There is another sense in which the city was still, at the end of Meiji, near nature, and still is today. The rhythm of the fields and of the seasons continued to be felt all through it. Everywhere in Japan Shinto observances follow the seasons. (It may be that in the United States only the harvest festival, Thanksgiving, is similarly bound to nature.) In deciding which among the great Japanese cities is, in this sense, most “natural,” subjective impression must prevail, for there are no measuring devices. When Tanizaki’s Makioka sisters, from an old Osaka family, wish to go on a cherry-blossom excursion, they go to Kyoto. They might have found blossoms scattered over Osaka, of course, but Osaka, more than Tokyo, is a place of buildings and sterile surfaces. From one of the high buildings, it is an ashen city. Having arrived in Kyoto, the sisters seem to have only one favored blossom-viewing spot near the center of the city, the grounds of a modern shrine. All the others are on the outskirts, not in the old city at all.
One is left with a strong impression that Tokyo has remained nearer its natural origins, and nearer agrarian rhythms, than the great cities of the Kansai. This fastest-growing city did remarkably well at preserving a sense of the fields and the moods of the seasons. At the end of Meiji the Tokyo resident who wished to revel under the blossoms of April might have gone to Asukayama, that one among the five original parks that lay beyond the city limits, but he could have found blossoms enough for himself and several hundred thousand other people as well at Ueno or along the banks of the Sumida. Nothing comparable was to be had so near at hand in Osaka or Kyoto.
Places famous in early Meiji for this and that flower or grass of the seasons did less well at the end of Meiji. Industrial fumes ate at the cherries along the Sumida, and clams, the digging of which was a part of the homage paid to summer, were disappearing from the shores of Shiba and Fukagawa. (The laver seaweed of Asakusa, famed in Edo and before, had long since disappeared.) Even as the city grew bigger and dirtier, however, new places for enjoying the grasses and flowers came to be.
Every guide to the city contains lists of places to be visited for seasonal things. Going slightly against the natural pattern, these things begin with snow, not a flower or a grass, and not commonly available in quantity until later in the spring. The ornamental plants of midwinter are the camellia and a bright-leafed variety of cabbage, but neither seems to have been thought worth going distances to view. The Sumida embankment was the traditional place for snow viewing. There were other spots, and in the course of Meiji a new one, the Yasukuni Shrine, joined the list. Probably snow has been deemed a thing worth viewing because, like the cherry blossom, it so quickly goes away—on the Tokyo side of Honshu, at any rate.
At the beginning of Meiji, the grasses and flowers of the seasons were probably to be found in the greatest variety east of the Sumida. One did not have to go far east to leave the old city behind, and, having entered a pastoral (more properly, agrarian) village, one looked back towards the river and the hills of the High City, with Fuji rising grandly beyond them. These pleasures diminished towards the end of Meiji, as the regions east of the river fell victim to economic progress. Kafū seems prescient when, in a story from very late Meiji, he takes a gentleman and a geisha to view some famous peonies in Honjo, east of the river. They are disappointed, and the disappointment seems to tell us what the future holds for the peonies and indeed all these regions east of the river. Yet as the peony lost ground in Honjo it gained elsewhere: famous peony places have been established nearer the center of the city.
Another generous disposition of blossom-viewing and grass-viewing places lay along the ridge that divided the Low City from the High City. From here one looked eastwards towards the river and the fields. At the southern end of the ridge was the site of the British legation that never came to be. Ueno and Asukayama, famous spots for cherry blossoms, both stood on the ridge.
The viewing places along the ridge fared better in Meiji than did those east of the river. Ueno gradually ceased to intimidate, as it had under the shoguns, and so moved ahead of Asukayama and the Sumida embankment as the favored place for the noisiest rites of spring. The part of the ridge that lay between Ueno and Asukayama, inside and outside the city limits, was the great Edo center for nurseries, for potted chrysanthemums and morning glories and the like. The pattern has prevailed through the present century. These establishments have been pushed farther and farther out, so that not many survive today in Tokyo Prefecture, but the northern suburbs are still the place for them.
Early in the spring came the plum blossom. To admire it in early Meiji one went to Asakusa and Kameido, a slight distance beyond Honjo, east of the Sumida. Kameido is also recommended for wisteria in May. The Kameido wisteria have survived, but there are plums no longer, either in Kameido or in Asakusa. The plum is the personal blossom, so to speak, of Sugawara Michizane, a tragic and quickly deified statesman of the tenth century, who is the tutelary god of the Kameido Shrine. If his flower has gone from Kameido, a plum orchard has since been planted at another of his holy places, the Yushima Shrine in Hongō. So it is that the flowers and grasses cling to existence, losing here and gaining there. Towards the end of The River Sumida Kafū has his sad hero go walking with an uncle to Kameido, and the poignancy of the scene comes in large measure from an awareness already present, then in late Meiji, of what progress is doing to the district. It lies in the path of economic miracles.
In April came the cherry, which might be called the city’s very own blossom. It has long been made much of, for the swiftness of its blooming and of its falling appeals to the highly cultivated national sense of evanescence. In the years of the Tokugawa hegemony the cherry became the occasion for that noisiest of springtime rites. Goten Hill, overlooking the bay at the southern edge of the Meiji city, is no longer found on early Meiji lists of blossom-viewing places. That was where the British legation had been put up and so promptly burned down. The most popular Meiji sites for the cherry blossom were Asukayama, remotest of the original five parks; Ueno; and the Sumida embankment. Two of the three have declined as the city and progress have engulfed them, while Ueno, nearest of the three to the center, thrives. It still draws the biggest crowds in the city and doubtless in all of Japan.
The peach and the pear come at about the same time, slightly later in the spring. They are dutifully included in Meiji lists of things to see, but the Japanese have not made as much of them as the Chinese, whose proverb has the world beating a path to a door with a blooming peach or pear. It would be easy to say that they are too showy for Japanese taste, but the chrysanthemum and the peony, both of them showy flowers, are much admired. Perhaps observance of the passing seasons was becoming less detailed, and the peach and the pear are among the lost details. There were no famous places within the city limits for viewing either of the two. In the case of the pear, one was asked to go to a place near Yokohama (the place where, in 1862, Satsuma soldiers killed an Englishman, prompting the British to shell Kagoshima). There were other flowers of spring and early summer—wisteria, azaleas, peonies, and yamabuki, a yellow-flowering shrub related to the rose.
Certain pleasures of the seasons were not centered upon flowers and grasses, or upon a specific flower or grass. For plucking the new shoots and herbs of spring, the regions east of the river and the western suburbs were especially recommended. For the new greenery of spring there were Ueno and the western suburbs. For the clams of summer there were the shores of the bay, at Susaki and Shibaura, where Tanizaki and his family went digging. Insects were admired, and birds. Fireflies, now quite gone from the city save for the caged ones released at garden parties, were to be found along the Kanda River, just below Kafū’s birthplace. They were also present in the paddy lands around the Yoshiwara, to the north of Ueno, and along the banks of the Sumida,