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      5. “‘Witches’ save Japan's national honor.”

We all tend to look at the way other people live through the prism of our own set of values. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be a corporate warrior in Tokyo. Your life was simply not your own. Yet, I came to admire them for their dedication to their firms—and to their country. To many Japanese, that gritty all-consuming struggle out of the dust and the ashes was a kind of life fulfillment. There was a certain beauty in it.

Alien Demons and Witches

      As expected, the Americans took the most gold medals—so many in fact that Tokyoites took to whistling the American National Anthem unconsciously and the medals ceremony band began truncating it at “… so gallantly streaming.”

      Japan wound up with sixteen gold medals for third place overall, taking five golds in gymnastics and five in wrestling. It would be their best showing ever until the Rio Olympics in 2016.

      More memorable, perhaps, for students of Japan, were events that offered a view into the Japanese psyche at the time.

      One was the marathon, run on Wednesday, October 21, in the persistent rain and fog that had plagued the second week of the Games. Marathons were extremely popular in Japan, and the 26-mile race, which went from National Stadium to a halfway point near Fuchu on the Koshu Kaido highway and back, was watched by energetic crowds of people nine and ten deep on each side of the road, many of whom had staked their spots the night before. Helping swell the throng were airmen from Fuchu Air Station and nearby Tachikawa Air base, among them a certain bleary-eyed kid from California just coming off an all-night shift staring at radar signals.

The event was won by Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, gold medalist of the Rome Olympics, making him the first man to win two Olympic marathons. I remember just catching a glimpse of him as he flashed past, not an ounce of extra flesh on his frame, striding along the pavement with an ease that was almost disrespectful. At least the famed “barefoot runner” was wearing shoes this time.

      But the marathon contained another story that gripped the nation as well. It involved Japanese runner Kokichi Tsuburaya, who had entered the stadium in second place with such a substantial lead he seemed guaranteed the silver medal, which would have been an Olympic first for Japan.

      By then, I had retreated out of the mist to a small wood-front coffee shop near the Higashi-Fuchu train station with colorful wax replicas of food and drink displayed in the window, among them an appetizing banana, tomato, and cucumber sandwich. I sat there at a rickety Formica table in the corner, beneath a poster showing the Olympic rings below the Rising Sun, sipped oolong tea, and watched the end of the race on the 21” Sanyo TV the proprietors had bought for the Games, cheering along with other customers whose ranks included a local rice farmer and a couple of puffy-faced off-duty bar girls in jeans and blouses with bandanas wrapped around their heads, chainsmoking Winston cigarettes. The cheering for Tsuburaya was building to a crescendo—I-ke! I-ke! I-ke! (Go! Go! Go!)—when suddenly the UK’s Basil Heatley heaved into view and proceeded to put on one of Olympic track and field’s greatest all-time spurts. He steadily closed the gap in the last 200 meters, passing Tsurubaya shortly before the wire and turning the wild cheering in the coffee shop, and in the stadium, and no doubt in the rest of Japan, into one huge collective groan.

      Tsuburaya was visibly mortified at the seeming ease with which he had been overtaken. After the race, he was quoted as saying to fellow marathoner Kenji Kimihara, “I committed an inexcusable blunder in front of the Japanese people. I have to make amends by running and hoisting the Hinomaru in the next Olympics, in Mexico.”

But Tsuburaya, a First Lieutenant in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, suffered back problems (lumbago) and, four years later, in January 1968, while training for the Mexico City Olympics, would commit suicide by slashing his throat in the Defense Force dormitory. He was found in his room holding his Bronze Medal.

      A suicide note found at the scene is still remembered today. To his parents he said he was “exhausted to the bone” and couldn’t run anymore. Then he apologized to his high school principal and a JOC (Japanese Olympic Committee) official for being unable to “keep my promise.”

      Another event obsessively anticipated across the nation was the judo open-weight class, held two days after the marathon on a Friday afternoon. The Japanese sport of Judo, developed in the late 19th century by Jigoro Kano, who had based it on the ancient martial art of ju-jitsu, had been included in the 1964 Olympics for the first time ever at Japan’s behest. The Japanese had dominated the sport in international competitions following World War II. It was a martial art that symbolized the Japanese way of approaching all athletics (including baseball) with its special focus on endless training and development of spirit (accomplished, among other things, through special winter camps where athletes had to arise at four in the morning and run barefoot through the snow in freezing temperatures).

For the Tokyo Games it had been decided to award medals in lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, and open-weight classes. As expected, Japanese judoka took gold medals in all of the first three classes. Some fifteen thousand people packed the hall for the final open-weight match between national champion Akio Kaminaga and Dutchman Anton Geesink, who was 6'7" and 270 pounds to Kaminaga’s 5'11" and 230 pounds. Geesink had crushed Japanese opponents for the gold medal at the 1961 World Judo Championships in Paris. But many in the crowd and watching on television, believed that Kaminaga would prevail on his home ground given the momentousness of the event, where national pride was at stake, and Kaminaga’s assumed superior fighting spirit because he was Japanese. After all, the whole point of judo from its inception was that a small man could defeat a larger man with proper technique and attitude.

      But it was not to be. Geesink, a former soccer and basketball player, had speed and agility as well as size. He dominated the match from beginning to end, pinning Kaminaga to the mat in just nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. It raised the question in

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