Tokyo had been somewhat tentatively renamed and reorganized, but it passed through the worst of the Restoration uncertainty by the fourth or fifth year of Meiji, and was ready for Civilization and Enlightenment: Bummei Kaika. The four Chinese characters, two words, very old, provided the magical formula for the new day. Bummei is generally rendered as “civilization,” though it is closely related to bunka, usually rendered as “culture.” Kaika means something like “opening” or “liberalization,” though “enlightenment” is perhaps the commonest rendering. Both words are ancient borrowings from Chinese. As early as 1867 they were put together and offered as an alternative to the dark shadows of the past.
“Examining history, we see that life has been dark and closed, and that it advances in the direction of civilization and enlightenment.” Already in 1867 we have the expression from the brush of Fukuzawa Yukichi, who was to coin many another new word and expression for the new day. Though in 1867 Fukuzawa was still a young man, not far into his thirties, the forerunner of what was to become his very own Keiō University had been in session for almost a decade. No other university seems so much the creation of a single man. His was a powerful and on the whole benign personality. In education and journalism and all manner of other endeavors he was the most energetic and successful of propagandizers for the liberal and utilitarian principles that, in his view, were to beat the West at its own game.
For the Meiji regime, Bummei Kaika meant Western modes and methods. Though not always of such liberal inclinations as Fukuzawa, the regime agreed that the new formula would be useful in combatting Western encroachment. Tokyo and Osaka, the great cities of the old day, led the advance, together with the port cities of the new.
The encroachment was already apparent, and it was to be more so with the arrival of large-nosed, pinkish foreigners in considerable numbers. The formal opening of Edo was scheduled to occur in 1862. Unsettled conditions brought a five-year delay. The shogunate continued building a foreign settlement all the same. Tsukiji, on the bay east of the castle and the Ginza district, was selected for reasons having to do with protecting both foreigner from native and native from foreigner. Isolated from the rest of the city by canals and gates and a considerable amount of open space known as Navy Meadow, the settlement was ready for occupation in 1867. The foreign legations, of which there were then eleven, received word some weeks after the Restoration that the opening of the city must wait until more equable conditions prevailed. The government finally announced it towards the end of the year. Several legations, the American legation among them, moved to Tsukiji.
The gates to the settlement were early abandoned, and access became free. Foreigners employed by the government received residences elsewhere in the city, in such places as “the Kaga estate” (Kaga yashiki), the present Hongo campus of Tokyo University. Others had to live in the Tsukiji quarter if they were to live in Tokyo at all. Not many of them did. Tsukiji was never popular with Europeans and Americans, except the missionaries among them. The foreign population wavered around a hundred, and increasingly it was Chinese. Though small, it must have been interesting. A list of foreign residents for 1872 includes a Frenchman described as an “equestrian acrobat.” Among them were, of course, bad ones, opium dealers and the like, and the gentle treatment accorded them by the consulates aroused great resentment, which had the contradictory effect of increasing enthusiasm for Civilization and Enlightenment—faithful application of the formula, it was felt, might persuade foreign powers to do without extraterritoriality.
The two chief wonders of Tsukiji did not lie within the foreign settlement. The Tsukiji Hoterukan was across a canal to the south. The New Shimabara licensed quarter, established to satisfy the presumed needs of foreign gentlemen, was to the north and west, towards Kyōbashi.
The Hoterukan could only be early Meiji. Both the name and the building tell of the first meetings between Meiji Japan and the West. Hoteru is “hotel,” and kan is a Sino-Japanese term of roughly the same meaning. The building was the delight of early photographers and late print-makers. One must lament its short history, for it was an original, a Western building unlike any building in the West. The structure, like its name, had a mongrel air, foreign details applied to a traditional base or frame. The builder was Shimizu Kisuke, founder of the Shimizu-gumi, one of the largest modern construction companies. Shimizu was a master carpenter, or perhaps a sort of building contractor, who came from a province on the Japan Sea to study foreign architecture in Yokohama.
Although the Hoterukan was completed in early Meiji, it had been planned from the last days of Tokugawa as an adjunct to the foreign settlement. It took the shape of an elongated U. Records of its dimensions are inconsistent, but it was perhaps two hundred feet long, with more than two hundred rooms on three floors, and a staff numbering more than a hundred. Tokugawa instincts required that it face away from the sea and towards the nondescript Ginza and Navy Meadow; the original design, taking advantage of the grandest prospect, was reversed by xenophobic bureaucrats, who wished the place to look more like a point of egress than a point of ingress. There was a pretty Japanese garden on the bay side, with a tea cottage and a pergola, but the most striking features of the exterior were the tower, reminiscent of a sixteenth-century Japanese castle, and walls of the traditional sort called namako, or “trepang,” dark tiles laid diagonally with white interstices.
From the outside, little about it except the height and the window sashes seems foreign at all, though perhaps an Anglo-Indian influence is apparent in the wide verandas. Wind bells hung along chains from a weathervane to the corners of the tower. The interior was plastered and painted in the foreign manner.
Through the brief span of its existence, the Hoterukan was among the wonders of the city. Like the quarter itself, however, it does not seem to have been the sort of place people wished to live in. It was sold in 1870 to a consortium of Yokohama businessmen, and in 1872 it disappeared in the great Ginza fire. (It may be of interest to note that this calamity, like the military rising of 1936, was a Two-Two-Six Incident, an event of the twenty-sixth day of the Second Month. Of course the later event was dated by the solar calendar and the earlier one by the old lunar calendar; yet the Two-Two-Six is obviously one of those days of which to be apprehensive.) The 1872 fire began at three in the afternoon, in a government building within the old castle compound.
Fanned by strong winds, it burned eastward through more than two hundred acres before reaching the bay. Government buildings, temples, and mansions of the old and new aristocracy were taken, and fifty thousand people of the lesser classes were left homeless. It was not the largest fire of the Meiji Period, but it was perhaps the most significant. From it emerged the new Ginza, a commercial center for Civilization and Enlightenment and a symbol of the era.
Then there was that other marvel, the New Shimabara. For the accommodation of the foreigner a pleasure quarter was decreed. It was finished in 1869, among the first accomplishments of the new government. The name was borrowed from the famous Shimabara quarter of Kyoto. Ladies arrived from all over the Kantō district, but most of them came from the Yoshiwara. In 1870, at the height of its short career, it had a very large component indeed, considering the small size of the foreign settlement and its domination by missionaries. It followed the elaborate Yoshiwara system, with teahouses serving as appointment stations for admission to the grander brothels. Upwards of seventeen hundred courtesans and some two hundred geisha, twenty-one of them male, served in more than two hundred establishments, a hundred thirty brothels and eighty-four teahouses.
The New Shimabara did not prosper. Its career, indeed, was even shorter than that of the Hoterukan, for it closed even before the great fire. A report informed the city government that foreigners came in considerable numbers to look, but few lingered to play. The old military class also stayed away. Other pleasure quarters had depended in large measure upon a clientele from the military class, but the New Shimabara got only townsmen. In 1870 fire destroyed a pleasure quarter in Fukagawa, across the river (where, it was said, the last of the real Edo geisha held out).