The fare was higher than for a boat or horse-drawn bus. Everyone wanted a ride, but only the affluent could afford a ride daily. Eighty percent of the passengers are said to have been merchants and speculators with business in Yokohama. The first tickets carried English, German, and French translations. From 1876 on, there was only English.
It was in 1877 that an early passenger, E. S. Morse, made his famous discovery of the shell middens of Omori, usually considered the birthplace of Japanese archeology. The train took almost an hour to traverse its twenty-five kilometers, and Omori was then a country village offering no obstructions, and so, without leaving his car, Morse was able to contemplate the mounds at some leisure and recognize them for what they were.
The Tokyo-Yokohama line was the first segment of the Tokaidō line, put through from Tokyo to Kobe in 1889. Unlike the Tokaidō, the main line to the north was built privately, from Ueno. It was completed to Aomori, at the northern tip of the main island, in 1891. By the turn of the century private endeavor had made a beginning at the network of suburban lines that was to work such enormous changes on the city; in 1903 Shibuya Station, outside the city limits to the southwest, served an average of fifteen thousand passengers a day. When it had been first opened, less than two decades before, it served only fifteen.
Shimbashi Station possessed curious ties with the Edo tradition. The Edo mansion of the lords of Tatsuno had stood on the site. Tatsuno was a fief neighboring that of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers of the most famous Edo vendetta. The Forty-seven are said to have refreshed themselves there as they made their way across the city, their vendetta accomplished, to commit suicide.
If the railroad caused jubilation, it also brought opposition. The opposition seems to have been strongest in the bureaucracy. Carrying Yokohama and its foreigners closer to the royal seat was not thought a good idea. If a railroad must be built, might it not better run to the north, where it could be used against the most immediately apparent threat, the Russians? Along a part of its course, just south of the city, it was in the event required to run inland, because for strategic reasons the army opposed the more convenient coastal route.
Among the populace the railway does not seem to have aroused as much opposition as the telegraph, about which the wildest rumors spread, associating it with the black magic of the Christians and human sacrifice. People seem to have been rather friendly towards the locomotive. Thinking that it must be hot, poor thing, they would douse it with water from embankments.
By the eve of the earthquake there were ten thousand automobiles in the city, but they did not displace the railroad as railroad and trolley had displaced the rickshaw. In one important respect they were no competition at all. When the railroad came, the Ukiyo-e print of Edo was still alive. The art, or business, had considerable vigor, though many would say that it was decadent. Enormous numbers of prints were made, millions of them annually in Tokyo alone, almost exclusively in the Low City. Few sold for as much as a penny. They were throwaways, little valued either as art or as investment. Nor were technical standards high. Artists did not mind and did not expect their customers to mind that the parts of a triptych failed to join precisely. Bold chemical pigments were used with great abandon. Yet Meiji prints often have a contagious exuberance. They may not be reliable in all their details, but they provide excellent documents, better than photographs, of the Meiji spirit. Losses over the years have been enormous. Today such of them as survive are much in vogue, bringing dollar prices that sometimes run into four figures, or yen prices in six figures.
The printmakers of early Meiji loved trains and railroads. Many of the prints are highly fanciful, like representations of elephants and giraffes by people who have never seen one. A train may seem to have no axles, and to roll on its wheels as a house might roll on logs. Windows are frivolously draped, and two trains will be depicted running on the same track in collision course, as if that should be no problem for something so wondrous. The more fanciful images can seem prophetic, showing urban problems to come, smog, traffic jams, a bureaucracy indifferent to approaching disaster.
Sometimes the treatment was realistic. The manner of Kobayashi Kiyochika, generally recognized as the great master of the Meiji print is both realistic and effective, as beautiful a treatment of such unlikely subjects as railroads, surely, as is to be found anywhere.
Train on Takenawa embankment. Woodcut by Kiyochika
Kiyochika was born in Honjo, east of the Sumida, in 1847, near the present Kyōgoku Station and not far from the birthplace of the great Hokusai. The shogunate had lumber and bamboo yards in the district. His father was a labor foreman in government employ. Though the youngest of many sons, Kiyochika was named the family heir, and followed the last shogun to Shizuoka. The shogun in exile was himself far from impoverished, but many of his retainers were. Kiyochika put together a precarious living at odd jobs, one of them on the vaudeville stage. Deciding finally to return to Tokyo, he stopped on the way, or so it is said—the details of his life are not well established—to study art under Charles Wirgman, the British naval officer who became Yokohama correspond ent for the Illustrated London News. Missing nothing, Kiyochika is said also to have studied photography under Shimooka Renjō, the most famous of Meiji photographers, and painting in the Japanese style as well.
His main career as a printmaker lasted a scant five years, from 1876 to 1881, although he did make an occasional print in later life. In that brief period he produced more than a hundred prints of Tokyo. The last from the prolific early period are of the great Kanda fire of 1881, in which his own house was destroyed. (That fire was, incidentally, the largest in Meiji Tokyo.)
All the printmakers of early Meiji used Western subjects and materials, but Kiyochika and his pupils (who seem to have been two in number) achieved a Western look in style as well. It may be that, given his Westernized treatment of light and perspective, he does not belong in the Ukiyo-e tradition at all.
The usual Meiji railway print is bright to the point of gaudiness, and could be set at any hour of the day. The weather is usually sunny, and the cherries are usually in bloom. Kiyochika is best in his nocturnes. He is precise with hour and season, avoiding the perpetual springtide of his elders. His train moves south along the Takanawa hill and there are still traces of color upon the evening landscape; so one knows that the moon behind the clouds must be near full.
The prints of Kiyochika’s late years, when he worked mostly as an illustrator, are wanting in the eagerness and the melancholy of prints from the rich early period. The mixture of the two, eagerness and melancholy, seems almost prophetic—or perhaps we think it so because we know what was to happen to his great subject, the Low City. His preference for nocturnes was deeply appropriate, for there must have been in the life of the Low City this same delight in the evening, and with it a certain apprehension of the dawn.
Shrine near the Yoshiwara. Woodcut by Inoue Yasuji, after Kiyochika
The lights flooding through the windows of Kiyochika’s Rokumeikan, where the elite of Meiji gathered for Westernized banquets and balls, seem about to go out. Lights are also ablaze in the great and venerable restaurant outside the Yoshiwara, but they seem subdued and dejected, for the rickshaws on their way to the quarter do not stop as the boats once did. In twilight fields outside the Yoshiwara stands a little shrine, much favored by the courtesans. Soon (we know, and Kiyochika seems to know too) the city will be flooding in all around it. Other little shrines and temples found protectors and a place in the new world, but this one did not. No trace of it remains.
Kiyochika had a knack one misses in so many travel writers of the time for catching moods and tones that would soon disappear. Other woodcut artists of the day, putting everything in the sunlight of high spring, missed the better half of the picture. Kiyochika was a gifted artist, and that period when Edo was giving way to Tokyo