“Rice riots” occurred in the autumn of 1866 while the funeral of the fourteenth shogun was in progress. The coincidence was ominous. Indeed, everything about the death of the shogun was ominous, as if the gods had withdrawn their mandate. He had been a very young man, barely past adolescence, and his election had quieted factional disputes which now broke out afresh. He died of beriberi in Osaka, the first in the Tokugawa line to die away from Edo.
Doughnut cloud forms above the Central Weather Bureau in Kōjimachi as fires sweep the Low City after the earthquake
The riots began in Fukagawa, east of the Sumida River, as peaceful assemblies of poor people troubled by the high cost of food. In a few days, crowds were gathering in the flatlands west of the river, so large and dense as to block streets. There were lesser gatherings in the hilly districts as well, and four days before the climax of the funeral ceremonies violence broke out. Godowns (as warehouses were called in the East) filled with rice were looted, as were the shops of karamonoya, “dealers in Chinese wares,” by which was meant foreign wares in general and specifically the products beginning to enter the country through Yokohama. It was in the course of the disturbances that the American consul was stoned, at Ueno, where he was observing the excitement.
What had begun as protests over economic grievances were colored by fright and anger at the changes that had come and were coming. The regime was not seriously endangered by the disturbances, which were disorganized and without revolutionary goals, but the anti-foreign strain is significant. Though the past may have been dark and dirty, the city did not, on the whole, want to give it up.
Yet the Tokugawa regime had brought trouble upon itself, and upon the city. The population had begun to shrink even before the Restoration. In 1862 relaxation was permitted of an institution central to the Tokugawa system, the requirement that provincial lords keep their families and spend part of their own time in Edo. Families were permitted to go to their provincial homes. There was a happy egress. The Mori of Nagato, most aggressive of the anti-Tokugawa clans, actually dismantled their main Edo mansion and took it home with them. It had stood just south of the castle, where a vacant expanse now seemed to mark the end of an era.
Widespread unemployment ensued among the lower ranks of the military, and a great loss of economic vitality throughout the city. An attempt in 1864 to revive the old system, under which the families of the daimyo were in effect held hostage in Edo, was unsuccessful. It may be that these changes did not significantly hasten the Tokugawa collapse, but they affected the city immediately and harshly. They plainly announced, as did the presence of foreigners, that things would not be the same again.
In 1863 the fourteenth shogun, Iemochi, he whose funeral coincided with the rice riots, felt constrained to go to Kyoto, the emperor’s capital, to discuss the foreign threat. The dissident factions were clamoring for immediate and final expulsion. Iemochi was the first shogun to visit Kyoto since the early seventeenth century. Though he returned to Edo for a time, the last years of his tenure were spent largely in and near Kyoto. His successor Keiki (Yoshinobu), the fifteenth and last shogun, did not live in Edo at all during his brief tenure.
The Tokugawa system of city magistrates continued to the end, but the shogun’s seat was for the most part without a shogun after 1863. The city could not know what sort of end it would be. The shogun was gone, and his prestige and the city’s had been virtually identical. Would someone of similar qualities take his place, or would Edo become merely another provincial city—a remote outpost, even, as it had been before 1600? The half-million townsmen who remained after the shogun and his retainers had departed could but wait and see.
Chapter 2
CIVILIZATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT
The fifteenth and last shogun, no longer shogun, returned to Edo early in 1868.
Efforts to “punish” the rebellious southwestern clans had ended most ingloriously. The Tokugawa regime did not have the resources for further punitive expeditions. The southwestern clans already had the beginnings of a modern conscript army, while the Tokugawa forces were badly supplied and perhaps not very militant, having had too much peace and fun in Edo over the centuries. Seeing the hopelessness of his cause, the shogun resigned early in 1868 (by the solar calendar; it was late 1867 by the old lunar calendar). He himself remained high in the esteem of the city. Late in Meiji, when his long exile in Shizuoka was at an end, he would be invited to write “Nihombashi” for that most symbolic of bridges. Subsequently carved in stone, the inscription survived both earthquake and war. The widow of his predecessor was to become the object of a romantic cult. A royal princess married for political reasons, she refused to leave Edo during the final upheaval.
Politically inspired violence persuaded retainers of the shogunate to flee Edo. The provincial aristocracy had already fled. Its mansions were burned, dismantled, and left to decay. Common criminals took advantage of the political violence to commit violence of their own. The city locked itself in after dark, and large sections of the High City and the regions near the castle were unsafe even in the daytime.
The lower classes stayed on, having nowhere to go, and—as their economy had been based on serving the now-dispersed bureaucracy—little to do either. The population fell to perhaps half a million immediately after the Restoration. The townsmen could scarcely know the attitude of the new authorities toward the foreign barbarians and intercourse with barbarian lands. Yokohama was the most convenient port for trading with America, the country that had started it all, but if the new regime did not propose to be cosmopolitan, then placing the capital in some place remote from Yokohama would be an act of symbolic importance. Some did indeed advocate making Osaka the capital, or having Osaka and Edo as joint capitals.
Even when, in 1868, Edo became Tokyo, “the Eastern Capital,” the issue was not finally resolved. By a manipulation of words for which a large Chinese vocabulary makes the modern Japanese language well suited, a capital was “established” in Edo, or Tokyo. The capital was not, however, “moved” from Kyoto. So Kyoto, which means “capital,” could go on performing a role it was long accustomed to, that of vestigial or ceremonial capital. The Meiji emperor seems to have gone on thinking of Kyoto as his city; his grave lies within the Kyoto city limits.
Some scholars have argued that the name of the city was not changed to Tokyo at all. The argument seems extreme, but the complexities of the language make it possible. The crucial rescript, issued in 1868, says, insofar as precise translation is possible: “Edo is the great bastion of the east country. Upon it converge the crowds, and from it one can personally oversee affairs of state. Accordingly the place known as Edo will henceforth be Tokyo.”
This could mean that Edo is still Edo, but that it is now also “the east ern capital,” or, perhaps, “the eastern metropolitan center.” Another linguistic curiosity made it possible to pronounce the new designation, whether precisely the same thing as a new name or not, in two ways: “Tokei” or “Tokyo.” Both pronunciations were current in early Meiji. W. S. Griffis’s guide to the city, published in 1874, informs us that only foreigners still called the city Edo.
The townsmen who stayed on could not know that the emperor would come to live among them in Tokyo, or Tokei. The economic life of the city was at a standstill, and its pleasures virtually so. The theaters closed early in 1868. Few came asking for the services of the Yoshiwara. Forces of the Restoration were advancing upon the city. Restoration was in fact revolution, and it remained to be seen what revolution would do to the seat of the old regime. The city had helped very little in making this new world, and the advancing imperial forces knew that the city had no high opinion of their tastes and manners. Gloom and apprehension prevailed.
The city waited, and the Meiji armies approached from the west. One