Besides Edo survivals, the park, broadly defined to include the campus of the art college, contains the oldest brick building in the city. It has just passed its centennial. The oldest concert hall, of wood, is chronically threatened with dismemberment. The oldest building in the National Museum complex, in a domed Renaissance style, was a gift of the Tokyo citizenry, put up to honor the wedding of the crown prince. The present emperor was already a lad of seven when it was finished. The planning, collecting of funds, and building took time. What has become the great symbol of the park, recognized all over the land, is also a relic of Meiji. The bronze statue of Saigō Takamori, on the heights above the railway station, was unveiled in 1898. The original plans had called for putting it in the palace plaza, but it was presently decided that Saigō, leader of the Satsuma Rebellion, at the end of which, in 1877, he killed himself, had not yet been adequately rehabilitated. His widow did not like the statue. Never, she said, had she seen him so poorly dressed.
Huge numbers of people went to Ueno for the industrial expositions, and soon after it became a park it was again what it had been in Edo, a famous place for viewing cherry blossoms. Under the old regime the blossoms had been somewhat overwhelmed by Tokugawa mortuary grandeur, however, and singing and dancing, without which a proper blossom-viewing is scarcely imaginable, had been frowned upon. A certain solemnity seems to have hung over the new royal park as well. Blossom-viewing places on the Sumida and on the heights to the north of Ueno were noisier and less inhibited. Indeed, whether or not because of the royal association, Ueno seems early to have become a place of edification rather than fun.
Asakusa was very different. The novelist Saitō Ryokuu made an interesting and poetic comparison of the two, Asakusa and Ueno. Ryokuu’s case was similar to Nagai Kafū’s: born in the provinces in 1867 or 1868 and brought to Tokyo as a boy of perhaps nine (the facts of his early life are unclear), and so not a son of Edo, he outdid the latter in his fondness for the Edo tradition. His way of showing it was different from Kafū’s. He preferred satire to lyricism, and falls in the proper if not entirely likeable tradition of Edo satirists whose favorite subject is rustic ineptitude in the great pleasure palaces of the metropolis. He is not much read today. His language is difficult and his manner is out of vogue, and it may be that he was the wrong sex. Women writers in a similarly antique mode still have their devoted followings.
Some of his pronouncements deserve to be remembered. Of Ueno and Asakusa he said: “Ueno is for the eyes, a park with a view. Asakusa is for the mouth, a park for eating and drinking. Ueno puts a stop to things. From Asakusa you go on to other things. In Ueno even a Kagura dance is dour and gloomy, in Asakusa a prayer is cheerful. The vespers at Ueno urge you to go home, the matins at Asakusa urge you to come on over. When you go to Ueno you feel that the day’s work is not yet finished. When you go to Asakusa you feel that you have shaken off tomorrow’s work. Ueno is silent, mute. Asakusa chatters on and on.”
Ueno was the largest of the five original parks. Of the other four, only Asukayama, the cherry-viewing place in the northern suburbs, has managed to do as well over the years as Ueno in looking like a park. The notion of what a park should be was a confused one. The Edo equivalent had been the grounds of temple and shrine. The park system of 1873 tended to perpetuate this concept, merely furnishing certain tracts a new and enlightened name. Ueno was almost empty at the outset and presently became royal, and ended up rather similar to the city parks of the West.
Asakusa, on the other hand, resembles nothing in the West at all. It was the third largest of the original five, more than half as large as Shiba and Ueno, and several times as large as the two smaller ones. What remains of the Edo temple gardens is now closed to the public, and of what is open there is very little that resembles public park or garden. The old park has in legal fact ceased to be a park. A decree under the Occupation, which liked to encourage religious institutions provided they were not contaminated by patriotism, returned the park lands to the temple. Yet the technicalities by which it ceased to be a park had as little effect on its career as those by which it had become a park in the first place.
The original Asakusa Park was expanded in 1876 to include the gardens and firebreak to the west. There was further expansion in 1882, and the following year “the paddies,” as the firebreak was called, were excavated to make two ornamental lakes. The reclaimed wetlands were designated the sixth of the seven districts into which the park was divided. In the Meiji and Taishō periods, and indeed down to Pearl Harbor, “Sixth District” meant the music halls and the movie palaces and the other things that drew mass audiences. The Sixth District had its first theater in 1886, and, in 1903, Electricity Hall, the first permanent movie theater in the land. Among the other things were a miniature Mount Fuji, sixty-eight feet high, for the ascent of which a small fee was charged, and a rope bridge across the lakes, to give a sense of deep mountains. The Fuji was damaged in a typhoon and torn down the year the Twelve Storys, much higher, was completed, on land just north of the park limits. Among those who crossed the bridge was Sir Edwin Arnold, the British journalist best remembered as the author of The Light of Asia. Several urchins tried to shake him and a lady companion into one of the lakes. The workmanship of the bridge reminded him of the Incas.
By the turn of the century, the Sixth District was a jumble of show houses and archery stalls—the great pleasure warren of a pleasure-loving city. It may be that the change was not fundamental, for the “back mountain” of the Asakusa Kannon had already been something of the sort. The Sixth District was noisier, brighter, and gaudier, however, and its influence extended all through the park. Remnants of the old Asakusa, shrinking back into it all, spoke wistfully to the few who took notice.
Kubota Mantarō, poet, novelist, playwright, and native of Asakusa, wrote of the change wrought by the cinema:
Suddenly, it was everywhere. It swept away all else, and took control of the park. The life of the place, the color, quite changed. The “new tide” was violent and relentless. In the districts along the western ditch, by the Kōryūji Temple, somnolence had reigned. It quite departed. The old shops, dealers in tools and scrap and rags, the hair dresser’s and the bodkin and bangle places—they all went away, as did the water in the ditch. New shops put up their brazen signs: Western restaurants, beef and horse places, short-order places, milk parlors. Yet even in those days, there were still houses with latticed fronts, little shops of uniform design, nurseries with bamboo fences, workmen from the fire brigades. They were still to be observed, holding their own, in a few corners, in the quiet, reposed, somehow sad alleys of the back districts, in the deep shade of the blackberry brambles behind the grand hall.
Asakusa had its gay and busy time, which passed. The lakes grew dank and gaseous in the years after the surrender, and were filled in. The crowds ceased to come, probably more because of changes in the entertainment business and new transportation patterns than because of what had happened to the park. It might be argued that Asakusa would have fared better if it had not become an entertainment center. If the old park had gone on looking like a park, then Asakusa, like Ueno, might still have its lures. As to that, no one can say—and it may be that if we could say, we would not wish the story of Asakusa to be different. It was perhaps the place where the Low City had its last good time. Nowhere today is there quite the same good-natured abandon to be found, and if people who remember it from thirty years ago may properly lament the change, the laments of those who remember it from twice that long ago are, quite as properly, several times as intense.
It is another story. Asakusa is an instance of what can happen to a public park when no one is looking, though the more relevant point may be that it never really was a park. As an episode in intellectual history, it illustrates the ease with which words can be imported, and the slowness with which substance comes straggling along afterwards. In 1873 Tokyo could face the other capitals of the world and announce that it too had public parks; but it was not until two decades later, when the city acquired land suitable for a central park (if that was what was wished) that the possibility of actually planning and building a park seemed real. The double life, in other words, was gradually reaching down to fundamentals. What had happened at Ueno had happened more by accident than forethought, and not much at all had happened at