Civilisation and Enlightenment

Low City, Big City is a description of Tokyo during the period that Japan caught up with Western powers after centuries of near isolation. The book does not contain much political, economic, intellectual or literary history, but seems more like an intellectual remembering what he read in the local newspaper. It covers Tokyo during the Meiji and Taishi emperors, and roughly matches a Chinese sexagenary cycle. The title refers to Yamanote as the High City of the intellectual and financial elite, and Shitamachi as the more dynamic Low City of merchants and artisans, and Mr. Seidensticker’s favourite. The book contains some copies of woodblock prints made during this period, depicting interesting, gay coloured scenes of Japan's transition.

At the end of the Tokugawa era in 1863, Edo was more like Washington than London or Paris. As a centre of government, it was not yet a great commercial centre. Edo’s economy was seriously affected by the fact that iIn 1862 Daimyo families were no longer required to live in Edo. Many left, and the population fell from over one million to half a million. With the name change to Tokyo (i.e. Eastern Capital), and the emperor's move from Kyoto to Tokyo, Tokyo started growing again, mainly by attracting people from Japan's northeast. Tokyo was a low rise city, with lots of open spaces, like a collection of villages, with transportation often on foot or by boot. Mr. Seidensticker quotes an attendant of General Grant during his visit to the city in 1879:

There is no special character to Tokio, no one trait to seize upon and remember, except that the aspect is that of repose

Earth quakes and fires were a regular feet of the city, and the city was rebuilt regularly, and almost completely after the great earth quake of 1923, that killed about 100,000 people in which was essentially still a wooden city.

With Japan opening up to the outside world, brick buildings are erected, and gas lights introduced. The first form of transportation on wheels is the rickshaw, a Tokyo original. They would later be replaced by horse-drawn buses, soon electric trams, and trains.

A cultural caesura happens in 1873 when the empress stops blackening her teeth. That year already a third of Tokyo men had cropped hair in the Western style. It doubled in 7 years. Many important changes occur in these years, including like driving on the left, reading from left to right, the introduction of beer, meat and dairy products, the appearance of the first Chinese restaurant, and the fad for rabbits with large floppy ears as pets. The 17th century dry goods store Mitsui (now known as Mitsukoshi) transforms itself into a department store, drawing crowds with culture and entertainment. It becomes a mandatory part of a tour of Tokyo for country folk. Its competitor Shirokiya brought shop girls as innovation. By 1923, two thirds of men wore Western dress in 1923, although women clung to traditional dress longer:

The relationship between tradition and change in japan has always been complicated by the fact that change itself is tradition.

According to Mr. Seidensticker, Tokyo has always been a fun city. Performances and festivals have always been central to Edo and Tokyo culture. Kabuki theatre, the tea ceremony, and elegant "pleasure quarters" of Yoshiwara were important manifestations of this culture. They were considered decadent by Tokugawa bureaucrats. However refined may have been the trappings of the theatre and of its twin the pleasure quarter, sex lay behind them, and worse, the purveying of sex. During the Meiji, the vulgarity is taken out of Kabuki theatre, and its image is consequently upgraded. It was accomplished with new theatres and the imperial family attending plays. Yose, vaudeville was the favourite form of theatre for the poor. The grounds of the larger shrines and temples were often pleasure centres also. The Asakusa Kannon was one vast and miscellaneous emporium for the performing arts. Sumo wrestling was also made acceptable by imperial viewing, and women were gradually allowed to attend this sport with religious significance. At the same time Yoshiwara decayed into prostitution, and tea houses started to operate as liaisons between geishas and wealthy merchants.

Nihombashi became a conservative area of town, whereas the Ginza with its main road of brick buildings became innovative and nouveau riche. Ginza was also the home of Seiko and Shiseido (by a pharmacist who first experimented with soap, toothpaste and ice cream). Earlier generations of rich Tokyoites had a Western building for receiving guests, but lived in more traditional premises themselves. Many shogunate estates gave way to public buildings.

The reign of Taisho saw the emergence of specialist schools and the office lady. During this era cars and motor cycles were introduced, as was asphalt in Ginza. Sanitation and sewage still primitively collected. In the 1920’s still only 20% of the mass was collected.

Farmers, in the days that they bought, were willing to pay more for sewage the higher the social level of the house. The upper-class product was richer in nutriment, apparently. So, apparently, was male excrement. In aristocratic mansions where the latrines were segregated by sex, male sewage was more highly valued than female. It seems that the female physique was more efficient. ( )

Having just gone to Tokyo, it made sense to start reading this book; I started it when I was there. This is an effort of Seidensticker's to capture the mood of the city during the period between the start of the Meiji Restoration and the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Seidensticker is well known as a great lover of the city, and so I was looking forward to reading this book, the first in a two volume set.

For the most part, I was happy with it; he goes through the time period both in terms of a variety of topics (commercialism, culture, architecture, geography, etc.) and documents how they changed over the course of the period. Some of it linked to other areas; once, say, the Ginza Bricktown was built, it became a draw for more Western culture, so it fit both in the cultural change and the architecture parts. It made for a lot of interesting reading, and it's no secret I'm a fan of Seidensticker's writing style. On the whole here, he struck an elegiac tone; there's a lot of "this was so great, and it's gone now" kind of passages, although he does note in some places where things are better, too.

On the other hand, I did find the book difficult to follow at points; since he jumped around in the chronology a lot, remembering what happened when and how it linked to other stuff became a bit hard. While going through topic by topic and addressing the changes is a valid way to write this sort of book, doing it on a paragraph by paragraph basis does get confusing, after a while.

Still, on the whole, I definitely enjoyed it, and will read the other half of the two-volume set quite soon. ( )