Japan 100 years ago in 1919, and the telephone challenges....
Hasn't the world changed in many respects?
Now we all have challenges with the internet!
JAPAN'S METROPOLIS.
OF TOKIO. ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT CITIES. A PALACE AND ITS ENVIRONMENT.
[By ADAM M'CAY, Special Commissioner of "The Sun," Sydney, and "The Herald,' Melbourne.] XVI. (Copyright.)
TOKIO, JAPAN, May 25 1919
In a curious way one "feels" the metropolis of a country when he has come into it. I had better not say whether the Australian or visitor to Australia has this feeling in Sydney or in Melbourne, but it does come to him in one of those cities. After a very few days in Tokio the "metropolitan feeling" is definite and deep. There is more energetic manufacturing energy in Osaka, and Kobe has now much more shipping and a greater population than the port of Yokohama; but if Osaka be called Manchester and Kobe be called Liverpool, Tokio will have to be called London. It will be the London of Asia.
There is fascination in trying to get the spirit of this great city in some of its innumerable facets; to touch the pulse of great politics, to sense the continental and international finance which daily undertakes vast projects for the future management of Asia; to appreciate how the influences of the whole planet can touch one another in a (quiet dinner at the Tokio Club; to understand how art and elegance and luxury are steadily detaching themselves" from their historic centres in Japan, to be concentrated more and more in the premier city of all. Then a new fascination comes, in seeking to penetrate the humbler life in such an aggregalion" of humanity; in finding a way through manufacturing districts, and threading a course through slums; in taking a' river boat and being punted d'own the stream through a new and unguessed city, whose inhabitants dwell (day and night, year after year, on the black and evilsmelling water.
Tokio is a city of long distances, rendered stately by the very fact which makes perpetually inconvenient the movement of its daily intercourse, commercial and social. The centre is the Imperial Palace, secluded in majesty behind the imposing moat and wall which enclose the palace grounds. After the Restoration, a great part of this noble domain was given over to the use of the nation, but even that area which the Emperor no longer retains is not a collection of shops and side streets; it still bears half the character of a part, woven with splendid avenues, beside which are built dignified public offices, and the handsome residences of ambassadors. In days past in Japan a prince, daimio or emperor set his castle or palace on the high ground of a city, and his adoring subjects dwelt in a circle round that sacred ground with its wall of soldiers. Even nowadays, therefore, to move from point to point in Tokio one cannot drive as straight as the aeroplane flies, but must skirt the great palace as he goes. Eithier you radiate from the palace, or (so to speak) you circumnavigate it in tram or rickshaw, or automobile.
Dwellers in Tokio complain that it is too flat, and it is a city of the plain, but the Imperial household has not taken all its rising ground. either for Emperor or for Prince. Often, indeed, you come to a locality which makes you say, "This is where I should live in Tokio if I were wealthy enough, and untroubled by the cost of petrol and and 'rubber" —and behold, just in 'he location which you would choose there are sentry-boxes at a big gate, and an Imperial Prince occupies the desirable building block you would have selected. But rich foreign merchants have also found elevated places on which to raise fine mansions, and even for men of moderate fortune the city offers charming suburban districts, with quaint Japanese or semi-Japanese houses, dowered as often as not with one of those lovely little landscape gardens in which Japan shows exquisite artistic skill.
The foreign section of Yokohama says certain superior things regarding Tokio. and even the foreign section of Tokio has certain words of admiration for Yokohama. In Yokohama there are bigger department stores, for example, and if you want to buy what comes from London or Paris, you may leave Tokio, with its 2,000,000 people, to shop in Yokohama, .with its 500.000. Yokohama has been so long the foreign headquarters in Japan. But the headquarters of many a business is transferring to the metropolis, and before long Yokohama will have to make unquestioning confession that in every respect, foreign or Japanese, it merely lives on the outskirts of the real city.
Tokio dust and Tokio mud. Every big city in Japan gives you offerings of dust and mud in its streets, but Tokio gives them in greater munilicence, because it has wider streets and more of them. In a Tokio street, outside some main thoroughfares you are less likely to find a footpath than in Yokohama. On a windy day in Tokio you are in danger of being suffocated. On a wet day you are certain to become ashamed of your boots, though you have only a few yards to walk." But not all the grit and slush can destroy this city's essential splendour. How one would love to know it as well as he knows his home city! The "Tokio feeding," I am sure, is the same as the London feeling or the Paris feeling. At any rate, I know the feelings of one visitor to Tokio; he does not know how he is going to tear himself away from it.
In the lovely region of Mlyano**bleep**a and Hakone, where we hung on for 30 hours and saw nothing but mountain mist, some tourists who were ahead of us in point of time, said: "There is nothing to see in Tokio." Nothing? There is everything; and the perfect experience of Japan, apart from travel through it's scenic beauties, would be to work in Tokio for a few years. One envies the foreign journalists here; but they in their turn envy even the Australians, because Sydney and Melbourne are big British cities* for which they have learned to pine.
Only one thing could drive a man out of Tokio, vowing never to return. That is the Tokio telephone; but the telephone is the same all through Japan. Let a copy of this article be sent to Mr Webster in Australia: in the search for new things there has been found a telephone
system worse conducted than his. To raise a man on the 'phone is a work of infinite energy and patience. The girl who calls up from your office and the girl who replies from the exchange are the two most voluble girls in all the world. Each of them speaks one thousand staccato syllables to the minute, and they "speak their piece" together. At the end of 25 minutes you learn that the number is engaged. But it is a point of honour in Tokio not to acknowledge defeat after one repulse by the telephone. You determine to devote the whole morning to the assault, and after half an hour you try again. Twenty minutes of loquacity go by, and you are informed, "Here is Smith San." You speak. You say, "Hello, Smith San." He answers, ''Hello." The rest is silence. You get the chit book and the chit boy, and send a letter by hand.
The quickest method is to have no telephone, and if you haven't got one already you are not likely to get one. For some reason which nobody will divulge, new telephones will not be granted; but when a 'phone falls vacant, you may buy it. Just now, the price of an installation in Tokio is anything from £2OO to £3OO. But this is an investment, not a loss. After buying the right to install, you may reasonably enough expect to sell it at a profit. Conditions are similar everywhere in Japan, and no one knows why. I have just heard of a man who waited years for his 'phone, and at last was told that he could have it for £l5O. But by this time he was dead, and the lines had not been carried as far as his new place of residence.
Trams in Tokio are always crowded, and they are dormitories besides being trams. Sixty per cent, of the Japanese who enter a tram—rather anaemic and lowly-vitalised they seem—go to sleep as soon as they have bought tickets and transfers. Even the strap-hangers are able to take a little snooze. And because the trams must run in circles round the palace grounds and park, instead of running straight to a destination, you usually change trams once or twice in going to a suburban home. The expert 40winkers in Tokio can sleep three times in one journey, and never miss the street corner at which it is necessary to wake up.
Osaka is a great and wonderful city for manufactures, and perhaps I give it this exclusive interest for lack of acquaintance, because I visited it specially for the examination of factory methods and conditions. But in Osaka the hotel dining-room certainly had the commercial look—you had the intuition that men were talking business, not "haute politique," nor the quintessence of social gossip. In Kobe there was too much evidence of trade jealousy, that city is the port of foreign commerce, having definitely beaten Yokohama, and the foreign trading community, which once had everything its own way, doesn't relish the manner in which the Japanese have "butted in" to take things for themselves. In this effort, Japan took many lessons from Germany, and in trade privileges—even in trade lawsuits—the favours go to the Japanese, not to the foreigners. One could sometimes grow a little tired of a Kobe man telling all the demerits of Japan —of "these fellows who believe in everything for themselves and nothing for anybody else." Assuredly the Japanese have something of the fault of the Dutch. They give too little and ask too much in the matters of commerce. Yet in Kobe there were signs of a rigid little foreign community holding aloof from Japan, and thereby narrowing its own mind to some degree.
Tokio is different from both Osaka and Kobe. It is more flnancial than commercial, and finance is lord and master of commerce. The standard of its politics is fixed by diplomacy, not by jealousies. Its great club is the social meeting-place of all leading men—whether they be commercial and financial magnates or directors of journalism, or foreign ambassadors, or Japanese peers and princes. So, Tokio is more than a city of Japan. It is a metropolis. It is in the great circuit of world cities.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SUNCH19190807.2.34
