It is easy to become sentimental about Edo and the beautiful way of life depicted on the screens. Nostalgia is the chief ware offered by the professional Edokko. But Meiji was an exuberant period, and even for the most conservative inhabitant there must have been a sense of release at its advent.
Tanizaki had a famous vision after the earthquake of what the rebuilt city would be like. He was in the Hakone mountains, some forty miles southwest of Tokyo, when the earthquake struck. He rejoiced in the destruction of the old city, and looked forward to something less constricting. Since he doubtless had the Nihombashi of his boyhood in mind, and the mood of Edo was still strong in that place and in those days, we may feel in his musings something of what the son of Edo must have felt upon leaving Edo and the repressive old regime behind.
Lafcadio Hearn once said that a person never forgets the things seen and heard in the depths of sorrow; but it seems to me that, whatever the time of sorrow, a person also thinks of the happy, the bright, the comical, things quite the opposite of sorrowful. When the earthquake struck I knew that I had survived, and I feared for my wife and daughter, left behind in Yokohama. Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. “Tokyo will be better for this!” I said to myself….
I have heard that it did not take ten years for San Francisco to be a finer city than before the earthquake. Tokyo too would be rebuilt in ten years, into a solid expanse of splendid buildings like the Marunouchi Building and the Marine Insurance Building. I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles. The geometric beauty of block towering upon block, and elevated lines and subways and trolleys weaving among them, and the stir of a nightless city, and pleasure facilities to rival those of Paris and New York…. Fragments of the new Tokyo passed before my eyes, numberless, like flashes in a movie. Soirees, evening dresses and swallowtails and dinner jackets moving in and out, and champagne glasses floating up like the moon upon the ocean. The confusion of late night outside a theater, headlights crossing one another on darkly shining streets. The flood of gauze and satin and legs and illumination that is vaudeville. The seductive laughter of streetwalkers beneath the lights of Ginza and Asakusa and Marunouchi and Hibiya Park. The secret pleasures of Turkish baths, massage parlors, beauty parlors. Weird crimes. I have long had a way of giving myself up to daydreams in which I imagine all manner of curious things, but it was very strange indeed that these phantasms should be so stubbornly entwined among sad visions of my wife and daughter.
In the years after the Second World War, one was frequently surprised to hear from the presumably fortunate resident of an unbombed pocket that he would have been happier if it too had been bombed. A lighter and airier dwelling, more consonant with modern conveniences, might then have taken its place. The Edo townsman must have shared this view when the gates to the back alleys were dismantled and, after disappearing in fires, the alleys themselves were replaced by something more in keeping with Civilization and Enlightenment, as the rallying call of the new day had it.
Meiji brought industrial soot and other forms of advanced ugliness, and Nagai Kafū’s laments for a lost harmony were not misplaced. But it also brought liberation from old fears and afflictions. In the spring of 1888 services were held on the site of the old Kotsukappara execution grounds, in the northern suburbs, for the repose of the souls of those who had been beheaded or otherwise put to death there. The number was then estimated at a hundred thousand. The temple that now stands on the site claims to comfort and solace two hundred thousand departed spirits. If the latter figure is accepted, then about two persons a day lost their lives at Kotsukappara through the three hundred years of its use—and Kotsukappara was not the only execution grounds at the disposal of the Edo magistracy. The Meiji townsman need fear no such judicial harshness, and he was gradually rescued from epidemics and fires as well.
Kotsukappara execution grounds
There was also spiritual liberation. The playwright Hasegawa Shigure, a native of Nihombashi, thus described the feelings of her father upon the promulgation, on February 11, 1889, of the Meiji constitution: “His joy and that of his fellows had to do with the end of the old humiliation, the expunging of the stigma they had carried for so many years as Edo townsmen.”
One should guard against sentimentality, then; but there is the other extreme to be guarded against as well. The newly enlightened elite of Meiji was strongly disposed to dismiss Edo culture as vulgar and decadent, and the latter adjective is one commonly applied even now to the arts and literature of the early nineteenth century.
Perhaps it was “decadent,” in a certain narrow sense, that so much of Edo culture should have centered upon the pleasure quarters, and it is certainly true that not much late-Edo literature seems truly superior. The rigid conservatism of the shogunate, and the fact that the pleasure quarters were the only places where a small degree of democracy prevailed (class did not matter, only money and taste), may be held responsible for the decadence, if decadence there was. As for the inadequacy of late-Edo literature, good taste itself may have been more important than the products of good taste.
Because of its exquisite products we think of the Heian Period, when the Shining Genji of the tale that bears his name did everything so beautifully, as a time when everyone had good taste. But it is by its nature something that not everyone possesses. Courtly Heian and mercantile Edo must have been rather similar in that good taste was held to be important and the devices for cultivating it were abundant.
Edo culture was better than anything it left to posterity. Its genius was theatrical. The chanoyu, the tea ceremony, that most excellent product of an earlier age, was also essentially theatrical. In the hands of the affluent and cultivated, it brought together the best in handicrafts, in painting, and in architecture, and the “ceremony” itself was a sort of dance punctuated by ritualized conversation. The objects that surrounded it and became a part of it survived, of course, but, whatever may have been the effect on the minds and spirits of the participants, the occasion itself was an amalgam of beautiful elements put together for a few moments, and dispersed.
So it was too with the highest accomplishments of Edo—and the likening of an evening at the Yoshiwara to an afternoon of tea is not to be taken as jest. In both cases, the performance was the important thing. The notion of leaving something behind for all generations was not relevant. Much that is good in the Occidental theater is also satisfying as literature, but writings for the Tokugawa theater, whether of Edo or of Osaka, tend not to be.
The best of Edo was in the Kabuki theater and in the pleasure quarters, whose elegant evenings also wore a theatrical aspect. It was a very good best,