Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  There remained only our expedition into the countryside, and since our route was a conventional one and almost ruined by rain, I will be brief about it.

  Accompanied by Tiger Saito, we left by a routine express for Yugawara, about ten miles south-east of Mount Fujiyama, which was invisible in the low cloud. Our objective was a modest Japanese inn, frequented only by Japanese, and the conventional Japanese bath, the three of us together in the small, roastingly hot, round pool. We then drove over the mountains in mist and pouring rain to a renowned tourist hotel at Miyanoshita, whose lately-deceased manager had been President of the International Moustaches Club and where I was delighted to find, in a prominent position on the wall, a photograph of a great-uncle of mine whose two-foot moustaches terrified me as a child. Then to Yamato and back to Tokyo by the most beautiful train I have ever travelled in – a streamlined aluminium affair in bright orange that looked as if it belonged to Mars, but in fact was operated by the Odawara Express Train Company, a private enterprise which, with its soft, piped music and its pretty girls in claret uniform dispensing tea and Japanese whisky (very good, though I, a Scot, say it), could teach British Railways a thing or two.

  And then it was time to pack and say the fond goodbyes, and after a last and, to me, rather melancholy banquet of raw fish and martinis with my Orientalist guide, philosopher and friend, Dick Hughes, the taxi dashed through the suburbs of Tokyo to catch the plane that would take me, in one hop across the Pacific, to Honolulu.

  As the travelogue would put it, Sayonara Japan! Aloha Hawaii … on double Friday the 13th!

  INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

  Hotels

  Whatever season you visit Tokyo, cable your accommodation reservations well in advance, and reckon on spending double your normal budget while you are in the most expensive city in the world.

  The Imperial Hotel Annexe, to which the reckless always flock, will cost 6,000 yen (£6) a day, but you can get into the original Imperial Hotel, which many people prefer anyway in the autumn and spring, when bedroom air-conditioning is not required, for two-thirds that price. For 3,000 yen you can get a good enough room at the Shiba Park Hotel, near by and also operated by the Imperial. The Nikkatsu is almost as expensive as the Imperial Annexe but more liberal and tolerant in – shall we say? – its policies. Because of the demand, there is a take-it-or-leave-it indifference at the reception desks in most of the big hotels.

  Recommended compromises may be found within fifteen minutes’ taxi drive from the Ginza and the heart of down-town Tokyo. One such is the Matsudaira – up to 4,000 yen a day for a small air-conditioned suite. The Matsudaira has an elegant swimming-pool, is quiet and discreet and caters for foreign airline crews on overnight stop-overs. Japanese-style inns of good quality like the Fukudaya usually require an introduction for a gaijin (foreigner).

  With the next Olympic Games in the offing, there is a boom in Tokyo hotel-building, so new names will be rising and maybe old names will be becoming less autocratic.

  Eating

  Tokyo, to quote an old Zen proverb, is a veritable paradise for gourmets. Japanese beef, fish, eels, fruit, mushrooms and vegetables are unexcelled anywhere, and Hiroshima oysters are reminiscent of Colchester’s. Eat your fish Western-style in either of the three Prunier restaurants (in the Tokyo Kaikan, the Imperial, or opposite the Asahi newspaper office), in either of the two Tsujitome restaurants (operated by maestro Kaichi Tsuji of Kyoto) or in the celebrated Shin Kiraku or Kinsui (both at Tsukiji). The Crescent is currently the most fashionable – which is also to say, the most expensive – Western-style dining-room in the city, That old Oriental delicacy, smorgasbrod, is served lavishly in the Viking Room at the Imperial Annexe. In a city distinguished for its peerless Kobe or Matsuzaka beef, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club will serve you a superb steak if a member can get you a seat at lunch-time, but a visitor may prefer the authentic Japanese Ogawa-ken restaurant, where you are invited to press your finger into the steak before choosing: if the impression made by your finger lingers, the steak is ready for the cook and the table.

  Don’t confine your experiments in the wide and rich field of Japanese cuisine to the tourist’s stand-bys: sukiyaki and tempura. The first is an indifferent beef stew which the Japanese seldom bother to eat themselves; the latter is just deep-fried fish, which is tasty enough but not outstanding. If you must try it, sukiyaki is available at any Japanese-style restaurant; the best place for tempura, among hundreds of good places, is the Hashizen in Shimbashi.

  You do not need to be daringly venturesome to try yakatori; which is charcoal-grilled chicken or duck, interspersed with green pimento and Japanese onions, and spiked à la brochette on bamboo needles. There are as many cheap and gay yakatori restaurants and bars in the swarming labyrinth of alleys around the Ginza as there are tempura and noodle shops.

  Be certain not to miss the magnificent supponnabe, or snapping turtle, which is combined soup and flesh cooked at the table in private rooms at a celebrated restaurant behind the Ginza. (Addresses are almost impossible to give in Tokyo but your hotel will write the location of any of the Tokyo restaurants mentioned for your taxi-driver.) Only the poor in spirit will refuse to taste sashimi (sliced raw fish); only the deficient in taste will refuse to repeat the order. And, as is well known to all Tokyo old hands, no one ever has a hangover, no matter what his excesses have been, if before going home he halts briefly and happily at a reputable bar for some sushi (rice topped with raw fish).

  For the truly adventurous, the ancient and famed Momonjiya restaurant still serves roast monkey, monkey brains and wild boar; there are haunts near the Tsukiji fish-markets that specialize in the delicious blow-fish, which can be prepared only in registered kitchens because it contains a deadly poison; and, finally, the Taiko restaurant (next door to the Show Boat cabaret) offers, very frankly: ‘Soup with sexual organs of ox and cock; sliced pork ovary with mushrooms; and sweet and sour sexual organs of ox-all 300 yen (6s.).’ These last entrées are described delicately as ‘Tonic Dishes’.

  Night-clubs and Night Life

  Tokyo is a wide-open city – except that there is no gambling. There is an embarrassing choice of night-clubs, embarrassing in price as well as in variety. The Copacabana is probably the best; it is run by the handsome and redoubtable Madam Cherry, who recruits most of her luscious hostesses from Kobe – in Western opinion, the cradle of the most beautiful Japanese girls. (The Japanese say that the most beautiful come from Hokkaido and Niigata.) The company of a hostess in the night-club puts you back 1,000 yen (£1) an hour. A foot-loose visitor will get more incident, value and variety for his money by roaming the colourful legion of little bars in the crowded, lantern-hung lanes around the Ginza. The names are immaterial because these little bars ceaselessly rise, fall and change hands as the shifting coteries of sincere Japanese drinkers lurch to new surroundings and find new bottles and new faces.

  Two notable and intimate cabarets which should be visited and compared are L’Espoir, controlled by Beautiful Crystal, an elegant former dancer, and Osome (‘Modesty’), controlled by Dawn of Love, a voluptuous former geisha from Kyoto. Both these cabarets compete for the patronage of Tokyo’s smart intellectual set, writers, artists and politicians (men only, of course). Gaijin are discreetly and carefully screened.

  Hints for Sake-drinkers

  Don’t be fooled by the apparent mildness of good sake. Sake has an alcoholic content of twenty per cent. It should be drunk warm, with food, and is much better for serious drinkers when poured into no-nonsense thick china mugs instead of the conventional porcelain thimbles, which smack of the tea ceremony to good flagon-men. Sake continues to ferment with age and does not keep much longer than a year even when bottled and sealed. Nor does it travel well. So there are no such things as sake cellars or sake vintage years.

  There is a delicate sweet sake, amakuchi, and also a more robust dry sake, karakuchi. Tokkyu means ‘special class’; ikkyu, ‘first class’. Any type of sake from the Okura Comp
any, especially tokkyu Gckke ikan (‘Laurel Crown’), is excellent; these brewers are purveyors to the Imperial household. Another top brand is the Kikumasamune of Nada (karakuclu), which goes well with grilled fish and octopus, but not with tempura.

  Tokkyu Taruhe (karakuchi) from Yamagata is the Burgundy of sakes, and has too much body to accompany sashimi (raw fish). With sashimi take very warm ikkyu Taiheizan (amakuchz), which has a delicate pine tree aroma. Tokkyu Ryozeki (also from Akita) is another amakuchi-type sake which can be recommended. Order Kembishi sake with tempura. When you sample blow-fish the barkeeper should thrust a fish-fin into your china mug of karakuchi sake.

  Don’t drink sake with Western food and don’t drink sake after plain rice has ended a Japanese meal. Officers of the pre-war Imperial Japanese Navy preferred cold sake as a summer drink to beer. Today, young Japanese, to the regret of the old samurai class, are turning to Japanese-type whisky instead of sake.

  4

  HONOLULU

  ‘HAVE A GOOD fright.’ The pretty hostess bowed demurely as I left the unfortunately-named ‘Final Departure Lounge’ of Tokyo Airport and walked out towards the sturdy, four-engined DC-6 of Japan Air Lines, Flight 614, for Honolulu. It was ten-thirty in the evening of Friday the 13th and, thanks to the international date-line, we were due at Honolulu before we had started – at two thirty-five on the afternoon of Friday the 13th. That double Friday the 13th! Here we go!

  I rather enjoy flying. I like the comparative privacy and quiet of the hurtling cocoon (now bouncing as well as hurtling as we battled with the fringes of Typhoon Number Twenty, cosily dubbed ‘Emma’, which at that moment was causing havoc around Okinawa), where one can sit and read books and write up one’s notes while people come and cosset you and positively beg you to drink champagne. And Japan Air Lines, as I had expected, had, to an exquisite degree, the desire to please – almost too much of it. With the suspicion born of Scots ancestry, a tiny mite of mistrust built up just above the level of consciousness as gift after gift ‘With the compliments of Japan Air Lines’ was heaped upon me. The usual travel folder, of course, but also a sandalwood scented fan, an expensive black moiré silk box containing masculine cosmetics, and finally a thing called a Happi Coat. This was a sort of waist-length kimono in black and white with a vast red ideogram on its back, which I assumed meant ‘Happiness’. Most of the American passengers put this on, but none of the Japanese, and not I, who decided to save it up as a round-the-world present for somebody. Drinks were brought and a midnight snack, and then it was time to climb into a comfortable bunk and say my thanks and farewells to the Orient before, via a deep sleep, preparing my mind for the impact of the West.

  About four hours later we were almost exactly at the point of no return between Tokyo and Honolulu, and around 2,000 miles out across the Pacific. So far as I was concerned, I had just about passed my half-way flight distance of 22,696 miles around the world. I was awoken by the authoritative voice of the captain. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. There has been an explosion in number three engine and a fire, which has been got under control. I have no hydraulic pressure. We have altered course for Wake Island where I shall carry out a no-flap landing at an unusual altitude and faster than is the custom. We shall then be towed to the airport. I have made many three-engine landings and also many without hydraulic pressure, so – see you on the ground!’

  Thinking, so much for a double Friday the 13th! I dressed and climbed out of my bunk to the ground. People were sitting very still and looking straight in front of them. The steward and the pretty stewardesses in their kimonos looked as impassive as the Japanese are supposed to look. The steward bustled up and moved a Japanese from my seat and apologized. The passengers from the front of the plane had been moved to the back while the fire-fighting went on. I gazed out of the window at the dead, blackened engine that now drooped somewhat from the horizontal. A beautiful dawn was coming up over the cloudless horizon. We had come down to about ten thousand feet and the flat calm looked positively inviting. I remembered Monsieur Bombard’s instructions about survival at sea. One must not struggle, but remain calm and conserve one’s energies, floating as much as possible. The salinity of the Pacific, I guessed, would be a help. I had laughed when the steward had demonstrated the inflatable life jackets. ‘This is your life vest,’ he had said. ‘This is your front-side and this is your back-side. There is a whistle to blow and a light to shine.’ Now I tried to remember the further instructions and, above all, not to inflate the thing until one was outside the aircraft. We hummed sturdily on, the aircraft vibrating slightly because of the unco-operative number three engine.

  Half an hour later and there was suddenly a big, four-engined air-sea-rescue plane with a yellow nose and yellow tail, belonging to the U.S. Air Force from Wake, only fifty yards away to starboard. She stayed there, dead steady, ready to throw out life rafts. A quarter of an hour later, far below us, just above the surface of the sea, two PBY amphibians of the American Navy were shadowing us ready to come down on the surface and pick up the bits. I felt greatly reassured and, remembering my soothsayer’s happy predictions and trying to forget the double Friday the 13th, I shaved and had coffee. There was a crackle from the Tannoy and the calm voice of the captain came to us again: ‘This is your captain speaking. To lighten the plane, I am about to dump fuel, so there will be no smoking please.’ (As if she had heard the announcement, the air-sea-rescue plane edged away from us.) ‘This aircraft will be unserviceable for many days. I have been in touch with our Tokyo headquarters and a relief plane is already on its way. Not much further to go!’ We all continued to stare straight in front of us.

  In due course, there was the blessed island of Wake, a tiny coral island fringed with surf and with a big, shallow, pale-green lagoon in its centre. We circled gently several times, losing height, and then, only just above sea level, came in at a good 200 miles an hour. We hit the runway smoothly and the captain juggled with his engines to keep us going straight. We did a few mild zigzags and then came to rest with a screech from the tyres. The fire engines and ambulances swept down on us and then the blessed hatch opened and we were back on terra firma.

  The man who achieved this satisfactory climax was Captain Stuart Baird of Balboa, California, a United Air Lines pilot loaned to Japan Air Lines. I salute him.

  Wake Island, which is an important aircraft staging-point, is notable for having absolutely no air-conditioning. I had always assumed that the first civilizing benefits Americans brought to newly acquired overseas territories were Coca-Cola, corned beef hash, and canned air, in that order. It was about ninety-five degrees in the mosquito-netted Quonsett huts that are the only buildings on Wake, and we spent an exhausting day nodding enthusiastically as successive ground and crew personnel came up and assured us how lucky we had been, Bud. Wake is one of the homes of the Pacific albatross, now so much disturbed, I believe, by the aircraft that they are in danger of extermination, but it was too hot to go and visit their haunts in the mangroves at the other end of the island. Instead, I slept gratefully in the spare crew quarters and gossiped with a man with a spotted dog who was in charge of quarantined animals – mostly monkeys and parrots en route for the States after being collected in the East by tourists. He told me that, though he liked life on Wake, there was nothing to do there but skin-dive and teach parrots in transit dirty words to shock their American owners.

  At eight o’clock that night, the relief aircraft from Tokyo arrived with a director of Japan Air Lines who was extremely nice and polite and thanked us all ‘for our co-operation’, though how we were to have done anything but sit tight and co-operate was not made clear. More unguents and scented fans, fresh Happi Coats and then we were out of the second Friday the 13th and drowsily bound for Honolulu.

  *

  After the zest and delight of Hong Kong and Tokyo, I had been dreading impact with the West, but Honolulu let me down comparatively softly. To begin with, I had always thought those famous leis
you see in the Matson Line advertisements in American magazines were made of coloured paper. But I discovered with pleasure that they are not, and when I descended from my aeroplane, I was presented with a handsome and very fragrant garland of white ginger and Vanda orchids. (I later discovered that the tariff for these leis is: orchids $3, frangipani or ginger, $1.50.) Seven o’clock in the morning, dyspeptic and unshaven, with U.S. Immigration and Customs in front of you, is not the best time to be garlanded with flowers, and when, inside the airport, I found the wash-rooms inscribed ‘Kane’ for men and ‘Wahime’ for women, I anticipated that all this aloha stuff might quickly pall. But I must admit it was a relief to get to the Moana Surf Riders’ Hotel, walk again on carpet instead of on the highly polished wood floors of Japan, and rediscover the comforts of a Western hotel bedroom and bath.

  The last time I had been in Honolulu had been in 1944 when I had done a brief spell with the Office of Naval Intelligence in Pearl Harbor. Then there had been no leis and the Moana and its neighbouring Royal Hawaiian had been Naval headquarters, camouflaged in black and green. But now, stepping out on to my balcony directly above the centre of Waikiki Beach, with Diamond Head glittering in the sun to my left and, in front, the first surf-riders coming gracefully in towards me on the creaming breakers, it was impossible to recall the days when Honolulu had been a fortress and Pearl Harbor a mass of unsalvaged wrecks. Yet behind this tropical tourist facade, Hawaii is still, after Okinawa, America’s forward naval base in the Pacific, the advance post for the Early Warning Defense System and, at this very moment, the centre from which the cones from the latest guided missiles were in the process of attempted recovery. And, since my last visit, Hawaii had come of age. She had become the fiftieth State of the Union and her population of over 600,000 had almost doubled since 1944.

  It will certainly double again before long, because the islands, of which there are eight in the group, with an area of 6,500 square miles, are becoming a tourist resort and retirement paradise second only to Florida. This is not surprising. The islands possess real beauty and an average, year-round temperature of 75°. (Half-way through November, the board on the life-saver’s cabin on the beach below my room says: ‘Air 78°, Water 75°.’) And jets do the 2,000 miles from the mainland in about five hours.