive, even today, in box-office arrangements for Sumō wrestling.) In his boyhood Tanizaki Junichirō was taken to a more modern and rationally organized theater, the Kabukiza, and it still had teahouses. Tanizaki was born in 1886, almost a decade after the opening of the second Shintomiza.

I remember how my heart raced as we set out by rickshaw, my mother and I, southwards from Nihombashi towards Tsukiji. My mother still called the Shintomi district Shimabara, from the licensed quarter of early Meiji. We crossed Sakura Bridge, passed Shimabara, where the Shintomiza then stood, and turned from Tsukiji Bridge to follow the Tsukiji canal. From Kamei Bridge we could see the dome of the Kabukiza, which was finished in 1889. This would have been perhaps four or five years later. There were eleven theater teahouses attached to the Kabukiza. Always when a play was on they had awnings draped from their roofs. We had our rickshaw pull up at the Kikuoka, where we would rest for a time. Urged on by a maid, we would slip into straw sandals and hurry over the boardwalks to the theater. I remember how strangely cold the smooth floor of the theater was as I slipped from the sandals. A cold blast of air always came through the wooden doors of a theater. It struck at the skirt and sleeves of a festive kimono, and was at one’s throat and stomach like peppermint. There was a softness in it, as on a good day in the plum-blossom season. I would shiver, pleasantly.

Kanya spent a great deal of money on important officials and foreign visitors. On opening day of the second Shintomiza in 1878 all manner of notables, dressed in swallowtails, were set out upon the stage on chairs. The prime minister and the governor were among them, and so were most of the actors to whom the future belonged.

As an innovator, Kanya experimented boldly to bring modern elements into the Kabuki repertoire. The ninth Danjūrō became famous for his “living history,” which sought to introduce literal reality into the properties and costumes of historical plays, while the fifth Kikugorō was renowned for his “cropped-head pieces”—plays with modern settings, distinguished by enlightened haircuts. Among Kikugorō’s roles were the celebrated murderesses Takahashi O-den and Hanai O-ume, and Spencer the balloon man. Kanya even experimented with foreign performers and settings. Clara Whitney witnessed his most ambitious attempt at the cosmopolitan, A Strange Tale of Castaways, in 1879. A foreign lady from Yokohama trilled, “delightful on the high notes. But the best parts were spoiled because the Japanese, who thought it was something unusually funny, would laugh aloud…. I was quite out of patience.” The experiment was a financial disaster, and Kanya’s enthusiasm for Western things waned thereafter.

Kikugorō’s balloon ascent did not join the Kabuki repertoire, but Kanya’s experiments in stagecraft had a profound effect on the form. Near-darkness had prevailed in Edo, and he started it on its way to the almost blinding illumination of our time. The second Shintomiza had gaslights, but it may be that Kanya was not the very first to use them. E. S. Morse thus describes a visit to a theater, probably one of the two that still remained in Asakusa, in 1877:

Coming up the raised aisle from the entrance, several actors stride along in a regular stage strut and swagger, the grandest of all having his face illuminated by a candle on the end of a long-handled pole held by a boy who moved along too and kept the candle constantly before the actor’s face no matter how he turned…. There were five footlights, simply gas tubes standing up like sticks, three feet high, and unprotected by shade or screen, a very recent innovation; for before they had these flaring gas jets it was customary for each actor to have a boy with a candle to illuminate his face.

Conservative actors still attempt to follow old forms as they are recorded in Edo prints and manuscripts; but bright lights have changed Kabuki utterly. Kanya also introduced evening performances, permitted because the bright new lights were regarded as less of a fire hazard than the dim old lights had been. From Edo into Meiji, theaters sometimes opened as early as seven in the morning, to pack in as much as possible before dusk. We can but imagine how heavily the shadows hung over the old Kabuki, natural light and candles doing little to dispel them. Perhaps Kabuki was improved by the efforts of people such as Kanya, perhaps it was not; but certainly it was changed.

Kanya was a zealous reformer in another sense. The “movement for the improvement of the theater” had two aims in his most active years: to abolish what was thought to be the coarseness and vulgarity of late Edo, and to make the Kabuki socially acceptable, a fit genre for upper-class viewing, let the lower classes follow along as they could and would.

As early as 1872, there were bureaucratic utterances informing the Kabuki that it must cease being frivolous and salacious and start being edifying. Danjūrō—to his great discredit, many will say—was a leading exponent of improvement. Wearing striped pants and morning coat at the opening of the second Shintomiza, he read a statement on behalf of his fellow actors: “The theater of recent years has drunk up filth and reeked of the coarse and the mean. It has discredited the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastising evil, it has fallen into mannerisms and distortions, it has been going steadily downhill. Perhaps at no time has the tendency been more marked than now. I, Danjūrō, am deeply grieved by these facts, and, in consultation with my colleagues, I have resolved to clean away the decay.”

Improvement became an organized movement during the Rokumeikan Period, shortly after The Mikado was first performed in London. There seems to have been a link between the two events. The Mikado was the talk of the Rokumeikan set, which thought it a national insult. Proper retaliation, it seems, was the creation of a dramatic form that foreigners had to admire, in spite of themselves. The Society for Improving the Theater had among its founders the foreign minister and the education minister. The wantonness of the old Kabuki must be eliminated. An edifying drama, fit for noble ladies, domestic and foreign, must take its place.

These purifying endeavors had little permanent effect on the Kabuki repertoire. Danjūrō presently moved away from “living history,” which had never been popular. Many found it incomprehensible. The novelist Mori Ogai advised the spectator to stuff his ears with cotton upon entering the theater. Danjūrō was all right to look at, he said, but dreadful to listen to.

Yet for better or for worse, the endeavor to make Kabuki socially acceptable did succeed. The emperor’s presence always conferred the badge of respectability; he dutifully viewed what he was told to, and one form of entertainment after another received the badge. He went to see Sumō wrestling in 1884 at the Hama Palace; the grand match was, most fittingly for all, a draw. He viewed certain offerings of the variety halls—and in 1887 he attended a presentation of Kabuki, at the foreign minister’s residence. Kanya was in charge of the arrangements, and Danjūrō headed the cast. The first performance, at which the emperor was present, lasted through the afternoon. The emperor did not leave until almost midnight. Danjūrō grumbled to Kanya that no actor could be expected to perform well with a truncated hanamichi (the processional way by which actors approach the stage through the pit), but of course he could not, on such an occasion, decline to go on. (Actors grumbled similarly, but likewise went on, when Kabuki came to New York in 1960.) On the second day the empress had her viewing, and on two succeeding days other members of the royal family, including the empress dowager, had theirs. The emperor was taciturn in his reaction, declaring merely that he found Kabuki unusual, but the empress wept so profusely at a play about the murder of a child that Kanya, alarmed, urged the actors to try understatement.

In Edo and the Tokyo of Meiji, the most highly esteemed Kabuki actors had enormous popularity and influence. They set styles, such as that for a certain kind of umbrella, which quite swept the place. Huge crowds, of which Tanizaki himself was sometimes a part, turned out for the funerals of famous actors.

Still in late Meiji, after the turn of the century, the Kabuki was, along with the licensed quarters, the form on which the high world of the Low City centered. At the end of Meiji a lumber merchant from east of the river, as in Osanai s novel The Bank of the Big River (see pages 69-70), could still be a patron of the arts. One would not come upon his kind today. If modern actors have patrons, they are from the entrepreneurial aristocracy of the High City. In this fact is the measure of the success of the improvers in “improving” Kabuki and its actors, making them artists in an art acceptable to the elite. In the process, old ties were cut. The Kabuki and the demimonde are still close, but the demimonde too has cut its ties with the Low City. One would not be likely to find a person from east of the river among the big spenders.

Danjūrō is often reproved for obsequiousness and for indifference to the plebeian culture that produced Kabuki. Whether or not he is to be blamed for what happened, one may see the dispersal of the old mercantile culture in the changing sociology of the theater.

Morita Kanya’s day of prosperity had already passed when Spencer came and Kikugorō took his balloon ride. It was at the Kabukiza that he took it. Opened in 1889, on the site east of Ginza where it still stands, the Kabukiza had a generally Western exterior, in a quiet Renaissance style. Some details suggest a wish to incorporate traditional elements as well. A fan-shaped composition on the central pediment looks in photographs like the ridge piece of a shrine or godown. Inside, the chief difference from the Shintomiza was in size: the Kabukiza was much larger. The great day of the former did not return and, immediately upon its opening, the Kabukiza became what it has been for almost a century, the chief seat of Tokyo Kabuki. Managerial methods were ever more modern, though the old teahouses were allowed in limited numbers, and yet humbler establishments as well, street stalls for which Ginza was still famous in the years after the surrender.

The Kabukiza, in a 1902 lithograph

The improvers still were not satisfied. Even after the opening of the Kabukiza, they lacked a place where a gentleman might enjoy, in gentlemanly company, the traditional theater. So, in the last full year of Meiji, the Imperial Theater was opened beside the palace moat, on the western edge of Mitsubishi Meadow. Plans were begun in 1906. Shibusawa Eiichi, most energetic and versatile of Meiji entrepreneurs, was chairman. He was born in 1840, in what is now a part of metropolitan Tokyo. To the true son of Nihombashi he may have been a bumpkin, but his case further demonstrates that Osaka people were not the only successful ones in emergent Tokyo. He was everywhere, doing everything, among the organizers of the Bank of Japan, the First National Bank (the first incorporated bank in the land), the Oji Paper Company, Japan Mail Lines (N.Y.K.), and the private railway company that put through the first line to the far north. His was the somewhat Moorish house (see page 97) that seemed so strange to the young Tanizaki and other children of Nihombashi. Among the other organizers of the Imperial Theater were Prince Saionji and Prince Itō.

The first Imperial, which survived the disaster of 1945, was a highly Gallic structure of marble, hung with tapestries, and provided with seventeen hundred Western-style seats. Initially it had a resident Kabuki troupe, but it never really caught on as a place for Kabuki. The High City liked it better than did the Low City, which had a happy simile: seated in the Imperial, one felt like a cenotaph in a family shrine. The Imperial was the place for gala performances when, in the years before the earthquake, celebrities like Pavlova began appearing.

Theater was meanwhile becoming a big business, one which Osaka dominated. The theater and journalism, indeed, provide the best instances of the conquest of Tokyo by Osaka capital that is commonly averred and not easy to prove. It may be that Osaka money did best in fields of high risk and low capitalization. The Shōchiku company of Osaka bought the Shintomiza and another Tokyo theater in late Meiji, and in 1912 the Kabukiza. Shōchiku has dominated Kabuki ever since—but of course Kabuki has become a progressively smaller part of the city’s entertainment business.