THE DAYS AFTER
In a few years the governor of Tokyo, the council, and the bureaucracy will move their offices out beyond the western limits of the old city.
Despite opposition from the eastern wards, the decision was made in 1985. Unless there are delays in building the somewhat grandiose new offices, the move will take place in 1991. The governor will then be nearer the population center of his constituency than he is now. However one may regret the departure from the old city, the reasons for the move are good ones.
The city has moved westward in the century and twenty years since it became Tokyo. So the governor recognizes the facts, and will go where the people who elect him have gone. American city halls tend to stay put. The New York city hall has not moved north or east with the spread of population, and the Philadelphia city hall has remained where William Penn put it. Perhaps the Japanese are more realistic and flexible in these matters.
Yet one does have regrets, for the move and for the shift that has made it seem realistic. Edo, the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns, became Tokyo in 1868, after the overthrow of the shogunate. The Low City, mostly reclaimed flatlands, was where the lesser orders lived, the merchants and artisans or workmen. It was the crowded part of the city, and the lively part. The hilly High City, to the west of the castle, was sparsely populated. A line north and south from the old magistracies (there were two of them) would have had the larger part of the population east of it, and the centers of commerce and culture as well. The aristocracy in the great castle complex and the High City had money and taste, but it was not imaginative or inventive. It was in the Low City that the things which interest us a century and a half and two centuries later were made and done.
By “aristocracy” is here meant the military class, the court and its courtiers having stayed in Kyoto. The military class was on the whole conservative. Its tastes and the tastes deemed appropriate to it were antiquarian and academic. What was new and interesting in Edo, the cultural center of the land under the last six or seven Tokugawa shoguns, was mercantile. The daimyo patronized Nō drama and the tea ceremony. The wealthy merchant patronized Kabuki and the entertainments, often of very high quality, provided by the geisha, whether in the licensed pleasure quarters or the less strictly regulated “private” quarters. Nō and the tea ceremony were elegant and elevated pursuits, but during the Tokugawa Period they became highly ritualized and formalized. If they changed, it was almost imperceptibly. Kabuki changed and grew, and so did the music and dance of the pleasure quarters. It has become common in our day to think of Kabuki, like Nō, as a crystallization of unearthly beauty, but it can be earthy, erotic, and ribald. More important, new and good things were constantly being added to it, and to the art of the geisha, as they were not to Nō and the tea ceremony. The former were living and growing, the particular treasures of the Low City.
In Meiji the governance of Tokyo Prefecture moved slightly westward, to Marunouchi. Meiji is the era designation for the first reign after the upheaval of 1867-68. The Meiji emperor died in 1912, and the era name changed to Taishō. The prefectural government, along with the city government when there has been one, as there has not been since 1943, has been in Marunouchi ever since. And now it will move much further west, to a part of Shinjuku that was not brought within the city limits until 1932.
Even if the governor and government were not moving, we would have to admit the fact, melancholy for some of us, that the Low City has fallen far behind. It was the cultural center of Edo, and the new prefectural offices will lie beyond the old High City, beyond even the first of the old post stations on the highway to the mountain province of Kai. Although already declining, the Low City was still important enough in Meiji that a cultural history of Meiji Tokyo could not leave it out.
The simplest and the best explanation for the decline of the Low City is economic. Money departed. Kabuki stayed behind and so did the best geisha, but rich merchants, such as the Mitsui, moved to the High City when the class structure of Tokugawa disappeared. The chief sources of patronage came to be the entrepreneurial and bureaucratic classes of the High City. In 1923 mansions of the wealthy and aristocratic stood along the Sumida, central to the arts and pleasures of the old Low City. Most of them then disappeared. The new Sumida Park and a brewery came to occupy the tract on the east bank of the Sumida where the greatest of them, the river villa of the Mito Tokugawa family, had stood.
Except for the regions immediately east of the outer moat, now filled in, not many would notice if the Low City were to disappear completely from a postwar history. Only the omission of Ginza, just east of the old castle complex, would be certain to bring complaints. Ginza is geographically in the Low City, since it lies east of the hills that begin in the palace (once the castle) grounds, but it belongs to the whole city. If the city, sprawling and decentralized, has a center today, it is probably Ginza and districts nearby.
Amusing things were still going on in the Low City during the interwar period, but they fall in the realm of popular culture, amusing enough for an evening, but ephemeral, not likely to be of much interest to anyone except very specialized antiquarians two centuries from now. So, even without insisting upon them, the story of Tokyo since 1923 must implicitly be about the decline of the Low City and the rise of the High City.
The Low City did almost completely disappear for a time late in the Taishō reign, which ended on Christmas Day 1926. Fires raged through it for two days following high noon of September 1, 1923, and left almost nothing behind save modern buildings along the western fringes. The fires followed upon the great Kantō earthquake, which struck at a minute and a few seconds before noon on September 1. The great shift to the High City was already in process and would have occurred even without the disaster, but the disaster sped it along. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō was born in Nihombashi, the heart of mercantile Edo, between the old castle complex and the Sumida. He remarked in 1934 that he could no longer think of Nihombashi, or indeed Tokyo, as home. The place where he had spent the most impressionable years of his boyhood now lay under asphalt, in the middle of a thoroughfare cut through after the earthquake. It is an extreme instance, but symbolic of what happened to the whole Low City. The sites were there, but denuded, stripped of history and culture.
Old things would probably, most of them, have vanished in any event. Except for grand public structures like temples, buildings were not meant to last long and did not last long. But they would not have gone so quickly. Crowded and flimsily built, the Low City could not be protected against the fires that broke out immediately after the earthquake. The High City fared better. It too was largely built of wood, but broken topography and irregular building patterns reduced the damage.
The financial, entrepreneurial, and merchandising center of the city—Nihombashi, Ginza, and Marunouchi—also fared better. The offices of governor and mayor, in Marunouchi, came through so solidly that no one within was immediately aware of what had happened. Lights swayed, but it was the news that automobiles were unable to get through to the east that brought the first sense of disaster. Presently, people on their way to the safety of the palace plaza were dying of burns and having babies under the mayor’s windows.
Marunouchi was less severely damaged than Nihombashi, and so the managers and entrepreneurs started moving westward, even as the city did. Marunouchi derives its name from the fact that the district lay within the outer revetments and moat of the castle. Developed in Meiji by the Mitsubishi enterprises, which bought it from the government, Marunouchi now emerged clearly dominant over Nihombashi, where the merchant class of Edo had been most affluent and powerful. The stock exchange and the Bank of Japan stayed in Nihombashi, but Marunouchi more and more became the right address for the big managers.
The Yamanote loop line of the National Railways, joining the center of the city with transfer points to the western suburbs, was finally finished in 1925. The last link joined Tokyo Central Station with Ueno, the point of departure for the north. Marunouchi thus became the genkan, the “front door,” for the whole nation. The front door of the station faced Marunouchi and, from 1926, a broad avenue leading to the palace plaza. Nihombashi, on the east side of the station, did not even have a back door. The number of big companies with offices in Marunouchi doubled between 1922 and 1924. Almost three decades, since the completion of the first Mitsubishi brick building in 1894, had been required to reach the 1922 figure.
Nihombashi was also losing out to Ginza as a retail district. It had Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, the energetic Meiji pioneers in the new, Western kind of retailing, but department stores in quick succession established main or branch stores in Ginza. Mitsukoshi was among them. As the lesser parts of the Low City, save only Ginza, were left further and further behind by the High City, so was proud—some might have said, arrogant—Nihombashi.
There was talk of more shattering change, spiritual and man-made this time—the physical disaster could scarcely have been more complete. Kyoto was still officially the capital of the land in 1867, when the shogunate collapsed. There was talk of having the capital somewhere other than Edo, seat of the shoguns and the actual seat of power. It was stilled when the emperor took up residence in Edo, and not revived until 1923.
With the city so grievously damaged, might it not be better off without the national bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy without the snarls and tangles of the great city? It should be easy to find a new capital less prone to disasters. Tokyo lies in earthquake country. Another flattening earthquake was bound to come. It has not come in the more than sixty years since the last one, but the assumption that it will come someday is universal.
Among nonseismic arguments for moving the capital was that Kyoto, or elsewhere in the Kansai, would be nearer the center of the Japanese empire, by which was meant Taiwan and Korea as well as the home islands. There even seems to have been talk in the armed forces—already feeling the spur of ambition—of moving the capital to the continent. Dispersal was suggested (and again today, when concentration in Tokyo has come to seem extreme and unhealthy, it is a popular subject). Kyoto had been all this while going on thinking of itself as the Western Capital. A measure of reality might be given to the claim. The government could be in both Kantō and Kansai.
On September 12, 1923, a royal proclamation said that Tokyo would remain the capital. This is the official translation: “Tokyo, the capital of the empire, has been looked upon by the people as the center of political and economic activities and the fountainhead of the cultural advancement of the nation. With the unforeseen visit of the catastrophe, the city has entirely lost its former prosperous contours but retains, nevertheless, its position as the national capital. The remedial work, therefore, ought not to consist merely in the reparation of the quondam metropolis, but, in ample provisions for the future development of the city, completely to transform the avenues and streets.” The regent, the next emperor, took a drive through the burnt-over wastes of the Low City. (He was to do it again, as emperor, in 1945)
The city burned for some forty hours, and before the last embers were out reconstruction had already begun. It was used to and indeed rather proud of fires, known as “flowers of Edo,” and proud as well of the speed with which it recovered. The proper merchant insisted upon speed in these matters. If a shop had not resumed business within three days, common mercantile wisdom held, it had no future. Prepared for what must come sooner or later, merchants kept reserves of lumber east of the Sumida River. The lumberyards were very watery, and reserves of lumber had a chance of surviving the worst conflagration, as also did inventories in somewhat fireproof warehouses. Department stores quickly put up emergency markets. Ginza and Asakusa almost immediately had street stalls again, as they had them before. Already on September 3 there was a sign in the wastes of the central fish market, in Nihombashi, summoning such fish dealers as survived to discuss plans for reopening.
Completely burned out. But see:
The son of Edo has not lost his spirit.
So soon, these rows and rows of barracks,
And we can view the moon from our beds.
So went “The Reconstruction Song,” popular in the months after the earthquake.
Late in September a newspaper account based on a police report said that thirty thousand “barracks” had already gone up. Here and in “The Reconstruction Song” the English word is used, in the singular, to signify a building erected hastily on the site of a disaster. The new barracks were most numerous in Asakusa, Shitaya, and Honjo wards, the northern tier of the old Low City. The smell of new wood was everywhere, faces were black from clearing the ashes, though the wares offered for sale were skimpy.
Barracks begin to go up in Hongō Ward after the earthquake
More than ashes had to be cleared away. The tallest building in the city, the Asakusa “Twelve Storys,” broke in two, at the eighth story, during the earthquake. The novelist Kawabata Yasunari was off for a look at Asakusa a scant two hours afterward. He was less impressed with the destruction than with the refugees, especially the courtesans and geisha who poured in from the north, “like a disordered field of flowers.” The great Yoshiwara quarter, to the north of Asakusa, was completely destroyed and several hundred of its women were incinerated, but the fires stopped just short of Asakusa proper, where Kawabata wandered in his field of flowers.
He did describe the final disappearance, the following year, of the Twelve Storys. It seems to have been a rather festive occasion. More properly the Cloud Scraper, the Twelve Storys was a pleasure and retailing center, a somewhat ungainly brick tower completed in 1890. Army demolition squads completed the destruction.
A character in Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenaidan) published at irregular intervals between 1929 and 1935, is speaking:
“All around us and as far as we could see were burned wastes. A few shacks had gone up here and there, but nothing blocked the view of the park from the school roof. The elevated portion of the roof was crowded with spectators. We must have waited an hour or so. There was an explosion and a cascade of bricks. The wall at one side had not fallen. It was like a thin sword. Another explosion and the sword fell. The crowds on the school roof cheered, and then how we all did laugh! As the sword collapsed a black mass of people raced up the mountain of rubble.”
Individual enterprise was so swift and forceful that some of it got in the way of larger plans. Charles Beard, the American historian, was also swift and forceful, generous with his advice. A telegram from him crossed with one from Gotō Shimpei, the home minister, now in charge of reconstruction. Mayor of Tokyo until shortly before the earthquake, Goto had once before asked Beard’s advice. He was known as “the mayor with the big kerchief,” which might be rendered as “the mayor with all the plans.” At his invitation, Beard studied the city administration for six months in 1922 and 1923 and submitted a report early in 1923. Now Gotō summoned him back. He came, and the telegram, a stern one, preceded him. Sentimentality about the old must not be allowed to interfere in any way with plans for the new: no new buildings were to be allowed until a new street plan had been drawn up. But of course barracks were already appearing at a rate of close to ten thousand per week, if that police report was accurate.
The earthquake came at a time of political disarray. The admiral who had become prime minister in the summer of 1922 died late in August 1923. It was the age of what historians call “Taishō democracy,” a somewhat liberal age between the authoritarianism of Meiji and that of the thirties and early forties. Political parties were for the first time experiencing the delights of power, and they were much given to squabbling. A successor cabinet was not easily arranged. On September 2, while the city still burned, a cabinet headed by another admiral took office. It lasted only until early 1924, but under it, and especially Gotō, the national government assumed the lead in the rebuilding. It would probably have done so even without the services of Gotō, since the city did not have the money.
Gotō’s original plan covered the whole city, including the relatively undamaged High City, and almost every lesser category imaginable streets, parks, rivers, canals, transportation. A grand arterial highway some two hundred yards wide was to run north and south through the city proper from beyond the city limits at either end, passing just to the east of Ginza and the main part of Nihombashi. For a politician, Gotō was curiously unrealistic. The budget was scaled down from several billion yen to about a half billion for Tokyo, and an additional amount for the still more grievously injured Yokohama. The main emphasis in the more modest plans was upon getting roofs over people’s heads and widening streets. The width of Gotō’s grand avenue was reduced to a little over half, and its length greatly reduced as well. Known as Shōwa Avenue from the era designation for the reign just recently ended, it runs past Ginza and Nihombashi and on to Ueno in Shitaya Ward.
Less than the half billion yen was finally approved. The new Reconstruction Agency was not of a single mind. Some thought that matters of little immediate concern were included and that the requisitioning of land for the widened streets would be a great bother. One of the two major political parties agreed. Why, it asked loudly, should so small a part of the country make demands upon the whole country? Widened streets and some new parks remained of Gotō’s dreams. The street pattern was similar to that of Edo.
The rebuilding of the city may seem like a case study in lost opportunities. It would not do, however, to suggest that nothing at all was accomplished. The city was rebuilt, after a nondescript fashion, and it was to an extent redesigned. Nor would it do to leave the impression that the city did nothing at all for itself. The national government took responsibility for main thoroughfares, new and widened, and the city for lesser streets. In the end almost a quarter of a million residences were moved. The proportion of streets to total area was much higher after the earthquake than before. Three big new parks were financed by the national government, all in the Low City, near or along the Sumida. The city built more than fifty small parks, many of them by waterways now gone, most of them near schools. Motomachi Park, in what was then Hongō Ward, near Ochanomizu Station, is perhaps the only one of the small parks to survive in its original form. Opened in 1930, it is a charming Art Deco composition, with something in it of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel as well. The erection of a memorial hall on the site east of the river where the largest loss of life occurred was the mayor’s idea. It took seven years to complete, but already by the first anniversary of the quake it was receiving pilgrims to its mass graves.
An anniversary service at the Earthquake Memorial Hall east of the Sumida, site of the largest loss of life in the fires following the earthquake
One of Kawabata’s short-short stories, which he called “palm-of-thehand stories,” is set on the first anniversary of the earthquake. A woman whose whole family died in the earthquake has become the companion of a clever and skillful Asakusa beggar. They go off to the memorial site. The man removes one of his shoes, and tells the woman that her questions about this eccentric behavior will soon answer themselves. He uses the bare foot to pick up coins that have been tossed at but missed the offertory box, and puts them in the shoe. A royal emissary arrives. So do the home minister and the mayor. All of them read messages at the altar. There are wreaths from ambassadors. “At two minutes before noon all vehicles in the city stopped for one minute. The whole city prayed in silence.”
The novelist Nagai Kafū tells in his diary how it was on that first anniversary, a day of aprehension for the superstitious. “The citizenry was in terror. Banks locked their doors, greengrocers and fishmongers took a holiday. The weather was good, with a fresh autumn wind.”
The climax to Kafū’s The Woman in the Rented Room, written in 1927, also occurs on September 1, 1924. “It was already dark, but the back alleys were ridiculously silent. The Yotsuya geisha quarter was, on the surface at least, taking a holiday. That was not all: even on the main trolley street there was none of the usual bustle of night stalls and shops. The trumpet from the grounds of the Military Academy, beyond Tsunokami Hill, seemed very near.” The woman of the title, through whom we observe the silence of this dread anniversary, is a kept woman, and the fact that she does not expect her patron to come calling this night of all nights causes him, after a sequence of almost ludicrous mishaps, to discard her.
The origins of the panic of 1927 may be traced directly to the earthquake. The causal relationship between the two was not inevitable, but the behavior of the government gave it the look of inevitability. The Yamamoto cabinet, which took office on September 2, declared a limited debt moratorium. Under certain conditions and in certain areas payment could be deferred. In effect, the Bank of Japan was required to guarantee losses by commercial banks, and its own losses were guaranteed by the government up to a specified limit. The time limit for these arrangements was extended repeatedly. Because the value of uncollected and uncollectable instruments far exceeded the official guarantee, the Bank of Japan was affected, and through it the commercial banks.
In March 1927 the finance minister did a peculiar thing. He said in the Diet that the Watanabe Bank, an important commercial bank, would be forced to close its doors in a few hours. This was untrue. The Watanabe Bank was in trouble, but not such critical and immediate trouble. He seems to have said it to divert attention from a bank still more heavily burdened with bad instruments. There was a run, and the Watanabe Bank was forced to suspend payments. So, after a time, was the second bank, the Bank of Taiwan, in the interests of which the minister had spoken his untruth, and half the capital of which came from public funds. Efforts to bail it out were declared unconstitutional by the Privy Council. Other banks failed, including one of the five largest in the land. It was the worst financial panic in the history of modern Japan, and its remote origins were in the earthquake. The cabinet resigned, to be succeeded by that of Tanaka Giichi, an army man and an early advocate of assertive policies on the continent. So the political and economic effects of the earthquake reached far. The politicians who said that the damage to the capital was of little concern to them and the nation were wrong.
Through a moratorium, actions by the Bank of Japan, and a bit of trickery, the crisis presently came under control. The banks that reopened did so with ostentatious piles of cash by their teller windows. Much of the money was printed only on one side, for there had not been time to print both sides.
It is possible—though to state it as fact we must put complete credence in the professed motives of the culprit—that the most sensational crime of the post-earthquake years was also caused by the earthquake. On December 27, 1923, the regent, after 1926 the emperor, was on his way to the opening of a Diet session. As he passed Toranomon, “Tiger Gate,” a young man pushed his way out of the crowd and fired point-blank at the regent, who escaped injury. This attempted assassination is known as the Tiger Gate Incident, from the site of a castle gate on the outer moat. (Both gate and moat are long gone.)
The young man was from a good provincial family, the son of a Diet member. He later said that he had to do what he did, and that he did it out of anger at the treatment of laborers and Koreans after the earthquake.
However matters were with laborers, Koreans were very badly treated indeed: they were massacred, as many as two thousand of them.
The would-be assassin was pummeled by the crowds and arrested. Not quite a year later, in November 1924, he was hanged at Ichigaya Prison, and that evening given a pauper’s burial east of the Sumida, in the northeastern suburbs. The river embankment was very pretty, it is said, with police lanterns.
Only after the sentence was handed down did the defendant break his silence. This he did with two shouted words encouraging revolution. So the theory that he might have avoided execution had he been less vehemently revolutionary is not supportable. The court was not prepared to be merciful to someone who had done such a thing.
Nagai Kafū, a quirkish man, had his own thoughts in the matter, and set them down in his diary.
November 16. Sunday. Sunny. Big play given in all the newspapers to the execution of Namba Daisuke. Daisuke is the student who was arrested after trying to shoot the regent at Toranomon last year. Some denounce the act as the vilest treason, but I do not think it anything so very astonishing or reprehensible. The assassination of monarchs is no rarity in the West. Everything about modern Japanese life is superficial imitation of the West. Daisuke’s behavior is but another instance of imitation. What is there to choose between him and a Westernized woman out dancing?
It is interesting to note, by way of comparison, what happened to earlier and later would-be assassins. In 1891 a policeman in the town of Otsu, just east of Kyoto, slashed the czarevitch of Russia with a sword. The Otsu trial was swifter than the Tiger Gate one, but the assailant was sentenced to life imprisonment rather than death. Though the prosecution asked the death penalty, the judge allowed only a charge of simple assault, holding that this attack on royalty was no different from an attack on anyone else. The fact that extraterritoriality was still in effect may have influenced the decision. The judge wished to demonstrate the independence of the courts from political pressures, and therefore the superfluity of extraterritorial consular courts. The fact remains that the Tiger Gate court did not follow the Otsu precedent.
On January 8, 1932, the emperor (the 1923 regent) was the victim of another attack. A Korean threw a hand grenade at his cavalcade as he was returning from a military parade. No one was injured, though one of the automobiles, not the emperor’s, was damaged. The incident bears the name of another of the old palace gates, the Sakurada or Cherry Orchard Gate. The Tiger Gate precedent, and not the Otsu one, was followed: the assailant was put to death. The conclusion seems hard to escape that not all royalty is equally royal. The cabinet resigned after the 1923 incident, and attempted to resign after the 1932 one. It was persuaded to stay on in the latter instance because of the outbreak of hostilities in Manchuria.
The Tiger Gate Incident had an effect on the culture of the nation that could not have been foreseen. The chief of the Tokyo police was dismissed, as was the assistant chief in charge of the patrolling forces.The latter was Shōriki Matsutarō, who set forth on a new career that brought him fame and power, in the media and in entertainment. He became president of the Yomiuri Shimbun in February 1924. It was a time when aggressive Osaka journalism seemed to be having everything its way. Two Osaka newspapers, the Asahi and the Mainichi, each passed a million in nationwide circulation the year after the earthquake. The largest Tokyo newspaper had a third of a million. The two Osaka papers ganged up on it, undermining it so successfully that the Yomiuri took it over. The Osakans next turned their energies on another distinguished Tokyo newspaper, and the Nichinichi, the Tokyo edition of the Mainichi (both names mean “daily”), took that one over.
Shoriki went quickly to work. He sought to give the Yomiuri a common touch, without the intellectual tendencies of the Osaka newspapers. His Yomiuri had the first women’s page and the first advice-to-thetroubled column. He also did wonders with sports, giving the Yomiuri a professional baseball team which the whole nation loves. He made it into the largest paper in the city. Since the war it has become the largest in the land.
So all manner of remarkable sequences of events (Shōriki was also to become a pioneer in commercial television) are traceable to the earthquake, if we may assume that the Tiger Gate Incident is traceable to it. But to return to the immediate aftermath. The governor of Yamaguchi Prefecture, whence the assailant came, docked his own pay for two months. The governor of Kyoto Prefecture, where the man had lingered on his way to Tokyo, was reprimanded. The man’s father resigned from the Diet and withdrew into the stoic seclusion of the dishonored samurai. The village in which he had been born forwent all New Year festivities by way of atonement. The principal of his elementary school—he had graduated a decade earlier—resigned.
The trail of punishment and contrition following the Otsu Incident is altogether less exaggerated. The home minister resigned, and the governor and police chief of Shiga Prefecture, of which Otsu is the capital, were dismissed: and that was that. All of these people may in some measure be held responsible, whereas it is hard to think the governor of Kyoto and the rural school principal responsible for what happened at Tiger Gate.
* * *
The Taishō period, the reign of the Taishō emperor, stands almost exactly midway through the first Tokyo century, 1868 to 1968. The whole of the Meiji reign and the portion of the Shōwa reign that falls within the century are of almost equal length. Taishō stands at midpoint in another sense. The city has not ceased changing since the end of Taishō, and the early years of Shōwa were to bring a disaster that almost destroyed it once again. Taishō may have been the era when change was fastest. There is no device for precise measurement of such phenomena as cultural change. Yet one has a “sense” that it must be so. The last year of Taishō must have seemed more different from the first than 1912 did from 1897, or 1925 from 1940. The things of late Taishō and early Shōwa, the institutions and the modes of behavior, have a familiar look about them that those of the Russo-Japanese War do not. Even “Taishō democracy,” which surrendered so meekly to the reaction of the thirties, seems familiar. It has come again. We have similar extravagances today. Only a prophet can say whether or not indignant, righteous men with guns will try one of these days to work a similar reaction.
The Taishō emperor
The Taishō emperor was mentally incapacitated—from how far back in his not very long life (he was born in 1879) we do not know. His birth was difficult and he was given up for dead. So it may be that he was retarded from infancy. He had already withdrawn from public life before the future Shōwa emperor became regent, late in 1920 and some months after his twentieth birthday. There was little stir over the Taishō emperor’s death, certainly very little compared with that which accompanied his father’s last illness. The announcement that he had pneumonia came early in December 1926. He was taken to the royal villa at Hayama, on Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo. (The villa disappeared, a victim of arson, in 1971.)
In his diary, Nagai Kafū indicated disapproval of the announcement.
December 14. Cloudy and cold. Toward evening it began to clear. I went in the evening to Ginza, which was noisy with hawkers of newspaper extras. I suppose they informed us that His Majesty’s death approaches. The detail with which newspapers, morning and evening, have reported the royal illness is extreme. They do not hesitate to tell us the state of his appetite and of his defecatory processes. This sort of reporting began with the death of the Meiji emperor. With the encouragement of the authorities, the newspapers told us that the emperor suffered from uremic poisoning, and that his august countenance had turned a muddy purple…. If my opinion were asked I would give it. I would say … that a national legend is thus destroyed. While he lives our sovereign is revered as a god, and to tell us that he has died a victim of uremic poisoning shatters the poetry…. Why must these facts about appetite and defecation be made public as the royal death approaches?
The emperor died very early on Christmas morning, and so the first year of Shōwa was only a week long. Among the curiosities one comes upon in flea markets are diaries and memorandum books for the year that failed to be, the sixteenth year of Taishō. It was too late to print books for the second year of Shōwa, and so people made do with ones printed before the royal death and the change of era names.
It has been the practice since 1868 to have era names coincide with reigns. In earlier centuries they were changed more frequently. The designation “Shōwa,” meaning literally “Clarity and Harmony,” and conveying a hope for peace at home and amity with all nations, comes, like most of them, from the Chinese classics. It is the longest-lived era name in Japanese history, and it is an inadvertency. The royal household got scooped and was embarrassed. Among the common Japanese ways of coping with an inadvertency is to pretend that it did not occur. A newspaper published the name originally chosen, Kōbun, before it was officially released. The alternative name Shōwa was therefore substituted on a moment’s notice and was with us for more than six decades. Kōbun, suggesting an age of brilliant letters, might have been more descriptive of the reign than Shōwa.
Interment of the Taishō emperor at Hachiōji, February 1927
The Taishō emperor was buried in February 1927 with suitable reverence and pageantry, and great crowds in which people were trampled to death, but without the public outpourings that accompanied his father’s obsequies. There had been disagreement about where the Meiji emperor should be buried. There seems to have been none in the case of the Taishō emperor. His grave is in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Lavish undertakings for a memorial to the Meiji emperor produced the Meiji Shrine and Gardens. No one took the trouble in the case of the Taishō emperor. General Nogi Maresuke, the greatest of modern military heroes, committed suicide on the first day of the Meiji emperor’s funeral. The poet and scholar who composed the official threnody died the day before the Taishō emperor’s funeral began, but not by his own hand.
All in all, a hush surrounds the Taishō emperor. It is not easy to assess the political importance of the Meiji emperor, but his name rallied the nation for the great efforts of the late nineteenth century. The Taishō emperor is by comparison a slight, sad figure.
He was, however, the first Tokyo emperor. His father was reared in Kyoto and buried in the outskirts of that city. The Taishō emperor lived his whole life in Tokyo, to the extent that anyone in this mobile age lives his whole life anywhere. His grave lies in Tokyo Prefecture. No one remembers much about him except that he was kept out of sight, but in this one regard he was unique, an original.