Taisho: Fourteen Years of Democracy, Jazz, and the Earthquake That Killed All Three

At 11 hours, 58 minutes, 32 seconds on the morning of 1 September 1923, the seabed off Sagami Bay shrugged sideways by about six metres and the Kantō plain shook for forty-seven seconds. Roughly 140,000 people were dead before the second day was over. Almost the same number of buildings burned in Tokyo alone, in a firestorm hot enough to soften steel and turn the surface of the Sumida river briefly into vapour. The era that died with them, the fourteen-year stretch from 1912 to 1926 called Taishō, had been Japan’s first real flirtation with parliamentary democracy, jazz, café society, bobbed hair, and a new kind of woman called the moga, and you can still walk through its surviving fragments in Tokyo and Inuyama today if you know where to look.

What Taishō Actually Was

Taishō is the shortest of the four modern Japanese era names, fourteen years and seven months bracketed by the death of Emperor Meiji on 30 July 1912 and the death of his son Emperor Yoshihito on 25 December 1926. The era name 大正 was taken from a line in the Yi Jing about the way of heaven being achieved through great rectitude. It is the only era of the four whose emperor barely showed up to it. By 1921 Yoshihito had withdrawn so far from public life that his eldest son Hirohito was named Prince Regent, and you could say the Taishō era was effectively a regency from that moment on.

The reason historians still argue about Taishō is that it does not behave the way the surrounding eras do. Meiji is a single arc of state-building. Shōwa is a single arc of war and recovery. Taishō is a strange in-between, brief enough to almost be ignored, busy enough to contain three separate revolutions in politics, daily life, and city form. I find it easiest to picture as the moment Japan briefly looked like it might become a different country, before the 1923 quake, the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, and a wider international slide buried that possibility.

Yoshihito himself is the most overlooked emperor in the modern Japanese line. He was born in 1879, the third son and only surviving child of the Meiji emperor and his concubine Yanagihara Naruko, contracted meningitis as an infant, and lived the rest of his life with neurological consequences that the official record refused to name. He was kept on a strict pedagogical schedule, married Sadako of the Kujō family in 1900, and produced four sons in seven years. The sons turned out to be unusually competent, particularly the eldest, who was raised explicitly to compensate for what the palace already feared his father could not handle.

The succession in July 1912 was rushed because Meiji’s death was rushed. Yoshihito stood through the proclamation, took the era name Taishō, and the three living genrō, the surviving oligarchs of the Meiji Restoration, settled in to run the actual government around him. The genrō at that point were Yamagata Aritomo, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Saionji Kinmochi. They had all been born before Commodore Perry showed up. They were not interested in giving up control to either the emperor or the new political parties.

The First Taishō Crisis: 1912 to 1913

The new reign started with a constitutional fight that nobody outside Japan paid attention to but that mattered enormously inside it. The Meiji Constitution gave the emperor formal authority over the army and navy, and a 1900 ordinance required that the army and navy ministers be active-duty officers. In December 1912 the Saionji cabinet refused to fund two new army divisions in Korea. The army minister, General Uehara Yūsaku, resigned in protest, and the army then refused to nominate a replacement, which forced the entire Saionji cabinet to fall.

That was the trigger. The genrō chose Katsura Tarō, an old Yamagata protégé, to form the new cabinet in late December 1912. The opposition saw the move as a naked oligarchic coup against parliament. By January 1913 a movement called the Goken Undō, the Movement to Protect Constitutional Government, had filled the streets around the Diet building. The most famous moment came on 5 February 1913, when the politician Yukio Ozaki stood up in the lower house and read a speech accusing Katsura of hiding behind the imperial throne to insulate himself from political accountability.

Katsura resigned within days. He was the third oligarch in three months to lose office, and he died of stomach cancer in October 1913. The crisis had two consequences that mattered for the rest of Taishō. The first was that public opinion, expressed through newspapers and street demonstrations, had successfully toppled a government for the first time in Japanese history. The second was that the genrō, particularly Yamagata, lost some of their assumed right to choose Prime Ministers without consultation.

Both consequences became the foundation of what scholars later called Taishō Democracy. The phrase was coined retrospectively by the historian Shinobu Seizaburō in the 1950s, but contemporaries already knew that something different was going on. Cabinet government was no longer purely a gift of the genrō. It was now also a gift of the lower house of the Diet, and you could feel that shift in the way newspapers covered politics from 1913 onward.

Wartime Boom and the Hara Cabinet

The First World War turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the Japanese economy and to Japanese democratic politics in the same gesture. Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, partly under treaty obligations to Britain and partly because the cabinet of Ōkuma Shigenobu wanted German concessions in Shandong and Micronesia. Within four months Japanese forces had taken Tsingtao and the German Pacific colonies. Almost no Japanese soldiers fought in Europe.

What Japan got instead was four years of Allied orders for textiles, ships, steel, and munitions. The European belligerents pulled out of Asian markets and Japanese exporters filled the gap. Real GDP rose roughly forty percent between 1914 and 1919. Yokohama silk exports tripled. The big trading houses, the sōgō shōsha like Mitsui Bussan and Mitsubishi Shōji, had their first golden age in this window, and the city of Osaka had a brief moment of being the largest city in Japan when the wartime industrial expansion ran ahead of Tokyo’s.

The boom created a new urban middle class with cash to spend and a working class with grievances about inflation. In August 1918 the price of rice doubled within a few months, partly because of speculation linked to the planned Siberian intervention, and the Toyama fishermen’s wives who first protested in late July touched off the Rice Riots, kome sōdō. Within a few weeks more than a million people in roughly five hundred locations had taken part. The cabinet of Field Marshal Terauchi resigned in disgrace.

The man the genrō chose to replace him in late September 1918 was Hara Takashi of the Seiyūkai party. Hara was the first commoner Prime Minister, the first party-political Prime Minister, and the first Prime Minister to come from outside the original Satsuma-Chōshū-Tosa-Hizen oligarchy. He was sixty-two when he took office. He had spent decades building Seiyūkai into a real political organisation with a real provincial base.

The Hara cabinet ran from September 1918 to November 1921 and is still treated as the high point of Taishō Democracy. He expanded the lower-house electorate by lowering the tax qualification, built railways, expanded universities, and deliberately cultivated the Diet rather than the genrō. He was also a pragmatist who refused to enact universal male suffrage when the lower house pushed for it in 1920. He thought the country was not ready, and he was probably wrong.

On 4 November 1921 Hara was on his way to a party conference in Kyoto and walked into the south concourse of Tokyo Station to board the night train. A nineteen-year-old Ōtsuka switchman named Nakaoka Kon’ichi stepped out of the crowd and stabbed him in the chest with a small dagger. Hara died within minutes. The plaque marking the spot is still there on the floor of Tokyo Station today, in a part of the building most commuters walk straight past.

The Second Taishō Crisis: 1921 to 1925

From late 1921 the political situation slid back toward the oligarchs. Yoshihito’s mental decline had progressed to the point where he could no longer perform basic ceremonial duties, and on 25 November 1921 the Privy Council formally appointed twenty-year-old Hirohito as Sesshō, Prince Regent. From that day on, the Taishō emperor was effectively a private citizen of the imperial household, kept at Hayama or Numazu while his son ran the public side of the throne.

The cabinets after Hara were a parade of caretakers. Takahashi Korekiyo from Seiyūkai lasted seven months. Admiral Katō Tomosaburō ran a non-party cabinet for the first half of 1923 and died in office. Admiral Yamamoto Gonbei came back for a third term in September 1923 specifically to handle the earthquake and resigned at the end of December over an unrelated assassination attempt on the Prince Regent.

What happened politically over those four years is usually told as a story of decline, but it also contained one of the great democratic reforms in Japanese history. In May 1925 the cabinet of Katō Takaaki passed the General Election Law, which extended the vote to all adult Japanese males regardless of tax payment. The electorate jumped from roughly 3 million to roughly 12.4 million in a single bill. It was the first universal male suffrage law in Japanese history.

The catch was that it was passed alongside the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which criminalised any organisation that aimed to alter the kokutai or to abolish private property. The combined package was sold as a balance, suffrage in exchange for security. In practice the Peace Preservation Law became the basic legal tool of state repression for the next twenty years. By the late 1930s the same law would be used to imprison everyone from communist labour organisers to liberal Christian academics.

You can read 1925 as the moment Taishō Democracy peaked and ended at the same time. I think that is roughly right, though I would push the actual end forward to early 1926, when Yoshihito’s health collapsed for the last time and the political class began openly preparing for Hirohito to take the throne. The legal architecture for everything that came afterward, including the wartime mobilisation of the late 1930s, was already on the books.

Marunouchi, Tokyo Station, and the Built Taishō City

If you want to understand what the Taishō city actually looked like, the place to start is Marunouchi. The Mitsubishi corporation had bought the entire square mile of former Edo daimyō residence land in 1890 from the new Meiji government for about a million and a half yen. By the 1910s the company had developed it into a continuous strip of brick offices designed by the British architect Josiah Conder and his Japanese pupils. Locals called the result Itchō Rondon, the One-Block London, because the cornices, sash windows, and mansard roofs all read as Manchester rather than Edo.

Tokyo Station opened on 20 December 1914 at the eastern edge of Marunouchi. Its architect, Tatsuno Kingō, had spent four years studying under William Burges in London in the 1880s and had picked up an enthusiasm for Queen Anne brick that survived twenty-five years of practice in Tokyo. The station building was 335 metres long, three storeys high, and entirely faced in red brick with white granite banding. Tatsuno died in 1919 and never saw it during the firestorm.

The interior decoration was elaborate. The two domed octagonal entrance halls had stained glass and bronze relief panels. The platforms had cast-iron sheltering arcades modelled on Charing Cross. There were separate entrances for first, second, and third class passengers. There was also a separate Imperial Entrance, the Chūō Guchi, designed for the emperor’s use only, and the only people who used it for years were Yoshihito’s son and his European visitors.

The other Marunouchi institution that defined Taishō Tokyo was Mitsukoshi. The dry-goods house had reorganised in 1904 under its young manager Hibi Ōsuke and began calling itself a Western-style department store, the first one in Japan. The Nihonbashi flagship rebuilt in 1914 was Renaissance Revival inside and out. There was a roof garden, a brass band that played at lunchtime, and floor-walkers in formal yōfuku who guided shoppers through the new merchandise grids.

By 1920 Mitsukoshi had been joined on the department-store circuit by Shirokiya, Matsuya in Asakusa, Daimaru in Osaka, Takashimaya, and the Hankyū store in Umeda that the railway magnate Kobayashi Ichizō had pioneered as the world’s first terminal department store in 1929. The format was an export from Selfridges and Le Bon Marché, but the way Japan adapted it created a particular Taishō genre. You went to the depāto not just to buy things but to spend the day, and the buildings were sized for that.

The Moga and Taishō Roman

The single most photographed phenomenon of late Taishō was the moga. Modan gāru, modern girl, was an originally critical category invented by male newspaper columnists in 1923 and 1924 to describe a new type of urban young woman who had bobbed hair, wore Western clothes, smoked in public, drank coffee in cafés, and went to American films alone. The term was meant to be slightly insulting. The women in question adopted it as a description.

The visual catalogue of the moga is fairly tight. Bobbed hair, often called dampatsu, that is, cut hair, with the implication of cropped versus the long hair married women had been wearing for centuries. A cloche hat or beret. A drop-waist or unbelted dress in the dance-era European silhouette. Stockings rather than tabi. Western shoes with low heels. Lipstick. A handbag rather than a sleeve pocket.

What you have to understand about the moga is that the look was geographically restricted. It worked in Ginza, on the Chūō Line west of Shinjuku, in Asakusa Rokku, and in a few discrete places in Yokohama and Osaka. It did not work outside the major cities. A 1925 estimate suggested the total number of women dressing this way in Tokyo was somewhere around two thousand, in a city of around two million. They were over-represented in newspapers because they were photogenic and the newspapers were written by men who liked photographing them.

The companion category was the mobo, modan bōi, modern boy. Same urban geography, same predilection for café culture, similar look, with high-waisted trousers, light flannels, hair parted and slicked back, often wireless rims if not actually wearing glasses. The two figures together became a generational shorthand for everything that worried the older generation. If you read the editorial pages of the Asahi Shimbun for any week in 1928 or 1929 you will find at least one column denouncing the modan tribe.

The cultural label that gathered all of this together is Taishō Roman, Taishō Romanticism, a phrase coined by the literary critic Yamada Bimyō to describe a particular sensibility that ran from roughly 1910 to 1925. Taishō Roman was hybrid by definition, kimono with a Western leather belt, a coffee shop with tatami flooring, a poetry reading conducted half in classical Japanese and half in French. The painter Takehisa Yumeji and the lyricist Kitahara Hakushū are usually treated as the central figures. The aesthetic carried into Showa nostalgia after the war, which is why you can buy Taishō Roman gift-shop kimono in Asakusa today.

If you want to compare the surface tension between yōfuku and kimono in this period, it is worth looking at how those two systems fought it out across thirty years of Taishō and early Shōwa. I have written about the way kimono rank reads at a glance in my guide to Japanese kimono, and the short version is that the Taishō moga were not abandoning the kimono so much as aggressively outranking it with imported finery. The middle-class daughters of the 1920s had two wardrobes, and they switched between them according to the venue.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Imperial Hotel

The Hotel built across the moat from the Imperial Palace by Frank Lloyd Wright is the single best single artefact of Taishō architectural ambition. Wright was not an obvious choice. He was forty-five in 1912, broke after the Mamah Cheney scandal had wrecked his Chicago practice, and known in Japan only because the architect Aisaku Hayashi had visited Taliesin in 1911 and decided this strange American with the long hair was the right person to design the new Imperial Hotel.

The first contract was signed in 1916. Wright moved to Tokyo in late 1917 and stayed, on and off, until 1922. The site was a flat marshland just east of Hibiya Park. The brief was a luxury hotel that had to symbolise modernity, withstand earthquakes, and provide diplomatic-grade accommodation for foreign visitors who were arriving in larger numbers every year as Tokyo became a capital.

The design Wright produced was an eclectic mix of Mayan, Pueblo, and Sezessionist influences, executed in a yellow Ōya stone called ōya-ishi quarried from the volcanic tuff hills near Utsunomiya. The whole thing sat on a thin reinforced-concrete raft that was designed to float on the soft ground rather than try to anchor against it. There were 270 guest rooms grouped around two long parallel wings flanking a central dining hall. The reflecting pool in the front courtyard was deliberately oversized, and Wright would later claim he insisted on it as fire-fighting reservoir.

Construction took six years, ran roughly four times over budget, and bankrupted Wright’s main local sponsor. The hotel formally opened on 1 September 1923. Twelve hours later Tokyo was on fire and Wright’s gamble was about to be tested under exam conditions.

The hotel survived. It was not entirely undamaged, and the legend that Wright cabled from Wisconsin claiming his building had been the only one left standing is roughly two-thirds exaggeration. Some interior plaster cracked, water mains broke, and one wing settled. The structure as a whole, though, came through both the shock and the firestorm largely intact, and the reflecting pool did get used to fight the fire when the city water mains failed. Wright’s reputation in Japan was secured for the rest of his life.

The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1968 to make way for a taller mid-century replacement, which is one of the great architectural losses of post-war Tokyo. The central pavilion, lobby, and reflecting pool were carefully dismantled, transported north, and reassembled at Meiji-Mura, an open-air architectural museum near Inuyama in Aichi prefecture. It is still there. You can still walk into Wright’s lobby, sit in one of his Peacock chairs, and look at the exact ōya-ishi blocks that were standing on 1 September 1923.

The Earthquake

I have left the Kantō earthquake until now even though it is the obvious centrepiece of the era, because you only really feel its weight if you understand what it interrupted. The quake hit at 11 hours, 58 minutes, 32 seconds Tokyo time on 1 September 1923. Modern seismology puts it at moment magnitude 7.9, with epicentre about thirty-five kilometres south of Tokyo in Sagami Bay. Primary shaking lasted between four and ten minutes depending on how you measure aftershocks against the main rupture. Forty-seven seconds of that was severe enough to bring buildings down.

The death toll was not from the shock. Roughly three quarters of the dead burned. The quake hit just before noon as roughly two and a half million households were preparing lunch over open charcoal braziers, and the simultaneous tipping of those braziers into kindling-dry late-summer wood houses produced perhaps two hundred separate ignition points across Tokyo. Within an hour the wind, which was unusually strong because Typhoon Genroku was passing offshore, had forced those points together into a continuous front.

The single worst event of the day happened at the Honjo Army Clothing Depot at around 16:00, when roughly 38,000 refugees who had gathered in what they thought was an open firebreak were caught in a fire whirlwind. Almost all of them died. A fire whirlwind, hi no tatsumaki, is what happens when convective heat is vertical and intense enough to spin into a cyclone. The Honjo whirlwind reached temperatures over 1,200 degrees Celsius. The eyewitness accounts that survived are not material I can rephrase here. If you visit the Yokoamicho Park Memorial Hall today, the basement of the building is the unmarked grave of those people.

The other thing that happened in the chaos was the massacre of Korean residents. In the night of 1 September and the days that followed, false rumours spread that Koreans were poisoning wells, setting fires, and looting. The rumours seem to have been spread partly by army units and partly by the Home Ministry. Citizen self-defence committees, jikeidan, were formed in most neighbourhoods. They turned into mobs.

Korean estimates of the death toll from these vigilante killings range up to about 6,000. Japanese government figures from the time give roughly 230. The truth is probably between 2,500 and 6,000, depending on which Korean and Chinese residents you count. The episode was a genuine atrocity that happened inside one Japanese week, and it was largely written out of the official commemorations of the quake until the 1980s. There is now a memorial stone at Yokoamicho Park, although the wording on it has been the subject of multiple separate political controversies in the last decade.

Yokohama got hit even worse than Tokyo by some measures. Roughly half of the houses in the city collapsed. The reclaimed land of the harbour district liquefied. Foreign residents who had survived the shaking watched the bluff above the bay slide into the sea. By the second day of fires the city was unrecognisable, and the Imperial Japanese Navy was using its destroyers as evacuation transports for survivors.

The Reconstruction

The man who tried to redraw Tokyo after the quake was Gotō Shinpei. He had been mayor of Tokyo from 1920 to 1923, was Home Minister in the Yamamoto Gonbei cabinet that was sworn in two days after the disaster, and had spent his pre-political career as a Kodansha-trained physician and the head of civil administration in colonial Taiwan. He believed in scientific city planning the way some people believe in religion.

Gotō’s plan called for thirteen billion yen of reconstruction spending, the demolition of large parts of the unburned old city as well, a complete redrawing of the road grid, the creation of new wide boulevards, and a long list of public parks. The Diet authorised about a tenth of what he asked for. Landowners refused to surrender frontages. The Diet was openly hostile to anything that looked like socialism, and Gotō had the misfortune of speaking in technical terms that landowners read as socialism.

What did get built mattered. The Shōwa-dōri running north to south through eastern Tokyo was a Gotō boulevard. So was the Yasukuni-dōri running east to west. Hibiya Park was reorganised. The Sumida riverfront was redesigned with bridges by the engineer Tanaka Hideto. Several new firebreaks were added. Almost all of these structures survived the 1945 firebombing in some form because they were the only wide enough public spaces in the city.

The other thing the reconstruction did was move the centre of cultural Tokyo decisively west. Asakusa had been the entertainment district of late Edo and Meiji, and it had been hit hard. Western parts of the city, especially Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro, suddenly mattered more because they had survived. New private railway lines, especially the Odakyū line opened in 1927 and the Tōyoko line in 1926, ran through these new western suburbs. They began to pull commuters and shoppers and entertainment with them.

Asakusa, Cinema, and Radio

Even after the quake Asakusa remained the dense entertainment district that had been built up since the late Tokugawa. The Rokku, Sixth District, was its theatre quarter. In the 1920s it housed cabarets, vaudeville, kabuki, the Casino Folies revue, the Asakusa Opera, and roughly thirty cinemas at peak. The novelist Kawabata Yasunari rented a room in Asakusa during 1929 and 1930 to write Asakusa Kurenaidan, the Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which is still the best fictional account of what the place felt like.

The cinema industry took off in this exact window. The first commercial film studio in Japan, the Yokohama Cinema Company, had opened in 1909. By the early 1920s Nikkatsu was running studios in Mukōjima east of Tokyo and had been joined by Shōchiku, founded in 1920. Kabuki actors crossed over into film. The benshi, the live narrator standing beside the screen, was the central figure in early Japanese silent cinema and a star in his own right.

The director Mizoguchi Kenji made his first film in 1923. The director Ozu Yasujirō was an apprentice at Shōchiku Kamata in 1923 and made his first film in 1927. Both of them developed their early style inside the Taishō and very early Shōwa period, in the shadow of theatres that had been rebuilt from quake rubble. By 1930 the Japanese film industry was producing more films per year than any other country except the United States.

Radio arrived in 1925. NHK, then called Tōkyō Hōsōkyoku, made its first experimental broadcast on 22 March 1925 from a studio in the Shibaura district of Tokyo. By July it had merged with the new Osaka and Nagoya stations to form Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, NHK proper, with the British-style public broadcasting model that has run continuously to the present day. Radio licences passed one million by 1932. The Showa era inherited a country that already listened to a single nationally synchronised voice.

Café culture is the other thing that became permanent in Taishō. The first coffeehouse, Kahiichakan, had opened in Ueno in 1888. The Café Lion in Ginza opened in 1911. By 1923 there were several thousand cafés in greater Tokyo, ranging from intellectual hangouts like Café Paulista in Ginza, where Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote, to the so-called erotic cafés where the staff were waitresses in elaborate yōfuku and the menu was as much performance as drink. The kissaten, the music coffee shop, evolved out of the Café Paulista lineage and is still the Japanese-only café format that survives today.

Literature, Magazines, and the Print Boom

Taishō was a print era as much as a building era. The publishing house Iwanami Shoten was founded in 1913 and published the philosopher Nishida Kitarō and the novelist Natsume Sōseki. The Kōdansha publishing empire began publishing King magazine in 1925, which sold a million copies a month inside two years and became the template for mass middle-class magazines for the rest of the century. Newspapers consolidated into the four big houses, Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi, and Tōkyō Nichi-Nichi.

The literary movement called Shirakaba, the White Birch Society, ran from 1910 through the 1920s and produced writers like Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, and Arishima Takeo. They were aristocratic, interested in Tolstoy, and committed to a kind of ethical idealism that read as countercultural inside the older Meiji literary establishment. By the late Taishō the so-called Shinkankaku-ha, New Sensation School, had begun to displace them with a more avant-garde, more European modernist style. Yokomitsu Riichi and the very young Kawabata Yasunari were the central figures.

The genre that retroactively defines the era for a lot of Japanese readers is ero-guro-nansensu, eroticism, the grotesque, and nonsense. Edogawa Rampo, who started publishing detective stories in 1923, is the canonical writer. His tales of suburban madness were direct descendants of the Taishō café modernism that had created the audience for that kind of thing.

The End of the Era

Yoshihito’s last public appearance was at the Diet opening on 4 December 1923, three months after the quake. He was visibly disoriented and read his prepared remarks badly. The court withdrew him from public life immediately afterward. He spent his last three years almost entirely at the imperial villa at Hayama, on the Sagami Bay coast, with his wife Sadako and his closest doctors.

He died on the morning of 25 December 1926 at age forty-seven. The era name changed at the moment of his death. Hirohito, who had been Sesshō for five years and three months by then, was twenty-five. The first Showa newspaper editions were on the streets within hours, with new mastheads and new black-and-white era charts in the back pages.

It is fashionable now to read Taishō as an interrupted democracy. I think that is partially right. The 1925 universal male suffrage law was a real step, the Hara cabinet was a real precedent, and the rise of authoritarian government in the 1930s was not inevitable in 1925. The people who lived through Taishō did not yet know they were living through a doomed liberal moment.

What they did know was that something very strange and visible had happened to the texture of urban life. There were neon signs in Ginza by 1923. There were bobbed-haired women in cafés. There was the country’s first underground railway, the Ginza Line, opened in December 1927 between Asakusa and Ueno. Urbanisation, mass print, female literacy, and consumer credit had arrived together in a fifteen-year window.

Where to See Taishō Today

If you want to walk through what is left of Taishō Tokyo, the route I would recommend has six stops and takes most of a day. The starting point is the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station. Tatsuno Kingō’s 1914 building was burned by incendiary bombs in May 1945, lost its third storey and the original dome roofs in the post-war rebuild, and was finally restored to its original profile between 2007 and 2012. The restoration is unusually faithful and uses the same Manchester brick. Stand on the central plaza and you are looking at the closest thing modern Tokyo has to a pre-quake building still on its original site.

From Tokyo Station, walk north to Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi. The current building dates from 1935, after the original 1914 store was damaged in the quake and rebuilt. The bronze lions out front have been there since 1914. The roof garden still works. The basement food hall is the lineal descendant of the 1920s depachika that Hibi Ōsuke pioneered.

The third stop is Yokoamicho Park in Sumida ward, which is the formal memorial park for the 1923 quake. It was opened in 1930 on the site of the burned army clothing depot. The Memorial Hall, designed by the architect Itō Chūta in a heavy mock-Buddhist style, contains the bones of an estimated 58,000 victims of both the 1923 quake and the 1945 firebombing. The memorial bell rings annually at 11 hours, 58 minutes on 1 September. The Korean memorial stone is in a separate part of the park and is worth finding.

The fourth stop is the Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum at Koganei, an hour west by Chūō Line. The museum, opened in 1993, has reassembled around thirty real Edo, Meiji, and Taishō buildings on a single park-like site. The Taishō exhibits include the De Lalande House from 1910, the Mitsui-related Maeda Marquis residence, and several preserved shitamachi shop fronts. The point of the place is that you can walk inside actual rooms that were lived in during Taishō.

The fifth stop is across the country, in Aichi prefecture. Meiji-Mura at Inuyama is the open-air museum that received Wright’s rescued Imperial Hotel in 1968. The reassembled lobby, central hall, and reflecting pool are the only place in the world where you can sit inside Wright’s hotel as a working interior. Even allowing for the partial nature of the reassembly, it is the single most affecting Taishō survival in Japan.

The sixth stop is Yokohama Akarenga, the Red Brick Warehouses on the Yokohama waterfront. The two warehouses date from 1911 and 1913 and survived the 1923 quake with damage that was repaired in the late 1920s. They were used as customs houses for most of the twentieth century, sat derelict between 1989 and 2002, and were renovated as a shopping and event complex that has since become one of the most visited tourist sites in Yokohama. The brick is original. The cast-iron interior columns are original. The crane bays are original.

Travel Practicalities

The Marunouchi station precinct is open continuously, but the best photographs come from the south side of the central plaza around fifteen minutes after sunrise. The plaza side has a Starbucks in the KITTE building if you need coffee before opening hours.

Yokoamicho Park is a ten-minute walk from Ryōgoku Station on the JR Sōbu line. The Memorial Hall is open daily 09:00 to 16:30, closed on Mondays, free entry. The annual 1 September commemoration ceremony is open to the public but the museum itself is at capacity from 09:00 onward.

The Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum is roughly an hour from central Tokyo, with the last leg by Seibu bus from Musashi-Koganei station on the Chūō line. Open 09:30 to 17:30, closed Mondays, ticket about ¥400. Plan three hours, and the on-site soba restaurant in the Takei Sanshōdō building is genuinely good.

Meiji-Mura at Inuyama is about thirty kilometres north of Nagoya, reached by the Meitetsu Inuyama Line and the Gifu Bus from the south exit. Open 09:30 to 17:00 in summer, 09:30 to 16:00 in winter. The Imperial Hotel reassembly is the showpiece, but the Kyoto St Francis Xavier Cathedral and the original Kanazawa prison also justify a full day.

Yokohama Akarenga is a fifteen-minute walk from Bashamichi Station on the Minatomirai Line. The warehouses are open until 23:00, with most shops closing at 19:00 or 20:00. The summer beer garden runs late June to September.

How Taishō Connects to What Came Before and After

Taishō is not the first time Japan reinvented its capital. Edo had been built in similar leaps under the Tokugawa, and the parallel attendance system that drove the alternate-year movement of daimyō from their domains to the city had funded much of the original urban infrastructure. I have written separately about how sankin-kōtai shaped the country, and the short version is that it was the original engine of the road network, the inn culture, and the consumer city that Taishō then re-energised under different management.

The parallels with the Meiji era are even more direct. The institutional architecture of imperial Japan, the new constitution, the national army, the public schools, the imperial palace built on the bones of the old shogun’s castle, all of it had been laid down in Meiji. If you want the prequel to Taishō, the place to start is my essay on the Meiji era. The transition from one to the other in 1912 was generationally smooth in a way that the transition out of Taishō into Showa, fourteen years later, decisively was not.

For the sequel, look at the Showa era, which inherited everything Taishō had built and put it into the service of a different politics. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law that I have been calling a foundation stone of authoritarian creep got used to its full ugly extent in Showa. The Showa-dōri boulevard that Gotō Shinpei built kept its name through the regime change for the obvious reason that it was named after the new emperor.

The deeper backdrop is the Edo city itself, the place that 1923 destroyed and that Taishō’s reconstruction tried to remake in an Italian-French-American key. I have written about the Edo era and the city it built elsewhere, and the comparison I would draw with Taishō is that both periods saw their capital remade after a catastrophic fire. The 1657 Meireki fire took most of Edo and produced the late-Tokugawa city. The 1923 fire took most of late-Meiji Tokyo and produced the early Showa city.

The cultural continuity that sometimes gets missed is the way classical Japanese arts adapted rather than disappeared during Taishō. The tea ceremony, for example, did not die in the face of café modernism. It became a portable amateur practice, increasingly framed as middle-class women’s accomplishment, and the schools that defined it consolidated their teaching certifications during exactly this period. My piece on Chadō and Sen no Rikyū covers the deep history. The Taishō chapter of that history is essentially when the chasen showed up next to the espresso machine in the same household.

The same kind of continuity-with-modernisation runs through Japanese gardens. My visitor’s guide to Japan’s greatest gardens covers the daimyō kaiyū circuit-style gardens that defined Edo and Meiji. The Taishō contribution to that lineage was less about new garden building and more about public access. Hama-rikyū, originally a Tokugawa duck-hunting park, was opened to the imperial family in Meiji and only opened to the public in 1946, but the cultural campaign to make great gardens public goods rather than aristocratic ones started in late Taishō. Rikugi-en became a public park in 1938 because of paperwork that had been initiated in Taishō.

The same is true of Edo Castle and the modern Imperial Palace. The transformation into a Western-influenced imperial residence was a Meiji project. The Taishō contribution was the gardens, the new central library, and the inner moat reconfiguration, and by 1925 the palace looked the way it would until the 1945 air raids.

What I Take from Taishō

The most useful thing I have learned from spending time with this era is that it is a story about what happens when a country tries to modernise three different domains at once. Politics, daily life, and city form all changed simultaneously between 1912 and 1923, and the change was driven less by a single agent than by an accumulation of small decisions. The First World War was an external accelerator. The 1923 quake was an external interrupter. Almost everything else came from inside the society.

The other thing I take from Taishō is that the moment of greatest cultural openness is sometimes immediately followed by the moment of greatest cultural backlash. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law and the 1925 Universal Male Suffrage Law were passed by the same Diet, the same week, by the same cabinet. The country that gave you the Moga in Ginza was also building the legal apparatus that would imprison her brother by 1934.

If you are visiting Tokyo and have a day for the era, my recommendation is: morning at Tokyo Station, afternoon at Yokoamicho Park, evening at any Ginza kissaten that has been running since the 1920s. The Café de l’Ambre in Ginza Hachi-chōme is one. The Café Paulista is another. You will not be drinking the coffee Akutagawa drank, exactly. You will be sitting in roughly the kind of room he sat in, and that is a fair definition of what survives of Taishō.