On the cause of the Great Meireki Fire of 1657 (Meireki 3), which burned Edo (lunar 1/18–20 = March 2–4 today), I wrote last time (March 24) about the “Furisode Fire” legend. There are also many arson theories.
The Central Disaster Management Council expert panel’s report “The 1657 Meireki Edo Fire” (March 2004) does not mention arson. In a draft of the report, however, it did.
A brief summary:
“The cause most widely talked of at the time was arson by rogue ronin. Some said remnants of Yui Shosetsu’s faction, which had plotted to overthrow the bakufu six years before the fire, set it in revenge; others that the bakufu itself set the fire to force a bold remaking of Edo. None of this has been confirmed as fact; it seems to remain rumor.”
The Yui Shosetsu rebellion (the Keian Incident) was an attempted coup by masterless samurai left adrift after the third shogun, Iemitsu, abolished many daimyo houses. A digression: Yui was a military scholar, and his school, Choko-do, stood in Kanda Renjaku-cho — about a ten-minute walk from Takebashi, near Toei Subway Awajicho Station. The area is known as a street loved by novelist Shotaro Ikenami. After the Meireki fire, residents were moved to what is now Mitaka for new-field development. That is why Mitaka has the place-names Kami-Renjaku and Shimo-Renjaku (the photo is the cover of a Renzaburo Shibata novel).
In any case, right after the fire there would have been theft and plunder in the chaos — literal fire-site thieves — so rumors of arson would have spread and unsettled people. That is easy to imagine.
Is the bakufu-arson theory too wild? Edo’s rapid growth had pushed the city’s functions to the limit, while evicting residents meant persuasion, compensation and new sites — huge trouble and cost. So, the story goes, the authorities burned the city flat and then rebuilt it in one stroke. A great remaking did follow the fire, so some may find the idea oddly plausible. Given the bakufu’s absolute power one thinks it unthinkable; yet even today one hears of high-handed clearance of slums in developing countries, short of actual arson. One wonders.
Why was the arson passage cut from the final disaster-council report? Because a government paper could not say the authorities themselves set the fire… perhaps?