Since the rise of Marunouchi, Hibiya Park, along with the public portion of the palace grounds abutting it on the north, has been the central park of the city—perhaps more important, because of easy access to Ginza, than Ueno. In early Meiji it was not a place where a townsman would have chosen to go for a pleasant walk, and it did not become a public park until thirty years after the original five. Lying within the outer ramparts of the castle, it was at the end of the Tokugawa regime occupied by mansions of the military aristocracy. While the castle grounds nearby were being put to somewhat helter-skelter use by the new government and ultimately, after their time of providing homes for foxes and badgers, were left as public gardens or turned over to the commercial developers, Hibiya was a parade ground. It was cleared for the purpose in 1871, and there, a year later, the emperor first reviewed troops. It seems to have been fearfully dusty even after the Rokumeikan and the Imperial Hotel were built to the east, for a scorched-earth policy was deemed in accord with modern military methods. In 1893 the army, which had acquired more suitable spots on the western fringes of the city, announced its intention of turning Hibiya over to the city by stages. Hibiya Park was opened in 1903.
Initially it was thought that the present Hibiya park lands would become the bureaucratic center. Planning to that effect began after the burning of the palace in 1872. There was no hesitation about rebuilding the palace on the site of the old castle, and in 1886 a government planning office proposed a concentration of government buildings on the parade grounds. The advice of the Germans was invited. Two eminent architects arrived and drew up plans for a complex of highly ornate buildings. A big hole was dug, at great expense, before it was concluded that the soil would not really bear the weight of all that echt Western brick and stone, and that lands farther to the west might be more suitable. Though German prestige slid, we may be grateful for the results. Without the excavation Tokyo might lack a central park (as Osaka does). The German plans, modified in the direction of simplicity, found use in the government complex that did presently come to be. The original plans have been described as seven parts Nikkō (with reference to the most florid of the Tokugawa tombs) and three parts Western.
Some liked the new park, some did not. Nagai Kafū, on his return from France in 1908, found it repellently formal. It became so favored a trysting place, however, that the Kōjimachi police station felt compelled to take action. On the summer night in 1908 when a dozen or so policemen were first sent into the park, they apprehended about the same number of miscreant couples, who were fined. Hibiya is usually referred to as the first genuinely Western park in the city and in Japan. That is what Kafū so disliked about it—he did not think that Westernization worked in any thing or person Japanese but himself.
In fact a good deal of the park is fairly Japanese, and it contains relics of all the eras—trees said to be as old as the city, a fragment of the castle escarpment and moat, a bandstand that was in the original park, a bronze fountain only slightly later. The bandstand has lost its original cupola and the park has changed in matters of detail; yet of all the major parks it is the one that has changed least. Perhaps the fact that it was Western in concept as well as in name may be given credit for this stability.
The area officially devoted to parks grew slightly through Meiji and Taishō, but remained low compared to the cities of the West with which comparison is always being made. (It is high compared to Osaka.) In the last years of Taishō, the total of open spaces, including temples, shrines, and cemeteries, offered each resident of the city only one four-hundredth as much as was available to the resident of Washington. Even New York, whose residents were straitened in comparison with those of London and Paris, boasted forty times the per-capita park area that Tokyo did.
Yet there is truth in the excuse given by that Taishō mayor for the shortage of tracts officially designated as parks. While public parks were not pointless, they may have seemed much less of a necessity than they did in Western cities. Besides the tiny plots of greenery before rows of Low City houses, there continued to be a remarkable amount of unused space, especially in the High City, but in the Low City as well.
Kafū could be lyrical on the subject of vacant lots.
I love weeds. I have the same fondness for them as for the violets and dandelions of spring, the bell flowers and maiden flowers of autumn. I love the weeds that flourish in vacant lots, the weeds that grow on roofs, the weeds beside the road and beside the ditch. A vacant lot is a garden of weeds. The plumes of the mosquito-net grass, as delicate as glossed silk; the plumes of foxtail, soft as fur; the warm rose-pink of knotgrass blossoms; the fresh blue-white of the plantain; chickweed in flower, finer and whiter than sand: having come upon them does one not linger over them and find them difficult to give up? They are not sung of in courtly poetry, one does not find them in the paintings of Sōtatsu and Kōrin. They are first mentioned in the haiku and in the comic verse of plebeian Edo. I will never cease to love Utamaro’s “Selection of Insects.” An ukiyo-e artist sketched lowly grasses and insects quite ignored by Sinified painters and the schools of Kyoto. The example informs us how great was the achievement of haiku and comic verse and the ukiyo-e. They found a subject dismissed by aristocratic art and they made it art in its own right.
Far more than the plantings in all the new parks around the outer moat and behind the Nikolai Cathedral, I am drawn to the weeds one comes upon in vacant lots.
An important addition was made in Meiji to the lists of shrines, some of them not so very different from parks. Kudan Hill, to the west of the Kanda flats and northwest of castle and palace, was once higher than it is now. It once looked down over the swampy lands which the shogunate early filled in to accommodate merchants and artisans. The top half or so was cut off to reclaim the swamps. Barracks occupied the flattened top in the last Tokugawa years. In 1869 it became the site of a shōkonsha, a nationally administered “shrine to which the spirits of the dead are invited,” or, in a venerable tradition, a place where the dead, and the living as well, are feasted and entertained. The specific purpose of several such shrines scattered over the country was to honor those who had died in line of duty “since the Kaei Period.” This is a little misleading. Commodore Perry came in the Kaei Period, and there may seem to be an implication that he was resisted with loss of life, which he was not. The real intent was to honor those who died in the Restoration disturbances. As other conflicts and other casualties occurred, the rosters expanded. They include three Englishmen who died in the battle of Tsushima, at the climax of the Russo-Japanese War, as well as other surprises. Not many now remember that Japanese lives were lost in the Boxer Rebellion. It is of interest that Tokyo names on the growing rosters ran consistently below the national average.
The son of Edo was not as eager as others to die for his country. In 1879 the Kudan shōkonsha became the Yasukuni Jinja, “Shrine for the Repose of the Nation.” It was in the Edo tradition, combining reverence and pleasure. There was horseracing on the grounds before the Shinobazu track was built. In 1896, the grandest equestrian year, 268 horses participated in the autumn festival. The last meet took place in 1898, and the track was obliterated in 1901. The shrine continued to be used for a great variety of shows, artistic and amusing, such as Sumō tournaments and Nō performances. A Nō stage built in 1902 survives on the shrine grounds, and a lighthouse from early Meiji. The latter served to guide fishing boats—for there were in those days fishing boats within sight of the hill.
A military exhibition hall was put up in 1882, a grim, Gothic place. It contained a machine gun made by Pratt and Whitney and presented to the emperor by General Grant. The Yasukuni had ten million visitors annually during and just after the Russo-Japanese War. Though the figure fell off thereafter, it continued to be in the millions. The shrine was more of a park, as that term is known in the West, than Asakusa. To those Japanese of a traditional religious bent it may have seemed strange that expanses of protective greenery extended to the southeast, southwest, and northwest of the palace—Hibiya Park, the Sanno Shrine (a very old one), and the Yasukuni Shrine—while the businessmen of the Mitsubishi Meadow were custodians of the most crucial direction, the northeast, “the devil’s gate.”
Tokyo grew the most rapidly of the large Japanese cities. At the close of Meiji, there can have been few foxes and badgers left