Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo

241 Pages·2020·23.663 MB·English

by  Timon Screech

Tokyo
Before Tokyo

Tokyo
Before Tokyo
Power and Magic in the
Shogun’s City of Edo
Timon Screech

REAKTION BOOKS
As always, the dedication is to Zoo Murayama,
with whom I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo, London,
Mandalay and so many other cities, for over thirty years
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2020
Copyright © Timon Screech 2020
All rights reserved
The publishers would like to thank the The Great Britain Sasakawa
Foundation for its support in the publication of this work

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers

Printed and bound in Singapore by 1010 Printing International Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 233 4
Contents
Introduction 
One The Ideal City 
Two The Centre of the Shogun’s Realm 
Three Edo as Sacred Space 
Four Reading Edo Castle 
Five The City’s Poetic Presence 
Six A Trip to the Yoshiwara 
Epilogue From Edo to Tokyo 

References 

Selected Sources and Further Reading 
General Bibliography 

Acknowledgements 
Photo Acknowledgements 
Index 
 Edo, c. . Conjectural  Edo Castle  Ryōgoku-bashi

view of the shogunal  Nihon-bashi  Yanagi-bashi

city at its greatest extent.  Shinobazu Pond  Great River (the
Orange for military  Kan’ei-ji Sumida)

(samurai) districts, red for  Sensō-ji (‘Asakusa  Gohyaku Rakan-ji
commoners, and purple Kannon’)  Tsukada-jima
for religious institutions.  Yoshiwara  Zōjō-ji
 Senju  Shinagawa

 Mokubo-ji  Kaian-ji
 Matsuchi-yama  Meguro

 Azuma-bashi  Yamanote
 Kuramae  Shinjuku
Introduction
T
his book is about Tokyo before it became known by that name.
Before it became the modern capital of Japan. Until 1868 the
city was known as Edo (pronounced to rhyme with ‘meadow’).
The city of Edo always stood in counterpoise to the more ancient
capital of Kyoto – indeed, kyōto (properly written with a long first
‘o’) meant simply ‘the capital’. The ancient capital was defined as the
place of residence for a shadowy religious-cum-cultural figure known

as the dairi, literally ‘the palace’. In early times his ancestors had ruled

Japan under the title of tennō, or ‘heavenly sovereign’. But the heavenly

sovereigns lost power to the military class in the twelfth century, with a
concomitant downgrading of their title. The dairi are thus the ancestors
of the modern emperors of Japan, who in 1868 reconfigured themselves
as monarchs on European constitutional lines. Japan became a modern
nation state and the dairi relocated to Edo, which therefore became
the capital. Since it lies in the east (tō), it was named Tokyo (properly,

Tōkyō, the ‘eastern capital’). Kyōto was then turned into a proper name.
Those later processes are discussed in the Epilogue; this book is about
Edo. It is the story of Tokyo before Tokyo.
The small town of Edo had existed since time immemorial, and
prehistoric artefacts have been found in the area. But it was only in
8 | Tokyo Before Tokyo
1590 that Edo became important, when it came under control of the
Tokugawa family. This great warrior clan had risen from nothing
during the previous decades. They won a huge battle in 1600 and in
1603 were able to persuade the dairi to nominate them to the defunct
post of shogun, or chief military figure of the state. Shoguns had to
be appointed by the dairi, and they controlled and ran a realm over
which the latter had notional ultimate sway, if without actual power;
in practice, the dairi’s hand was forced, and once they had secured it,
shoguns handed on the title hereditarily. Over history there had been
three dynasties of shogun. The Tokugawa would be the last.
In the pages that follow, we will assess Edo, its urban planning,
its culture and its life. But this is not a chronology, nor a methodical
overview of Edo’s huge diversity and 250-year history. It is a selection
of vignettes that are especially telling about how the city worked and
how it was experienced. Part of this story is about the way in which Edo
positioned itself against the capital, as we will call it (leaving ‘Kyoto’ to
refer to the city in the modern period). The two metropoles were, and
are, almost exactly 500 kilometres apart on an East–West axis. Today,
guidebooks refer to Kyoto as ‘Japan’s ancient imperial capital’, and in
a way it is. But in our period, 1590–1868, the capital was under warrior
control every bit as much as Edo was. The dairi was no ‘emperor’ as

we understand the word today. The twin centres of rule and suasion

were in actuality both Tokugawa domains.

•

Japan is an archipelago and an extremely long one. It extends from
about 41 degrees north to 31 degrees south and covers some 20 degrees
of longitude from east to west. Positioned over a map of Europe, the
Japanese islands stretch northeast to southwest from about Bucharest to

the middle of the Sahara Desert; plotted over the usa, they cover from
Boston to the southeast corner of Texas. Japan is also mountainous,
with a topography akin to Switzerland. Nowhere in Europe or North
America has such a density of peaks and also such a dearth of open
spaces to accommodate centres of human habitation. Over the course
9 | Introduction
of history, Japan’s few flatlands had been built on. But the area around
Edo had not. It lies in the extensive Plains of Musashi, but settlements
had remained mostly scattered villages. Being on the coast, the region
was home to fishing communities, its position meaning it was also
protected from storms: Edo means ‘door to the bay’. Yet Edo did
not grow. It played no role as a significant centre of any kind and
was nothing compared to the great cities of early times – not just the
capital, but Nara and Osaka too. In 1590 Edo was a backwater.
It lagged for a reason. Edo was – as Tokyo still is – highly prone
to earthquakes. Tremors led to the collapse of buildings, but also, and
much worse, the spread of fires as braziers and stoves toppled over. It
made no sense to construct buildings of importance here. Earthquakes
create tsunamis, and Edo’s ‘door’ was only a partial guard against them.
Much of Japan is volcanic, and earthquakes are common in many places.
But Edo, specifically, is one of the least seismically stable places on earth.
Apart from the rigours of nature, Japan was repeatedly wracked
by civil wars. Edo acquired a castle, like numerous other locations in
the country, but only late, in 1457, to be precise. Its seaboard location
made Edo potentially strategic, if only as a lookout post. Near the bay
and above the generally marshy ground was an outcrop, and the castle
was built here. It was far from impregnable, and when besieged in 1524

by Hōjō Ujitsuna, it quickly fell. Below its walls, fishing communities

carried on using the sea.

The wide River Sumida meanders along the edge of the Plains of
Musashi and empties into the bay here, so Edo had fresh water, too. It
happened that a Buddhist temple lay upstream of Edo – on raised land,
so protected from floods – with a surrounding hamlet called Asakusa
(‘shallow grass’). Monks at the temple claimed that their icon was
capable of working wonders. The place was a site of local pilgrimage,

though the name of the temple indicates it was a lowly affair: Asakusa-
dera. The word tera or dera denotes a Buddhist institution, but it is
rare for temples to take simple geographical names. Most have elegant
designations derived from theological concepts. The Asakusa-dera,
however, would play a key role in Edo’s eventual rise.