Flâner à Tokyo

Edward Seidensticker's Tokyo Rising, the sequel to the almost equally engaging Low City, High City : Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, is a treasure trove of the breathtaking changes that Tokyoites’ public life went through from 1923 until the height of the Japanese bubble. Just like Low City, High City, Tokyo Rising does not contain much political, economic, intellectual or literary history, but seems more like what an intellectual remembered of the time and what he had read in the newspaper. Still the author deserves praise for making all these data available, and still managing to turn the book into a coherent story. On the other hand, it is not very clear what someone who does not live in Tokyo or is a regular visitor can learn from this book.

Roughly speaking, the book is about the decline of Tokyo’s Low City in the East and the rise of the High City in the West. The disastrous Kanto earthquake of 1923 speeded up that process. Tokyo was rebuilt with cheaper international devices in lighter colours than before (page 23). After the earthquake retail merchandising, entertainment and culture imitated and emulated what the Japanese had observed in New York and London. Old shop signs, often abstract and symbolic, gave way to signs that announced their business loudly and unequivocally. People stopped changing from street wear into slippers when entering a store, and as shops ceased visiting people at home, matrons had to start mingling with the lesser orders. In 1926, the first vending machines were introduced. Mitsukoshi Department Store included a theatre in its post-earthquake building. All such stores had gardens, terraces, galleries and exhibition halls. Department stores were built at commuter transfer points like Shibuya and Shinjuku. The early era saw the start of suburbanisation with bunka jutaku ("cultural dwellings"): houses with 3-4 rooms, one in Western style, 2 floors, a tiled kitchen and a bath. This lead to the demise of public baths, once an important element of Japanese culture. In the Japanese language, neologisms were mainly foreign imports.

Industrialisation progressed and 1927 saw the introduction of the underground railway. Shinjuku was up and coming and less bourgeois with market stalls and phonographs. It was probably already the most crowded place in the city with flower sellers and fortune-tellers (page 51). The bars in Ginza had French names, and young men no longer came to look at women and listen to their traditional music. The women were becoming more aggressive and less inhibited, and emerged to take charge of conversation. The waitress gave way to the hostess (page 61). Prices came forward and so did the tips. Other changes were the growing popularity of Osaka cooking (Osaka being the challenger/runner-up in many fields), and sumo and kabuki, that started to attract millions of visitors.

1940, the year Japan was 2600 years old, should have brought the Olympics, but Japan returned the franchise. Because of the Sino-Japanese war steel was in short supply. Foreign-named cigarettes were rebranded, but mama and papa could not be extirpated anymore. To support the war effort the nation turned to technology and production, with ersatz to satisfy the populace. Still, the suicide rate went down. And despite the purification of culture, German, Italian, and Russian classical music were still allowed.

The first American air raid hit Tokyo in 1942, but the second one only came in 1944. A total of 4,000 flights occurred over the city. After the war the Americans settled in Marunouchi, and Tokyo was rebuilt on the old street pattern. Japan profited handsomely from the Korean War, which helped rebuild the city. Tokyo needed about a decade to recover from the war. The occupation force mainly censored acts of military virtues like loyalty, but allowed the first kisses on stage and screen. They were soon followed by strip shows. Strippers in Asakusa first wore Japanese dress, while their colleagues in Ginza wore Western dress and Shinjuku was in between. However, soon Ginza was the norm because the clothes went off faster. Another form of amusement of the time was women's swordplays.

The fifties saw the invention of pachinko. Speed and noise increased with these vertical pinball machines:

It does seem to be the case that the Japanese would prefer to be knocked into happy oblivion by sheer noise than by most things.

Car traffic increased to 2.5 million in the mid 1960's, and tramways were done away with before the Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics were the first in Asia, and were supposed to remedy the strong feelings of inferiority and isolation that had persisted. The Olympics led to 20 miles of motorways, the "bullet train" to Osaka, and a monorail to the airport. However t the time only a third of the people outside the centre had access to sewers (page 234). At the Olympics Japan won gold in women's volleyball, but wept for losing the final in open-weight judo.

In these years Harajuku came up as a place for youth culture. Up to the oil crisis of 1973, Japan experienced quickly rising wealth and Tokyo ever more cars. The parking-lot business began. In 1963 it was made illegal to keep the family automobile in the street space in front of the family house. "Key child" was one of the new words of 1964 (it equally existed in Holland in the early 1970's), and in the next year the first newspaper article about fat children appeared. "Tribes" of young people came up, among others in Harajuku:

It is more likely rebellion against the boredom of peace, prosperity, and the life of the office worker and the spouse.

Tokyo got its first high rise buildings of over 200 metres. Golf overtook sumo as a popular diversion for the elite, which the author blames on the demise of the geisha. The golf course became increasingly the place for big deals, despite that it takes dozens of evenings at an expensive geisha restaurant to spend a sum equal to the membership fee in one of the golf clubs.

In the mean time Japan and Tokyo developed what is now known as one of the greatest bubble economies of the 20th century:

One of the most popular little stunts at drinking places has to do with the ten-thousand-yen banknote and the price of land. The note, the largest printed by the Japanese government, is worth about eighty dollars, though the value shifts from day to day. A person is told to fold one of the notes as tightly as possible. Take it down to Ginza and drop it, the instructions continue; it will not buy the bit of land upon which it falls.

This is somewhat overstating it, but a 200 square feet flat in Tokyo costed about 1 million US dollar. Land speculation caused Tokyo house prices to rise at about three times the national rate. Japan’s concentration of money and power (and consequently head offices and artists) was unthinkable in the United States. And as a consequence, Yokohama, Tokyo’s satellite city, was larger than Osaka, the country’s third city.

So Tokyo is and has almost everything, and many a son of the city might say it has lost the most important thing, its identity. (...) The loss of identity is the result of the very Japanese process of homogenisation. Everything is subsumed unto Tokyo and Tokyo is subsumed unto everything; and the nation marches victoriously on, untroubled by the insistence on separateness and difference that troubles so many other nations. ( )

This is the second half of the history of Tokyo from Meiji on by Seidensticker, covering the time period after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 until the end of the Showa period in the late 1980s. Much like the first book, you get a very good sense of how much Seidensticker knows about the city: both the outward appearances and the pulse of it that lies underneath. He definitely gives a good sense of the changes over time, as well. One definitely can get a sense of Tokyo from the book.

That said, I feel that the book isn't as good as the first one, and certainly shouldn't be read without having read Low City, High City first. Again, the main trouble is one of organization. In the first book, mostly about Meiji, the chapters were grouped roughly by topic, which worked fairly well, although he jumped back and forth in time, and so it got hard to follow at points. In this one, the chapters are divided by time period: reconstruction after the earthquake, leadup to the war, occupation, etc. Each chapter tends to then look at each of the subareas of interest to Seidensticker: population movement, architecture, entertainment, etc. The problem still is that he jumps around in time a lot, and when you're grouping by time period, that's a real problem. It does get hard to follow some of the time, because of it.

But Seidensticker still has great stories and anecdotes to detail his points, still has that wry voice in his writing that I really like, still gives you lots of information about the city that I find quite interesting. I did still like the book, but I think it could probably have used a bit more revision before going out, so it all hung together a bit better. Even if I feel ambivalent about his main point (Tokyo no longer has a culture of its own, but has a national culture for Japan), it's well presented... just a bit jumpy sometimes. If you're inclined to books on Japan, this won't be a bad choice, but I wouldn't start here. ( )