International: Modan City

Of Tokyo’s seven million people, four million were gone. Most of them were still hiding in rural areas, whence they or their immediate ancestors had come. Nearly a hundred thousand were dead beneath the bombings.

The broad, modern streets, planned after the 1923 earthquake as both thoroughfares and firebreaks, stretched emptily. The squalid, crooked back alleys, so planned three centuries ago by the Shogun Ieyasu for defensive fighting, no longer crawled with humanity.

Only 10% of the city’s streetcars had survived eight years of war. They rattled slowly through the streets, crowded with men in uniform, women in mompei, the wartime pantaloons. All Tokyo had only 60 busses left. Women conductors still bowed formally when passengers paid their fares, bowed at the few passing busses.

Bronze Sparrows. A few cinemas were still open, showing prewar love stories. Shows began at 10 a.m. Queues of escape-hungry Japanese formed at dawn.

The Mitsukoshi depato (department store) which had boasted an American-style drugstore and a soda fountain featuring banana splits, now offered an odd assortment of unwanted goods—violin bows, pottery goldfish, bronze sparrows, unstrung tennis rackets and women’s hats.

All downtown hospitals, including that of Keio University, the city’s second largest, were gone. Holy Mother (Catholic) Hospital still stood. So did St. Luke’s (Protestant Episcopal), largest U.S. mission hospital in the world. The Japanese had renamed it “The Greater East Asia Hospital” and had removed its golden cross.

Edema, dysentery, nephritis and pulmonary ailments packed the surviving hospitals. The T.B. rate was estimated at 22% of the population. Hospital patients were required to furnish their own bedding and food. There were no cotton bandages, few disinfectants.

The Imperial Palace, isolated in the city’s heart behind its green moats and grey stone walls, was still standing—as were the Ministries of Trade and Education, the Police Headquarters, the U.S. Embassy and the Diet. The Foreign Office and the Navy Ministry were rubble.

For the most part the physical remains of Tokyo were of the West. Structural steel and concrete had survived the shock of war; the flimsy Japanese houses had not found protection in white squares of paper hung on their gates to propitiate the fire gods.

But the spiritual remains of Tokyo were thoroughly Japanese.

Honorable Silkworm. Like any modan (Japanese adaptation of “modern”) city, Tokyo was dotted with open parks. But the monuments in the parks rarely commemorated historic figures. More frequently they were sacred to deified animals and trees. In the center of the city was a shrine to Inari, the god of harvests, and his servant, the fox. Inari & Fox did a mail-order business (literally) in charms against witchcraft. The cotton plant and the silkworm were annually feted because they gave their lives for humanity.

Telephones were always scarce in Tokyo (about 250,000 before the war). The value of a set was determined, to some extent, by the exchange number. Numbers in ascending order might cost several hundred dollars, because they were lucky. Numbers containing the figure four had been a drug on the market: the pronunciation of the word for four (shi) was identical with the word for death.

Vitamin pills were consumed regularly, when they were available, but many Tokyo-ites relied for defense against the dreaded common cold upon a door sign that said: “Hisamatsu does not live here.”

(The ghost of Hisamatsu is pursued by his ghostly girl. She always has a cold.)

All distances are measured from the Nihonbashi, or Bridge of Japan, crossing one of the canals in the heart of the city, and most Japanese towns boast a copy of Tokyo’s Nihonbashi. Many streets are pleasantly named for flowers, trees and beasts. Exceptions: Anjin-cho (pilot street), named for Will Adams, first Englishman to visit Japan; the Ginza (“mint for silver coins”), Tokyo’s main street, combining the worst features of Broadway, Sixth Avenue and the Atlantic City boardwalk. Signs in Roman characters along the Ginza were often just a little wrong: “Milk Snop”; “Barber Shot”; “Traunks & Bugs.”

Last week this wretched, sleazy city was stark and rude, its colors mud-brown, grime-grey and the red of rusted iron roofing on shacks where bombed-out thousands lived. The wind, as characteristic of Tokyo as of Chicago, touched the rubble heaps, whined along the empty streets, but never quite carried away the ancient stench of fish and sewage.