It is not known exactly when and why these first trees disappeared, leaving the willow to become the great symbol of Ginza. The middle years of Meiji seem to have been the time. Perhaps the original trees were victims of urbanization, and perhaps, sprawling and brittle and hospitable to bugs, they were not practical. Willows, in any event, took over. Hardy and compact, riffled by cooling breezes in the summer, they were what a busy street and showplace seemed to need. Long a symbol of Edo and its rivers and canals, the willow became a symbol of the newest in Tokyo as well. Eventually the willow too went away. One may go out into the suburbs, near the Tama River, and view aged specimens taken there when, just before the earthquake, the last Ginza willows were removed.
With the new railway station just across a canal to the south, the southern end of what is now Ginza—it was technically not then a part of Ginza—prospered first. From middle into late Meiji it must have been rather like a shopping center, or mall, of a later day. There were two bazaars by the Shimbashi Bridge, each containing numbers of small shops. The youth of Ginza, we have been told by a famous artist who was a native of the district, loved to go strolling there, because from the back windows the Shimbashi geisha district could be seen preparing itself for a night’s business. One of the bazaars kept a python in a window. The python seems to have perished in the earthquake. From the late Meiji Period into Taishō, Tokyo Central Station was built to replace Shimbashi as the terminus for trains from the south. It stood at the northern boundary of Kyōbashi Ward, and so Ginza moved back north again to center upon what is now the main Ginza crossing.
At least one building from the period of the new Ginza survives, Elocution Hall (Enzetsukan) on the Mita campus of Keiō University. Fukuzawa Yukichi invented the word enzetsu, here rendered as “elocution,” because he regarded the art as one that must be cultivated by the Japanese in their efforts to catch up with the world. Elocution Hall, put up in 1875 and now under the protection of the government as a “cultural property” of great merit, was to be the forum for aspiring young elocutionists. It was moved from the original site, near the main entrance to the Keiō campus, after the earthquake. It is a modest building, not such as to attract the attention of printmakers, and a pleasing one. The doors and windows are Western, as is the interior, but the exterior, with its “trepang walls” and tiled roof, is strongly traditional. In its far more monumental way, the Hoterukan must have looked rather thus.
The great Ginza fire of 1872 is rivaled as the most famous of Meiji fires by the Yoshiwara fire of 1911, but neither was the most destructive. The Ginza fire burned over great but not consistently crowded spaces. The Kanda fire of 1881, the one that brought an end to Kiyochika’s flourishing years as a printmaker, destroyed more buildings than any other Meiji fire. And not even that rivaled the great fires of Edo, or the Kyoto fire of 1778. Arson was suspected in the 1881 fire, as it was suspected, and sometimes proved, in numbers of other fires. It was a remarkable fire. Not even water stopped it, as water had stopped the Ginza fire. Beginning in Kanda and fanned by winter winds, it burned a swath through Kanda and Nihombashi, jumped the river at Ryogoku Bridge, and burned an even wider swath through the eastern wards, subsiding only when it came to open country.
In a space of fifteen years, from early into middle Meiji, certain parts of Nihombashi were three times destroyed by fire. Great fires were commonest in the early months of the year, the driest months, when strong winds often came down from the north and west. (The incendiary raids of 1945 took advantage of these facts.) Much of what remained of the Tokugawa castle burned in 1873, and so the emperor spent more than a third of his reign in the Tokugawa mansion where the Akasaka Palace now stands. He did not move back into the palace until 1889. There were Yoshiwara fires in 1871, 1873, 1891, and 1911, and of course in 1923.
The great Yoshiwara fire of 1911
But Kanda has in modern times been the best place for fires. Of five great Meiji fires after a central fire department was organized in 1880, four began in Kanda, two of them within a few weeks of each other in 1881. The great Yoshiwara fire was the fifth. Only one Taishō fire, that of 1923 excepted, was of a magnitude to compete with the great Meiji fires. It too began in Kanda. No other Taishō fire, save again that of 1923, was remotely as large. The flowers of Edo were finally withering.
It was not until early Taishō that the fire department was sufficiently well manned to fight fires without amateur help. The disbanding of the old volunteer brigades did not come until after the earthquake. A ceremonial trace of them yet survives in the dezomeshiki, the display of the old panoply and tricks that is a part of the Tokyo New Year. Half the trucks owned by the department were lost in the earthquake, the first of them having been acquired five or six years before.
The Low City lived with the threat of fire. Only the wealthy had fireproof godowns. The lower classes kept emergency baskets ready in conspicuous places, and dug pits under their floors with ingenious arrangements that caused flooding when heated, and so, it was hoped, preserved such valuables as had been put away in time.
The young Tanizaki and his friends found an interesting use for the baskets.
They were oblong and woven of bamboo, about the size of a small trunk, and they were kept where everyone could see them, awaiting an emergency. In the Kairakuen they were kept in a storeroom that had been the Chinese room. For us, as we played at our games, they became the cribs of the courtesans. Three and four of us would take turns in a basket as ladies and their companions. Gen-chan and I were lady and companion any number of times. I do not remember that we did much of anything but lie face to face for a few minutes. Then it would be the turn of another lady and companion to produce staring and snickering.
I think that the origin of the game was probably in reports that Gen-chan had from the cooks about the Susaki quarter. The game delighted us, in any event. Day after day we would play it, the fire-basket game, as we called it.
“Let s have another go at the fire baskets,” someone would say.
E. S. Morse, the American zoologist who taught at the imperial university in early Meiji, was a great connoisseur of fires and firefighting methods.
Nearly every house has a staging on the ridge-pole with a few steps leading to it. Here one may go the better to observe the progress of a conflagration… When endangered by the approach of a conflagration the heavy window shutters and the doors of the fireproof building are closed and clay is then plastered over the cracks and chinks. Before closing it up, a number of candles are placed in a safe spot on the floor within and are lighted, thus gradually consuming all the oxygen and rendering ignition less likely.
Morse was initially contemptuous of Tokyo firefighting methods, but moved towards admiration as he became more knowledgeable. Of the first good fire to which he was witness, he said, among other things:
The stream thrown was about the size of a lead pencil and consisted of a series of independent squirts, as there was no air chamber as with our hand engines. The pumps were square instead of cylindrical and everything so dry, having hung in the sun for weeks, that more water spurted up in the air from the cracks than was discharged through the pipe… The fire companies are private and each company has a standard-bearer… These standard-bearers take a position as near the fire as possible, on the roof even of a burning building, and the companies whose standard-bearers are in evidence get a certain amount of money from the owners of the buildings saved.
In a note added for publication, he provided more sophisticated information, to the effect that the chief work of the firemen was not to put fires out but to prevent their spreading, and that the purpose of the little streams of water was not to extinguish the fire but to preserve