It was an excellent mode of transport, particularly suited to a crowded city of narrow streets. It was dusty and noisy, to be sure, but no dustier and in other respects cleaner than the horse that was its first genuine competitor. An honest and good-natured runner, not difficult to find, was far less dangerous than a horse. Most people seem to have liked the noise—leastways Meiji reminiscences are full of it. Rubber tires arrived, and the clatter went away, though the shouting lingered on. The best thing about the rickshaw, perhaps, was the sense it gave of being part of the city.
Even this first and simplest vehicle changed the city. The canals and rivers became less important, and places dependent on them, such as old and famous restaurants near the Yoshiwara, went out of business. Swifter means of transportation come, and people take to them. Yet it seems a pity that the old ones disappeared so completely. The rickshaw is gone today, save for a few score that move geisha from engagement to engagement.
In its time the rickshaw itself was the occasion for the demise of another traditional way of getting about. The palanquin, which had been the chief mode of transport for those who did not walk, almost disappeared with the sudden popularity of the rickshaw. It is said that after 1876, with the departure for Kagoshima of the rigidly conservative Shimazu Saburō of the Satsuma clan, palanquins were to be seen only at funerals and an occasional wedding. The bride who could not afford a carriage and thought a rickshaw beneath her used a palanquin. With the advent of motor hearses and cheap taxis the palanquin was deprived of even these specialized functions.
The emperor had his first carriage ride in 1871, on a visit to the Hama Detached Palace, where General and Mrs. Grant were to stay some years later. Horse-drawn public transportation followed very quickly after the first appearance of the rickshaw. There were omnibuses in Yokohama by 1869, and not many years later—the exact date is in doubt—they were to be seen in Ginza. A brief span in the 1870s saw two-level omnibuses, the drivers grand in velvet livery and cocked hats. The first regular route led through Ginza from Shimbashi on the south and on past Nihombashi to Asakusa. Service also ran to Yokohama, and westwards from Shinagawa, at the southern edge of the city. The horse-drawn bus was popularly known as the Entarō, from the name of a vaudeville story-teller who imitated the bugle call of the conductor, to great acclaim. Taxis, when their day came, were long known as entaku, an acronym from Entarō and “taxi,” with the first syllable signifying also “one yen.”
The horse trolley arrived in 1883. The first route followed the old omnibus route north from Shimbashi to Nihombashi, and eventually to Asakusa. In the relentless advance of new devices, horse-drawn transportation had a far shorter time of prosperity than in Europe and America. There was already experimentation with the electric trolley before the horse trolley had been in use for a decade. An industrial exposition featured an electric car in 1890. In 1903 a private company laid the first tracks for general use, from Shinagawa to Shimbashi, and later to Ueno and Asakusa. The electric system was very soon able to carry almost a hundred thousand passengers a day, for lower fares than those asked by rickshaw runners, and so the rickshaw withdrew to the suburbs. Initially in private hands, the trolley system was no strong argument for private enterprise. There were three companies, and the confusion was great. In 1911, the last full year of Meiji, the city bought the system.
Horse-drawn buses in Ginza Bricktown, from a print by Hiroshige III (Courtesy Tokyo Central Library)
The confusion is the subject of, or the occasion for, one of Nagai Kafū’s most beautiful prose lyrics, “A Song in Fukagawa” (Fukagawa no Uta), written in 1908. The narrator boards a trolley at Yotsuya and sets forth eastwards across the city. As it passes Tsukiji, an unplanned but not unusual event occurs, which sends him farther than he has thought to go.
The car crossed Sakura Bridge. The canal was wider. The lighters moving up and down gave an impression of great activity, but the New Year decorations before the narrow little shops and houses seemed punier, somehow, than in Tsukiji. The crowds on the sidewalks seemed less neat and orderly. We came to Sakamoto Park, and waited and waited for a sign that we would be proceeding onwards. None came. Cars were stopped in front of us and behind us. The conductor and motorman disappeared.
“Again, damn it. The damned powers gone off again.” A merchant in Japanese dress, leather-soled pattens and a cloak of rough, thick weave, turned to his companion, a redfaced old man in a fur muffler.
A boy jumped up, a delivery boy, probably. He had a bundle on his back, tied around his neck with a green kerchief.
“A solid line of them, so far up ahead you can’t see the end of it.”
The conductor came running back, change bag under his arm, cap far back on his head. He mopped at his brow.
“It might be a good idea to take transfers if you can use them.” Most of us got up, and not all of us were good-humored about it. “Can’t you tell us what’s wrong? How long will it be?”
“Sorry. You see how it is. They’re stopped all the way to Kayabachō…”
Caught in the general rush for the doors, I got up without thinking. I had not asked for one, but the conductor gave me a transfer to Fukagawa.
So Kafū finds himself east of the river, and meditates upon the contrast between that backward part of the city and the advanced part from which he has come. He yearns for the former, and must go back and live in the latter; and we are to suppose that he would not have had his twilight reverie if the trolley system had functioned better.
The rickshaw changed patterns of commerce by speeding people past boat landings. The trolley had a more pronounced effect, the Daimaru dry-goods store being a case in point. It was one of several such establishments that were to develop into department stores. Established in Nihombashi in the eighteenth century, it was in mid-Meiji the most popular of them all, even more so than Mitsukoshi, foundation of the Mitsui fortunes. “The Daimaru,” said Hasegawa Shigure, “was the center of Nihombashi culture and prosperity, as the Mitsukoshi is today.” In her girlhood it was a place of wonder and excitement. It had barred windows, less to keep burglars out than to keep shop boys (there were no shop girls in those days) in. Sometimes a foreign lady with foxlike visage would come in to shop, and the idle of Nihombashi would gather to stare. But the Daimaru did not lie, as its rivals did, on a main north-south trolley line. By the end of the Meiji it had closed its Tokyo business and withdrawn to the Kansai, whence only in recent years it has returned to Tokyo, this time not letting the transportation system pass it by. It commands an entrance to Tokyo Central Station.
For some, Nagai Kafū among them, the trolley was a symbol of disorder and ugliness. For others it was the introduction to a new world, at once intimidating and inviting. The novelist Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō, a university student from the country, took the advice of a friend and dashed madly and randomly about, seeking the rhythms of this new world.
Construction of a railway, financed in London, began in 1870. The chief engineer was English, and a hundred foreign technicians and workers were engaged to run it. Not until 1879 were trains entrusted to Japanese crews, and then only for daylight runs. The first line was from Shimbashi, south of Ginza, to Sakuragichō in Yokohama, a stop that still serves enormous numbers of passengers, though it is no longer the main Yokohama station. The Tokyo terminus was moved some four decades later to the present Tokyo Central Station, and the old Shimbashi Station became a freight office, disappearing in 1923.
Daimaru Department Store, Nihombashi. Woodcut by Kiyochika
The very earliest service, in the summer of 1872, was from Shinagawa, just beyond the southern limits of the city, to Yokohama. The Tokyo terminus was opened in the autumn, amid jubilation. The emperor himself took the first train He wore foreign