Nihonbashi:
East Meets West, 1603 Meets 1924,
Ieyasu
Tokugawa Meets Sinclair Lewis
Rusty Allred
At
one time there existed a land bridge between what are now Korea and Siberia.
Though artifacts establish human activity there as early as 30,000 BCE, a
unique culture (Jomon) developed around 10,000 BCE and lasted for thousands of
years before being displaced by the Yayoi culture, the precursor to modern
Japanese culture, by the third millennium BCE[1].
It
was around the time of the beginnings of this Yayoi culture that the Kanto
Plain, of which Tokyo
Around
the 12th century of the Common Era, Shigenaga Edo[3],
a military governor of the region, built Edo Castle in this area[4]. This is how the town that would
become Tokyo came first to be called Edo[5].
This castle was rebuilt in 1456 by Dokan Ota3 who was also responsible for the rerouting of some of the
rivers flowing in the area. Indeed, the Hirakawa River was rerouted out of
existence at that time[6], though Hirakawa-cho is
still the name of a section of central Tokyo[7].
In
olden times the capital of Japan moved with the various emperors, though the Kyoto-Osaka
region contained the capital for more than a millennium from 794 until 1868[8].
Warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who also operated in that region, sent Ieyasu
Tokugawa to the Kanto region in 1590. He needed Tokugawa’s services there, and
probably wanted to have this able and ambitious general safely away from his
home base. Arriving in that region, Tokugawa selected Edo as his headquarters.
After
Toyotomi’s death Tokugawa defeated his rival Mitusnari Ishida and became the
most powerful feudal lord, setting up a central government in Edo
in 1603.
Tokugawa
had been making improvements in Edo since his arrival. In 1603, the year he
became Shogun, his workers constructed a bridge called Nihonbashi or two-lane bridge. Over time the characters used to write the name were
changed such that, though still called Nihonbashi, it now meant Japan Bridge and there emerged the explanation
that this was the bridge connecting Edo with the rest of Japan[9].
Interestingly,
the waterway crossed by this bridge originally had no name, so it came to be called
the Nihonbashi River, after the bridge itself. This man-made river had been
constructed as the original rivers were rerouted[10],
which might explain its previous anonymity.
Business
built up around the bridge and this part of Edo came to also share the name
Nihonbashi. Eventually this would become a key business district in Tokyo. These
entities all still exist: the Nihonbashi bridge (though not the original
construction), the Nihonbashi River, and a Nihonbashi section of town in today’s
financial district.
By
around 1700 Edo had become the largest city in
the world. Ieyasu Tokuawa died at the age of 75 in 1616, but his heirs went on
to extend the Tokugawa family rule to a period of over 260 years.
While
the Tokugawas ruled Japan from Edo, Osaka, where the emperor still lived,
remained the official capital until the Meji Resoration in 1868 when Tokugawa’s
heir peacefully handed power to the new government, the emperor moved to Edo,
and the city was renamed Tokyo, or eastern
capital.
During
World War II the central part of Tokyo
In spite of
all that, in 1942 and 1943 Tohkadoh, a publisher then operating in Nihonbashi,
published as a three volume set Chouju Ugai’s translation of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith
(1924). Whether he really believed this, or was trying to justify his
translation of an American novel at this time in history, in the afterword to
Volume 2, Ugai explained that knowledge gained through their literature would
help to defeat the enemy[11].
Shortly
after the war the translation was apparently republished by Kawade[12]
which had also been operating in Nihonbashi. Perhaps they acquired Tohkadoh, or
at least the rights to this work. During the war, Kawade moved from its
Nihonbashi location due to bomb damage to its facilities[13].
It has since been located across town in the Shibuya-Shinjuku area.
Had
Sinclair Lewis ever gone to Japan he would have missed Ieyasu Tokugawa by
several hundred years, and even the Tokugawa Shogunate by a number of decades.
Nevertheless, Nihonbashi is the place where his story merges with theirs, at
least in the mind and heart of this author.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tokyo,
21 May 2015.
[3] Much of the English language
literature uses Japanese names in their original form – surname followed by
given name. But this seems to lead to confusion in some sources as to which
name is which. For this reason, I have used the Western form – given name
followed by surname – for all names.
[4] http://www.conservapedia.com/Tokyo,
24 May 2015.
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_Shigenaga,
24 May 2014.
[6] Jinnai, H., Tokyo , a Spatial
Anthropology, University
of California
[10] Jinnai, H., Tokyo, a
Spatial Anthropology, University of California Press, 1995, ISBN-13:
978-0520071353.
[11] Allred, “Japanese
Adventures with Sinclair Lewis,” Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Fall 2004.
