Great changes were coming, meanwhile, to the Mitsubishi Meadow, also known as Gambler’s Meadow. The meadow (the Japanese term might also be rendered “wasteland”) lay within the old outer moat of the castle, or palace. Such of its buildings as survived the Restoration disturbances served as the bureaucratic center of early Meiji. The offices gradually moved out, and in 1890 the meadow was sold as a whole to the Mitsubishi enterprises. The army, which then owned the land, needed money for installations on the outskirts of the city, and first proposed selling the tract to the royal household. This body, however, was in straitened circumstances, and unable to pay what the army asked. So the land went to Mitsubishi. It is the present Marunouchi district, where the biggest companies strive to have their head offices. When such early visitors as Griffis remarked upon the great expanses of empty lands in the city, Marunouchi (which means something like intramuros, “within the walls”) must have been among the places they had in mind. The Mitsubishi purchase was considered a folly. If the government did not want the place, who would? In very late Meiji it was rejected as a possible site for a new Sumō wrestling stadium. The children of Edo who provided Sumō with its spectators could not be expected to go to so desolate and forbidding a place. It was a day, wrote the poet Takahama Kyoshi,
when people spoke of the row-houses, four in number, on the Mitsubishi Meadow, otherwise the abode of foxes and badgers. Here and there were weed grown hillocks from aristocratic gardens. The murder ot O-tsuya was much talked about in those days…
Marunouchi was a place of darkness and silence, of loneliness and danger. If one had to pass the Meiji Life Insurance building, a black wilderness lay beyond, with only the stars to light it. Darkness lay over the land on which Tokyo Central Station now stands, and on towards Kyōbashi, where a few lights were to be discerned.
The murder of O-tsuya dates the description. It occurred in 1910, and was indeed talked about, one of the most famous of Meiji crimes. The corpse of a young lady, identified as Kinoshita O-tsuya, had been found one November morning near the prefectural offices. Her murderer was apprehended, quite by accident, ten years later.
Late in Meiji, Ogawa Isshin, one of the more famous of Meiji photographers, took panoramic photographs from the City Hall, on the site of the present prefectural offices in Marunouchi. On most sides of the City Hall appear empty expanses, very unlovely, as if scraped over by some landmover ahead of its time. In a southwesterly direction, scarcely anything lies between the City Hall and the Hibiya crossing, at the southeast corner of the palace plaza. The aspect to the north is even more desolate. There are a few barracks-like buildings, but for the most part the City Hall and the Bank of Japan, off on the western edge of Nihombashi, face each other across an expanse of nothing at all. To the northwest are the first of the new Mitsubishi buildings. Yet at the end of Meiji, Marunouchi still looked very hospitable, on the whole, to foxes, badgers, and gamblers. Only the view to the east towards the Ginza district, beyond the arches for the new elevated railroad, is occupied, most of it in what seems to be a rather traditional way. The remains of Ginza Bricktown do not show.
Mitsubishi was even then filling in the emptiness. In 1894, Conder finished the first of the brick buildings for what came to be known as the Mitsubishi Londontown. More than one architect worked on the district, and suggestions of more than one style were to be detected while Londontown yet survived. The first buildings lay along the street that runs past the prefectural offices from the palace moat. When this thoroughfare had been imposingly lined with brick, there were extensions to the south and then the north, where at the end of Meiji the new Tokyo Central Station was going up. Marunouchi took a quarter of a century being filled, and the newest buildings of Londontown did not last much longer than a quarter-century more. No trace survives today of the original rows of brick. Mitsubishi tore them all down in the years after the Second World War, perhaps a little too hastily. A surviving Conder building would be splendid public relations.
The preeminence of Marunouchi as a business district was assured by the opening of the new station in 1914, at which point it replaced Ginza as “the doorway to Tokyo.” Goto Shimpei, director of the National Railways, he who was to become the mayor with the big kerchief, told the architect to produce something that would startle the world. The brick building, three towers and joining galleries said to be in a French style, is not very startling today. It was once more ornate, however, and grander in relation to its surroundings. The central tower, now topped by a polyhedron, was originally domed; the dome was badly damaged in 1945. In 1914 the station looked off towards the palace over what had been finished of Londontown. Perhaps the most startling thing about it was that it did front in that direction, rather than towards the old Low City, which, thus eloquently told that it might be damned, was separated by tracks and a moat from the station.
This curious orientation has been explained as a show of respect for the palace and His Majesty. Certainly Mitsubishi and its meadow benefited enormously from the arrangement. There was nothing explicitly corrupt about it, but the smell of collusion is strong. So it is that economic miracles are arranged. To many it seemed that the naming of the station was itself an act of arrogance, implying that the other stations of the city, including Shimbashi, were somehow provincial. Kyōbashi and Nihombashi, east of the station, felt left out of things, and continued to board their trains at Shimbashi. It was friendlier and almost as convenient. In 1920 a decision was finally reached to give Tokyo Central a back or easterly entrance, but at this point the Low City proved unco-operative. Quarreling between Kyōbashi and Nihombashi about the location of the necessary bridge was not settled until after the earthquake, which destroyed most of both wards.
Only after the earthquake were tracks laid from Tokyo Central to Ueno, whence trains depart for the north. By then Tokyo Central was unshakably established as the place where all trains from the south stopped and discharged their crowds. Even today, one cannot take a long-distance express from the north through Tokyo and on to the south and west without changing trains. It is rather as Chicago was back in the days when Americans still traveled by rail. The traveler from San Francisco had to change in Chicago if he wished to go on to New York. The traveler southwards gets off at Ueno and boards again at Tokyo Central. Economic reasons can be offered to explain the tardiness with which Tokyo and Ueno were joined. The right-of-way passes through densely populated regions laid waste by the earthquake and fire, far more heavily used in Meiji than those between Shimbashi and Tokyo Central or north of Ueno; but the effect was to assure that Mitsubishi Meadow would become worth approximately its weight in gold. The governor of Tokyo has recently announced his opposition to a new express line from the north extending all the way to Tokyo Central. Thus a curious gap yet remains in one of the best railway systems in the world.
Tokyo Station from Nihombashi, about 1915
Another Meiji revolution was that which dispelled the shadows of Edo. It has happened everywhere, of course—dark medieval corners have become rarer the world over—but it happened more rapidly in the Japanese cities than in Europe and America. There are those, Tanizaki among them, who have argued that dark places were central to Japanese aesthetics, and that doing away with them destroyed something of very great importance. In his famous discourse on shadows, a subject dear to him, Tanizaki speculated on the course modern inventions might have taken had the Japanese done the inventing. Shadows would not have been done away with so brusquely.
Edo already had the kerosene lamp. Tokyo acquired gaslights sixty years later than London, and so the gaslit period was that much shorter. A leading Meiji entrepreneur named Shibusawa Eiichi proposed that the first gaslights be in the Yoshiwara. His reasons seem to have been aesthetic and not moral, and certainly it would have been appropriate for that center of the old, shadowy culture to lead the way into the new. But before this could happen the great Ginza fire intervened, and the rebuilt Ginza became the obvious place for the new brightness. In 1874 eighty-five gaslights flared, and became the marvel of the city, from Shiba along the main Ginza street as far north as Kyōbashi. By 1876 there was a line of gaslights all the way from Ginza to Asakusa, and westwards from Ginza towards the palace as well.