The pleasure quarters were culture centers, among the few places where the townsman of affluence could feel that he had things his way, without censorious magistrates telling him to stay down there at the bottom of an unchanging social order. The Yoshiwara was central to the culture of Edo from its emergence in the seventeenth century as something more than a provincial outpost.
The elegance of the Yoshiwara was beyond the means of the poorer shopkeeper or artisan, but he shared the Edo passion for things theatrical. The city was dotted with Yose, variety or vaudeville halls, where he could go and watch and pass the time of day for a very small admission fee. There he found serious and comic monologues, imitations of great actors, juggling and balancing acts, and mere oddities. At no expense whatever there were shows on festival days in the precincts of shrines and temples. A horror play on a summer night was held to have a pleasantly chilling effect; and indeed summer, most oppressive season for the salaried middle class of the new day, was for the Edo townsman the best of seasons. He could wander around half naked of a warm evening, taking in the sights.
He did it mostly on foot. A scarcity of wheels characterized Edo, and the shift from feet to wheels was among the major revolutions of Meiji. The affluent of Edo had boats and palanquins, but almost no one but draymen used wheels. More than one modern Japanese city has been described as “the Venice of Japan,” and the appellation might have been used for Edo—it was not as maritime in its habits as Venice, and the proportion of waterways to streets was certainly lower, but there was a resemblance all the same. Edo had a network of waterways, natural and artificial, and the pleasantest way to go to the Yoshiwara was by boat. Left behind by movements and concentrations of modern power, Venice remained Venice. Not Edo. No Japanese city escaped the flood of wheeled vehicles, and there really is no Venice of modern Japan. Something more of the Edo canal and river system might have survived, however, if the city had not become the political center of the modern country, leading the way into Civilization and Enlightenment.
Pleasure boats moored in the northern suburbs in winter, early Meiji
In late Edo the resident of Nihombashi had to go what was for him a long distance if he wished a day at the theater or a night in the Yoshiwara. The theaters and the Yoshiwara were there side by side, leagued ge ographically as well as aesthetically in the northern suburbs. The Yoshiwara had been there through most of the Tokugawa Period. It was popularly known as “the paddies.” The Kabuki theaters were moved north only in very late Edo, when the shogunate had a last seizure of puritani cal zeal, and sought to ease its economic difficulties by making the towns-man live frugally.
Asakusa was already a thriving center because of its Kannon temple, and it had long been the final station for wayfarers to the Yoshiwara. Now it had the Kabuki theaters to perform a similar service for. In the last decades of Edo, the theaters and the greatest of the pleasure quarters both lay just beyond the northeastern fringe of the city, and Asakusa was that fringe. The efforts of the shogunate to discourage indulgence and prodigality among the lower classes thus had the effect of making Asakusa, despite its unfortunate situation in watery suburban lands, the great entertainment district of the city. This it was to become most decisively in Meiji.
The Kannon drew bigger crowds of pilgrims, many of them more intent upon pleasure than upon devotion, than any other temple in the city, and a big crowd was among the things the city loved best. Crowds were their own justification, and the prospect of a big crowd was usually enough to make it even bigger. When the Yoshiwara was first moved north in the seventeenth century, the Kannon sat among tidal marshes, a considerable distance north of Nihombashi, and beyond one of the points guarding access to the city proper. That is why the Yoshiwara was moved there. The shogunate did not go to the extreme of outlawing pleasure, but pleasure was asked, like funerals and cemeteries, to keep its distance.
The same happened, much later, to the theaters. The Tempo sumptuary edicts, issued between 1841 and 1843, were complex and meticulous, regulating small details of the townsman’s life. The number of variety halls in the city was reduced from upwards of five hundred to fifteen, and the fifteen were required to be serious and edifying.
Ladies in several trades—musicians, hairdressers, and the proprietresses of archery stalls in such places as the Asakusa Kannon—were held to be a wanton influence, and forbidden to practice.
In 1842 the Kabuki theater was picked up and moved to the northern limits of the city, a five-minute walk nearer Asakusa than the Yoshiwara. Kabuki was enormously popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The more successful actors were cultural heroes and leaders of fashion and taste, not unlike television personalities today. When two major theaters burned down, permission to rebuild was denied, and the possibility was considered of outlawing Kabuki completely. There was disagreement among the city magistrates, and a compromise was reached, permitting them to rebuild, but far from their old grounds. The suburban villa of a daimyo was taken over for the purpose. There the theaters remained even after the reforming zeal had passed, and there they were when Edo became Tokyo, and the Meiji Period began.
So Asakusa was well placed to provide the city of the new era with its pleasures. It has declined sadly in recent decades, and its preeminence in late Edo and early Meiji may have been partly responsible. People had traveled there on foot and by boat. Now they were to travel on wheels. The future belonged to rapid transit and to places where commuters boarded suburban trains. Overly confident, Asakusa chose not to become one of these.
It is of course a story of gradual change. The city has always been prone to sudden change as well, uniformly disastrous. It cannot be said, perhaps, that disasters increased in frequency as the end of Edo approached. Yet they were numerous after the visit of Commodore Perry in 1853, an event which many would doubtless have listed first among them. A foreboding hung over the government and the city.
The traditional system of chronology proceeds not by a single sequence, as with b.c. and a.d., but by a series of era names, which can be changed at the will of the authorities. In premodern Japan, they were often changed in hopes of better fortune; when one name did not seem to be working well, another was tried. The era name was changed a year after the Perry visit, and four times in less than a decade before the Meiji Restoration finally brought an end to the agonies of the Tokugawa.
Half the Low City was destroyed in the earthquake of 1855. There were two great fires in 1858 and numbers of lesser but still major fires through the remaining Tokugawa years, one of which destroyed the Yoshiwara. The main redoubt of the castle was twice destroyed by fire during the 1860s. Rebuilding was beyond the resources of the shogunate.
A lesser redoubt, hastily and roughly rebuilt after yet another fire, became the Meiji palace, and served in that capacity until it was destroyed again, early in the new era. A fire which destroyed yet another of the less er redoubts was blamed on arson. The Meiji emperor spent most of his first Tokyo decades in a Tokugawa mansion to the southwest of the main palace compound. It later became the Akasaka Detached Palace and the residence of the crown prince, and is now the site of the guest house where visiting monarchs and prelates are put up.
There were, as there had always been, epidemics. It was possible to see ominous portents in them too. A nationwide cholera epidemic in 1858 was laid to the presence of an American warship in Nagasaki.
The opening of the ports meant the arrival of the foreign merchant and missionary, and the undisguised adventurer. The Tokugawa regime never got around to lifting the anti-Christian edicts of the