The first city council was elected in 1889, the year other cities were permitted to elect mayors. There were three classes of electors, divided according to income, each of which elected its own councilmen.
Some very eminent men were returned to the council in that first election, and indeed lists of councilmen through successive elections are worthy of a body with more considerable functions. The Ministry of the Interior had a veto power over acts of the city government and from time to time exercised the power, which had an inhibiting effect on the mayor and the council. Fukuzawa Yukichi, perhaps the most successful popularizer of Civilization and Enlightenment, the rallying call of the new day, was among those elected to the first council. Yasuda Zenjirō, founder of the Yasuda (now the Fuji) financial empire, was returned by the poorest class of electors.
The high standards of the council did not pervade all levels of government. There were scandals. The most sensational was the one known as the gravel scandal. On the day in 1920 that the Meiji Shrine was dedicated (to the memory of the Meiji emperor), part of a bridge just below the shrine collapsed. Investigation revealed that crumbly cement had been used, and this in turn led to revelations of corruption in the city government. The gravel scandal coincided with a utilities scandal, and the mayor, among the most popular the city has had, resigned, to be succeeded by the famous Gotō Shimpei. Tokyo deserves the name it has made for itself as a well-run city, but City Hall does have its venalities from time to time.
The Meiji system, local and national, could hardly be called democratic, but it was more democratic than the Tokugawa system had been. It admitted the possibility of radical departures. Rather large numbers of people, without reference to pedigree, had something to say about how they would be governed. Meiji was a vital period, and gestures toward recognizing plebeian talents and energies may help to account for the vitality. The city suffered from “happy insomnia,” said Hasegawa Shigure, on the night the Meiji constitution went into effect.
Her father made a speech. The audience was befuddled, shouting, “No, no!” when prearranged signals called for “Hear, hear!” and vice versa; but it was happy, so much so that one man literally drank himself to death. It is an aspect of Meiji overlooked by those who view it as a time of dark repression containing the seeds of 1945.
The population of the city increased from about the fifth year of Meiji. It did not reach the highest Edo levels until the mid-1880s. The sparsely populated High City was growing at a greater rate than the Low City, though in absolute terms the accretion was larger in the Low City. The new population came overwhelmingly from the poor rural areas of northeastern Japan. Despite its more stable population, the Low City had a higher divorce rate than the High City, and a higher rate than the average for the nation. But then the Low City had always been somewhat casual toward sex and domesticity. It had a preponderantly male population, and Tokyo continues to be one of the few places in the land where men outnumber women. The High City changed more than the Low City in the years between the Restoration and the earthquake, but when sons of Edo lament the death of their city, they refer to the dispersal of the townsman and his culture, the culture of the Low City. The rich moved away and so their patronage of the arts was withdrawn, and certain parts of the Low City, notably those immediately east of the palace, changed radically.
The Meiji emperor, photographed in 1872
Change, as it always is, was uneven. Having heard the laments of the sons of Edo and turned to scrutinize the evidence, one may be more surprised at the continuity. The street pattern, for instance, changed little between Restoration and earthquake. In his 1874 guide to the city, W. E. Griffis remarked upon “the vast extent of open space as well as the lowness and perishable material of which the houses are built.” Pictures taken from the roof of the City Hall in the last years of Meiji still show astonishing expanses of open land, where once the mansions of the military aristocracy had stood. Photographs from the Nikolai Cathedral in Kanda, taken upwards of a decade earlier, show almost unbroken expanses of low wooden buildings all the way to the horizon, dissolving into what were more probably photographic imperfections than industrial mists.
One would have had to scan the expanses carefully to find precise and explicit survivals among the back alleys of Edo. Fires were too frequent, and the wish to escape the confines of an alley and live on a street, however narrow, was too strong. Yet one looks at those pictures taken from heights and wonders what all those hundreds of thousands of people were doing and thinking, and the very want of striking objects seems to offer an answer. The hundreds of thousands must have been far closer to their forebears of a hundred years before than to the leaders, foreign and domestic, of Civilization and Enlightenment.
Even today the Low City is different from the High City—tighter, more conservative, less given to voguish things. The difference is something that has survived, not something that has been wrought by the modern century.
It was considered very original of Charles Beard, not long before the earthquake, to characterize Tokyo as a collection of villages, but the concept was already familiar enough. John Russell Young, in attendance upon General and Mrs. Grant when they came visiting in 1879, thus described a passage up the river to dine at an aristocratic mansion:
The Prince had intended to entertain us in his principal town-house, the one nearest the Enriokwan, but the cholera broke out in the vicinity, and the Prince invited us to another of his houses in the suburbs of Tokio. We turned into the river, passing the commodious grounds of the American Legation, its flag weather-worn and shorn; passing the European settlement, which looked a little like a well-to-do Connecticut town, noting the little missionary churches surmounted by the cross; and on for an hour or so past tea houses and ships and under bridges, and watching the shadows descend over the city. It is hard to realize that Tokio is a city—one of the greatest cities of the world. It looks like a series of villages, with bits of green and open spaces and inclosed grounds breaking up the continuity of the town. There is no special character to Tokio, no one trait to seize upon and remember, except that the aspect is that of repose. The banks of the river are low and sedgy, at some points a marsh. When we came to the house of the Prince we found that he had built a causeway of bamboo through the marsh out into the river.
The city grew almost without interruption from early Meiji to the earthquake. There was a very slight population drop just before the First World War, to be accounted for by economic disquiet, but by the end of Meiji there were not far from two million people. Early figures, based on family registers, proved to be considerably exaggerated when, in 1908, the national government made a careful survey. It showed a population of about a million and two-thirds. This had risen to over two million by 1920, when the first national census was taken. The 1920 census showed that almost half the residents of the city had been born elsewhere, the largest number in Chiba Prefecture, just across the bay; and so it may be that the complaints of the children of Edo about the new men from the southwest were exaggerated. In the decade preceding the census (the figures are based upon family registers) the three central wards seem to have gained population at a much