Tokyo by Stephen Mansfield

Author:Stephen Mansfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-4-8053-1329-9
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Despite its seclusion, Tokyo’s Imperial Palace is little more than a stone’s throw away from the business of daily life. Originally completed on the grounds of Edo Castle in 1889, many of its key structures were destroyed in an air raid in 1945 and were subsequently rebuilt. (Dreamstime © Haveseen)

CHAPTER 5

Hachiman, God of War

Assassinations – Censorship – A failed coup –

Mobilizing for war – Air raids

Construction of a new Diet building, home to the Upper and Lower Houses, was completed at a staggering cost of 26 million yen in the autumn of 1936, just in time for the seventieth session of parliament convened for that winter. The structure represented an earnest, nationalist-inspired effort to have a building made by Japanese architects, with Japanese materials and labor.

Apart from the pneumatic carriers and locks, thermostatic heaters, and mail chutes—which were imported from the United States—and a number of stained-glass windows and mirrors from England, the building was an entirely Japanese enterprise. The designers and contractors of the steel-framed structure, which was set in concrete, with a liberal tonnage of marble on the inside and granite on the exterior, claimed the building was indestructible, even in a major earthquake. The Diet building still stands today, vindicating their confidence. Its 65.8-meter tower was the highest point in the city at the time, but because it overlooked the Imperial Palace grounds, the public was not permitted to take in the view, which would have been an unthinkable impertinence.

The decade witnessed Tokyo transformed in other ways, as it became the center for the foremost concentration of heavy industry in the country. The headquarters of almost all the most prominent private financial enterprises in Japan were to be found here, making it by far the most advanced industrialized capital in Asia. The city’s boundaries were redrawn in the 1920s and again in 1932, absorbing contingent towns and villages and consolidating them into twenty new wards to make a total of thirty-five in the city. Greater Tokyo could now boast a population of 4,970,000, making it the second-largest city in the world after New York. The technical classification of Tokyo as a city would change in 1943, however, by combining Tokyo Prefecture and the existing city into Tokyo-to, the Tokyo Metropolis. The administrative reach of this new entity included land masses far to the south of the city, such as the Izu Islands and the Ogasawara Islands—the latter being a twenty-six-hour boat ride from Tokyo Bay.

The skies expanded as well, with the completion of Haneda Airport in 1931. The new Tsukiji marketplace, destined to become the largest wholesale market in the world, opened for business in February of 1935. Its first sales were of fresh-caught fish, produce, and poultry; sales of dried and salted fish began in June. The playwright Osanai Kaoru, back in Tokyo after study trips to Russia and Germany, built the 1924 Tsukiji Little Theater near the market, just a few blocks from the Kabuki-za. Here he produced plays by Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, and other

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