The department stores and the bazaars were in it to make money, but they also provided pleasure and entertainment. So it was too with the expositions. People were supposed to be inspired and work more energetically for the nation and Civilization and Enlightenment, but expositions could also be fun.
The Japanese learned early about them. The shogunate and the Satsuma clan sent exhibits to the Paris fair of 1867, and the Meiji government to Vienna in 1873 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
The Japanese experimented with domestic fairs early in Meiji, one of them in the Yoshiwara. The grand exhibition that called itself the First National Industrial Exposition occurred at Ueno in 1877, from late summer to early winter. The chief minister was chairman of the planning committee. He was a man of Satsuma, and the Satsuma Rebellion was just then in progress; and so the import of the exposition was highly political, to demonstrate that the new day had arrived and meant to stay, in spite of dissension. The emperor and empress came on opening day and again in October, a month before the closing. The buildings were temporary ones in a flamboyantly Western style, with an art gallery at the center and flanking structures dedicated to farming and machinery and to natural products. Some of the items on display seemed scarcely what the Japanese most needed—a windmill, for instance, thirty feet high, straight from the drylands of America. Almost a hundred thousand items were exhibited by upwards of sixteen thousand exhibitors. The total number of visitors was not much less than the population of the city.
Other national exhibitions were scattered across Meiji. As a result of the second, in 1881, Tokyo acquired its first permanent museum, a brick structure designed by Josiah Conder, begun in 1878 and not quite finished in time for the exposition. The fourth and fifth expositions, just before and after the turn of the century, were held in Kyoto and Osaka. The sixth, in 1907, at Ueno once more, remains the grandest of the Tokyo series. Coming just after the Russo-Japanese War, it had patriotic significance, and therapeutic and economic value as well. Economic depression followed the war, and a need was felt to increase consumption. The main buildings, Gothic, in the park proper, were built around a huge fountain, on six levels, surmounted by Bacchus and bathed in lights of red, blue, and purple. Although the architecture was for the most part exotic, the prestige of Japanese painting had so recovered that the ceiling of the art pavilion was decorated with a dragon at the hands of the painter Hashimoto Gahō, who was associated with such fundamentalist evangelizers for the traditional arts as Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Tenshin.
A water chute led down to the lower level, on the shores of Shinobazu Pond, where special exhibitions told of foreign lands and a growing empire. There was a Taiwan pavilion and a Ryūkyū pavilion, the latter controversial, because ladies from the pleasure quarters were present to receive visitors and make them feel at home. They were considered an affront to the dignity of the Ryūkyūs, whose newspapers protested.
It was the Sixth Exposition that inspired Natsume Sōseki’s famous remarks about illumination (see page 93). Indeed, all the expositions were makers of taste. The more fanciful architectural styles of Taishō derive quite clearly from two expositions, held at Ueno early and midway through the reign.
Ueno, the place for expositions, is one of five public parks, the first in the city, established in 1873. The public park is another Meiji novelty introduced under the influence of the West. The old city had not been wanting in places for people to go and be with other people, but the idea of a tract maintained by the city solely for recreation was a new one. We have seen that at least one mayor thought such places unnecessary. He had a good case. The city already possessed myriads of gardens, large and small, and temples, shrines, cemeteries, and other places for viewing the flowers and grasses of the seasons.
The fact that one such place, in the far south of the city, was chosen by the shogunate as the site for the British legation was among the reasons for public satisfaction at the destruction of the unfinished building. A succession of temples occupied most of the land from what is now Ueno Park to the Sumida.
There were fewer such public spaces as time went by; and so the principle that the city had a responsibility in the matter was an important departure. The grandest of Edo temples are far less grand today. Had public parks not come into being, the loss of open space as religious establishments dwindled might have been almost complete.
A foreigner is given credit for saving Ueno. Almost anything might have happened to the tract left empty by the “Ueno War,” the subjugation in 1868 of holdouts from the old regime. Before that incident it had been occupied by the more northerly of the two Tokugawa funeral temples, the Kan-eiji. With branch temples, the Kan-eiji (named for the era in early Edo when it was founded) extended over the whole of “the mountain”—the heights to the north and east of Shinobazu Pond—and low-lying regions to the east as well, where Ueno Station now stands. Six of the fifteen shoguns are buried on the Kan-eiji grounds. The grave of Keiki, the last, is nearby in the Yanaka cemetery.
The attacking forces destroyed virtually the whole of the great complex. What is the main hall of the Kan-eiji today was moved in 1879 from the provinces to the site of a lesser temple. A gate is the only relic of the central complex, although a few seventeenth-century buildings, among the oldest in the city, still survive in the park. The public had been admitted to the Kan-eiji during the daytime hours. The precincts were, then as now, famous for their cherry blossoms.
After the fighting of 1868, Ueno was a desolate but promising expanse, more grandly wooded than it is today. The Ministry of Education wanted it for a medical school. The army, the most successful appropriator of land in early Meiji, thought that it would be a good location for a military hospital. It was at this point that the foreign person offered an opinion.
Dr. E. A. F. Bauduin, a Dutchman, had come to Japan in 1862. He was a medical doctor, and during his career in Japan served as a consultant on medical education in Nagasaki and Edo, and at the university in Tokyo. The Ministry of Education summoned him from Nagasaki for consultations in the matter of making the Ueno site a medical school. Quite contrary to expectations, he argued instead that Ueno would make a splendid park, and that the medical school could just as well go in some other place, such as the Maeda estate in Hongō, now the main campus of Tokyo University.
This view prevailed. In 1873, Ueno became one of the first five Tokyo parks. The others were the grounds of the Asakusa Kannon, the Tokugawa cemetery at Shiba, some shrine grounds east of the river, and a hill in the northern suburbs long famous for cherry blossoms. Of the four parks in the city proper it was the only one that was not otherwise occupied, so to speak, and it has had a different career than the others. It was transferred to the royal household in 1890, and returned to the city in 1924, to honor the marriage of the present emperor. Today it is officially called Ueno Royal Park. Shinobazu Pond to the west, a remnant of marshlands that had once spread over most of the Low City, was annexed to the park in 1885.
Ueno has not entirely escaped the incursions of commerce. Though the scores of little stalls that had established themselves in the old temple precincts were closed or moved elsewhere, the huge Seiyōken restaurant is the chief eyesore on an otherwise pleasing skyline. (An 1881 poster informs us that the restaurant is in Ueno Parque.) The original park now includes the campus of an art and music college. The Tokugawa tombs were detached from the park in 1885.
Yet Ueno has remained very much a park, less greedily gnawed at than Asakusa and Shiba have been. For a decade in mid-Meiji, until 1894, there was a horseracing track around Shinobazu Pond, a genteel one, with a royal stand. The emperor was present at the opening. The purpose, most Meiji-like, was not pleasure or gambling but the promotion of horsemanship in the interests of national defense. Woodcuts, not always reliable in such matters, seem to inform us that the horses ran clockwise.
Ueno Park had the first art museum in the land, the first zoo, the first electric trolley, a feature of one of the industrial expositions, and, in 1920, the first May Day observances. (There have been 53 as of 1982; a decade’s worth were lost to “Fascism.”) In a city that contains few old buildings, Ueno has the largest