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Tokyo and Maturity

It is virtually impossible to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the Tokyo of 1922 on the basis of the Tokyo we know today — the world’s largest city, a megalopolis bustling, noisy, dirty, totally commercial and seemingly “Western.” Even in its days as Edo, the eastern capital of the warrior dictators of the *shogunate* (the hereditary Japanese military dictatorship that ruled the country before 1860 under the puppet leadership of the emperor-god away to the West in aesthetic Kyoto), Tokyo was always a city of strength and vigor. As early as the eighteenth century it rivaled cities in the West in size. But it had grown up as a collection of villages, without plan or order, and with none of the attempts at design that marked the Chinese-style capitals in western Japan.

In 1922, it was the tinkle of the bells of the _jimicksha,_ the man-pulled chariot, and the patter of his feet that was the dominant sound of locomotion at night in Tokyo’s small alleys. After all the catastrophes that have befallen twentieth-century Tokyo, these tiny, narrow alleys still stretch through the crowded residential areas of most of the city. But today they are crowded with autos, bicycles and — Hondas. To Western eyes, the city was a gray, weatherbeaten assemblage of shacks — slums, except that through Japanese industry and cleanliness they were and are tidy and neat like no other poor areas of the world. There were, of course, big traditional Japanese-style villas occupied by some of the Japanese nobility, many of them merchant princes whose fortunes had arisen only after the opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. The Peace Exhibition was on in Ueno Park, an effort by the Japanese to prove to the world that the military clashes already taking place in China and Siberia were not of their own doing. The exhibition opened in March and lasted most of the summer, dominated by Mr. Mikimoto’s Pearl Tower, and with a visit by the then Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VIII and then Duke of Windsor, the main social event of the season. But the city had all the aspects of an overgrown and ill-planned Oriental bazaar. Only the big Japanese business houses and the banks were grouped in red-brick, imitation-Georgian, Western-style buildings in the Marunouchi district. <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, the American architect, about this time took a hotel design he reportedly conceived originally for Mexico and planted it on the outskirts of the huge palace enclave surrounded by a moat in the center of the city. The Imperial Hotel’s three stories and modest spread seemed monumental. It was not the rather modish but dilapidated structure — now gone too — it turned into in the post–World War II era surrounded by the glass and steel structures of the new Tokyo in the so-called international style. Covering a 300-by-500-foot area — an enormous piece of land by Japanese standards, where the standard measurement then and now is still the jo, or a straw mat about three feet by six feet, the Imperial’s three stories were tall — for most Japanese buildings were only one or two stories. Indeed, the prohibitions against anything over eight stories lasted until the 1960s when the ban against higher buildings in the Tokyo area was finally lifted. The gardens and terraces and pools of the building were called “a gathering of clans” by Louis H. Sullivan, Wright’s teacher and sponsor, who along with the rest of the world saw and admired the building when it was finally completed in 1922 after four years of construction. It became one of the most important attractions in Tokyo, a city almost devoid of attractive monuments, so much the more when it survived all the catastrophes of the city during the four decades after its completion.

Making his pilgrimage to the hotel, young Honda, in the care of his father, arrived like a _hyakushyo_ (hayseed), staring at the traffic and the buildings. Honda was surprised to see as many as ten cars at one time. In Hamamatsu he had seen one car a month. Finally the two — for the elder Honda, too, had never been in the capital before — managed to find Arto Shokai. The elder Honda introduced himself and his son to Yuzo Sakakibara, the owner, and young Honda thought himself within minutes of being a full-fledged apprentice to an auto repair workshop.

“But reality,” Honda says, “was far different from what I had dreamed. When I set foot on Tokyo soil, leaving my home village, I was full of burning ambition to become an expert car mechanic. What happened though was that I spent my time, day after day, nursing the baby of the owner on my back. When my back became warm, I knew it was the baby. Older apprentices would make fun of me, saying: ‘Look, a world atlas is written on Honda’s back again.’”

At first, Honda took the whole situation stoically. He bought a chauffeur’s cap with his first pay — five yen ($1.25) a month — and hoped for the time when it would be appropriate to his job. After all, his predicament was the traditional Japanese way of treating apprentices. Even as late as the 1950s, many small Japanese firms drew no distinction between the duties of a new employee to the owner’s household and to his business. And, in fact, as Professor Chie Nakane, the noted cultural anthropologist of Tokyo University, has pointed out, the concept of the _ie_ (literally “house” in Japanese but nearer to the English “household”) was a relationship among coworkers which was a bond as strong as that of the family in other parts of Asia. It is this concept of household obligations in preindustrial Japan, Nakane believes, that has been translated into today’s unique Japanese “company spirit,” a worker’s sense of belonging to a corporate commercial entity unknown in its intensity anywhere else in the industrial world.

In spite of this traditional pattern, Honda says now, as day passed into day he was losing faith. He would have packed his things, climbed down a rope from his attic _futon_ (a traditional Japanese mattress bed) and gone back to Shizuoka but for one thing: He did not know how he could face his parents — his father’s sense of failure and his mother’s disappointment. Meanwhile business at Arto Shokai prospered. Although there were a modest number of automobiles, all imported, in Tokyo — and indeed in all Japan — in those days Arto Shokai was also one of the few repair shops. Suddenly one day the owner called out to Honda: “_Kozo_ [apprentice], we are very busy today. So come over and help here!” Honda says he could hardly believe his ears. He was ecstatic.

Through all the trials and tribulations of a long life, Honda feels that this experience as an apprentice — an apprentice who had to wait endlessly to get at his work — was the most trying. He has told members of his family and fellow officers in the Honda organization that he believes that it was this experience that gave him courage to face greater difficulties in later life, that somehow he felt that nothing would ever be so hard for him again. Yet the jobs he was given for the next year and a half were menial at best. Then something happened — the kind of national, or even international, catastrophe that has befallen Japan in Honda’s lifetime but that somehow has always seemed to give him a step upward, much as the whole nation, itself, has overcome it with persistence and resilience. It was one of many instances of this sort that really pose the question of how much the element of chance plays in any life, and in Honda’s, how often luck has been with him.

In September 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake occurred. It was one of the greatest natural disasters that any modern society has endured. The epicenter of the quake was in Yokohama, the great satellite port city to Tokyo, where the whole face of the cliff behind the city fell. The earthquake occurred at midday, just as hundreds of thousands of Tokyo and Yokohama housewives were cooking rice for the noonday meal. Besides the thousands of people who were killed by falling debris and the cavernous cracks that opened in the ground, tens of thousands more died in the firestorms that swept the huge cities, blazing instantly through the wood and paper houses like so many matchboxes ignited from the noontime rice-cooking fires in every household.

In Japanese mythology, it is said that the island of Honshu on which Tokyo and Kyoto are found rides on the back of a whale. The great mammal’s nose is pointed north and his two fins extend, one west in the direction of Kyoto and one east in the direction of Tokyo. And, like a whale, it is there that the action is most fierce when the whale moves and the country has an earthquake. However far-fetched the metaphor, it does describe fairly accurately what has befallen the Japanese over the centuries when these great catastrophes have occurred. Earthquakes are more frequent in northern Honshu but less destructive, but in both the Kyoto and Tokyo areas they are fierce. Over the past three hundred years there have been thirteen major tremors in the Kyoto area and ten in the Tokyo region. On that morning of September 1, 1923, it came without warning, without the rumbling noise that sometimes accompanies the tremors. Actually, it was a series of shocks — some twenty-two were recorded the first day, more than three hundred the second day, and more than a hundred for three subsequent days. It’s estimated that some 3,600 people in Tokyo alone — and the earthquake actually did more damage immediately in Yokohama than in the capital — were crushed in the first tremors. Some 57,000 died in the great fires that followed and another 12,000 or so drowned, either by falling into the water or by diving into one of the many canals that crisscrossed the lower part of the city in those days in order to escape the fire.

The calamity was more than a physical disaster, however. It was a great divide in modern Japanese history. Before that, nineteenth-century Japan had had phenomenal progress. The Restoration of the Emperor in the 1860s and the ending of the policy of seclusion had led to a relatively stable government under the reforming Emperor Meiji. After initial difficulties with foreign banks and lenders, the Japanese had succeeded in finding a method of importing the technology and capital they needed from abroad for industrialization. Their leadership had seen industrialization as the only insurance that they would not fall victim to Western imperialism like their Chinese neighbors. With their traditional skill at taking what they wanted and needed from foreign cultures and rejecting the rest, they appeared to have achieved a synthesis of the old Japanese society and the new industrialization. Successful wars in 1898 against the Chinese and in 1905 against the Russians not only secured their independence, but delivered valuable raw material sources through the annexation of Taiwan and the colonization of Korea and parts of China. And in 1918, as full-fledged — or almost — members of the victorious alliance in Europe, they had achieved their sought-for place as a recognized major power among the nations. It had all happened in a little over a half century, a miracle in world history, and certainly unparalleled in the Asian family of nations.

For many Japanese later on in the 1930s, the Great Kanto Earthquake was to be remembered as the high watermark of “the good old days.” The holocaust was followed by wild political rumors that the emigrant Korean community in Tokyo was plotting to rebel. They were slaughtered mercilessly in the miserable slums where they lived. That infamous episode aggravates Japanese-Korean relations to this day. The catastrophe was also followed shortly by the first of the signs of the oncoming worldwide depression that was to hit Japan hardest, the world’s marginal trading nation then even as it is today. Political corruption, the failure of the imitative parliamentary system borrowed from the West, the ascension to the throne of a weak and perhaps mentally disturbed emperor — all seemed to follow in quick succession. Never mind that the chronology is hardly correct. It is a part of Japanese folklore now that the earthquake was the signal for a long series of disasters that led, finally, to World War II (or as the Japanese call it, the Pacific War) and the final defeat. It is why some pessimistic, older Japanese speak today so ominously of the likelihood of another earthquake catastrophe in their islands. Their forebodings are reinforced by a certain statistical certainty — a major earthquake has come about every sixty years. And an earthquake’s meaning portends for many far more than just a natural disaster.

Honda was at his apprenticeship in Arto Shokai that noontime when the calamity befell Tokyo. “The first thing which I tried to grab at the time was the telephone. I had been told that the telephone was a very expensive thing and so I thought of detaching it from the wall, using a screwdriver, and then to get it out of the house.”

“‘No use saving the telephone,’ someone shouted at me,” Honda remembers. “‘Move out the cars! Anybody who can drive, drive one car each to a safe place!’ ”

Honda had never driven a car. But, typical of his daredevil character, that didn’t deter him. He hopped into one of the cars, maneuvered it out of the garage, and picked his way through the streets clogged with men, women, and children carrying bedding and food and scurrying in every direction. The fires reached the Arto Shokai and completely burned it out. Honda took refuge with the repair shop owner and his family in a corner under the elevated railway near Kanda station in eastern Tokyo. In the ruins of a warehouse next door he found canned food not too badly damaged by the fire, and he ate to his heart’s content.

“Whenever I had time,” he says, “I went downtown on a motorcycle we had managed to salvage. It had a sidecar and I carried passengers who paid me to get about the city from railway station to station where they could get trains. I made money. I needed it to buy rice for my owner and his family and myself. But mostly I enjoyed myself riding around Tokyo at what seemed breakneck speeds on the motorcycle.”

The great calamity turned out to be a piece of good luck for young Honda in other ways too. Before the earthquake and the fire, the Arto Shokai had employed fifteen or sixteen repairmen. Most of them had gone back to their homes when the catastrophe fell because their homes were burned out and they had no food for their families. Only two were left — the senior apprentice and Honda. Business was resumed, repairing a large number of vehicles by hand that had been burned in an assembly plant in Shinagawa. Honda says now that the repairs, given the shortage of materials and their poor craftsmanship, were pretty bad. But somehow they made the cars look like new, cannibalizing parts and coating them with paint. The biggest problem, he remembers, was with the wheels. The spokes of the wheels of Japanese cars in those days were made of wood and they had burned away. Honda and his boss managed to improvise new ones. But it was hard work and he remembered it later and it was to play a role in his career.

“So far as I was concerned,” Honda recalls today, “the earthquake was far from being a disaster. I could drive cars, ride motorcycles, and I learned how to repair automobiles.” That time and experience might have been much further off if the disaster had not come.

But the country boy still had a lot to learn about life in the big city. He tells this story on his lack of sophistication: Once on his day off he was getting ready to go to Asakusa, the notorious “gay quarter” (a Japanese euphemism for bordellos) of Tokyo dating from Edo days before the Meiji Restoration. The senior mechanic suggested they go together. “I’ll show you how to get off the streetcar without paying. Walk close behind and copy all my gestures.” When the men arrived in Asakusa, the senior apprentice got off first, pointing back with his thumb to Honda. For a moment Honda thought he was home free — then the conductor called. Unfortunately there was no one behind Honda’s pointing thumb. He had to pay both fares.

Life was a succession of these relatively innocent adventures in the city — and, as for most Japanese, a lot of extremely hard work. He made rapid progress in the repair shop, winning the trust and goodwill of the “master”-owner. Soon Honda was going outside the shop to handle more complicated repair jobs. “One summer day,” Honda recalls, “I was told by the owner to go to Kudan beyond Kanda [in eastern Tokyo] to take care of a car which had been stranded there because of gear trouble. I bicycled to the spot and found that the gears could not be repaired unless they were taken back to the shop. So I tied the gearbox, black with grease, to the back of the bicycle and hurried back to Hongo, humming as I pedaled along. It was already evening and beginning to get dark. I had no lights on the bike. I arrived at the intersection of Suido-bashi and was hailed by a policeman. He wore the traditional uniform and snow-white gloves plus a saber of the emperor’s police of those days.

“In order to stop me, the policeman threw himself across the gearbox which I was carrying on the back of the bike. ‘What do you think you are doing . . . running around without lights! Come to the police box with me!’ the policeman said peremptorily. When we got into the light of the police box, the policeman looked down at his uniform, astonished to find it and his gloves smeared with black grease. He flew into a rage, screaming at me: ‘You rascal, why do you have to carry something like that on a bicycle?’”