LITMIR.BIZ

       Shinobazu Pond, Ueno

      The eastern suburbs were, again, the place to go for “the seven grasses of autumn,” some of them actually shrubs and only one a grass as that term is commonly understood in the West. The chrysanthemum, not one of the autumn seven, was featured separately. Dangozaka, “Dumpling Slope,” just north of the university in Hongō, was a famous chrysanthemum center that came and went in Meiji. Chrysanthemum dolls—chrysanthemums trained to human shape—were first displayed there in 1878. They figure in some famous Meiji novels, but by the end of Meiji were found elsewhere, first at the new Sumō stadium east of the river, and later in the southern and western suburbs. (Also, occasionally, in a department store.) The grounds of the Asakusa Kannon Temple were famous for chrysanthemums early in Meiji, but are no longer.

      Asuka Hill, noted for its cherry blossoms, was the best place near the city for autumn colors. At the end of the year there were hibernal moors to be viewed, for the wasted moor ended the cycle, as snow had begun it. Had nature been followed literally, the sequence could as well have been the reverse; but an ancient tradition called for the wasted and sere at the end of the cycle of grasses and flowers. For the best among sere expanses, one went to Waseda, in the western suburbs.

      It is not surprising, though it is sad, that so many famous places of early Meiji for the things of the seasons are missing from late-Meiji lists. Gone, for instance, are the night cherries of the Yoshiwara, popular in the dim light of early Meiji. It is more surprising that many places remain, in a larger, smokier city. A guide published by the city in 1907 gives a discouraging report on the Sumida cherries, even then being gnawed by industrial fumes and obscured by billboards. Yet it has a ten-page list of excursions to famous places in and near the city. Arranged by season, the list begins with felicitous New Year excursions, “all through the city,” and ends with New Year markets, “Nihombashi, Ginza, etc.” Snow-viewing tides the cycle over from one year to the next, and the Sumida embankment is still preeminent among places for indulging. Most if not quite all of the flowers and grasses are covered, from the plum (twenty-nine places recommended, all in the city and the suburbs, with a new place, the Yasukuni Shrine, at the head) to wasted moors (none left in the fifteen wards—only the western and northern suburbs). The twenty-three places for viewing cherry blossoms are headed, as they would have been at the end of Edo, by Ueno and the Sumida embankment. The sixty-page section on “pleasures” includes cemeteries and graves. They are chiefly for those of an antiquarian bent, of course, but a Japanese cemetery can also be pleasant for observing the passage of the seasons.

      A person of leisure and some energy could have filled most of his days with the round of annual and monthly observances. The same guide contains a five-page list of monthly feast days at shrines and temples, and only on the thirty-first day of a month would there have been nowhere to go. In this too, tradition survives. No month in the lunar calendar had thirty-one days, and no thirty-first day in the solar calendar has been assigned a feast. Besides monthly feast days, most shrines had annual festivals, boisterous to the point of violence, centering upon the mikoshi “god-seats,” portable shrines borne through the streets and alleys over which the honored god held sway. The god-seat sort of festival was among the great loves of the son of Edo, who, it was said, would happily pawn his wife to raise the necessary funds. Some of the god-seats were huge. Weaving down narrow streets on the shoulders of manic bearers who numbered as many as a hundred, they could go out of control and crash into a shopfront. Sometimes this happened on purpose. In Asakusa, especially, such assaults were welcomed: it was thought that if a god in his seat came crashing through the front of a shop, the devils must depart through the rear.

      Some shrines and temples had annual markets, perhaps the most remarkable of them being the Bird Fair, the Tori no Ichi, on the days in November that fell on the zodiacal sign of the bird. It was held at several “eagle shrines” throughout the city, the most famous and popular of them just outside the Yoshiwara. Bird days occur either twice or three times in a month, and when they occurred in November the throngs at the Yoshiwara were enormous. They threatened the pillars of heaven and the sinews of earth, said Higuchi Ichiyō in the best of her short stories. It was believed that years in which November contained three bird days were also years in which “the flowers of Edo,” the conflagrations, flourished.

      Though obviously the motives were mixed for crowds so great and boisterous, it was essentially a shopkeepers’ fair, and a part of the towns-man’s culture. The day of the bird was chosen from among the twelve because the Japanese love a pun. Tori, “bird,” also means “taking in” or “reaping,” and ornamental rakes were purchased at the market, as a means of assuring a profitable year. The rake merchants added a pleasant twist: to insure the flow of profits, a larger rake must be purchased every year. Bird fairs have declined in recent years, largely because the traditional business of the Yoshiwara has been outlawed. They have not, however, disappeared.

      But many observances that must have been very amusing are gone. One no longer hears, for example, of “the watch of the twenty-sixth night.” On that night in the Seventh Month under the lunar calendar (which would generally be August under the solar), people would gather along the coasts and in the high places of the city, waiting for the moon to rise. If it emerged in a triple image, presently falling back into a single one, it presaged uncommonly good luck. The watch lasted almost until dawn, since the twenty-sixth is very near the end of the lunar cycle. Devices were therefore at hand for enhancing the possibility of the triple image.

      Annual observances were closely tied to the agrarian cycle even when they did not have to do specifically with the flowers, the grasses, the birds, and the insects. A sense of the fields has survived, despite the expansive ways of the city that had driven wasted moors from the fifteen wards by the end of Meiji, and eaten up most of the paddy and barley lands. Spring began in two ways, the lunar and the solar. The lunar way is now hardly noticed, but the solar way survives, with spring beginning,

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