“Venice of the Orient.” Trite though it may be to modern ears, this was how Western commentators described the Japanese capital of Edo, later to become Tokyo, when they arrived in newly opened Japan in the 1850s.
- ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE LANTERN MAGAZINE
Traversing the city’s rivers they saw restaurants, theatres and all manner of businesses jutting out over the water on stilts, and huge markets stretching along open riverbanks and bridges. A network of waterways bustled with traffic of all shapes and sizes: merchants moved produce in flat-bottomed barges; officials hurried to court in elaborate high-prowed boats; nobles dined in lantern-lit pleasure craft; and kimono-clad brides were ferried to their new homes, their dowries in tow.
Such scenes are hard to fathom today. Tokyo’s rivers and remaining canals are hidden by soaring highways and concrete embankments, their waters dark and sluggish, and the waterfronts that were once both the commercial centres and gathering places of the city have long since been obliterated by relentless land reclamation. But in its day, Edo was indeed a world built on water.
Originally a fishing village built on the highlands of a river delta, Edo was defined by the waterways it straddled. To the south, the Edo River flowed along the border of what would become Tokyo and Chiba before emptying into Tokyo Bay, while the Arakawa River snaked down from the Kanto mountains onto the plains and into the heart of the city; its lower reaches became the Sumida River, the city’s main artery.
The Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu made Edo his stronghold at the end of the sixteenth century and ultimately chose it as his seat of government after he unified Japan under his rule. His engineers set about draining and reclaiming the remaining marshes and swamps of the lowlands so that the new capital could expand and prosper, but even so Edo would remain for many years a city on water, standing along the banks of the rivers and canals fashioned from the delta by reclamation.
The feats of these engineers were ambitious for their times—embankments were built, rivers diverted, and canals cut—but not all of them were carried out for the benefit of the humble denizens of the city; in the 1590s, for example, the Onagigawa Canal was constructed to carry salt from Gyotoku in Chiba directly to the Shogun’s table. More importantly, no adequate measures were taken to prevent flooding until after the disastrous Great Meiji Flood of 1919, which submerged half the city and cost an estimated five percent of the gross national product to clean up.
The first and foremost function of Edo’s canals was transportation. The existing road system was built for foot traffic, and transporting goods to the capital was a tiring and time-consuming business. Edo’s marshy coastline lacked a harbour that could receive the coastal trading ships that carried merchandise from throughout Japan, so these ships anchored in deeper water and discharged their cargo onto barges that carried it up the city’s waterways to the markets that lined their banks. Rice from Niigata, soy from Chiba, apples from Aomori, sake from Osaka, lumber from Kofu; the rapidly growing city’s insatiable appetite welcomed it all.
Lumber was a commodity especially important to a booming city built almost entirely of wood. Edo’s Kiba district was a huge floating lumberyard, its waterways constantly choked with workers guiding logs to and fro. These loggers were fiercely proud of their skills and were, by most accounts, a loud and feisty breed; not content to simply escort the logs down the canals they performed all manner of tricks to show off their abilities and show up their co-workers. A favourite kakunori, or log-riding feat, was to balance a child in a basket on a bamboo pole while walking across a rolling log; Edo mothers, it seems, were not overly protective of their offspring. Other industries relied on the canals for more than transportation: the textile industry used shallow, fast-flowing waterways to rinse dyed fabric, and the sight of long bolts of cotton streaming in the canal near Shimo-Ochiai was common until World War II.
But the waterways were not the exclusive preserve of trade and industry. Yoshimune, the eighth shogun, initiated the practice of hosting great banquets on the water aboard a luxurious riverboat popularly known as his “floating castle”. The middle class soon emulated him, holding lavish parties, replete with musicians and seasonal cuisine, aboard yakatabune (party boats) adorned with lanterns and banners. The boating season began in June with a huge fireworks display and lasted all summer, with highlights including rather quaint firefly viewing parties and somewhat less decorous evening cruises on the Sumida River.
The Sumida marked the eastern boundary of the city; kawa no muko—“across the river”—was and remains a euphemism for unfashionable and rural. Within the boundary of the river reigned conservatism enforced by the shogun’s edict, while without thrived a demimonde of exiles, prostitutes and artistes including sumo wrestlers, who did not enjoy the status they command today. Predictably perhaps, the first foreigners to take up residence were confined to the “Low City” on the far side of the river, on land reclaimed at Tsukiji.
Before long however, the waterfront areas along the Sumida River developed into one of Edo’s most popular pleasure quarters, their dubious past adding a heady hint of the risqué for the middle class. At teahouses and restaurants built out over the water, customers enjoyed the views and cool breezes before taking a boat to one of the nearby kabuki theatres that were one of the Low City’s great contributions to popular culture. Shadow plays were performed aboard barges in front of the larger teahouses, and small craft moved along the shoreline selling the latest crazes in foods and drinks. The Yoshiwara, Edo’s notorious red-light district, was situated here too, and nobles, courtesans, and commoners were ferried across the river to reach it.
There was no better way for the inhabitants of Edo to spend their leisure time than walking along the waterfront or gliding along the waterways. The city’s many great bridges functioned as traffic nodes, and woodblock prints show busy rivers or canals against a backdrop of one of those lofty symbols of modernity in much the same way that modern postcards of Tokyo show neon-lined streets beneath towering skyscrapers. The markets surrounding the bridges were both commercial centres and communal areas for shopping, dining, street theatre, public agitation, and official proclamations. They were also the most overwhelming sight that awaited new arrivals to the city, as a popular poke at country bumpkins from the period recounts:
They don’t get seasick
On the boat from Kisarazu
But their eyes start swimming
At the crowds on Edo Bridge
In 1867 Edo became Tokyo following the restoration of the Emperor Meiji, and in the years that followed a second revolution—this one in transportation—changed the face of the capital forever. The canal system remained intact until the turn of the century but lost its role as the principal mode of public conveyance in a remarkably short time as town planning took hold and roads were widened; in short, the wheel replaced the oar and barge pole almost overnight.
Road, river and rail; the Kanda River usurped by road traffic of the Shohei Bridge while the Chuo commuter train line soars above them both
Early foreign visitors had remarked on the seemingly total absence of wheeled vehicles on the city’s streets, but by 1880 there were some 50,000 rickshaws in operation, their clattering wheels and shouting runners shattering the decorum of the city and depriving the boatmen of custom. The upper classes took to moving about in horse-drawn carriages, while minor nobles, who could not afford such luxury but found rickshaws too vulgar, favoured palanquins. Trains arrived in 1872 and the power of steam soon usurped even that of the mighty loggers of Kiba. Early foreign visitors had remarked on the seemingly total absence of wheeled vehicles on the city’s streets, but by 1880 there were some 50,000 rickshaws in operation, their clattering wheels and shouting runners shattering the decorum of the city and depriving the boatmen of custom. The upper classes took to moving about in horse-drawn carriages, while minor nobles, who could not afford such luxury but found rickshaws too vulgar, favoured palanquins. Trains arrived in 1872 and the power of steam soon usurped even that of the mighty loggers of Kiba.
At the same time, the process of land reclamation that had helped create Edo’s water world gradually began to destroy it as islands were absorbed and canals filled in and converted into roads. Speeding up this process were disasters both man-made and natural: many waterways disappeared abruptly in 1923 when rubble from the Great Kanto Earthquake was piled into them; others would suffer a similar fate after the bombing of World War II. More than one modern commentator has wondered where all the rubble will go when the next cataclysm strikes.
While the trendy suburb of Shibuya glows in the distance, the river that bares its name is reduced to a storm water drain and all but forgotten
By the 1960s, when reclamation had reached its peak, the canals were all but gone, and those that remained were hidden behind concrete flood control barriers that further distanced people from the water which had once been the lifeblood of the city. But it was pollution that was to be the last nail in the coffin of the water world. By the 1970s, Japan was feeling the full effect of its rapid economic growth and many of the few waterways left behind were positively unsafe due to contaminants. The public frequently welcomed the filling in of smaller canals- they were often stagnant, repositories for old bicycles and garbage and in summer their stench was overpowering-but the dire state of the rivers began to raise eyebrows. The government somewhat grudgingly responded with antipollution regulations, though momentum was not really achieved until after a series of high-profile contamination cases elsewhere in Japan. Finally, factory outflows were checked, sewer systems overhauled, and canals dredged.
It would take years before real momentum was achieved, and there remains much to be done, but tighter regulations and improved water treatment facilities have certainly paid off. The water quality of most of the broader rivers in the outer suburbs has improved so much that they are now popular weekend walking courses and picnic spots, but it is the renewed interest being shown in the inner city waterways that has been most surprising. Several tours of the waterways have recently appeared, local governments have suddenly opened their purse strings for river-related projects, and even museum exhibitions on the city’s rivers have been organized.
The Consortium of Rediscovery Edo-Tokyo Tourism Walk (CREW) was established in August 2008 to study the development of local revitalization through tourism in the center of Tokyo, namely Chuo-ku, Chiyoda-ku, and Minato-ku. They currently operate a tour exploring Tokyo’s river culture and have seen interest in it grow steadily.“With the filling in of the canals and increasing water pollution, people just lost interest in recreation on the rivers,” says the head of CREW, Tatsushi Kimura. “Now, after much effort has been made on water purification, people are starting to reconsider the rivers, and the river transportation system—especially in regard to tourism—is becoming popular once again.
“CREW’s carbon-friendly electric tour boat offers a leisurely—and wonderfully quiet—hour-long tour of the central waterways accompanied by an historical commentary. Slipping silently beneath Nihombashi and past the spot where criminals and anyone unlucky enough to fall foul of the Shogun were publicly pilloried, you are soon made aware of just how important a role the river system played in Tokyo’s history, in both good times and bad: in addition to the former sites of markets and palaces, a stone monument marks the spot where Edo families left messages seeking lost children, while on another section of embankment a sinister black smudge reveals what is thought to be the legacy of a WWII incendiary bomb.
Strangely, it is partly due to one of Tokyo’s latest infatuations that people are rediscovering what was Edo’s great love affair. When the Tokyo Sky Tree is completed next year, Sumida Ward plans to organize cruises down the Kitajukkengawa river so that visitors can gaze up at this modern marvel, and in 2009 the ward budgeted 270 million yen to built a pedestrian bridge, riverside terrace and walkway, a pier and water purification facilities; for 2010, the figure is set to leap to 820 million yen. Koto Ward, meanwhile, hopes to steal some of its neighbor’s thunder with water tours of Fukagawa, one of the few parts of Tokyo that still retains a hint of what Edo must have been.Kisarazugashi, once the site of Edo’s busiest seafood market, will also soon have a new quay, and it is hoped that Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture, the town that originally gave the market its name, will participate in re-enactments of the shipping of fresh seafood to the city as part of the 100th anniversary of Nihombashi.
The once grand Nihombashi, pride of the city and the geographic centre of all Japan, now lies buried beneath a multi-lane expressway
The rehabilitation of Nihombashi itself however, remains a tantalizing, almost pie-in-the-sky dream. The relocation of the metropolitan expressway to a subterranean road network, as championed by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (and opposed by Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara), seems positively utopian, especially to the average Tokyo taxpayer who will be footing what is expected to be a 500 billion yen price tag. The success of Odaiba’s manmade beach and Akarenga Soko in Yokohama have shown that such developments are popular however, and even small, more localized attempts to beautify waterways have paid off; in Nakameguro, the Meguro River, though still sunk well below street level, is lined with cherry trees that are not only popular in sakura season but have helped turn what was once a nondescript suburb into a leafy pedestrian heaven that is rivaling Aoyama for fashionista appeal, replete with a river-based arts festival.
Fish and fishermen have returned to the banks of the Sumida, but it would be a brave or foolhardy angler that eats his catch.
Most of the old water world is gone, but it is still possible to catch glimpses of it here and there throughout the city. In Yokohama there are still some hardy souls living on the water; the city government curtly denies their existence, but the local postmen cannot be bothered with such charades and carry on delivering to mail boxes that hang from the sides of dilapidated houseboats. The little island of Tsukudajima, which seems to float in the middle of the Sumida and was once the home to banished criminals, retains its canals but it is more an upscale residential zone than a den of thieves these days. The timber industry moved to neighbouring Shin-Kiba, where it remains today, though cement and steel have replaced timber as Tokyo’s main ingredient. The kakunori are still performed at certain times of the year, but in deference to modernity-and the Health and Safety Department-a small dog usually replaces the child in the basket-and-bamboo trick. The Onagigawa Canal is still there too, but Tokyo now gets its salt via different means and the canal is little more than an empty stretch of water.