He may be taxed with complacency. The professional child of Edo has descendants today, and they are proud of themselves to the point of incivility. They tend to divide the world between the Low City and other places, to the great disadvantage of the latter. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō, a genuine Edokko, born in 1886 of a Nihombashi merchant family, did not like his fellow Edokko, whom he described as weak, complaining, and generally ineffectual. Yet the Low City of Edo had high standards and highly refined tastes, and if exclusiveness was necessary to maintain them, as the years since have suggested, that seems a small price to pay.
Kyōbashi, to the south of Nihombashi, included Ginza, which came aggressively forward to greet the new day. An artisan quarter under the old regime, Ginza stood at the terminus of the new railway and eagerly brought new things in from Yokohama and beyond. Tanizaki and others have described the diaspora of the Edokko, with Nihombashi its chief victim, as the new people came in. It can be exaggerated, and one suspects that Tanizaki exaggerated for literary effect. He made much also of the helplessness of the Edokko before the entrepreneur from the West Country. Yet many an Edo family did very well. Among those who did best were the Mitsui, established in Nihombashi since the seventeenth century. Not many children of Edo had been there longer. The demographic and cultural movement to the south and west was inexorable all the same, and more rapid after the earthquake.
The High City was much less severely damaged than the Low City. The growing suburbs, many of them later incorporated within the city limits, were hurt even less. Through the years before and after the earthquake, industrial production remained fairly steady for Tokyo Prefecture, which included large suburbs as well as the city proper. Within the fifteen wards of the city, it fell sharply in the same period. The suburban share was growing.
With the Low City pleasure quarters lost in the fires, those of the High City throve. They did not have the same sort of tradition, and the change meant the end of something important in the life of the city. The novelist Nagai Kafū—not, like Tanizaki, a real son of Edo, both because he was not from the merchant class and because his family had not been in the city the three generations held necessary to produce one—was even so an earnest student of Edo and Tokyo. All through his career (he was born in 1879 and died in 1959) he went on lamenting the fact that the latter had killed the former; and all through his career, with lovable inconsistency, he went on remembering how Edo yet survived at this and that date later than ones already assigned to the slaying. Though he is commonly considered an amorous and erotic novelist, his writings are essentially nostalgic and elegiac. The pleasure quarters were central to Edo culture, and it was in those conservative regions if anywhere that something of Edo survived. So it was natural that they should be his favorite subject. He had many harsh things to say about the emergent pleasure centers of the High City, and their failure to keep sex in its place—pleasurable, no doubt, but not the only thing at which the great ladies of the older quarters thought it necessary to excel. The old quarters were genuine centers of the higher arts. The seventy-seventh of the Chinese sexagenary cycles came to a close in 1923. When Cycle Seventy-seven began, in 1864, the Tokugawa shogunate was in its final convulsions. The short administration of the last shogun was soon over, and the “Restoration,” as it is called in English, occurred. Edo became Tokyo, with the Meiji emperor in residence. “Restoration” is actually a bad translation of the Japanese ishin, which means something more like “renovation” or “revitalization.”
Edo could not have known, at the beginning of the Cycle Seventy-seven, that Lord Tokugawa would so soon be in exile. Yet there were ample causes for apprehension, not the least of which was the presence of the foreigner. He obviously did not mean to go away. At first, upon the opening of the ports, foreigners seem to have been greeted with friendliness and eager curiosity. Presently this changed. A Dutch observer dated the change as 1862, subsequent to which there were many instances of violence, including the stoning of an American consul. The Dutchman put the blame upon the foreigners themselves, an unruly lot whom the port cities attracted. The Edo townsman seems to have had little to do with the violence; his feelings were not that strong. Yet he seems to have agreed with the rustic soldiers responsible for most of the violence that the barbarian should be put back in his place, on the other side of the water.
Early in 1863, the new British legation was destroyed by arsonists of the military class—among them Itō Hirobumi, later to become the most prominent of Meiji statesmen. The legation had been built in the part of the city closest to the relative security of Yokohama. It was not yet occupied, and nothing came of plans for other legations on the same site. The Edo townsman seems to have received news of the fire with satisfaction.
Edo was not, like the great capitals of Europe, a commercial center in its own right, with interests independent of and sometimes in conflict with those of the sovereign. More like Washington than London or Paris, it was an early instance, earlier than Washington, of a fabricated capital. Technically it was not the capital at all, since the emperor remained in Kyoto through the Tokugawa centuries. It was, however, the seat of power. The first shogun established himself there for military reasons, and the commercial and artisan classes gathered, as in Washington, to be of service to the bureaucracy. It was an enormous bureaucracy, because the Tokugawa system required that provincial potentates maintain establishments in the city. The Edo townsman was happy, on the whole, to serve and to make money. He saw enough of the bureaucracy to know that its lesser members, at least, looked upon his own life with some envy.
Land-use maps, though they disagree in matters of detail, are consistent in showing a very large part of the city given over to the aristocracy and to temples and shrines, and a very small part to the plebeian classes, mercantile and artisan. If the expression “aristocracy” is defined broadly to include everyone attached in some fashion to the central bureaucracy and the establishments of the provincial lords, then the Edo townsman occupied perhaps as little as a fifth of the city. Not even the flatlands commonly held to be his abode belonged entirely to him. The banks of the Sumida were largely aristocratic all the way to Asakusa. The aristocracy possessed most of the land east of the river, and very large expanses as well in eastern Nihombashi and to the east of Ginza. There were extensive temple lands along the northern and southern fringes of the flatlands. A half million townsmen were crowded into what was indeed a small part of the city, scarcely enough to make up two of the present inner wards, or four of the smaller Meiji wards.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edo was probably the largest city in the world. The population was well over a million, perhaps at times as much as a million and two or three hundred thousand, in a day when the largest European city, London, had not yet reached a million. The merchant and artisan population was stable at a half million. The huge military aristocracy and bureaucracy made up most of the rest. There were also large numbers of priests, Buddhist and Shinto, numbering, with their families, as many as a hundred thousand persons; and there were pariahs, beneath even the merchants, the lowest of the four classes established by Tokugawa orthodoxy. There were indigents and transients. And finally there were entertainers, accommodated more and more uncomfortably by the Tokugawa regime as it moved into its last years.
Pictures of Edo—woodcuts and screens—make it seem the loveliest of places to live. Elegant little shops are elegantly disposed among temples and shrines, each of which offers a range of amusing sights and performers, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and swordsmen, and perhaps a tiger or an elephant brought from abroad in response to the exotic yearnings of a sequestered populace.
Prominent in such representations are the main streets of Nihombashi. They suggest a pleasant buzz of life, which indeed there must have been, but they do not reveal the equally probable crowding of the back streets. The main or “front” streets were for the better shops and the wealthier merchants. Lesser people occupied the alleys behind, living in rows of shingled huts along open gutters, using common wells and latrines.
The old city did not fill the fifteen wards of the Meiji city, much less the twenty-three wards of the present city. “It is Edo