Determining the number and cause of the fires has been as difficult as distinguishing between earthquake damage and fire damage. The best estimate puts the total number at upwards of a hundred-thirty, of which well over half could not be controlled. Most of the damage occurred during the first afternoon and night. It was early on the morning of September 2 that the Mitsukoshi was seen burning so brightly. Nineteen fires, the largest number for any of the fifteen wards, began in Asakusa, east of Shitaya. By the morning of September 3 the last of them had burned themselves out or been extinguished.
Ruins in Asakusa, including the Twelve Storys, after the earthquake.
It is commonly said that the chief reason for the inferno was the hour at which the first shocks came. Lunch was being prepared all over the city, upon gas burners and charcoal braziers. From these open flames and embers, common wisdom has it, the fires began.
But in fact many fires seem to have had other origins. Chemicals have been identified as the largest single cause, followed by electric wires and burners. This suggests that the same disaster might very well have occurred at any hour of the day. The earthquake of 1855 occurred in the middle of the night. Much of the Low City was destroyed then too. Most of the damage was caused by fire—yet in the mid-nineteenth century there were no electric lines and probably few chemicals to help the fire on. Fires will start, it seems, whenever buildings collapse in large numbers. No fire department can cope with them when they start simultaneously at many points on a windy day. Tokyo is now a sea of chemicals and a tangle of utility wires. It is not as emphatically wooden as it once was, to be sure, but the Low City, much of it a jumble of small buildings on filled land, will doubtless be the worst hit when the next great earthquake comes.
Among the rumors that went flying about the city was the imaginative one that an unnamed country of the West had developed an earthquake machine and was experimenting upon Japan. There were, nevertheless, no outbreaks of violence against “foreigners,” which in Japan usually means Westerners. Instead, the xenophobia of the island nation turned on Koreans.
The government urged restraint, not to make things easier for Koreans, but because the Western world might disapprove: it would not do for such things to be reported in the Western press. Rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells. The police were later accused of encouraging hostility by urging particular attention to wells, but probably not much encouragement was needed. A willingness, and indeed a wish, to believe the worst about Koreans has been a consistent theme in modern Japanese culture. The slaughter was considerable, in any event. Reluctant official announcements put casualties in the relatively low three figures. The researches of the liberal scholar Yoshino Sakuzō were later to multiply them by ten, bringing the total to upwards of two thousand.
Not all the things of Edo were destroyed. The most popular temple in the city, the great Asakusa Kannon, survived. An explanation for its close escape was that a statue of the Meiji Kabuki actor Danjūrō, costumed as the hero of Shibaraku (meaning “One Moment, Please”), held back flames advancing from the north. But fire did destroy the Yoshiwara, most venerable of the licensed quarters that had been centers of Edo culture.
Several fine symbols of Meiji Tokyo were also destroyed. The old Shimbashi Station, northern terminus of the earliest railroad in the land, was among the modern buildings that did not survive. The Ryōunkaku (literally “Cloud Scraper”), a twelve-story brick tower in Asakusa, had survived the earthquake of 1894, when many a brick chimney collapsed and brick architecture in general was brought into disrepute. It had been thought earthquake-proof, but in 1923 it broke off at the eighth story. The top storys fell into a lake nearby, and the rest were destroyed the following year by army engineers.
The great loss was the Low City, home of the merchant and the artisan, heart of Edo culture. From the beginnings of its existence as the shogun’s capital, Edo was divided into two broad regions, the hilly Yamanote or High City, describing a semicircle generally to the west of the shogun’s castle, now the emperor’s palace, and the flat Low City, the Shitamachi, completing the circle on the east. Plebeian enclaves could be found in the High City, but mostly it was a place of temples and shrines and aristocratic dwellings. The Low City had its aristocratic dwellings, and there were a great many temples, but it was very much the plebeian half of the city. And though the aristocracy was very cultivated indeed, its tastes—or the tastes thought proper to the establishment—were antiquarian and academic. The vigor of Edo was in its Low City.
The Low City has always been a vaguely defined region, its precise boundaries difficult to draw. It sometimes seems as much an idea as a geographic entity. When in the seventeenth century the Tokugawa regime set about building a seat for itself, it granted most of the solid hilly regions to the military aristocracy, and filled in the marshy mouths of the Sumida and Tone rivers, to the east of the castle. The flatlands that resulted became the abode of the merchants and craftsmen who purveyed to the voracious aristocracy and provided its labor.
These lands, between the castle on the west and the Sumida and the bay on the east, were the original Low City. Of the fifteen Meiji wards, it covered only Nihombashi and Kyōbashi and the flatlands of Kanda and Shiba. Asakusa, most boisterous of the Meiji pleasure centers, was scarcely a part of the old city at all. It lay beyond one of the points guarding approaches to the city proper, and was built initially to serve pilgrims to its own great Kannon temple. Later it was linked to the theater district, and was a part of the complex that catered to the Yoshiwara licensed quarter, yet farther to the north.
Today everything east of the Sumida is regarded as part of the Low City, but until Meiji only a thin strip along the east bank of the Sumida was so considered, and not even that by everyone.
The heart of the Low City was Nihombashi, broadest of the lands first reclaimed by the shogunate. Nihombashi set the tone and made the definitions. Nihombashi proper, the “Japan Bridge” from which the district took its name, was the spot where all roads began. Distances from the city were measured from Nihombashi. A proper resident of Nihombashi did not have to go far east, perhaps only as far as the Sumida, perhaps a few paces beyond, to feel that he had entered the land of the bumpkin. The Low City was small, tight, and cozy.
It changed a great deal between the resignation of the last shogun and the earthquake. As time runs on, new dates for the demise of Edo are always being assigned by connoisseurs of the subject. In 1895, we are told, or in 1912, Edo finally departed, and only Tokyo remained. Yet even today the Low City is different from the High City, and so it may be said that even today something of Edo survives. The earthquake was all the same a disaster from which the heart of the Low City did not recover. Already before 1923 the wealthy were moving away from Nihombashi, and vitality was departing as well. The earthquake accelerated the movement to the south and west, first apparent in the rise of Ginza. Today the most prosperous centers for drinking and shopping lie beyond the western limits of the Meiji city.
Tokiwa Bridge, Nihombashi, in early Meiji. Later site of the Bank of Japan
Nihombashi and the Low City in general were conservative. There was, of course, resentment at the rigid Tokugawa class structure, which put the merchant below everyone else. By way of fighting back, a satirical vein in the literature and drama of the Low City poked fun at the High City aristocrat, but never strongly enough to make the urban masses a threat to the old order. The Edokko, the “child of Edo,” as the native of the Low City called himself, was pleased to be there “at the knee” of Lord Tokugawa, and the shogunate was wise enough to take condescending notice of the populace on