As a schoolgirl, I heard the story of the change of the city's name, in 1868, from Edo to Tokyo (which means "the eastern capital"). I learned that this change symbolized the beginning of a new time in Japan, called the Meiji Era, after the emperor then on the throne. I was taught that it was a natural consequence of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his "Black Ships" in Edo in 1853, ending more than 200 years of Japanese isolation. In the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Japanese society was transformed, as the country was moved from medieval backwardness into the modern industrial era. Poor Edo paid a heavy price; name represented the past, while Tokyo became the city of the Japanese future. Edo survives now in history books and old prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige and in words like Edokko. Nobody in old Edo or in the Tokyo of the Meiji Era could ever have imagined that a Japanese schoolgirl would hear this history and then go home to watch Clint Eastwood speaking dubbed Japanese on "Rawhide." Some of the old Edokko would have been amused, a few outraged; all of them certainly would have been curious.
My Tokyo
By Fukiko Aoki Hamill
I was born in Kanda-Jimbocho, a section of northeastern Tokyo associated with the traditional Shitamachi, or Low City, home to merchants and artisans, tradespeople and craftsmen, geishas and courtesans-the core of Tokyo culture. When other Japanese hear this, they smile and call me an Edokko - a descendant of the inhabitants of Edo, as Tokyo was called when it was a castle town in feudal times. The Edokko have been described as being "like fresh spring breezes propelling the traditional carp kites" (open and outspoken, with nothing to hide) and as "not being able to hold on to their money" (liberal and generous). Like descriptions of New Yorkers, none ever seems to fit; there are always exceptions.
SNAPSHOTS OF MEMORY
The Tokyo of my earliest memories exists in black and white, like old snapshots. When the Korean War broke out, in 1950, I was two years old, and Kanda-Jimbocho, like the rest of Japan, had not yet recovered from World War II. In the monochrome of memory, I see U.S. troops occupying buildings or driving jeeps or walking in pairs down our crowded streets. At the same time, Japan was undergoing its first deep immersion in American popular culture, with American movies in the theaters and American music on the radio. My mother remembers the way hungry Japanese children, their parents dead, their hands out, implored American servicemen, "Give me chocolate." And there were still empty lots filled with rubble from the wartime bombing.
By the time I started attending the Futaba Elementary School, life was getting better. Black-market dealers still stood on street corners. People who had lost their homes during the American bombing were still living in hastily constructed public housing. But most people were no longer struggling to get enough to eat. By the time I was in fourth grade, we had watched television and seen streets crowded with automobiles. The empty lots were almost all filled with new structures. The city remained poor, hardworking, austere, but we knew the worst was behind us.
Those old snapshots of memory are clear in my mind when I'm away and are part of what always draws me home. When I return to Tokyo I usually stay in the Hilltop Hotel, in the neighborhood called Surugadai, within walking distance of Kanda-Jimbocho. In the lobby I sometimes meet other Japanese writers, who stay here while finishing books or meeting with editors and publishers. Perhaps most important, from the Hilltop I can walk down a long, sloping avenue into the streets where I was born and grew up and where my father still has his publishing company.
AFTER MANY HAPPY RETURNS, AN EXPATRIATE ARGUES THAT NO CITY CHANGES MORE-OR LESS
None of them, however, would recognize much of their lost city in the Tokyo of the present. It's almost as difficult for people born a few decades back in this century. I've lived in New York for more than eight years and return to Tokyo at least twice a year. On every visit, the city where I was born and grew up seems to have receded a bit more, disappearing into the mists of history.
MY NEIGHBORHOOD
Kanda-Jimbocho is famous throughout Japan for its used-books stores. During the Meiji Era many such shops are established to serve the students at the nearby universities. Until recently, two-thirds of all secondhand bookstores in the entire country were said to be in this district; they carried stock in many foreign languages as well as Japanese. Shops still exist whose signs announce their specialties: Western books or medical texts, for example, ukiyo-e prints or computer guides, the literature of the Edo period or the fat Japanese comic books called manga.
But Kanda-Jimbocho is more than bookshops. On the side streets or wedged between the bookshops are dozens of intimate restaurants, serving delicious curries, soba (buck-wheat noodles), assorted cakes, and different kinds of coffees. Here too you can find stores selling a dazzling variety of stationery, pens, brushes, handmade paper, and art supplies. For those wearied by too much intellectual effort there are even some pachinko parlors, where students, professors, cartoonists, and novelists lose themselves in the intricacies of a uniquely Japanese version of pinball.
Time, alas, presses on without mercy, even in my beloved Kanda-Jimbocho. In the most important ways - spirit and a sense of community - my neighborhood survived the bombing, but it might not survive progress.
In some ways the changes in Kanda-Jimbocho reflect the transformation of all of Tokyo. The 1980s saw a frenzied rush to construct new buildings. Japan's economic triumph made billions of dollars available to speculators. Some buildings are quite handsome, designed by a generation of superb Japanese architects. Others are extravagant, even arrogant, towering shamelessly over ordinary dwellings. And for every new building that arrives, older buildings have vanished. After the war my father moved into a two-story wood-frame house in Kanda. I was born there. My father's publishing company was on one floor, and we lived on the other until I was three. In the late 1950s the house was torn down and replaced with a four-story concrete building to accommodate the expanding company. Last year the four-story building also came down, to be replaced by a new, nine-story building. It's a handsome structure, and my father's office is now on the top floor, looking out over Kanda-Jimbocho. But the two buildings that are gone live on in memory.
DESTRUCTION AND RENEWAL
In my first hours back home, I sometimes feel like a stranger. And like most people faced with change, I suffer a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, even for lost ugliness. I hear old New Yorkers aching for places and people that will never return. The same is true in Tokyo. Edward Seidensticker, of Columbia University, well known for his English translation of the 1,000-year-old Tale of Genji, understands this feeling. In the first volume of history of Tokyo, Law City, High City, he writes about the fine Edokko novelist Nagai Kafu (1879-1959): “Kafu was as elegist, mourning the death of Edo and lamenting the emergence of modern Tokyo.”