Still, with all the changes, the flowers and grasses, the god-seats and the shrine fairs, survived. New Year celebrations became less prolonged and detailed. The advent of spring became less apparent in the eastern suburbs as industrial mists replaced natural ones. Nurseries were driven farther and farther north, and presently across the river into another prefecture. Yet the city remained close to nature as has no other great city in the world. In midsummer, for the festival of the dead, people returned in huge numbers to their villages, and those who could not go had village dances in the city. It was the double life at its best. Civilization and Enlightenment had to come, perhaps, but they did not require giving up the old sense of the earth. It is a part of Japanese modernization which other nations might wish to emulate, along with managerial methods and quality control and that sort of thing. No one can possibly have attended all the observances that survived from Edo through Meiji. It is a pity that no record-keeper seems to have established who attended the most.
The moods of a place will change, whatever its conscious or unconscious conservatism. The exotic and daring becomes commonplace, and other exotic and daring things await the transformation. Tolerance grows, the sense of novelty is dulled, and revolutions are accomplished without the aid of insistent revolutionaries. The old way did not go, but more and more it yielded to the new. The shift was increasingly pronounced in the last years of Meiji, after two ventures in foreign warfare.
If a native who departed Tokyo in 1870, at an age mature enough for clear observation and recollection, had returned for the first time forty years later, he would have found much to surprise him. He might also have been surprised at how little change there was in much of the city. The western part of Nihombashi and Kanda had their grand new banks, department stores, and universities, while fires played over the wooden clutter to the east. So too with trendier, more high-collar Kyōbashi: the new Ginza went as far as the Kyōbashi bridge, where the shadows of Edo took over.
He would have found ample changes, certainly: the new Ginza, the government complex to the south of the palace, the financial and managerial complex to the east. Scarcely a trace remained of the aristocratic dwellings that had stood between the outer and inner moats of the castle. He would have found department stores in place of the old “silk stores” (though he would still have found silk stores in large numbers as well), and an elevated railway pushing into the heart of the city, through what had been the abode of daimyo, badger, and fox.
He might have been more aware of a change in mood, and had more trouble defining it.
There was great insecurity in the early years of Meiji. Nagai Kafū describes it well in an autobiographical story titled “The Fox.” The time is the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion. The place is Koishikawa, the northwest corner of the High City, above the Kōrakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family.
The talk was uniformly cruel and gory, of conspirators, of assassinations, of armed robbers. The air was saturated with doubt and suspicion. At a house the status of whose owner called for a moderately imposing gate, or a mercantile house with impressive godowns, a murderous blade could at any time come flashing through the floor mats, the culprit having stolen under the veranda and lain in wait for sounds of sleep. I do not remember that anyone, not my father or my mother, gave specific instructions, but roustabouts who frequented our house were set to keeping guard. As I lay in my nurse’s arms through the cold winter night, the wooden clappers of the guards would echo across the silent grounds, sharp and cold.
Some of the disorder was mere brigandage, but most of it was obviously reactionary, directed at the merchant and politician of the new day, and reflecting a wish to return to the old seclusion. Of a piece with the reactionary radicalism of the 1930s, it suggests the gasps and convulsions of the dying. Already the Rokumeikan Period was approaching, and the high-water mark of Civilization and Enlightenment. The serving women in the Nagai house read illustrated romances of the old Edo variety, and we know that their children would not. At the beginning of the Rokumeikan Period the revolution known as the Restoration was not yet complete and thorough. The violence was nationalistic in a sense, stirred by a longing for the secluded island past, but it suggests an afterglow rather than a kindling.
The Meiji Period was sprinkled with violence. It was there in the agitation for “people’s rights” and the jingoism that inevitably came with the first great international adventure, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. The sōshi bully-boys of the eighties and nineties were a strange though markedly Japanese combination of the expansive and the narrow. They favored “people’s rights” and they were very self-righteous and exclusive. “The Dynamite Song,” “The Chinks,” and “Let’s Get ‘Em” were among their favorite militant songs. Not many voices were raised against the xenophobia, directed this time at fellow Orientals, save for those of a few faltering Christians. The disquiet of Kafū’s boyhood was probably more serious, in that people lived in greater danger, but it was less baneful, something that looked to the past and was certain to die. The mood of the city at the end of the century was more modern.
Despite economic depression, it would seem to have been festive during the Sino-Japanese War. We hear for the first time of roistering at Roppongi, on the southern outskirts of the city, and so have the beginnings of what is now the most blatantly electronic of the city’s pleasure centers. Roppongi prospered because of the army barracks it contained. What is now the noisiest playground of self-indulgent pacifism had its beginnings in militarism. The ukiyo-e print, also more than a little militarist and nationalist, had its last day of prosperity. Anything having to do with the war would sell. The great problem was the censors, who were slow to clear works for printing. Great crowds gathered before the print shops, and pickpockets thrived. The Kyōbashi police, with jurisdiction over the Ginza district, sent out special pickpocket patrols. No Japanese festive occasion is without its amusing curiosities. A Kyōbashi haberdashery had a big sale of codpieces, strongly recommended for soldiers about to be exposed to the rigors of the Chinese climate.
There was ugliness in the “Chink”-baiting and perhaps a touch of arrogance in the new confidence, and one may regret that Roppongi ever got started, to drain youth and money from less metallic pleasure centers. Yet, despite casualties and depression, the war must have been rather fun for the city.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a more somber affair. The boisterous war songs of the Sino-Japanese War were missing. Nor were the makers of popular art as active. Pounds and tons of prints survive from the Sino-Japanese War; there is very little from the Russo-Japanese War. It may be said that the ukiyo-e died as a popular form in the inter-bellum decade. Dark spy rumors spread abroad. Archbishop Nikolai, from whom the Russian cathedral in Kanda derives its popular name, felt constrained to request police protection, for the first time in a career that went back to the last years of Edo.
The rioting that followed the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905 was a new thing. It was explicitly nationalist, and it seemed to demand something almost the opposite of what had been demanded by the violence of Kafū’s boyhood. Japan had arrived, after having worked hard through the Meiji reign, and now must push its advantage. The politicians—the violence said—had too easily accepted the Portsmouth terms. The war itself had of course been the first serious engagement with a Western