Tokyo: A Biography. Stephen Mansfield
interment in the family grave at a temple.
Another execution ground existed at Kotsukappara, an area in the northeast of the city near Minami Senju and the day-labor district of Sanya. More than 200,000 severed heads were reportedly displayed on stakes here. Shortly after the establishment of Kotsukappara in 1651, a statue of Jizo—patron of stillborn children, travelers, and souls suffering in hell—was erected to stand guard over the grounds; the figure is known as the “Chopped-neck Jizo.” Kotsukappara was a benighted place, characterized by a bleakness and dereliction that still clings, like the reek of a tomb, to some of the back streets and alleys of the district. Disposing of dead bodies—whether of criminals or ordinary citizens—fell to the outcast hinin and eta. Their descendants, now referred to in hushed undertones as burakumin (hamlet people), continue to inhabit present-day districts to the east of the city such as Taito, Arakawa, and Sumida wards, where there are concentrations of the small factories, crematoriums, and leather-working shops in which work traditionally assigned to untouchable groups is carried out.
An antidote to such grim sights, Mount Fuji stands a hundred kilometers southwest of Nihonbashi. In the perspective-compressing prints of the day it appears as a looming presence, the principal feature in the Edo landscape. The city’s close links to the mountain were partly due to its powerful symbolism: the mountain was the locus of a complex mix of beliefs and doctrines practiced by religious cults dedicated to its worship. Dominant among these quasi-religious sects during the early Edo period was Shugendo, or mountain asceticism. Reflecting Fuji’s transcendent quality, the unquestioned notion that it was the most proximate peak to heaven, an inordinate number of shrines in Edo were dedicated to the deities that resided on the mountain. Each of these places of worship contained a miniature Mount Fuji within their grounds, where devotees, unable to make the pilgrimage to the real mountain, would climb and offer prayers. On “mountain-opening day” supplicants would offer prayers to the rising sun from these diminutive, easily scaled peaks.
Tokugawa Ieyasu died in 1616—the same year as William Shakespeare—having, like the bard, accomplished a great deal in his lifetime. By the 1650s Edo’s population had reached almost half a million, making it the largest city in Japan. Among the immigrants from other cities and the countryside were a small number of foreigners, the first overseas visitors to Japan since the arrival of early Chinese Buddhists. Dutch traders, restricted to a tiny artificial island known as Dejima in Nagasaki, were subjected to every possible humiliation in order to maintain their trade. Annual delegations to Edo were required between 1660 and 1790; thereafter, tributary visits were made every four years. Having visited Edo in the 1690s, Engelbert Kaempfer, a German naturalist and physician in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, gave a detailed account of the strange obeisance required of foreign visitors when they made their mandatory annual visit to Edo Castle in his History of Japan, posthumously published in 1727:
The moment the captain appeared, an affectedly loud voice called out, “Oranda kapitan” (Holland captain), a signal for him to step forward and pay his respects. He was then expected to crawl forward on hands and knees to the spot where the presents brought by the Dutch were displayed, and to the high seat of the shogun. Crouching on his knees, he bent his head to the floor and then, like a lobster, crawled back, all this without one word being exchanged.
It was a tiresome business, but the Dutch, eager to stay in the good graces of the shogun and maintain their preeminence in trade, were grudgingly prepared to oblige.
On a less pantomimic note, the shogunate required the Dutch mission to submit an annual report on world events and developments beyond the confines of Japan. The Dutch duly obliged—an arrangement that continued until the end of the policy of national seclusion in the mid-nineteenth century.
In a set of four linked gold-leaf screens known as Edo Meishozu Byobu (Screens of Famous Places in Edo), now in the collection of the Idemitsu Museum of Art, we can gain some idea of how Edo looked at the time of the early Dutch tributary visits to the city. Besides Edo Castle, the screens depict a Noh performance, a ballad drama performed by joruri puppets used in epic narrative dramas, acrobats at a tent in the Shinbashi district, and scenes at an annual festival at the Senso-ji temple. It is a hyper-compression of reality that nevertheless reflects an already energetic, culturally virile city.
As the areas surrounding the citadel evolved into an urban center, two distinct communities of townspeople sprang up. The first of these was the shiro-shitamachi, an area of soon-to-be-affluent merchant stores and businesses centering on Nihonbashi and Kyobashi. Shirokiya, a large commodities store, opened in Nihonbashi in 1662, developing into a successful merchandizing chain that became today’s Tokyu department store. Maps of the district from the mid-seventeenth century show a rectilinear grid system that would soon be overwhelmed by a far more organic and random urban evolution. The second area, which sprang up along the banks of the Sumida River, consisted in the main of small businesses and shokunin (craftsman) residences. The center of this area of intense activity was Asakusa, to the north of the original shiro-shitamachi.
Nihonbashi Bridge was the starting point for the Tokaido, the “Eastern Road” that ran to the imperial capital of Kyoto. Four major trunk roads originated at the bridge. Its zero marker remains even today the point from which all distances are measured. Bulletin boards were placed at the approaches to the bridge, making the spot an information outlet. Sexual offenders and adulterers, among whom an inordinate number appear to have been priests, were placed in fetters at the south end of the bridge. The public exposure and resulting humiliation effectively combined punishment and penitence. Murderers were buried alive with their heads protruding from the earth. A saw was conveniently placed nearby. Passersby, if so inclined, could pick up the tool and sever the head, which would then be placed on a pike at the end of the bridge. This terrifying apparition of death—rapidly decaying heads with their eyes gouged out by ravens—served as a powerful deterrent to potential felons.
The dry winter winds that the Kanto region is prone to, combined with all its wooden structures, made Edo especially fire-prone. The Meireki Fire, which broke out on the morning of January 18, 1657, was one of the era’s most notable conflagrations, destroying almost two-thirds of the buildings in Edo. Better known as the Long Sleeves Fire, the conflagration started at an exorcism ceremony at Honmyo-ji temple in Hongo for a kimono that had been used by three young women who subsequently died prematurely. When a gale blew up during the ritual, embers from the costume settled on the roof of a nearby temple, setting off a sequence of fires that, fanned by powerful westerly winds, spread across the contiguous quarters of Yushima and Surugadai before moving on to ravage the districts of Nihonbashi, Tsukudajima, Kobikicho, and the important rice granaries in Asakusa. That fire burned out, but a second rose up in the samurai district of Koishikawa, going on to destroy Edo Castle and countless warrior residences. More fires flared up that evening in the Kojimachi quarter.
The fire penetrated the spacious grounds of Edo Castle, burning down the main keep and melting all the gold stock that was stored in its cellar. The interior walls of the castle, decorated with priceless paintings by the great court artist Kano Tanyu, were destroyed. Among the human casualties of the Long Sleeves Fire were the inmates of the city’s main prison at Kodemmacho. Somehow, the understanding between the prisoners and the authorities that they would be released from the jail and meet up at an agreed temple location was muddled as the fires approached. The authorities, believing that prisoners were trying to escape and loot the city, had the gates firmly closed, resulting in the death of more than twenty thousand people.
In the two days of raging fires, 930 daimyo residences were razed and 350 temples and shrines were destroyed, along with 1,200 merchants’ homes and 61 bridges. The estimated number of victims was 108,000 out of a population of some half a million. The timing was pitiless; the following day it snowed. Despite the prompt distribution of relief rice from the shogun’s granaries, many people died from starvation and hypothermia.
If two detailed paintings on folded screens (the Screen of Edo and the Screen of Famous Places in Edo) and an early extant Kan’eiera (1624–43) map of Edo are accurate, the city built after the fire was not as splendid as the castle town that preceded it. The ensuing reconstruction—based more on pragmatic concerns than aesthetics—required wider streets, firebreaks, and a program to get merchants to fireproof their homes and storehouses with plaster, which