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