The most interesting thing about the quarter is what it tells us of changing official standards. In very early Meiji it was assumed that the foreigner, not so very different from the Japanese, would of course desire bawdy houses. Prudishness quickly set in, or what might perhaps better be described as deference to foreign standards. When the railway was put through to Yokohama, a land trade resulted in a pleasure quarter right beside the tracks and not far from the Yokohama terminus. Before long, the authorities had it moved away. Foreign visitors would think it out of keeping with Civilization and Enlightenment.
The foreign settlement seems to have been chiefly a place of bright missionary and educational undertakings. Such eminent institutions as Rikkyō University, whose English name is St. Paul’s, had their beginnings there, and St. Luke’s Hospital still occupies its original Tsukiji site.
The reaction of the impressionable townsman to the quarter is as interesting as the quarter itself. The word “Christian” had taken on sinister connotations during the centuries of isolation. In appearance so very Christian, the settlement was assumed to contain more than met the eye.
At about the turn of the century Tanizaki Junichirō was sent there for English lessons. Late in his life he described the experience:
There was in those days an English school run by ladies of the purest English stock, or so it was said—not a Japanese among them… Exotic Western houses stood in unbroken rows, and among them an English family named Summer had opened a school. At the gate with its painted louver boards was a wooden plaque bearing, in Chinese, the legend “Bullseye School of European Letters.” No one called it by the correct name. It was known rather as “The Summer.” I have spoken of “an English family,” but we cannot be sure that they were really English. They may have been a collection of miscellaneous persons from Hong Kong and Shanghai and the like. They were, in any event, an assembly of “she foreigners,” most alluring, from eighteen or nineteen to perhaps thirty. The outward appearance was as of sisters, and there was an old woman described as their mother; and there was not a man in the house. I remember that the youngest called herself Alice and said she was nineteen. Then there were Lily, Agnes, and Susa [sic]… If indeed they were sisters, it was curious that they resembled each other so little…
Even for us who came in groups, the monthly tuition was a yen, and it must have been considerably more for those who had private lessons. A yen was no small sum of money in those days. The English lived far better, of course, than we who were among the unenlightened. They were civilized. So we could not complain about the tuition…
Bird’s-eye view of Tsukiji foreign settlement
Wakita spoke in a whisper when he told me—he had apparently heard it from his older brother—that the she foreigners secretly received gentlemen of the Japanese upper classes, and that they were for sale also to certain Kabuki actors (or perhaps in this instance they were the buyers). The Baikō preceding the present holder of that name, he said, was among them. He also said that the matter of private lessons was a strange one, for they took place upstairs during the evening hours. Evidence that Wakita’s statement was not a fabrication is at hand, in the “Conference Room” column of the Tokyo Shimbun for January 27, 1954. The article, by the recently deceased actor Kawarazaki Gonjūrō, is headed: “On the Pathological Psychology of the Sixth Kikugorō.” I will quote the relevant passage:
“There was in those days an English school in Tsukiji called the Summer. I was sent to it. The old Uzaemon and Baikō, and Fukusuke, who later became Utaemon, had all been there before me, and it would seem that their object had to do less with the English language than with the Sanctuary of the Instincts. Among the Summer girls was a very pretty one named Susa. She was the lure that drew us.”
Later Sasanuma, to keep me company, also enrolled in the Summer. The two of us thought one day to see what the upstairs might be like. We were apprehended along the way, but we succeeded in catching a glimpse of florid decorations.
Here is a description of Tsukiji from another lover of the exotic, the poet Kitahara Hakushu, writing after the settlement had disappeared in the earthquake, not to return:
A ferry—off to Boshū, off to Izu?
A whistle sounds, a whistle.
Beyond the river the fishermen’s isle,
And on the near shore the lights of the Metropole.
This little ditty written in his youth by my friend Kinoshita Mokutarō, and Eau-de-vie de Dantzick, and the print in three colors of a Japanese maiden playing a samisen in an iris garden in the foreign settlement, and the stained glass and the ivy of the church, and the veranda fragrant with lavender paulownia blossoms, and a Chinese amah pushing a baby carriage, and the evening stir, “It’s silver it’s green it’s red,” from across the river, and, yes, the late cherries of St. Luke’s and its bells, and the weird secret rooms of the Metropole, and opium, and the king of trumps, and all the exotic things of the proscribed creed—they are the faint glow left behind from an interrupted dream.
The foreign settlement was rebuilt after the Ginza fire, but not the Hoterukan. As the reminiscences of Hakushū tell us, there were other hotels. The Metropole was built in 1890 on the site of the American legation when the latter moved to the present site of the embassy. The Seiyōken is recommended in Griffis’s guide of 1874. It was already in Tsujiki before the first railway was put through, and food fit for foreigners was brought from Yokohama by runner. The Seiyōken enterprise survives as a huge and famous restaurant in Ueno.
The Tsukiji foreign settlement lost its special significance when, at the end of the nineteenth century, revision of “the unequal treaties” brought an end to extraterritoriality. By way of bringing Japan into conformity with international practice in other respects as well, foreigners were allowed to live where they chose. The quarter vanished in the earthquake and fire of 1923, leaving behind only such mementoes as St. Luke’s.
Very soon after the Restoration the city set about changing from water and pedestrian transport to wheels. A significant fact about the first stage in the process is that it did not imitate the West. It was innovative. The rickshaw or jinrickshaw is conventionally reviled as a symbol of human degradation. Certainly there is that aspect. It might be praised for the ingenuity of the concept and the design, however, and if the city and the nation were determined to spin about on wheels, it was a cheap, simple, and clean way of getting started. Though the origins of the rickshaw are not entirely clear, they seem to be Japanese, and of Tokyo specifically. The most widely accepted theory offers the names of three inventors, and gives 1869 as the date of the invention. The very first rickshaw is thought to have operated in Nihombashi. Within the next few years there were as many as fifty thousand in the city. The iron wheels made a fine clatter on rough streets and bridges, and the runners had their distinctive cries among all the other street cries. The populace does not seem to have paid as close attention as it might have. Edward S. Morse, an American professor of zoology who arrived in the tenth year of Meiji to teach at the university, remarked upon the absentminded way in which pedestrians received the warning cries. They held their ground, as if the threat would go away.
Some of the rickshaws were artistically decorated, and some, it would seem, salaciously, with paintings on their rear elevations. In 1872 the more exuberant styles of decoration were banned. Tokyo (though not yet the provinces) was discovering decorum. Runners were required to wear more than the conventional loincloth. Morse describes how a runner stopped at the city limits to cover himself properly.
For a time in early Meiji four-wheeled rickshaws carrying several passengers and pushed and pulled by at least two men operated between Tokyo and Yokohama. There are records of runners who took loaded rickshaws from Tokyo to Kyoto in a week, and of women runners.
From late Meiji the number of rickshaws declined radically, and runners were in great