STORY NOTES

For people living in wood and paper homes, fire was a big concern. It did not take much to set a house on fire, and any strong wind could quickly spread it out of control.

There were some twenty major fires in Edo from 1600 to 1866. One of the most destructive was in 1657 in which 108,000 people died and half the city was laid to waste.

Many precautions were taken to prevent the spread of fire. Large barrels of water and buckets were kept on streets, and many streets themselves were wide enough to act as fire breaks. Fire towers, equipped with bells or alarm boards, were erected throughout the city. The location and ferocity of the fires were indicated by the number and strength of the strokes hitting the alarm.

Firefighters were organized by the daimyo (lord) to protect his castle and the homes of his retainers, and by merchants to protect their own interests. Firefighters were called tobi-no-mono or hikeshi. The term tobi-no-mono (tobi = Siberian black kite; mono = person) comes from the fact that the hook they used had a head shaped like the beak of a kite. Hikeshi (hi = fire; keshi = to extinguish) is a more descriptive term. The daimyo's firefighters wore protective leather clothing with hooded helmets, whereas the town's tobi wore heavy cotton clothing and were mainly composed of carpenters, roofers, and other construction experts. Large mallets and poles were used to knock down walls; bamboo ladders enabled the firefighters to climb; and hooks tore down burning roofs. Manually operated wooden pumps were introduced in the mid-18th century to shoot streams of water through bamboo pipes. Each company of tobi had a standard: a geometric shape mounted on a pole. The standard-bearer took a position as close to the fire as possible, sometimes even on the roof of a burning building. The owner of the saved building would pay a fee to those companies whose standards were represented and who put out the blaze.

References:

References for the fire-fighting scene were gotten from: History of Fire Fighting in Japan, by Tadayoshi Yamamoto, published in 1981 by Fukuinkan-Shoten, Tokyo, a wonderful picture book depicting the firefighters from the Edo period to the present; Everyday Life in Traditional Japan, by Charles J. Dunn, 1969, Charles E. Tuttle Co. of Rutland, VT and Tokyo, described the structure of the fire department; Kabuki Costume, by Ruth M. Shaver, with illustrations by Soma Akira and Ota Gako, 1966, Charles E. Tuttle Co., described in detail the tobi and his uniform; and Japan Day by Day, by Edward S. Morse, 1945, Houghton Mifflin Co. of Boston, gives fascinating accounts of three fires witnessed by the author, one extinguished by traditional means, and one using a foreign-type water pump.