Home Life in Tokyo

by Jukichi Inouye

THE area of Tokyo is not so great as is generally supposed. The people of Yedo used to say that their city was ten miles square; but the extreme length, from north-east to south-west, of Tokyo which does not differ materially in its limits from the old city, is no more than eight miles. The actual area is only 18,482 acres, or nearly twenty-nine square miles. The population fell with the decline of the feudal government and was under a million in the early days of the new regime. The registered population returned to one million in 1884. The municipal census which was taken for the first time on the first of October, 1908, gave the settled population as 1,622,856, composed of 872,550 males and 750,306 females, and the number of families as 377,493. This took no account of the floating population which probably exceeds a hundred thousand; there is also a large population, not less than a quarter of a million, which the rise of rents and the facilities of electric-tramway communication have sent outside the administrative limits of the municipality; it forms, properly-speaking, a part of the population of the city.

Tokyo is therefore a great city; but the stranger who visits its streets for the first time usually gets an impression of an even greater populousness. For the streets are always in the evening teeming with young children; they are not gutter-snipes, but children of respectable parents, small tradesmen or private persons of slender means, who let them run about on the public road rather than romp in their narrow dwellings. But it is not the children alone who think they have a greater right of way over the roads than the public: for on summer evenings especially, men and women turn out of doors and walk about or sit on benches outside their houses. Shops are completely open and reveal the rooms within, so that whole families may be seen from the streets; and as most houses are of only one or two stories, people live for the most part on the ground-floor. Even in private residences of some pretensions, the thin wooden walls allow voices to be easily heard on warm days when the rooms are kept open. So that from the people he sees crowding the houses and the noises he hears on all sides, the stranger is often deceived into giving the city credit for a larger population than it actually possesses.

A STREET IN YEDO.
(FROM A PICTURE BY SETTAN, 1778–1843).

The streets themselves are worth notice. If the foreigner who comes to Japan expects to see in such a great capital the asphalt carriageway and paved sidewalk of his native country, he will be sadly disappointed, for Tokyo, with all its multitudinous thoroughfares, cannot boast even the boulevards and avenues of a European provincial town. In spite of the efforts of the Tokyo municipality, the streets are still narrow. Their total length is about six hundred miles, with a width ranging from one yard to fifty, the average being nine yards. It was decided twenty years ago to widen some three hundred miles of these roads, giving the largest a width of forty yards for carriageway with a footway on either side of six yards, and the smallest a carriageway of twelve yards and a footway one yard wide. The work is to be accomplished in ninety years. Improvements to this end are slowly going on. The fact is that the City Fathers missed a great opportunity in the early years of the new regime when, upon the desertion of the residences of the daimyo and other feudatories after the fall of the Shogunate, land could have been purchased for a song, for it went begging in the heart of the city at less than thirty yen an acre. Those who were wise enough to buy it have made big fortunes, for the same land now sells for a hundred thousand yen or more per acre. Now, however, the municipality cannot command sufficient funds to purchase the land needed for improvements along the streets proposed, but buys it up only when it is absolutely necessary to relieve the congestion of traffic; and elsewhere it waits patiently until a fire burns down the streets and clears the required space for it as, in that case, it will not have to give any compensation for the removal of the houses.

In the old days, the narrowness of the streets did not interfere with such traffic as was then carried on. The daimyo and others of high rank rode in palanquins, and officials went about on horseback; but the rest of the world walked. The citizens were not allowed to make use of other legs than their own. Those who had to go about much put on cheap straw sandals, which were thrown away at the end of their journey, so that they did not give a thought to the width or the state of the road as they had in any case to wash their feet afterwards; while others, of the common people, were, if they met a daimyo’s procession, thrust to the wall or oftener into the ditch, and they too cared as little for the width of the thoroughfare. And when a samurai met another in a narrow lane, it was by no means rare, if their sword-scabbards touched in passing, for an altercation to arise and be followed by bloodshed; but as brawls were in their way, they did not trouble themselves about the widening of the road. Pedestrians, moreover, could always pick their way in any street, and if they saw coming towards them a daimyo’s retinue or a company of swash-bucklers, they usually turned into a side-street. To the happy horsemen and palanquin-riders the size of a street was a matter of absolute indifference, for if those on shanks’ mare got in their way, it was their lookout. But luckily for these walkers there was little else for them to dodge, for vehicles were comparatively few. The only objects on wheels were handcarts and waggons drawn by horses or oxen. These waggons came from the country with bags of rice, fuel, and other necessaries, and were used, not for their speed which was a snail’s pace, but for their carrying power.

In these latter days, however, things have materially changed. Men to-day would be put to the blush by the hale old survivors of those pedestrian times, for they have gone to the other extreme. The conveniences of the jinrikisha, or two-wheeled vehicles drawn by men, and latterly of electric tramways have sapped all energy out of them, and we hear little nowadays of walking feats. There were in 1900 forty-six thousand jinrikisha in Tokyo; but the electric cars, which began to run a few years later, are driving them out of the city, for they are now less than one-half of that number. Still, the pedestrian has need to keep a good lookout on the road, for where, in the absence of footways, men, women, children, vehicles, and horses move about in an inextricable jumble, it is a matter for wonder that accidents are not more frequent. Besides the jinrikisha and electric cars, there are thousands of handcarts, some drawn by coolies and carrying objects of every description from household articles to stones for road-making and trees for gardens, and others drawn by milkmen with their milk-cans, by apprentices with their masters’ wares, by pedlars with various assortments to attract the housewife’s eye, or by farm-boys with vegetables fresh from the field. There are but a thousand waggons drawn by horses or oxen in Tokyo; but as there are twice as many more in the surrounding country, they are very much in evidence in the city since they make their presence unpleasantly obtrusive in narrow streets. These waggons, however, move slowly and give one time to get out of their way. In this respect they are better to meet than the carriages which drive on indifferent to the width of the road; in narrow streets the latter are preceded by grooms who hustle all loiterers out of the way. They are only less eagerly shunned than the motor-cars and the files of handcarts which move leisurely along with pink flags marked “ammunition” from the Imperial arsenal.

But the Ishmael of the streets of Tokyo was until lately the bicycle. A few years ago there were six thousand of these machines in the city; they were patronised by shop-apprentices who, with large bundles on their backs, scorched through crowded streets careless of accidents to themselves or others. These apprentices were therefore in the policeman’s black books; nor did the jinrikisha-man look upon them with any favour, for he regarded bicycling as an innovation intended to defraud him of his fares. But his hostility against the bicycle melted away when he was confronted by the electric car which has proved itself the most formidable of his foes. The bicycle, too, has suffered an eclipse; for apprentices and others of its patrons find it more expensive to keep it in repair than to travel by the car at the cost of a penny per trip. The motor-car also made its debut a few years back and the dust it raises and the smell of petrol it leaves in its track have brought upon it the anathema of all pedestrians; and though the police regulations prohibit a motor-car from traversing streets less than twelve yards wide, it runs merrily through lanes and small side-streets. It sometimes charges into shops and makes havoc among their merchandise. The pranks it plays in the hands of unskilful chauffeurs are not likely to lessen its unpopularity.

What with carriages, jinrikisha, waggons, handcarts, and bicycles jostling one another and men, women, and children threading their way through the labyrinth or fleeing before motor or electric cars, the more frequented streets of Tokyo present a confused mass of traffic; but in respect of actual numbers they are really less crowded than western streets of similar importance. The busy appearance is mostly due to the absence of sidewalks, and the bustle is increased by the wayfarers having to run to and fro to get out of the way of the vehicles. In streets provided with sidewalks one would expect less confusion; but as a matter of fact, people are so used to walking among vehicles of all sorts that they prefer sauntering on the carriageway to quietly pacing the sidewalks; and it is no uncommon experience to meet a company walking abreast in the middle of the road and dodging carriages while the sidewalks are almost deserted.