LITMIR.BIZ

      The fastest train in the world.

Of special significance to the Japanese was the completion of the Olympic Village, also in Yoyogi Park. Located next to the important shrine Meiji Jingu, the area had been the site of a barracks and parade ground for the Japanese Imperial Army before the war. During the Occupation, the Americans had appropriated the land, renamed it Washington Heights, and made it home to the families of 2,350 US Air Force men. Now, retooled and renovated, the complex would put up the 6,624 athletes, coaches, and trainers during the Games.

      Washington Heights had been perfectly situated in the heart of the city. It is remembered fondly (by Americans) as one of the best US military residential complexes ever built. Respective gates led you to the key hubs in Tokyo. One exit took you to Shibuya, another to Harajuku and the tree-covered ground of the Meiji Shrine, and still another to Yoyogi. It was a short, cheap taxi ride to Shinjuku or Roppongi. Washington Heights was also home to the Meiji Club, the best military club in the Far East, with a large bank of slot machines and top Stateside talent. I spent a lot of time there warming up on my way to the Happy Valley.

      For many Japanese, however, the fact that Americans had occupied this particular territory had been humiliating enough. What made it even worse was the alarming manner in which some of the foreign barbarians living there had behaved, right next door to the sacred Meiji Shrine, no less.

      In 1956, for example, there had been the widely reported case of five teenaged American boys accused of raping an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl. Instead of being forced to face justice in Japanese court, however, the five youths were merely sent back to the United States, no questions asked. Japanese domestic maids working on the base complained in one magazine piece that they were expected to cook, clean, launder, answer the telephone, and be a governess to the family’s children, all for $24 a month, while the provocatively dressed ladies of the house were over at the officer’s club getting tanked up and flirting with other women’s husbands.

Then there was the case of the sexually liberated family in which every single member, including the maid, caught the same dose of gonorrhea. I personally knew the hapless father, who worked at Fuchu. He had slept with a bar girl off base and contracted the disease, which he gave to his wife, and then to their maid, who turned around and gave it to the sixteen-year-old son and his high school buddy who, in turn, gave it to the daughter. They were all sent packing to the United States.

      The Americans returned the Yoyogi Park land in 1963, relocating near Fuchu, all expenses paid by the Japanese government. It was an act of American generosity considering the value of the real estate they had willingly vacated, a gesture toward the Olympics that was welcomed all across the political spectrum, as both left- and right-wing groups had long wished for the day when all the Americans, starting with those based in central Tokyo, would pack up and go home. It was yet another step on the road back to self-respect. Shortly thereafter the Americans closed down other military sites such as Jefferson and Pershing Heights. The Sanno military hotel in Akasaka and Hardy Barracks, with its heliport, were regarded as too important for the US Embassy to give up. Both are still under US control today, the Sanno having been moved since to another prime Tokyo location in Minami-Azabu.

      But not quite everything was finished. Yet to be completed were six of the planned expressways, as well as the fleet of mobile public toilets the government had ordered built at the last minute over the summer and spring, after some alert bureaucrat discovered there were not enough public restrooms in the original plans. In an effort to put a stop to the common male practice of relieving the bladder on side streets in the city—“a habit grown too much,” as Hamlet would say—that might offend the tender sensibilities of Olympic visitors, signs in the subways were put up that said, “Let’s refrain from urinating in public.”

      ***

A full week before the Opening Ceremony, Olympic athletes began arriving at Haneda Airport—the Russians via Aeroflot, the Americans via Pan Am, the British via BOAC—with welcoming press conferences arranged right on the tarmac. Along with the athletes came the first waves of international tourists.

      It was the first time in the history of Tokyo that this many gaikokujin from around the world had gathered there (in Japan, much less in one city), with the exception of the early Occupation when several hundred thousand mostly American soldiers were in the city—not exactly what you would call welcome guests, however. Many Japanese appearing on man-in-the-street interviews said they were seeing gaijin for the first time in their lives.

      The city that had newly emerged was almost unrecognizable compared to what it was when I first arrived. Construction had halted, and everywhere you looked you saw a glistening new building. There were flags all over the city honoring the ninety-four nations participating in the games—7,000 of them said the papers, each one of them tended to by a Japanese boy scout. The Hotel Okura displayed the flag of every participating nation outside its main entrance

      Menacing yakuza had virtually vanished from the streets. At the request of the government, gang bosses had ordered the more “unpleasant looking” mobsters in their ranks to leave the city for the duration of the Games and undergo “spiritual training” in the mountains or seashore. The beggars and vagrants who had occupied Ueno Park and other parts of the city had also magically disappeared, as had the streetwalkers who normally populated the entertainment areas. As an added bonus, the city’s 27,000 taxi drivers had been persuaded by the authorities to stop honking their horns, all in the interests of making Tokyo sound as sedately refined as a temple garden hung with wind chimes. At many intersections were containers of yellow flags,

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