Chapter 4

THE DECAY OF THE DECADENT

 

 

 

 

 

People like to think themselves different from other people; generally they like to think themselves superior. In the centuries of the Tokugawa seclusion, the Japanese had little occasion to assert differences between themselves and the rest of the world, nor would they have had much to go on, were such assertion desired. So the emphasis was on asserting differences among various kinds of Japanese. The son of Edo insisted on what made him different from the Osakan. He did it more energetically than the Osakan did the converse, and in this fact we may possibly find evidence that he felt inferior. Osaka was at the knee of His Majesty, whereas Edo was merely at the knee of Lord Tokugawa. Today it is Osaka that is more concerned with differences.

Aphorisms were composed characterizing the great Tokugawa cities. Some are clever and contain a measure of truth. Perhaps the best holds that the son of Kyoto ruined himself over dress, the son of Osaka ruined himself over food, and the son of Edo ruined himself looking at things.

This may seem inconsistent with other descriptions we have heard of the son of Edo, such as the one holding that he would pawn his wife to raise funds for a festival. There is no real inconsistency, however. What is meant is that Edo delighted in performances, all kinds of performances, including festivals and fairs. Performances were central to Edo culture, and at the top of the hierarchy, the focus of Edo connoisseurship, was the Kabuki theater. On a level scarcely lower were the licensed pleasure quarters. So intimately were the two related that it is difficult to assign either to the higher or the lower status. The great Kabuki actors set tastes and were popular heroes, and the Kabuki was for anyone (except perhaps the self-consciously aristocratic) who had enough money. The pleasure quarters, at their most elaborate, were only for male persons of taste and affluence, but the best of what its devotees got was very similar to what was to be had at the Kabuki. The difference between the two might be likened to the difference between a performance of a symphony or opera on the one hand and a chamber concert on the other.

It has been common among cultural historians to describe the culture of late Tokugawa as decadent. It definitely seemed so to the bureaucratic elite of the shogunate, and to eager propagandists for Civilization and Enlightenment as well. That it was unapologetically sensual and wanting in ideas seemed to them deplorable. They may not have been prudes, exactly, but they did want things to be edifying, intellectual, and uplifting, and to serve an easily definable purpose, such as the strengthening of the state and the elevating of the commonweal. If certain parts of the Edo heritage could be put to these purposes, very well. Everything else might expect righteous disapproval.

There is a certain narrow sense in which anything so centered upon carnal pleasure ought indeed to be described as decadent. However refined may have been the trappings of the theater and of its twin the pleasure quarter, sex lay behind them, and, worse, the purveying of sex. Perhaps something of the sort may also be said about the romantic love of the West. The high culture of Edo, in any event, the best that the merchant made of and for his city, is not to be understood except in terms of the theater and the pleasure quarters. What happened in these decadent realms is therefore central to the story of what happened to the Meiji city.

We have seen that General and Mrs. Grant visited the Kabuki in the summer of 1879. Probably the general did not know that he was participating in the movement to improve the Kabuki. It had already been elevated a considerable distance. Had he come as a guest of the shogunate, no one would have dreamed of taking him off to the far reaches of the city, where the theaters then were, and having disreputable actors, however highly esteemed they might be by the townsmen of Edo, perform for him and his Julia. His aristocratic hosts would not have admitted to having seen a performance themselves, though some of them might on occasion have stolen off to the edge of the city to see what it was like. It belonged to the townsman’s world, which was different from theirs. Making it a part of high culture, which is what “improvement” meant, had the effect of taking it from the townsman and his world.

The Shintomiza, which the Grants visited, was managed by Morita Kanya, the most innovative of early Meiji impresarios. The Kabuki had been removed from the center of the city to Asakusa in that last seizure of Tokugawa puritanism, a quarter of a century before the Restoration. There, remote, the three major theaters still stood when the Restoration came. All three were soon to depart, and none survives. The Nakamuraza, which stayed closest to the old grounds, was the first to disappear. It was still in Asakusa Ward, near the Yanagibashi geisha quarter, when in 1893 it was destroyed by fire one last time. The Ichimuraza stayed longest on the Asakusa grounds, and survived until 1932, when one of repeated burnings proved to be its last.

The Moritaza left Asakusa most swiftly and with the most determination, and led the way into the new day. It took the new name Shintomiza from the section of Kyōbashi, just east of Ginza, to which Kanya moved it.

He had long harbored ambitions to return his theater to the center of the city. He thought to make the move in stealth, because he wanted none of his Asakusa colleagues to come tagging after him. He preferred to be as far as possible from the old crowd, and especially from such sponsors of the Kabuki as the fish wholesalers, who were likely to oppose his reforming zeal. The Shintomi district was his choice for a new site because it was near Ginza and because it was available, nothing of importance having come along to take the place of the defunct New Shimabara licensed quarter. There were bureaucratic difficulties. His petition would be approved, he was told, only if it was presented jointly by all three theaters. By guile and determination he was able to obtain the seals of the other two managers. He moved just after the great Ginza fire, the rebuilding from which put Ginza at the forefront of Civilization and Enlightenment.

The first Shintomiza looks traditional enough in photographs, but certain architectural details, such as a copper-roofed tower, were a wonder and a pleasure to the Kabuki devotee. In the pit (though they are not apparent in woodcuts) were several dozen chairs, for the comfort of those who chose to attend in Western dress. Kanya’s first Shintomiza burned in 1876. The theater visited by General Grant was opened in 1878.

Kanya was an enthusiastic improver—in content, in techniques, and in managerial methods. He introduced bright new lights, and theater evenings. Kabuki had been staged only during daylight hours, on moral grounds, it seems, and also for the practical reason that the fire hazard increased as darkness came on. With the opening of his second Shintomiza he greatly reduced the number of theater teahouses, with a view to eliminating them altogether. The teahouse functioned as a caterer and ticket agency, monopolizing the better seats. Kanya’s endeavor to get rid of the teahouses was in the end a complete success, although it took time. Only complete control of the box office would permit a rationalization of managerial methods. With little exaggeration, it might be said that he looked ahead to the impersonal efficiency of the computer. Old customs can be slow to disappear, however, when people find them a little expensive and time-consuming, but not unpleasant. That they should die was probably more important to entrepreneurs like Kanya than to the Low City Kabuki devotee. (Traces of the old system survive, even today, in box-office arrangements for Sumō wrestling.) In his boyhood Tanizaki Junichirō was taken to a more modern and rationally organized theater, the Kabukiza, and it still had teahouses. Tanizaki was born in 1886, almost a decade after the opening of the second Shintomiza.

 

The Shintomiza

 

I remember how my heart raced as we set out by rickshaw, my mother and I, southwards from Nihombashi towards Tsukiji. My mother still called the Shintomi district Shimabara, from the licensed quarter of early Meiji. We crossed Sakura Bridge, passed Shimabara, where the Shintomiza then stood, and turned from Tsukiji Bridge to follow the Tsukiji canal. From Kamei Bridge we could see the dome of the Kabukiza, which was finished in 1889. This would have been perhaps four or five years later. There were eleven theater teahouses attached to the Kabukiza. Always when a play was on they had awnings draped from their roofs. We had our rickshaw pull up at the Kikuoka, where we would rest for a time. Urged on by a maid, we would slip into straw sandals and hurry over the boardwalks to the theater. I remember how strangely cold the smooth floor of the theater was as I slipped from the sandals. A cold blast of air always came through the wooden doors of a theater. It struck at the skirt and sleeves of a festive kimono, and was at one’s throat and stomach like peppermint. There was a softness in it, as on a good day in the plum-blossom season. I would shiver, pleasantly.

 

Kanya spent a great deal of money on important officials and foreign visitors. On opening day of the second Shintomiza in 1878 all manner of notables, dressed in swallowtails, were set out upon the stage on chairs. The prime minister and the governor were among them, and so were most of the actors to whom the future belonged.

As an innovator, Kanya experimented boldly to bring modern elements into the Kabuki repertoire. The ninth Danjūrō became famous for his “living history,” which sought to introduce literal reality into the properties and costumes of historical plays, while the fifth Kikugorō was renowned for his “cropped-head pieces”—plays with modern settings, distinguished by enlightened haircuts. Among Kikugorō’s roles were the celebrated murderesses Takahashi O-den and Hanai O-ume, and Spencer the balloon man. Kanya even experimented with foreign performers and settings. Clara Whitney witnessed his most ambitious attempt at the cosmopolitan, A Strange Tale of Castaways, in 1879. A foreign lady from Yokohama trilled, “delightful on the high notes. But the best parts were spoiled because the Japanese, who thought it was something unusually funny, would laugh aloud…. I was quite out of patience.” The experiment was a financial disaster, and Kanya’s enthusiasm for Western things waned thereafter.

Kikugorō’s balloon ascent did not join the Kabuki repertoire, but Kanya’s experiments in stagecraft had a profound effect on the form. Near-darkness had prevailed in Edo, and he started it on its way to the almost blinding illumination of our time. The second Shintomiza had gaslights, but it may be that Kanya was not the very first to use them. E. S. Morse thus describes a visit to a theater, probably one of the two that still remained in Asakusa, in 1877:

 

Coming up the raised aisle from the entrance, several actors stride along in a regular stage strut and swagger, the grandest of all having his face illuminated by a candle on the end of a long-handled pole held by a boy who moved along too and kept the candle constantly before the actor’s face no matter how he turned…. There were five footlights, simply gas tubes standing up like sticks, three feet high, and unprotected by shade or screen, a very recent innovation; for before they had these flaring gas jets it was customary for each actor to have a boy with a candle to illuminate his face.

 

Conservative actors still attempt to follow old forms as they are recorded in Edo prints and manuscripts; but bright lights have changed Kabuki utterly. Kanya also introduced evening performances, permitted because the bright new lights were regarded as less of a fire hazard than the dim old lights had been. From Edo into Meiji, theaters sometimes opened as early as seven in the morning, to pack in as much as possible before dusk. We can but imagine how heavily the shadows hung over the old Kabuki, natural light and candles doing little to dispel them. Perhaps Kabuki was improved by the efforts of people such as Kanya, perhaps it was not; but certainly it was changed.

Kanya was a zealous reformer in another sense. The “movement for the improvement of the theater” had two aims in his most active years: to abolish what was thought to be the coarseness and vulgarity of late Edo, and to make the Kabuki socially acceptable, a fit genre for upper-class viewing, let the lower classes follow along as they could and would.

As early as 1872, there were bureaucratic utterances informing the Kabuki that it must cease being frivolous and salacious and start being edifying. Danjūrō—to his great discredit, many will say—was a leading exponent of improvement. Wearing striped pants and morning coat at the opening of the second Shintomiza, he read a statement on behalf of his fellow actors: “The theater of recent years has drunk up filth and reeked of the coarse and the mean. It has discredited the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastising evil, it has fallen into mannerisms and distortions, it has been going steadily downhill. Perhaps at no time has the tendency been more marked than now. I, Danjūrō, am deeply grieved by these facts, and, in consultation with my colleagues, I have resolved to clean away the decay.”

Improvement became an organized movement during the Rokumeikan Period, shortly after The Mikado was first performed in London. There seems to have been a link between the two events. The Mikado was the talk of the Rokumeikan set, which thought it a national insult. Proper retaliation, it seems, was the creation of a dramatic form that foreigners had to admire, in spite of themselves. The Society for Improving the Theater had among its founders the foreign minister and the education minister. The wantonness of the old Kabuki must be eliminated. An edifying drama, fit for noble ladies, domestic and foreign, must take its place.

These purifying endeavors had little permanent effect on the Kabuki repertoire. Danjūrō presently moved away from “living history,” which had never been popular. Many found it incomprehensible. The novelist Mori Ogai advised the spectator to stuff his ears with cotton upon entering the theater. Danjūrō was all right to look at, he said, but dreadful to listen to.

Yet for better or for worse, the endeavor to make Kabuki socially acceptable did succeed. The emperor’s presence always conferred the badge of respectability; he dutifully viewed what he was told to, and one form of entertainment after another received the badge. He went to see Sumō wrestling in 1884 at the Hama Palace; the grand match was, most fittingly for all, a draw. He viewed certain offerings of the variety halls—and in 1887 he attended a presentation of Kabuki, at the foreign minister’s residence. Kanya was in charge of the arrangements, and Danjūrō headed the cast. The first performance, at which the emperor was present, lasted through the afternoon. The emperor did not leave until almost midnight. Danjūrō grumbled to Kanya that no actor could be expected to perform well with a truncated hanamichi (the processional way by which actors approach the stage through the pit), but of course he could not, on such an occasion, decline to go on. (Actors grumbled similarly, but likewise went on, when Kabuki came to New York in 1960.) On the second day the empress had her viewing, and on two succeeding days other members of the royal family, including the empress dowager, had theirs. The emperor was taciturn in his reaction, declaring merely that he found Kabuki unusual, but the empress wept so profusely at a play about the murder of a child that Kanya, alarmed, urged the actors to try understatement.

In Edo and the Tokyo of Meiji, the most highly esteemed Kabuki actors had enormous popularity and influence. They set styles, such as that for a certain kind of umbrella, which quite swept the place. Huge crowds, of which Tanizaki himself was sometimes a part, turned out for the funerals of famous actors.

Still in late Meiji, after the turn of the century, the Kabuki was, along with the licensed quarters, the form on which the high world of the Low City centered. At the end of Meiji a lumber merchant from east of the river, as in Osanai s novel The Bank of the Big River (see pages 69-70), could still be a patron of the arts. One would not come upon his kind today. If modern actors have patrons, they are from the entrepreneurial aristocracy of the High City. In this fact is the measure of the success of the improvers in “improving” Kabuki and its actors, making them artists in an art acceptable to the elite. In the process, old ties were cut. The Kabuki and the demimonde are still close, but the demimonde too has cut its ties with the Low City. One would not be likely to find a person from east of the river among the big spenders.

Danjūrō is often reproved for obsequiousness and for indifference to the plebeian culture that produced Kabuki. Whether or not he is to be blamed for what happened, one may see the dispersal of the old mercantile culture in the changing sociology of the theater.

Morita Kanya’s day of prosperity had already passed when Spencer came and Kikugorō took his balloon ride. It was at the Kabukiza that he took it. Opened in 1889, on the site east of Ginza where it still stands, the Kabukiza had a generally Western exterior, in a quiet Renaissance style. Some details suggest a wish to incorporate traditional elements as well. A fan-shaped composition on the central pediment looks in photographs like the ridge piece of a shrine or godown. Inside, the chief difference from the Shintomiza was in size: the Kabukiza was much larger. The great day of the former did not return and, immediately upon its opening, the Kabukiza became what it has been for almost a century, the chief seat of Tokyo Kabuki. Managerial methods were ever more modern, though the old teahouses were allowed in limited numbers, and yet humbler establishments as well, street stalls for which Ginza was still famous in the years after the surrender.

 

The Kabukiza, in a 1902 lithograph

 

The improvers still were not satisfied. Even after the opening of the Kabukiza, they lacked a place where a gentleman might enjoy, in gentlemanly company, the traditional theater. So, in the last full year of Meiji, the Imperial Theater was opened beside the palace moat, on the western edge of Mitsubishi Meadow. Plans were begun in 1906. Shibusawa Eiichi, most energetic and versatile of Meiji entrepreneurs, was chairman. He was born in 1840, in what is now a part of metropolitan Tokyo. To the true son of Nihombashi he may have been a bumpkin, but his case further demonstrates that Osaka people were not the only successful ones in emergent Tokyo. He was everywhere, doing everything, among the organizers of the Bank of Japan, the First National Bank (the first incorporated bank in the land), the Oji Paper Company, Japan Mail Lines (N.Y.K.), and the private railway company that put through the first line to the far north. His was the somewhat Moorish house (see page 97) that seemed so strange to the young Tanizaki and other children of Nihombashi. Among the other organizers of the Imperial Theater were Prince Saionji and Prince Itō.

The first Imperial, which survived the disaster of 1945, was a highly Gallic structure of marble, hung with tapestries, and provided with seventeen hundred Western-style seats. Initially it had a resident Kabuki troupe, but it never really caught on as a place for Kabuki. The High City liked it better than did the Low City, which had a happy simile: seated in the Imperial, one felt like a cenotaph in a family shrine. The Imperial was the place for gala performances when, in the years before the earthquake, celebrities like Pavlova began appearing.

Theater was meanwhile becoming a big business, one which Osaka dominated. The theater and journalism, indeed, provide the best instances of the conquest of Tokyo by Osaka capital that is commonly averred and not easy to prove. It may be that Osaka money did best in fields of high risk and low capitalization. The Shōchiku company of Osaka bought the Shintomiza and another Tokyo theater in late Meiji, and in 1912 the Kabukiza. Shōchiku has dominated Kabuki ever since—but of course Kabuki has become a progressively smaller part of the city’s entertainment business.

The large theaters were not the only theaters, nor was Asakusa bereft of Kabuki with the departure of the three major establishments. The name Miyatoza inspires great nostalgia, for that theater is held by many a connoisseur to have been the true heir to the Edo theater. It stood for forty years north of the Asakusa temple and park, very near the site of the big three. In 1896 a bankrupt theater was reopened under the name Miyatoza and new management, that of the enterprising Kanya. Miyato is an old name for the Sumida River. By the end of the century the important names in Meiji Kabuki were much too important to be associated with such a place, but many lesser and more traditional actors played there, as did most of the actors to be important in Taishō. The Miyatoza was destroyed in 1923, as the flames advanced upon the Asakusa Kannon but were held back by Danjūrō’s statue (see page 27). It was rebuilt, and did not finally close until 1937. The lovelorn hero of Kafū’s novella The River Sumida goes to the Miyatoza in search of forgetfulness. Asakusa has had nothing like it since. Nor, indeed, has Tokyo.

In 1873 the city issued regulations limiting the number of “proper theaters” to ten. These were theaters that had the appurtenances of grand Kabuki: hanamichi processional ways, revolving stages, drawn (as opposed to dropped) curtains, and teahouses. Smaller “Kabuki huts” were also permitted. By the end of Meiji the accumulated count of proper theaters, as one went and another came, was more than double the prescribed ten. The theater was a risky, unstable business, but some survived all the same. Except when rebuilding after fires, the Ichimuraza and the Moritaza stayed in business through the whole of Meiji. Two Kabuki theaters founded in Meiji yet survive, the Meijiza in Nihombashi and the Kabukiza. Neither is in its original building. The origins of the former lie in the years of the first Shintomiza, and so it has passed its centennial.

Kabuki was made proper and even elegant. In a sense, too, a kind of democratization was at work. The affluent bourgeoise from the High City does not at all mind being seen at a Kabuki opening with a Low City geisha a few seats away. The one is not demeaned and the other is perhaps somewhat elevated. Yet the form, as an institution, a play of social forces, has changed utterly; and because it was so crucial to the culture of the city, that has changed as well. The change was of course gradual. Yet something important happened when the Meiji emperor viewed Kabuki and so bestowed upon it the ultimate cachet. Something important happened again when the Imperial Theater was opened, and the gentry finally had a place where they could watch the old theater comfortably, among people who knew them and whom they knew. The Low City had lost an element of its culture that had but a few decades before been of supreme importance. Other people and places gained, but the loss of something that harms scarcely anyone, and has a refining and even ennobling effect upon many, is sad. In later days the son of Edo may have ruined himself watching baseball. That seems a comedown, somehow, from ruining himself watching Kabuki.

 

Kabuki was the liveliest of the arts cultivated by the Edo townsman. It was expensive, however, and did not attract people as did the Yose, or variety halls. The term Yose, which has been tendered above as “vaudeville,” is in fact an abbreviation of a word signifying “a place that brings in the crowds.” The heart of it was the monologue, sometimes serious and edifying, sometimes comic. It was the genuinely popular theater.

The average admission for Kabuki ran seven and eight times that for Yose, not including the levies of the teahouses. The cheapest possible day at the Kabuki was twice as expensive as the average for Yose. Attendance at Yose consistently ran four and five times as high as attendance at the Kabuki theaters; and yet total revenues were smaller. The less affluent son of Edo, when he wished to be away from the noise and clutter of home, went to either a bathhouse or a Yose theater.

“There were no electric trolleys and no busses and taxis,” wrote the playwright Osanai Kaoru late in his life. “Only horse trolleys ran along the main streets of the Low City. It was a very rare occasion indeed when the Tokyo person set out for Ginza or Asakusa after dark. He would for the most part range no farther than the night stalls in the neighborhood or perhaps a temple or shrine fair. Yose was his one real diversion. It was a bore to stay at home every night, and he could hardly go on a constant round of calls. Even the stroll among the night stalls was denied him on a rainy evening. So what he had left was Yose.”

The sedentary father of a geisha in Osani’s The Bank of the Big River goes off every afternoon to the serious, edifying sort of Yose. The playwright Hasegawa Shigure, who grew up in Nihombashi, describes a person in her neighborhood who spent his mornings at the bathhouse and in the afternoon had a good rest in a Yose hall.

The number of such places fluctuated through Meiji, but it was never under a hundred in the fifteen wards, and sometimes it ran as high as two hundred. The greatest concentration was in the less affluent wards of the Low City. In Shiba there were seventeen houses in 1882, and sixteen are listed in a guide published by the city in 1907. In Kanda there were twenty-two and seventeen, respectively.

The best Yose monologues may claim to be literature. Sanyūtei Enchō, the most famous of Meiji performers, is held by the literary historians to have been a pioneer in the creation of a modern colloquial prose style. Born in 1839 in the Yushima section of Hongō, the son of that Entarō who gave his name to the horse-drawn trolley and part of it to the taxi, he was active to the end of the nineteenth century. Like the great Danjūrō of the Kabuki, Enchō has had his critics, and for a similar reason: he too harbored a penchant for “improving,” for making his genre acceptable to high society. He did edifying historical pieces (one of them about Queen Elizabeth) and adaptations from Western literature, clearly in an attempt to raise it to the level of high culture, suitable for noble gentlemen and ladies, and for the international set as well—to achieve for Yose, in short, what such improvers as Danjūrō were achieving for Kabuki. Perhaps he was also like Danjūrō in that his popularity did not quite match his fame. He was very good at publicizing himself. Recent scholarship has cast doubt upon the theory that he too was summoned to perform in the royal presence. The chronology does not accord, it seems, with what is known of the emperor’s round of engagements. Perhaps, late in his life, Enchō made the story up, and no one saw any reason to doubt him.

Yose did not become excessively proper despite Enchō’s efforts. It was not, like Kabuki, taken over by the upper classes and made over into an assembly at which a person of the lesser classes, an artisan or a shopkeeper, was likely to feel uncomfortable. Today it is performed in the National Theater (at rather unfriendly hours), but it survives in the Low City as well. When the writer Nagai Kafū—in rebellion against the High City and intent upon losing himself in low, traditional places—sought to become a Yose performer, a spy tattled upon him, and he was dragged home and presently sent into exile beyond the ocean. It is true that the family’s reactions to his plans for a career as a Kabuki playwright were no more positive, but it seems likely that, had he persisted and avoided exile, his chances would have been better in improved Kabuki than in still benighted Yose.

Enchō’s achievements were considerable all the same. His was only the biggest name among the many that made for Yose its last golden age. It began to decline from about the turn of the century, although it may be said that the Meiji flowering was in any event not as fine as that of late Edo. The puritanical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century, identifying pleasure with decay, had allowed only one Yose house for every thirty that earlier dotted the city. The Meiji total never reached the highest Edo total, upwards of five hundred. Edo is said, with only slight exaggeration, to have had a Yose house for every block.

Though it has declined grievously since late Meiji, enough remains that we may imagine what Yose was like in the best years of Edo and Meiji. By any standard it was superior to the popular entertainment of our day. A good storyteller, whether of the edifying or the amusing sort, was a virtuoso mimic. The katsuben narrator for the silent movies, a remarkable and uniquely Japanese performer, may be seen as successor to the Yose man of the great days. He too took (and still does, vestigially, in the surviving Yose halls) all the parts, distinguishing among them with most remarkable skill. Mass entertainment has come to be dominated by the popular singer and the talk man, neither of whom tries to be other than himself, occasionally interesting and often not. It is perhaps inevitable that this should happen as the mass has grown and the tightness of the Low City been dissipated. The story of decline is a sad one all the same.

The few houses that survive today (there are no more than a half-dozen in the city) are large by Meiji standards, holding several hundred people. The typical Meiji house was cozier, more neighborly, perhaps occupying the space up some back alley that had once accommodated a private house or two, now lost to fire or wind or rot. The great masters of Meiji Yose are said to have striven for small, intimate audiences. A hundred was the ideal size. Fewer than a hundred led to an appearance of unpopularity, and more than a hundred to a loss of rapport. When a theater became too popular, the leading performers would turn their duties over to disciples and wait for more manageable circumstances.

 

*     *     * 

 

The son of plebeian Edo and Tokyo had many things besides Kabuki and Yose to look at and go bankrupt over. The grounds of the larger shrines and temples were often pleasure centers. The Asakusa Kannon, busiest of them all, was one vast and miscellaneous emporium for the performing arts. As Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason observed in the 1891 edition of their guide to Japan:

 

On no account should a visit to this popular temple and the grounds (Kōenchi) surrounding it be omitted; for it is the great holiday resort of the middle and lower classes, and nothing is more striking than the juxtaposition of piety and pleasure, of gorgeous altars and grotesque ex-votos, of pretty costumes and dingy idols, the clatter of clogs, cocks and hens and pigeons strutting about among the worshippers, children playing, soldiers smoking, believers chaffering with dealers of charms, ancient art, modern advertisements—in fine, a spectacle than which surely nothing more motley was ever witnessed within a religious edifice.

 

And again:

 

The grounds of Asakusa are the quaintest and liveliest place in Tokyo. Here are raree shows, penny gaffs, performing monkeys, cheap photographers, street artists, jugglers, wrestlers, life-sized figures in clay, venders of toys and lollipops of every sort, and, circulating amidst all these cheap attractions, a seething crowd of busy holiday-makers.

 

The skill of jugglers, acrobats, magicians, paper cutters and folders, and the like was so remarkable that Japanese performers had already traveled abroad, to acclaim, before the Restoration. There are records of fat women and peacocks, pleasing to the child of Edo, from the very earliest years of the city. In the last decades of the shogunate, Asakusa was the most thriving pleasure center, for it had the Yoshiwara and the theaters in addition to its great temple. There were other centers, near the two Tokugawa mortuary temples at Ueno and Shiba, for instance, and across the river in Honjo, where the Ekōin Temple, erected in memory of those lost in the great fire of 1657, had become a place for cheering departed spirits as well as for remembering them. Asakusa, Ueno, and Ryōgoku, where the Ekoin is situated, had the most thriving of the hirokōji, the “broad alleys,” originally cleared as firebreaks and scattered through the city. The broad alleys of Ueno and Ryōgoku did not fare well in Meiji, as Asakusa prospered more and more. The stalls and shows were presently moved from the immediate environs of the temple to the western edge of what had become Asakusa Park.

Some of the shows seem to have been inelegant, even grotesque. At Ryōgoku there was a man greatly skilled at breaking wind. For some years a spider man turned up on all the big Asakusa feast days. He had the head of an aged adult, a body some two feet tall, and the arms and legs of an infant. He was very popular. Also at Asakusa was a woman who smoked with her navel. The painter Kishida Ryūsei, born in 1891, described a puppet show in the Ginza of his boyhood, in which a she-devil slashed open the stomach of a pregnant woman and ate the foetus—or rather, being a doll, not up to the ingestion, announced that she would take it home for dinner. (It was Ryusei who—see page 76—informed us of that particular Ginza pleasure, peeping in upon Shimbashi geisha as they made ready for a night.)

Many of the shows were free, some of them to aid in the hawking of medicines and the like, while some were willing to accept whatever pennies the viewer felt like tossing down. The larger shrines had stages for Kagura, “god performances,” which also were free, and sometimes, as Tanizaki’s reminiscences inform us, not very godly.

 

Kagura has all but disappeared from the shrines of Tokyo, festive performances are probably even rarer. The modern child would probably think it stupid beyond description, but I am filled with almost unbearable longing for the very feel of them, those naive dances to drum and flute, the dancers masked as fool and as clown, on a long spring day in Nihombashi… The troupes would also perform for this and that banquet, but the one I saw most frequently offered skits on the grounds of the Meitoku Inari Shrine, very near our house, on the eighth of every month, the feast day, in the evening. A genuine “god dance” would sometimes be offered to the presiding deity, but more commonly there were skits. The performers were amateurs with other occupations. One of them functioned as head of the company, and even had a stage name, Suzume. All the others referred to him as “the master.”

About then, which is to say the autumn of 1897, there occurred in Ochanomizu the murder of Kono, a very famous one that will doubtless be remembered by other old persons my age. A man from Fukushima named Matsudaira Noriyoshi, aged forty-one, who lived in Ushigome, murdered his common-law wife, Kono, who had been a serving woman in a geisha quarter and had accumulated a little money. He murdered her on the night of April 26, the Bishamon Fair, and mutilated her face to prevent identification. Wrapping the naked body in a straw mat and tying it with ropes, he set it rolling down the slope at Ochanomizu towards the Kanda River. It stopped some five feet short and was immediately found. There was an enormous stir. Noriyoshi was soon apprehended. The newspapers of course made a huge thing of the incident, and in this and that shop and in stalls on the day of the Suitengu fair I often saw card-sized pictures of Kono’s mutilated face among the usual pictures of actors and geisha. Kono was forty, a year younger than Noriyoshi. The line where her eyebrows had been shaved was “iridescent,” it was said, and she was “like a cherry still in fresh leaf,” That the new avant-garde theater should take the incident up was inevitable. Already in June at the Ichimuraza the troupe headed by Ii Yōhō and Yamaguchi Sadao presented a “sensational” (or so it was proclaimed) version, along with A Comical Tour of Hell… It was perhaps a month later that I saw the Suzume troupe do the affair on the Kagura stage of the Meitoku Inari, in imitation of Yamaguchi and Kawai, who were the murderer and his victim at the Ichimuraza… Noriyoshi … throttled her. Then, with the greatest concentration, he carved several trenches on her face, and, lifting her head by the hair, showed it to all of us. It seems strange that such a play should have been done on the grand Kagura stage of a shrine, and it does not seem strange at all, for it was a day when Kono’s face, on display in all the stalls, upset no one.

 

All the best-loved crimes of Meiji became material for the theater, and all of them, probably because the dramatic possibilities were heightened, involved women. A murdered woman, such as Kono, made good theater and good popular fiction, and a murderess was even better. There was, for example, Harada Kinu, known as “O-kinu of the storm in the night,” a reference to her last haiku, composed as she set out for the Kotsukappara execution grounds:

 

A storm in the night.

Dawn comes, nothing remains.

A flower’s dream.

 

She was beheaded early in the spring of 1872. Heads of criminals were still put on display, in the old fashion. On his first trip from Yokohama to Tokyo, W. E. Griffis saw some, near the southern limits of the city. The newspapers reported that O-kinu’s head possessed a weird, unearthly beauty. The concubine of a minor daimyo, she was left to fend for herself after the Restoration. She became the mistress of a pawnbroker and fell in love with a Kabuki actor, whom, in accepted style, she purchased. The affair proved to be more than a dalliance.

One winter morning in 1871 she fed the pawnbroker rat poison, that she might live with the actor. She did so until apprehended. One may pity O-kinu, for she belonged to the class that suffered most in the revolution called Restoration.

The most famous of Meiji murderesses, vastly popular on stage and in fiction, was Takahashi O-den, who was beheaded in the Ichigaya prison in 1879 by the executioner who dispatched O-kinu. She too came from the lower ranks of the military class. The story of her misdeeds has probably been exaggerated by writers of popular fiction. She is charged with more than one poisoning before she committed the crime that took her to Ichigaya. Evidence in support of the charges is slight, and she was convicted only of slitting the throat of a used-clothes merchant in an Asakusa inn. She did it for the sincerest of motives: after the Restoration she had made her way chiefly by prostitution, and she robbed the merchant to pay the debts of her chief patron. Hers was the last case assigned to the famous executioner. He did it badly, wounding her before the final cut. There were horrible screams, according to newspaper accounts.

 

The execution of Takahashi O-den. from an 1879 woodcut

 

O-den, too, composed a final poem:

I wish to be no longer in this hapless world.

Make haste to take me over, O ford of the River of Death.

 

Her grave may be visited in the Yanaka Cemetery, where the poem is cut upon the stone. The little plot of earth is a sad one, beside a public lavatory, clinging precariously to the edge of the cemetery, given only cursory notice in guides that account for all the famous graves, such as that of Kafū’s grandfather. The stone is not unimposing, however, and it is replete with bittersweet irony. It was erected in 1881 from contributions by most of the famous theatrical and journalistic persons of the day, and the man who collected the funds was Kanagaki Robun. Robun had rushed into woodcut print with a sensational story of her life a scant month after her execution. (He did a quickie on General Grant before the general had even departed the city.)

Among these dangerous women the most romantic was Hanai O-urae, the only one of the three who survived to enjoy her fame. It is generally agreed that she was less criminal than victim. She too came from the low ranks of the military class. After service as a geisha in Yanagibashi and Shimbashi, she opened a place of her own, near the river in Nihombashi. She was tormented by a former employee, Minekichi by name (it is a name with a nice ring to it), who wanted to take over both her and her business. One night early in the summer of 1887, answering a summons to meet him on the bank of the canal that ran through her part of Nihombashi, she stabbed him thrice with his own butcher knife, beneath the willows, in a gentle rain. A troublesome and less than romantic detail is that she, and not he, may at the outset have been in possession of the knife. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and freed in 1903. In her last years she joined a troupe of traveling players; her most popular role was that of herself in her finest moment. She died in 1916, in a Yotsuya slum.

The performers who played murderer and victim in the drama described by Tanizaki were both men. So it will be seen that many conventions of Kabuki were retained by the “avant-garde” theater of the day, in spite of its aim to make the theater more Western and realistic. Men still played female roles.

In 1890 the chief of the Tokyo prefectural police let it be known that men and women might appear on the stage together. One of the two great Kabuki actors, improver Danjūrō, supported the policy, and the other, Kikugorō, opposed it. The Kabuki stage continued to be exclusively masculine. The new policy was revolutionary all the same, in a day when so many mixed things, such as bathing and wrestling, were held to accord ill with Enlightenment.

Women had never been absent from the performing arts. They had quite dominated the parlor varieties found at their best in the pleasure quarters. There were well-known actresses in late Meiji, and fullblown celebrities, symbols of their day, in Taishō. Musumegidayū, Osaka theater music (gidayū) performed by pretty girls (musume), was enormously popular in Meiji, especially among students, who seem to have found it erotic. In 1900, when the vogue was at its peak, there were more than a thousand musumegidayū performers in Tokyo.

Music was less disposed than other arts to go Western. The musumegidayū vogue passed, not so much because it was overtaken by Western forms as because other traditional forms came into fashion. Yet already in Meiji are to be found the beginnings of modern popular music, which, with its volatile trendiness, may be distinguished from folk music and from the various forms of stage music, popular or otherwise, as well.

The street minstrel known as the enkashi had his beginnings in the Tokyo of mid-Meiji and was still to be seen for perhaps a half-dozen years after the earthquake. He was such a part of late Meiji and of Taishō that he can scarcely be omitted from graphic and dramatic attempts to convey the mood of the day. The word enkashi may be written in two ways, one of them conveying merely “singer,” the other something like “singer of amorous songs.” The enkashi was Western at top and at bottom—bowler hat and shoes—and always accompanied himself on a violin. The remainder of his dress was Japanese. He would stand on a street corner and sing topical songs in return for pennies. The repertoire was in part amorous, but it was also strongly political and satirical. There were war songs and there were songs of a righteous nature criticizing the customs and manners of the day. Perhaps the nearest thing to a hit was called “The Voice of the Pine.” In a satirical vein, it criticized the decadent ways of girl students, and might have been called anti-amorous. Fujiwara Yoshie, later to become the most famous of Japanese opera singers, got his start as an enkashi, in attendance upon the man who did the voice of the pine.

 

Three things to ruin oneself in the viewing of—the theater, cherry blossoms, and Sumō wrestling—were held to be the great delights of Meiji Tokyo. Sumō is a very ancient sport, its origins traceable, according to the earliest chronicles, to prehistory. It is more complex and sophisticated than at first sight it seems to be. The rules are simple: when a wrestler touches the ground with any part of himself save the soles of his feet, or when he is forced from the ring, he loses. It may seem that size is the only important thing, for the wrestlers in recent centuries have been huge. The hugest on record, however, have not been the most successful. There are delicate skills having to do with balance and timing.

Early in Meiji, change touched Sumō. Like so many things of Edo, it was meant for masculine enjoyment. In the last years of Edo, women were admitted to the audience only on the final day of a tournament. There seem to have been religious reasons for this exclusion, having to do vaguely with ritual purity. From 1872 women were admitted on every day except the first, and from 1877 they were admitted every day. The Sumō ring continues, however, to be sexist. No woman may step inside. When, recently, a boxer with a lady manager fought in the Sumo stadium, the manager was required to manage from a distance.

Sumō, as we have seen, was made respectable by a royal viewing. This happened in 1884, at the Hama Palace. Sumo had seemed in early Meiji to be declining, but in late Meiji it enjoyed popularity as never before. This was probably due less to royal notice than to the emergence of two uncommonly skilled wrestlers, one of whom fought to the famous draw in the royal presence.

In 1909 Sumō acquired the biggest sports arena in the city and indeed in the whole Orient, a great improvement over the shelters in which tournaments had earlier been held, they were so flimsy that competition had to be called off in bad weather. The new arena was named Kokugikan, “Hall of the National Accomplishment,” and Sumō has since been thought of as that, although baseball might in recent years have better claimed the sobriquet. Before construction was begun in 1907 there was a lengthy hunt for a site. Marunouchi, the Mitsubishi Meadow, was considered, but rejected as too remote from the traditional Sumō base in the Low City. The promoters finally decided on an old tournament site at the Ekōin, east of the river. The Meiji building was gutted by fire in 1917, badly damaged in the earthquake, and afterwards rebuilt on the same site.

Sumō was modernized in another way. The “human rights” of wrestlers became a burning issue. Some thought the old authoritarian methods of training and management inappropriate to the new enlightened age. The Tokyo band of professional wrestlers, based at the Ekōin, split over the issue in 1873. The rebellious faction, advocating human rights, withdrew to Nagoya. Back in Tokyo soon after, it held its tournaments at Akihabara, south of Ueno. In 1878 the police intervened, being of the view that two rival bands in the same city had disruptive possibilities. The factions were brought together under a system of government licensing, although a number of wrestlers of advanced views refused to participate.

The rebels became the establishment, and were themselves presently the victims of a strike. This occurred in 1895. The immediate occasion was a contested decision, but the authoritarian ways of the people in control were the real issue. The strike succeeded in that the head of the family, who had been among the rebels of the earlier day, was shorn of his powers. Sumō has continued to be very conservative all the same. Managerial methods, long similar to those of the theater, have remained close to their origins.

Early in Meiji (the precise date is a subject of scholarly dispute) there occurred an event of great moment. Few events have affected the lives of more Japanese. A stick and several hard balls arrived in Yokohama, bringing baseball to Japan. The first games were somewhat aristocratic. They were played on the grounds of a mansion on the southern outskirts of Tokyo belonging to the Tayasu, an important branch of the Tokugawa clan. The early years of Japanese baseball were dominated by the Shimbashi Club, named from the railway station and yards. It included numbers of Americans in the employ of the government. The work of the catcher seems to have been hazardous, for neither mitt nor protector had come with the stick and balls.

By mid-Meiji there were several clubs here and there around the city, and school teams as well. The last years of the century were dominated by the First Higher School, most elitist of institutions. Baseball was still somewhat elegant and high-collar, but it was on the way to becoming business as well. Waseda and Keiō universities, whose teams are today not quite amateur, had their first engagement in 1903. The mood in the stands grew so murderous towards the end of their 1906 series that they did not meet again until late in the following reign.

An international game, believed to have been the first, took place in 1896 between a team of Japanese schoolboys and an American team from Yokohama. The Japanese won. A Japanese university team went to the United States in 1905, and two years later the first foreign team, semiprofessionals from Hawaii, came to Japan. On that occasion an admission fee was charged for the first time.

In 1890 there was an international incident, demonstrating even earlier than the Waseda-Keiō fanaticism how important baseball had become to the Japanese. During a game between Meiji Gakuin and the First Higher School an excited American dashed onto the field. He proved to be a missionary from the Meiji Gakuin faculty. After a pummeling by students from the First Higher School, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. A consular trial seemed in prospect, extraterritoriality yet prevailing. The view of the arbiter that both sides were at fault was accepted, however, and so the matter ended. It was long before the two schools were once again on friendly terms.

Baseball was something very new, a team sport. Traditional sporting encounters had been man-to-man. One can only speculate upon why baseball, among all the possible foreign importations, was chosen to become (as indeed it did) the national accomplishment. A prophet in early Meiji might have given cricket the better chance, for anglomania was strong. Today cricket is almost the only major foreign sport that does not interest Japanese at all.

Having had its beginnings in Tokyo, Japanese baseball is now everywhere. Like so many things, it continues to be dominated by Tokyo. The Tokyo Giants have a nationwide following that is rivaled by no Osaka team, and a Waseda-Keiō series still arouses passions such as are aroused by no other amateur (if somewhat professional) encounter.

Sumō became “the national accomplishment” in late Meiji, but its great popularity had to do less with nationalism than with the attributes and accomplishments of certain wrestlers. Judō, on the other hand, as distinguished from the earlier jujitsu (more properly jujutsu), fell definitely into the category of martial arts, and had strongly nationalist connotations. Its origins lie in mid-Meiji, in a temple of the Low City. The two words, judō and jujitsu, are almost synonymous, judō being a development of jujitsu in the direction of “the way,” the Chinese Tao, with emphasis upon spiritual training and upon utter concentration and dedication. Perhaps more remarkable than judō itself were the organizing skills of the founder, Kanō Jigorō. The huge following which judō came to have meant a return to tradition, which in Japan often means nationalism. Yet the growing popularity of baseball, also in the last decades of Meiji, informs us that the nationalism of those years was not the sort of revivalism that wished to return to the old isolation and reject importations.

With engaging openness and a regard for reality, the guide published by the city in 1907 includes the licensed quarters in its pleasure section, along with the theater and other places to see things, and with graves and cemeteries as well.

The licensed quarters had a rather bad time of it in Meiji. They had been important cultural centers, and, though prostitution continued to flourish, they declined badly as places of culture. Nowhere was the decay of the decadent more in evidence than here. The playwright Osanai Kaoru stated the matter well.

 

One has no trouble seeing why playwrights of Edo so often set their plays in the Yoshiwara. It was the fashion center and the musical center of Edo. In the dress of the courtesans and in the dress of their customers as well were the wanton colors and designs for all the latest rages. The brightness of the samisen when the ladies were on display, the quiet sadness of the old schools of music, Katō and Sonohachi: one no longer has them at the Yoshiwara. The courtesan has degenerated into a tasteless chalk drawing, the stylish clientele has given way to workmen’s jackets and flat-top haircuts and rubber boots, and mendicant musicians [enkashi] who play “Katyusha’s Song” on the violin. The Yoshiwara of old was the veritable center of Edo society. The daimyo with his millions, the braves of whom everyone was talking, robbers in the grand style who aimed at aristocratic houses, all of them gathered in the Yoshiwara. When an accidental meeting was required, therefore, the Yoshiwara was the obvious place to have it occur. No playwright would be silly enough to put the Yoshiwara of our day to such use. A chance encounter under the lights of the beer hall at the main gate would most likely involve a person with a north-country accent and a home-made cap, and his uncle, in the city with a petition to the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. The customer sweetening his coffee with sugar cubes in a Western-style salon, given a farewell pat on his new muslin undershirt, would most likely be a numbers man in a visor cap, or a wandering singer of Osaka balladry who does the outskirts of town. No one could think of the Yoshiwara as in the slightest degree a romantic setting.

 

This passage is quoted by Kubota Mantarō, who remarks that the decay was still more pronounced after the earthquake. “Katyusha’s Song,” commonly held to be among the earliest examples of popular music, had first been sung by Matsui Sumako, most celebrated of Taishō actresses (see below, page 267), in a stage version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. After the earthquake, says Kubota, it gave way to “Arabian Love Song.”

The demimonde did not disappear or even decline, but it changed. The best of music and the dance, not inferior to that of the Kabuki, with which it shared a great deal, had indeed been found in the quarters, and especially the oldest and largest of them, the Yoshiwara. It was what the big spender wanted and got. There were both male and female geisha, but the performing arts of the quarters were largely the province of women, as those of the Kabuki were exclusively the province of men.

The elegant word for the bright centers of the demimonde has long been karyūkai, which an earlier edition of the principal Japanese-English dictionary defines as “a frivolous community,” and the most recent edition, with less flourish, “the gay quarters.” The expression means literally “streets of flower and willow.” It comes from Li Po, the great Tang poet, who made the flower and willow similes for the ladies of the demimonde. For the purist there was a distinction between the two which has largely been forgotten, the flower being the courtesan and the willow the geisha.

The distinction was never widely respected, and even when it was accepted in theory it quickly ran into trouble in practice. Geisha is one of the most difficult words in the Japanese language to grasp and define. Literally it is “accomplished person.” Nagai Kafū lamented the degeneration of the word and the concept, especially in the “geisha” quarters of the Meiji High City. Some geisha doubtless had a nunlike dedication to their artistic accomplishments, but many would have had trouble naming any that they possessed. They were for sale if the price and the asker were right. The grander of Edo courtesans, on the other hand, were sometimes very accomplished indeed, as little designs and billets-doux which survive from their hands demonstrate most clearly.

For all these imprecisions, the geisha and the courtesan had different places in the elaborate organization of the Edo Yoshiwara. To the former was entrusted the early part of a big evening, music and dance often of a very high quality, and to the other the more carnal business of the smaller hours.

As Meiji moved on towards Taishō, the geisha languished in the licensed quarters even as she thrived elsewhere. The licensed quarters became places of prostitution and little else, and for a more elegant sort of evening the affluent pleasure-seeker went rather to one of the geisha quarters. The change is seen most clearly in the fate of the hikitejaya, literally “teahouses that take one by the hand.” Central to the organization of the old quarters, the “teahouses” were guides to and intermediaries for the bordellos proper. Houses of high grade did not receive customers directly, nor did the wealthy merchant, as he set forth upon an evening of pleasure, think of going immediately to a brothel. Preparations were made by a teahouse, to which the customer went first, there to be taken by the hand; and so ties between teahouse and geisha, male and female, were close. The teahouses were in large measure guardians of the old forms, and as they declined prostitution became almost the exclusive business of the quarters.

 

A brothel in the Yoshiwara, as rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1911

 

The number of licensed prostitutes declined through Meiji, unlicensed prostitution flourished, and, as Nagai Kafū did not tire of telling us, certain geisha quarters, especially in the High Town, were little better than centers of prostitution. More to the point than this decline in the rolls of the professionals is the sharp decline in the number of teahouses. A successor institution, the machiai, prospered as the teahouses declined. Originally antechambers to tea cottages, machiai became places of assignation and presently restaurants to which geisha were summoned. “Streets of flower and willow” came presently to mean geisha quarters, as the old teahouses, the hikitejaya, and also the boathouses that had seen people so elegantly and comfortably to the Yoshiwara, merged with or gave way to the new machiai. It is not to be thought that the geisha quite disappeared from the Yoshiwara, where, indeed, some of the most talented and accomplished geisha of the Taisho period plied their trade. Geisha from all over town came to them for lessons.

The first thing that Civilization and Enlightenment did to the Yoshiwara and the other licensed quarters was to “liberate” their courtesans. An order of liberation was handed down by the Council of State, the high executive of the new government, late in 1872. It seems to have been a direct result of the Maria Luz affair, which gave international prominence to the licensed quarters. The captain of the Maria Luz, a Peruvian ship, was in 1872 convicted by a Yokohama court of running slaves, specifically Chinese coolies. In the course of the recriminations the Japanese were accused by the Peruvians of being slave traffickers themselves, their chief commodity being the ladies of the Yoshiwara and the other licensed quarters.

So the ladies of the quarters were liberated legally whether or not they wished to be, or had other means of subsistence. Stern measures were taken for the repression of “private,” which is to say unlicensed, prostitution. The aging aunt in Kafū’s The River Sumida had gone to the uncle for help when she was liberated, and was among the fortunate ones, for he married her.

There were other marks of enlightenment in the quarters. An 1874 newspaper reported that the young men who traditionally patrolled the night with wooden clappers, urging vigilance against fires, had taken to using trumpets. Not well received, the practice was soon abandoned. A fad for Western dress coincided with the Rokumeikan period. An enterprising bawdy house had Western beds in some of its rooms. The same house had a somewhat cosmopolitan staff, which included the first Okinawan courtesans active in Tokyo.

With liberation, the old brothels became karizashiki, literally “rooms for rent,” and the crisis passed. The old trade was permitted under a new jargon, the ladies now in theory being free agents. They were permitted to do business in the rented rooms, so long as they were licensed. Six centers in and around the city had rooms for rent: the four “post-stations,” Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Itabashi, and Senjū, which were the points of entry into the old city; and the Yoshiwara and Nezu (just north of Ueno). Prosperity returned as the new system proved as functional as the old. “A thousand houses, four thousand women, seven districts,” went a saying of mid-Meiji, declaring the proportions of the trade. (Senjū had traditionally been counted as two post-stations, because roads from the north converged there as they entered the city; hence “seven districts.”)

The Yoshiwara, the largest district, dwindled alarmingly in early Meiji, and after a decade or so began to revive. The number of houses on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War was still smaller than in the last years of Edo, though some of them were larger and more ornate houses by far than Edo had ever seen, grand edifices, indeed, of four and five storys, with chandeliers, stained glass, and the like.

The quality of the several districts may be gauged from the importance to each of its teahouses. It was considerably higher at the Yoshiwara than at Nezu, the next largest district. Of the old post-stations, Shinagawa maintained the highest ratio of teahouses to brothels, though it was lower than at the Yoshiwara and about the same as that at Nezu. Shinagawa had been the most particular of the Edo post-stations, because it commanded the most important point of access to the city, from the south and west, and the most demanding clientele, from the Kansai. What these facts tell us is that the old forms were more perdurable at the Yoshiwara than elsewhere. While there were teahouses there was at least a possibility that an evening at the Yoshiwara would not be given over entirely to fleshly things.

By the end of Meiji there were no teahouses at all in Itabashi, where the inland road from the Kansai entered the city. It was the smallest of the districts, notably unsuccessful at coming to terms with the new age. At Shinjuku, the most triumphantly successful of the old post-stations in this regard, there were only nine teahouses serving fifty-eight establishments with “rooms for rent.” At the Yoshiwara the number was a dozen times as large. The Yoshiwara was, after all, in its fashion, a guardian of tradition.

It had its own cycle of festivals, closely tied to the seasons. Observances were less punctilious and elaborate in Meiji than during the last years of Edo, and less still so as Meiji progressed. In late Edo there had been grand processions of courtesans, so laden with robes and ornaments and elevated upon pattens to such heights that they had to be supported. These processions honored the flowers of the seasons, and especially the cherry blossoms of the third day of the Third Month under the lunar calendar, the iris of the fifth day of the Fifth Month, and the chrysanthemums of the ninth day of the Ninth Month. A curious custom known as “heaped bedding,” tsumi yagu, was still to be seen in Meiji, though less frequently and less elaborately than in Edo. The great courtesans demonstrated their popularity and the wealth of their patrons by public displays of bedding. It was a curious custom, and it must have been very erotic as well. The bedding, especially commissioned for display, was in gold and silver brocades and colored silks of extreme gaiety.

At least three Yoshiwara events still attracted whole families, men, women, and children. The main business of the quarter prospered, of course, but could hardly account for the throngs. More innocent amusements included the “night cherry blossoms,” which the whole quarter turned out to view, and much of the city, and especially the Low City, as well. In late summer and early autumn the quarter set out lanterns in memory of an eighteenth-century courtesan of great popularity and sensitivity and high attainments, while dances known as Niwaka were performed on wheeled stages that moved up and down the main central street. They were sometimes humorous and sometimes solemnly dramatic, and the performers were the geisha, male and female, of the quarter. For obscure reasons, the observance declined sadly in late Meiji. Then on the two or three “bird days” of November came the Bird Fair, observed throughout the city but with an especial crowding at the Eagle Shrine just outside the quarter. On the days and nights of the fair the back gates of the quarter were opened to roisterers and the curious in general—on other days the main north gate was the only point of egress and ingress. The press and the stir were wondersome. Higuchi Ichiyō thus described them in her novella “Growing Up.”

 

Not given to letting such chances pass, young men poured into the quarter from the back gates. The main gate was quiet, and so it was as if the directions had suddenly reversed themselves. One trembled lest the pillars of heaven and the sinews of the earth give way in the roar. Gangs pushed arm in arm across the drawbridges and into the Five Streets, plowing the crowd like boats plowing their way up the river. Music and dancing, shrill cries from the little houses along the moat, and samisen in the more dignified heights, a delirious confusion of sounds that the crowds would not soon forget.

 

The Yoshiwara Main Gate as it was in late Meiji and early Taishō

 

In the spring of 1881, when the cherry blossoms were in their greatest glory, a new main gate of wrought iron was dedicated. The inscription was a Chinese poem by Fukuchi Genichirō, president of the Tokyo prefectural council. He was paid the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars, thought by some excessive. No one in the quarter, male or female, failed to attend the dedication. The poem, two lines of eight Chinese characters each, may be rendered thus:

 

The deepening of a springtide dream. A teeming street overcast by cherry blossoms.

First tidings of autumn. Twin rows of lanterns down the street.

 

It refers, of course, to the first two of the three great annual Yoshiwara observances.

So the old pleasure quarter, greeting the visitor with Chinese poetry from an eminent hand, was still in mid-Meiji a place of some culture; but it was declining. The great fire of 1911, the last full year of Meiji, dealt a grievous blow. On April 9, just one day short of three decades after the dedication of the iron gate, the Yoshiwara was almost completely destroyed. Two hundred brothels and teahouses were lost, within a few score of the total number. The quarter was rebuilt, but in a manner that appeared to demonstrate what may be expected in such cases, or to illustrate the proposition that the worst thing the West did was to make things easy and inexpensive. Old methods were discarded. They were too dear and too troublesome. The results of the rebuilding had a certain charm when they were in the whimsically ornamental style of Taishō, but when simple and utilitarian, tended to be merely dull. With what remained of the old they formed a rather motley stylistic triad. The loss of the teahouses left a permanent scar. Very little of high culture remained. The Yoshiwara became what it was to be until the outlawing of prostitution on April Fool’s Day, 1958, a place of just that and nothing more. Kafū exaggerated when he said that the Low City of Edo died in the flood of 1910 and the Yoshiwara fire of 1911, but the old Yoshiwara never really recovered its earlier, if decadent, glory.

 

None of the Five Mouths, as the post-stations fringing the city were called, lay within the fifteen wards of the Meiji city. A part of Shinjuku was incorporated into Yotsuya Ward just before the earthquake, and Shinagawa lay just beyond the southern tip of Shiba, the southernmost ward. The other two were more remote. (As has been noted, there were actually only four “mouths,” Senju at the north being counted twice.) Though not central to the culture of Edo as the Yoshiwara was, they provided essentially the same pleasures and services. Each made its way through the Meiji era in a different fashion, and so they offer interesting variations upon the theme of change.

Shinagawa was the busiest of the four (or five), and second in size only to the Yoshiwara among the quarters of greater Edo. Very conservative, the Shinagawa station and quarter sought to remain apart from the new day. In this endeavor it was perhaps too successful. It was left alone, and dwindled to insignificance.

There was strong opposition in Shinagawa to the Shimbashi-Yoko-hama railroad. It ran along the coast, partly on fills, to the present Shinagawa Station, in Shiba Ward. Had it continued on the coast it would have passed very near the quarter. Instead it passed some distance inland. The quarter itself doubtless had less influence than the army on these arrangements, but a result was that the district around the new railway station prospered, and the old post-station, the “mouth,” was isolated. It survived as a pleasure quarter, but a certain determination was required to get to it. This was true also of the Yoshiwara, and doubtless had something to do with the decline of that place as a cultural center. The rashness of choosing to stand apart from new traffic patterns was apparent earlier, however, in the case of Shinagawa. Where the Yoshiwara had always had its own very special attractions, Shinagawa had flourished only because it was beside the main Tōkaidō highway. The Shinagawa district lost population in late Meiji. It grew again in Taishō, but pleasure centers for the new city were by then emerging elsewhere. A private railway put through the district in the early years of this century was not enough to relieve the isolation, because there was no transfer to and from the main government line. This did not come until after the earthquake. The automobile age brought traffic back to Shinagawa, for the highway to Yokohama followed the old Tōkaidō, but by then it was too late. There were other places to go. In late Meiji and early Taishō the old Shinagawa station presented the curious picture of a bawdy district, with a few geisha to give it tone, cut off from the world by an encirclement of temples.

The case of Shinjuku was quite the opposite. It had been a relatively unimportant way station in the Tokugawa period, and even in mid-Meiji, when Shinagawa was being left behind, it was the smaller of the two quarters. It lay on the road to the province of Kai, the present Yamanashi Prefecture. The principal inland route to the Kansai now passes through Yamanashi, but did not then. The number of customers who might be expected to wander in from the highway or pass one last night on the road before venturing into the city was small. Shinjuku, meaning “New Station,” was the parvenu among the Five Mouths, put together when the older Takaido station came to seem a bit too far out to serve as a first stop on the way to Kai.

Shinjuku was a lonely place under the Tokugawa. It did not immediately spring into prosperity with the beginning of the new day. Like Shinagawa, it was circumvented by the new transportation system. The railway that ran north and south along the western fringes of the city passed slightly to the west of it, even as the Tōkaidō line passed west of the Shinagawa quarter. There were two important differences, however: the old station, the “mouth,” lay between the new station and the city, and within easy walking distance, and so the stroller need not have such a strong sense of purpose to get there as to reach Shinagawa; and the new station was to become an extremely important transfer point for commuters, the most important, indeed, in all the land. A private railway line, later bought by the government railways, was opened from Shinjuku westwards to Tachikawa in 1889.

The growth of Shinjuku as a residential district proceeded so briskly that it was the only significant annexation to the city through the Meiji and Taishō Periods. Its prosperity brought the decline of such geisha districts, nearer the city, as Yotsuya and Kagurazaka. The old pleasures of the way station also got lost in the prosperity. The bawdy houses, very conspicuous on the main highway westwards from the city, embarrassed the bright new Shinjuku. There were plans, very long in the formulation, to put them out of sight on back streets. With the assistance of fires, the plans were well on the way to fruition when the earthquake came, making relocation easier. The old quarter gradually dwindled, though it survived long enough to be outlawed on that memorable April Fool’s Day of 1958.

Itabashi was the earliest of the Five Mouths to fall into a decline. By the middle years of Meiji it had fewer houses and ladies than Shinjuku, and no teahouses at all. The old highway on which it stood, the inland route to the Kansai, had been important; especially in the years after Perry, it accommodated grand processions fearful of the exposed seashore route, among them that of the royal princess who traveled east to become the wife of the fourteenth shogun. Itabashi fell in the revolution that put everyone on wheels. There are still traces of the old post-station, but one has to hunt for them. Most of the old quarter was destroyed by fire in 1884. Though it was partly rebuilt, the old business continued to decline. After the earthquake Itabashi began to attract commuters and developers, not customers for the old quarter. It does not, like Shinagawa, seem to have striven to be left behind by the new day, but somehow it was.

Senjū provided two of the Five Mouths. There were two clusters for pleasure and lodging, known as the Upper Station and the Lower, on either bank of the Arakawa River (as the upper reaches of the Sumida are called) and Senjū did more than double duty as a way station. Three important roads converged upon it: from Mito, seat of one of the “three Tokugawa houses”; from the far north; and from Nikkō, mortuary shrine of the first and third shoguns. Of all of them, it best gives a sense today of what an old way station was like. Senjū never languished like Itabashi nor throve like Shinjuku, and it did not, like Shinagawa, seek to reject the swift new wheels. In between, it has kept more of its past than any of the others.

The traveler from Edo usually proceeded northwards on foot, having arrived at Senjū on foot or by boat, as the great poet Bashō did in the seventeenth century. The modern road to the north does not follow the old road, which, therefore, escaped widening. There was another road, farther to the west, for grand official processions to Nikkō, and so Senjū did not get exceedingly important people, as Itabashi and Shinagawa did. Probably nothing made by man is old enough to have been seen by Bashō as he set out on his narrow road to the north, but there are yet patches of richly brown latticework and heavily tiled roofs, to suggest the sort of road it was. To reach Asakusa and Shitaya, the first considerable areas of dense population, the traveler still had to pass extensive farmlands. Senju was thus fairly safe from the fires that so frequently afflicted the city.

The last of the districts, Nezu, on the fringes of Hongō, was an inconvenience in early Meiji, for it lay just down the hill from the old estate of the Maeda, lords of Kanazawa, which became the campus of the Imperial University. The proximity was not thought appropriate, since the young men of the university were the future of the nation. They must be kept from temptation, at least within walking distance. The Nezu quarter could simply have been closed, but that posed another problem: Such facilities were necessary to a city absorbing great floods of unattached young men from the country. Edo always contained more men than women, and Tokyo continues the pattern. So in 1888 the Nezu quarter was moved bodily to Susaki, which means something like “sandbar,” filled land in Fukagawa near the mouths of the Sumida. Great celebrations on the occasion of the removal let everyone know where the quarter had gone. Through the remainder of Meiji and indeed down to the outlawing of prostitution, the transplanted quarter was the chief rival of the Yoshiwara as a “nightless city.” After the fires of early Meiji, it may have looked more like the Yoshiwara of Edo than did the Yoshiwara itself. Photographs and prints show low buildings in good traditional taste, comparing well with the Yoshiwara and its tendency towards the flamboyant. The old customs seem to have survived better at Susaki than at the post-stations.

 

As Meiji came to an end and Taishō began, the flower and willow of the old system were drifting apart. The flower was the more carnal of the two, the willow or geisha the more artistic and spiritual. The flower came to dominate the licensed quarters, while the willow was preeminent in the geisha quarters. Machiaijaya, literally “rendezvous teahouse,” is what is usually referred to by the English term “geisha house.” A Japanese word exists that may be literally rendered “geisha house,” but it is not commonly used, and is more likely to be found in bilingual dictionaries than in the purely Japanese sort. The inference is strong that it is a translation from English for the convenience of foreign persons. The rendezvous teahouse, in any event, developed into an elegant restaurant to which geisha were summoned. Lest it seem that the music and dance of Edo declined absolutely as they declined in the six licensed quarters, the geisha districts ask to be looked at.

Edo had its “geisha of the town,” distinguished from the geisha of the licensed quarters. Some of the “town” districts still present through Meiji were very old, going all the way back to the seventeenth century. Some of the most flourishing quarters, on the other hand, had their beginnings only in Meiji. A census of geisha, both those attached to the licensed quarters and those of the town variety, shows that they were concentrated, not surprisingly, in the Low City. Three-quarters were in four of the fifteen wards: Nihombashi, Kyōbashi, Shiba, and Asakusa. Geisha quarters were scattered over the flatlands, and in the hilly regions at least one, Kagurazaka, commenced operations at about the time Commodore Perry arrived. Other districts grew up in the High City of Meiji. They were neither as expensive nor as elegant, on the whole, as the best of the Low City districts.

The two great geisha districts of Meiji were Yanagibashi and Shimbashi. The Yanagibashi district, on the right bank of the Sumida south of Asakusa, was the Meiji quarter most esteemed by the connoisseur of old ways, and much reviled, as well, by those who thought that it was squandering its legacy. Narushima Ryūhoku’s New Chronicle of Yanagibashi (Ryūkyo Shinshi) is a classic among satirical writings of the new age, as Ryūhoku himself was a classic son of Edo, one of the professionals. Ryūhoku, an “elegant sobriquet, suggests affinities with Yanagibashi. Literally, “North of the Willows,” it derives from Yanagiwara or “Willowfield,” the banks of the Kanda River near its confluence with the Sumida. Born in Asakusa in 1837, of a family of minor bureaucrats, Ryūhoku lived for some years to the north of Yanagiwara, and a slight distance to the west of Yanagibashi, “Willowbridge.” Yanagibashi is thought, though without complete certainty, to have taken its name, as Ryūhoku took his sobriquet, from Yanagiwara.

He was in attendance upon two shoguns. Though he was for a time under house arrest because of critical remarks about persons in high places, he was given important assignments, such as seeking to keep the blue-eyed peril at bay. He served in a capacity roughly equivalent to that of Foreign Minister. With the collapse of the shogunate he was of course out of work and, like so many other men of the losing side, he went into journalism.

The first part of New Chronicle of Yanagibashi was written in 1859 and expanded in 1860. The Yanagibashi district had been in existence since the late eighteenth century, but its best age was in the last decades of Edo. The first section of the chronicle, starting with the premise (which must have had great immediacy in those years after the arrival of Perry) that we cannot be certain of the morrow, chronicles the standards and practices of the quarter in great detail. It is of a genre common and popular in late Edo, a display of connoisseurship that may have been helpful to the adolescent son of Edo embarking upon a career as a spendthrift, but may seem a touch self-satisfied and even pretentious to the outsider.

The work would probably be forgotten, save among specialists and bibliographers, had it not been for the advent of Meiji, a development not pleasing to experts on pleasure among the sons of Edo. Ryūhoku wrote a second installment in 1871. Both installments were published in 1874. A third installment, written in 1876, was banned, and Ryūhoku spent a time in jail because of it. The acerbity of the satire apparently passed limits. Only the introduction survives. Ryūhoku continued his journalistic career after his release, and died in 1884, securely established among the Edokko.

The chief interest of the Chronicle is in its account of what Meiji did to Yanagibashi. The first section tells us what it was like in the days of good taste and deportment. Then came the depredations of the new establishment. There are accounts of the violent and boorish ways of the new men, of parties at which people talk politics and ignore the geisha and her accomplishments, of speakers of English, of liberators and improvers. The geisha of the old school has no place in the new world, and the new variety is more interested in money than in art, and not easy to distinguish from the prostitute. She buys copies of the official gazette to determine how much her clients make, and has trouble identifying the father of her child. Thus has the corruption advanced, the decay of the decadent, even so early in Meiji. The son of Edo can only lament, and remember.

Ryūhoku’s chronicle was extremely popular, although it is written in a highly sinified and ornate prose, remote from the tastes of our day. It is one of several works which were said to have forced up the price of paper. However valid his strictures may have been, Yanagibashi boasted famous and accomplished geisha through Meiji and beyond. Among the prosperous quarters of Meiji, it continued to be the one that had the closest ties with the old mercantile elite. Shimbashi and later Akasaka were the haunt of the new bureaucrat and businessman, while it was to Yanagibashi that the danna went, the Low City shopkeeper or wholesaler. (If he was really successful he probably no longer lived in the Low City, but that was another matter.) Yanagibashi was still the nearest of the quarters to Edo. It was favored by its situation, on the Sumida, just above Ryogoku Bridge, where that finest of summertime observances, the opening of the river, took place. Fukagawa, most storied of the quarters of late Edo, lay on the opposite bank. Only at Yanagibashi could a singer of amorous balladry be expected to come rowing his way up to a machiai, or a geisha and her customers to go boating among lanterns and samisen. The Sumida was in those days still fairly odorless.

Yanagibashi was the principal geisha quarter of very late Edo and early Meiji. With the rebuilding of Ginza, Shimbashi came to rival it. The new people, bureaucratic and entrepreneurial, formed the Shimbashi clientele. A concentration of government buildings lay just to the west, and the big companies had their offices to the north. Shimbashi was among the places where the modern league of business and government, admired by some and reviled by others, took shape. It served the new establishment.

There had been “town geisha” in Shimbashi and Ginza from about the time of the Perry visit, and that watery region was a center for the funayado (see page 69). Shimbashi had its tradition then, but its great day began some twenty years after the Restoration. In late Meiji it was the quarter most favored by persons of money and power. The Shimbashi archetype was the country girl with energy and ambition, and a certain ruthlessness as well, in contrast to the Yanagibashi geisha, who inherited, or so it was said, the self-sacrificing pluck and verve of the Fukagawa geisha.

There were other geisha quarters, and they suffered vicissitudes. Old ones went, new ones came. The count of such quarters (as distinguished from the licensed quarters that deteriorated so grievously through Meiji) ran to almost thirty from Meiji into Taishō. Osanai Kaoru, in his novel about the banks of the big river, caught the last days of the big spenders from the Low City. There were still big spenders, but they were far less likely to be from regions near at hand. In what happened to the quarters, licensed and otherwise, is a measure of what was happening to the old mercantile culture in general. It was being scattered, dissipated.

The two disasters at the end of Meiji, the flood of 1910 and the fire of 1911, certainly worked great damage on the Low City. If one is intent upon finding a date for the death of Edo, one could do worse than follow Kafū and set it in the last years of Meiji.

It may be, however, that we are too easily disposed to see the death of a much-honored head of state as the end of an era. Events at the end of his reign or early in the next are taken as watersheds and given a prominence in cultural history that they might not otherwise have had. Kafū himself went on finding remnants of Edo to almost the end of his life, usually near the banks of the Sumida. His native High City interested him much less. There remained a difference between the two divisions of the city, for all the dilution and dispersal of Edo culture. He may have been wiser when he sought evidences of life than when he professed to know exactly the date of the demise of Edo.

The weakening of its old pleasures has been more pronounced in the last half of the Tokyo century than it was in the first. The son of Tokyo who had money to spend continued to do it as the son of Edo had, on the theater and closely allied pursuits. The Imperial Theater opened late in Meiji, of course, and then there were the movies, and Pavlova, but the pastimes that took his money continued to be largely traditional. If the Yoshiwara offered fewer of them on the eve of the fire than on the eve of the Restoration, and fewer after the fire than before, they were still to be had in places like Yanagibashi. Even today it is an insensitive person who, wandering the Low City of a long spring evening, does not come upon intimations of Edo.

It may be objected that the life of Edo and Meiji was not all pleasure. If a son of Edo spent himself into bankruptcy at the theater and in the pleasure quarters, his family did not really think that he had done the city and the family honor. The proper merchant had a severe code, and disinheritance was likely to come before bankruptcy. To insist upon pleasure as central to the culture of the city, and upon the decay of the way of pleasure as symptomatic of wider decay, may therefore be a distortion.

Yet a sense of evanescence hung over Edo in its finest day even as it hung over the Heian capital of a millennium before. The best things did not last. They were put together of an evening and vanished in the morning sunlight. The difference was that the Heian aristocrat had things his way. If he wished to fuss over perfumes and tints, there was no one to gainsay him. The merchant risked rebuke and even seizure, neither of them happy eventualities. His pleasures had to be more clandestine. He had his way only when he patronized actors and went to the pleasure quarters. This did not mean that he was a person whose taste was inferior to that of the Heian noble.

Meiji had its two sides. One cannot believe that Hasegawa Shigure dissembled when she described her father’s exultation at the removal of the Edo stigma. Boundless new energies were liberated. To dwell upon inequity and repression is to miss this very important fact. Perhaps, facing braver and broader worlds, the son of Edo was ashamed that so much of his attention had gone into things so small. The big new things were often coarser things, however. The pleasure quarters presently lost their geisha, and the geisha presently lost their accomplishments.

The world of the geisha may have been a cruel one, as the world of the dedicated Kabuki actor was. No one should be sentenced to involuntary service in such a world. Yet it is a pity that people ceased submitting, and that no one was left to appreciate the sacrifice. The son of Edo knew a good geisha and an accomplished actor when he saw one. Less art and discrimination go into the making and appreciating of a Ginza bar girl and a first baseman.