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The Soldier

Tokyo. Winter. 1962: “The Most Dynamic City on Earth”

At that time, the first thing that hit you on the streets of central Tokyo was the crowds. Enormous waves of people everywhere, men and women in long dark coats, bundled against the cold, bumping, jostling, a sea of black hair navigating streets clogged with automobiles and bicycles. Long queues formed on train station platforms. Commuter cars were so packed that uniformed platform pushers were required to get everyone inside and close the doors.

Then it was the construction, the level of which was simply off the charts. Everywhere you turned it seemed there was a building being put up or another one being pulled down. Crumbling sidewalks were ripped apart, roadways air-hammered into rubble, trucks whizzing by carrying dirt and building materials. Overhead, half-finished highways filled the sky, rebars and braided cables exposed. There was so much going on that it was a contact high just to stand there and watch it all.

The noise was omnipresent. A constant cacophony of auto horns, jack hammers, pile drivers, and trolley cars. Honk-honk. Rat-a-tat-tat. Wham. Boom. Clang-clang-clang. An electronic billboard sign erected at a Nishi-Ginza intersection in downtown Tokyo measured the sonic damage: 79. 81. 83. 86. Beside it stood a sign that read: BE MORE QUIET! THE NOISE AT THIS MOMENT: 88. STANDARD FOR RESIDENTIAL AREA: 50 PHONS. BUSY CORNERS: 70 PHONS. But the noise, meticulously measured though it was, never stopped.

Construction was nonstop.

The massive congestion, the traffic jams, and the reek of setting cement produced an overwhelming assault on the senses: dust, soot, smoke, and smog were pervasive. Auto-exhaust pollution was so bad that traffic policemen carried small oxygen cylinders. Pedestrians wore facemasks and sidewalk cafes were encased in large plastic screens. There was another electronic sign near the Ginza that gave you, in addition to the time and temperature, the current sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide levels. At a nearby police box, a first aid station was set up for citizens overcome by the toxic air.

I was a young man from rural California, nineteen years old, a mechanic’s son, newly assigned to Tokyo by the United States Air Force. I was on my first foray into the city, standing in Yurakucho on a freezing-cold day in January 1962, and I was mesmerized by all the activity. I would circle the globe many times in my lifetime. I would live in many of the world’s major capitals and visit many more. Yet nothing I would ever see would match the spectacle then before my eyes.

Tokyo was in the midst of a historic transformation, made urgent when the city was awarded the 1964 Olympics, the first Asian country so honored. The unsightly urban sprawl of rickety wooden houses, scabrous shanties, and cheaply constructed stucco-covered buildings that had mushroomed out of the rubble left by the American B-29 Superfortress bombings was now being razed to the ground, and in its place a brand-new city was going up. Thousands of office and residential buildings were under construction, ranging in height from four to seven stories, along with several five-star hotels and an elevated expressway network. Also being built were two brand-new subway lines to go with the two that already existed, a multimillion-dollar monorail from Haneda Airport into downtown Tokyo, and a billion-dollar 160-mile-per-hour bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka.

I had arrived in Japan weeks earlier, catching my first wide-eyed view of the country as the Military Air Transport propeller plane I was on touched down at Tachikawa Air Base on the eastern coast of Honshu, completing a forty-four-hour flight over the Pacific Ocean with stopovers in Honolulu and Wake Island. Spread out before me was an exotic checkerboard of rice paddies and farming plots that stretched out in all directions, with a snow-covered Mt. Fuji visible in the distance.

After processing, I was greeted by an older leathery-cheeked Japanese gentleman with gold teeth, wearing a dark-blue gold-tasseled uniform, who introduced himself as my chauffeur. He grabbed my B-4 bag and led me outside into the biting cold where a dark-blue Air Force station wagon waited to make the 15-mile drive to my new home, Fuchu Air Base. The ride took me over a narrow two-lane blacktop road flanked by rice fields, wooded areas, thatched farmhouses emitting smoke from narrow chimney pipes, Buddhist temples, and small roadside Shinto shrines. The road was occupied by a weird assortment of vehicles: military jeeps, big American passenger cars, Toyota sedans, motorbikes, and rickshaws. Off to one side, a packed commuter train whizzed by. I opened the window for some air and was greeted by the smell of sewage.

There was a lot to do to bring the city up to Western standards, as I would discover. Living conditions were still largely primitive in most areas outside the main hubs. The harbor and the capital’s main rivers were thick with sludge from the human and industrial waste that poured into them, and drinking local tap water, we were told, was unsafe, with hepatitis a constant worry. Decades later, Tokyo would be justifiably famous for its high-tech toilets, with their automated lids, music modes, water jets, blow-dry functions, and computer analyses, that headlined an impressive sewerage. But back then, despite the frantic rebuilding, less than a quarter of the city’s twenty-three sprawling wards had flush sewage systems at all, making Tokyo one of the world’s most undeveloped (and odiferous) megalopolises.

This state of affairs compared unfavorably with the United States and Europe where flush toilets had been the norm in cities since the turn of the century. In statistical terms, it meant that millions of Tokyoites lacking such amenities in their homes were forced to rely on a primitive scoop and dispose system in which fecal matter had to be sucked out from under buildings by the kumitoriya vacuum trucks and then transported to rice paddies for use as fertilizer after processing. American troops sarcastically nicknamed them “honey trucks” because of the powerful odor they emitted. Since the trucks visited most neighborhoods only once or twice a week, there was a continual, pervasive stench in vast parts of the capital. Added to that were the gesui, or roadside gutters, where the kitchen and bath water effluence ran and into which late-night drunks often urinated and, not infrequently, tumbled.

At Fuchu Air Station.

Tokyo was also rat-infested. Some 40 percent of Japanese had tapeworms. There were no ambulances, and infant mortality was twenty times what it is today. Moreover, house theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night. Yakuza (gangsters) were everywhere, their numbers at an all-time high.

Tokyo’s most unlikely winning bid for the Olympics had been the result of the submission of an ambitious half-billion-dollar budget to remake the capital for the event (a figure that far exceeded the $30 million spent for the Rome Games in 1960) as well as the intensive wining and dining of the Olympic Committee during a visit to the capital in 1958. (This entertainment, according to the Andrew Jennings exposé “The New Lords of the Rings,” published in 1996, included the prepaid services of Tokyo’s finest call girls.) After the awarding of the games to Tokyo was announced in the spring of 1959, however, the question many people had was, “How in the world is the city ever going to be ready in time?”

The effort to redo Tokyo’s urban infrastructure had been undertaken in conjunction with a massive government plan to simultaneously double GNP and per capita income by the end of the sixties through the manufacture and export of transistors, radios, television sets, and automobiles.

Streetcars were eliminated to make room to build new overhead highways.

Tokyo was already the single most populated city in the world, with residents exceeding ten million as of February 1962 (more than doubling since the end of war, and still growing, bursting at the seams). Thousands flowed into the city every day, the bulk of them on shudan-sha, trains dedicated to carrying groups of job seekers, many of them teenagers fresh out of provincial junior high schools, destined for the city’s factories and numerous construction sites, at salaries twice that of anywhere else in the country.

The pace of life in the city was dizzying—“double that of New York,” according to Time magazine, which, despite the haze and smell that lay heavy over the city, called Tokyo the “most dynamic city on the face of the earth.” There was so much going on that it was impossible to take it all in.

For one thing Tokyo still oozed culture—both modern and traditional. The main shopping and entertainment hubs offered grand department stores, deluxe movie theaters with 70mm screens, and pachinko pinball parlors jangling noisily all day long. These crowded together with noodle stands, yakitori shops with their smoky grills, food marts, and discount shops, only to give way suddenly to ancient temples with serene gardens of gravel and rocks and inner courtyards where lessons in Zen archery and the tea ceremony were taught.

The futuristic seventeen-floor Hotel New Otani, with Tokyo’s first revolving roof, was going up in a 400-year-old garden, once the province of a Tokugawa-period feudal lord. The spanking new Tokyo Tower, modeled after Paris’s Eiffel Tower, and the tallest such structure in the world at the time, overlooked century-old geisha houses (which were just beginning to rebuild their self-esteem after having faced the tragic dilemma of the American Occupation years: close the doors quickly or welcome in the barbarians at the gate).

It was after sunset that Tokyo really came into its own, transmogrifying into a Neon City of bright, bold colors with signs in katakana script and kanji characters flashing on and off like giant insects in the sky. Tokyo gave off so much light that it was easily visible from outer space, as reported by Russian cosmonauts and American Mercury astronauts after space flights began in 1961.

There were by one count twice as many places to eat as in New York, serving just about every type of food imaginable, from the corner sushi shop to the Grill Room steaks in the Imperial Hotel. (McDonald’s, Shakey’s Pizza, and Wendy’s were years from their invasion of the culinary scene.)

Tokyo also had more bars per square kilometer than anywhere in the world. These ranged from the cheap hole-in-the-wall places known as ippai nomiya (literally “one-drink” watering holes, although the consumption almost never stopped after one drink) where a Nikka whisky highball cost ¥30 (less than a dime) to the elegant high-end hostess clubs like the Crown and Queen Bee in the Ginza where you could spend a month’s pay in two hours. In between were sutando bars, cocktail lounges, beer gardens, and conpa pubs (where people sat around circular tables and counters and got to know one another). There was a modern building in front of Shinbashi Station, not far from the 1,000-year-old Karasumori Shine, which housed a hundred different stand bars. Later during my first year, a friend from the base and I tried to have a drink at every one of them one night (a practice called hashigo or “ladder drinking” in Japanese), but only made it through the first twenty before we both collapsed.

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Master Sergeant Korn, a crusty Air Force lifer from Tennessee with a deep tan and a corncob pipe, who ran the Keesler AFB assignment desk, had told me when delivering the news of my next posting. “Tokyo is the best city in the world. You’ll be over there with all those geisha girls, riding around in rickshaws. Ten million people. More neon signs than you can imagine. A sake house on every corner. Makes me wish I was young again just thinking about it.”

Although, as I would discover, hardly anybody used a rickshaw anymore and geisha girls were the expensive preserve of extremely wealthy men, he was certainly right about the rest.

Indeed, there were so many places to drink in Tokyo that even if you could somehow patronize them all, by the time you finished, a whole new crop of establishments would have made their appearance. The spectrum of entertainments was infinite. Narrow buildings in the entertainment areas were crammed full of mizu shobai (“water trade” as the nightlife business was called) establishments. On the first floor might be a coffee shop, the second a bar, the third a dance hall, the fourth a supper club, the fifth a restaurant, the sixth a hostess nightclub, and so on. They would be identified by a panel of illuminated signs hanging from the side of the building in one of the four Japanese writing systems: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji (the roman alphabet). To get to one of them you went up a dingy elevator, inside of which a second panel listed the businesses inside and the floors on which they were located. The sheer denseness of information was daunting—too much, some said, for the Western eye to process; it took a certain kind of reckless fortitude to step onto the elevator and wade your way in. But it was also exhilarating, and I was hooked before I had a chance to fully process how I got there in the first place.

There’s an old Japanese saying that you can’t get drunk on sake you don’t drink. But in Tokyo, not drinking hardly seemed to be an option. Issa, the great 18th-century haiku poet, when he sat by the banks of the Sumida River with sake in hand, invited even the butterflies to join him: 酒好きの蝶なら来よ角田川 (“If you’re a butterfly that likes to drink, come down here to the Sumida River”).

A Little History

It was not a bad thing to be an American in Tokyo back then, considering what Japanese had just endured at our hands. American B-29s had destroyed most of Japan’s major cities in horrific fire-bombing campaigns, and then we dropped devastating atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. American forces occupied the country for nearly seven years, during which time they disbanded the Japanese military, instantly creating hundreds of thousands of unemployed, tried and executed war criminals, and broke up the zaibatsu—the old family-owned financial/industrial combines that had run the country. In the process they also helped to create massive black markets and a pervasive streetwalker culture. To cap it all off, tens of thousands of US soldiers remained on Japanese soil, a result of the United States–Japan Security Treaty signed in 1951 in San Francisco, a consummation intensely unwelcome in many quarters of the populace.

To be sure, the Occupation had its benevolent side: bulk food donations to prevent mass starvation and a new democratic constitution that eliminated the cruel and inequitable feudal family system of Japan, gave equal rights to women, fostered unionization, promoted land reform and, at the urging of a group of Japanese lawmakers, renounced war. Indeed, such provisions were in stark contrast to the brutality with which Japan had treated its neighboring countries, epitomized by the Nanjing Massacre where Japanese troops engaged in rape, arson, and the mass murder of an estimated 300,000 men, women, and children in the winter of 1937.

In practice, however, the Occupation blueprint proved contradictory, with GHQ (General Headquarters) officials preaching freedom of speech and democracy while simultaneously censoring the Japanese press, limiting fraternization between Japanese and Americans, and prohibiting Japanese filmmakers from showing any evidence of the occupiers in their films. Then there was that confusing change in basic policy midway through, which came to be known as the Reverse Course, whereby the GHQ, alarmed by the rise of Mao in China and the division of the Korean Peninsula into hostile states, dropped its original goal of turning the country into the peace-loving Switzerland of Asia and instead opted to make Japan a “Bulwark against Communism.” That meant rebuilding its defense systems, suppressing left-wing union activity, and putting the zaibatsu back together again in the form of so-called keiretsu groups, a 180-degree change in direction.

Everything considered, the Occupation had been a relatively peaceful one. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Douglas MacArthur, had been widely respected among the Japanese. Given that several hundred thousand young American soldiers had been placed in a country where there had never been more than a handful of Westerners at any one time (people who by and large were traders, teachers, or missionaries), it was remarkable that things went as smoothly as they did. Tens of thousands of American GIs married Japanese women, despite draconian GHQ rules prohibiting fraternization. (Many, many more availed themselves of the services of the pan-pan girls—young street prostitutes—who, in Tokyo, lined the sidewalks all the way from Yurakucho to Shinbashi Station.)

The Korean War brought manufacturing out of a long depression and Japan’s economy began to recover. However, thanks to a number of unpleasant incidents involving American soldiers back from duty in the Republic of Korea on Japanese R&R (Rest and Recreation—or, as some GIs put it, Rape and Revel), the American image took a hit. There were frequent reports of GIs stiffing taxi drivers, trashing bars to blow off steam, and even throwing people into Tokyo’s canals, just for laughs. The most famous crime was that of Specialist Third Class William S. Girard who, while on guard duty at the firing range of a military base in Gunma Prefecture, inadvertently killed a Japanese farmer’s wife who was scavenging for empty shells. The incident developed into an international scandal and Girard became the first American GI to be tried in Japanese court (which gave him a suspended sentence and allowed him to go home with his Taiwan-born wife).

Anger toward the Americans reached a postwar peak at the start of the following decade, when the pro-US government of Japan, under the aegis of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, rammed through an extension of the Security Treaty, now putting a reduced but still significant number of 75,000 American soldiers in the country on a permanent basis (more than the United States had stationed anywhere else in the world, including Germany), causing waves of widespread, and sometimes violent, protests. “Yankee Go Home” was an English phrase that nearly all Japanese knew and understood.

By the time I arrived, however, anti-Americanism had largely dissipated. Most Tokyoites seemed quite taken with new US President John F. Kennedy and the youthful energy, optimism, and good intentions he projected on behalf of the United States. JFK’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade had captured the imagination of the Japanese as much as it had the Americans. The Japanese media seemed especially preoccupied with Jackie Kennedy, whose elegance and fashion sense had become a model for Japanese women to follow. As an American in Japan, you began to feel swathed in a borrowed Kennedy glow.

Robert F. Kennedy at Waseda University. 1964.

People also liked the fact that JFK had appointed as US ambassador to Japan Harvard scholar Edwin Reischauer, who spoke the language fluently and was married to a Japanese. The man Reischauer had replaced, the imperious Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the famed general, had thought, like many in the foreign service, that French was the only second language a US diplomat needed to know. He regarded the idea of speaking Japanese as undignified and disparaged those Americans who did. “Going native” was poor form, as everyone in the elite American community knew.

At Reischauer’s urging, JFK won further points by sending his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to Tokyo as part of a goodwill tour of Asia in 1962 in order to lay the groundwork for a planned visit by the president himself. Bobby proved to be a tremendous hit. He eschewed the usual diplomatic receptions and state dinners, choosing instead to meet with ordinary citizens as much as possible. He played soccer with Japanese children, met with women’s groups and opposition Socialist Party and union leaders, sat through sumo and judo demonstrations, and sampled sake at a Ginza bar, trading toasts with Japanese customers at the counter and playing the bongos.

On a blurry black-and-white TV set in the Shinjuku Fugetsudo coffee shop, in the company of the largely beatnik clientele, I watched live as RFK engaged angry, jeering Marxist students in spirited debate at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University. He responded politely to charges of American imperialism in Japan and complicity with the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party in order to further US interests. The tousled-haired Kennedy told the students that Americans believed in having a divergence of views and the right to express them because that was the only way a country could determine its proper course.

He called the most vocal of the students down onto the stage and greeted him warmly, saying, “You are experiencing an example of democracy at its best, because never in communist-controlled lands could citizens object to government policy so vociferously.” At the end, Kennedy sang the Waseda school song, which Reischauer had urged him to learn, with the assembled students.

One of the Fugetsudo denizens, a man in his thirties with a Van Dyke beard and scraggly hair, and wearing a black beret and turtleneck sweater, penned a seventeen-syllable haiku in English when it was over and handed it to me, which I submit here for posterity:

Kennedy is cool

I dig his windblown hair

Banzai the USA

Roppongi

Fuchu Air Base was a tiny island of small-town Americana in the Tokyo suburbs. It had all the accoutrements of home: manicured lawns, soda fountains, supermarkets, cheeseburgers, movie theaters playing the latest first-run hits from Hollywood. For the Japanese who had the opportunity to enter the base, it was like traveling abroad without a passport. There were BX concessions selling American goods unavailable anywhere else in Greater Tokyo at bargain basement prices, military clubs, restaurants, a bowling alley, and a basketball arena. Enlisted men lived in modern, centrally heated dormitory-style buildings. Married personnel lived at the nearby Green Park complex, a military installation with Western-style family housing, grade schools, and teen clubs. Everyone had a maid—quite often war widows who had nowhere else to go and who worked for what Americans regarded as a pittance—and that included me. Mine was an older Japanese woman with wiry hair, silver teeth, and a permanent smile who looked after my room on the third floor of a Fifth Air Force 6000th Support Squadron barracks. The room overlooked a field where old women clad in monpei toiled and, in the distance, young Japanese boys chased fly balls on a makeshift baseball diamond. Beyond that, Mt. Fuji rose majestically in the distance. I called my maid “Mama-san.” She called me “Boy-chan.”

The bars off base in a quarter known as the “Han” catered almost exclusively to American men, hard drinking, highly sexed American men, a state of affairs that may not have pleased all of the local citizenry but was certainly a boon to the local economy. The bar girls spoke foul English (“You cherry boy?” “You like play with Japanese girl?”) and played 45 RPM records of the Billboard Top 40: “Soldier Boy,” “Travelin’ Man,” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry” were big favorites. Airmen bought jackets from the BX with an image of Mt. Fuji and the word “Japan” painted on the back, but few ever strayed far from the base. There were people, I would discover, who had spent three years at Fuchu and had never eaten sashimi or learned to speak any Japanese other than sayonara, from the Marlon Brando film, and the “Phrase of the Day” from Walt and Hiroko on FEN.

The most dynamic city on the face of the earth. Ginza, 1965.

***

For me, the lure of Tokyo was irresistible. If Fuchu was like Eureka, the foggy backwater in California I couldn’t wait to escape, Tokyo was Manhattan. It was a half-hour train ride from Higashi-Fuchu Station on the Keio Line to the main Shinjuku Station terminal on the western rim of Tokyo, a ride that took you past rice paddies and bedroom-towns. I made the trip as often as I could, clad in a cheap three-piece navy-blue suit, custom made in two days by an off-base Korean tailor, and armed with a Japanese phrase book and a map of the metropolitan area. I also carried some extra ¥50 coins (then the equivalent of 14 cents) to give to the white-robed, disabled war veterans, some with hooks for hands, who routinely patrolled the Keio Line cars in small groups begging for money, bearing placards describing their horrible fates and singing sorrowful songs to the accompaniment of an accordion player. This was the pitiful result, I learned, of the Japanese government’s neglect of its own disbanded wartime armies. Most of the Japanese passengers looked away.

There were 15,000 coffee shops in Tokyo, more than in any other city in the world, it was said, and that was long before Starbucks made its debut there. These kissaten featured music from classical to jazz, and you could sit all day and read and relax and no one ever complained.

I was partial to Ladies Town in the Ginza, where coffee was served by some of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, dressed in long satin bridal gowns and lacy veils, and C’est Si Bon, a little spot playing Piaf and Segovia, run by an aging ex-ballerina who told me that I looked like Warren Beatty.

***

There were also lots of interesting nightspots that openly welcomed foreigners. One of them was the Showboat in Shinbashi, which appeared in the movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri and was almost as large as a real live Mississippi riverboat. There, the customer was piped aboard a huge replica of a Mississippi riverboat and entertained by a band moving up and down an elevator shaft, as well as by a revolving squadron of hostesses. A girl driving a miniature train collected empty glasses. Also in Shinbashi was the Rendezvous, a military-themed bar where the customer was escorted by a “soldier” past a sand-bagged bandstand to his table and introduced to his hostess, who was clad in a white nurse’s uniform and a pale-blue cap. Up the street in Akasaka was the Golden Getsusekai where the hostesses dressed like Playboy bunnies. In Ueno, there was the Transistor Cutie Club, where the girls were all under 5 feet tall.

A favorite place in Tokyo in those early months was the Club 88, introduced to me by colleagues in intelligence. It was a trendy night spot in Roppongi, one of the more interesting parts of the city, home to foreign embassies, internationally oriented nightclubs, and restaurants and offbeat bars. The US Military Installation Hardy Barracks, home of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, was also located there. The “88” stood for the eighty-eight keys on the piano, which was played by a talented African American named Larry Allen, an ex-GI from Indiana who had recorded songs for American troops during the Occupation and entertained at international and military clubs all over Asia. He was a holdover from the Golden Gate, which had occupied the same real estate in Roppongi until the police closed it down for “moral violations.”

Allen, dubbed the “Clown Prince of the Keys,” wrote and sang his own music. He favored deep-throated parodies of popular songs. One of them, “Shinbashi Woman,” sung to the tune of “St. Louis Blues,” will give you the idea:

Shinbashi woman, with all her bumps and curves

Shinbashi woman . . . those bumps and curves ain’t hers . . .

The 88 had twenty tables and a long bar, in addition to a separate sushi bar. It was always packed with an eclectic crowd of people. There were diplomats, foreign correspondents, assorted businessmen, and visiting US congressmen. Officials from the police agencies came in and sat alongside yakuza bosses who sat next to CIA agents. At times, one might see Catholic priests and missionaries of other faiths sitting next to exotic dancers and hostesses from neighboring clubs who came in with their boyfriends after eleven, when the hostess bars closed.

The Club 88 was one of the few nightclubs open after 11:30 p.m. It was expensive, although not as expensive as the high-class hostess clubs like the Copacabana or the New Latin Quarter. But even on a military salary of $100 a month (the equivalent of ¥36,000) you could manage the occasional visit if you sat at the bar and nursed your drink until well after the ice was gone, a skill I readily mastered. The club had a rule that women could not enter unaccompanied; the object, supposedly, was to prevent hookers from taking over the place. Nevertheless, every night around midnight a stream of well-painted and striking young ladies would find someone to escort them in, sit at the bar, and negotiate top-of-the-line fees for their proscribed services.

Ladies of a Tokyo evening.

The Club 88 was the brainchild of Alonzo Shattuck, one of the more accomplished and colorful characters among the stream of foreign carpetbaggers and soldiers of fortune that poured into the city after the war. Shattuck, as I would later learn, was a former Occupation-era intelligence agent who had worked for the infamous Tokyo-based black ops group, the Canon Agency, fighting North Korean agents who were smuggling heroin and crystal meth into Japan with the help of the DPRK in an effort to addict American GIs to drugs and render them unable to fight in future wars.

After the Occupation, Shattuck and a Japanese American partner, Saburo Odachi, a black belt in judo, drifted into the nightclub business, first with an American gambler named Ted Lewin, running the black-tie Latin Quarter, and when that burned down they opened up the Club 88. In 1960 Shattuck was cordially invited to leave the country by the Japanese government for certain underworld and intelligence-related activities, about which I would learn more later, but he managed to return from time to time on tourist visas and keep a hand in his business.

Lots of well-known people dropped by the 88. Nat King Cole, in Japan on tour, came in one night to have a drink and sat down at the piano to sing a few songs. I met the Hollywood actor Rick Jason there early one evening sitting at the bar. Jason was a star of the Combat television series, which was a huge hit in Japan, with Rick’s voice dubbed in Japanese. At the time, he was more popular in Japan than in his own country, and he would appear in a number of Japanese movies over the years. He was affable and charming—“How ya doin’ kid?” he said—and created the illusion that he was actually more interested in what a twenty-year-old GI was doing in Tokyo than in talking about himself.

Another time, I was astonished to see Shirley MacLaine come in. The red-haired movie actress was in town to visit her husband, Steve Parker, a dapper, mustachioed screen-and-stage producer based in Tokyo. The two had a bizarre trans-Pacific arrangement, she with a house in Malibu and he with one in Shibuya, where their young daughter stayed. Between films, she would come and visit her family.

Sometimes there was trouble. A well-known story had it that one night a member of the Tosei-kai, a powerful underworld gang, had wandered into the 88 drunk wearing a .38 in a shoulder holster. This was a violation of Japan’s extremely strict Sword and Firearms Law. Shattuck asked him to leave. The yakuza refused. In a flash, Shattuck pinned the man’s right arm, grabbed the gun from the holster, and dragged him out of the club. A week later, the head of the gang, Hisayuki Machii, also known as the Crime Boss of Tokyo, came around to apologize for the fuss, bringing with him the offending subaltern, who was now missing the tip of the pinky on his left hand, having been ordered to slice it off in what was the standard act of contrition in the Japanese underworld for embarrassing the gang. (I confirmed this story with Shattuck years later when I met him for the first time.)

Happy Valley

By the end of my first year, I had developed a special liking for Shibuya, a major hub on the Yamate railway line that circled the city. It was a town of young people closer to my age group—lots of students from nearby Aoyama Gakuin University and working-class types. It had a more common, quotidian feel than the Ginza playground of the rich and was also not top heavy with gaijin the way Roppongi was. It felt more like the “real Japan.” Shibuya was an interesting mix of modern department stores, cheap cabarets and bars, street vendors, and dilapidated sake houses with corrugated tin roofs. Another feature of the town was “Love Letter Alley,” a collection of makeshift stalls where Japanese young women could go to have language experts write letters in English to their boyfriends overseas—former GIs who were not likely coming back.

Shibuya was also home to the famous statue of Hachiko, the legendary canine who epitomized the loyalty so central to the traditional Japanese value system. After his owner died of a sudden stroke and failed to appear at the station where Hachiko had always waited for him, the dog stayed there, cared for by sympathetic commuters, until his own death ten years later. Today, his statue is perhaps the most popular meeting place in all of Tokyo. I was partial to the Happy Valley Dance Hall, a popular 1940s-style establishment that was packed to the rafters every Saturday night. Regulars included beauticians, secretaries, waitresses, and college coeds—nice ordinary girls whose presence helped me overcome my native shyness. A surprising number were snaggletoothed, which was a particularly endearing quality. This feature, as a popular (if unconfirmed) belief had it, was the result of an Occupation-era policy to put more calcium in the Japanese diet, causing teeth to outgrow the mouth.

The Happy Valley consisted of a large dance floor underneath a glittering rotating mirror ball suspended from the ceiling that cast multicolored reflections around the interior and a stage where rotating orchestras played half-hour sets. A swing band like Nobuko Hara’s Sharps and Flats would play Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey hits from the 1940s—“In The Mood,” “Little Brown Jug,” and others; they would be followed by a rock and roll band offering up contemporary fare such as “Rock Around the Clock” and “The Twist”; these in turn would give way to Japanese pop singers like husky teenager Mieko Hirota, Japan’s “Queen of Pops,” belting out their own latest hits. Connie Francis even put in a brief appearance there one evening to sing “Pretty Little Baby” in Japanese, a version that topped the Tokyo pop charts.

When the music sufficed to put you and your partner “In the Mood,” a possible destination was a “love hotel,” a unique Japanese invention that came about because of the lack of privacy in most Japanese houses and apartments, with their cramped spaces and paper-thin walls. Shibuya was filled with them. You could get a three-hour “rest” or a room for the night. You “checked in” by handing over the entrance fee through a narrow slot in a wall in the lobby and were then given a key with the room number on it. When you left, you returned the key through the slot. No face-to-face contact. No uncomfortable stares. No embarrassment.

Japanese society supposedly frowned on premarital sex but that didn’t seem to bother the girls I met at the Happy Valley. Not that they were sexually experienced, but then again neither was I, my lone such episode back in Eureka, an encounter with a girl named Sandy in the back of my 1955 Ford that lasted approximately ten seconds. My first visit across the street to Love Hotel Hill was with a slender nineteen-year-old junior college student named Keiko with a cute face, silky smooth skin, and braces. She spoke a smattering of English and kept saying, “Please take care.” I had no idea what she meant. When I woke up in the morning, she was gone, but she had folded my clothes in a neat pile on the tatami and left a note on top with her phone number and the words “Thank you berry much.” I called her once but the older man, presumably her father, who answered the phone could not understand what I was saying using the few words of Japanese I knew, and I certainly could not understand him. So that was the end of that.

I went to the Happy Valley so often I became friends with the bartender, a tall, gaunt, morose young man with slicked-back hair and a scraggly mustache, named Jun. Jun spoke a little English and liked the chance to practice it with me when I went in. I would bring him gifts from the base. Johnny Walker Black was a big favorite. So were Napoleon Brandy, American cigarettes, Levis, and leather belts. Such items were subject to huge tariffs on the Japanese market but were dirt cheap at the Base Exchange. Jun would drink the Johnny Walker himself and then pour domestic Japanese whisky—Suntory Single Malt or Suntory Whisky Royal—in the empty bottles, and the Happy Valley would charge a fortune for it, an arrangement that ingratiated him no end with his bosses. It was a testament to the early quality of Suntory Whisky, made with pure Kyoto river-valley water, that most customers couldn’t notice the difference. I found myself enjoying it as well, particularly as my consumption of it there rarely made its way onto the bar bill.

Jun did me the honor of inviting me to his home on New Year’s Day 1963—his home consisting of a tiny two-room apartment where he lived with his wife and baby son. One room was a six-mat size (with a total space of 108 square feet), while the second room afforded the space of a large closet and was completely filled by a huge chest of drawers and several rolled up futons.

Communicating with a mixture of Japanese and English words and hand signals, we sat there at a low table on frayed zabuton (cushions), drank Japanese sake, and ate ozoni (soup with rice cakes) and other traditional Japanese New Year’s foods. Later, after the alcohol had taken hold, he confessed that he was not a pureblooded Japanese but rather the son of a Korean father and a Japanese mother. It was something he said he kept a secret from all but a few people, because there was so much discrimination against people of Korean origin in Japan.

Japan had colonized the Korean Peninsula in the early part of the 20th century, forcing its inhabitants to learn and speak Japanese. Two million Koreans wound up in Japan, many as forced laborers. Jun’s father had been one of them, working in the coal mines in Kyushu. He wound up marrying the teenage daughter of an impoverished farming family but returned to the Korean Peninsula shortly after the end of the war and was never heard from again. Jun suspected he was in the north, where his father’s parents were from. There were more than a half a million Koreans—zainichi chosenjin as they were called—still left in Japan. They had decided not to return home because living conditions on the Korean Peninsula were even more miserable than they were for them in postwar Japan. But since they were viewed in Japan as a lesser class of people, it was hard for Koreans to get into good schools or get jobs at good companies, or marry into respectable Japanese families. As a result, many Koreans took Japanese names and hid their identities.

Jun said that he and his wife, who was Japanese—a beauty parlor attendant whom he had met at the Happy Valley—did not want their son to suffer that kind of discrimination, so they kept his origins a secret. He said he would hide the truth from the boy for the rest of his life.

“I can tell you,” Jun said, “because you’re not from this country. But I can’t tell others. Here my son will have a better chance in life.”

Hachiko the Dog. The most popular meeting spot in Tokyo, in front of Shibuya Station.

The Happy Valley Dance Hall was a purlieu for the Shibuya-based Ando gang, the five-hundred-member underworld organization that controlled the area. Just around the corner, the Ando-gumi ran a low rent cho-han game, a traditional form of gambling in which patrons bet on whether a pair of dice thrown from a cup would produce either an even or an odd number. One night after the dance hall had closed Jun invited me to take part. We went down a side-street stairwell into a large tatami room behind a big steel door.

On the other side of the door we were met by a beefy man in a red Aloha shirt.

“Nani kore?” (What’s this?), he said, a look of repugnance on his face as though Jun had just dragged in a dead cat. He had a deep half-moon scar on his badly shaven chin.

“He’s okay,” said Jun. “He’s a friend.”

The man looked at Jun as though he were transparent. Another Ando factotum pushed himself upright from the wall against which he had been slouching. He carried a carbine rifle.

Jun did not alter his expression. “He’s a Happy Valley regular,” he said. “He sits at the same bar as the Ando-gumi.” There was magic in the name: The grim set of the gatekeeper’s features relented a few micrometers and he gestured us inside.

Arrayed on either side of a long rectangular mat were a collection of chinpira, or low-level hoods in punch perms, salarymen (office workers), and local merchants. They sat with intent expressions and made bets on dice rolled by a dealer (tsubofuri) wearing only a haramaki sash around his abdomen, white pajama bottoms, and an elaborate dragon tattoo on his back. The shirtless attire, Jun explained, was to forestall charges of cheating. The centuries-old betting procedure never varied. The dealer held out the dice for all to see and, with an elaborate gesture, calling out “Hairimasu!” (Dice in!), placed them in a bamboo cup, which he then turned over on top of the mat, concealing the numbers. “Hatta! Hatta!” (Lay down your bets!) was the next cry, and the players then wagered as to whether the total of the two dice would come out even (cho) or odd (han). The thug with the rifle had gone back into his slouch against the wall. Another member of the gang lit cigarettes for the players and poured sake, much as a Ginza nightclub hostess might. I made a few small bets just to be polite, a ¥500 note ($1.38) here and there, and was surprised to discover that at the end of my desultory play I was ahead several thousand yen. But it turned out that even at this low-level game I was strictly small potatoes; not a few of the players were betting stacks of ¥10,000 notes.

By the time Jun and I wandered back into the street, the sky was just beginning to whiten in the east. Despite my coup, I had pretty well decided not to add cho-han to my already burgeoning list of vices.

***

Jun quit his job around that time and opened up a tiny bar on the second floor of a ten-story ferro-concrete building in Udagawa-cho. There was a counter with about ten stools and two tables in the back. It was like a thousand other bars in the city in that there was barely room to turn around and its survival depended on the patronage of fellow mizu shobai workers and other friends. He invited me to his opening party, which was attended by a handful of Happy Valley employees and some other small-timers in the Shibuya entertainment world. Jun, looking less morose than I had ever seen him, stood behind the bar mixing drinks and making conversation.

The bar struggled in the ensuing months. Jun complained he barely cleared enough to pay his rent on the place. I took him booze and cigarettes when I could. As per usual, he poured the less expensive Suntory Whisky into the empty Johnny Walker bottles and charged double. One day, months later, I dropped by and found the bar closed. I went over to his apartment and that too was empty. Jun had simply gone, no one knew where. The word was that he had borrowed money from Tosei-kai yakuza loan sharks who charged 20 percent a month and couldn’t pay it back. I never saw him again.

***

But Shibuya retained a special place in my heart. One hot, muggy August night I had missed the last train back to the base and had no money for a taxi. I sat down in front of the station, next to the statue of the dog, actually, and prepared to stay there until 5 a.m. when the trains started running again. An elderly woman who was closing up her station-front kiosk asked me what was the matter. I told her, she listened sympathetically, and after she had finished closing up, she said simply, “Come with me.” She took me through the back streets to a small first-floor apartment in a two-story wooden building, where a ten-year-old girl, apparently her granddaughter, was sleeping. She rolled out a futon on the tatami in an adjoining three-mat room and bid me good night. In the morning she made toast and coffee and sent me on my way back to Fuchu. It was a simple act of kindness that went beyond anything I had experienced before. And I never forgot it. I always remembered to stop by her kiosk when visiting Shibuya and bring presents from the base for her and the little girl. She was a nice lady.

JFK was assassinated in the morning of November 23, 1963. The next time I went to the Happy Valley I received a funeral envelope with a ¥10,000 bill inside from the Happy Valley management, which both touched and confused me. I only learned later that this was the common custom to express condolences. One of the girls at the Happy Valley went one step further. She invited me out for dinner and what would turn out to be other consolations.

Dr. Sato: The Smell of Freshly Dried Asphalt

As the countdown to the Games progressed, doubts about Tokyo making the deadline intensified. The two shiny new subway lines had opened up—Toei Asakusa (1960) and Hibiya (1961), joining the older Ginza (1927) and Marunouchi (1954) lines—but as late as January 1963 none of the target dates for road construction had been met, and Shojiro Kawashima, cabinet minister in charge of the Olympics, was forced to concede to reporters that Olympic preparations were “regrettably” behind in all aspects.

Construction on the new elevated coastal highway leading from Haneda Airport some 13 miles into the capital was late getting started because fishermen owned long stretches of the land along the intended route and were demanding multiples of the price the government had anticipated paying. In another case, speculators had bought up large plots of land the government was eyeing for development into a second inland expressway into the city and demanded exorbitant prices, which again went beyond the budget the authorities had prepared. There were eminent domain laws on the books, but the government was obligated by legal precedent to pay the full asking price, and in the above-mentioned cases the asking price was simply too high.

An even bigger problem looming ominously over the city was a dire shortage of water in the capital caused by an abnormal lack of rainfall in the wet season preceding the Games. Tokyo’s reservoirs had been emptying for three months, and as the summer began the municipal government instituted water rationing. Bathhouse hours were restricted and swimming pools closed, and on narrow side streets police water trucks, usually employed to quell leftist riots, filled housewives’ buckets with water hauled in from nearby rivers. Soba shops cut down on their cooking, while Ginza nightclubs urged thirsty patrons to “drink your whisky without water and help save Tokyo.”

Drilling crews dug emergency artesian wells, while other work crews excavated canals to bring in water from nearby rivers. Japan Self-Defense Force planes dumped dry ice on overhead clouds, while on the shores of the Ogochi reservoir outside the city a Shinto priest in the mask of a scarlet lion writhed through a ceremonial rain dance. Townsmen were warned not to expect miracles. As the priest explained, “It will take two days for the message to get through to the dragon god.”

As the deadline for the Games approached, there was an enormous, frantic rush to finish everything on time. Construction continued around the clock, seven days a week. Bulldozers rearranged the landscape, and dump trucks, loaded up with sand for land-reclamation projects in Tokyo’s fetid harbor, rumbled back and forth in unbroken streams. In January 1964 the city government had mobilized 1.6 million residents to help clean Tokyo’s streets. That’s not a misprint.

At night, after the salarymen had gone home and the traffic thinned out, the city stepped up construction. Blinding work lights and diesel compressors switched on, traffic on Tokyo’s main thoroughfares was rerouted, and new sets of air hammers and pile drivers were put to work opening up those streets. This went on until dawn, when the avenues were covered with temporary wooden planks and traffic resumed. Most of Tokyo’s citizens stoically put up with the annoyances, using blackout curtains and earplugs to block out the light and noise. I did the same when I stayed overnight in the city. But I clearly remember a newspaper item in one of the English-language dailies about a college student who, unable to study because of the constant pounding near his rooming house, became so agitated that he marched down to the construction site, put his head underneath the offending pile driver, and ended his misery.

Some historians called the build-up in Tokyo before the Games “The greatest urban transformation in history.”

Three months before the Games were scheduled to begin, glimpses of the New Tokyo began to appear, including long-finished stretches of the raised expressways. You could even take a ride on a section of the new overhead highway from Shinbashi to Shibaura for ¥50 (about 15 cents), and many people did just that to see what it was like, including me, with a new acquaintance, a Dr. Sato, who took me for a spin on the 2-mile run in his brand new Nissan-Z Fair Lady roadster (his “weekend car” as he put it), oohing and aahing at the smoothness of the road, while listening to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” by a new group called the Beatles, on the radio.

“I like the smell of freshly dried asphalt,” he exclaimed, “It means progress.”

Dr. Sato was my student, actually. He was a plastic surgeon who wanted a private English tutor. He had placed an advertisement on the bulletin board at Sophia University, a Jesuit institution in Yotsuya, central Tokyo, where I had started taking evening courses, and I had answered it. We met for the first time at his clinic in the West Ginza one evening after he was finishing up for the day, and after a brief interview I became his teacher. Just like that. You could do things like that in those days as there were a limited number of native speakers of English in the city—only a few thousand American civilians including businessmen, diplomats, judo students, intelligence agents, Mormons preaching the word of Joseph Smith, and ex-Occupationaires who had stayed on to seek their fortune—and countless Japanese wanted people they could practice speaking with, especially with the Olympics coming up.

Like other Americans in the capital, I found I could be sitting quietly in a kissaten or bar and someone would approach me asking, “May I speak English with you?” I even had people come up to me on train station platforms and ask me to correct their English pronunciation. I could stand on a street corner looking lost and in no time someone would walk up to me and ask, “May I help you?”

Most Japanese had some exposure to English, which was taught from middle school on. Missing from the curriculum built around grammar and translation, however, were conversation skills. Private English conversation schools proliferated to fill the gap. There were in fact more schools than there were teachers to staff them, with the result that ten-year-old American students at private schools in the city were also taking part-time work as English “teachers” to Japanese adults.

Thus, it was that, needing more funds to finance the increasing amount of time I was spending in the city, I found myself joining the ranks of those American ten year olds.

Dr. Sato was in his late forties, a slight, impeccably tailored man with slicked-back hair, who smoked Rothmann’s cigarettes and carried a gold Dunhill lighter. Most of the patients in his plastic surgery practice were women, he explained, in rather good English, nightclub hostesses in the area who wanted their eyes un-slanted, their noses un-flattened, and their breasts and hips augmented in the belief that this would enhance their professional appeal.

“I want you to know that I like Americans,” he said. “I remember how kind they were during the aftermath of the war. They handed out free food and candy for Japanese kids. They were a lot nicer than the Japanese militarists ever were. Imperial soldiers were arrogant. They’d hit you just for looking at them the wrong way. I’m not saying I’m glad Japan lost the war, but the problem with Japanese is that they don’t know how to be equal. They either kiss your feet or sit on your face. They can learn from American democracy. I want to improve my English-speaking ability because I want to meet as many Americans as I can during the upcoming Olympics.”

He said that he wanted to meet for a “conversation lesson” once a week, on a Friday or Saturday evening, for an hour at his clinic, followed by dinner somewhere, and then proceed to a club. His treat. On top of that he would pay me ¥10,000 a pop. All I would have to do was talk to him and correct his English.

I, of course, couldn’t say yes fast enough. It would mean earning ¥10,000 x 4 = $111 per month (at what was then a ¥360-per-dollar exchange rate), which was more than my monthly pay and double what I made at a Ginza English conversation school where I had started teaching part time. I did stop to consider, if only briefly, why a rich doctor would want me, a twenty-one-year-old GI with somewhat limited experience of the world, as a tutor. But I chalked it up to a simple matter of supply and demand. I certainly wasn’t going to argue.

One time he invited me to an establishment down the street from his clinic to show me the results of his labors. Le Rat Mort (The Dead Rat) was an intimate Ginza nightclub that, the doctor explained, was the most exclusive and most expensive of its kind in the entire city. (Some cynics speculated that the strange name was the result of a misrendering of L’Amour—“L” being indistinguishable from “R” in Japanese. Otherwise, why a dead rat should come to symbolize dedication to elegance and pulchritude remains an unexplained mystery.)

Indeed, the place looked like something conjured up in a 1950s MGM movie musical, featuring a marble floor inlaid with mother of pearl, deep leather sofas, Picasso paintings on the walls, and gold lighters and ashtrays. Le Rat Mort, said the doctor, had the most impeccably mannered and attentive women in the city. Its owner had imposed certain ironclad rules for his charges to obey to ensure that this was so, and they went something like this: Always report for work perfectly groomed and wearing a brand-new dress. Always smile. Always flatter. Always be interested in what a client has to say. Never, ever forget a returning customer’s name, his favorite drink, or his favorite song (which the piano player was expected to tinkle out immediately upon the client’s entry into and exit from the club). Never let a customer’s cigarette go unlit or his glass remain unfilled. Never forget the old Ginza adage: “The ideal woman is dumb on the outside but clever underneath.”

In return for the perfection he demanded, Le Rat Mort’s owner paid his hostesses the highest salaries of any such establishment in Japan.

The girls, with their round eyes, reshaped noses, and hourglass figures were indeed beautiful (although in my own studiously informed opinion, attractive Asian women did not need such enhancements), and they were a hit with Le Rat Mort’s clientele, which, according to Dr. Sato, included politicians, movie actors, baseball and sumo stars, and other important, wealthy people who, in the pre-Olympic era, thought nothing of dropping the equivalent of $10,000 for a quiet evening of booze and companionship.

I was blown away by it all—once again a crazy trip through the Looking Glass, when all I had done was answer an ad for an English tutor. It was certainly a different level than I was used to operating on. Sumo stars, rich plastic surgeons, gorgeous hostesses. What the heck was going on?

The doctor, married with a wife and three young children, explained to me that the girls were not the sort you took home on short acquaintance. To the regulars at Le Rat Mort, the club was not a vulgar “dump” like, say, the Mikado with its twelve-hundred hostesses, where it was so easy to sleep with the girls on the first night. There, all you needed was money, although, admittedly, a lot of it was required. Le Rat Mort customers wanted the psychological chase and conquest that their club offered, one in which numerous visits were required to develop a relationship, which was not merely paid-for lust but nearly indistinguishable from true love. Sato himself had a mistress there, he said, adding that he’d even introduced the mistress to his wife, who had given her approval of the relationship because it freed her from the burdensome duties of the marriage bed and allowed her to concentrate on raising the kids. “Welcome to Japan,” the doctor said with a hearty laugh.

After a number of visits I was asked if I would be willing to teach English to the hostesses there. The owner was expecting a big influx of foreigners to Tokyo because of the upcoming Olympics and he wanted his girls to be able to talk to them. Finding no earthly reason to decline, I began giving lessons every Saturday at noon at the Ginza location and it was a revelation. I barely recognized the women when they filed in wearing blue jeans, sandals, and scarves, with no makeup or perfume, chewing gum, and frequently hungover, thoroughly shattering the nighttime image they had worked so hard to cultivate.

I also discovered that most of them hated their high-paying jobs, which they deemed terminally boring, with its mindless chatter, and a pain in the neck to boot, as they had to go to the beauty parlor every day and were constantly required to buy new dresses, selling the old ones after they had worn them only once or twice. They were just making money to finance some business venture or other, they told me, like a fashion boutique or a coffee shop.

It had not yet dawned on me that with Dr. Sato I was in fact becoming the male equivalent of a Tokyo nightclub hostess, an accessory to enhance his elite status in Japan’s New Order.

Yoyogi Park

The much-ballyhooed monorail from Haneda International Airport into Tokyo began operations on September 17, 1964; it would become the busiest and most profitable monorail line in the world. On October 1, ten days before the Games were scheduled to begin, the putative crown jewel of the Olympic effort, the Japanese bullet train, started operations between Tokyo and Osaka. The Shinkansen transported its passengers 320 miles in about four hours, less than half the time it had taken before, reaching peak speeds of 130 miles per hour to make it the fastest train in the world. The train followed the picturesque route of the old Tokaido Line, along the earthquake-prone Pacific coastline. The New Tokaido Line would become the busiest commuter corridor in the world, busier even than the one that ran between New York and Washington, DC. The trains’ arrival and departure times were so reliable that people could set their watches by them, the average delay being half a minute.

During this period the wraps were taken off the last of the shining new buildings constructed in the center of the city, among them the glamorous Hotel Okura (modeled after an ancient Kyoto temple), the seventeen-floor New Otani (the tallest building in the city), and the 1,600-room Shiba Prince Hotel. Way behind schedule for completion, the Otani builders and the ToTo Corporation (the world’s largest toilet manufacturer) developed the unit bathroom: toilet, sink, and bathtub in one neat box installed by crane from the outside. Then one after another, the athletic fields, arenas, and halls to be used in the Olympics were announced ready. They included the space-age Olympic Park complex for volleyball and soccer; the bat-winged Budokan for the martial arts; the National Stadium for track and field; and Kenzo Tange’s swooping, wave-shaped National Gymnasium complex for swimming and diving in Yoyogi Park. Melding modern engineering techniques with traditional Japanese forms, Tange’s work would later win the Pritzker Architecture Prize and become an iconic Tokyo landmark.

The fastest train in the world.

Of special significance to the Japanese was the completion of the Olympic Village, also in Yoyogi Park. Located next to the important shrine Meiji Jingu, the area had been the site of a barracks and parade ground for the Japanese Imperial Army before the war. During the Occupation, the Americans had appropriated the land, renamed it Washington Heights, and made it home to the families of 2,350 US Air Force men. Now, retooled and renovated, the complex would put up the 6,624 athletes, coaches, and trainers during the Games.

Washington Heights had been perfectly situated in the heart of the city. It is remembered fondly (by Americans) as one of the best US military residential complexes ever built. Respective gates led you to the key hubs in Tokyo. One exit took you to Shibuya, another to Harajuku and the tree-covered ground of the Meiji Shrine, and still another to Yoyogi. It was a short, cheap taxi ride to Shinjuku or Roppongi. Washington Heights was also home to the Meiji Club, the best military club in the Far East, with a large bank of slot machines and top Stateside talent. I spent a lot of time there warming up on my way to the Happy Valley.

For many Japanese, however, the fact that Americans had occupied this particular territory had been humiliating enough. What made it even worse was the alarming manner in which some of the foreign barbarians living there had behaved, right next door to the sacred Meiji Shrine, no less.

In 1956, for example, there had been the widely reported case of five teenaged American boys accused of raping an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl. Instead of being forced to face justice in Japanese court, however, the five youths were merely sent back to the United States, no questions asked. Japanese domestic maids working on the base complained in one magazine piece that they were expected to cook, clean, launder, answer the telephone, and be a governess to the family’s children, all for $24 a month, while the provocatively dressed ladies of the house were over at the officer’s club getting tanked up and flirting with other women’s husbands.

Then there was the case of the sexually liberated family in which every single member, including the maid, caught the same dose of gonorrhea. I personally knew the hapless father, who worked at Fuchu. He had slept with a bar girl off base and contracted the disease, which he gave to his wife, and then to their maid, who turned around and gave it to the sixteen-year-old son and his high school buddy who, in turn, gave it to the daughter. They were all sent packing to the United States.

The Americans returned the Yoyogi Park land in 1963, relocating near Fuchu, all expenses paid by the Japanese government. It was an act of American generosity considering the value of the real estate they had willingly vacated, a gesture toward the Olympics that was welcomed all across the political spectrum, as both left- and right-wing groups had long wished for the day when all the Americans, starting with those based in central Tokyo, would pack up and go home. It was yet another step on the road back to self-respect. Shortly thereafter the Americans closed down other military sites such as Jefferson and Pershing Heights. The Sanno military hotel in Akasaka and Hardy Barracks, with its heliport, were regarded as too important for the US Embassy to give up. Both are still under US control today, the Sanno having been moved since to another prime Tokyo location in Minami-Azabu.

But not quite everything was finished. Yet to be completed were six of the planned expressways, as well as the fleet of mobile public toilets the government had ordered built at the last minute over the summer and spring, after some alert bureaucrat discovered there were not enough public restrooms in the original plans. In an effort to put a stop to the common male practice of relieving the bladder on side streets in the city—“a habit grown too much,” as Hamlet would say—that might offend the tender sensibilities of Olympic visitors, signs in the subways were put up that said, “Let’s refrain from urinating in public.”

***

A full week before the Opening Ceremony, Olympic athletes began arriving at Haneda Airport—the Russians via Aeroflot, the Americans via Pan Am, the British via BOAC—with welcoming press conferences arranged right on the tarmac. Along with the athletes came the first waves of international tourists.

It was the first time in the history of Tokyo that this many gaikokujin from around the world had gathered there (in Japan, much less in one city), with the exception of the early Occupation when several hundred thousand mostly American soldiers were in the city—not exactly what you would call welcome guests, however. Many Japanese appearing on man-in-the-street interviews said they were seeing gaijin for the first time in their lives.

The city that had newly emerged was almost unrecognizable compared to what it was when I first arrived. Construction had halted, and everywhere you looked you saw a glistening new building. There were flags all over the city honoring the ninety-four nations participating in the games—7,000 of them said the papers, each one of them tended to by a Japanese boy scout. The Hotel Okura displayed the flag of every participating nation outside its main entrance

Menacing yakuza had virtually vanished from the streets. At the request of the government, gang bosses had ordered the more “unpleasant looking” mobsters in their ranks to leave the city for the duration of the Games and undergo “spiritual training” in the mountains or seashore. The beggars and vagrants who had occupied Ueno Park and other parts of the city had also magically disappeared, as had the streetwalkers who normally populated the entertainment areas. As an added bonus, the city’s 27,000 taxi drivers had been persuaded by the authorities to stop honking their horns, all in the interests of making Tokyo sound as sedately refined as a temple garden hung with wind chimes. At many intersections were containers of yellow flags, put there at the pedestrian’s disposal by the governor’s office, for use in safe passage across the street, a necessity given the humongous traffic jams that clogged Tokyo’s main avenues.

The citizens of Tokyo had been trained to accord the highest courtesy and hospitality to the athletes, officials, journalists, and spectators who converged on the capital. Smiling interpreters, organized by the municipal government, roamed the city in special cars, searching for bewildered-looking foreigners to help—and they were not hard to find. In the Ginza, at the big shrines like Meiji Jingu, at cafes, clubs, and restaurants, there was never a shortage of loud-talking foreign tourists anxiously poring over their guidebooks and maps, attempting to decipher Japan’s arcane chronologically based address system and quite evidently in need of assistance. During that time, I found it nearly impossible to walk down a street in any of the main shopping and entertainment areas without being stopped by someone and asked if I needed help finding my destination.

Even when no volunteer raced up to offer you guidance, it was still hard for the foreign visitor to get lost. No matter where you were, on the sidewalk, at the train station, in Japan’s labyrinthine underground pedestrian walkways, there were signs posted in English pointing the way.

There were also signs in Japanese reminding the citizenry to be on its best behavior, along with others warning young girls not to be taken in by the ladies-first etiquette practiced by foreign men. “Do not mistake this as an expression of love,” said one that I remember with particular fondness.

On October 9, one day before the start of the games, as if ordained by the Shinto gods, a heavy rain visited Tokyo and washed away all the dirt and dust and air pollution, cleansing the city for the big event.

October 1964: “The Greatest Olympics Ever”

I watched the opening ceremony at Dr. Sato’s luxurious new Western-style Harajuku apartment, on the seventh floor of a brand new ten-story residential building that had just opened up, one of the most desired spots in the city. The National Stadium was visible from the bay window in the living room, which was the size of a hotel lobby. Present were the doctor’s wife, his two preschool daughters, and two Japanese movie actresses, both wearing trendy Mary Quant miniskirts. Rounding out the entourage was a Japanese nisei business executive from Hawaii named Harry.

We sat on expensive leather couches in front of an enormous Toshiba color television eating fois gras and drinking Napoleon brandy. What I remember most about that day was the aura of pride that pervaded the room; my hosts and their other guests were bursting with it; it was in their misty-eyed faces, if not in their otherwise mostly restrained reactions to the on-screen ceremony. For them, for the whole of Japan, it was plain to see that this was a transformational moment.

Emperor Hirohito, the man in whose name the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Southeast Asia were undertaken by the Japanese Imperial Army some twenty-five years earlier, the man who was saved by MacArthur, if stripped of his power and divinity, performed the welcoming duties for the visiting athletes—not as the head of state as normally required by the IOC but in his capacity as “patron” of the Tokyo Olympics, to use the term concocted by the Organizing Committee with the assistance of the Ministry of Education.

He stood there in a special box wearing a simple black suit, a thousand riot police guarding the grounds outside, as the athletes marched into the shiny new National Stadium before a crowd of 75,000: American athletes in their big cowboy hats, Indians in purple turbans, Ghanaians in saffron robes, and the Japanese contingent, coming in last, in red blazers and white slacks, carrying the Hi no Maru flag, which was, along with the emperor, another symbol of Japan’s imperial past. Trumpets blared and cannons roared as Yoshinori Sakai, a nineteen-year-old student athlete born in Hiroshima just hours after the atomic bomb fell on the city (and dubbed the “Atomic Bomb Boy” by the press), carried the Olympic torch up a flight of 179 steps to deposit it in its cauldron, the five-ring Olympic logo on his white T-shirt set fashionably beneath the red-ball logo of the Rising Sun. Takashi Ono, a Japanese gymnast, took the athletes oath on behalf of the 5,151 participating athletes—4,473 men and 678 women.

Through it all the emperor stood there alone, a diminutive 5'2", looking for all the world like a neighborhood accountant without his wartime military uniform, medals, and white stallion, watching with a demeanor that was notably more respectful than imperial. The Chicago Tribune’s Sam Jameson, who sat in the press box on the other side of the stadium, later wrote, “I don’t think I ever saw the Emperor being the only person standing before that. I imagined in my mind that he was thanking the world for readmitting Japan into international society.”

The broadcast of that opening ceremony, on October 10, 1964, which ended with the JSDF (Japan Self-Defense Forces) aerobatic skywriting team Blue Impulse tracing the five rings of the Olympic symbol in the sky with their F-86 Sabre Jets (without the benefit, one might add, of an electronic guidance system for the pilots), was watched by over 61.2 percent of the viewing public in Japan and was the first such Olympic event to be telecast live internationally. It was also the first to be telecast in living color.

(The only thing that marred the event was the release of 8,000 doves from their cages. Intended as a symbolic finale for peace and friendship, the spectacle instead rained droppings on the athletes, causing them to run their fingers through their hair in disgust—except for the Americans who were thankful they were wearing those big hats.)

I was already enamored of the country, and in my own way I shared in the emotion, but at the same time, a little voice inside me was starting to make itself heard. “What are you doing here?” it asked, as I took another swallow of the superb cognac. “You’re a simple GI from a small town in California. What have you to do with movie stars and the super-rich?”

Adding to this discomfit was my excoriation at the hands of the Hawaiian nisei, Harry—once for my failure to recognize two such famous actresses, a faux pas not taken lightly in elite social circles, and once for giving a facetious answer to a question put to me by one of them. She wanted to know if I was there in some capacity related to the games. I told her yes, I was running in the 400-meter relay with Bob Hayes as a warmup to the pole vault event. She flushed, evidently supposing she had asked me an inappropriate question. Harry weighed in immediately with the scowling admonition that Japanese people did not take well to sarcasm.

“Mr. Whiting is my best friend,” announced the doctor, as though to allay my qualms. “Besuto furendo. He is my personal tutor.”

The other guests were suitably impressed, which was of course the doctor’s intention.

(It should be noted that while the term “best friend” was imported in vivo into the Japanese language, the range of its usage was considerably broadened in the transfer. At a time when ten-year-old American children were being asked to serve as language tutors, for a grown-up native speaker it was not hard to find offers of best friendship, even under the most casual circumstances.)

”Sugoi,” gushed the actresses in unison, embarrassment forgotten, using a popular Japanese word that means “wow” or “cool” or “awesome.”

In fact, one could say that having a personal American tutor was an indispensable accessory for the discerning well-to-do Olympic-era Japanese. (It wasn’t long afterward that the indispensable accessory morphed into a blond American female tutor.)

Dr. Sato was himself the son of a very rich doctor with connections to the Imperial Family, born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. (I found out that he had spent the entire war in the family villa in the resort town of Karuizawa, watching the B-29s bomb Tokyo from afar.) In addition to his Ginza clinic he was now building his own hospital outside Shinjuku. He was in the top 1 percent in terms of income. He traveled around the city in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental Limousine, dressed in expensively tailored English suits, and, as we have seen, spent his evenings cavorting in plush Ginza nightclubs. He was comfortable spending more money in one day than most Japanese salarymen did in a year.

Ordinary Japanese company workers, such as those that I had gotten to know through my other tutoring jobs, could not imagine the doctor’s lifestyle. They commuted for an hour or more each way on uncomfortably packed trains, worked twelve-hour days, drank cheap Nikka whisky at discount stand bars in the entertainment hubs, and had one suit that they wore daily until it was shiny, pressing it by laying it out under the futon each night in their small and gloomy apartments, which were often little better than hovels and where it might take several hours for the gas heater to warm the bath.

But, as I came to understand, Japanese on all levels of the economic scale shared certain beliefs. These might be summarized as follows: The war had been bad, but Japan was not entirely to blame for it. Japan had done a noble thing in attempting to throw off the white man’s yoke in Asia.

Japan’s wrongdoings in war were no worse than those of other countries. They had hated the idea of foreigners occupying Japan and had mixed feelings about the Western-style constitution that had been imposed on them by the Americans. They were on a collective mission to restore Japan’s face in the world and hosting the Olympics was the first big step. The pride they felt in that achievement was beyond description.

1964 Tokyo Olympics

1. Trumpets blared and cannons roared as Yoshinori Sakai, a nineteen-year-old student-athlete born in Hiroshima just hours after the atomic bomb fell on the city (dubbed the “Atomic Bomb Boy”), carried the Olympic torch up a flight of 179 steps.

2. Opening Ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

3. Japan loses the silver medal.

4. Anton Geesink of the Netherlands takes the open-weight judo gold from Akio Kaminaga.

5. “‘Witches’ save Japan's national honor.”

We all tend to look at the way other people live through the prism of our own set of values. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be a corporate warrior in Tokyo. Your life was simply not your own. Yet, I came to admire them for their dedication to their firms—and to their country. To many Japanese, that gritty all-consuming struggle out of the dust and the ashes was a kind of life fulfillment. There was a certain beauty in it.

Alien Demons and Witches

As expected, the Americans took the most gold medals—so many in fact that Tokyoites took to whistling the American National Anthem unconsciously and the medals ceremony band began truncating it at “… so gallantly streaming.”

Japan wound up with sixteen gold medals for third place overall, taking five golds in gymnastics and five in wrestling. It would be their best showing ever until the Rio Olympics in 2016.

More memorable, perhaps, for students of Japan, were events that offered a view into the Japanese psyche at the time.

One was the marathon, run on Wednesday, October 21, in the persistent rain and fog that had plagued the second week of the Games. Marathons were extremely popular in Japan, and the 26-mile race, which went from National Stadium to a halfway point near Fuchu on the Koshu Kaido highway and back, was watched by energetic crowds of people nine and ten deep on each side of the road, many of whom had staked their spots the night before. Helping swell the throng were airmen from Fuchu Air Station and nearby Tachikawa Air base, among them a certain bleary-eyed kid from California just coming off an all-night shift staring at radar signals.

The event was won by Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, gold medalist of the Rome Olympics, making him the first man to win two Olympic marathons. I remember just catching a glimpse of him as he flashed past, not an ounce of extra flesh on his frame, striding along the pavement with an ease that was almost disrespectful. At least the famed “barefoot runner” was wearing shoes this time.

But the marathon contained another story that gripped the nation as well. It involved Japanese runner Kokichi Tsuburaya, who had entered the stadium in second place with such a substantial lead he seemed guaranteed the silver medal, which would have been an Olympic first for Japan.

By then, I had retreated out of the mist to a small wood-front coffee shop near the Higashi-Fuchu train station with colorful wax replicas of food and drink displayed in the window, among them an appetizing banana, tomato, and cucumber sandwich. I sat there at a rickety Formica table in the corner, beneath a poster showing the Olympic rings below the Rising Sun, sipped oolong tea, and watched the end of the race on the 21” Sanyo TV the proprietors had bought for the Games, cheering along with other customers whose ranks included a local rice farmer and a couple of puffy-faced off-duty bar girls in jeans and blouses with bandanas wrapped around their heads, chainsmoking Winston cigarettes. The cheering for Tsuburaya was building to a crescendo—I-ke! I-ke! I-ke! (Go! Go! Go!)—when suddenly the UK’s Basil Heatley heaved into view and proceeded to put on one of Olympic track and field’s greatest all-time spurts. He steadily closed the gap in the last 200 meters, passing Tsurubaya shortly before the wire and turning the wild cheering in the coffee shop, and in the stadium, and no doubt in the rest of Japan, into one huge collective groan.

Tsuburaya was visibly mortified at the seeming ease with which he had been overtaken. After the race, he was quoted as saying to fellow marathoner Kenji Kimihara, “I committed an inexcusable blunder in front of the Japanese people. I have to make amends by running and hoisting the Hinomaru in the next Olympics, in Mexico.”

But Tsuburaya, a First Lieutenant in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, suffered back problems (lumbago) and, four years later, in January 1968, while training for the Mexico City Olympics, would commit suicide by slashing his throat in the Defense Force dormitory. He was found in his room holding his Bronze Medal.

A suicide note found at the scene is still remembered today. To his parents he said he was “exhausted to the bone” and couldn’t run anymore. Then he apologized to his high school principal and a JOC (Japanese Olympic Committee) official for being unable to “keep my promise.”

Another event obsessively anticipated across the nation was the judo open-weight class, held two days after the marathon on a Friday afternoon. The Japanese sport of Judo, developed in the late 19th century by Jigoro Kano, who had based it on the ancient martial art of ju-jitsu, had been included in the 1964 Olympics for the first time ever at Japan’s behest. The Japanese had dominated the sport in international competitions following World War II. It was a martial art that symbolized the Japanese way of approaching all athletics (including baseball) with its special focus on endless training and development of spirit (accomplished, among other things, through special winter camps where athletes had to arise at four in the morning and run barefoot through the snow in freezing temperatures).

For the Tokyo Games it had been decided to award medals in lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, and open-weight classes. As expected, Japanese judoka took gold medals in all of the first three classes. Some fifteen thousand people packed the hall for the final open-weight match between national champion Akio Kaminaga and Dutchman Anton Geesink, who was 6'7" and 270 pounds to Kaminaga’s 5'11" and 230 pounds. Geesink had crushed Japanese opponents for the gold medal at the 1961 World Judo Championships in Paris. But many in the crowd and watching on television, believed that Kaminaga would prevail on his home ground given the momentousness of the event, where national pride was at stake, and Kaminaga’s assumed superior fighting spirit because he was Japanese. After all, the whole point of judo from its inception was that a small man could defeat a larger man with proper technique and attitude.

But it was not to be. Geesink, a former soccer and basketball player, had speed and agility as well as size. He dominated the match from beginning to end, pinning Kaminaga to the mat in just nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. It raised the question in everyone’s mind, including mine, of just how far an athlete can go on konjo, or fighting spirit, alone. The lopsided win by the big blond foreigner was a bitter disappointment for millions of Japanese fans. It was doubly painful because Geesink had humiliated his Japanese opponent in front of the entire planet, via satellite television. I could see that pain firsthand when I watched the match, standing in front of a big TV on display in the show window of an electronics store on the Ginza. Around me was a large crowd of grim-faced Japanese men in suits, some of whom looked to me to be on the verge of tears.

Author and Japanologist Ian Buruma would later write in a memorable essay:

Sports, like sex, cuts where it hurts the most, that soft spot where national virility is at stake. And at no time was it more delicate than in the 1960’s, when the nation was beginning to crawl away from the shame of the greatest humiliation of all: defeat in war and subsequent occupation by a superior foreign power. The Tokyo Olympics were supposed to have put the seal on all that. The revival of national virility, already boosted by the accelerating economic boom, was at hand, the Judo Open Weight gold medal was meant to have clinched it: the shame of defeat would be wiped out and Japanese face would finally have been restored…. [But instead it] was as though the ancestral Sun Goddess had been raped in public by a gang of alien demons.

Still, unlike some victorious American athletes whose effusive celebrations knew no bounds, Geesink had shown restraint and respect to Japan in his triumph. He had bowed to Kaminaga after the match, as was required by judo form, and had behaved in a dignified manner throughout. With a gesture of his hand, he had stopped his jubilant coach and teammates from running onto the sacred mat. The moment was captured in national newspaper headlines and has never been forgotten by the Japanese.

Unfortunately, in his later years he moved to Japan to become a professional wrestler and did much damage to his image not only because of the tergiversation but also because of his surprising inability to perform in his new sport. Said Giant Baba, owner of the All Japan Pro Wrestling association to which Geesink belonged, “With a judogi on, there was nobody better. In wrestling trunks there was nobody worse.”

It was left to the maniacally trained and wonderfully adept Japan national women’s volleyball team to salvage the nation’s pride. Their gold medal victory over the taller, stronger Soviet Russian squad on the final evening of competition at the four-thousand-seat Komazawa Olympic Park Gymnasium would set television viewing records.

According to Video Research, 66.8% of all TV-owning households in Japan were tuned in to the match from the beginning, making it the second-most-watched television program in Japanese history—a position it still holds today (first is an NHK New Year’s Eve songfest). As the final point was scored the rating had gone up to 95%. (This raises the question of what the other 5% were watching.)

The “Witches of the Orient,” as a Russian newspaper dubbed them, would go on to become a metonymy for the Games and the subject for a raft of academic treatises spanning the next fifty years. Their bruising eleven-hour-a-day practice regimen over a period of two years was seen to symbolize the dogged resurgence of the Japanese economy, short on resources but full of fighting spirit. Their gold medal victory would go down in Japanese sporting lore as one of the Top Ten great sporting achievements of the 20th century, reaching #5 on a list compiled by the Asahi Shimbun at the end of 1999.

***

The Olympics were a resounding success, making, in just about everyone’s opinion, the madness of reengineering an entire city worthwhile. Japan had originally been designated as host of the 1940 Olympics, but when war appeared on the horizon, the event was canceled. Now, after twenty-four years of catastrophic events, Tokyo came to host the first Olympic games in Asia, and all sorts of records were set. They were the first Games in Olympic history that used computers to keep results, introducing new electronic timing devices, variations of which are still in use today. Innovations included a new timing system for swimming that started the clock by the sound of the starter’s pistol and stopped it with touchpads, and a photo finish using an image with lines on it to determine the sprint results. Such advances thrust Japan into the forefront of global technological development, literally overnight.

The Olympics put the Seiko Watch company, the official timekeeper of the Games and owner of the iconic Hattori Building in Ginza 4-chome with the famous clock on top, on the map. Moreover, a major Hollywood film, the Cary Grant movie Walk Don’t Run, would be set in Tokyo during this time.

I could not get tickets to any of the glamor events but did manage to see a soccer game between Iran and Romania. I remember that the stadium was packed and very enthusiastic, although few in the stands had any serious rooting interest in either team. But just being in Tokyo and soaking up the atmosphere was enough. It was impossible to walk into any coffee shop, restaurant, or bar without finding a new TV set tuned to the NHK telecast of the Games. More than once, I was taken for an Olympic athlete and asked which event I was participating in. “Beer drinking” was my stock answer. (Evidently, I had still not fully processed Harry’s warning about the use of irony.)

When it was over, Life magazine, citing the emotion-filled opening ceremony, the high quality of competition, and the pervading goodwill, called the 1964 Games “the greatest ever.” Sports Illustrated noted that, to the very end, Japanese kept their manners toward their foreign guests. During the two weeks 194 pickpockets were arrested in Tokyo, but only 4 in the Olympic area had copped a foreign wallet.

For the Japanese, all of this was a source of pride. A new Japan had just been introduced to the world, and it was nothing like the old. No longer a militarist pariah shattered by war, it had successfully reinvented itself as a peaceful democracy on its way to becoming a world economic powerhouse. The Games had demonstrated to the West that Japan was now their equal and was going to be a force to be reckoned with. The emperor, the flag of the Rising Sun, the unofficial anthem “Kimigayo,” and the use of Japanese soldiers (even if they were now members of the so-called Self-Defense Forces), once symbols of the menace Japan had posed to its Asia-Pacific neighbors, now stood forth in an entirely different and far more salubrious light.

That this had been accomplished in a mere two decades served as an example to other countries in Asia and the developing world seeking to modernize their own societies. For the citizens of Tokyo, the Olympic success was doubly important because their city had now been transformed into a shiny international metropolis that would be a magnet for foreign tourists, businessmen, scholars, and others.

Indeed, as if to put the final stamp of approval on the place, the most popular franchise in screen history would choose Tokyo the following year as the central location for one of its most famous films, You Only Live Twice, produced in 1966 and released in 1967, becoming a global smash hit. The Hotel Otani would appear as the Osato Chemical and Engineering Co. Building, Tokyo headquarters of the infamous SPECTRE. I was able to watch some of the filming between classes at Sophia, which was ten minutes up the hill. Also featured was the adjoining garden, as well as the Tokyo subway system, the Kuramae Kokugikan sumo hall, and the neon-lit Ginza nightscape. In the film, that keen Japanologist, James Bond, also gave out the secret of the precise temperature to which sake had to be warmed to please the demanding palate.

You Only Live Twice, filmed in Tokyo in 1966, was a huge global hit. The Hotel New Otani management gave the 007 crew carte blanche to shoot in their five-star hotel. They were deeply disappointed to hear 007 respond to a question by a SPECTRE operative in the film—“Where are you staying in Tokyo, Mr. Bond?”—by saying, “The Hilton.”

Dark Side of the Olympics

If for the citizens of Tokyo the Olympiad was a blaze of glory, it also cast some shadows. The transformation of the metropolis from a war-ravaged city into a major international capital, seemingly overnight, had a dark side that was rarely talked about. The Games were in fact responsible for a great deal of environmental destruction and human misery in the city and its environs. As one who was there and paid attention to what was going on, I can attest to that.

The Nihonbashi river culture disappeared in the rush to rebuild.

There was absolutely no reason to have a high-speed train connecting Tokyo to Osaka just for the Games, since there were no events taking place in Japan’s second-largest city. Yet the Shinkansen project was rushed through by JNR executives in the name of “urban improvement.” The goal was to impress the rest of the world with the high level of Japanese technological achievement while the global media focused on the Tokyo Olympiad. Thanks primarily to the haste (and also to dirty politics and graft), the project wound up costing a billion dollars, twice what the original budget called for (and roughly one-third the total cost of the Games), and the JNR president was compelled to resign.

The funds diverted to cover the expanding costs of the Shinkansen took money away from other projects, like the monorail, which had originally been intended to link Haneda Airport to the city center. Instead it wound up terminating in sleepy Hamamatsucho, a less-convenient station several stops away and far from the top hotels. There was simply not enough capital to buy the land and extend the line to a more logical location like Tokyo Station or Shinbashi, for which the monorail company had acquired a license.

And a national treasure was ruined.

Moreover, in order to avoid buying expensive privately owned land for the monorail, its builders constructed it over water on a route provided gratis by the municipal government, covering the rivers, canals, and sea areas below with landfill and concrete in the process. Fishing permits held by local fishing cooperatives in these districts were revoked by City Hall and many local fishing jobs were lost. A seaweed field in Omori in the city’s Ota Ward from which a prized delicacy, Omori nori, had been harvested since the Edo period, simply disappeared. (The tradition itself, however, is still preserved at the Omori Nori Museum, founded in the same district in 2008.)

The lack of funds affected highway construction as well, as it also became necessary to build overhead expressways above the existing rivers and canals to avoid purchasing land. Among the many eyesores that resulted from this arrangement is that of the iconic Meiji-period bridge at Nihonbashi, a historic terminus for the old Tokaido Road footpath to the economic center of the old city—and the zero point from which all distances are measured in Japan. The bridge had been built back in Meiji times so that it would provide a view of Mt. Fuji for anyone crossing from the east side to the west.

I remember taking a walk along the canal to see the famous bridge, shortly before the Games began. I was dismayed to see its once charming appearance completely ruined by the massive highway just a few feet overhead, like a giant concrete lid, obliterating the sky. The smell from the toxic water in the canal was so offensive I had to cover my nose. I imagined Mt. Fuji, looking on from afar, doing the same.

The reconstruction effort for the Olympics cost Tokyo much of its navigable waterways and put an end to what had been a vibrant, commercial river culture in and around Nihonbashi. Planting the support columns of the highways and other structures in the water below had rendered many river docks useless, costing even more jobs. Water stagnated, fish died, and biochemical sludge, known as hedoro in Japanese, formed in the previously unpolluted Tokyo estuaries, creating increasingly putrid cesspools. Some were simply buried with debris from construction and the tearing down of World War 2–era structures. Others were filled with concrete and turned into roads. Life did not return to the Kanda River, the Sumida River, and other connected waterways for several years, and when it did it was in the form of unsavory pathogens.

Then there were the highways themselves, clogged as they were with stop-and-start traffic. As Chicago Tribune correspondent Sam Jameson put it, “Building an expressway system based on a mathematical formula of a two-lane expressway merging into another two-lane expressway to create . . . a two-lane expressway was not the smartest thing to do. It guaranteed congestion. The system had to have been designed by someone who had never driven.”

Another casualty of the 1964 Olympics was the trolley lines, which had been a cheap, reliable, and pleasant way of getting around the city. The elimination of two major lines in street-widening schemes caused a corresponding increase in vehicular traffic and a worsening of air quality in Tokyo and set the stage for the removal of almost all the other trolley lines in the city. With their dedicated traffic lanes, they were the most dependable passage through the traffic congestion.

Corruption, in the form of bid rigging (dango) and price collusion, a well-known fact of life in postwar construction in Japan, also reared its ugly head during the pre-Olympic years. Many construction firms were fronts for organized crime, as one organized crime figure told me later, and yakuza gangs were a fixture at most construction sites. They brought in the laborers, supplied temporary lodging, ran the food concessions, the afterhours gambling dens, and brothels, and, of course, provided “protection.” With taxpayer money siphoned off to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and underworld bosses, the subsequent cost-cutting often resulted in shoddy work. The use of sand from the sea when mixing concrete, for example, caused the internal rebar and steel beams used in highway construction to rust prematurely.

The staging of the Olympics provided an opportunity to reward Tokyo’s underworld gangs for their devoted efforts in helping the conservative (and CIA-backed) ruling Liberal Democratic Party pass the 1960 extension of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which kept US soldiers in Japan over widespread opposition in the country at large. Yakuza bosses had deployed their minions to suppress protests and were in the Diet building on the night the treaty was passed in a special Diet session, successfully barring the doors to opponents of the ratification massing outside.

It took Japan over thirty years to repay the money it borrowed from the World Bank to build roads for the 1964 Olympics.