In 1915 the mayor found a curious excuse for inaction in the matter of parks, an excuse that tells much of life along the narrow streets. More than nine-tenths of the city was still wooden, he said, and most of the wooden houses were but one story high, each with its own little park. So public parks were not needed as in the cities of the West. It is good bureaucratic evasion, of course, but there must have been truth in it. Most of the streets had to be only wide enough for rickshaws to pass, and an occasional quarrel between runners when they could not was rather fun. The Edo townsman had long been accustomed to thinking of only the central portion of the street as public in any event. The rest could be devoted to greenery, especially to such plants as the morning glory, which gave a delicious sense of the season and did not require much room. The back streets may indeed have been like little parks, or fairs. Edo had always been the greenest of the large cities, and the morning glory might have been as good a symbol as the abacus of the Low City and its concerns.
Improved transportation had by the end of Meiji brought the Low City and the High City closer together. The aristocratic wife of Edo scarcely ever went into the plebeian city, though instances are recorded of well born ladies who attained notoriety by becoming addicted to the theater and actors. Now they commonly went shopping in Ginza or Nihombashi. Kabuki became an object of wealthy High City attention. Its base was more general. It was no longer the particular pride and treasure of the Low City.
In another sense, the division between high and low was accentuated. Class distinctions, measured in money and not pedigree, became clearer. The wealthy moved away from the Low City. Still in Tanizaki’s childhood, the mansion of the entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi was an object of wonderment, looking somewhat Moorish on a Nihombashi canal. The great flood of 1910 destroyed many of the riverside villas of the wealthy—which were not rebuilt—but the last such place did not disappear until after the Second World War. The process was one of gradual evacuation, leaving the Low City with vestiges of a professional middle class, but no one from the old military and mercantile elite or the new industrial elite. Wealth went away and the self-contained culture of the Low City went too.
This is not to say that the Low City and the High City became alike. The Shitamachi jōchō, the “mood of the Low City,” still existed, in the row upon row of wooden buildings and in the sense of neighborhood as community. But the creative energies had waned. The arts of Edo became respectable, and the lesser plebeian ranks, stranded in the Low City when the wealthy moved away, were not up to creating anything of a disreputability delicate and intricate enough to match the tradition. It was as in the old castle towns that had been cultural centers of some note: the new and original things were being done elsewhere.
The Shibusawa mansion, Nihombashi
In early Meiji, as industrialization got underway, factories were scattered over the city. By the end of Meiji a pattern had emerged: three-quarters of the factories were in the bay-shore wards, Kyōbashi and Shiba, and the two wards east of the river. Tokyo lacked the prominence in manufacturing that it had, by the end of Meiji, in finance, management, and (vague word) culture. Yet Meiji may be seen as a period of concentration, and the time when this one city emerged as a place of towering importance. Edo was important, having in its last century pulled ahead of its Kansai rivals, culturally at least. Tokyo by the end of Meiji was far more important.
On the eve of the earthquake the city had about a sixteenth of the population of the country and about two-fifths of the economic capital. Osaka had almost as many corporations as Tokyo, but less than half as much capital. A quarter of the total bank deposits were in Tokyo. Within the city, the wealth was concentrated in three wards: Kojimachi, which contained the palace and the Mitsubishi Meadow, and Kyōbashi and Nihombashi to the east. Four-fifths of all Japanese companies with capitalization of five million yen and more had their headquarters in one or another of three wards.
In one curious cultural respect Tokyo lagged behind the nation. There was far greater reliance upon private education at the primary level than in the nation at large. In 1879 Tokyo contained more than half the private elementary schools in the country. Despite its large population, it had fewer public schools than any other prefecture except Okinawa. The “temple schools” of Edo had the chief responsibility for primary education in early and middle Meiji. It was only towards the turn of the century that the number of pupils in public schools overtook the number in private schools. The reason would seem to be that the Meiji government could not do everything at once, and the system of private elementary education was so well developed in Edo that it could be made to do for a time. Ahead at the end of Edo, Tokyo was consequently neglected. The public schools had the greater prestige. Higuchi Ichiyō’s novella Growing Up, about a group of children on the edge of the Yoshiwara, informs us of the inferiority and resentment which the ordinary child felt towards the privileged ones in the public schools.
In higher education, Tokyo prevailed. The western part of Kanda was by the end of Meiji all students and universities, and so was a large part of Hongō. In more general cultural matters, the century since the Meiji Restoration may be seen as one of progressive impoverishment of the provinces, until eventually they were left with little but television, most of it emanating from Tokyo. This process was far advanced by 1923; Tokyo was big-time as Edo had not been. While the cities of the Kansai might preserve their own popular arts and polite accomplishments (and for reasons which no one understands have produced most of the Japanese Nobel laureates), it was in Tokyo that opinions and tastes were formed. It was because Tokyo was so much the center of things that Tanizaki’s decision to stay in the Kansai after the earthquake was so startling. All other important literary refugees quickly returned to Tokyo, and even Tanizaki in his last years was edging in that direction.
When, in 1878, the fifteen wards were established, they more than contained the city. They incorporated farmland as well. At the turn of the century two-thirds of the city’s paddy lands were in Asakusa Ward and the two wards east of the Sumida. Half the dry farmlands were in Shiba and Koishikawa, the southern and northern fringes of the High City. Farmland had virtually disappeared by the end of Meiji. Attrition was especially rapid late in the period. In 1912, the last year of Meiji, there was only one measure of paddy land within the fifteen wards for every two hundred fifty that had been present but a decade before, and one measure of dry farmland for every three hundred.
The situation was similar with fishing and marine produce. The last authentic “Asakusa laver” (an edible seaweed) had been produced early in the Tokugawa Period. In early Meiji most of the nation’s laver still came from outlying parts of Tokyo Prefecture. By the end of the period the prefecture produced none at all, save for the Izu Islands and beyond. The largest fishing community was at Haneda, beyond the southern limits of the city. Sushi is still described in restaurants as being Edo-mae, “from in front of Edo”—that is, from Tokyo Bay—but very little of it in fact was by the end of Meiji. None at all is today.
So a great deal changed in Meiji, and a good deal remained at the end of Meiji for the earthquake to destroy. In 1910, or whatever the chosen year, one could have joined all the sons of Edo in lamenting the demise of their city, and one could as well have rejoiced at all the little warrens of unenlightenment still scattered over the Low City. It is not possible to weigh change and tradition and decide which is the heavier.
To rejoice in what remained might, in the end, have been the less discommoding course. Recovering from his shock on perhaps the seventh or eighth of September, 1923, many a son of Edo must have lamented that he had not paid better attention to what had until so recently been all around him.
Chapter 3
THE DOUBLE LIFE
Civilization