LITMIR.BIZ

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by a beefy man in a red Aloha shirt.

      “Nani kore?” (What’s this?), he said, a look of repugnance on his face as though Jun had just dragged in a dead cat. He had a deep half-moon scar on his badly shaven chin.

      “He’s okay,” said Jun. “He’s a friend.”

      The man looked at Jun as though he were transparent. Another Ando factotum pushed himself upright from the wall against which he had been slouching. He carried a carbine rifle.

      Jun did not alter his expression. “He’s a Happy Valley regular,” he said. “He sits at the same bar as the Ando-gumi.” There was magic in the name: The grim set of the gatekeeper’s features relented a few micrometers and he gestured us inside.

Arrayed on either side of a long rectangular mat were a collection of chinpira, or low-level hoods in punch perms, salarymen (office workers), and local merchants. They sat with intent expressions and made bets on dice rolled by a dealer (tsubofuri) wearing only a haramaki sash around his abdomen, white pajama bottoms, and an elaborate dragon tattoo on his back. The shirtless attire, Jun explained, was to forestall charges of cheating. The centuries-old betting procedure never varied. The dealer held out the dice for all to see and, with an elaborate gesture, calling out “Hairimasu!” (Dice in!), placed them in a bamboo cup, which he then turned over on top of the mat, concealing the numbers. “Hatta! Hatta!” (Lay down your bets!) was the next cry, and the players then wagered as to whether the total of the two dice would come out even (cho) or odd (han). The thug with the rifle had gone back into his slouch against the wall. Another member of the gang lit cigarettes for the players and poured sake, much as a Ginza nightclub hostess might. I made a few small bets just to be polite, a ¥500 note ($1.38) here and there, and was surprised to discover that at the end of my desultory play I was ahead several thousand yen. But it turned out that even at this low-level game I was strictly small potatoes; not a few of the players were betting stacks of ¥10,000 notes.

      By the time Jun and I wandered back into the street, the sky was just beginning to whiten in the east. Despite my coup, I had pretty well decided not to add cho-han to my already burgeoning list of vices.

      ***

Jun quit his job around that time and opened up a tiny bar on the second floor of a ten-story ferro-concrete building in Udagawa-cho. There was a counter with about ten stools and two tables in the back. It was like a thousand other bars in the city in that there was barely room to turn around and its survival depended on the patronage of fellow mizu shobai workers and other friends. He invited me to his opening party, which was attended by a handful of Happy Valley employees and some other small-timers in the Shibuya entertainment world. Jun, looking less morose than I had ever seen him, stood behind the bar mixing drinks and making conversation.

      The bar struggled in the ensuing months. Jun complained he barely cleared enough to pay his rent on the place. I took him booze and cigarettes when I could. As per usual, he poured the less expensive Suntory Whisky into the empty Johnny Walker bottles and charged double. One day, months later, I dropped by and found the bar closed. I went over to his apartment and that too was empty. Jun had simply gone, no one knew where. The word was that he had borrowed money from Tosei-kai yakuza loan sharks who charged 20 percent a month and couldn’t pay it back. I never saw him again.

      ***

But Shibuya retained a special place in my heart. One hot, muggy August night I had missed the last train back to the base and had no money for a taxi. I sat down in front of the station, next to the statue of the dog, actually, and prepared to stay there until 5 a.m. when the trains started running again. An elderly woman who was closing up her station-front kiosk asked me what was the matter. I told her, she listened sympathetically, and after she had finished closing up, she said simply, “Come with me.” She took me through the back streets to a small first-floor apartment in a two-story wooden building, where a ten-year-old girl, apparently her granddaughter, was sleeping. She rolled out a futon on the tatami in an adjoining three-mat room and bid me good night. In the morning she made toast and coffee and sent me on my way back to Fuchu. It was a simple act of kindness that went beyond anything I had experienced before. And I never forgot it. I always remembered to stop by her kiosk when visiting Shibuya and bring presents from the base for her and the little girl. She was a nice lady.

      JFK was assassinated in the morning of November 23, 1963. The next time I went to the Happy Valley I received a funeral envelope with a ¥10,000 bill inside from the Happy Valley management, which both touched and confused me. I only learned later that this was the common custom to express condolences. One of the girls at the Happy Valley went one step further. She invited me out for dinner and what would turn out to be other consolations.

Dr. Sato: The Smell of Freshly Dried Asphalt

      As the countdown to the Games progressed, doubts about Tokyo making the deadline intensified. The two shiny new subway lines had opened up—Toei Asakusa (1960) and Hibiya (1961), joining the older Ginza (1927) and Marunouchi (1954) lines—but as late as January 1963 none of the target dates for road construction had been met, and Shojiro Kawashima, cabinet minister in charge of the Olympics, was forced to concede to reporters that Olympic preparations were “regrettably” behind in all aspects.

Construction on the new elevated coastal highway leading from Haneda Airport some 13 miles into the capital was late getting started because fishermen owned long stretches of the land along the intended route and were demanding multiples of the price the government had anticipated paying. In another case, speculators had bought up large plots of land the government was eyeing for development into a second inland expressway into the city and demanded exorbitant prices, which again went beyond the budget the authorities had prepared. There were eminent domain laws on the books, but the government was obligated by legal precedent to pay the full asking price, and in the above-mentioned cases the asking price was simply too high.

      An even bigger problem looming ominously over the city was a dire shortage of water in the capital caused by an abnormal lack of rainfall in the wet season preceding the Games. Tokyo’s reservoirs had been emptying for three months, and as the summer began the municipal government instituted water rationing. Bathhouse hours were restricted and swimming pools closed, and on narrow side streets police water trucks, usually employed to quell leftist riots, filled housewives’ buckets with water hauled in from nearby rivers. Soba shops cut down on their cooking, while Ginza nightclubs urged thirsty patrons to “drink your whisky without water and help save Tokyo.”

      Drilling crews dug emergency artesian wells, while other work crews excavated canals to bring in water from nearby rivers. Japan Self-Defense Force planes dumped dry ice on overhead clouds, while on the shores of the Ogochi reservoir outside the city a Shinto priest in the mask of a scarlet lion writhed through a ceremonial rain dance. Townsmen were warned not to expect miracles. As the priest explained, “It will take two days for the message to get through to the dragon god.”

      As the deadline for the Games approached, there was an enormous, frantic rush to finish everything on time. Construction continued around the clock, seven days a week. Bulldozers rearranged the landscape, and dump trucks, loaded up with sand for land-reclamation projects in Tokyo’s fetid harbor, rumbled back and forth in unbroken streams. In January 1964 the city government had mobilized 1.6 million residents to help clean Tokyo’s streets. That’s not a misprint.

At night, after the salarymen had gone home and the traffic thinned out, the city stepped up construction. Blinding work lights and diesel compressors switched on, traffic on Tokyo’s main thoroughfares was rerouted, and new sets of air hammers and pile drivers were put to work opening up those streets. This went on until dawn, when the avenues were covered with temporary wooden planks and traffic resumed. Most of Tokyo’s citizens stoically put up with the annoyances, using blackout curtains and earplugs to block out the light and noise. I did the same when I stayed overnight in the city. But I clearly remember a newspaper item in one of the English-language dailies about a college student who, unable to study because of the constant pounding near his rooming house, became so agitated that he marched down

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