Dai Ichi

In Tokyo the time of the rains had passed and hot and humid summer settled firmly in on the rickety, raucous, jerry-built capital that has sprung up from the ashes and rubble of 1945. Tokyo, Japan's capital since 1868, was before World War II a sort of oriental Washington, D.C. Officially, only a limited number of nightclubs were permitted in the capital, and the sword-swinging prewar Japanese police force saw to it that decorum was the order of the day as well as the night. Now all this has changed. In twelve feverish, prosperous postwar years, Tokyo has had an explosive growth. Not only is it now the new Shanghai of the Far East, but it has also overtaken New York and London and become the largest city in the world.

Last week the 8,471,637 inhabitants of Tokyo's 789 square miles* were hurtling to and from their homes and offices in 900 overcrowded tramcars, 860 jammed buses, 14.3 miles of pin-neat subway tunnels, 240,000 autos, and 12,451 desperately driven taxis, popularly known as "kamikazes." To enforce the law in their burgeoning metropolis, Tokyoites have the services of 22,334 policemen (now equipped with nightsticks and U.S.-made .38-cal. revolvers instead of swords). One of the police force's biggest headaches: a spreading rash of crimes of violence by the spiv and Teddy-boy element of the city's 350,000 students, whose favorite weapons are knives and bicycle chains.

Ginza & Gardens. Tokyo's daily vital statistics include 340 births, 128 deaths, 256 weddings, 20 divorces and 6 suicides. Despite the fact that 400 new buildings are going up monthly, Tokyo is still suffering a staggering (400,000) housing shortage. The current price of land along the famed Ginza is $4,160 for four square yards. The prewar regulation limiting the number of nightclubs has long since been forgotten. Tokyo now has 35,000 bars, 2,000 brothels and 73,000 foreign civilian residents (including 10,000 Americans).

Not all of the prewar graces are gone. Over the pea-green waters of the 500-year-old, moss-and lichen-encrusted Imperial Moat, big-winged black butterflies flutter languidly. Within the Imperial Palace grounds (visited by 700,000 Japanese yearly) swarms of graceful scarlet dragonflies dip and glitter in the sunshine. In tiny rock gardens behind the bamboo walls of private homes, artificial fountains gurgle, and tiny bells tinkle to the slightest breeze. Traffic cops, sweating in their summer khakis, pause to admire carefully arranged clusters of chrysanthemums set in their dusty control stations, sip glasses of hot green tea to keep cool. And even the most suicidal of taxi drivers is more likely than not to have at least one flower vase in his careening chariot.

Double Life. The postwar impact of the West, and particularly of the U.S., has created a striking duality in the lives of Tokyo's plain people. They wear Western clothes to work, slip into cool kimonos or yukata at home. They drink coffee or eat popsicles at midmorning, have curried rice, raw fish or veal cutlet for lunch, go home to green tea, rice, seaweed, lily bulb, lotus root and bean curd. They go to see Marilyn Monroe at the cinema one night, follow this up (finances permitting) with long excursions to lengthy and painstakingly stylized classic Japanese Kabuki or No dramas.

The total effect of the U.S. influence has yet to be evaluated. Says one American resident in Tokyo: "They are using us like gunpowder--to blow up the thick walls of old custom." Gunpowder or not, the Western influence, matched by Japan's own singular drive and energy, is giving the country the highest living standard in the Far East. And the living standard in Tokyo is higher than anywhere else in the four main rich and fertile islands of Japan. This, in part, is responsible for Tokyo's spectacular population increase, which now averages about 250,000 annually--from 70,000 to 80,000 through Tokyo births alone, and a colossal 180,000 annually through immigration from the countryside. As a symbol of power and riches, Tokyo has now become to plain Japanese what London was to Dick Whittington, or New York to Horatio Alger's boys.

Seiichiro Yasui, 66, who has been governor of Tokyo for a decade, has no idea where it will all end. Says he: "If this keeps up, Tokyo's population will be 12 million by 1970. Tokyo has got to stop growing."

*Compared with 8,346,137 pop. for London's 693 sq. mi., 7,771,509 for New York's 319 sq. mi. Greater Tokyo (which includes the sprawling port of Yokohama) is also much more heavily populated (approximately 20 million) than either the New York metropolitan area (15.5 million) or Greater London (10 million).

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