The effect upon the arts was profound, and probably most profound upon the theater. By at least 1877 Kabuki was gaslit, and a decade later had its first electric lights. Today it is dazzlingly bright, and to imagine what it was like in the old shadowy days is almost impossible.
Having left shadows behind, Tokyo seemed intent upon becoming the brightest city in the world, and it may well have succeeded. A series of industrial expositions became the ground for testing the limits.
“Sift civilization to the bottom of your bag of thrills,” wrote the novelist Natsume Sōseki in 1907, “and you have an exposition. Filter your exposition through the dull sands of night and you have blinding illumination. If you possess life in some small measure, then for evidences of it you go to illumination, and you must cry out in astonishment at what you see. The civilized who are drugged with civilization are first aware that they live when they cry out in astonishment.” It is the late-Meiji view of someone who was himself becoming weary of Civilization and Enlightenment; but it is not wrong in identifying “illumination” (the English word is used) with the soul of Meiji. Turning up the lights, much more rapidly than they had been turned up in the West, was indeed akin to a quest for evidence of life. Freed from the black Edo night, people gathered where the lights were brightest, and so at nightfall the crowds commenced heading south to Ginza from a still dark Nihombashi.
Tanizaki did not become a devotee of shadows until his middle years. In his boyhood Nihombashi was more amply provided with them than he wished. “Even in the Low City there were few street lights. The darkness was rather intimidating. I would return after dark from my uncle’s house a few blocks away, scampering past certain ominous places. They were lonely places of darkness, where young men in student dress would be lurking in wait for pretty boys.” Tanizaki himself was abducted by an army officer who had the “Satsuma preference,” as it was called, and taken to the Mitsubishi Meadow, where he made a perilous escape.
Like the trolley system, the electric power system advertized the confusion of a city growing and changing too rapidly, and the inadequacies of private enterprise. In late Meiji the city had three power companies, in sometimes violent competition. Charges were not for power consumed but for the number of bulbs, which system of course provided encouragement for keeping all bulbs burning at all times. The same house might have a power supply from more than one company, and there were fist-fights among linemen when a house changed from one company to another. Two mayors, one of them the famous parliamentarian Ozaki Yukio, were forced to resign because of their inability to impose order in this situation. Proposals for public ownership came to nothing. Finally, in 1917, an accord was reached dividing the city and the prefecture among the three companies. The city did presently buy a part of the system, and was providing power to extensive regions in the High City at the time of the earthquake.
Enlightenment was not immediately successful in dispelling shadows, and smells proved even more obstinate. In 1923 the central fish market stood where it had for almost three hundred years, right beside the Nihombashi Bridge, almost across the street from the Mitsukoshi Department Store and only a few steps from the Mitsui Bank and the Bank of Japan.
As early as the opening of Shimbashi Station, there were earnest endeavors to beautify the main street leading north through Nihombashi. The market was forbidden to use the street, and every effort was made to keep dealers out of sight. Yet the establishment sent its odors through much of Nihombashi and Kyōbashi. There were only two latrines, at the eastern and western ends of the market, remote from the convenience of busy fish dealers. Fish guts were left for the crowds to trample. Each time there was a cholera epidemic the market was blamed, and a clamor arose to move it where it might have the space (should it choose to use it) to be more sanitary and less smelly. Cholera germs were in fact traced to the market in 1922, and authorities closed it for several days.
It had been proposed in 1889 that the market move eastwards to the river, the move to be accomplished by the end of the century. There was strong opposition. A complex system of traditional rights stood in the way of expeditious removal. Nothing happened. In 1923 almost four hundred persons are thought to have died there in the post-earthquake fires that finally decided the matter. The market reopened, first in quarters by the bay and a few months later on the site it now occupies in Tsukiji, a short distance south of where the foreign settlement would be had it survived the earthquake. Most of the fish sold in the last years of the Nihombashi market were brought there by land. What came by water had to be reloaded for transport up the canal. The new site, by the harbor and only a short distance from the freightyards where the old Shimbashi terminus had been, was far more convenient. It was just across a canal from the Hama Palace, but the day was long past when eminent foreigners stayed there. The present emperor, an uncomplaining man, was then regent.
Sewers scarcely existed at the end of Meiji. Kanda had a tile-lined ditch for the disposal of kitchen wastes, but body wastes were left to the owaiya with his dippers and buckets and carts and his call of owai owai as he made his way through the streets. It was still a seller’s market at the end of Meiji; the owaiya paid for his commodity. The price was falling rapidly, however, because the growth of the city and the retreat of farmlands to greater distances made it more and more difficult for the farmer to reach the inner wards. The problem grew to crisis proportions in the Taishō Period, as the seller’s market changed to a buyer’s and in some parts of the city it was not possible to get rid of the stuff. Shinjuku, on the western edge of the city, was known as the anus of Tokyo. Every evening there would be a rush hour when great lines of sewage carts formed a traffic jam.
The water supply was more sophisticated. It long had been. The Tokugawa magistracy had done virtually nothing about sewers, and the Meiji governors and mayors did little more, but there was a venerable system of reservoirs and aqueducts. The Low City was still heavily dependent on wells at the end of Meiji, however, making the problem of sewage disposal not merely noisome but dangerous as well. Water from wells was murky and unpalatable, and so water vendors made the rounds of the Low City, buckets hanging from poles on their shoulders, a wooden Boat in each bucket serving as a simple and ingenious device to keep the water from spilling.
It has been customary, this century and more, for the person who sees the city after an absence to remark upon the dizzying changes. W. E. Griffis, back in Tokyo a few weeks before the Ginza fire and after about a year in the provinces, found the city “so modernized that I scarcely recognize it… Old Yedo has passed away forever.” Edo has gone on passing away ever since.
Certainly a comparison of the central Ginza district at the beginning and end of Meiji, of the Mitsubishi Meadow east of the palace, or the western part of Nihombashi, tells of devastating (if one wishes to call it that) change. Scarcely anything present at the beginning of the period, apart from streets, canals, and rivers (or some of them), is present at the end. Not only the visitor, but the native or old resident could remark upon the devastation.
“Bridges were rebuilt, there were evictions after fires, narrow streets were widened,” said the novelist Tayama Katai in 1917. “Day by day Edo was destroyed.”
Some streets were indeed widened, especially towards the end of Meiji, to make way for the trolley and to provide firebreaks. Others disappeared. The back alleys, the uradana of Edo, had been altogether too crowded and dark, and when it became possible to spread out even a little the townsmen quickly did so. Photographs and other graphic materials inform us that the extreme closeness of Edo was early, and happily, dispensed with. The most straitened classes, when they could put together the means, would rather be on a street, however narrow, that led somewhere than on a closed alley.
Yet even today, after numerous minor disasters and two huge ones, the Tokyo street pattern is remarkably like that