insightful comments. Peter Miller of Kamprint in Kamakura read several versions and offered trenchant analysis and encouragement. Tokyo management consultant Mitch Murata provided feedback on a number of occasions, as did securities and military affairs analyst Hiroki Allen. New York-based journalist David Roberts, the former academic physicist and diplomat who was my collaborator at Foreign Policy magazine, offered valuable advice, while China-based writer Don MacLaren read through the manuscript twice and corrected many mistakes. Douglas Victoria, a fellow traveler at Fuchu Air Station back in the day, offered helpful recollections. It was good to reconnect with him again. Peter O’Connor offered research materials. FP editor Blake Hounshell helped iron out kinks in LDP- and Olympic-related articles. 1964 author Roy Tomizawa offered advice. Bryan Dunn and Kevin Novak offered libationary guidance. David Shapiro, who edited Tokyo Underworld and The Meaning of Ichiro, did another one of his thoroughly professional edits on the MS, while Japanamerica author Roland Kelts, who also set this project up with Peter Goodman at Stone Bridge, did a final edit. Mark Schreiber read the final version and offered several valuable suggestions for improvement. Peter and John Sockolov did a superb job preparing the text and the photographs for publication. I thank them all for their generous help and take the blame for any other errors that may still exist.
I also want to thank Kozo Abe of the Yukan Fuji and Hiroshi Naito at the Sankei Shimbun for their help in the long, arduous task of digging out photos and express my gratitude to the following individuals: Noriko Takahashi at WAttention, Bob Kirschenbaum of Pacific Press Service in Tokyo, the Andrew Roth Gallery in New York on behalf of Katsumi Watanabe, Noriyuki Suetsugu of Getty Images Japan, Pierre-Louis Denis at the William Klein studio in Paris, Bonnie Pong Mai-wa at Hitomi Watanabe photos, and Hiroko Moriwaki and Nakajima-san at the FCCJ. Also thanks to Shoko Nakajima at Kyodo and Mark Schreiber for the photos they provided.
Finally, a big arigatou to my wife Machiko and my sister Margo who provided moral support as well as old photos, and thanks to everyone in my extended family in the Kondo, Hayano and Kobaysahi clans in the Tokyo area and the Noble, Davis and Gruttadauro families in the US.
***
Unlike my previous works, this book has no footnotes or bibliography. It is a memoir after all. However, researchers who are interested in my sources are free to contact me and I will be happy to answer specific questions. You can find my contact information on my web page:
—RW
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