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