A Story of Fukagawa

Ozu — born forty-three metres away

Yasujiro Ozu was born here on 12 December 1903.

His family ran a wholesale business under the name Yuasaya, dealing in dried seafood and fertiliser. They had moved to Fukagawa from Nihonbashi in 1834 and, by the time Ozu was born, held a good deal of land in the neighbourhood.

Fish again. Remember that.

He left at the age of ten for Matsusaka, the family's home town. He came back to Tokyo in 1923 and took a job as an assistant cameraman at the Shochiku studio in Kamata. Four years later, at twenty-three, he was directing.

He made fifty-four films. Late Spring. Early Summer. Tokyo Story. If you have seen one, you will remember the camera: placed low, at the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami floor, holding still while people come and go. He filmed families gathering, and families coming apart, over and over, for thirty-five years.

An Autumn Afternoon, in 1962, was his last.

He died on 12 December 1963, his sixtieth birthday — the same date he was born.

His reputation abroad grew mostly after his death. Alongside that 2012 directors' poll, Tokyo Story placed third in the critics' poll the same year, and fourth in 2022. The directors who voted for it included Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino.

The plaque marking the place he was born stands a forty-second walk from the front door.

Basho — where the road north began

Matsuo Basho is the reason haiku exists as we know it — the seventeen-syllable form that has since been written in almost every language on earth. He moved to Fukagawa in 1680, leaving the noise of central Edo for the marshy east bank of the Sumida River.

A student gave him a banana plant. The Japanese word for it is basho. It took root beside his hut, the hut became known as the Basho Hut, and in time the poet took the name for himself. Until he came to this neighbourhood, Basho was not yet Basho.

古池や　蛙飛びこむ　水の音

furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

The old pond — a frog jumps in, the sound of water.

He wrote it here. It is probably the single most quoted poem in Japanese, and people are still arguing about what it means.

In 1689 he decided to walk north, into what was then the remote and half-known interior of the country. The book he made of that journey is Oku no Hosomichi — usually given in English as The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Before leaving he gave up his hut. He did not expect to come back.

For the last stretch before departure he stayed at Saitoan, the retreat of his student Sugiyama Sampu. Sampu was a fish wholesaler and a serious poet, counted among Basho's ten principal disciples — a friend in verse, and also the man who paid for things. The fish trade of Fukagawa financed the most famous journey in Japanese literature.

He said his goodbyes, took a boat up the Sumida, came ashore at Senju and started walking.

行く春や　鳥啼き魚の目は泪

yuku haru ya / tori naki uo no / me wa namida

Spring is going — the birds cry out, and there are tears in the eyes of the fish.

Nobody knows exactly where Saitoan stood. A document left by Sampu's son-in-law places it at the “north corner of Motokiba Hirano-cho”, which points to this block. In 1981 the ward registered the whole area as a historic site.

Today a bronze Basho sits at the foot of Umibebashi bridge, dressed for the road, resting on the edge of a veranda. The hut itself is thought to have stood about a hundred and forty metres to the south-west of him.

From that bridge, the canal wall runs west as the Basho Haiku Walk: his poems set along the water in the order he wrote them on the journey. Walking it, you follow the route of the book.

A town of water and boats

If one thing connects the poet and the director, it is water.

Fukagawa was built on it. In the Edo period the bay came much further inland than it does now, and at low tide the sandbanks off this shore gave up clams by the basketful. Fishermen cooked them on board — clams and spring onion simmered briefly in miso, poured over rice, broth and all. That is where fukagawa-meshi comes from, and you can still order it a few streets away.

That fish money reached Basho through Sampu. The same trade built the house Ozu was born into. And Basho left by boat.

Later, in 1878, Yataro Iwasaki — the founder of Mitsubishi — bought some ten hectares here and built a garden. He had famous stones brought in from all over Japan by Mitsubishi steamship, and floated them in through a channel off the Sumida, directly into the grounds. That garden is Kiyosumi, and it is a five-minute walk away: a pond you walk around, crossed by a line of stepping stones set just above the water.

Even the rocks arrived by boat.

Festivals and faith

Ten minutes south is Tomioka Hachimangu, founded in 1627 and the largest Hachiman shrine in Edo.

In 1684 the authorities licensed the shrine to hold public sumo in its grounds. Professional sumo as Japan knows it started on this spot. A monument to the grand champions stands in the precinct, and newly promoted yokozuna still perform their first ring-entering ceremony here.

Every third year the shrine holds the Fukagawa Hachiman Festival, one of the three great festivals of old Edo: more than fifty portable shrines carried through the streets while the crowd throws buckets of water over the bearers. It is known, reasonably enough, as the Water-Throwing Festival.

Next door is Fukagawa Fudodo, a Buddhist temple — the Tokyo branch of Naritasan. Several times a day the monks burn cedar sticks in a fire ritual, to a wall of drums. You do not need to know what is being said to find it worth twenty minutes.