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In submitting itself to repeated sessions of radical plastic surgery, allowing the scalpel to slice away and dispose its loose membranes, Tokyo’s remodeled surfaces always seem youthful, to have somehow escaped the rigor mortis of European capitals.
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Tokyo may have changed its face on countless occasions but place names, precious to Japanese people because of their folkloric and literary connections, are rarely altered unless there is good reason for it. The name Tamanoi may not be familiar to you. It does not appear on maps of the city before 1910. Part of what is now called Higashi Mukojima, itself a section of Mukojima ("Island on the Other Side"), the name is synonymous in the minds of many older Tokyoites with prostitution. A few years ago a decision was made to rename the Tobu Isezaki Line station Higashi Mukojima. Although no official reason was forthcoming for the change, and many local residents associations, expressing an open fondness for the tainted history of the district, vociferously objected to it, it was assumed that the railway officials who forced the decision through, regarded the old name of Tamanoi as unsavory.
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| A monument, one of 29 placed in the garden and carved with inscriptions by artists who contributed to the creation of the garden. |
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| An exhibit outside Higashi Mukojima's excellent transport museum |
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| If the area is remembered at all it is largely because of Nagai Kafu’s masterpiece A Strange Tale from East of the River (Bokuto Kidan), a semi-autobiographical novella set in the denizens of Tamanoi. Tamanoi, at the time of Kafu’s association with the area in the 1930s and early ‘40s, was a conveniently located red-light district without any of the traditions or expensive trappings of the more graceful licensed quarters. It existed largely to serve the new breed of factory workers from east and northeast of the river, and the lower ranks of office workers. Tamanoi’s brothels traded under the name of meishuya, or "liquor houses," the buildings squatting along alleyways that lured people in by placing signs on the main roads at each end declaring Chikaichi, "Short Cut." |
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Although the old red-light district was completely incinerated in a series of horrific air raids that took place on the night of March 10, 1945, it managed to resurrect itself, a short walk away from its original site, as Hato no Machi. "Pigeon Town," survived for a few years with a dwindling clientele until the official ban on prostitution went into force in 1958, wiping the district out forever. It is tempting to lapse into nostalgia when picturing the women at their windows along the dank, mosquito-infested lanes of this old quarter during its brief heyday, but the subservient life of these females who serviced the blue-collar workers and office people from Asakusa, newly connected to Tamanoi by a railway bridge over the Sumida, can hardly have been a joyful one. Most in fact, were working off heavy debts arising from loans made to their families by the brothel owners and other sharks who ran the district’s highly lucrative water trade.
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A building along the Mukojima Highway so aggressively kitsch it almost aspires to the level of art.
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| Although the back streets of Higashi Mukojima as the district is now known, are no longer the dank, ill-lit places they were during the quarter’s peak in the 1930s, and the pools of rank water that filled its alleys, causing the pestilential clouds of mosquitoes Kafu frequently remarks upon, have all gone, it is still possible to glimpse narrow houses of wood and mortar, some even replete with tell-tale tiles on their facades, indicating their former incarnations as brothels. |
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In the 5-chome zone of Higashi Mukojima, an area called Terajima ("Temple Island"), in what might conceivably be the remains of the southern periphery of Hato no Machi, I recently stumbled upon a time capsule of old houses and lanes that seemed to correspond almost exactly with Paul Waley’s description in his marvelous area history of Tokyo, Fragments of a City, of the old liquor houses of this district: "Some of mortar and tile, many of clapboard, were crowded together in a confusion of wood and scrap, two rooms down and three up." The lanes, if these still-inhabited buildings are indeed the same, were clogged with potted plants, old bicycles and washing lines. A wall running along the side of a shrine gave off a sour reek from hundreds of neatly stacked sake bottles and beer cans deposited there, proof that the area still has its fair share of hard drinkers.
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| The shrine at the edge of this nexus of dilapidated but evocative housing is Shirahige Jinga. Although the main buildings may have been reconstructed after the air raids, judging from the memorial stones that dot the grounds this is clearly an old site. A plaque tells us that Terajima village was mostly paddy-field between the years 1688-1704, its fertile soil, carried over from the upstream Sumida, also being ideal for growing the eggplants popularly known as Terajima-nashi. Farmers would ship their products along the river to the daily vegetable markets at Senju, Honjo-Yotsume and Kanda. |
Today’s river traveler, cruising downstream passed the shrine on one of the Sumida’s most traditional forms of transport, the yukatabune pleasure boats, may catch a glimpse of the area’s post-modernist side. Rising like an apparition in the midst of Higashi Mukojima’s low-rise housing sprawl, architect Hasegawa Itsuko’s choice of location to erect her space-age Sumida Culture Factory, a community center, library and local media center, is curious. Defined as a "microcosm of the greater media city," the building rises in a series of triangulated roofing, perforated screens and a central dome that has to be seen to be believed.
Shirahige Shrine is just two or three minutes from one of Tokyo’s best known, though little visited, Edo-period gardens, the Mukojima Hyakkaen ("Hundred Flowers Garden"). Built during the early 19th century, the garden covers little more than one hectare but is intensely planted with trees, deciduous shrubs, flowering bushes and herbaceous perennials, the most notable being a beautiful, 30-meter tunnel of miyagino-hagi (bush clover) that bursts into purple-rose flower in September.
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| The Sumida Culture factory looms out of the surrounding clutter of low-rise buildings in the old Tamanoi area |
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A Tamanoi local at one of the summer festivals the area east of the river love to have.
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Read next month:
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Prospero's Strip
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