The city had a slaughterhouse from late Tokugawa, first in the hills of Shiba, then, because of local opposition, on the more secluded Omori coast, beyond the “red line” that defined the jurisdiction of the city magistrates. The students at Fukuzawa’s Keiō University seem to have been inveterate eaters of beef, as was most appropriate to that Westernizing place. Yet they had their inhibitions. Reluctant to be seen in butcher shops, customers would receive their orders through inconspicuous windows. When a butcher entered the Keiō gates to make deliveries, he would be greeted with the clicking of flints that was an ancient cleansing and propitiatory ritual.
Chinese cuisine was also new to the city, though it had long been present in Nagasaki. It is so ubiquitous today, and in many ways so Japanized, that one might think it most venerable. The first Chinese restaurant in Tokyo opened for business only in 1883. It was the Kairakuen in Nihombashi, where Tanizaki and his friends played at whores and cribs. Where the beef-pot seems to have caught on without special sponsorship, the Kairakuen, like the Rokumeikan, had wealthy and powerful promoters, who thought Chinese cooking a necessity in any city worthy of the name.
There were pig fanciers. Pigs commanded high prices. The tiny creatures known as Nanking mice also enjoyed a vogue. But the rabbit vogue was more durable and more intense, a rage of a vogue indeed. Though it spread all over the country, its beginnings were in Tokyo, with two foreigners, an Englishman and an American, who, situated in the Tsukiji foreign settlement, offered rabbits for sale. They also offered to make plain to the ignorant exactly what a rabbit connoisseur looked for in a particularly desirable beast. The rabbits were to be patted and admired, as dogs and cats are, and not eaten. A society of rabbit fanciers was formed. Rabbits with the right points brought huge prices, far greater, by weight, than those for pigs. Large floppy ears were much esteemed, as was the sarasa, or calico coat. A person in Shitaya was fined and jailed for staining a white rabbit with persimmon juice.
Imports from distant lands increased the rabbit count, and encouraged speculation and profiteering. In 1873, a year in which the population of domestic rabbits in the central wards reached almost a hundred thousand, authorities banned a meeting of the society of rabbit fanciers. Later that year they banned the breeding of the rabbits themselves, and imposed a tax to discourage possession. The vogue thereupon died down, though foreigners were observed thereafter selling French rabbits in Asakusa. Newspapers regarded the consular courts as too lenient, and so the rankling issue of extraterritoriality came into the matter. So did one of the great social problems of early Meiji, because the lower ranks of the military aristocracy—who had great difficulty adjusting to the new day—were the chief losers from the profiteering.
The enthusiasm for foreign things waned somewhat in mid-Meiji. In the realm of personal grooming there was a certain vogue for “improving” Japanese things rather than discarding them for the Western. This nationalist reaction was by implication anti-Western, of course, but it was not accompanied by the sort of antiforeign violence that had been common in late Tokugawa. There were such incidents in early Meiji, but usually under special circumstances. When, in 1870, two Englishmen who taught at the university were wounded by swordsmen, W. E. Griffis was on hand to help treat them. Initially he shared the anger and fear of the foreign community, but eventually he learned of details that shocked his missionary sensibilities and caused him to put the blame rather on the Englishmen. They had been out womanizing. What happened to them need no more concern the God-fearing citizen of Tokyo than a similar incident at the contemporary Five Points slum need concern a proper citizen of New York. Two men from southwestern clans were executed for the assaults, some have thought on insufficient evidence. Sir Harry Parkes, the formidable British minister, was about to depart for home, and it was thought necessary (or so it has been averred) that something memorable be done for the occasion. One of the two condemned men retracted his confession, which did not in any event agree with the evidence presented by the wounds.
Out of fashion for some decades after Prince Itō’s masked ball, dancing became wild and uncontrolled, by police standards, in the years after the First World War. Another new institution of the Rokumeikan period, the coffee house, also left its early primness behind. A Chinese opened the first one near Ueno Park in 1888. Descriptions of it suggest that it may have been a sort of gymnasium or health club, with coffee offered as an invigorating potion. The transcription of “coffee” had a sort of devil-may-care quality about it. Today the word is generally written with two characters that have only phonetic value, but the founder of the Coffee House chose a pair signifying “pros and cons,” or perhaps “for better or for worse.” The English word has continued to designate the beverage, while the French came to signify a place where stylish and affluent gentlemen (without their wives) went to be entertained by pretty and accommodating young ladies. It was among the symbols of the Taishō high life.
Though sea bathing was not completely unknown in Meiji, ladies’ bathing garments became good business only in Taishō. Immersion in natural bodies of cold water has long been a religious observance, but it was not until recent times that the Japanese came to think it pleasurable. When Nagai Kafū describes a summer beach of late Meiji it is notable for its loneliness, even a beach which now would be an impenetrable mass of bodies on a hot Sunday afternoon. In his memoirs Tanizaki describes an excursion to the Shiba coast, to a beach situated almost exactly where the expressway now passes the Shiba Detached Palace. The purpose of the outing seems to have been more for clamdigging than for bathing. In late Meiji there was an advertising campaign to promote the district and induce people to come bathing in its waters (then still clean enough for bathing, even though the south shore of the bay was becoming a district of factories and docks). Among the points made in favor of sea bathing was that it was held in high esteem by foreigners.
Eminent foreigners began coming to Tokyo at an early date. They were on the whole treated hospitably. An exception was the czarevitch of Russia, who was wounded by a sword-swinging policeman, though not in Tokyo, when he paid a visit to Japan in 1891. The very earliest was the Duke of Edinburgh, who came in 1869. Others included German and Italian princes, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and a head of state, the King of Hawaii. William H. Seward called in 1870. The Meiji government felt more immediately threatened by Russia than by any other nation. Seward suggested an Alaskan solution to the Russian problem: buy them out. Pierre Loti was probably the most distinguished literary visitor of Meiji, but such attention as he received—his invitation to the Rokumeikan, for instance—had less to do with his writing than with his diplomatic status as a naval attaché.
The eminent foreigners most lionized were without question General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. On a round-the-world journey, they reached Nagasaki by cruiser in June, 1879, and were in Tokyo for two months, from early July to early September. They were to have visited Kyoto and Osaka, but this part of their schedule was canceled because of a cholera epidemic. The guard along the way from Yokohama was commanded by Nogi Maresuke, who became, in the Russo-Japanese War, the leading military immortal of modern times, and demonstrated the extent of his loyalty to the throne by committing suicide on the day of the Meiji emperor’s funeral. For the Grants there was a reception at Shimbashi Station, before which a display of hydrangeas formed the initials “U.S.G.” Japanese and American flags decorated every door along the way to the Hama Palace, where the party stayed, and where the governor honored them with yet another reception. Receptions were held during the following weeks at the College of Technology and Ueno. The former is said to have been the first soiree essayed by the Japanese, whose ways of entertaining had been of a different sort. There were parades and visits to schools and factories, the sort of thing one gets on a visit to the New China today. The general planted a cypress tree in Ueno. It came through the holocausts of 1923 and 1945, and yet survives, providing the background for an equestrian statue of the founder of the Japanese Red Cross. Mrs. Grant planted a magnolia, which survives as well. There was classical theater, both Kabuki and Nō, and there was the most festive