On September 5, 1905, the day the Portsmouth Treaty was signed, a protest rally gathered in Hibiya Park. For the next two days rioting was widespread, and from the evening of the fifth to the evening of the sixth it seemed out of control. The rioters were free to do as they wished (or so it is said), and the police were powerless to stop them. Tokyo was, albeit briefly, a city without government. There were attacks on police boxes, on government offices, on the houses of notables, on a newspaper, and on the American legation. (Today the American embassy is an automatic target when anything happens anywhere, but what happened in 1905 was unprecedented, having to do with Theodore Roosevelt’s offices as peace-maker.) Ten Christian churches were destroyed, all of them in the Low City. Casualties ran to upwards of a thousand, not quite half of them policemen and firemen. The largest number occurred in Kōjimachi Ward, where it all began, and where the largest concentration of government buildings was situated. Some distance behind, but with enough casualties that the three wards together accounted for about a third of the total, were two wards in the Low City, Asakusa and Honjo, opposite each other on the banks of the Sumida. It would be hard to say that everyone who participated did so for political reasons. Honjo might possibly be called a place of the new proletariat, now awakening to its political mission, but Asakusa is harder to explain. It was not rich, but it was dominated by conservative artisans and shopkeepers.
In some ways the violence was surprisingly polite. None was directed at the Rokumeikan or the Imperial Hotel, both of them symbols of Westernization and right across the street from Hibiya Park. Too much can be made of the attack on the American legation. It was unprecedented, but mild, no more than some shouting and heaving of stones. So it may be said that the violence, though widespread and energetic, was neither as political nor as threatening as it could have been. There was an element of the festive and the sporting in it all. There usually is when violence breaks out in this city.
Yet the Russo-Japanese War does seem to mark a turning point. Edo had not completely disappeared in the distance, but the pace of the departure began to increase. Our old child of Edo, back in 1910 after forty years, might well have been more surprised at the changes had he gone away then and come back a decade later. The end of a reign is conventionally taken as the end of a cultural phase, but the division between Meiji and Taisho would have been clearer if the Meiji emperor had died just after the Russo-Japanese War, in perhaps the fortieth year of his reign.
The Russo-Japanese War was followed by economic depression and, for the city, the only loss in population between the Restoration disturbances and the earthquake. Kōjimachi Ward, surrounding the palace, lost population in 1908, and the following year the regions to the north and east were seriously affected. When next a war came along, it brought no surge of patriotism; the main fighting was far away, and Japan had little to do with it. In an earlier day, however, there would have been huge pride in being among the victors. The city and the nation were getting more modern all the time.
Chapter 4
THE DECAY OF THE DECADENT
People like to think themselves different from other people; generally they like to think themselves superior. In the centuries of the Tokugawa seclusion, the Japanese had little occasion to assert differences between themselves and the rest of the world, nor would they have had much to go on, were such assertion desired. So the emphasis was on asserting differences among various kinds of Japanese. The son of Edo insisted on what made him different from the Osakan. He did it more energetically than the Osakan did the converse, and in this fact we may possibly find evidence that he felt inferior. Osaka was at the knee of His Majesty, whereas Edo was merely at the knee of Lord Tokugawa. Today it is Osaka that is more concerned with differences.
Aphorisms were composed characterizing the great Tokugawa cities. Some are clever and contain a measure of truth. Perhaps the best holds that the son of Kyoto ruined himself over dress, the son of Osaka ruined himself over food, and the son of Edo ruined himself looking at things.
This may seem inconsistent with other descriptions we have heard of the son of Edo, such as the one holding that he would pawn his wife to raise funds for a festival. There is no real inconsistency, however. What is meant is that Edo delighted in performances, all kinds of performances, including festivals and fairs. Performances were central to Edo culture, and at the top of the hierarchy, the focus of Edo connoisseurship, was the Kabuki theater. On a level scarcely lower were the licensed pleasure quarters. So intimately were the two related that it is difficult to assign either to the higher or the lower status. The great Kabuki actors set tastes and were popular heroes, and the Kabuki was for anyone (except perhaps the self-consciously aristocratic) who had enough money. The pleasure quarters, at their most elaborate, were only for male persons of taste and affluence, but the best of what its devotees got was very similar to what was to be had at the Kabuki. The difference between the two might be likened to the difference between a performance of a symphony or opera on the one hand and a chamber concert on the other.
It has been common among cultural historians to describe the culture of late Tokugawa as decadent. It definitely seemed so to the bureaucratic elite of the shogunate, and to eager propagandists for Civilization and Enlightenment as well. That it was unapologetically sensual and wanting in ideas seemed to them deplorable. They may not have been prudes, exactly, but they did want things to be edifying, intellectual, and uplifting, and to serve an easily definable purpose, such as the strengthening of the state and the elevating of the commonweal. If certain parts of the Edo heritage could be put to these purposes, very well. Everything else might expect righteous disapproval.
There is a certain narrow sense in which anything so centered upon carnal pleasure ought indeed to be described as decadent. However refined may have been the trappings of the theater and of its twin the pleasure quarter, sex lay behind them, and, worse, the purveying of sex. Perhaps something of the sort may also be said about the romantic love of the West. The high culture of Edo, in any event, the best that the merchant made of and for his city, is not to be understood except in terms of the theater and the pleasure quarters. What happened in these decadent realms is therefore central to the story of what happened to the Meiji city.
We have seen that General and Mrs. Grant visited the Kabuki in the summer of 1879. Probably the general did not know that he was participating in the movement to improve the Kabuki. It had already been elevated a considerable distance. Had he come as a guest of the shogunate, no one would have dreamed of taking him off to the far reaches of the city, where the theaters then were, and having disreputable actors, however highly esteemed they might be by the townsmen of Edo, perform for him and his Julia. His aristocratic hosts would not have admitted to having seen a performance themselves, though some of them might on occasion have stolen off to the edge of the city to see what it was like. It belonged to the townsman’s world, which was different from theirs. Making it a part of high culture, which is what “improvement” meant, had the effect of taking it from the townsman and his world.
The Shintomiza, which the Grants visited, was managed by Morita Kanya, the most innovative of early Meiji impresarios. The Kabuki had been removed from the center of the city to Asakusa in that last seizure of Tokugawa puritanism, a quarter of a century before the Restoration. There, remote, the three major theaters still stood when the Restoration came. All three were soon to depart, and none survives. The Nakamuraza, which stayed closest to the old grounds, was the first to disappear. It was still in Asakusa Ward, near the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, when in 1893 it was destroyed by fire one last time. The Ichimuraza stayed longest on the Asakusa grounds, and survived until 1932, when one of repeated burnings proved to be its last.
The Moritaza left Asakusa most swiftly and with the most determination, and led the way into the new day. It took the new name Shintomiza from the section of Kyōbashi, just east of Ginza, to which Kanya moved it.
He had long harbored ambitions to return his theater to the center of the city. He thought to make