Nagai Kafū accused the Sumida, which he loved, of flooding twice annually. “Just as when summer gives way to autumn, so it is when spring gives way to summer: there are likely to be heavy rains. No one was surprised, for it happened every year, that the district from Senzoku toward the Yoshiwara should be under water.”
So begins the last chapter of his novella The River Sumida. It is an exaggeration, and in other respects not entirely accurate. Late summer and autumn was the season for floods. The rains of June are more easily contained than the violent ones of the typhoon season. The passage of the seasons so important to Kafū’s story required a flood in early summer. Records through the more than three centuries of Edo and Meiji suggest that the Sumida flooded on an average of once every three years. It may be that, for obscure reasons, floods were becoming more frequent. In the last half of Meiji the rate was only a little less than one every two years, and of eight floods described as “major, two were in late Meiji, in 1907 and 1910.
The flood of 1910, commonly called the Great Meiji Flood, submerged the whole northern part of the Low City, eastwards from the valleys of Koishikawa. Rising waters breached the levees of the Sumida and certain lesser streams. Asakusa, including the Yoshiwara and the setting of the Kafū story, suffered the worst damage, but only one of the fifteen wards was untouched, and the flood was a huge disaster. The damage has been calculated at between 4 and 5 percent of the national product for that year. Kafū liked to say that Edo disappeared in the Great Flood and the Yoshiwara fire of the following year. The flood was the occasion for the Arakawa Drainage Channel, to put an end to Sumida floods forever (see page 257).
Of all Meiji fires, the Ginza fire of 1872 had the most lasting effect upon the city. From it emerged the new Ginza.
Ginza had not been one of the busier and more prosperous sections of mercantile Edo. Compared to Nihombashi, farther north, it was cramped and narrow, caught between the outer moats of the great Tokugawa citadel and a bay shore occupied in large measure by the aristocracy. The great merchant houses were in more northerly regions. Ginza was a place of artisans and small shops.
W. E. Griffis gave a good account of what he saw there in 1870, before the fire. It contained no specific reference to Ginza, but a long walk, on his first visit to the city, took him from Tsukiji and the New Shimabara (which he wrongly calls the Yoshiwara) to Kanda. It must have been the Ginza district through which he first strolled.
I pass through one street devoted to bureaus and cabinets, through another full of folding screens, through another of dyers’ shops, with their odors and vats. In one small but neat shop sits an old man, with horn-rimmed spectacles, with the mordant liquid beside him, preparing a roll of material for its next bath. In another street there is nothing on sale but bamboo poles, but enough of these to make a forest. A man is sawing one, and I notice he pulls the saw with his two hands toward him. Its teeth are set contrary to ours. Another man is planing. He pulls the plane toward him. I notice a blacksmith at work: he pulls the bellows with his foot, while he is holding and hammering with both hands. He has several irons in the fire, and keeps his dinner boiling with the waste flame… The cooper holds his tub with his toes. All of them sit while they work. How strange! Perhaps that is an important difference between a European and an Asian. One sits down to his work, and the other stands up to it…
I emerge from the bamboo street to the Tori, the main street, the Broadway of the Japanese capital. I recognize it. The shops are gayer and richer; the street is wider; it is crowded with people.
Turning up Suruga Chō, with Fuji’s glorious form before me, I pass the great silk shop and fire-proof warehouses of Mitsui the millionaire.
Ginza had once been something of a theater center, until the Tempō edicts of the 1840s removed the Kabuki theaters to the northern suburbs. Theater quickly returned to the Ginza region when it was allowed to, after the Restoration, but the beginning of Ginza as a thriving center of commerce and pleasure came after the fire.
The governor decided that the city must be made fireproof, and the newly charred Ginza offered a place to begin. An English architect, Thomas Waters, was retained to build an entire district of red brick. The government subsidized a special company “for building and for the management of rentals.” The rebuilding took three years, when it could have been accomplished in the old way almost overnight. Rather proud of its fires, the old city had also been proud of the speed with which it recovered.
There seem to have been at least two brick buildings in the Ginza district even before the great fire, one of them a warehouse, the other a shop, “a poorer thing than the public latrines of later years,” says an eminent authority on the subject. When the rebuilding was finished there were almost a thousand brick buildings in Kyōbashi Ward, which included Ginza, and fewer than twenty in the rest of the city. An 1879 list shows a scattering of Western or Westernized buildings through most of the other wards, and one ward, Yotsuya in the High City, with none at all.
The hope was that the city would make itself over on the Ginza model, and become fireproof. Practice tended in the other direction. Only along the main street was a solid face of red brick presented to the world. Very soon there was cheating, in the form of reversion to something more traditional. Pictures from late Meiji inform us that Bricktown, as it was called, lasted longest in what is now the northern part of Ginza. Nothing at all survives of it today.
The new Ginza was not on the whole in good repute among foreigners. Already in the 1870s there were complaints about the Americanization of the city. Isabella Bird came visiting in 1878 and in 1880 described Tokyo as less like an Oriental city than like the outskirts of Chicago or Melbourne. She did not say what part of the city she had reference to, but almost certainly it was Ginza. Pierre Loti thought that Bricktown had about it une laideur americaine. Philip Terry, the English writer of tour guides, likened it, as Griffis had likened Nihombashi, to Broadway, though not with Griffis’s intent to praise. “Size without majesty, individuality divorced from all dignity and simplicity, and convenience rather than fitness or sobriety are the salient characteristics of this structural hodge-podge.” Not much of Bricktown survived when Terry wrote, in 1920. What did survive was the impression of a baneful American influence; and the original architect was English.
Ginza Bricktown, with trees
The city was of two minds about its new Ginza. Everyone wanted to look at it, but not many wanted to live in it. In a short story from early in this century, Nagai Kafū described it as a chilling symbol of the life to come.
The initial plans were for shops on the ground floors and residential quarters above, after the pattern of merchant Edo. The new buildings were slow to fill. They were found to be damp, stuffy, vulnerable to mildew, and otherwise ill adapted to the Japanese climate, and the solid walls ran wholly against the Japanese notion of a place to live in. Choice sites along the main street presently found tenants, but the back streets languished, or provided temporary space for sideshows, “bear wrestling and dog dances” and the like. Among the landowners, who had not been made to relinquish their rights, few were willing or able to meet the conditions for repaying government subsidies. These were presently relaxed, but as many as a third of the buildings on the back streets remained empty even so. Vacant buildings were in the end let go for token payments, and cheating on the original plans continued apace. Most Edo townsmen could not afford even the traditional sort of fireproof godown, and the least ostentatious of the new brick buildings were, foot for foot, some ten times as expensive. Such fireproofing measures as the city took through the rest of Meiji went no farther than widening streets and requisitioning land for firebreaks when a district had been burned over.
Despite the views of Miss Bird and Loti, the new Ginza must have been rather handsome. It was a huge success as an instance of Civilization and Enlightenment, whatever its failures as a model in fireproofing. Everyone went to look at it, and so was born the custom of Gimbura, “killing time in Ginza,” an activity which had its great day between