find that the anatomical plates in the Dutch book were a true representation of the human internal organs. By 1774 Ryotaku had translated the Dutch work and thereby set Japanese medicine in new directions over the next century. With his appetite for more “esoteric” Western knowledge whetted, he mastered the Dutch language and went on to translate works on geography, military matters, and astronomy. This interest in Dutch learning (rangaku) was to expand among a group of Edo scholars, and thus the 19th century saw a gradual broadening of Japanese views. In 1826 Philipp Franz van Siebold was the first foreigner to teach modern European medical practices in Japan, and the revolution in the knowledge of modern medicine gathered steam.
Time moved on, and in 1858 another retainer of the Matsudaira clan, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), was asked to open a school of Western learning on the clan property in Tsukiji. His students followed Dutch studies at first, but they then moved on to studies in English. Within a decade his school became the forerunner of Keio University, which today is south of Tsukiji in the Mita area of Tokyo. With the demise of the Tokugawa shogun’s rule in 1868, the daimyo moved back to their estates and abandoned their Edo holdings, which in many cases were seized by the Meiji government. The Tsukiji area was not much in demand, since it was isolated from Ginza by various canals, and its space became known as the Navy Meadow, for the naval installation that existed here between 1858 and 1888. The Meiji government after 1868 was not happy with the unequal treaties forced upon Japan under the Tokugawa, and if Japan had to have foreigners in its midst, what better place to put them than in the comparatively isolated Tsukiji sector that had been abandoned by the daimyo?
To entice the foreigners to this somewhat out-of-the-way area, the government held out certain inducements. To begin with, they built a three-story hotel of 200 rooms. Since the foreigners ungraciously preferred to live in Yokohama, the hotel had to be sold to a Japanese entrepreneur four years after it was built. This grand if unsuccessful hostelry burned to the ground in 1872. Wooden houses of a vaguely Western nature were built for the foreigners who served in the legations and missionary enterprises that developed in Tsukiji. The American legation was here as well, and it remained until the extraterritorial status ended in 1899 and an embassy was set up in the Toranomon area of the city.
For the benefit of the foreigners, the Meiji government even established a new Shimabara in the Shintomicho district, the area that in time would be occupied by the first Kabuki theater. Shimabara was the licensed, red-light district in Kyoto, and the new Shimabara brothel area in Edo had 84 teahouses, where one made an appointment to meet the more respectable geisha. It is said that there were 1,700 courtesans in 130 brothels aside from the 200 geisha (21 of them male) in 200 establishments—if these figures can be believed. Unfortunately the government did not realize that the few foreigners who were settling in the Tsukiji area were mostly Protestant missionaries, and thus the government’s gracious accommodations found few foreign takers. The new Shimabara experiment folded in 1870, within one year of its creation. So much for one of the first major enterprises of the Meiji government.
Missionaries, teachers, and missionary physicians began to appear in Tsukiji. One such Presbyterian missionary from Scotland, from 1874 to 1887, was Henry Faulds, who opened a hospital close to the river. He noted that the illiterate among the Japanese used the print of their thumb for identification on documents. His scholarly paper concerning this discovery, which he submitted to the British journal Nature in 1880, led in time to the use of fingerprints as a source of identification for criminals in the West. Besides Fauld’s hospital, schools and other medical facilities were established in this area by Western missionaries. One of them was to eventuate into Rikkyo University (now in Ikebukuro) and another into Aoyama Gakuin University (now in the Aoyama-Omotesando area).
The abolition of the unequal treaties led to a move by foreigners out of the Tsukiji area after 1900, and the earthquake of 1923 brought a temporary end to this sector as a residential area. One great reminder of the Western presence today is St. Luke’s International Hospital, whose first buildings were replaced in 1933 and which has undergone modernization and expansion since the 1980s. St. Luke’s was started in 1902 by Dr. Rudolf Teusler from Virginia, an Episcopal missionary. Unlike other Western-style hospitals in Tokyo, its records were kept in English rather than German. The Meiji government had previously turned to German medical schools and hospitals as a model for medical Westernization. The 1932 building was designed with colorful tile decorations by an American architect in the Art Nouveau style, and its tower was topped with a cross. An inscription at one entrance notes that the hospital was an endeavor of Christianity in Japan. New buildings were constructed in the 1990s to meet the needs of modern medicine, and they occupy a major portion of Tsukiji just beyond the Tsukada-jima Bridge, creating a luxury area in which two skyscrapers, comprising the St. Luke’s Tower, offer residential apartments for St. Luke’s Hospital as well as a hotel, shops, and offices.
After crossing the bridge from Tsukadajima, the first major cross street should be taken to the left. At the beginning of the second street is a small granite memorial to Henry Faulds, noting that “Dr. Henry Faulds, pioneer in fingerprint identification, lived here from 1874 to 1884.” A small bubbling fountain behind the stone sends water coursing down a tiny channel along the sidewalk. The original American legation sat on the left in this second block from the bridge; the site is now covered by the twin high-rise buildings mentioned above. The area on the west of these twin towers was the location of the foreigner’s settlement. Ahead on this street paralleling the river, in the Akatsuki Koen, is a bust to Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796– 1866) who came to Edo as early as 1826 and gave lessons in medicine and surgery. A plaque dated June 18, 1988, next to the bust of Siebold explains that the memorial was presented to Chuo ward by Leiden University of the Netherlands and by the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation in cooperation with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The park has lovely fountains and a delightful children’s playground.
Going back one street to the end of the block on which the twin towers mentioned above are located and turning to the left (away from the river), one comes upon a tiny triangular plot named the Nihon Kindai Bunka Koto Hajime-no-Chi (Cradle of Modern Japanese Culture). Two memorial stones erected in 1958 commemorate those Japanese who lived or worked here and brought Western knowledge to Japan. The larger stone to the rear, depicting an illustration from an anatomy book, is to Maeno Ryotaku and Sugita Genpaku and their associate Nakagawa Junen, who translated the first Dutch textbook on anatomy between 1771 and 1774. The second stone is to Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose 1858 private classes for the Matsudaira clan led in time to the formation of Keio University. Inscribed in the stone book are Fukuzawa’s words, “Heaven created no man above another nor below.” This egalitarian sentiment no doubt was a part of the reason that in 1901 the Meiji government would not permit Fukuzawa and his wife to be buried in the graveyard of Fukuzawa’s family temple—for it was too near the Imperial Palace. This spiteful action was remedied in 1950 by the moving of their remains to the family temple graveyard. Another stone commemorates the fact that: “Here Dutch Studies Began.”
The buildings of St. Luke’s Hospital, begun by Dr. Rudolf Teusler in 1901, cover much of this area. Teusler not only introduced American medical approaches to health care, but he was concerned that his hospital offer medical care to all classes of society and not just the former samurai or Meiji official class. Curiously, opposite the entrance to St. Luke’s in times past was the residence of Lord Asano, the unfortunate daimyo whose followers gained notoriety after his death as the 47 Ronin. On his disgrace, his lands were transferred to the Matsudaira clan.
5 TSUKIJI HONGAN-JI TEMPLE
Continuing southwest from St. Luke’s Tower and the Faulds Monument, walking almost parallel to the Sumida River, the road comes to Harumi-dori, where a right turn leads in about 300 yards to the Tsukiji Hongan-ji Temple, an unusual-looking structure reminiscent of the architecture of India. The temple is a branch of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Amida Buddhism, at one time a militarily powerful religious group. In their Osaka headquarters in the mid-1500s, they were able to stand off Oda Nobunaga and his troops when he was the leading general as well as the civil ruler of Japan. In the 1590s Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunaga’s successor and Tokugawa Ieyasu’s predecessor, disarmed the
