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      Construction was nonstop.

      The massive congestion, the traffic jams, and the reek of setting cement produced an overwhelming assault on the senses: dust, soot, smoke, and smog were pervasive. Auto-exhaust pollution was so bad that traffic policemen carried small oxygen cylinders. Pedestrians wore facemasks and sidewalk cafes were encased in large plastic screens. There was another electronic sign near the Ginza that gave you, in addition to the time and temperature, the current sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide levels. At a nearby police box, a first aid station was set up for citizens overcome by the toxic air.

I was a young man from rural California, nineteen years old, a mechanic’s son, newly assigned to Tokyo by the United States Air Force. I was on my first foray into the city, standing in Yurakucho on a freezing-cold day in January 1962, and I was mesmerized by all the activity. I would circle the globe many times in my lifetime. I would live in many of the world’s major capitals and visit many more. Yet nothing I would ever see would match the spectacle then before my eyes.

      Tokyo was in the midst of a historic transformation, made urgent when the city was awarded the 1964 Olympics, the first Asian country so honored. The unsightly urban sprawl of rickety wooden houses, scabrous shanties, and cheaply constructed stucco-covered buildings that had mushroomed out of the rubble left by the American B-29 Superfortress bombings was now being razed to the ground, and in its place a brand-new city was going up. Thousands of office and residential buildings were under construction, ranging in height from four to seven stories, along with several five-star hotels and an elevated expressway network. Also being built were two brand-new subway lines to go with the two that already existed, a multimillion-dollar monorail from Haneda Airport into downtown Tokyo, and a billion-dollar 160-mile-per-hour bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka.

      I had arrived in Japan weeks earlier, catching my first wide-eyed view of the country as the Military Air Transport propeller plane I was on touched down at Tachikawa Air Base on the eastern coast of Honshu, completing a forty-four-hour flight over the Pacific Ocean with stopovers in Honolulu and Wake Island. Spread out before me was an exotic checkerboard of rice paddies and farming plots that stretched out in all directions, with a snow-covered Mt. Fuji visible in the distance.

After processing, I was greeted by an older leathery-cheeked Japanese gentleman with gold teeth, wearing a dark-blue gold-tasseled uniform, who introduced himself as my chauffeur. He grabbed my B-4 bag and led me outside into the biting cold where a dark-blue Air Force station wagon waited to make the 15-mile drive to my new home, Fuchu Air Base. The ride took me over a narrow two-lane blacktop road flanked by rice fields, wooded areas, thatched farmhouses emitting smoke from narrow chimney pipes, Buddhist temples, and small roadside Shinto shrines. The road was occupied by a weird assortment of vehicles: military jeeps, big American passenger cars, Toyota sedans, motorbikes, and rickshaws. Off to one side, a packed commuter train whizzed by. I opened the window for some air and was greeted by the smell of sewage.

      There was a lot to do to bring the city up to Western standards, as I would discover. Living conditions were still largely primitive in most areas outside the main hubs. The harbor and the capital’s main rivers were thick with sludge from the human and industrial waste that poured into them, and drinking local tap water, we were told, was unsafe, with hepatitis a constant worry. Decades later, Tokyo would be justifiably famous for its high-tech toilets, with their automated lids, music modes, water jets, blow-dry functions, and computer analyses, that headlined an impressive sewerage. But back then, despite the frantic rebuilding, less than a quarter of the city’s twenty-three sprawling wards had flush sewage systems at all, making Tokyo one of the world’s most undeveloped (and odiferous) megalopolises.

This state of affairs compared unfavorably with the United States and Europe where flush toilets had been the norm in cities since the turn of the century. In statistical terms, it meant that millions of Tokyoites lacking such amenities in their homes were forced to rely on a primitive scoop and dispose system in

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