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Shakespeare would have loved Shin-Okubo, finding in its vulgar, intemperate streets a mirror image, an Asian version no less, of the teeming Elizabethan world. Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the London Globe Theatre, in Tokyo recently to oversee a performance of As You Like It, agreed with me when I suggested that Shin-Okubo might share some of the features of old Shoreditch, the site of the original Globe Theatre, an area which, in the bard’s day, was a rough, working class district patronized by English and foreign sailors, dock workers, whores, heavy drinkers and lovers of the histories, comedies and tragedies staged at the theater there.
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Parts of Tokyo -- one thinks of certain sections of the shitamachi district -- still recall the lively, voluptuous mood of former times. The feeling is corroborated by Donald Richie in his highly original new book Tokyo: A View of the City, when he observes that there are some parts of the megalopolis which managed in the past to escape the effects of the repressive Tokugawa regime, and subsequently retain, among a certain section of the people, “something of an Elizabethan quality.”
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The narrow, but interestingly crammed piece of land that the Kaichu Inari Shrine stands on.
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| By a happy coincidence Shin-Okubo happens to be the site of the Tokyo Globe Theatre, a modified replica of the original Shakespeare stage. Okubo-dori, the main strip along which the area galvanizes, is an extraordinary place even by Tokyo standards. The area might I suppose, could have been gentrified by now, but for the influx of foreigners, refugees, pimps and procurers, political exiles and old time neighborhood shopkeepers who have made Shin-Okubo their home. |
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Putting aside the literary analogy for a while, Shin-Okubo has been described by veteran Tokyo journalist Jean Pearce, as a “suburb within the center of the city.” Once a semi-rural residential district on the periphery of Shinjuku, it has now acquired a distinctly urban character and mien. It is an environment that one-time Okubo resident Lafcadio Hearn, a lover of more gentle things - gardens, incense, cypress bark, reed and thatch - would be unlikely, if he were to return to the site of his small house off Okubo-dori, where a stone monument to the writer is embedded in the wall of his garden, to recognize.A large section of Shin-Okubo was once owned by the Imperial army. During the Edo period there was a fashion to build miniature versions of Chinese lakes, sacred mountains and important toll roads which the poor townspeople, unlikely to ever see the real thing for themselves, could visit.
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Tokyo In stone. Shin-Okubo also has its quiet, ancient spots if you know where to find them.
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| There was for example, an indoor version of Mount Fuji in Asakusa, somewhere near the Sensoji Temple, and even today, scaled-down versions of the fifty-three stages of the Tokaido can be viewed at the Korakuen garden in Idabashi and, care of Japan Railways, a replica at Yatsuyamabashi in Shinagawa ward of the same relay stations complete with landmarks such as Lake Biwa. |
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A booth selling religious souvenirs and keepsakes at the Kaichu Inari Shrine.
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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. |
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Shin-Okubo seems at one time to have had a similar attraction, a reproduction of the Hakone mountain region created on land that eventually passed into the hands of the army. In 1948 the Tokyo municipal government, in it's fervor to eradicate the past, to literally bury its military connections under several layers of rubble and topsoil, unveiled a plan to build a zoological garden around the preserved “mountain.” The Occupation forces however, had other plans, of a more practical kind. The thousand apartment units that were built here — they in turn have also disappeared — became the much copied model for the so-called danchi, or mass housing style of construction prevalent now among young or low-income families throughout Japan. Ironically, Toyama Heights, it's surrounding semi-parkland and the western segment of Toyama Park, near the Yamanote line tracks, have been requisitioned by a sizable percentage of the city's homeless. Many of these people, working formerly as day laborers in the construction industry, have created a veritable encampment of stubby, well built blue tarpaulin huts, tents and sheds here.
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| The mountains of Hakone remain though, a clearly recognizable hill surrounded by a path and a plaque in Japanese explaining the existence of this hump in the middle of the park. Nobody appears to mind if you take the elevators up to one of the top floors of the huge public apartment blocks that stand next to the hill for a fine view of Shin-Okubo and nearby Shinjuku. |
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| Religion, belief and a touch of superstition surface at several places in Shin-Okubo, including the Zenru-ji, a temple on the strip of Okubo-dori itself, set back from an entrance which has an interesting cluster of old bodhisatva and Buddha stones, and on the other side of the JR bridge, the Kaichu-Inari Shrine, a narrow corridor of souvenir booths, stone washing troughs, omikuji (fortune message) frames, and miniature shrines with headless concrete and ceramic foxes. Dishes of coins and aburage, an oily, tofu-sponge preparation said to be a favorite of Japanese foxes, are placed in front of the statues. An inordinate number of churches within a small segment of Tokyo — I saw at least four on my last visit — are an unlikely part of the area's polytheism until you consider the presence of a large Korean community in Shin-Okubo, not to mention the Filipinos, Brazilians and other assorted Christians temporarily or permanently settled here. Perhaps Shin-Okubo's most extraordinary place of worship is the recently completed Wesleyan Yodobashi Church. The Senior Pastor, the Reverend Mineno Tatsuhiro, was kind enough to show me around. The construction, designed by the well known Japanese architect Inatomi Akira, blends the minimalism of Japanese walls, windows and screens, cloisters that appear to have been teleported from a European cathedral, with post-modernist forms. 16th century Shoreditch, as Shakespeare knew it, a place of amusement, good-natured profanity and occasional violence, a red-light district of inflammable wooden buildings, was not far from its own places of worship and contrition. |
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Many of the sirens who work in the hostess bars, strip joints, cubby bars and pink salons, the complex chain of fluorescent, neon-strung islands that form the nocturnal archipelago that is Shinjuku's water trade, apparently live in many of the apartment blocks of Shin-Okubo, a short taxi ride away in the early hours of the morning. At night, the neon strip of Okubo-dori and the pedestrian alleys that feed into it, are vibrant with conversations and importunings in a dozen different languages, its Burmese, Thai, Malaysian and Korean restaurants releasing pungent smells into the brothy, salt atmosphere, giving the impression that one is on an island detached from mainland Tokyo. The cast of characters who step out onto the streets of this Elizabethan melting pot is a rich one. The island, Caliban's Island, has not reverted entirely to the developers who would build their own Utopia of high rents and parking lots here, but passed, for the time being, into the hands of those spirited souls from continental Asia, the drifters, exiles and nomads who have washed up on its narrow strip. There really is nowhere quite like this in Tokyo.
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| Read next month: The Water Margins |
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