So the age of rapid economic growth, which had lasted from the years when the Korean War was being put to such good use, was at an end. The years immediately following were ones of hesitation and uncertainty. Bankruptcies occurred with greater frequency than at any other time since the war. It came to seem possible that rapid growth would be replaced by no growth at all, or even a diminution. The effect on the life of Tokyo was immediately noticeable. Most prominent among the lights to go out was the Morinaga globe in Ginza. Elevators were put on furlough, lights in hallways were dimmed. Broadcasting hours and movie hours were shortened. Filling stations took holidays. Another sacred institution, the expense account, seemed threatened.
The city and the nation emerged from it all with greater confidence than ever. It was in those years that one began to hear that Japan, after a century and more, had nothing to learn from the world, and the world, if it had any sense, should start learning from Japan. Though slow economic growth would be the thing, the continuing slide of the dollar was the best indication that the national foreign policy, export and export and export some more, had been a success. The lights started going on again. By the end of the decade the city gave little indication, in its surface aspects at least, that the shock had occurred.
Inflation proceeded apace. In 1975 prices in the ward part of Tokyo were four times what they had been a quarter of a century before, when the wild inflation of the immediate postwar years had been brought under control. The higher price of energy of course made domestic manufactures more expensive. The lower price of the dollar might have been expected to make foreign products, and especially American products, cheaper. Deflation in this regard was scarcely to be detected. It certainly did not occur at the rate at which the dollar declined. Economic growth would continue, at a reduced pace, and the country had proved itself capable of handling both expensive imports of raw materials and cheap imports of manufactured goods. The new confidence seemed quite justified. Opinion will differ as to whether or not it made Tokyo a pleasanter and more livable city.
Fire hoses drench students holding out at Tokyo University during the battle of “Xasuda Castle,” 1969
Quiet was returning to the campuses by the early seventies. The violence and the apparent ability of students to do as they wished with their universities began to subside with the fall of what the media called Yasuda Castle. Yasuda Hall is the main administration building at Tokyo University. Radical students who had made it their “castle,” expelling the president and all the other administrators, were themselves expelled in the summer of 1968. They occupied it again, and were again expelled, in January 1969, after a fierce battle with close to ten thousand policemen, watched by the whole nation on television. Among the popular words of those years were gebaruto and gebabō. The former is the German Gewalt (“force, power”), and the latter combines its first two syllables with a Japanese word for “stick” or “stave.” It refers to the staves with which radical students flailed at the police and rival student factions.
Mishima Yukio died on November 25, 1970. It was too complex an incident, and he was too complex and intelligent a person, for us to see it as merely an instance of misguided nationalism. He knew the youth of the land too well, and the changes that were coming over it, now that the turbulent sixties were out of the way, to expect that the army (more properly, the Ground Self-Defense Force) would rise up and follow him in bringing about a Shōwa Restoration. A repetition of the 1960 demonstrations against the Security Treaty was expected in 1970. It did not come off, and 1970 may be seen as the year in which the Socialist Party lost all credibility as a possible alternative to the conservatives who had been in charge of the country since 1948. Those who wanted change became splinter groups. Conformity came to prevail, and an appearance of democracy in which it would not be possible to turn the rascals out.
Mishima Yukio’s last oration, Ichigaya, 1970
After standing on a balcony for a few minutes and urging the assembled soldiers at the Ichigaya barracks to rise and follow him, Mishima withdrew into the office of the commanding general, and there, with help, met his end (it was technically murder and not suicide). The recorded shouts of the soldiers are more suggestive of amusement and derision than sympathy—and it is hard to believe that Mishima expected them to be otherwise.
His death speaks of the times, in a very negative fashion. He did not like the emerging consensus and conformity. In all manner of ways, from dress to sexual behavior, he was a nonconformist. He did not have much to say about democracy in the lands of its origin, but he thought that in Japan it was a sham and a pretense. He had hoped that the anticipated anti-treaty demonstrations of 1970 would bring a genuine confrontation and the emergence of something more honest, even if the honesty might be revealed in ungentle ways. It is clear that he started making preparations for his death during the summer, when the confrontation seemed possible. Motives other than disappointment must have been present in his last, drastic deeds. We may reasonably think that it was among the motives, however. The city was entering a time of ever bigger and brighter material objects and ever greater conformity, and no one turned up to protest, on the last occasion when genuine protest might have been possible.
In the spring of 1977 four young men who had been members of Mishima’s private army attacked the headquarters of the Federation of Economic Organizations, just north of Marunouchi. Even as there are splinter groups on the radical left, there are such groups on the right and Mishima and his death are among the inspirational sources of the latter. The day when such happenings will be of importance is a great if not infinite distance away, but they serve to remind us that the city and the nation chose to take one course and some by no means stupid people wished them to take another.
For bright young people who conformed there might be a room at the top of one of the high new buildings. These were very new, something the city had not seen before, the first buildings worthy of the name skyscraper. The city started reaching upward as New York had done a half century before. In this way too the years just before the golden jubilee and after the Olympics seem to mark the beginning of a stage.
The relatively permanent, fireproof, and advanced parts of the city had low, fairly even lines in the interwar period and the years just after the war. On one of her visits from suburban Osaka to Tokyo, Sachiko, the heroine of Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, finds the avenue with the palace moat and plaza on one side and the office buildings of Marunouchi on the other—it is the avenue on which General MacArthur had his headquarters—almost the only thing in Tokyo, aside from the Kabuki, worth looking at.
It was, by comparison with its condition today, a modest, quiet sort of avenue. The big Marunouchi office buildings, including the Marunouchi Building, the biggest of them all, did not exceed seven and eight storys, in a day when New York was flinging the Empire State Building into the heavens. Reasons of dignity and reasons of prudence were argued for this state of affairs. The royal residence must not be dwarfed by huge towers (for the same reason headquarters of the prefectural police, at Cherry Orchard Gate, were kept to a modest level); and skyscrapers would not do in a city of earthquakes.
Somewhat higher buildings began to rise in the years after the Korean War. The biggest and highest of the Olympic hotels was seventeen storys high. The reasons of dignity just mentioned are closely related to aesthetic reasons, and these last seemed to be forgotten. The hotel, the New Otani in Akasaka, looms over a surviving segment of the old outer moat, until the Olympics (when it also got freeways) one of the prettiest places left from the old city. When the time came for real skyscrapers, however, aesthetic considerations asserted themselves once more. A race seemed in prospect to see who would have the first such building. The competition was between the Marine Insurance Building in Marunouchi, on Sachiko’s avenue and General MacArthur’s, and a building which Mitsui proposed to erect just south of the Kasumigaseki government complex. The form
er got embroiled in a controversy over the integrity of the avenue. Time passed before an accommodation was reached which cut several storys from it. The new Mitsui building meanwhile went up, to be the first of the “super high-rises,” as the Japanese expression for the genre may be translated.
The Kasumigaseki Building was finished in 1968, and it is thirty-five storys high. We are told that prudence was kept in mind. The building, along with other supers, we are assured, is perfectly earthquake-resistant. It is in any event a nauseating experience, like seasickness, to be high in one of them when even a mild earthquake strikes. When the building was new the largest annex to the American embassy stood right across the street from it. People would rush to their windows and watch it rock. Looking up at the supers, one may wonder less whether they will stand through a big earthquake than whether all that glass will come showering down into the street. The Kasumigaseki Building was a new adventure for Japanese builders, but it does not look very daring, save for its height. It is a large block.
It did not long remain the highest building in the city. In the years since it was finished it has slipped to tenth place or so. In 1970 a World Trade Center (Sekai Bōeki Sentaa) was put up at Hamamatsuchō, a short distance south of Ginza and Shimbashi. It is forty storys and a hundred fifty meters high. Though it was not yet built when the Olympic monorail was put through to the airport, it now functions as the northern terminus.
The highest structure in the city continues to be Tokyo Tower, and the highest building in the narrower sense of the term—a structure of walls and rooms—is the Sunshine, finished in 1978 on the site of Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro. It is sixty storys and a bit more than two hundred forty meters high, plus three underground levels.
The Shinjuku Westmouth, however, is the true place for supers. It has a cluster of them, while those mentioned above stand in isolation. The cluster too wears an air of isolation when viewed from anywhere except the middle of the cluster itself. From a distance it goes on looking as if the city had not made adequate preparations for it and did not quite know what to do with it.
The prefecture kept a part of the old reservoir site for its own use, and it is there, toward the western end, beside Shinjuku Central Park, that the new prefectural offices are under construction. The rest of the tract was turned over to private developers. The park is made over from the well-wooded grounds of an old shrine that still occupies a corner of it.
The old Yodobashi reservoir, later site of the Shinjuku Westmouth skyscrapers
A new station building rose at Eastmouth in the year of the Olympics. Besides being the main Shinjuku station for what were then the National Railways, it is an elaborate shopping and feasting complex with an English name, My City. Traffic and crowds were put into a kind of order at Westmouth before the high buildings started going up. The Westmouth plaza was finished in 1966. The pleasant station plaza that had stood near Piss Alley at the undeveloped Westmouth quite disappeared. A complex on several levels took its place, accommodating many, many vehicles, public and private, and people and shops. It became possible to have a covered, rain-free walk eastward from the old reservoir site past one subway station and on to another, a distance of a kilometer or so, with subterranean entrances to shops and department stores and rapid transit all along the way. Not many cities can have the digs that Tokyo has. It is like a coal mine.
No one seems to have foreseen that the Westmouth plaza could easily be clogged by people who chose to clog it. On a day early in October 1968 students for whom the Communist Party was too conservative started hurling chunks of pavement, mostly at the police but somewhat randomly, and occupied a police box. Then, by way of preparation for an “antiwar day” later in the month, all the paving blocks were taken up in the course of a single night and replaced by asphalt. Windows were boarded over. My City closed early in the evening. Some twelve thousand policemen were massed in readiness. The station was occupied by student factions all the same, and in chaos. Fires were set, stones were hurled, tear gas was used.
Thereafter for a time skirmishes were almost nightly affairs, and fun to watch. Folksinging and dancing of a militantly nonmilitant sort succeeded the violence. They too led to clogging and police action. The police eventually succeeded in putting a stop to the singing and dancing, but it was a great bother to them. The Shinjuku Incident of October 1968 and the fall of Yasuda Castle early the following year were probably the most conspicuous events in the great show of youthful spirits. We have seen that the Delinquent Tribe of the Eastmouth was a part of the action, and got dispersed as a result of it. What with mouths and plazas and tribes and factions, Shinjuku was in those days a very lively place.
The first super high-rise on the old reservoir site was the Keiō Plaza Hotel, finished in 1971, forty-seven storys, but still under two hundred meters. Also in Shinjuku, another Mitsui building, finished in 1974, went up fifty-five storys and some twenty meters over the two hundred mark. Critics of architecture do not find much to praise in these supers. The new prefectural offices will, however, be something to look at. If they look like big pieces of latter-day Gothic, they will do so with some honesty. Notre Dame of Paris is the admitted inspiration. The offices will be, we are told, a monumental specimen of “postmodern” architecture.
This very fashionable expression is elusive, but one of the things it seems to mean is that architectural forms will once more hark back to periods remoter than the present century. While all this was going on at Westmouth, Eastmouth did not cease to bustle. The immediate Eastmouth remained one of the best places for shopping, and crowds of ladies with money poured in upon it every afternoon from every direction. The district farther east, where the old post station had been, became somewhat specialized. It evolved into the homosexual capital of the nation, and surely it is well in the running for the designation homosexual capital of the world. The homosexuality is not exclusively male, but that predominates.
As a place for masculine bustle of the commoner type, Kabukichō, with its neighbor the Golden Block, was leaving the competition behind in Shinjuku, certainly, and arguably in the land as well (though the Kansai cities were often pioneers in the kinkier things). In 1984 and 1985 the police had another fit of puritanism, and it was generally agreed that Kabukicho provided the occasion. It was becoming altogether too open and brazen with one of its two staples, sex. The other staple, alcohol, was not a problem unless it led to drunken driving, and this was dealt with sternly. Nor has noise, a by-product, been thought a problem. Tokyo and its police have in this regard always had a high threshold.
Kabukichō at night
The puritanical fit removed from the streets the most obvious signs of what was going on. Touts became more reticent about laying hands upon passersby who seemed in a mood for something; the latter had to look a little harder to find it. Gaudy billboards and lights were no longer there to direct them. Yet it had taken a quarter of a century to create Kabukichō in its present image, and it was not prepared to revert to an earlier existence, or convert to something else. Detailed maps of the place go on showing something of a titillating nature at almost every Kabukichō number.
A recent one is packed full of mysterious runes and codes, and the key to them may be translated thus: “peep show; crystal; health girl; massage in private rooms; telephone club; love room; television games; video; girl companions; private sauna; pantyless tearooms; special baths; adult toys.” About half the key is in what seems to be English. It would take a genuine expert to say exactly what all the terms mean, and whether they are carefully defined and mutually exclusive categories. That the sex business is large and subtle, however, must be apparent to anyone.
Love hotel in Kabukichō
A Kabukichō eating and drinking establishment, unfortunately named
The most mysterious item is the second, “crystal.” It is in the Japanese phonetic syllabary, and seems to be from English. The English word was alre
ady present in the Japanese language in such expressions as “crystal glass,” “crystal diode,” and “crystal microphone.” In this case it seems to derive from the title of a popular novel, Somehow Crystal (Nan to naku Kurisutaru), written in 1980 by a student named Tanaka Yasuo. It is an almost plotless piece, really a novella, which would run to no more than thirty thousand words in English translation; and it contains 442 footnotes identifying details, predominantly exotic, that might otherwise puzzle the reader. We may presume that the use of the word here also signifies something exotic, though a recent inspection of Kabukichō turned up no very convincing answer to the question. The “crystal” places seemed no different from the run-of-the-mill purveyors of “adult” gadgetry.
Another recent tabulation, compiled at about the time the police were beginning to have their puritanical seizure, covered only the southern half of Kabukichō, the half in front of the Seibu station and nearest to Eastmouth proper. It contains twenty “consolidated pornography houses” (pornography emporiums, so to speak), twenty-one places offering massages in private rooms, two strip theaters, twenty-one “nude shows in private rooms,” four pornographic movie theaters, seventeen “soaplands” (which would earlier have been called Turkish baths), four houses offering video in private rooms, thirteen peep shows (including places that offer these in private rooms), two pantyless tearooms, seventeen pornography shops, and eleven enterprises which (most ingeniously) fell into none of the above categories—a total of a hundred thirty-two. There were also fifteen love hotels, and some two hundred touts swarmed the area, no more than five hundred yards across east to west and two hundred north to south.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 66