The extent of the conflagration showed how rapidly it had spread, and the wooden buildings partly burned indicated that the work of firemen was not so trivial as foreigners supposed it to be; at least to check the fire in a high gale must have required great effort and skill. The fact is that their houses are so frail that as soon as a fire starts it spreads with the greatest rapidity, and the main work of the firemen, aided by citizens, is in denuding a house of everything that can be stripped from it… It seems ridiculous to see them shoveling off the thick roofing files, the only fireproof covering the house has; but this is to enable them to tear off the roofing boards, and one observes that the fire then does not spring from rafter to rafter. The more one studies the subject the more one realizes that the first impressions of the fireman’s work are wrong, and a respect for his skill rapidly increases.
Given the fact that the fire brigades were largely manned by carpenters, a certain conflict of interest might be suspected; but they seem to have done their work bravely and, within the limits of the materials they had to work with, well.
Fire losses declined as Meiji gave way to Taishō. An accompaniment, or so the children of Edo often saw it, was a loss of harmony in traditional architecture. Kafū lamented it, and so did the novelist, playwright, and haiku master Kubota Mantarō, who may be numbered among Kafū’s disciples. Kubota was a true son of Edo, born in 1889 in Asakusa (Tanizaki was born in Nihombashi three years earlier) to a family of craftsmen and shopkeepers. He stayed in Asakusa until the fires of 1923 drove him away, and, though he never moved back, spent most of the four decades that remained to him in various parts of the Low City. Sadness for the Low City and what the modern world did to it dominated his writing in all the several forms of which he was master. He had the right pedigree and unswerving devotion to the cause; and so he may be called the most eloquent spokesman for that loquacious band, the sons of Edo. Tanizaki was a better novelist, but he spoke on the whole grouchily of his native Low City. Writing in 1927, Kubota lamented the disappearance of the hinomi, the “firewatcher” or staging noted by Morse on the ridges of Tokyo houses.
Among the things that have disappeared from all the blocks of Tokyo is the hinomi. I do not mean the fire ladder or the firewatch tower. I mean the hinomi itself. I do not know about the High City, but in the Low City, and especially on the roofs of merchant houses in busy and prosperous sections, there was always a hinomi. It was not only a memento of Edo, so ready with its fires. In the days when the godown style was the ideal in Japanese architecture, the hinomi was, along with the board fence, the spikes to turn back robbers, and the eaves drains, an indispensable element giving form to a Japanese house. And such fond dreams as the thought of it does bring, of Tokyo under willows in full leaf.
It may seem silly to mourn for appurtenances that proclaim a building, and indeed a whole city, to be a firetrap. Yet Kubota’s remarks, and similar remarks by other mourners for Edo such as Nagai Kafū, have substance. Despite the failure of the city to take advantage of the Ginza model, it gradually made itself more resistant to fire, and the result was a great increase in ugliness. “Fair to look at is the capital of the Tycoon,” said Sir Rutherford Alcock, who was in Edo during the last years of the Tycoon, or shogun. No one could call the Tokyo of our day a fair city, though it contains beautiful things. Coming upon a surviving pocket of Edo or Meiji, one sees in the somber harmonies of tile and old wood what has been lost.
The domestic and commercial architecture of Tokugawa Japan varied with the region. Except for warehouses, it was almost always of wooden frame construction, one or two storys high. The Kansai region favored paints and stains much more than did the Kantō and its greatest city, Edo. In Edo there were several kinds of roofing. The more affluent merchant houses were heavily roofed with dark tiles, while humbler dwellings had thatched or shingled roofs, the best kind of fuel for the fires that were always getting started. The wooden fronts of the unpainted houses and shops of Edo, often with delicate lattices over the windows, turned to rich shades of brown as they aged, and the roofs were of neutral tones to begin with.
Only an eye accustomed to austere subtleties could detect the reposeful variations upon brown and gray which a Low City street must have presented. That is probably why one looks in vain through writings by early foreign visitors for descriptions of what the Low City looked like (as distinguished from its effect upon the other senses). Even E. S. Morse, the most discerning and sympathetic of them, is far better at street cries and the buzz of life and quaint curiosities than he is at the expanses of wood and tile that he must have passed every day. Isabella Bird went through the wards east of the river in her quest for unbeaten tracks. She tells us nothing about them, though they must have been among the urban places of early Meiji where the old harmonies were least disturbed. Perhaps if she had known that they all were to go (and to do so more rapidly than unbeaten tracks), she might have tried a little to describe them.
The very first Western buildings, such as the British legation and the Hoterukan, were not fireproof. They were built by Japanese, accommodating old Japanese techniques to what were presumed to be Western needs and sensibilities. The first period of pure Western building may be held to begin with the new Ginza. It is often called the English period. Thomas Waters gave advice for Ginza, and Josiah Conder, the most famous of foreign architects active in Meiji Japan, put up buildings all over the city. The work of Japanese architects, inconspicuous during the English period, began to appear again in mid-Meiji. The most eminent were Conder’s pupils. A Japanese architect designed the first Imperial Hotel, which opened on a part of the present site in 1890. The grandest buildings of late Meiji and early Taishō—the Bank of Japan, the Akasaka Palace, the Imperial Theater, Tokyo Central Station—were by Japanese.
Conder, born in 1852, came to Japan early in 1877, retained by the Ministry of Technology. He taught architecture at the College of Technology and later at the university. A student of Japanese painting, he was especially good at fish.
He was a very important man. No other foreign architect who worked in Japan, not even Frank Lloyd Wright, was as influential as Conder, and probably none will be. He was a highly eclectic and not particularly original architect, but he was enormously successful as a teacher. The grand style in public building derives from him. His most famous work was an early one, the Rokumeikan, which gave its name to a span of years in mid-Meiji. Begun in 1881 and finished in 1883, the Rokumeikan was a state-owned lodging and gathering place for the cosmopolitan set. It was also, in those days when the “unequal treaties” were the great sore to be healed, a means of demonstrating to the world that the Japanese were as civilized and enlightened as anyone else, and so need not put up with such indignities as extraterritoriality.
The name means “House of the Cry of the Stag.” It is a literary allusion, to a poem in the oldest of Chinese anthologies, the Shih Ching, and it signifies a hospitable summons to illustrious guests, and the convivial gathering that ensues. The Hama Palace, which had a semi-Western guest house even before the rebuilding of the Ginza, had earlier provided lodging for such guests, among them General Grant; it was in a bad state of repair, however, and otherwise considered unsuited to the needs of foreigners. So the Rokumeikan was put up, on the site of a Satsuma estate in Hibiya, by then government property, across from what was to become Hibiya Park.
The Rokumeikan
It was a two-story structure of brick, in an Italianate style, most splendid for the time, with about fifteen thousand square feet of floor space. It had a ballroom, a music room, a billiard room, a reading room, suites for illustrious guests, and a bathtub such as had never before been seen in the land: alabaster, six feet long and three feet wide. Water thundered most marvelously, we are told, from the faucets.
Pierre Loti, who attended a Rokumeikan ball on the emperor’s birthday in 1885, thought that, all flat, staring white, it resembled a casino at a French spa. He may have been dazed. He was taken by rickshaw, he says, from Shimbashi Station through dark, solitary streets, and arrived at the Rokumeikan about an hour later. One can easily walk the distance in ten minutes.