Japan: A Reek of Cement In Fuji’s Shadow

This abode of mine Adjoins a pine grove, Sitting on the blue sea. And from its humble eaves Commands a view of soaring Fuji.

—A Samurai’s Waka (A.D. 1460)

On wintry mornings, when the sun burns off the pearl and filthy mist, Fuji still soars beyond the freeway. And every week a dozen tank cars rumble through the pine grove of the Imperial Palace, hosing dust and soot from the drooping needles. The harbor itself, and the once limpid Sumida River where warrior-poets repaired, are now thick with wastes—both human and industrial. Yet there is scarcely a resident of Tokyo who could not compose a stately, sympathetic waka in the shade of his humble eaves.

Tokyo, the world’s largest and ugliest city, is at the same time its most dynamic. Founded in the 15th century by a poetically minded samurai named Do-kan Ota, it wore the name of Edo during its early, bucolic years. Then the populace found its major thrill in watching whales cavort through the clear, blue waters of the bay. But by 1720 Tokyo had attained a population of a million—making it the largest city in the pre-Industrial Revolution world, and whale-watching gave way to more active pursuits. With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Tokyo came into its own. It assumed the status of seat of government, as well as its new name, which means simply Eastern Capital. It has dwelt for nearly two decades beneath a cloud of dust that hid its expansion—a trebling growth that took the city’s 3,500,000 population at war’s end to a current 10.6 million. In the process Japan became the world’s fifth largest and Asia’s only industrial power. Five years ago, when Tokyo won the bid to host the XVIII Olympiad, the furor of that growth redoubled. And next month, when the Games open, Tokyo will clearly show that the sound and fury of its past signify something.

“All for the Olympics.” Japan has spent nearly $2 billion to refurbish Tokyo for the Olympic Games. Last week, as the finishing touches were applied, the dust and din of the past three years began to lift, revealing shiny new buildings, glistening overhead superhighways and a network of fine, wide roads that is already speeding up traffic considerably. Four superexpressways slash like sword scars through 62 miles of the once impenetrable capital, while 25 miles of new subway bore beneath the random, rickety scab of slums, pachinko parlors and noodle shops that is home to most of the city’s population.

Nearly 10,000 buildings, ranging from four to seven stories in height, have mushroomed near the city’s center. And many more have come down, for “transitory” is Tokyo’s middle name. Even Frank Lloyd Wright’s earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel, built in 1922, is threatened with replacement by a highrise, moneymaking skyscraper. But most of the buildings razed have been scabrous shanties along the narrow, unnamed streets trod by geta-ed feet which comprise most of Tokyo’s byways. The new roads—$470 million worth of them—will ease the burden of Tokyo’s cab drivers, who have a hard time finding their way around and usually require written directions (in Japanese) to reach a destination. The reek of setting cement permeates Tokyo like a geisha’s scent, and roadside cafes are mounted with plastic shields to ward off the dust stirred up by building.

But it is after dark, when traffic diminishes, that Tokyo really begins to build. Bulldozers and steamrollers emerge like nocturnal predators; the smell of hot tar and the chatter of jackhammers shatter the night. In Shinjuku, Tokyo’s Greenwich Village, and along the Ginza, an army of orangehelmeted workmen swarms out to remove temporary planks covering the streets, while trailer trucks roar up to dump fuming loads of fill into yawning caverns. Thousands of lights sway in the evening breeze, sending crooked shadows under the neon. At dawn, the trucks and workers disappear like cockroaches. Then the city’s kamikaze cab drivers emerge and proudly tell their fares: “All for the Olympics.”

Lonely Are the Brave. To the 6,624 athletes who will soon swoop into Tokyo, the city has indeed offered its all. Fully $65 million has been spent to renovate and erect sports facilities, as well as an Olympic Village replete with trees and ornamental shrubs. In the Olympic Cafeteria, 150 separate menus will provide 520,000 lunches, suppers and breakfasts of champions. Dominating the Olympic Tokyo is Architect Kenzo Tange’s shell-shaped National Gymnasium complex, where swimmers and basketball players will vie, while the first judo competition in Olympic history will be conducted beneath the bat-winged roof of the Budokan Hall. Last week teams from 96 nations were forming for the Tokyo Games, and sports buffs the world over prepared to descend on the city by sea and air. At least 20,000 of them a day will make the scene during the Games’ two-week run.

The scene has been well prepared. Tokyo officials feared that there would not be enough hotel space for all the visitors, so they pumped $93 million in loans into the city’s hotel industry. Two new hotels—the Otani, with a revolving cocktail lounge on its roof, and the Tokyo Prince —boast 1,600 rooms between them, to add to the facilities of the huge new Okura and Tokyo Hilton hotels. In addition, eight ships will anchor in Tokyo Harbor to provide floating accommodations. Other tourists will be housed at Kakone, the coolly beautiful mountain resort 58 miles west of the city. Improvements to the ryokan, Japan’s traditional inns, have added 4,000 more rooms to the total.

Travel in Tokyo has always been—and will continue to be—a major problem. The best way is clearly by subway, which costs only 80 at most, and takes the traveler under the most congested sections of the city. In preparation for the Olympics, the subway has put out an English-language guide. Worst way to travel is by foot: at many intersections the Japanese have placed bundles of yellow flags, and the braver pedestrians hopefully wave them at oncoming drivers in order to secure safe passage. Lonely are the brave.

A spanking new Wenner-Gren monorail, costing $55 million, will soon whisk tourists from Haneda Airport to downtown Tokyo, while the world’s fastest railroad, the 125-m.p.h. Hikari Express (TIME, Sept. 4), runs via artful Kyoto to bustling Osaka in four hours—almost half the time it took before.

Pachinlco & Prices. But fleeing Tokyo by train is the last thing Olympic visitors will want to do. The city itself offers more action and interaction than any other major conurbation outside New York. There are 1,052 pachinko parlors constantly pocking the air with the jangle of small metal pinballs, 527 movie houses, 30 bowling alleys, a triple-decker golf driving range near the Tokyo Tower, four full-scale symphony orchestras, three opera companies, three baseball parks (drawing as many as 45,000 spectators a night) and of course there is the Kabuki Theater. There is also Tokyo’s industry to be seen—the vast Honda plant that cranks out motorcycles of all sizes and speeds (see MODERN LIVING); the glittering edifices of the banking and manufacturing cartels; the movie industry that has given the screen the best and cheapest imitations of U.S. cornball westerns ever made, as well as great directors such as Akira Kurosawa. Tokyo has 32,000 restaurants—nearly twice as many as New York. The best of the Japanese establishments can cost as much as $30 per person for food and geisha entertainment, but at sukiyaki and tempura houses like the Ginza’s Suehiro and Tenichi, prices are moderate. Tokyo also has excellent Western dining spots, such as Lohmeyer’s (German) and the Crescent (French), as well as Liu Yuan, a four-story Chinese restaurant that ranks with the best in the world.

At a minimum, Tokyo boasts 30,000 establishments where a man or woman can have a drink. Prostitutes used to be everywhere, but a 1958 antiprostitution law scattered them to the winds, except for those who reappeared’ as “bar hostesses.” In the Ginza, Akasaka, Shimbashi, Shinjuku and Asakusa districts, such swank bars and nightclubs as Le Rat Mort offer unusual entertainment at prices that can be as exorbitant as anywhere in the world.

But the vices of Tokyo have been toned down for the Games. Lady Diet members pushed through a law requiring the masseuses in Tokyo’s “hotsie bath” emporiums to wear robes instead of bikinis, and the police have enacted a midnight curfew that has already gone into effect.

“Prone to Feel Lonely.” Despite all the efforts to primp for the Games, Tokyo remains the world’s most primitive megalopolis. Less than a quarter of its 23 sprawling wards have sewage systems, and all efforts at city planning have failed in the discussion stage. Twice in its history—after the 1923 earthquake that took 100,000 lives and leveled half the city, and after World War II when it lay again in ruins—Tokyo had a chance to rebuild itself into a cohesive metropolis. Indeed, Ichiro Kono, the stocky, 66-year-old State Minister in charge of the Olympics and the man who is largely responsible for Tokyo’s face lifting, blames General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. occupation for the latter-day failure.

“Once we had a powerful agency known as the Home Ministry,” he explains, “which had the power to step into local problems and solve them. The Americans abolished it as not democratic. Thus, this summer.”

But in their ebullience, the Japanese have preferred merely to grow, and so Tokyo continues to spread over the once green Kanto Plain like lava from an erupting volcano. As one Japanese psychologist wrote: “The Japanese is by nature prone to feel lonely, and he cannot bear to lead a solitary existence. He does not wish to live except where he is constantly surrounded by people.” The adhesive that holds this mass together is the atmosphere of security in numbers so vast that mere compression affords privacy, of a sophistication and toughness that set Tokyo above and beyond any other Asian city. Even the delightfully wicked quality of its night life helps to weld the city. More than anything else, it is a city of people, of crowds, of action. It is bound to emerge from this Olympiad uglier than ever, but beloved of its people nonetheless.