The instruments came from wherever they could be found. A foreign circus called Chiarini was leaving Japan, so the founders bought up its cornets, French horns, trombones and basses, collecting them from a cheap Yokohama hotel known as the Chabu Ya, or ‘Chop Inn’, a lodging house for circus performers, sailors and travelling Westerners. When they still came up short, they asked an acquaintance bound for Shanghai to buy more there. For uniforms they chose a glittering gold French style and put it together piece by piece, because they could not afford the whole outfit at once.

This was the Tokyo Shichū Ongakukai, the Tokyo City Band. By the following spring, it was already performing publicly. Almost everything we know about it comes from an interview that Ikeda Tatsugorō, one of its founders, gave to a music magazine in 1942, half a century on. While it must be read critically, this source offers a rare glimpse into the world of Meiji-era commercial musicians, and what it reveals rarely makes the textbooks.

What the textbooks leave out

The familiar account centres on the state. Western marches arrived with foreign troops from the 1850s. Missionaries brought hymn singing once the ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873. From 1878 the government mandated song lessons in primary schools and set up the body that became the Tokyo Academy of Music. All of this built the infrastructure. It explains far less about how ordinary people came to enjoy the stuff.

Demand grew in places the state had not planned for. Weddings, garden parties, shop openings, sporting events and vaudeville shows all wanted music, and by the 1880s the appetite for it had outrun what the official military ensembles could supply. Retired military musicians, pushed out as the armed forces professionalised, saw the gap. They had the training and could get the instruments. They formed bands as commercial ventures, played for hire, and turned a parade-ground skill into paid entertainment.

Building the band

The Tokyo Shichū Ongakukai was among the first and most ambitious of these ventures. In 1888 it was incorporated as a joint-stock company and attracted investment from twenty-five shareholders. Among them was Shibusawa Eiichi, the industrialist often called the father of Japanese capitalism. Its capital of 10,000 yen was, in Ikeda’s words, ‘a very large amount at the time’, and within about a year the band had returned nearly three times the investment. Part of that came down to controlling costs. Of thirty-two members, twenty-six were unpaid students.

The founders wanted a Western face at the front, and the search produced one comic failure before it yielded success. Their first hire, an American cornet player named R.S. George whom they had met at the Chop Inn, turned out to be unable to read music or conduct. They took him on regardless, apparently because a foreigner lent the band a certain authenticity. He lasted a month before he ‘could not stand living’ in Tokyo and quit. Their second choice, an Italian called Lizetti, was the real thing. He led the band while playing the cornet and, through his connections, won it a contract to play four times a month at Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, the grandest address on the waterfront. The same musicians who dealt in the shabby world of the circus and the Chop Inn now played its chandeliered rooms, and it was the Japanese players who decided whether a Westerner was good enough to hire.

What audiences wanted

What the audiences wanted shaped what the band played. They ran through marches by Sousa and Pryor and numbers from the comic opera Geisha, but according to Ikeda, one piece stood out above the rest. ‘Hiawatha went down very well,’ he recalled. ‘No march was as well received as that. We had encore after encore.’ Each encore had a price. An audience paid around ten yen to get one, and on a single night the band took 300 yen in encore fees. Western music had become something people queued up and paid extra to hear again.

Success bred friction. Living and travelling together day after day wore on a group of proud and talented men, and tensions eventually boiled over into what Ikeda delicately called ‘a clash of feelings’. The band split. Ikeda and others founded a rival outfit, the Tōyō Ongakukai, and the two competed for slots at the very same Grand Hotel. Lizetti later led a breakaway group to Kobe. The market could carry all of them, and brass and wind bands were multiplying across Japan’s port cities.

The strangest turn in Ikeda’s story took him out of Japan altogether. A guest at the Grand Hotel, the American general William Worth Belknap, wanted woodwind added to the all-brass band of the warship USS Omaha and asked Ikeda to join. The German bandmaster did not trust his playing, so Ikeda was made to audition, sight-reading the William Tell Overture and a clarinet part for a polka he had never seen. He passed, and became the first Japanese musician to serve on a US navy vessel. He sailed with it to California, studied there for two and a half years, and came home only when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 and he was called up. A man who had started out scrounging instruments from a circus had crossed the Pacific on an American warship.

Boys in Scottish uniforms, bands in the street

The commercial logic that drove the Tokyo Shichū Ongakukai spread into other corners of city life. In 1909 the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo founded a boys’ band, a shōnen gakutai, to amuse and attract customers, with the children dressed in military uniforms modelled on a famous Scottish regiment. Behind the performances lay hard work and little glamour. The boys, aged ten to fifteen, rehearsed after school in a paper warehouse, and many of them cried because they found the music too hard to read. The director handed out sweets to keep their spirits up. Their first public performance was voted the most interesting attraction of the store exhibition where it took place, and within a few years rival stores in Nagoya and elsewhere had copied the idea. The programmes mixed European and Japanese music freely, running from Donizetti and Verdi to a passage of kabuki nagauta scored for brass and wind.

If the department store band brought Western music into the controlled space of the shop, the jinta carried it into the street. Small troupes of costumed musicians, also called chindon-ya after the percussive clatter of their playing, walked the cities with a trumpet, clarinet, bass drum and cymbals, carrying banners and handing out leaflets to advertise a shop or a coming attraction like a circus or a film show. One critic remembered them playing ‘Western music for the people’, parading ‘in a joyful, sometimes comical, sometimes serious way’.

For some listeners, these street bands left a lifelong mark. The conductor Konoye Hidemarō, three years old around 1901, was so taken with a band that advertised a cigar shop near his home that he and his sister climbed over the garden gate one morning to follow it, got swept up in the crowd, lost sight of the band and ended up in a police box. The composer Takagi Tōroku, hearing a three-man jinta advertise a moving-picture show in his home town in 1911, said the clarinet and trumpet sent him into ‘a hallucination that my entire body was being electrified’. What moved him most, he said, was ‘hearing a sound that I had never heard before’. Both men grew up to become professional musicians.

Why it worked

The encounter with Western culture in Meiji Japan is usually told through the state and its institutions of reform. The bands tell a different story. For many people, Western music arrived through musicians who were trying to make a living, in hotels and parks and shops and on the street. Above all, it arrived as entertainment. People paid for repeated encores of popular Western pieces because they enjoyed them. Commercial bands did not simply perform Western music; they created audiences for it. That, as much as any government policy, is how the new sound took hold.

This post is based on James Walsh, ‘The Tokyo Shichū Ongakukai: Commercial Bands and the Informal Spread of Western Music in Meiji Japan’, Japan Forum.

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Conventional scholarship has treated Kabuki under the Tenpō Reforms mainly as an object of oppression, viewed through Tokugawa administrative and institutional history. The reforms, directed by Mizuno Tadakuni, the Chief Senior Councillor (Rōjū Shuza), pulled the discussion in that direction. Yet the relationship between early modern Edo society and Kabuki was closer and stranger than that. Move past the purely political dimension and it becomes clear how particular plays and role-types (yakugara) led to the arrest of Danjūrō VII, and what ‘collective mentality’ (shūgō shinsei) his performances stirred among the people of Edo. (He was performing under the name Ebizō at the time and is referred to here as Danjūrō VII for consistency.)

Kagekiyo breaks out

In June of the thirteenth year of the Tenpō era (1842), Torii Yōzō, Magistrate of the South Magistrate’s Office (Minami-Machi Bugyō), sentenced Danjūrō VII to banishment from Edo, beyond a ten-ri radius of about 40 kilometres. Just before the arrest, the Kawarazaki-za theatre had been staging Kagekiyo, one of the celebrated plays of the Kabuki Jūhachiban. That performance was the direct trigger for his banishment.

Playing the warrior Kagekiyo, Danjūrō VII tore through the wooden bars of his cell, shattering the symbols of authority and scattering armed soldiers in a display of fierce, stylised mie. This prison-break was the climax of the play. It offered the people of Edo a profound catharsis, a moment of release from the daily weight of oppression, at a time when they felt suffocated by the Bakufu’s controls on ordinary life. The audience projected their own grievances onto Kagekiyo’s struggle and vented, through the actor’s body, a resistance to the regime they could not otherwise express.

The Shogunate arrested Danjūrō VII and stopped the production at once, because the stage had begun to work as an instrument of political satire, rousing the collective emotions of the crowd. Inside the theatre, audience empathy and a spirit of resistance met and produced a shared, alternative value system, something the Shogunate saw as a dangerous movement threatening the foundations of its rule. The banishment of Danjūrō VII was more than a matter of one actor. It was a confrontation over the representation of power between rulers and ruled, played out through the physical space of the theatre.

Luxury and the sumptuary laws

On 16 October 1842, six months before the banishment, the Shogunate issued a sweeping set of Sumptuary Laws (Shashi Kinshi-rei). Following the pattern of the Kyōhō and Kansei Reforms, these nationwide edicts imposed strict controls on the daily life of every resident of Edo, from town officials, the town elders (machi-toshiyori), down to the poorest tenement dwellers. Their true purpose went beyond frugality. It was to harden the status order (mibun chitsujo) that lay at the core of the Tenpō Reforms.

Danjūrō VII’s private life broke these edicts openly. He kept buying extravagant miniature doll furniture (�󾱲Բ�-��ō����), lacquered and carved in bright colours, and displayed it on scarlet felt carpets in his drawing rooms, claiming the pieces were ‘gifts from anonymous townspeople’. He owned objects far above his station: a small chest (ko-dansu) worked in gold paulownia crests using the intricate shakudō nanako metal technique, elaborate iron daggers (kozuka), and finely made oak chests (karabitsu) and framed tablets.

These rules reached into the theatre as well. Convinced that ordinary props would not satisfy his audience, Danjūrō VII used real, prohibited leather and iron armour on stage, along with ancestral netsuke (coral-root carvings) and inro decorated in high-relief lacquer (taka-makie inrō). For a Kabuki actor, who stood outside the ����-��ō-��ō-����ō (samurai-farmer-artisan-merchant) order of the Tokugawa system altogether, to parade martial armour and luxuries reserved for the samurai elite counted as a grave breach of the status order. He tried to comply after the edicts, pulling down part of his residence, but his conduct was judged an intolerable departure from his assigned rank, and his home was demolished in full.

The penalties reached well beyond Danjūrō VII. Fines fell on a wide circle around him: the landlords and former neighbourhood heads (nanushi) who had failed in their duty of supervision, a Fukagawa pawnbroker who took in the doll furniture without registering it properly, and the second-hand dealers who handled his stage equipment. The crackdown shows what the Shogunate was really after. It meant to dismantle the whole consumer culture that had gathered around the actor, a culture in which people flaunted wealth with no regard for status. The message was a calculated warning, aimed at forcing the customs of Edo society as a whole back into line.

An alternative order

The suppression of Kabuki under the Tenpō Reforms was more than a question of political policy. It grew out of the satire built into Danjūrō VII’s performances and the collective mentality of Edo society that answered them. The theatre he created became a space where social cohesion cut across class and occupation. When the loyalty of the audience (hiiki) locked onto his performance, the shared values of that space produced an alternative social order, one wholly distinct from the rigid, status-based hierarchy with the Tokugawa Shogun at its top. The Shogunate imposed a ten-ri banishment precisely because it saw that this theatrical domain threatened the established logic of rule.

The arrest and banishment of Danjūrō VII was more than a punishment for luxury or for breaking regulations. It was a deliberate, forceful attempt by the state to sever the self-governing social networks that the theatre had built.

This post is adapted from Ryo Kimura, A Historical Study of Ichikawa Danjūrō VII (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2014). Read more about the author’s work at .

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Kimura Ryō, PhD, is a theatre historian of early modern Japan specialising in the Kabuki tradition, the Ichikawa Danjūrō lineage, and regional social networks. He is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at Gifu Women’s University and a Visiting Researcher at the Toyo Bunko. The author of two monographs on Ichikawa Danjūrō VII and VIII, he uses digital humanities and regional archives to explore Edo-period cultural change.

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