A breathtaking romp through Tokyo's history from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, using lots of images, writings and clippings to bring back to life those far-off days.
A breathtaking romp through Tokyo's history from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, using lots of images, writings and clippings to bring back to life those far-off days.
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Overview
A breathtaking romp through Tokyo's history from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, using lots of images, writings and clippings to bring back to life those far-off days.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9789888273454 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Earnshaw Books Ltd |
| Publication date: | 04/13/2022 |
| Series: | Tales |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tales of Old Tokyo
The Remarkable Story of One of the World's Most Fascinating Cities
By John Darwin Van Fleet
Earnshaw Books
Copyright © 2015 John Darwin Van FleetAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-988-8273-45-4
CHAPTER 1
Black Ships
On 8 July 1853, after 250 years of enforced seclusion from the outside world, Tokyo witnessed Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy lead a fleet of two smoke-belching steamships and two sloops into Uraga Harbor, due south of what is now downtown. Perry's mission was to open trade with Japan on behalf of the United States.
Representatives of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi, pretending to be higher in rank than they actually were, met Perry at anchor and directed him to sail for Dejima, in Nagasaki, where (Perry knew, having studied the matter) he'd be restricted to secondary trade with the Dutch at one of the few ports where the Tokugawa Shogunate had allowed foreign trade and interaction to occur.
There was a crowd of people there, all stirred up and making guesses about the burning ships on the horizon. Then those ships came nearer and nearer, until the shape of them showed us they were not Japanese ships but foreign ones ..."
An anonymous shore-side observer in 1853
Astonishment
Bayard Taylor, a New York Tribune correspondent travelling with Perry's fleet, in A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853
The sight of our two immense steamers — the first that had ever entered Japanese waters — dashing along at the rate of nine knots an hour, must have struck the natives with the utmost astonishment.
Return from Whence You Came!
From Young Americans in Japan by Edward Greey, 1882
Twenty-seven years ago an armed fleet "thundered at the gates of Japan," and, in the name of humanity, requested that its harbors should "be opened to the distressed ships of Western nations." I was a member of that expedition, and heard the haughty reply of the official, which was thus interpreted:
"Return from whence you came. No foreigner is permitted to land on our sacred soil!"
How we received this command is a matter of history.
A Prompt Effect
In Americans in Japan by Robert Tomes, 1857
[The Japanese] were now told that the Commodore bore a letter to the Emperor from the President of the United States ... to this they replied that Nagasaki, in the island of Kiusou, was the only place where any such communication could be received ...
... The Commodore sent back an answer declaring that he would not go to Nagasaki; and, moreover, if the authorities did not remove their boats, which were thronging about the ships, he would disperse them by force. This last piece of intelligence produced a very prompt effect ...
* * *
Futility
From A Diplomat in Japan by Ernest Satow, 1921
In view of the expected return of the American ships in the following year, forts were constructed to guard the seafront of the capital, and the ex-Prince of Mito was summoned from his retirement to take the lead in preparing to resist the encroachments of foreign powers ... But when the intrusive foreigners returned in the beginning of the following year, Japan found herself still unprepared to repel them by force. The treaty was therefore signed, interdicting trade, but permitting whalers to obtain supplies in the three harbours of Nagasaki, Hakodate and Shimoda, and promising friendly treatment to shipwrecked sailors.
* * *
People People People
From Japan, A Reinterpretation by Patrick Smith, 1997
At the Meiji Restoration Japan was a country of roughly 30 million people. ... Edo's population at the moment it became Tokyo was less than a million. Then it began to grow: to more than two million at the end of the Meiji period, to almost four million by 1920, year of the first modern census. In August of 1945, half of the city's 7 million inhabitants were either dead or dispersed in the countryside. Then Tokyo began to grow once more: it reached 7 million again by 1952, and 10 million a decade later. In the 1960s an average of more than a hundred families a day left the old villages for Tokyo and the other cities along the Pacific Coast.
CHAPTER 2Growing Up in Edo
Once I moved ...
From A Daughter of the Samurai by Sugimoto Etsu, 1926
Throughout the two-hour lesson, he never moved the slightest fraction of an inch except for his hands and lips. And I sat before him on the matting in an equally correct position. Once I moved. It was in the midst of a lesson. For some reason I was restless and swayed my body slightly, allowing my folded knee to slip a trifle from the proper angle. The faintest shade of surprise crossed my instructor's face; then very quietly he closed his book, saying gently but with a stern air, 'Little Miss, it is evident that your mental attitude is not suited for study today. You should retire to your room to meditate.' My little heart was killed with shame. There was nothing I could do. I humbly bowed to the picture of Confucius and then to my teacher, and, backing respectfully from the room, I slowly went to my father to report as I always did, at the close of my lesson.
Iya!
From A Japanese Miscellany by Lafcadio Hearn, 1901
The last patient of the evening, a boy less than four years old, is received by nurses and surgeons with smiles and gentle flatteries, to which he does not at all respond ... There are doctors here ... doctors that hurt people ... He lets himself be stripped, and bears the examination without wincing; but when told that he must lie down upon a certain low table, under an electric lamp, he utters a very emphatic "Iya!" [no!]
So they lay hands upon him two surgeons and two nurses, lift him deftly, bear him to the table with the red cloth. Then he shouts his small cry of war, for he comes of good fighting stock, and, to the general alarm, battles most valiantly, in spite of that broken arm. But lo! A white wet cloth descends upon his eyes and mouth, and he cannot cry, and there is a strange sweet smell in his nostrils, and the voices and the lights have floated very, very far away, and he is sinking, sinking, sinking into wavy darkness. ... Now the cloth is removed; and the face reappears — all the anger and pain gone out of it. So smile the little gods that watch the sleep of the dead. ...
The faces of the little stone Buddhas, who dream by roadsides or above the graves, have the soft charm of Japanese infancy. They resemble the faces of children asleep ...
CHAPTER 3Samurai
Common people who behave unbecomingly to the samurai or those who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on the spot.
Directive of the Tokugawa Shogunate, 17th century
The Happy Dispatch
From The Japanese Sword and its Decoration by Helen C. Gunsaulus, 1924
Up to 1876 all samurai or military men were privileged to carry two swords, the katana and the wakizashi. The first was the weapon with which they fought, settling personal quarrels and clan feuds, or defending their feudal lord, for whose sake each one was proud and ready to die at any moment. The other, the wakizashi, was a shorter weapon generally uniform in decoration with the katana, for these two were worn together thrust through the belt, and were spoken of as dai-sho, meaning "large and small."
The wakizashi was always worn indoors. The katana, however, was removed on entering a private house and, as proof of trust in one's host, it was laid upon the katana-kake, a rack placed near the entrance. The wakizashi was especially dear to the samurai, for with it he could follow his feudal chief in death, or, rather than be taken prisoner by the enemy, he could perform the "happy dispatch." If condemned to death, he was privileged to take his own life rather than suffer the disgrace of public execution.
* * *
Practice
In The Dark Side (2001), author Mark Schreiber explains that Yamada Asaemon, described below, was the dynasty name (eight generations) of Tokyo's equivalent of Lord High Executioner.
When a policeman was not up to the task [beheading the convicted], Yamada would be summoned from his residence in Hirakawa-cho, just west of Edo castle's inner moat, to do the job. But his main source of income was testing and certifying swords, an activity called tameshi-giri. Good swords did not come cheap, and it made sense to certify that the blade was suitably robust. Yamada made sure buyers got what they paid for. To do this, ropes were tied to the wrists and ankles of a headless corpse ...
A Very Daring Joke
From The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, 1899
When I first called at the residence of my lord Okudaira in Shiodome without those 'things on my waist' [the long and short samurai swords], the officials insisted that I was disrespectful to his lordship to enter the estate thus incompletely dressed.
But I had determined upon the abolition of these things and I used to make this sarcastic remark: "It is only the fool who in this enlightened age would carry around the instruments of murder at his side. And he who carries the longer sword is so much the bigger fool. Therefore the sword of the samurai should better be called the "measuring scale of stupidity."
Many of my colleagues shared this idea. One of them, Wada Yoshiro, once carried off a very daring joke. One evening, he with a few friends had gone for a walk without the swords as usual. While they were walking along they came face to face with a group of bullies swaggering along — a considerable number — with their long swords sticking out from their sides as if the road were too narrow to hold them.
Thereupon Wada, deliberately striding along the middle of the road, began to void urine as he came. It was a ticklish situation, whether the ruffians would move apart to the sides of the road or set upon Wada for a fight. ... His boldness must have got the better of them; the bullies turned aside and passed by without a word. This may seem a very drastic measure, hardly thinkable in these modern times, but it was not so unusual in those times of turmoil.
Quakes and Catfish Pictures
On 11 November 1855, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck Edo. Nearly ten thousand people were killed, many in the fires that followed, as usual for Edo. A shortage of burial containers forced people to leave bodies in the streets.
Japanese legend of the time held that earthquakes were caused by a giant catfish (namazu) wriggling underground. Moreover, earthquakes were seen as a sign of the gods' discontent with the government. After the shogun's humiliating concession to the United States, and the earthquake, namazu-e, 'catfish pictures', became highly popular, with the namazu shown in a variety of supernatural roles.
Population of Tokyo: 1860 – 1970
CHAPTER 4The Inaugural U.S. Ambassador
After Perry's initial forcing of Japan to accept foreign contact, the first U.S. ambassador, Townsend Harris, led the United States' further opening of Japan to US-defined trading terms. Similar to demands made by the British on China 15 years previously, after the first Opium War, Harris and the other members of the initial wave of foreigners demanded extra-territoriality (jurisdiction not by Japanese courts but by the foreign for those resident in the foreign-controlled districts), residence in what was then called Edo, and currency/gold/silver exchange considerations. Japan and the USA signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1858, largely due to Harris's initiative, so the treaty is also widely referred to as the 'Harris Treaty'. The terms of the treaty inflamed large segments of the samurai class and contributed to the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868. The highest ranking signer of the treaty on the Japanese side, Ii Naosuke, was assassinated just outside the Shogun's castle two years after the signing, in what became known as the Sakuradamon Incident.
An Unpromising Reputation ...
From He Opened the Door of Japan by Carl Crow, 1939
The visit of [Commodore] Perry apparently made an equally powerful impression on Harris, for this dramatic enterprise called his attention to his own rather aimless life. He had had an opportunity to achieve a certain local fame as the president of the Board of Education of New York and the founder of the city's first free library, but among many men in New York he was known only as a tippler and a business failure.
... Transformed!
From a 28 December 1919 New York Times Magazine article by William Elliot Griffis, author of Townsend Harris: First American Envoy in Japan
When I returned in 1874 from Japan, having lived under both feudal and imperial Governments, I called on Townsend Harris in the old Democratic Club-house, at Nineteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. His first question was, "What do the Japanese think of me?"
How highly Japan thinks and has thought of Townsend Harris is being told today in a drama at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, which has been crowded nightly since the play had its premiere last November.
From Japanese Expansion and American Policies by James Francis Abbott, "sometimes instructor of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy", 1921
Unsupported by a powerful fleet, living for over a year in fact without communication with his home country, apparently forgotten in Washington ... in the midst of a semi-anarchy attendant upon the dissolution of the Shogunate and the restoration of the Emperor, Harris nevertheless maintained a stead-fastness of purpose, and displayed a tact and ability that deserve the highest praise. Every sort of obstruction was placed in his way by the Japanese, but in the end he won his way through to the conclusion of a treaty, so skillfully drawn that it served as the model for all subsequent treaties entered into by Japan with other foreign nations. Indeed it served as the basis of Japan's foreign relations until 1899. Harris refused to crawl on his hands and knees before the Shogun, and that monarch respected his prejudices in the matter.
The Rejected Concubine
Tojin Okichi was the concubine of Townsend Harris, allegedly rejected by her people as a result, but the legend doesn't align with the facts. Okichi was sent home by Harris, who complained about her skin quality, after a few days. Thus it was not her service to Harris, but his rejection of her, that caused her people to scorn her as well.
Assassination ...
The Manifesto of the Sakuradamon Conspirators, who assassinated Chief Minister Ii Naosuke on 24 March 1860, in front of the Sakuradamon gate of the Edo castle. (Translation from James Murdoch's A History of Japan, Volume 3, 1926)
While fully aware of the necessity for some change in policy since the coming of the Americans at Uraga, it is entirely against the interest of the country and a stain on the national honour to open up commercial relations with foreigners, to admit foreigners into the Castle, to conclude treaties with them, to abolish the established practice of trampling on the picture of Christ, to allow foreigners to build places of worship for the evil religion, and to allow the three Foreign Ministers to reside in the land. Therefore, we have consecrated ourselves to be the instruments of Heaven to punish this wicked man, and we have taken on ourselves the duty of ending a serious evil, by killing this atrocious autocrat.
... And Other Killings
From Belli Looks at Life and Law in Japan by Melvin Belli, 1960
In the grounds of Meguro temple in Tokyo are the three gravestones of Catholic fathers who were burned to death upon refusing to renounce Christianity. They bear no inscriptions, but each bears a cross disfigured ... they died on a cross.
Ninja
Sometimes covert agents, sometimes mercenaries, ninja first appeared in the Warring States period (roughly 1450 through the Battle of Sekigahara, 21 October 1600). By the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1867), ninja had become myth-encrusted figures – we have little ability today to separate fact from legend.
What The Hell?!
As the Shogunate was collapsing and the country drifted into civil war in 1867, licentious partying broke out all over the country. Ee ja nai ka, literally "it's OK, isn't it?" or loosely "What the Hell?!", became a rallying cry for these celebrations, which featured drinking, singing and dancing under -clothed through the streets, cross-dressing, sex in public, etc.
CHAPTER 5The Beginning of the End
The Edo era and the rule of the Shogunate were coming to a close. But the seeds of the destruction had been planted long before ...
From Japan: A Short Cultural History by George Bailey Sansom, 1931
But on the whole it is true to say that the peasants were heavily oppressed by members of the knightly order, who soon in their turn were exploited by the rising class of merchants. Then, as the daimyo and the samurai attempted to transfer their burden of debt to the already overladen shoulders of the farmers, the agricultural economy broke down, and was replaced by a mercantile economy which Japan was unable to support without calling on the outside world. Her history for more than two hundred years is summarised in that brief statement.
"Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians!"
This phrase, sonno joi in Japanese, beloved of hotheads who deluded themselves into thinking that Japan could be closed to 'impure foreign influences', was itself one of myriad imports from ancient China.
From The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, 1899
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tales of Old Tokyo by John Darwin Van Fleet. Copyright © 2015 John Darwin Van Fleet. Excerpted by permission of Earnshaw Books.
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