Edokko – who were the people of Edo really, under the shogunate?

A grandfather who burned through his fortune, a father who never saved a copper, a son who still spoke faster than he thought. A handful of Edo townspeople gave Japan ukiyo-e, iki, mono no aware – most of what we now consider its essence. Their self-portrait remains the strongest literary character of the Tokugawa era.

About a man who spent faster than he earned, talked faster than he listened, fought faster than he thought – and along the way created much of what we now call truly Japanese

Dawn over the Sumida. A carpenter walks out of a bathhouse in Nihonbashi, still steaming, with skin so red it looks as though someone had been boiling him for fifteen minutes – because someone basically had. He walks with his head up, arms swinging wide as if pushing the air out of his way. The air smells of wet wood and something that burned two streets over during the night. The carpenter doesn’t turn his head that way – the fire was interesting, but it wasn’t his street. Two coppers left in his purse, and the day hasn’t even started. He passes firefighters running with a wooden standard, throws something over his shoulder at them, they throw something back, both sides laughing. Forty years old, his father born under the same roof, his grandfather still remembered the Tanuma years. Proud, easily offended, quick to fight, a patriot of his own neighbourhood. Whatever he earns – that same day he spends on bathhouses, women, sake and good food. Never haggles, never regrets. Because he knows that any copper he doesn’t spend today might burn down with the house tomorrow – saved money is wasted money.

This is how a certain kind of person walked Edo – people for whom money was something to spend, fire something to watch, and scalding water something to relax in. Not every resident of the million-strong capital. Far from every one. To deserve the title, you had to be born in the lower city, in the home of parents born in the lower city, and in the strictest version, you had to have grandparents from the same streets. How many such people existed? Hinako Sugiura, a researcher of Edo culture, counted them mercilessly: one and a half percent. Out of a million souls, perhaps fifteen thousand people. A handful who called themselves all of Japan.

And it was this handful that created what later all of Japan came to recognise as its soul. A dialect impossible to fake. A philosophy of money in which thrift was a disgrace. The ethos of neighbourhood patriotism and honour-bound brawls. And, finally, a self-portrait so carefully polished that its authors started to laugh at it themselves. I think an era is best understood through its people. And whose portrait could tell us more about Tokugawa Japan than the portrait of the Edo townsman? People who gave Japan ukiyo-e, mono no aware, and most of what we love about it – though we usually credit it all to the samurai. We’ll meet the stereotype – how the rest of Japan saw the people of Edo, and how they saw themselves. Buckle up.

Three generations and not a day less!

The word edokko (江戸っ子, literally “child of Edo”) was coined late. It made it to paper only at the end of the 18th century, even though the city had stood for nearly two hundred years. The first detailed definition was given by someone who considered himself a walking specimen of the type: Santō Kyōden. Born in Nihonbashi in 1761, son of a tobacco dealer, woodblock print artist, author of entertainment books describing Yoshiwara and city manners. In 1787 he published Tsūgen sōmagaki (通言総籬), a collection of dialogues from inside a teahouse, and stuck inside a definition that would be repeated for the next hundred and fifty years: a true edokko is born in the shadow of Nihonbashi bridge, bathes in the bathhouses of Kanda, hears the dawn bell from Hongan-ji temple, and knows no sun other than the one rising over Edo Bay.

It sounds like an inside joke – and it kind of was. Kyōden was defining himself and his colleagues of the brush in this way. But the definition stuck. In the following decades it was tightened to the point of absurdity. Three generations. Both parents from Edo. A registered address in one of the four lower-city districts: Nihonbashi, Kanda, Asakusa, Fukagawa. Honjō across the Sumida – sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on who was counting. If just one parent had been born elsewhere, the child got the label madara (斑 or まだら), meaning “spotted” – like an unevenly dyed cloth. A half-true, half-false person, half from the city, half from somewhere else.

By this definition, almost everyone was excluded. Samurai – because they lived in yamanote, the upper city, on the residential hills. Merchants from Osaka, even if they had been in Edo for thirty years. Farmers from neighbouring villages who came to the capital for work. Daimyō and their retinues, sent in every year as part of sankin kōtai. Monks, doctors, ladies-in-waiting to imperial women, merchants who had washed up somewhere on the other end of Honshū. Edo was a city of newcomers – but an edokko was born only from parents who had known no other place.

Sugiura’s numbers are crucial because they overturn everything we think about this. One and a half percent. In a capital that in 1721 had a million inhabitants (and was at that time the largest city in the world, larger than London and Paris combined), true “children of the city” perhaps numbered fifteen thousand. The rest were arrivals. Everything we today call Edo culture was thought up by a handful. But thought up with such confidence that all of Japan went on copying their gestures.

This paradox – a city with a minority of natives dictating to all the rest how to dress, talk and spend money – will repeat itself many times in the history of great metropolises. New York, Paris, the old Lwów. A small group is enough to give a city its face. Except the edokko, it seems, took it to an extreme.

Financial frivolity

The most famous saying of this culture goes:

宵越しの銭は持たぬ

(yoigoshi no zeni wa motanu)

“Money does not stay overnight”

It’s not about glorifying poverty. It’s about an attitude of drawing from life. What you earned today, you spend by evening. What’s left for tomorrow – you’ll think about tomorrow. The second saying goes with it:

明日の風は明日吹く

(ashita no kaze wa ashita fuku)

“Tomorrow’s wind will blow tomorrow”

From the perspective of today’s financial advisor, this sounds like a diagnosis of a serious problem. No security, no planning, risk of poverty in old age. And yet this attitude had a precise, hard justification in Edo. The reason was called: fire.

The chronicle of Saitō Gesshin, Bukō Nenpyō (武江年表), lists by date and name nearly every serious fire in the capital – and there were dozens of serious ones in the 17th century alone. The Great Meireki Fire of 1657 burned down two-thirds of the city and killed about a hundred thousand people. Meireki no Taika was not an accident – it was a generation-defining event, like the Warsaw Uprising for Poles. But Edo kept burning. Less dramatically, more often, regularly. By the middle of the 18th century, the city had a saying that:

喧嘩と火事は江戸の華

(kenka to kaji wa Edo no hana)

“fights and fires are the flowers of Edo”

It was no joke. Statistically, a townsman’s house burned down once every seven or eight years. The life of a serf in a European village seems safer.

In such a city, thrift looked different than for a merchant from Osaka. Osakans were famous for their stinginess – and rightly so, because their city burned less often, the merchants traded in silver, and business required capital. In Edo the logic was the opposite. A coin saved is a coin that will burn with the house. A ryō spent (the highest monetary unit, in gold) is a ryō the fire won’t reach. The faster the coin vanished into a bathhouse, an izakaya or an oiran, the safer it was. Money that doesn’t stay overnight at home is safe money.

This practical calculation later turned into an ethos. To be edokko meant you couldn’t haggle over prices, you couldn’t count your small change, you couldn’t check your change in front of strangers. If you invited a friend to a teahouse, you paid for everything. If you bought from a vendor, you took as much as you needed and a bit more, and you didn’t haggle like a market woman in Sendai. Haggling was yabo – unrefined, provincial, unworthy of the city. The ethos was so strong that even the poor played the part. An apprentice who got his wages and “drank them away” in a bathhouse, an izakaya and at a woman’s in one night was no spendthrift. He was doing what had to be done.

The best illustration of this philosophy is a scene known from the literature of the era, set at the fish market in Nihonbashi – a topos of the stingy merchant in spendthrift Edo recurring across many kibyōshi, sharebon and senryū of the period, in countless variants. A wealthy merchant from Osaka comes to buy katsuo (鰹, a fish from the mackerel family). The vendor names a price. The Osakan haggles. A carpenter from Kanda standing nearby buys without a word at the asking price, though both know it’s inflated. He looks at the Osakan, shakes his head and walks out. Three streets away he tells his friends about it and everyone laughs. This carpenter – who has just overpaid by half – thinks the other one made a fool of himself. And he is right, when it comes to the city’s ethos. The other is right, when it comes to the purse.

The paradox will stick. Even in the Meiji era, a London merchant doing business with Tokyo would be amazed that Tokyoites paid without haggling, while in Osaka he had to fight over every yen. The ethos of “flowing” money would outlive Edo by more than a hundred years.

The bath that makes you faint

The second thing in which the edokko saw himself clearly was the bath. Not just any. Public, male, daily, in scalding water in which Western travellers of the second half of the 19th century recorded with disbelief temperatures of forty-six, forty-eight, once even fifty degrees Celsius. Edward Morse, an American zoologist living in Tokyo in the 1870s, wrote to his sister that he couldn’t step in past his ankles without crying out, while the Japanese sat up to their necks, chatting and looking content. Morse was neither the first nor the last. Every European writing about Edo (or Meiji-era Tokyo) had to devote a separate paragraph to it.

The bathhouse in Edo was not a luxury. It was a necessity. Townsmen’s houses did not have their own water-heating stoves (where would they, in a city of wood and paper?), so for a bath one went to the local sentō (I write more about Edo bathhouses here: Sentō Bathhouses in Shogunate-Era Japan – Dense Steam, Quiet Conversations, the Scent of Damp Pine). Prices were so low that even a poor porter could afford one every day. Bathhouses were everywhere. By the middle of the 19th century, in the lower city alone, around six hundred were counted (the number comes from “Morisada Mankō” (守貞謾稿) of 1837–1853 – an encyclopaedic chronicle of daily life in Edo, Osaka and Kyoto by Kitagawa Morisada). Open from dawn to late evening, with separate hours for women and men (or shared, since both happened, until the shogunate banned it, then had to ban it again – and again – the people of Edo had a poor memory for prohibitions).

But the temperature – that was something more than comfort. Forty-six degrees is not a temperature in which one easily relaxes. It is a temperature one endures. Stepping into such water for the first time is a painful shock – the skin screams, the body rebels. The second time only slightly better. The tenth – still unpleasant. But after several hundred times, the brain learns it will survive, and the skin stops sending alarm signals. You can sit up to your neck for an hour. You can talk. You can even fall asleep (and many really did, sometimes for good – statistics of deaths in Edo bathhouses are striking).

Shikitei Sanba in Ukiyoburo (浮世風呂, “Bathhouse of the Floating World”, 1809) left the best literary record of this ritual. Four volumes, each more than a hundred pages of conversations inside a single bathhouse. Sanba sat there for years, eavesdropped, recorded dialects with documentary precision. Preserved in his prose is a conversation between a woman from Kyoto, speaking in soft kansai-ben, and a woman from Edo who answers her quickly, hissing, dismissively. He recorded dialogues of children smeared with ink from Buddhist temple schools, dropping into the bathhouse on their way home to avoid a scolding from their mothers. In one passage, he notes that a boy instinctively knew how to speak differently to a well-dressed peer than to a hooligan from a nearby nagaya. The bathhouse as an informal school of social position. The child, before it even learns the word “class”, already feels it on the skin.

Sanba gave us a talking photograph of the city. When you open his book, you can hear Edo even after two hundred years.

What matters for our subject – in the bathhouse, an edokko was recognised instantly. By the way he stepped into the hottest tub, ōyu (大湯, “great water”), without a cry, a hiss or a recoiling gesture. He slid into the scalding water smoothly, as if sitting down on his own bench, with a small sigh of contentment, and said something to his neighbour. A newcomer from the provinces hissed, jumped, pulled his foot back. Unmasked in five seconds. There’s no faking it.

Out of this ritual came a self-confidence that money cannot buy. Since my body endures what yours does not, I am from here, and you are not. A flashily dressed provincial lost out to a naked porter from Kanda, if the porter could sit in fifty-degree water with a face as if nothing was happening. In Edo bathhouses there was no clothing. The body said everything.

Eating syllables

The third immediately noticeable trait was speech. The so-called edo-ben (江戸弁) – the dialect of Edo – later passed into the Tokyo standard, but in its pure form, before the Meiji reforms, it sounded different from today’s Japanese. Faster. Harder. With swallowed vowels, jumbled consonants, with a rhythm that was itself a declaration of identity.

The most famous mark was the confused pair hi and shi. An edokko said Shibiya instead of Hibiya, pronounced hito like shito, and shichi (seven) sounded almost like hichi. This was not a speech defect. It was a distinction. In the literature of the era we find scenes in which a father admonishes his son: “Speak more clearly, or they’ll take you for a peasant from Yamato” – and the son answers him precisely with that mixed hi/shi, proud to be from here.

The second mark was the merging of vowels. Akai (red) was pronounced akee. Sugoi (great) – sugee. Hayai (fast) – hayee. This style later passed into the dialogue of manga and anime as the marker of “tough guy, low register, street” – to this day in Japanese popular culture, that’s how a Tokyoite from working-class Kōtō or a hero of a yakuza film speaks. Etymologically it is simply a contracted form – but by the 19th century no one remembered that. People spoke this way because they spoke this way.

The third thing was rhythm. The Edo tempo was faster than the Kyoto one. Shorter. Stronger. Without softening. In Kyoto, conversation was a dance; in Edo, it was a burst of short rifle fire. Sayings of the era register the difference: an Osakan haggles for an hour, a Tokyoite for two seconds – he either takes it or he doesn’t. The speed survived. Today’s Tokyo yabai, thrown by a contemporary teenager on Shibuya, is a distant descendant of edokko speech.

Today’s yabai (やばい) – the Tokyo youth exclamation that means at once “awful” and “amazing”, depending on how you throw it – is a distant descendant of that fast, economical speech. In edokko times, yabai meant something quite specific: “run, they’re onto us”. A word from the slang of thieves and gamblers from Yoshiwara, a warning whispered between market stalls when someone spotted a dōshin patrol. Two centuries pass, and the word still lives on the same streets – only the owner has changed. From the intelligence cue of an Edo street operator, it has become the universal sigh of a teenager who has seen something incredible, terrible, or simply expensive.

Sanba and Jippensha Ikku, author of the travel cycle about Yajirobei and Kitahachi, preserved this speech for posterity in prose so dense with dialectisms that for today’s Japanese reader it sounds like a foreign language. School editions come with notes for students: what each phrase and word means. Edo spoke differently from the rest of the islands and knew it.

The greatest virtue of this dialect was its untranslatability. Two edokko talking by a sushi stall understood each other in half a word. A newcomer from Hiroshima, even after ten years in the capital, caught every fourth sentence. After the Meiji reforms, when all of Japan flooded into Tokyo, the dialect started to become a stylisation – and in the 20th century, after the great earthquake of 1923 and the American air raids of 1945, it ended up in a museum.

Fights and fires, the flowers of the capital

The earlier saying, “kenka to kaji wa Edo no hana”, deserves pausing on. “Flowers” – meaning ornaments, distinguishing marks, points of pride. A city in which fights and fires are the ornaments sounds like a place no one would want to spend a holiday in. But for the edokko, both were part of identity. Let’s see why.

A fire in Edo was not a private catastrophe. It was a public matter, of the street, of the neighbourhood. When a fire began at night, everything with legs ran out into the street. Men, women, children, the elderly, dogs. Not to flee – to watch. A great fire was an event. It gave a topic of conversation for the next week. In the literature of the era we find scenes of people who left their dinner, left their work, left even their dying grandmother, just to make it in time to see the rice warehouse on the other side of the canal go up in flames. It sounds cruel. But the people of Edo grew up knowing that their house too would one day burn, so watching someone else’s fire had something of looking at one’s own fate from a safe distance.

The fight against fire was conducted by organised brigades of municipal firemen. They were established after the Yoshimune reforms in 1718 as machibikeshi (町火消, “city extinguishers”), in forty-eight units marked with the letters of the iroha syllabary. Each unit had its own sector and its own standard, matoi (纏) – a wooden pole with paper tassels and the unit’s mark. The standard was driven into the ridge of the nearest burning house, as a sign: “we work here”. If anyone managed to take the standard down, it was an insult. If it was driven into the house of another unit, it was also an insult. Firefighter brawls were regular things, loud, sometimes ending in death (more about the hikeshi firefighters here: 'Our guys are on the roof!' — Hikeshi in the shogunate era, when a firefighter was a hero, a brawler, and an Edo celebrity).

The firefighters themselves had a legendary status. Tattooed all over their bodies, running naked or nearly naked through the streets on the night of a fire, shouting to each other in code, putting out fires by demolition. Today this doesn’t seem particularly effective, but it had its sense. In a city of wood and paper, the only way to stop the front of a fire was to demolish a strip of buildings ahead of it. The firefighters didn’t so much extinguish as create a void in which the fire choked. They did this with axes and hooks. Very showily. The masters of ukiyo-e – Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi – painted them later as folk heroes, in poses from kabuki theatre.

“Edokko” had a relationship of boundless admiration with the firefighters. The dream of every little boy from Kanda was to one day become an extinguisher in unit i, or ro, or the most famous me. The firefighter was the model of masculinity. Honour, a fit body, readiness for death, the standard in the burning ridge. In the literature of the era, in kabuki theatre, in woodblock prints – everywhere, firefighters everywhere. The nation worshipped them more or less as the English at the same time worshipped their admirals.

The fight was the second flower of the capital. Edo gained a reputation as a city in which newcomers were picked on in the streets without obvious cause. The reputation was earned. The lower-city people prided themselves on a temperament they did not hide. Offending an edokko was easy. It was enough to give him a wrong look, accidentally bump into him in a crowd, mispronounce the name of his neighbourhood. A fight broke out in seconds. It ended just as quickly – without legal consequences, because the city authorities knew the locals were like that, and shoving entire neighbourhoods into prison for it would be impossible. People fought and went back to work.

From our perspective today this sounds like hooliganism. From Edo’s perspective it was a form of honour. To have a short temper meant: to be a person alive, present, not letting himself be insulted. To turn the other cheek was “yabo”, provincial, unworthy of a townsman. Avoiding a fight was a flaw, like stinginess or haggling in a shop. More about the most famous brawl in Edo – between the firefighters of unit “me” and sumo wrestlers – here: An Epic Brawl Between Firefighters and Sumo Wrestlers on the Streets of Edo: “Megumi no kenka” .

Iki, inase, hari

Out of these elements – speech, the bath, the purse, the brawl – something was moulded in the 18th and 19th centuries that Japan would later regard as its highest aesthetic: iki. A difficult word. Iki (粋) is translated as “chic”, “elegance”, “taste”, “refinement”, but none of these words quite captures it. The most famous attempt at a definition was given by the philosopher Kuki Shūzō in the book Iki no kōzō (「いき」の構造, “The Structure of Iki”, 1930). Kuki broke down the concept into three elements.

First: bitai (媚態, “coquetry”). But not the ordinary, direct kind. A very subtle game of distance. A look that promises and at the same time withdraws. A garment that exposes the nape but covers everything else. A conversation that is close, but not too close. Second: ikiji (意気地, “pride”). A stance that does not allow itself to be bent. It’s not about stiffness. It’s about a certain unbendingness, felt in someone’s voice and the way they carry their body. Third: akirame (諦め, “resignation”). And here it gets interesting. Because this is no depressed surrender. It is the awareness that nothing lasts. Money does not stay overnight, fire will come, the woman will leave, youth will vanish. So why struggle?

The combination of these three components gives, according to Kuki, the fullness of iki. Coquetry with distance. Unshakable pride. Awareness of impermanence. A man who has all this at once is iki – and that is exactly how the edokko saw himself. Well dressed, but without ostentation. Self-confident, but without boasting. Aware that tomorrow he might not be here – and precisely for that reason, today he doesn’t worry.

Alongside iki in the edokko’s vocabulary, there were two more concepts, inase (鯔背) and hari (張り). Inase meant the swaggering elegance of a young man – something between a dandy and a hooligan. The term comes from the hairstyle of young fish vendors at the Nihonbashi market, who wore their hair in a tuft resembling the back of an ina fish (鯔, mullet). They looked so distinctive that they became the model of male elegance (more on Edo hairstyles here: Who Knew More About Everyone Than the Daimyō? – Kamiyui, the Barbers of Edo). Hari, in turn, “tension”, meant inner uprightness. Someone who carries himself straight, who won’t let himself be walked over, who has inside something of a taut bowstring.

The most famous Edo saying about itself goes:

江戸っ子は五月の鯉の吹流し

(edokko wa satsuki no koi no fukinagashi)

“An edokko is like the carp streamer of the May festival”

Those colourful paper carp that were hung on bamboo poles for Boys’ Day looked impressive. They referred to the carp as a symbol of unbendingness. But they were also at the same time a self-ironic reflection: the paper carp fluttered in the wind, shone, made an impression – but inside they were empty. The edokko speaks here about himself: we are showy, but empty inside. We catch the eye, but there’s really nothing there. We lack the wisdom of a merchant from Osaka, the spiritual focus of a monk from Kyoto, the simplicity of a peasant from Tōhoku. We are streamers in the wind.

What perhaps distinguishes Edo self-irony from European sarcasm is the absence of bitterness. An edokko saying he is an empty carp says it with pride. It is a mark of distinction. Only someone so sure of himself can say such a thing about himself and not feel ashamed. And only a city with such a density of literary autobiography could produce a saying so precisely aimed at itself.

Did edokko ever exist at all?

After going through all these elements – the purse, the bathhouse, the speech, the brawl, iki – the basic question must be asked. Did edokko, as I have described him, ever really exist? Or is he a literary fiction, the self-portrait of a few writers from Nihonbashi that later grew into a national myth?

The answer is: both. Yes, because the facts confirm many of these descriptions. Things really burned. Bathhouses really had such temperatures. Firefighters really fought other groups. The dialect really sounded different. No, because the figure that combined all these traits in one living organism, in such extremes, is for the most part a literary abstraction. It was glued together from a thousand observations into a single “ideal” townsman. Most real people had only some of these traits. No one was a perfect “edokko”, just as no one was a perfect Victorian gentleman, a perfect Texas cowboy, or a perfect sarmatian from over the Vistula (I know, this can be argued).

You can see this in that the literature of the era also records the opposite kind of people. Stingy people from Edo. Cowards from Edo. Merchants who saved. Carpenters who haggled. Fathers of families who hid when a fire started at the neighbour’s. These people existed, but the literature treated them as deviations. It wrote: “this is not a true edokko”. By doing so, it defined what an edokko is, by exclusion of what he is not.

Hinako Sugiura has an interesting observation on this. She writes that “edokko” was not so much a sociological description as a model to be realised. Like “samurai” in bushido. The ideal samurai did not exist. But all samurai knew what he should look like. And they tried to come as close to that ideal as they could. With “edokko” it was the same. A resident of Edo knew how a real “edokko” should behave in a given situation, and did what he could to play the role convincingly. Sometimes he managed. Sometimes not. But the model hung in the air like a theatre poster.

From this perspective, “edokko” is the first known case to me of an urban identity created consciously, as a role to be played (perhaps with the exception of some somewhat different cases in antiquity). Not ethnicity. Not religion. Not noble birth. Just the city. The resident of the capital played the capital. And he knew he was playing it. And he knew the others knew. And that everyone had agreed on this together.

Something similar will later happen in Paris with the Parisian, in New York with the New Yorker, in Vienna with the Viennese. The resident of a great city as a cultural role one plays, regardless of where one was born.

That’s why ultimately it makes no sense to ask whether edokko existed. The question should sound different: how strong was this role, that even two hundred years after it was written down in Sanba’s books, people still try to play it? Because they really do try. In today’s Tokyo there exists an association called Edokko-no-kai, bringing together people who can prove three generations of family in shitamachi. It numbers only several hundred persons. But they meet once a year, in Asakusa, and speak the same dialect that Sanba overheard in 1809. The streamer keeps fluttering, even though the wind has long since changed.

1923, 1945, 2026

Edo as a city formally ended in 1868, when the shogunate fell, the emperor came from Kyoto, and the name was changed to Tōkyō, “Eastern capital”. But the edokko himself outlived this change by several good generations. Still in Meiji, still in Taishō, still in Shōwa. The bathhouses worked. Firefighters ran with their standards, except now they had pumps too. The dialect was the dialect. Money still tasted best on the same night you earned it.

The first wound came on the first of September 1923, at noon. The Great Kantō earthquake, magnitude 7.9, with the epicentre in Sagami Bay. The earthquake itself would have been a nightmare. But it came exactly when in tens of thousands of houses, stoves were lit for cooking rice. Wind from the ocean fanned the fire. All of Honjō was burning, all of Asakusa, all of Nihonbashi. A hundred and forty thousand people died, most of them burned alive, not from the earthquake. The most in the Hifukushō clothing depot in Honjō, where forty thousand people had taken shelter – and where the fire pulled them all into a single deadly funnel. This was a place where, the day before, children from terakoya schools had been running. Now ash up to the waist.

After 1923, everything that could be rebuilt was rebuilt. Tokyo stood up again in four, five years. The bathhouses came back, the dialect came back, the firefighters came back. The streets were redrawn, some a little wider, but the layout remained. It seemed the city remembered how to rise again from the fire – because it had two hundred years of practice.

The second wound was final. On the night of the 9th to the 10th of March 1945, American B-29s, flying under the codename Operation Meetinghouse, dropped seven hundred thousand incendiary bombs on the lower city. The target was chosen deliberately: wooden buildings, dense, flammable. The wind that night reached twenty metres per second. The fire formed a firestorm, the same kind that had burned Dresden a month earlier. A hundred thousand people in one night. The lower city, the heart of “edokko” culture, ceased to exist. All the bathhouses. All the workshops. All the nagaya houses in which three, four generations had grown up. Temples, tobacco shops, teahouses. The “matoi” standards. Everything.

After 1945 there was no rebuilding in the same sense as after 1923. After 1923, the old city came back. After 1945, Tokyo decided to be modern. Concrete replaced wood. Apartment blocks replaced nagaya. Public bathhouses began to disappear (today around five hundred remain in all of Tokyo, a city of thirty-five million). The dialect entered television as a dialect, that is, as a stylisation, not a daily way of speaking. Children taught standard Japanese in school stopped laughing at provincials, because they themselves had stopped hearing the difference.

According to the latest data from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, about sixty-eight percent of current residents were born in the city itself. That sounds like a lot. But “edokko” in the strict sense – three generations, both parents from shitamachi – amounts to a few tens of thousands of people. Exactly the number Sugiura estimated for the 18th century. A handful, as back then. Except now it is a handful whose parents remember the ashes, not a city of wood and paper.

Does this mean that “edokko” is dead? Both yes and no. The figure from Sanba’s literature is gone. There is no carpenter walking out of a bathhouse at dawn with two coppers in his purse. But if you sit on a bench in a park in Asakusa and watch for two hours, you can see an old man returning from the market in wooden sandals, buying a single mochi for three hundred and twenty yen, speaking to the saleswoman in something that sounds like a yakuza-manga dialect, then sitting down on a bench and silently asking a passing stranger something with a jerk of his chin. If you strike up a conversation with him, he will tell you his grandfather was a blacksmith on this street, and his great-grandfather rowed a boat down the Sumida.

There are fewer such people in Tokyo every year. But they exist. And they recognise each other. By small things. By the way someone takes coins into his hand. By how he opens the door at the bathhouse. By whether he flinches at hot water or not. The matoi standard no longer hangs on the ridge. But it hangs somewhere else.

Better than a Statue

A word at the end about us. Edokko was the urban man of his time, not rooted in the soil, not rooted in a village family, not rooted in a samurai clan. Rooted only in the city. A resident not of a country, not of a region, but of a neighbourhood in which he had everything he needed. A man who knew his house would probably burn, so it wasn’t worth becoming too attached to it. A man who knew tomorrow might not come, so today had to be lived. A man for whom lack of money, fire, water and fights were everyday things.

In Poland we have no exact equivalent. The Varsovian isn’t quite it, the Lvovian isn’t quite it either. Perhaps the closest – though the analogy is fragile – is the old Varsovian from pre-war Stara Praga. A man who had lived in Praga for three generations, spoke in dialect, had his sayings, his firefighters, his fights. Left-bank Warsaw burned down at the end of 1944 a little differently from lower Edo in 1945, but the cultural logic was similar: wooden buildings, an explosion of violence, ash, rebuilding in concrete. After 1945 there are fewer and fewer of the old Varsovians. You can hear them only in cabarets and in memoirs.

There are also differences. “Edokko” had his Sanba. Had his Kyōden. Had Jippensha Ikku, Kuki Shūzō. Had hundreds of books in which his image was polished to such a degree that one can reconstruct him two hundred years later from the literature alone. The old Varsovian did not have his Sanba. We have Wiech, we have Tuwim, we have a few volumes. But we don’t have a “Bathhouse of the Floating World” in which the actual dialogues of the districts, as they really were, would have been preserved.

That is why today, when we try to understand who the old townsman of Warsaw, Krakow, or Lwów was, we have many difficulties. We know more or less how he spoke. We know more or less what he ate. But did he haggle in shops or not? How did he behave when a fire broke out at his neighbour’s? What did he think about saving money? About these things we know less and less. We have the edokko on a fork, because he took literary care of himself. Our townsmen from the ashes of war we have to guess at.

Perhaps that is the final lesson. A city that wants something more than streets and foundations to remain after it must have someone to describe it. Not a monument. Not a museum. A book. Or three hundred books, as Edo had. Then even when the city burns – and one day it will, every city has burned at some point – its inhabitant will walk out of the ashes on paper. With his dialect, his vices, and two coppers in his purse.

Źródła

1. Santō Kyōden, Tsūgen sōmagaki (山東京伝『通言総籬』), Edo 1787. Zbiór dialogów z wnętrza herbaciarni Yoshiwary, zawierający pierwszą szczegółową definicję edokko. Edycja krytyczna: w tomie Sharebon-shū, seria Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, Iwanami Shoten, Tokio.

2. Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyoburo (式亭三馬『浮世風呂』), 1809-1813. Czterotomowa kronika rozmów wewnątrz tokijskich łaźni publicznych, kluczowy dokument codzienności i dialektu edokko. Współczesne wydanie krytyczne: Iwanami Bunko, Tokio.

3. Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyodoko (浮世床), 1813-1814. Odpowiednik Łaźni płynącego świata osadzony w zakładzie fryzjerskim. Wydanie krytyczne w serii Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū.

4. Jippensha Ikku, Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (十返舎一九『東海道中膝栗毛』), 1802-1814. Komiczna powieść podróżnicza, w której dwóch edokko o imionach Yajirobei i Kitahachi wędruje traktem Tōkaidō. Najlepszy zachowany zapis żywej mowy edońskiej tej epoki.

5. Saitō Gesshin, Bukō Nenpyō (斎藤月岑『武江年表』), połowa XIX wieku. Kronika wydarzeń w Edo od początku epoki Tokugawa. Podstawowe źródło do statystyki pożarów, klęsk i wydarzeń miejskich. Współczesne wydanie: Heibonsha Tōyō Bunko.

6. Kitagawa Morisada, Morisada Mankō (喜田川守貞『守貞謾稿』), 1837-1853. Encyklopedyczna kronika życia codziennego trzech głównych miast Edo, Osaki i Kioto – mody, kuchni, profesji, łaźni, świąt. Współczesne wydanie krytyczne: Iwanami Bunko, Tokio.

7. Kuki Shūzō, Iki no kōzō (九鬼周造『「いき」の構造』), Iwanami Shoten, Tokio 1930. Klasyczna analiza pojęcia iki, wykonana z pozycji filozofii fenomenologicznej. Polskie tłumaczenie nie istnieje, dostępne wydanie angielskie: “Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki”, transl. John Clark, Power Publications, 1997.

8. Hinako Sugiura (杉浦日向子), liczne publikacje o codzienności Edo, m.in. Edo e yōkoso (江戸へようこそ, “Witamy w Edo”), Chikuma Shobō, Tokio 1989. Sugiura była jednocześnie historyczką i mangaką, a jej oszacowania liczbowe dotyczące populacji edokko są szeroko akceptowane.

9. Tanaka Yūko, Edo no sōzōryoku (田中優子『江戸の想像力』), Chikuma Shobō, Tokio 1986. Studium wyobraźni kulturowej Edo, z osobnymi rozdziałami o literaturze sharebon i kibyōshi.

8. Robert Leutner, Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction, Harvard University Press, 1985. Najobszerniejsze anglojęzyczne studium twórczości Sanby z analizą jego rejestru dialektów.

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