Among the sakariba, the bustling places of the city, Shibuya was the one that was most visibly affected by preparations for the Olympics, and it was the one most directly caught up in the aftermath. The Shibuya district proper, the vicinity of the mass-transit complex, did not change at an especially dizzying rate compared with the other bustling places even after the freeway went through. It became part of a larger complex, however: a triangle northward from Shibuya to the Meiji Shrine and, beside it, the site of Washington Heights and the Olympic village, eastward to Aoyama Avenue, the street widened in preparation for the games, and back to Shibuya along this last. The northeast corner of the triangle came close to the outskirts of Roppongi, another rampant pleasure district, and on to the north Roppongi merged with Akasaka of the cabarets (such as the one in which Rikidōzan was stabbed) and the geisha. So one vast entertainment, shopping, and to a degree managerial district was growing up all the way from the outer castle moat to Shibuya. For convenience, though the expression has no currency in Japan, we may call it the Southwest.
With the Olympic village at one end of the main street leading through the Harajuku district, and Aoyama Avenue, the main access by rapid transit to Ginza and the old center of the city, at the other, the Olympics brought a great increase in the number or late-night purveyors of pleasure. In the beginning it was a matter between athletes and purveyors, but the female adolescent crowd loved all the exoticism and lingered on. A decade earlier the idle young tended not to have money to spend. Now they did. The fame of Harajuku spread, and it became a place with a powerful attraction for curious and mildly rebellious youth the whole land over. Great swarms of schoolboys and schoolgirls have always converged upon the city, especially during the clement seasons, to improve themselves. In days of old they came in tightly mustered groups and looked reverently at the royal residence and the Diet building. Now they preferred to look at Harajuku, and the teachers who were their wardens were powerless to stop them.
There, in the post-Olympic years, one seemed to see the future most clearly. In those years we first started hearing of the Harajuku addition to the zoku, the “tribes” which followed one another through the postwar decades. Harajuku has disappeared as the official name of a district, but it survives as the name of the Yamanote station next north from Shibuya, that nearest the Olympic village (and that whence the bodies of emperors depart for their final repose). In popular usage it signifies the regions eastward from the Meiji Shrine and the Olympic village to Aoyama Avenue—the northern side of the triangle. The expression “Harajuku Zoku” might be freely rendered “flaming youth.” They have been perhaps the most perdurable of all the tribes, for, changing as fads and rages change, they are with us yet. They have their sports cars and their hot rods and motorcycles, and the police have seemed unwilling or unable to stop them as they race back and forth along that northern side of the triangle, Yoyogi Park, where the Olympic village was, to Aoyama Avenue.
They also have flamboyant styles of dress and lawless ways, among them the taking over of any bit of unguarded and unoccupied property. It was in the post-Olympic years that the English words “event” and “happening” entered the language, to designate the exhibitionist behavior of the young, especially in Harajuku and Yoyogi. The Sunday afternoons of a quarter of a century have been rendered deafening by the noises from their amplifying devices and riotous by their dress and dancing. Happenings and events are concentrated in front of the staid Meiji Shrine, at the northwest corner of the Shibuya triangle.
Street performers on a Sunday in Harajuku
Many have been distressed by them, some have thought them a hopeful sign—for a small measure of pluralism in Japan, most conformist and undifferentiated of nations, might be good for all of us. Thorstein Veblen thought the Japanese opportunity would pass when, as must inevitably happen, premodern ways of behavior no longer prevailed. It might finally be happening. Yet in some ways the Harajuku tribe does not seem so very rebellious and decadent after all. Detailed maps of Harajuku are striking for the lack of the sort of places so numerous in Shinjuku, the sex places. The events and happenings are alfresco.
The Harajuku-Aoyama district was becoming the center of high fashion in an ever more highly fashioned city. Such expressions usually have reference to feminine elegance, and this one does here. The center of masculine elegance has stayed in Ginza.
Men were wearing Western dress with reasonable competence during the interwar decades. The emperor may look a bit overdressed in the famous pictures of that first interview with the general, but he does not look badly dressed. Since emperors of Japan never wear Japanese dress on public occasions save the most elaborately ritual ones, such as coronations, it was during the interwar years that he got his practice.
And when did it happen for women? The disasters of 1923 and 1945 both brought sudden increases in the frequency of Western dress for women—although the victims of the 1932 Shirokiya fire, as we have seen (page 319), were still in Japanese dress. In the postwar years Japanese dress became so uncommon that it also became uneconomical. Low demand brought high prices. Old weavers died, old techniques fell into disuse, and those who had to have Japanese dress, such as geisha, had to pay high and ever higher prices for superior pieces.
There came a time, along toward the end of the first quarter or third of a century after the surrender, when women at length began to look as if Western dress were meant for them—not women of the diplomatic and banking sets, who came to grips with the problem much earlier, but housewives and students and office girls. With women’s dress as our indicator, we may say that it took almost a century from the Meiji Restoration for Western appurtenances to rest other than awkwardly. Today Japanese ones are coming to seem that way, as when young ladies kick at the skirts of the kimonos they put on for graduation day or a wedding. Their stride goes better with Western dress.
Yet another part of Washington Heights, parts of which became Yoyogi Park and the Olympic gymnasium, became a new center for NHK, the public broadcasting corporation. The old building, near Hibiya Park, had been “Radio Japan,” whence the Tokyo Rose broadcasts went forth to gladden young American hearts all over the Pacific. In 1972 NHK sold the old building to Mitsubishi. The price was over thirty-four billion and a few-odd million yen. Even in those days of a strong dollar this figure converted to almost a hundred million dollars. The new complex, very glassy, was completed with the opening of NHK Hall, for concerts and the like, in 1973.
Roppongi was the earliest of the brassy, amplified entertainment districts. It had its tribe, its zoku, years in advance of the Harajuku one. The origins of Roppongi are similar to those of Shibuya: military. There were training grounds beyond Shibuya, and there were barracks near the main Roppongi crossing. So Roppongi developed in response to the military demand. This occurred during the two big wars of Meiji. The barracks were taken over by the Americans, and Roppongi went on responding.
During the American years it was not an especially lively place, though it contained many a little bar that stayed open late at night to please the soldiers. When Tokyo Tower went up in 1958 (see pages 517-518), Roppongi was like the darkness at the foot of the lighthouse. The tower blazed, and Roppongi did not. The place on the edge of Roppongi where the tower went up was a dark, lonely one, well suited for murder (see page 479).
In the early sixties, the pre-Olympic years, Roppongi started to become the sort of place people knew about. The Americans moved out of the barracks in 1959. Providentially, a very big television studio opened there the same year. In those early years of its fame, Roppongi was new among the pleasure centers of the city in more than one sense. It was of course the newest in point of time, and it was the only one among them that took a little trouble to get to. Asakusa languished because it was not an important transfer point and was not served by the National Railways. Roppongi was not served by any kind of rapid transit. It did not have a subway line until 1964, the Ol
ympic year, and it has never had an elevated line, private or public. Young people came in droves all the same. Unlike the hot-rodders and motorcycle gangs that were later to converge on Harajuku, not many of them had their own transportation. And what was it that lured them, despite the inconvenience? What if not television? When the American clientele departed Roppongi, the television one took its place, and young people went to ogle, and to imitate, and to dance and eat pizza. The mass media were talking about a Roppongi Zoku from about 1960. It did the things just enumerated. The pizza and dancing were exotic, and the people of television were at the bright cutting edge of progress. The exotic and the advanced were what the Roppongi Zoku were after, and what they signified.
The Yoshiwara, when it flourished, was known as “the nightless city,” but it was less nightless by far than places like Roppongi have become in the years since the Olympics. Though the Yoshiwara may have been in business all through the night, there were no crowds in the streets during the early-morning hours, and the biggest noise was that of the wooden clappers exhorting caution against fires. It is not so with Roppongi and other parts of the Southwest. Especially before a holiday, they are lighted, crowded, brassy, and amplified all through the night, nightless as no Japanese place had been before. They are like Times Square on New Year’s Eve or Greenwich Village on Halloween.
Television has also figured in the prosperity of Akasaka, just to the north. Once dominated by the geisha, it is an older and was a more elegant pleasure center than Roppongi or Shibuya. The geisha dominates no more. Her decline of recent years has been precipitous. Akasaka was one of the great geisha quarters of Meiji, very much of Meiji in the sense that it had been a dark, silent place of noble estates under the shoguns and began to bustle only in Meiji. It lay on one of the guard points along the outer moat and near the southwestern limits of the Meiji city. During the interwar years it was favored with a station on the earliest subway line, and after the war it became one of two points at which transfer between the first and second subway lines was possible (Ginza was the other).
The Akasaka geisha prospered because of her proximity to the bureaucratic center of the city. After the war Akasaka was the most conspicuous place for machiai politics, thought infamous by the newspapers, which invented the term. The word machiai is rendered by the big Japanese-English dictionary as “an assignation house.” It is the institution more popularly rendered as “geisha house.” Machiai politics had to do with the big deals in which businessmen and politicians worked hand in glove and with the arrangements whereby rival political factions formed their shifting coalitions.
Akasaka supplanted Ginza as a cabaret center. It had the gaudiest ones in the city, both because of machiai politics and because of all the big hotels that came with the Olympics. It too had its big television studios, and so, like Roppongi, it was a place to go for a look at the people who were making the future. There was no Akasaka Zoku, however. Only one zoku, the expense-account one, seemed made for Akasaka, but it was scattered everywhere.
The Shibuya-Aoyama-Harajuku triangle lies almost completely beyond the limits of the old city; Akasaka and Roppongi lie within. The separate parts have their several histories, some reasonably old and some very new, but none of them amounted to much of anything before Meiji. They are still somewhat separate, though the cordons of quiet between them are not wide.
One would be hard put to say whether the Olympics or television was more important in the rise of the Southwest. Roppongi had taken off well before the Olympics came, and so it may be that the young would have gone to that part of town in search of the future even if the Olympics had not worked their change on the Shibuya triangle. The Olympics did come, however, and they brought other ingredients of the future—freeways and boutiques and high fashion and exoticism. It has long been the case, though the Japanese remain astonishingly faithful to old modes of behavior (whether Veblen was right or not is still in doubt), that they look abroad to see what the material future will be.
While the Southwest was thus leaping forward, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro were in the Olympic years making more modest progress, and plans. The first postwar subway line joined the two, and took a circumspect route that joined both of them to the old center of the city. The old Eastmouth at Ikebukuro became a plaza for automobiles, that at Shinjuku returned to places for eating, drinking, and shopping. Ikebukuro may thus have erred. It has less chance of one day catching up with the old center of the city than has Shinjuku or Shibuya. Its Westmouth is not in serious competition, as a provisioner of drink and sex, with Kabukichō in Shinjuku.
Shinjuku started burrowing as the Yaesu Mouth of Tokyo Central Station had done, and by the Olympics had a grand subterranean promenade leading under the railroad tracks and joining Eastmouth and Westmouth. Grander plans were still largely plans. They had to do with the reservoir, and included everything a planner needed to keep himself happy—streets, plazas, parks, parking, big buildings. Two years before the Olympics water started flowing into the new Higashimurayama Reservoir, out in the county part of the prefecture. The year after the Olympics the old reservoir ceased to function. So the post-Olympic years were the time for making plans come true.
Though Shinjuku went on having a larger count of bodies in transit than Shibuya, it might have fallen behind the Southwest if it had not had the reservoir. Barring the rise of bustling centers out in the county part of the prefecture, however, its decline could only be relative. It has gone on being a gigantic blaze and din, and in one respect it remained well in the lead of the Southwest even before the Westmouth started reaching upward into the light: the sex business. For all the grotesqueries of Harajuku and Yoyogi Park and the kinky clubs of Roppongi, they were places where a boy could go walking with his high school sweetheart, in from the country, with no fear of embarrassing her or giving her the wrong idea about him. The difference is rather like that between Times Square and Greenwich Village. The Village may offer all manner of perverse pleasures, but it keeps them out of sight. For the open thing, one goes to the Square.
Certain farsighted companies, knowing what was to come, started putting up big buildings at Westmouth even during the Olympic years. An insurance building was finished in 1961; another, about twice the size, in 1964. Neither outdid buildings in the center of the city in size or height, but they looked very big and rather lonely there at Westmouth, the undeveloped side of Shinjuku. Today, viewed from the east, they are like foothills against the range that was thrust up later.
Just after the Olympics, Shinjuku had a zoku, a tribe. The Fūten Zoku were more aggressive dropouts from society than the Harajuku Zoku. Fūten is the first adjective in the title of the famous Tanizaki novel Diary of a Mad Old Man. In this ease it means something more like “delinquent” (and indeed the Tanizaki title could have been rendered Diary of a Senile Delinquent). The Futen Zoku had as their habitat the plaza in front of the newly rebuilt Shinjuku Eastmouth, what was then the main entrance to the station complex. They were the equivalent of the flower children of San Francisco, and they could have chosen almost any place in which to loiter had they not craved attention. That they did want it, and so clearly, gave their doings an air of the theatrical. They got their attention as they lolled about, quaffing and sniffing mysterious things. Then they started having a social conscience, and it was the beginning of the end. Japan may be a little discommoded by dropouts, but it knows how to deal with political and ideological dissent. In 1967 the Fūten Zoku joined certain anti-communist (which is to say, more radical than the communists) student factions in a famous attack on the Eastmouth police box. It was the first of several such attacks in those years when the left-wing establishment was falling apart and the student left was growing ever more violent. When the violence died down the Fūten Zoku was no more.
The Bankers’ Club, a Taishō building surviving in Marunouchi
Marunouchi was in these Olympic years tearing down its Londontown, those blo
cks of red-brick buildings left from Meiji. The process was not completed until the post-Olympic years, when the first to go up was the last to come down. There was no murmur of protest when it did come down, but there has since been a vigorous movement to protect from demolition two brick buildings yet remaining in the Marunouchi district, the Bankers’ Club and Tokyo Central Station. Both date from Taishō. Only in the past two decades has Tokyo come to have some sense that there might be objects worth preserving in its material heritage. Not quite everything of Meiji has disappeared from Marunouchi. Each of the Londontown buildings contained, high up in its attic, a Buddhist image. The images and the lightning rods are preserved in the basement of the Marunouchi Building, saved by the Mitsubishi executive who oversaw the destruction.
Despite the beginnings at the Shinjuku Westmouth, there was no indication that the business center of the city had any intention of jumping westward across the palace grounds. Except for the two Shinjuku insurance buildings just mentioned, all the major office buildings put up in the early sixties were in the three central wards, Chiyoda, Chūō, and Minato, the largest number in Chiyoda, which is to say, greater Marunouchi, the Marunouchi district proper and the districts immediately to the north and south. It is hard to know why insurance companies should have been the boldest in moving out beyond the central fastnesses. Perhaps, feeling less vulnerable to foreign incursions, they have felt less need to be near the bureaucracy. Two years after the Olympics another big insurance company moved its headquarters to the old site of the American school, in Meguro Ward, south of Shibuya.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 61