Thursday January 20, 2005 – A Walk About in Tokyo

Thursday January 20, 2005 – A Walk About in Tokyo

As I walked out of the Dai Ichi Hotel that Tuesday August 31, 1965, I entered a wonderful world so entirely different than anything I had seen before. The smell of Tokyo was different than the smell of Yokosuka, though the two were familiar and both were unique from all the cities I had known in the states: San Francisco, New York, Norfolk, and Seattle. It is a distinctive smell, a mixture of diesel and gasoline fumes, burning sandalwood, and an amalgam of Japanese flora, cleaning solvents, and cooking fragrances emanating from the many small restaurants tucked into the side streets along Chuo-Dori the main thoroughfare leading from Shimbashi Station into the Ginza. There is a hint of the same scent in a Japanese car. In 1965, Chuo-Dori was lined with low rise buildings most no more than two or three stories high. There were a few new high rises in the Ginza, notable the cylindrical Mitsubishi Building rising nine stories, capped with a huge Mitsubishi logo at the top which rose a third of the height of the building further skyward. Around the bottom of the cap were the words Mitsubishi Electric Mfgr. Co.

The city had an energy that you could sense. It wasn’t the manic-neurotic force of New York, but the energy of a city where everyone seemed to be working toward a common purpose. You could sense it in the way people walked. Individuals within a crowd seemed to act as though part of a single larger entity. If there were any disruption it was due to an outsider like me not familiar with what was expected. Another sign was the greeting protocol where each person understood their position relative to those around them and acted accordingly, a younger man being deferential to an older, a shop or restaurant owner showing deference to customers, men seemingly peers with one deferring to the other. Small school children in groups—dressed in uniform of white top and short blue pants topped off by a blue cap—all following their teacher and assistants with a well-understood notion of what was permitted and what wasn’t. Older children dressed in a uniform of dark blue of black jacket and long pants of the same color. I was reminded of cadets at military academies.

During my first walk down Chuo-Dori, I discovered two great places that I would visit each time I stayed at the Dai Ichi. One was the Takarazuka Theatre and the other was the Nichigeki Music Hall, which was in the same building on a different floor. I can’t remember where the theater was and today the Takarazuka has been rebuilt and in no way resembles the multistory building I remembered back then, The Takarazuka on the ground floor was an all-female dance review that reminded me Radio City Music Hall—a movie followed the review. The shows were colorful music and dance productions—some with a large cast of dancers, others with two or more principal dancers demonstrating their artistry. The Nichigeki was a burlesque show, skits as well as partially nude dance numbers resembling the reviews in many Las Vegas hotels. One skit I remember clearly shows a young prostitute dragging herself home after a hard day. As she prepares for bed, she looks into her purse to count her earnings and, shrieking in outrage, realizes that she has been short changed. The skit was understandable with no knowledge of Japanese. However, all of the top banana sequences between longer skits were spoken and the jokes went over my head though the body language was quit funny.

As the day drew to a close and the city’s office workers began to file into the streets, I joined the crowd allowing myself to be swept along hoping to follow some group to where they were going. I ended up in a bar that was far different from those I knew in Yokosuka. This one had no hostesses waiting to greet you and become your companion for as long as you were inside. Instead it had a long bar that ran from near the entrance all the way to the rear of the building, which was sufficiently long that a good twenty-five or so patrons were seated side by side along its length on both sides—the bar ran down the center with drinks above the bar tender and beer in the coolers below. There were three such bars parallel to one another and nearly every seat was taken as I entered, found a vacant seat and order a Suntory Whiskey. As soon as I sat down, I found my box of Benson & Hedges cigarettes and lit up just as the bartender placed the whiskey in front of me and collected the Yen I had laid on the bar. I spent a good hour and a half in the bar watching the teaming crowd within. There were some solitary drinkers like me, but most were part of small groups two to three people talking shop, There were women in the bar but they were vastly outnumbered by the men. Back then women were just beginning to enter the work force and most were in secretarial pools in large offices. Dave Brubeck had produced an album entitled Jazz Impressions of Japan. In the album is a cut called “Toki's Theme,” his homage to one of these women.

I left the bar, its name I never knew as it was in Japanese not English, though many bars and restaurants signs had English or European names along with Kanji, and wondered back toward the Dai Ichi. I discovered along the way a high rise building featuring a bar at the top and I ventured up to have an Asahi beer and watch the sunset over Tokyo. By the time the sun went down, so was the beer and I returned to the hotel, freshened up grab a light dinner had headed back toward the Ginza to catch a movie. During my walk about earlier in the day, I had passed a number of movie theaters advertising American and European movies along with Japanese films. All the movies were in the original language with Japanese subtitles.

I spent the remainder of shore leave catching all the sights around Tokyo, Hibiya Park, the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Tower, but mostly I walked up and down the streets of the Ginza and the Marunouchi district—Tokyo’s business district. At night I caught a few more movies. I was “playing the role” as my shipmates called it, which meant pretending to be a businessman, not the sailor I was. But, that was okay, I came to enjoy the role I was playing. It helped shape the adult I would eventually become.