Traffic on the left side of the street also appears to have been a Meiji innovation. There had not been much vehicular traffic in Edo, but bridge signs give evidence that such as there was had been expected to pass on the right. In early Meiji, police orders—probably under the influence of the British, at the forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment in so many ways—required carriages to pass on the left.
Reading a line of horizontal print from left to right was a Meiji innovation. Not imposed by authority, the practice gradually and uncertainly came to prevail. Two adjoining Nihombashi financial establishments might have signs reading in contradictory fashion, one in the old direction, right to left, the other in the new. On the same train the description of the route would read right to left and the no-smoking sign left to right.
Beer, which has now replaced sake as the national drink, even as baseball has replaced Sumō as the national sport, made its appearance early in Meiji. The first brewery was in Tokyo, just south of the Hibiya parade grounds, not far from where the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel later arose. The first beer hall opened in Kyōbashi on the Fourth of July in 1899, celebrating the end of the “unequal treaties.”
Until very recently, the system of house numbers was so chaotic that ancient uncodified custom seemed the most likely explanation. In fact, however, there were no house numbers at all until Meiji. The sense of place centered upon the machi or chō, which might be rendered “neighborhood.” A few streets had popular names and today a few have official names, but the neighborhood continues to be the central element in an address. Before Meiji there was nothing else. If more detailed information was required as to the site of a dwelling, only description could be offered—“two houses from the retired sealmaker in the second back alley,” and the like. House numbers were observed by early travelers to the West, and thought desirable, and assigned helter-skelter as new houses went up and old houses wished numbers too.
The want of system has been remedied somewhat in recent years, so that Number 2 in a certain neighborhood will usually be found between Number 1 and Number 3; yet the consciousness of place continues to be by tract or expanse and not by line. Though it provides its pleasures, and sometimes one has a delicious sense of adventure in looking for an address, a system of numbers along a line is without question more efficient than one of numbers scattered over an area. The chaos of the Meiji method was a product of Civilization and Enlightenment, however, and not of benighted tradition, which eschewed house numbers.
What is now the most ubiquitous of Japanese accessories, the calling card, is a Western importation. The first ones are believed to have been brought from Europe in 1862 by a Tokugawa diplomatic mission. In the 1903 edition of their guide to Japan, Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason describe Tokyo as having “a tranquil and semi-rural aspect owing to the abundance of trees and foliage.” Compared to most Japanese cities, and especially Osaka, Tokyo is indeed a city of greenery. Yet the planting of trees along streets is a modern innovation. In the premodern city there had been some public trees (as they might be called) along waterways. The Yanagiwara, the “Willowfield” along the Kanda River, even predated the Tokugawa hegemony. Virtually all the trees and grasses of the old city were in pots or behind walls, however, and the pines, cherries, maples, and oaks of Ginza were the first genuine street trees.
Western things tended to make their first appearance in the treaty ports. Yet many an innovation was first seen in Tokyo. Yokohama may have had the first lemonade and ice cream, but Tokyo had the first butter and the first Western soup.
The first artificial limb in the land was bestowed in Yokohama upon a Tokyo Kabuki actor, the third Sawamura Tanosuke. Dr. J. C. Hepburn, a pioneer medical missionary and the deviser of the Hepburn system of romanization (still in use despite modifications in detail), amputated a gangrenous leg and then sent to America for a wooden one, which arrived and was fitted in the last full year before Meiji. Tanosuke lost his other leg and a hand before he finally died, in 1878. He went on acting to the end.
Men were in most respects quicker to go high-collar than women. It was so in the cutting of the topknot, and it was so as well in the discarding of traditional dress. The phenomenon is to be observed elsewhere in Asia. It has to do, probably, with the decorative functions assigned to women, and also with somewhat magical aspects assigned to Western panoply and appurtenances. Whether or not the business suit is more businesslike than the kimono, people are bound to think it is, because the wearer has been better at business.
There may have been a few geisha with bustles and flounces and the shampoo coiffure, and these were the proper accouterments for a well-placed lady of the upper classes on her way to the Rokumeikan. Yet even for upper-class ladies the emphasis in the late years of the century shifted from Western dress to “improvement” of the Japanese kimono. Though hot-weather dress became Westernized more quickly than dress for the cooler seasons, most lady strollers in Ginza still wore Japanese dress on the eve of the earthquake. Some two-thirds of the men were in foreign dress, which was very expensive in the early years, and attainable only by the wealthy and the bureaucracy (for which it was mandatory). The military and the police were the first to go Western. The change had begun before the end of the shogunate. By 1881, there were two hundred tailoring and dressmaking establishments in the city, more than half of them in Nihombashi.
The emperor’s buttons and the empress’s bracelets and bodkins arrived from France in 1872. Traditional court dress was abolished by the Council of State that same year, though most court officials were still in traditional dress at the opening of the Yokohama railroad. Willingness to wear Western dress was more prevalent among men than among women, and among the upper classes than the lower.
Even at the height of the Rokumeikan era (for a description of that building see pages 82-83), when the world was being shown that the Japanese could do the Western thing as well as anyone else, there seems to have been more determination than ardor. Newspaper accounts inform us that the dance floor at some of the more celebrated events was dominated by foreigners, and Pierre Loti informs us that Japanese ladies, when coaxed out upon the floor, were correct but wooden.
Rokumeikan parties did not have much to do with the life of the city. They belonged in the realm of politics and the highest society, and if the sort of person who took his pleasures at Asakusa ever set foot in the place, it was doubtless as a servant or a delivery boy. Such affairs do not belong to the story of what happened to Edo and all its townsmen. Yet the Rokumeikan era was such an extraordinary episode, or series of episodes, that to dismiss it as political and really too high-class would be to risk letting the Meiji spirit, at its most ardent there in Tokyo whether of the city or not, disappear in an excessively rigid schema.
The building itself is gone, and historical treatment of the era runs towards dryness. The life of the place is best sensed in the works of wood-cut artists who, not themselves of high society, can have attended few if any Rokumeikan soirees. They make the best years of the Rokumeikan, and especially the ladies in their bright, bright dresses, seem utterly charming. Had one lived through those years, however, and been among the lucky few on the invitation lists, one might well have found the Rokumeikan hard work, no more charming than the doings of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society today. The flounces and bustles might not be so much fun had they been photographed rather than made into prints. They came when the art of the Ukiyo-e was having its last show of vigor, and lent themselves well to the bold pigments favored by Meiji artists.
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