Also—a reason for the acceleration—Japan now has more people in it than ever before. This means less space. Old-time spreading out—whether in public parks or private houses—has become much more expensive. More efficient housing, more efficient methods of feeding, more efficient entertainment—all of this means enormous change. Brand-new products must be consumed in ever larger doses to spur an economy whose only consideration is its own steady growth. New products are welcomed everywhere in the world—if the hype is right—but only in Japan is the shin hatsubai (newly available) so ubiquitous as to be a national institution.
Added to this is a certain fecklessness, long visible and celebrated from the Edo era—it even had a name, iki—which finds in the changing fashions and the latest modes a gratification not unknown in other countries but seldom elsewhere found in such a lavishly concentrated form. Fads and fancies follow each other in an endless parade across the tube, the screen, and onto the streets. All of these are fittingly expensive and all are dependent only upon naked novelty.
Finally—another reason for Japan's particularly poignant reaction to change—is that it is acknowledged ("a world of dew") in the same breath as it is regretted ("but even so"). Though there are resigned repetitions of that national slogan, shikata ga nai (can't be helped), there is at the same time an acknowledged sadness, a public admission of the essentially tragic nature of life.
The officially optimistic West ("no use crying over spilt milk") has never understood this. Things over there always change for the better, in the long run, for the most people—and it is only the romantics at best, the old fogies at worst, who would think otherwise.
Japan is only cautiously optimistic. It seems from these shores that the mildly pessimistic might in the long run, for the most people, turn out to be the more accurate. Hence, hundreds of years ago, a name was given this benign sense of tragedy wherein dissolution was acknowledge, accepted, and to an extent even celebrated.
The name is mono no aware, a tangled term with a disputed etymology which nonetheless illuminates Japanese art and continues to lighten Japanese life. There are various interpretations. It has been compared to the Western lacrimae rarum as well as the universal stream of Heraclitus. Regarding vanishing Japan, however, a more homely illustration might be: Look into the mirror and regard one more wrinkle, one more gray hair. The proper mono no aware attitude is not to call up for an appointment at the beauty parlor but to gaze, find things going as they must and therefore should and, if possible, smile. This is mono no aware in action. And it is a term salient to the Japanese identity.
Around 1332, aesthetic recluse Yoshida Kenko, noting all the change around him, wrote that: "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty." And in quoting this Donald Keene noted that indeed this is "the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal— perishability."
Perishability as an ideal is not a notion familiar to nor congenial with the West. Over there, the way is to decry the change and then go ahead and embrace it. Over here, in Japan, the way is to embrace the necessity of the change itself.
Let us then, in old Japanese fashion, accept (shikata ga nai) necessary change. But in celebrating our very transience let us also remember. We should, as did Kenko, write about what has passed, make lists, catalogues, and celebrate what was with the same voice that we celebrate the need, even the virtue, of its passing.
This is what Elizabeth Kiritani has done. Here quite long enough to have seen massive change, she has compiled descriptions of this vanishing Japan—and Itsuo Kiritani has deftly sketched the buildings, the objects, the very people, before they disappear. In so doing they have both rendered the past alive.
One of the reasons they can do this is that they live in one of the last stands of old Tokyo. This is the neighborhood of Yanaka, only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the Ginza, but a warren of narrow streets, temples, stands of bamboo, bathhouses, mom-and-pop stores—some of the sights of which you can see in the illustrations in this book.
I live in Yanaka too, just up the street from the old Edo-style house where the Kiritanis live. And as I sit here, following my brush, as the old essayists say, a cool summer breeze wanders into my room, bringing with it the faint scent of lotus and the rich smell of mud, for just over that ridge of trees is Shinobazu Pond, the principal ornament of Ueno Park.
That it is still there, cool in the summer and home to hundreds of water birds, is due to Elizabeth and her neighbors. She has been socially useful and politically practical in joining (and creating) groups of concerned citizens who fight against avoidable and damaging changes which continue to threaten. Shinobazu has for the time being been saved from the developers who want a parking lot instead of a pond. She and her friends marched on the officials of Taito Ward and demanded that the pond remain. This time the developers backed down, but this eight-year-old battle still goes on.
Combining then a regard for the past with a critical eye to the future, Elizabeth Kiritani has—like Kenko before her—limned the vanishing with precision, with care, and with love. So long as her work remains, old Japan will not have vanished entirely.
Summer, 1994
Tokyo
Publicity Bands I
If you happen upon three or four people dressed outlandishly and dancing down the street banging on drums and tinny things, sparkling as they twirl and shout, chances are that you have run across the chindonya. Skipping and dancing, they disappear down an alley only to re-emerge from another, the leader clanging his metal gong while making official-sounding announcements, a saxophonist at the rear. No, it's not the Mad Hatter's tea party gone berserk, but the last of a long tradition of street advertising.
Chindon tradition dates back to the Meiji Era (1868-1912), when they were called tozaiya or hiromeya. In those times, jinta, or street musicians, who later accompanied silent films, performed the same type of street advertising. When the talkies started, these musicians, as well as a lot of itinerant actors and actresses, lost their jobs and many of them became chindonya. The name chindonya—which came into use during the early Showa Era (circa 1926)—comes from the sound of the leader's metal and leather drums which make a "chin" and "don" sound. Of course, in the old days there was less street noise and the chindonya were very loud and conspicuous.
The golden age of the chindon business was between 1946 and 1956, when work was plentiful and lucrative. Kinosuke Hanashima is the boss of a group that occasionally works in our neighborhood. His father and mother had been chindonya after the war and when his father died, he had to quit his job as a city worker to accompany his mother and help support their large family. His is a popular group: he has received four silver and at least ten bronze medals from the chindon association for their performances.
A group usually has seven members, of which up to four work at one time. This is so that at busy times the group can work two jobs by splitting up into one group of three and another of four. The one who heads the group as they proceed down the street is the hatamochi (or hataodori) who carries a flag and gives out leaflets. He or she is followed by the oyakata, the boss, who carries the chindon drums with their large paper umbrella propped up over them. The third in procession used to play the shamisen, but now is the