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CHAPTER 1

The Master Plan

Fishing village to citadel – Social structure – First

foreign visitors – Pleasure quarters – Flowers of Edo

The origins of entire dynasties have been predicated on foundation myths, cities on oracular prophesies, the divinations of occult figures, the occurrence and mediation of supra-human incidents. Accordingly, legend claims that the goddess Benten, through the medium of a fish that leapt out of the river, led the feudal lord Ota Dokan to a low hill where he was commanded to erect a fortress in the vicinity of a nondescript fishing village named Edo.

The mound, standing above the outer gardens of today’s Imperial Palace, was easily defensible, commanding the estuaries of a number of local rivers. One of those waterways was the Hibiya inlet, connected to Edo Bay. Boats could anchor at a quay near the foot of the settlement. Under Ota’s supervision, beginning in 1457, the quay was turned into a thriving center for shipping and trade. Fish, rice, tea, copper, iron, and much-coveted herbal medicines from China were offloaded here.

Visiting poets, scribes and members of the literary nobility left short accounts of this first incarnation of the city, but no trace remains of its earth fortifications or structures. Its thatched buildings, compacted earthen embankments, bamboo palisades, ditches, and wells were likely more akin to a rural stockade than a castle. The site reverted to nature and the original fishing families who predated the settlement after Ota Dokan’s murder in 1486 at the command of his own lord, Uesugi Sadamasa, who was jealous of Ota’s success as a military strategist and gifted administrator.

The plot of land rose to unexpected prominence a hundred years later. Its elevation from a dismal fishing village huddled within marshland to the world’s largest city begins with the arrival of the warrior-clan head Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1590. The site of Edo and its eight surrounding provinces were Ieyasu’s reward for masterminding a successful military campaign against the Hojo clan, the principal rivals of the supreme hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had occupied the fiefdom and overseen it from his stronghold at Odawara. Hideyoshi’s largesse concealed a desire to distance Ieyasu from Kyoto and the centers of power. The offer, a disguised banishment, was finalized during the fall of Hojo castle. At the suggestion of Ieyasu, the promise was sealed by the two of them urinating in unison in the direction of Odawara—perhaps the only example in history of the fate of a location destined to become a world-class city being sealed with the simultaneous relieving of bladders.

It took a visionary to see abundant promise in the mosquito-infested salt inlets and reedy swamps at the head of the long bay where Ieyasu would build his bastion. Geography may be destiny, but shared perceptions cannot be assumed. The two men’s visions of Edo could not have been more different: Hideyoshi judged the under populated wetlands to be a godforsaken place with a deficit of natural spring water; Ieyasu envisaged a dazzling new city, a civil and military citadel encircled by a great bay fed by a system of navigable rivers.

Ieyasu, in common with other authoritarian city-builders the world over, possessed the mind of an engineer. Casting an eye over the worm-eaten fishing huts, salt-eroded port structures, termite-infested storehouses, and decaying steps to the main gate of Ota’s soot-blackened fortress, Ieyasu saw immense promise, visualizing the infrastructure of a great city where others saw only a morass. Even the moderately astute could see some advantages to a site at the entrance to the Kanto plain that had sea access and was near the estuaries of Japan’s greatest waterway in the east, the Tone River. Located at the top of the bay, the site would be easy to defend, and was less vulnerable to storms than other sea-facing settlements like nearby Kamakura.

After winning the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu emerged as shogun from the power struggle that had ensued after Hideyoshi’s death in 1598. Ieyasu was unchallenged in his control of the entire country, leaving a powerless emperor and effete court to their own distractions in Kyoto. His first official entry into the city may have occurred as early as the summer of 1590; he would have passed his first night in a Buddhist temple, at that time a common form of lodging for high-ranking visitors. The endorsement of the new city and its military regime by Shinto and Buddhist priests was considered crucial to the legitimacy of the city. Like those of the pagan priests of Rome, their services—which included dedicatory rites, funereal proceedings, and important consecrations—accorded the priests a status only a little below that of the warrior class.

It was important for Ieyasu that the physical structure of Edo replicate the hierarchical social order of what would arguably become the most well-managed feudal society the world has ever known. The master plan required strict social and occupational classes: peasants, artisans, and merchants. The members of one class could not legally intermarry with members of another class; nor, at least in theory, could they change their occupations.

Below the house-owning merchant families and the service class who rented property were outcast groups known as eta and hinin. Discrimination extended to the districts in which they were permitted to live; these were well removed from the daimyo and samurai. Clothing and hairstyles were required to be functional, understated. Outcasts lived in hamlets on the periphery of the city, engaging in the most onerous tasks: working in slaughter houses, curing animal hides, digging ditches, disposing of the dead, assisting in torture chambers and at the execution grounds. Others eked out a living as street performers, fortunetellers, blind musicians, and wandering mendicants.

The 176 fudai daimyo (inside lords) who had risked their estates and livelihoods by supporting Ieyasu even in the days before his victory at Sekigahara were allocated choice parcels of land to build estates on within the shadow of Edo Castle; the tozama daimyo (outer lords), the eighty-six noblemen not prescient enough to ally themselves with Ieyasu, were to reside in more peripheral zones, where allegiance and its concomitant compliance became a form of survival. An inability to trust one’s own subjects—a characteristic of all dictatorships—was reflected in a complicated system called sankin kotai (alternative residence). This required all daimyo to maintain two residencies: one in Edo, the other in their home province. One year was to be spent at the Edo residence, the next at their domain. The divide-and-rule approach was reinforced by the stipulation that half of the outer lords had to make their return to Edo in March every year, while the other half returned to their ancestral homes at the same time. The inside lords did the same in August. The processions marking their departure and return required costly displays of pomp and ostentation. A further proviso required daimyo to leave their consorts, children and heirs apparent permanently in their Edo residencies as a warranty against insurrection. For good measure, the shogunate erected barriers along the main routes into Edo, enforcing a “no women out, no weapons in” rule.

Obliging the daimyo to live in grand style while in Edo, to build residencies in a style reflecting the more sumptuous tastes of the earlier Momoyama era, and to maintain large retinues and staff ensured they did not have sufficient funds to purchase arms and mount an insurgency. In the most effective tradition of menace, the real purpose of alternative residence was never spelled out, but implicitly understood. The system firmly established Edo—as opposed to the imperial capital of Kyoto—as the country’s de facto seat of governance, and therefore an unassailable military citadel.

The obsession with security and the determination to build a fortress impregnable to any potential assailant dictated that steep walls be used to face the raised ground above the moats surrounding the citadel. The granite and volcanic rock used in the construction of the elevated embankments came from the Izu peninsula, some 85 kilometers south of Edo. Carried by ships, some three thousand all told, the rocks were offloaded at the dock and then dragged by rotating teams of laborers and ox carts. Seaweed was placed under the larger stones to facilitate their movement, and itinerant musicians blowing conches, banging drums, and dancing in a comedic parody of “southern barbarians” (as Europeans were called) were employed to spur on the work.

The castle’s inner ramparts consisted of massive walls of stone curving outward in graceful convex lines from moats. Pine trees, planted at the top of the fortifications, were carefully trained to lean downward over the curving masonry and the water’s surface. The medina of water channels, tidewater moats, estates, and alleys formed both an auspicious and physically protective cosmos with the castle at the gravitational center. The impregnability of the castle was never tested, but the plans show a structure that was as impervious as any Saracen fortress or Cathar stronghold.

Being the central topographical feature of the early city, the castle was also its nerve center, a structure whose centrality to the life of the city was highlighted by its strategic positioning. The primacy of Edo Castle—which was finally completed in 1640— was emphasized in maps of the city: it was always shown at the center, occupying Edo’s most elevated ground. The prestige of place and site names, usually written vertically, were reflected in the location and direction of the ideograms used on the maps to represent them. Thus the higher status of Buddhist temples and shrines means that, cartographically speaking, they were shown facing toward the castle. Likewise, private residences and shops were depicted facing away from the castle in accordance with their status.

The form of the castle and its protective moats resembled a logarithmic spiral. This shape is associated with a mystical form in Shinto originating from the Taoist yin-yang, the harmony of opposites that underpins the functioning of the universe. The design of Edo Castle and its environs may have favored the circular to fortify an unassailable political system, but the directions—the energy flows of the city—were far from centrifugal. Chinese geomancy dictated how principles, symbols, and directions should influence the auspicious placement of buildings. The troublesome east, direction of the Cyan Dragon, required a waterway; this was provided by the Sumida River. The west, domain of the White Tiger, demanded a major highway—one already in place in the form of the Tokaido trunk road. The south, provenance of the Vermillion Bird, required a pond. This called for a little more creative thinking, but a surrogate was found in the waters of Edo Bay. A mountain was mandatory for the northerly direction, habitat of the Dark Warrior, but the only option was Mount Fuji in the west. This problem was solved by reorienting the castle’s main gate, the Ote-mon, from the south to the east. If the fortress were read as a compass, the sacred peak could be understood to occupy the northern coordinate. Geomancy dictated that on maps, Edo had to be oriented (rotated more than 90 degrees counter-clockwise) so that Mount Fuji’s actual west-southwest orientation would correspond with Gembu, the god of the north.

Geomantic concerns continued to occupy the thoughts of subsequent shoguns in their desire to reinforce the city against malevolent forces. In 1624, the second shogun, Hidetaka, asked the influential priest Tenkai to construct a temple in the northeast quarter of Ueno. Both the quarter and the cardinal point were believed to be the source from which evil flowed. To block this portal, known as the Kimon (Devil’s Gate), Tenkai constructed Kan’ei-ji temple. Successive shoguns continued developing the barrier; by 1700, there were no fewer than thirty-six sub-temples in the area.

The diagonal flow of malign forces required a temple counterpart to Kan’ei-ji in the southeast. In accordance with these beliefs, the great Zojo-ji, a temple of the Jodo sect, was established in Shiba in 1598. At its height it must have been a magnificent complex, with forty-eight sub-temples and over a hundred structures in all. On completion, the mausoleums of the Tokugawa shoguns lined each side of the temple. Their compounds were replete with the lacquered gates and carved and painted transoms, eaves, and beams attesting to the Tokugawa love of elaboration. These features are evident not only in their private residences and art collections, but also in the great shrine and mausoleum that would be built for the shogun Ieyasu at Nikko in Tochigi Prefecture.

Both sets of daimyo—the favored and the disgraced—were expected to supply labor, funds, and materials for the construction of ambitious projects, particularly the building of Edo Castle, a project that would take several more decades to complete. Compliance was considered a test of allegiance. In a city built by fiat, policy was made by diktat; advice, when it was solicited, was taken exclusively from the inside lords and those close to them, deemed infallible loyalists. The Hibiya inlet, at the eastern edge of the castle site, was filled in with earth taken from the Surugadai hill in Kanda to the north. Impressive feats of engineering, which involved diverting water channels and rivers to form a spiderweb of canals and an inner and outer moat, were required to complete the system. The Kanda River was co-opted as a source of water for the moats surrounding the castle, a function it still serves today. Landfills were created by removing earth from the high terrain of the Yamanote hills to the north and west. A waterway known as the Dosanbori Canal was dug to enable the transportation of construction materials. Ieyasu used the construction as a way to test the loyalty of his supporters and as a further attempt to deplete the coffers of suspected rivals by demanding massive outlays from them in material resources as well as assignments of corvée labor. This was all part of a colossal civil engineering project called tenka-fushin (construction of the realm).

With the circulation of waterways for transport and security determined, the practical business of providing a flow of potable water for Edo became an immediate priority. Early attempts to bore wells in the coastal city had only succeeded in drawing up salt water. The Kanda Josui, a 17-kilometer water system, consisted of more than 3,600 sub-aqueducts. The subterranean sections used pipes made from hollowed-out timber to transport water to communal wells. The system was operational by the Kan’ei era (1624–44). It was an admirable system, far superior to many of the appalling water management arrangements in contemporaneous European cities, but with the rapid expansion of Edo the Kanda Josui soon reached capacity.

In 1652 in the western district of Tama, where villagers were already engaged in manufacturing lime for construction projects, work began on a second water system, the Tamagawa Josui. On its completion two years later, the 80-kilometer-long system was able to carry fresh water to every part of the city. Further measures were taken to improve the quality of water supplied to Edo, including the removal of crudely made latrines and huts along riverbanks and prohibitions against the disposal of waste in rivers.

Once matters like the benign flow of spiritual forces and the redirection of water had been settled, city planners turned their attention to the flow of human traffic. The sankin kotai system of alternative residence meant that the approach roads to Edo were always busy, requiring greater numbers of post-stations near the city. Shinjuku had its Koshu-kaido trunk road to the west, Senju the Nikko-kaido running north. Some of the country’s major highways spread out radially from within the moat: the Tokaido in the south, the Daisendo to the southwest, the Koshu-kaido to the west, and the Nakasendo to the northeast. The superimposition of moats and highways at the center was one of the most distinct features of the city. The improved transportation systems not only freed up space for daimyo entourages, but also facilitated the movement of officials, merchants, goods, and the increasing volume of people making pilgrimages to holy sites.

The residences of daimyo and samurai families took up a disproportionate 70 percent of Edo’s land disposition. Land occupied by temples and shrines accounted for roughly 14 percent of the city, leaving only a 16 percent residential allocation for commoners, a demographically far larger group, to build their homes and shops. Many increasingly prosperous merchant families were able to do this, but the fate of Edo’s service class was to rent row houses in the back streets and alleys of the city.

Typically, these ura nagaya, or “rear long-houses,” were partitioned into units with living areas seldom larger than 3 meters square. A narrow cooking space and entrance added an extra strip of flooring at a slightly lower elevation than the main floor. An entire family might live in this single room. A large number of single men, supporting families in the countryside, occupied these homes. Most of these bachelor tenants were of the lower orders, scraping out a living as mendicant entertainers, laborers, and tinkers—though there were among them ronin (masterless samurai) fallen on hard times. Communal facilities included garbage dumps, the toilet, and the well where the washing and laundry were done. Rats were drawn to the garbage piles and the runnels that served as open sewers running along the middle of the alleys, where in some cases the width between the clapboard residences was less than a meter. Sleeping conditions inside the row houses must have been suffocating. Within the confined space, the superheated air—particularly in the humid summer evenings, when lamps powered by rapeseed oil and vegetable wax were used—would have been stifling. There was no special night-wear; people slept in their daytime clothes.

An abundance of water, an asset in normal times, could exacerbate sanitation problems. In a normal year the Sumida River could be expected to flood twice, its inundations turning districts along its banks into quagmires of foul-smelling mud. Canals, pools, and puddles were the perfect breeding ground for the swarms of mosquitoes that infested the city in the summer months. Insects and rodents swarmed at the unwholesome fish markets. In such conditions, it is little wonder that epidemics of diseases like measles, smallpox, and beriberi were so common. The latter, caused largely by the nutritional deficiencies inherent to an unvaried diet of polished white rice, was so persistent it was dubbed the “Edo disease.”

The two-story homes of the wealthy merchants, shopkeepers, and occasional winners of temple lotteries, whose frontages onto wider streets provided better access and light, were far superior. Their tiled roofs were somewhat fire-resistant; their earthen surfaces were covered in a burnt ash from crushed oyster shells, India ink, and lime. With time and wear, the dark stucco and plaster walls became so lustrous that the sight of women stopping to adjust their hair in front of the semi-reflective surfaces was not uncommon. Though they were despised as money-grubbers by the aristocracy and warrior class, merchants were a vital element, as they provisioned the city.

In 1606, one of Ieyasu’s first acts as shogun had been to order the creation of a camellia garden within the castle grounds (site of the current Ninomaru Garden). The moist air, plentiful rainfall, and generous parcels of land allotted to daimyo were perfect for the creation of aristocratic “stroll gardens.” Ponds were excavated for these artificial landscapes. At high tide they would fill with salt water; at low tide their levels were controlled by sluice gates. Some of these—like the Hama-Rikyu and Kyu Shiba-Rikyu Onshi gardens—remain, though in diminished scale.

Less pleasing to the eye were Edo’s execution grounds. Executions were generally conducted at the city prison in Kodenmacho, while burning at the stake and crucifixions were confined to the Suzugamori execution ground near Shinagawa, where some 150,000 criminals were dispatched. Criminals were placed backward on a horse, paraded around the city, then tied to a wooden cross, a practice that continued into the mid-nineteenth century. They would then be speared through the side in crucifixion scenes not unlike the one on the hill at Golgotha in the Christian bible. A pyre where bodies were burnt alive and a stone platform for impalings remain as testament to the public staging of punishments. The execution grounds were located beside the Tokaido trunk road to remind travelers of the fate of those whose criminal acts made them outcasts unworthy of a decent interment in the family grave at a temple.

Another execution ground existed at Kotsukappara, an area in the northeast of the city near Minami Senju and the day-labor district of Sanya. More than 200,000 severed heads were reportedly displayed on stakes here. Shortly after the establishment of Kotsukappara in 1651, a statue of Jizo—patron of stillborn children, travelers, and souls suffering in hell—was erected to stand guard over the grounds; the figure is known as the “Chopped-neck Jizo.” Kotsukappara was a benighted place, characterized by a bleakness and dereliction that still clings, like the reek of a tomb, to some of the back streets and alleys of the district. Disposing of dead bodies—whether of criminals or ordinary citizens—fell to the outcast hinin and eta. Their descendants, now referred to in hushed undertones as burakumin (hamlet people), continue to inhabit present-day districts to the east of the city such as Taito, Arakawa, and Sumida wards, where there are concentrations of the small factories, crematoriums, and leather-working shops in which work traditionally assigned to untouchable groups is carried out.

An antidote to such grim sights, Mount Fuji stands a hundred kilometers southwest of Nihonbashi. In the perspective-compressing prints of the day it appears as a looming presence, the principal feature in the Edo landscape. The city’s close links to the mountain were partly due to its powerful symbolism: the mountain was the locus of a complex mix of beliefs and doctrines practiced by religious cults dedicated to its worship. Dominant among these quasi-religious sects during the early Edo period was Shugendo, or mountain asceticism. Reflecting Fuji’s transcendent quality, the unquestioned notion that it was the most proximate peak to heaven, an inordinate number of shrines in Edo were dedicated to the deities that resided on the mountain. Each of these places of worship contained a miniature Mount Fuji within their grounds, where devotees, unable to make the pilgrimage to the real mountain, would climb and offer prayers. On “mountain-opening day” supplicants would offer prayers to the rising sun from these diminutive, easily scaled peaks.

Tokugawa Ieyasu died in 1616—the same year as William Shakespeare—having, like the bard, accomplished a great deal in his lifetime. By the 1650s Edo’s population had reached almost half a million, making it the largest city in Japan. Among the immigrants from other cities and the countryside were a small number of foreigners, the first overseas visitors to Japan since the arrival of early Chinese Buddhists. Dutch traders, restricted to a tiny artificial island known as Dejima in Nagasaki, were subjected to every possible humiliation in order to maintain their trade. Annual delegations to Edo were required between 1660 and 1790; thereafter, tributary visits were made every four years. Having visited Edo in the 1690s, Engelbert Kaempfer, a German naturalist and physician in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, gave a detailed account of the strange obeisance required of foreign visitors when they made their mandatory annual visit to Edo Castle in his History of Japan, posthumously published in 1727:

The moment the captain appeared, an affectedly loud voice called out, “Oranda kapitan” (Holland captain), a signal for him to step forward and pay his respects. He was then expected to crawl forward on hands and knees to the spot where the presents brought by the Dutch were displayed, and to the high seat of the shogun. Crouching on his knees, he bent his head to the floor and then, like a lobster, crawled back, all this without one word being exchanged.

It was a tiresome business, but the Dutch, eager to stay in the good graces of the shogun and maintain their preeminence in trade, were grudgingly prepared to oblige.

On a less pantomimic note, the shogunate required the Dutch mission to submit an annual report on world events and developments beyond the confines of Japan. The Dutch duly obliged—an arrangement that continued until the end of the policy of national seclusion in the mid-nineteenth century.

In a set of four linked gold-leaf screens known as Edo Meishozu Byobu (Screens of Famous Places in Edo), now in the collection of the Idemitsu Museum of Art, we can gain some idea of how Edo looked at the time of the early Dutch tributary visits to the city. Besides Edo Castle, the screens depict a Noh performance, a ballad drama performed by joruri puppets used in epic narrative dramas, acrobats at a tent in the Shinbashi district, and scenes at an annual festival at the Senso-ji temple. It is a hyper-compression of reality that nevertheless reflects an already energetic, culturally virile city.

As the areas surrounding the citadel evolved into an urban center, two distinct communities of townspeople sprang up. The first of these was the shiro-shitamachi, an area of soon-to-be-affluent merchant stores and businesses centering on Nihonbashi and Kyobashi. Shirokiya, a large commodities store, opened in Nihonbashi in 1662, developing into a successful merchandizing chain that became today’s Tokyu department store. Maps of the district from the mid-seventeenth century show a rectilinear grid system that would soon be overwhelmed by a far more organic and random urban evolution. The second area, which sprang up along the banks of the Sumida River, consisted in the main of small businesses and shokunin (craftsman) residences. The center of this area of intense activity was Asakusa, to the north of the original shiro-shitamachi.

Nihonbashi Bridge was the starting point for the Tokaido, the “Eastern Road” that ran to the imperial capital of Kyoto. Four major trunk roads originated at the bridge. Its zero marker remains even today the point from which all distances are measured. Bulletin boards were placed at the approaches to the bridge, making the spot an information outlet. Sexual offenders and adulterers, among whom an inordinate number appear to have been priests, were placed in fetters at the south end of the bridge. The public exposure and resulting humiliation effectively combined punishment and penitence. Murderers were buried alive with their heads protruding from the earth. A saw was conveniently placed nearby. Passersby, if so inclined, could pick up the tool and sever the head, which would then be placed on a pike at the end of the bridge. This terrifying apparition of death—rapidly decaying heads with their eyes gouged out by ravens—served as a powerful deterrent to potential felons.

The dry winter winds that the Kanto region is prone to, combined with all its wooden structures, made Edo especially fire-prone. The Meireki Fire, which broke out on the morning of January 18, 1657, was one of the era’s most notable conflagrations, destroying almost two-thirds of the buildings in Edo. Better known as the Long Sleeves Fire, the conflagration started at an exorcism ceremony at Honmyo-ji temple in Hongo for a kimono that had been used by three young women who subsequently died prematurely. When a gale blew up during the ritual, embers from the costume settled on the roof of a nearby temple, setting off a sequence of fires that, fanned by powerful westerly winds, spread across the contiguous quarters of Yushima and Surugadai before moving on to ravage the districts of Nihonbashi, Tsukudajima, Kobikicho, and the important rice granaries in Asakusa. That fire burned out, but a second rose up in the samurai district of Koishikawa, going on to destroy Edo Castle and countless warrior residences. More fires flared up that evening in the Kojimachi quarter.

The fire penetrated the spacious grounds of Edo Castle, burning down the main keep and melting all the gold stock that was stored in its cellar. The interior walls of the castle, decorated with priceless paintings by the great court artist Kano Tanyu, were destroyed. Among the human casualties of the Long Sleeves Fire were the inmates of the city’s main prison at Kodemmacho. Somehow, the understanding between the prisoners and the authorities that they would be released from the jail and meet up at an agreed temple location was muddled as the fires approached. The authorities, believing that prisoners were trying to escape and loot the city, had the gates firmly closed, resulting in the death of more than twenty thousand people.

In the two days of raging fires, 930 daimyo residences were razed and 350 temples and shrines were destroyed, along with 1,200 merchants’ homes and 61 bridges. The estimated number of victims was 108,000 out of a population of some half a million. The timing was pitiless; the following day it snowed. Despite the prompt distribution of relief rice from the shogun’s granaries, many people died from starvation and hypothermia.

If two detailed paintings on folded screens (the Screen of Edo and the Screen of Famous Places in Edo) and an early extant Kan’eiera (1624–43) map of Edo are accurate, the city built after the fire was not as splendid as the castle town that preceded it. The ensuing reconstruction—based more on pragmatic concerns than aesthetics—required wider streets, firebreaks, and a program to get merchants to fireproof their homes and storehouses with plaster, which radically altered the appearance of the city. Carpenters, sawyers, and plasterers did well in this still largely flammable city. Burnt earth from the fire was collected and used to reclaim a number of marshes. Ryogoku-bashi, Edo’s “Interstate Bridge,” was built over the Sumida River, effectively annexing the east side of the city for further development. Lumberyards were moved from Hatchobori to Fukagawa, a supposedly less incendiary area east of the river. The transfer to Fukagawa, which at that point was little more than a marsh, added to the eastward movement and expansion of the shitamachi, more land reclamation, and the building of docks and storage yards. Preeminent lumber tycoons like Kinokuniya Bunzaemon made fortunes from the almost constant necessity to rebuild. The lumber king’s own mansion was located a sensible distance from the river, so that fresh water could be channeled into the garden.

Rather than being cowed by the fire, the city took on a fresh life, actually expanding in size so that formerly rural areas now became part of the urban mass of Edo. Fires were the price you paid for living in the most culturally dynamic city in Japan. The ever-positive townspeople even chose to see poetic merit in the fires, calling the periodic conflagrations Edo no hana, the “flowers of Edo.” Vigor flowed back into the veins of Edo citizens, their irrepressible energy at times usurping the best-laid plans of the authorities. No sooner had a large area of merchant houses between the bridges at Nihonbashi and at Edobashi been cleared to create a firebreak, for example, than food stalls, storytelling booths, makeshift tea houses, and tents putatively known as “archery ranges,” which actually functioned as brothels, began to line the newly broadened Edobashi Road, nullifying the self-evident benefits of the project.

In a city so vulnerable to fire, it is not surprising to learn that arson was punishable by death. When a fire broke out in the winter of 1682 near the home of a greengrocer’s daughter named Oshichi, the family was forced to seek shelter in Enjo-ji, a nearby temple, where she fell secretly, fatally, in love with one of its young acolytes. Her family’s shop was rebuilt and she reluctantly returned home, but impulsively set fire to her own house in the hopes of being sent back to the temple again. Instead, she was caught in the act and thrown into jail. Being just short of sixteen, she could have had the death penalty reduced to a life sentence. Unable to contemplate separation from the object of her love, however, she altered her age by one year and duly received the death sentence. Her comportment as she was led through the streets, unapologetic and seemingly unfazed by any concerns for the ghastly fate awaiting her at the execution ground at Suzugamori, won over the hearts of bystanders. Like those of many popular folk heroines, her story acquired extra details and embellishment with the passage of time.

To some degree, fires were also tied to the Buddhist concept of ukiyo, the “sorrowful world,” referring to the grief-laden plane of existence defined by transience and impermanence. Reinterpreting the word homophonically, the Genroku-era (1688–1704) merchants and tradesmen who lived in this period of heightened affectation and dilettantism, which was contemporaneous with the Restoration in England, altered the meaning of ukiyo from “sorrowful world” to “floating world,” suggesting a realm of sensual, hedonistic pleasures.

After the Meireki Fire, the authorities, who regarded the pleasure districts and the theatres as akusho (venues of moral degeneration), had the city’s preeminent pleasure quarter, the Yoshiwara, removed from east of the castle to Asakusa in the northeast, where they hoped it would languish. To their chagrin, Asakusa’s location on the banks of the Sumida River meant that an easy boat trip could be made up the river into the Sanya Canal and thence to the pleasure quarter. At Yanagibashi, the “Willow-Tree Bridge” located at the mouth of the Kanda River, boats known as chokibune could be boarded for that purpose; however, enterprising locals soon turned the water district into an unlicensed quarter, obviating the need for those with less refined tastes or funds to travel upriver to the Yoshiwara. For their part, brothel owners in the Yoshiwara were delighted that they were now allowed to stay open all night. This led to the quarter being dubbed the fuyajo, or “place without night”; it flourished to such a degree that by 1780, the number of prostitutes exceeded four thousand, and would grow to over seven thousand by the end of the Edo period in 1868.

To the consternation of the ruling elite, the pleasure quarters acted as social levelers, with clients drawn from the samurai ranks of the yamanote as well as the merchants and tradespeople of the shitamachi. The only requirement for entry was the admission fee. And there were services to accommodate every purse. Aside from the houses for licentious pleasure, there were drinking establishments, restaurants, and shops near the entrance that sold amigasa, broad-brimmed hats made from straw that could be purchased by customers such as samurai and priests, who preferred their identities to go unnoticed. The absence of behavioral parameters in the pleasure quarters, and the abandonment of the strict social codes that determined class relations, was a matter of increasing concern to the authorities.

The services of the jiroro, the lowest-ranking purveyors of pleasure in the hierarchy of the flesh trade, were swift and without the pretentions of affection; those of the more celestial tayu, high-ranking courtesans, were more lingering and nuanced. Adept at witty repartee and double entendres, tayu were accomplished at flower-arranging, incense-differentiation, sake-pouring, singing, dancing, haiku composition, fortune-telling, and the playing of the shamisen. The pleasures of the flesh, like the administration of a strong potion, were the final ecstasy that would guarantee the return of a patron, even if it ruined him.

Exalted symbols of beauty, the tayu were sumptuously robed, the outer lineaments of their kimonos stiff with gold thread; saf-flower juice was used to make the rouge they applied to their lips. Teeth-blackening was common; the powder used for this was made from a mixture of iron filings and nails soaked in tea and sake. A striking fashion at one time was to paint the lower lip with a gloss of iridescent green rouge. With faces, necks, and hands luminous with the otherworldly effects of white cosmetics, the tayu resembled painted icons, effigies whose power was, arguably, more voluptuous than spiritual. The novelist Shozan wrote, “The dress of the tayu is a long robe made of luxuriously embroidered silk brocade. Her head is ornamented with a brilliance of tortoise-shell hairpins that radiate around her like the aureole of a saint.” The satirist Ihara Saikaku sounded a more cautionary note when he observed, “The clothing of the courtesan is so arranged that her red crepe de chine undergarment will open to reveal a glimpse of white ankle, or even the thigh. When men see such a vision, they become insane, lavishing even money entrusted to them.” The tayu, emblems of a divine but costly beauty, would eventually cultivate themselves out of existence.

Women like the tayu, who could comfortably afford such costly adjuncts to their profession and lifestyle, kept a number of adult toys in their closets, presumably both for self-pleasure during slack times and for the benefit of customers. A dried sea cucumber—tube-shaped, with nobbly outer layers—was filled with water to serve as an embellished dildo. Other dildos were uniform in shape, but their proportions varied from giant decorative versions to tiny “finger” varieties. There was a brisk trade in aphrodisiacs, though they were costly. Korean and Chinese ginseng roots were mixed with pulverized rhinoceros horn and wild herbs that could be found along the banks of the Sumida River to make extracts and potions. These were quite expensive, and the tayu were virtually the only people who could procure them.

Economics were an equally important consideration for both patrons and procurers of women. The influx of men working at the newly built warehouses and lumberyards of Fukagawa, east of the river, created the need—in a city outside the jurisdiction of Edo magistrates where males vastly outnumbered women—for an unlicensed pleasure quarter that was more affordable than the Yoshiwara. The establishment of a temple and shrine in the area stimulated commerce, and soon there were shops and teahouses staffed by young women. Many of the lower-ranking prostitutes were on display along the back streets of the quarter, where they could be seen sitting behind latticework windows.

A similar level of service, catering to those of more slender means, existed at Shinjuku, the first westward stop of the Koshu Kaido—the post road running westward from Edo toward Nagano and the Japan Sea. The rough-and-ready temporary inns set up in 1698 as lodgings for travelers were shut down in 1718 because of an incident involving a customer and a “rice-serving girl” at one of the many brothels catering to their guests. It would be almost fifty years before the Shinjuku post town was reopened, but it went on to become one of the foremost of Edo’s six licensed quarters.

When it came to illness and death—the great levelers—there was not a great deal to distinguish the low-ranking sancha or jijoro prostitutes in quarters like Shinjuku from the courtesans of the Yoshiwara, known for cultivating a theatrical indolence and arrogance. Women from both the highest ranks of the Yoshiwara and the less-exalted pleasure quarters were bedeviled by sexually transmitted diseases; most of the lower-ranking women died in their early twenties, and were mourned by few. At Jokan-ji temple in Minowa, a working-class district of northeast Tokyo, the remains of more than eleven thousand young women who perished while working in the pleasure quarters of the city during the Edo era are buried in a common, unmarked grave. Brothel staff would dump the bodies over the temple wall, giving rise to the establishment’s better-known name, Nagekomi-dera (the Waste-disposal Temple). A belief that prostitutes would return to haunt a person who treated their body with disrespect ensured that the corpses were wrapped in straw before being dropped over the wall, although this was the identical custom observed for dead animals.

Aside from their purely carnal functions, the pleasure quarters and their easily disposed and replenished women provided more than the playhouses themselves. Playwrights, artists, and poets found boundless subjects in the pleasure quarters. Far from being a public seraglio with sex as the dominant theme, the Yoshiwara in particular became the center of an alternative culture marked by a decadent aestheticism and connoisseurship of taste that were depicted by some of the greatest artists of the city. The quarter gave birth to fashions in dress, and its speech mannerisms and styles of deportment were widely emulated.

As subjects, the pleasure quarters were assiduously avoided by the older schools of painters, despite the fact that they existed not only for the sake of sexual gratification, but also as cultural seedbeds that would overwhelm the arts patronized by the aristocracy. Representations of urban styles in the pleasure quarters and elsewhere were derisively compared to the refinements of the Tosa and Kano schools of painting. It was not until the appearance of Hishikawa Moronobu, one of the early practitioners of ukiyo-e, that more refined commercially available woodblock print images began to emerge. Moronobu established a reputation for executing Yoshiwara no tei (Scenes from the Yoshiwara) and work in other erotic print genres.

Moronobu’s early prints were monochrome, but it was not long before pigments were added, resulting in the vibrant nishiki-e or “brocade prints” of artists like Suzuki Harunobu. In Pictures of Japanese Occupations, Moronobu, drawn to the exuberant complexity of Edo street life, created a highly realistic visual document of the working habits of ordinary townspeople—its tradesmen and fishmongers; peddlers of clams, rice cakes, and bean curd; washerwomen; salt-gatherers and priests; apothecaries and harlots.

Kabuki actors, with their sumptuous costumes, wigs, and extravagant makeup, made wonderful print subjects. The word kabuki had connotations of sexual license, and by the early seventeenth century it was synonymous with being out of the mainstream. Much beloved of the pleasure-seeking townspeople, kabukimono were male popinjays who sallied around the city in flamboyant dress, offending none but the authorities. Because the early female Kabuki troupes were associated with prostitution, it was ordained that women’s roles would be played by young men. In Edo, a city fixated on the erotic, this merely created another problem, as quarrels over the favors of attractive young actors broke out among members of the Buddhist priesthood and samurai in the audiences. Henceforth, female parts were to be acted only by older adult males.

Edo’s first licensed Kabuki theater was founded at Nakabashi in 1624, but because of its proximity to the castle, it was relocated to Negicho (now known as Ningyocho), and then moved once again to Sakaicho. By 1714, there were three major theaters in the area: Ichimura-za, Morita-za and Nakamura-za. The auditoriums were dark, with stages lit by candles; black-hooded stagehands moved through the shadows, unnoticed by audiences. Where special effects were needed to heighten the drama or for performances of ghost stories, trap doors could be used for sudden visitations. Small boys illuminated the ghastly visages of actors by holding lit candles beneath their faces. The overpowering smells of wax, camellia hair oil, women’s face powder, and clouds of tobacco smoke, combined with the tight seating arrangements, must have made for a suffocating theater experience, especially in the summer months, when there was little or no ventilation in the theaters.

Ichikawa Danjuro was the leading actor of the Genroku era (1688–1703). An exponent of the bravura aragoto or “rough” heroic style of Kabuki, embodying the superhuman features and valor of the heroes he played, Danjuro’s highly charged, masculine performances were enriched with patterned kimonos, scarlet silk underwear, and dazzling red-and-white makeup. Such was the legacy of Danjuro that he remains a tutelary deity among actors even today.

Book-publishing flourished at this time, as paper costs had fallen and literacy levels were on the rise. With the appearance of booksellers around 1650, public demand grew for picture books, scholarly works on Confucianism and moral conduct, travel journals and diaries, and works of literature. There was also great demand for light narratives, music manuscripts, comic verse, woodblock prints of the pleasure quarters and guides to the same, and anatomical treatises on “Dutch learning.” The latter were of great interest to physicians eager to learn about advances in Western medicine and surgery. If you could not afford to buy a title in one of Edo’s well-stocked bookstores, there were itinerant peddlers who carried their wares on their backs, renting them out for five days at a time in exchange for a small fee. By the late 1830s, the number of book lenders in Edo exceeded 800. Little wonder that literacy levels in Edo ranked among the highest in the world at that time.

Writing could get you into serious trouble, though, especially if you had the temerity to lampoon the authorities. Reactionary policies and edicts like the Kansei reforms in the late eighteenth century typically involved the promulgation of new censorship laws and an effort to dissuade the warrior class from dabbling in writing fiction.

A surge in literary activity and the cultural refinement it represented was embodied in the person of the great haiku poet Matsuo Basho. In the winter of 1680, a disciple of the writer built a humble reed-thatched cottage for him on the eastern shores of the Sumida River. Erected on land owned by Sugiyama Sampu, a wealthy lumber merchant, it was exposed to sea winds from the bay, typhoons, and the constant threat of tsunami. Fukugawa was by then a semi-rural area built on reclaimed delta land. As there were no natural springs or aquifers, water was delivered by boat. The poet had taken his pen name from the gift of a basho (banana) tree given by a student. The leaves appealed to Basho’s aesthetic of rustic simplicity, recalling, as he said, the “injured tail of a phoenix. When they are torn, they remind me of a green fan ripped by the wind.” Furthermore, pointing out that the basho had no value as timber, he added, “I admire the tree for its very uselessness.” The master named his cottage the Basho-an.

It was an accepted fact for Edo citizens that everything could be lost in a moment. The huge firestorm that devoured Basho’s neighborhood on December 28, 1682, left him homeless; he saved his own life by jumping into the river and hiding under a reed mat.

The satisfaction he enjoyed from the recognition of his work was not always matched by material comfort. As the poet wrote one cold night:

An oar striking waves

The sound freezing my bowels

Evening tears

In an age of almost excessive refinement, of mannerism in dress, taste and language, the nuances and symbolism of verse were implicitly understood. In the summer of 1676, pressed for funds, Basho wrote:

Placed on a fan

Wind from Mount Fuji

A gift from Edo

The imagery would have been immediately apparent to the more urbane reader. It is considered a gesture of immense elegance to offer a present on a fan instead of sullying it with the bare hand; thus, the impecunious Basho is offering the coolness of the fan itself as a gift to his host.

In Basho’s day, Edo’s complex network of rivers, canals, and moats were the equal of roads. Water stood for more than just a commercial conduit, being the medium for a floating social life. In the highly structured class system of Edo, the banks, water, and hirokoji (“open spaces”) adjacent to the Sumida River and other public congregation points came to represent areas of greater permissible freedom. The superimposition of the river upon the life of the city was an ordinary process whose natural energy matched the vitality of Edo. If it was a city of water, it was probably closer to Suzhou than Venice, with plenty of the former’s storehouses, granaries, and quays and none of the latter’s palazzi or monuments to great wealth.

The Sumida served in the way that all rivers should, by bringing nature into the city. The oars of pilots plying the river were still apt to become entangled in waterweeds; beautiful white birds, oyster-catchers known as miyakodori (capital birds), could still be seen in the waters of the river into the early years of the twentieth century. Cranes were a common sight, their presence during the migratory season adding grace notes to the riverbanks of Edo, though shoguns had taken to hunting them with falcons during the winter, taking excursion parties to Mikawashima, an area to the northwest of Shin-Yoshiwara.

The presence and well-being of animals took on particular significance during the tenure of the shogun Tsunayoshi, (1680– 1709), whose birth year happened to be the Year of the Dog. An influential priest in the service of his mother persuaded the impressionable young man to forbid the killing and mistreatment of dogs and other animals under penalty of death. Tsunayoshi accordingly issued his “Edicts on Compassion for Living Things,” and ordered compounds to be built in Edo to accommodate stray dogs. The number of canines in Edo rose sharply, their nocturnal barking and fighting depriving residents of their sleep. Animal-rights ordinances were issued nationwide, but only appear to have been enforced in Edo; people were tried and sentenced in a total of sixty-nine cases, and thirteen of them were executed. Edo citizens were required to address dogs using the form O-inu sama (Honorable Mr. Dog). The edicts were immediately abrogated by Tsunayoshi’s successor, the shogun Ienobu. A revenge of sorts was posthumously visited upon Tsunayoshi by the good people of Edo, who would forever refer to him by the title inu-kubo, the “Dog Shogun.”

The dispensation of favors by Tsunayoshi, much resented by the people of Edo, appeared to have been predicated on the shogun’s ever-changing sexual predilections, which were mostly centered on males. The Sanno Gaiki, a historical document, is quite clear on the topic: “The shogun preferred sex with males of all social rankings, providing they were handsome.” The record lists 130 appointments of this kind. Tsunayoshi was not a physically imposing man: life-sized Buddhist mortuary tablets kept at Daiju-ji temple in Okazaki city in Aichi prefecture record his height at 124 centimeters (4 feet).

Mercifully for the protein-deficient people of Edo, fish were not listed among Tsunayoshi’s creatures deserving of compassion. A large fish market operated at Shiba, along the bay to the southeast of the fort. A general market just outside the castle gates called Yokkaichi (Fourth-Day Market) sold dried and salted fish brought down the coast from the Kamakura area.

Edo’s largest rice granaries were located in Kuramae, where berths cut into the riverbanks housed the tributary rice shipped from the domains to the shogun’s own storehouses. Rice brokers were able to amass great wealth. The rice merchants were known for their profligacy, squandering much of their wealth in the licensed quarters of Yoshiwara and Yanagibashi. Meat was not commonly consumed, due in part to the Buddhist proscription on the eating of animal flesh. Meat was consumed as a “medicinal food,” however; some believed that it was an elixir. Animal flesh, referred to as “mountain whale,” could be bought at hunters’ markets like the one in Yotsuya, or at butcher’s shops in the vicinity of Komadome Bridge, where deer, wild boar, monkey, and varieties of game were sold.

Other creatures, on the other hand, were not consumed, but given supernatural forms and persona. Little-understood geological occurrences like earthquakes were blamed on an outlandishly sized earth spider; in the later years of Edo, seismic activity was attributed to a giant catfish that caused tremors when it became disgruntled and thrashed its tail. In a world where supernatural forces and divination were inseparable from quotidian life, natural disasters were interpreted as a form of divine retribution.

Major earthquakes and fires, a common combination, occurred in 1694 and 1703. A year later, flooding was followed by outbreaks of cholera, plague, and measles. Intense tremors shook Edo on October 4, 1707, as Mount Fuji belched ash over the city. Two days later, the mountain erupted, the fire and lava from its cone turning the sky above Edo a deep red. With ash and hot cinders falling on the city and turning daytime into night, people took to carrying lanterns. Others doused hessian cloth with water and wrapped it around their heads as a precaution against falling cinders. As people crowded into temples and shrines to offer prayer for divine intercession, the eruption was inevitably attributed to failings in governance, corruption, and political malfeasance.

Evacuating people from the impoverished warren of the shitamachi was almost impossible. The sheer number of inhabitants itself was a barrier to escape. Ieyasu had encouraged the immigration of merchants, fishermen, manufacturers, and craftspeople to his new military bastion so they could service the needs of the court and the nobility and their retainers. The population of Edo was half a million by 1630, and at the end of the century it had doubled, making Edo the most populous city in the world. The world at large, however, was hardly aware of Edo, and had yet to discover its extraordinary material growth and cultural efflorescence.

A rare survivor of war and disaster, the magnificent Toshogu in Ueno Park is one of Japan’s designated Cultural Properties. (Photo by Joe Mabel, printed under the Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic and 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licenses)