Tokyo Junkie - Robert Whiting

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across the street, a necessity given the humongous traffic jams that clogged Tokyo’s main avenues.

      Even when no volunteer raced up to offer you guidance, it was still hard for the foreign visitor to get lost. No matter where you were, on the sidewalk, at the train station, in Japan’s labyrinthine underground pedestrian walkways, there were signs posted in English pointing the way.

      There were also signs in Japanese reminding the citizenry to be on its best behavior, along with others warning young girls not to be taken in by the ladies-first etiquette practiced by foreign men. “Do not mistake this as an expression of love,” said one that I remember with particular fondness.

      On October 9, one day before the start of the games, as if ordained by the Shinto gods, a heavy rain visited Tokyo and washed away all the dirt and dust and air pollution, cleansing the city for the big event.

      I watched the opening ceremony at Dr. Sato’s luxurious new Western-style Harajuku apartment, on the seventh floor of a brand new ten-story residential building that had just opened up, one of the most desired spots in the city. The National Stadium was visible from the bay window in the living room, which was the size of a hotel lobby. Present were the doctor’s wife, his two preschool daughters, and two Japanese movie actresses, both wearing trendy Mary Quant miniskirts. Rounding out the entourage was a Japanese nisei business executive from Hawaii named Harry.

      We sat on expensive leather couches in front of an enormous Toshiba color television eating fois gras and drinking Napoleon brandy. What I remember most about that day was the aura of pride that pervaded the room; my hosts and their other guests were bursting with it; it was in their misty-eyed faces, if not in their otherwise mostly restrained reactions to the on-screen ceremony. For them, for the whole of Japan, it was plain to see that this was a transformational moment.

      Emperor Hirohito, the man in whose name the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Southeast Asia were undertaken by the Japanese Imperial Army some twenty-five years earlier, the man who was saved by MacArthur, if stripped of his power and divinity, performed the welcoming duties for the visiting athletes—not as the head of state as normally required by the IOC but in his capacity as “patron” of the Tokyo Olympics, to use the term concocted by the Organizing Committee with the assistance of the Ministry of Education.

      Through it all the emperor stood there alone, a diminutive 5'2", looking for all the world like a neighborhood accountant without his wartime military uniform, medals, and white stallion, watching with a demeanor that was notably more respectful than imperial. The Chicago Tribune’s Sam Jameson, who sat in the press box on the other side of the stadium, later wrote, “I don’t think I ever saw the Emperor being the only person standing before that. I imagined in my mind that he was thanking the world for readmitting Japan into international society.”

      The broadcast of that opening ceremony, on October 10, 1964, which ended with the JSDF (Japan Self-Defense Forces) aerobatic skywriting team Blue Impulse tracing the five rings of the Olympic symbol in the sky with their F-86 Sabre Jets (without the benefit, one might add, of an electronic guidance system for the pilots), was watched by over 61.2 percent of the viewing public in Japan and was the first such Olympic event to be telecast live internationally. It was also the first to be telecast in living color.

      (The only thing that marred the event was the release of 8,000 doves from their cages. Intended as a symbolic finale for peace and friendship, the spectacle instead rained droppings on the athletes, causing them to run their fingers through their hair in disgust—except for the Americans who were thankful they were wearing those big hats.)

      Adding to this discomfit was my excoriation at the hands of the Hawaiian nisei, Harry—once for my failure to recognize two such famous actresses, a faux pas not taken lightly in elite social circles, and once for giving a facetious answer to a question put to me by one of them. She wanted to know if I was there in some capacity related to the games. I told her yes, I was running in the 400-meter relay with Bob Hayes as a warmup to the pole vault event. She flushed, evidently supposing she had asked me an inappropriate question. Harry weighed in immediately with the scowling admonition that Japanese people did not take well to sarcasm.

      “Mr. Whiting is my best friend,” announced the doctor, as though to allay my qualms. “Besuto furendo. He is my personal tutor.”

      The other guests were suitably impressed, which was of course the doctor’s intention.

      (It should be noted that while the term “best friend” was imported in vivo into the Japanese language, the range of its usage was considerably broadened in the transfer. At a time when ten-year-old American children were being asked to serve as language tutors, for a grown-up native speaker it was not hard to find offers of best friendship, even under the most casual circumstances.)

      ”Sugoi,” gushed the actresses in unison, embarrassment forgotten, using a popular Japanese word that means “wow” or “cool” or “awesome.”

      In fact, one could say that having a personal American tutor was an indispensable accessory for the discerning well-to-do Olympic-era Japanese. (It wasn’t long afterward that the indispensable accessory morphed into a blond American female tutor.)

      Ordinary Japanese company workers, such as those that I had gotten to know through my other tutoring jobs, could not imagine the doctor’s lifestyle. They commuted

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