152

The Making of Modern Japan people poured out of the residential quarters, hoping to escape the rapidly spreading re. Discarded family chests clogged street crossings . . . Tongues of raging ames shot into the crowds of jostling people, pushing and shoving against one another . . . bridges fell, reduced to ashes. Hemmed in by ames, the crowd rst surged to the south, then came back to the north. Struggling helplessly, they tried the east, the west.26

When it was over more than 100,000 had died. Lying in ashes were 160 daimyo estates, 3,550 temples and shrines, more than 750 residential compounds of hatamoto and samurai, and perhaps 50,000 commoner houses. After the re the city was quickly rebuilt. A half century of peace had brought increased standards of prosperity and comfort, and the daimyo mansions tended to be more splendid than before. Additional residences were built by domains that had not yet supplemented their primary residence. The bakufu did its best to reorder some arrangements to prevent a recurrence of the re. Many temples were moved from the center to relatively suburban positions, and the city grew outward to the north and west. In the crowded commoner quarters the government tried to institute clearings along waterways and bridges to create rebreaks. As McClains study of Edo Bridge shows, however, these efforts were not long successful. The rst to petition for exceptions to the rule were wholesalers anxious to establish warehouses for the goods that arrived by boat. In their wake came temporary shops that gradually became less temporary and tutelary temples that provided protection against disaster; restaurants and houses of entertainment soon multiplied, and with them came theaters, entertainers, and beggars. What was happening, as McClain describes it, was a gradual shift, over time, in which the commoners were gaining at the expense of elite status groups in respect to the appropriation of space despite the fact that the inequality of space remained largely as it had been. This was to be seen in two additional areas. Fire ghting in the broad expanses of samurai Edo was at rst a warrior prerogative; daimyo were responsible for their compounds, and bakufu vassals for their zones. But as res knew no jurisdiction, the inefciency that divided responsibility produced led daimyo to petition for permission to pursue res before their compounds were endangered. In the early eighteenth century the bakufu tried to establish a citywide authority structure under which clearly dened zonal responsibilities were established. Fire-ghting technology consisted largely of pulling down houses that were expected to be in the line of re rather than trying to pump water. This led to a combination of authoritarianism and privatization: commoner units were conscripted as a form of taxation, and merchants, who