Tokyo Junkie. Robert Whiting

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.