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CHAPTER 2

The Restive City

Flowering of culture – Neo-Confucianism – A rising

merchant class – The green city – Perry’s black ships

– Assassinations, war, turmoil – The end of Edo

On an unseasonably snowy morning in January 30, 1703, an event took place that electrified Edo, plunging it into a protracted debate about honor, duty, and punishment. Lord Kira Yoshinaka, a daimyo whose sumptuous estate lay close to the Sumida River in Ryogoku, had been appointed to instruct young Lord Asano Naganori Takuminokami in the finer points of court ritual. Failing to receive the gifts he felt entitled to and openly derisive of his charge, Lord Kira goaded Asano to the point where he drew his dagger and struck out at the older man—a grievous offence at court that was punishable by death. The assailant was arrested and ordered to commit seppuku, ritual self-disembowelment.

With the Asano family disinherited and its estates divided up, its retainers became masterless ronin (“wave men”). Oishi Kuranosuke, Asano’s elder councilor, began secretly plotting his master’s revenge along with forty-six other former Asano retainers. Cognizant that Kira’s men would be keeping them under strict surveillance, the ronin set about obliterating any traces of samurai bearing in their public demeanor, blending in with the populace by taking up the activities of petty merchants, laborers, carpenters, peddlers, and tinkers. Oishi himself repaired to Kyoto, where he adopted a life of drunkenness and dissipation, going as far as to evict his wife and two young children from his home and take up with a young concubine of ill repute. Oishi’s debauchery and apparent desire for self-annihilation were dutifully reported to Kira, who began to lower his guard. It was an effective ruse.

Asano’s former retainers saw their imminent act less as revenge than high ritual. Accordingly, they dressed in new clothing, donning white underwear of padded silk, hakama trousers, black padded kimonos bearing family crests, gauntlets, leggings, and black-and-white hoods and mantles. Some followed the ancient custom of burning incense in their helmets. If the enemy cut their heads off, their helmets would be fragrantly scented.

In the early morning hours of January 30, 1703, Oishi’s men stormed Kira’s snowbound villa. Several of Kira’s men fought to the last, while others, including his son, dropped their weapons and fled. The ronin found Kira’s bed still warm, but empty. A brief search of the property revealed an old hut used to store charcoal, and it was there they found their prey. The identity of the man in the hut, who was dressed in a white satin sleeping-gown, was confirmed by the scar from Asano’s dagger. Offered the chance to commit seppuku, Kira refused. Oishi then stepped forward and beheaded him with Lord Asano’s own sword.

After walking through streets covered in an unusually thick layer of snow, carrying the head in a bucket, the ronin boarded a ferry that took them to the pine-covered shore beneath Sengakuji temple. They washed the head in a well, and then placed it before Asano’s tomb. Each retainer kneeled, and, burning a pinch of incense, prayed for his master’s repose. After this ritual, the abbot of the temple invited them into the main hall where he served them a temple breakfast of simple rice gruel.

The retainers had dispensed justice in perfect accordance with the code of honor demanded by samurai ethics, so how could the shogunate enact its own? Scholars were employed by the authorities to write briefs examining the moral and penal issues. The only conceivable judgment one that would save face for all parties was the eventual order issued to the ronin to commit suicide. The self-disembowelments of the forty-seven retainers, who ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-seven, took place on February 4, 1703. The event quickly passed into popular culture, with woodblock prints portraying scenes from the revenge tale, and a major Kabuki play, Chushingura (Treasury of Loyal Retainers), was written by the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Theatrical representations of the incident were invariably set in the past, however, to comply with government prohibitions on portraying recent events.

Ronin more fractious than the disciplined assassins who dispatched Lord Kira roamed the streets of Edo. Cast out of service for misdemeanors, or made redundant by disgraced masters stripped of their privileges, these men behaved unpredictably, posing political problems for the shogunate, as they often became involved in brawls and riots. In the 1790s, the shogun’s chief councilor, Matsudaira Sadanobu, had a detention center built on Tsukudajima, an artificial island in the Sumida River, where ronin, along with vagrants, could be held while they learnt a trade. It was a solution of sorts, though a scheme to turn men trained as warriors into harmless artisans was an imperfect one.

Economically bled by the sankin kotai system of rotating residence, the warrior class became more effete as they devoted their time less to martial arts and more to the pleasures of patronizing Noh plays, holding incense parties, collecting fine pieces of ceramic ware, and attending the tea ceremony. Groups of low-ranking hatamoto (bannermen), though officially the shogun’s fighting force, often found themselves with time on their hands. These young samurai, with their notoriously low stipends, could be troublesome in their idle moments. They refused to settle their debts when cash-strapped, and could be socially disruptive, even violent, when flush with money. The notorious Shiratsuka-Gumi, or “White Hilt Gang,” typified the brash, unstable elements that would become a feature of Edo street life, emerging in the early 1640s only to be eliminated by the authorities at the end of the seventeenth century. The gang’s name came from the swords they carried, which were conspicuously longer than normal and decorated, like their obi (sashes), with showy white fittings. They took their sartorial rebellion and contempt for convention to new heights by wearing long kimonos in summer and short ones in winter. To promote an affected swagger, they placed lead at the bottom of their kimono hems, causing their clothes to swing.

It was a showy form of representation that had something in common with the urban, or at least etymological, origins of Kabuki. The original meaning of the word kabuki—from the verb kabuku, which carried the sense of leaning or tilting off-balance—had little or no connection to a theatrical form. It also suggested the idea of having an eccentric personal appearance, and acting in a free-spirited, uninhibited manner. By the seventeenth century, it had acquired the meaning of “being unusual or out of the ordinary,” and also connoted sexual debauchery. The image of the kabukimono—the rowdy, swaggering young blades of Edo—embodies some of the spirit and style of the age. The subversive reputation of Kabuki, an egalitarian art affordable to all but the poorest, and widely supported by the lower orders of Edo society—and its transgressive potential—evident in its frequent breaking of sumptuary laws and tendency to draw its subject matter from current, often sensitive events—never failed to exacerbate the authorities. The Tokugawa authorities, despising all forms of plebeian theater, were never completely able to cut the townspeople off from a drama they had adopted as their own. Kabuki would eventually have to compete for audiences with yose (variety halls). An affordable alternative to the bath-houses and meaner bordellos of the Yoshiwara, yose provided the townspeople with a lively program of comedians, jugglers, dancers and storytellers.

Crossings close to main streets and bridges were requisitioned as open entertainment spaces called hirokoji. Here, social ranking tended to blur as visitors’ attention was distracted by top spinners, acrobatics, magic shows, side stalls, tooth-powder vendors, and displays of exotic creatures—camels, Bengali oxen, ostriches, cassowaries, and donkeys—brought into the country by Dutch traders in Nagasaki. Quite how many of these animals, often presented as official gifts to shoguns, ended up in the hirokoji of Edo, is unclear. Performances of “beggar’s Kabuki” by minor troupes were held in makeshift theaters made from reed mats. Actors doubled up on roles, each side of their face made up to represent a different character. The two sides of their bodies were likewise dressed in the costume of each respective protagonist. More circus-like acts involved performers leaping through baskets spiked with sword blades and rattan hoops affixed with burning candles.

The most popular of the Edo hirokoji was at the western approach to the Ryogoku Bridge spanning the Sumida River. Inevitably, the unscrupulous preyed on the crowds: mountebanks sold snake medicine and miracle formulas to the credulous; Buddhist exorcisms were as popular as lantern shows and performances by illusionists.

The firebreak at Ueno, at the southeast corner of Shinobazu Pond in Shitaya, provided a similar fare of acrobats, fire-eaters, dancers, preachers, and sermonizers. The lanes behind its teahouses, stalls, and booths offered the services of kekoro, low-class prostitutes working in the district’s cramped brothels.

Like its Ryogoku counterpart, Ueno offered makeshift tents, stalls, and booths made of reed and wattle set up for performances by acrobats, jugglers, and storytellers. Inside the tents you could see peep shows; exhibitions of human freaks; lifelike models of goblins, giants and Dutch galleons; and crude pornographic shows. There were tableaux vivants of a similar voyeuristic nature, featuring realistic models of courtesans in various stages of undress.

Okuyama, a patch of land behind the main hall of Senso-ji temple, was just as animated. There were brothels posing as archery galleries, conjurers, and automata; displays of papier-mâché figures depicted red-haired barbarians, scenes from Kabuki, and a particularly terrifying model of the old hag of Adachi Moor, a bloodthirsty woman who enticed travelers into her hut in order to rob and murder them. There were stalls dispensing sake and tea, and others where you could find cosmetics, hairpins, boxwood combs, plants, medicines, and solutions for blackening teeth.

Edo was a bodacious, pullulating city, one whose population by 1720 exceeded 1.3 million, making it the largest city in the world. London, the most congested city in Europe, had a population of 850,000 by 1801, Beijing roughly one million. Any notion of a city boundary had long vanished. Because of the nature of employment in Edo, where trades and crafts largely excluded women, only a third of its population was female. By 1720, there was population parity between the shitamachi and the yamanote; each had roughly 650,000 inhabitants. The disproportion, however, was in density, as the shitamachi region covered a mere 16 percent of the surface area of Edo.

Governance and infrastructure initiatives may have originated from an elite, demographically small class, but it was Edo’s own inhabitants—the lower orders—who seem to have dictated the character of the city. Those with three generations of uninterrupted Edo ancestry could now lay claim to the moniker “Edokko,” meaning “true child of Edo.” Edokko prided themselves on being unproductive and expressed open contempt for pecuniary concerns; their sense of identity could be heard in expressions like “The true Edokko loves fires and brawls,” and “It’s an unqualified Edokko who hoards money.” Rather than creating a sense of grievance and separateness, the impoverished living conditions east of the river inspired a fierce, confrontational pride in the inhabitants. They were not universally liked. The diligent tradesmen of Osaka, for example, derided the Edokko as “rakes and profligates of Edo, hot-bloodied but hairy-brained, putting assets into bottomless bags.” The Edokko embodied the energy and appetite of the city, representing a powerful, potentially untamed force that was, accordingly, the object of much suspicion by the authorities. The townspeople were not exactly manning the barricades, but there were subtle forms of subversion taking place. The backers of this process were the wealthier merchant families that supported popular culture in all its prolific forms—from the red chambers of the pleasure quarters to Kabuki, to fashions in dress, to new work from members of the literati and woodblock artists.

A slew of gifted writers and satirists with a good eye for social follies, excesses, and injustice aided social change. Edo offered freedoms not vouchsafed for in other major cities like Osaka and Kyoto. It was possible for people not listed on the Census Register, for example, to pass unnoticed in Edo’s rich social mix, making a living as day laborers. It was relatively easy to blend in with the social outcasts and criminal class.

Inhabiting the lower rungs of the social ladder did not exclude the townspeople from developing an urbane, codified style of manners and tastes. A bravura aesthetic involving a loud flair, ostentation, and straightforwardness flourished in Edo. A more subdued and understated style was closely associated with the wealthy Low City merchant, who had connections with the Yoshiwara. The acquisition of such tastes represented a greater degree of cultural discernment. The more rebellious, lower-class practitioners of a brasher, more vivid form of style and taste, on the other hand, preferred districts like Fukagawa, a working-class pleasure quarter that flourished in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The former were likely to engage in amorous dalliances in the cultural setting of literature, witty conversation, art, and music; the latter to pursue simpler, more easily attainable forms of desire. In this period of ripe, ultimately subversive culture, the Buddhist term ukiyo, denoting the impermanence of life, was appropriated and repurposed to express the “floating” decadence and social flux of the era.