{"id":5668,"date":"2022-03-30T01:08:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T08:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5668"},"modified":"2022-03-30T01:09:12","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T08:09:12","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-robert-whiting-tokyo-junkie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5668","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: Robert Whiting, Tokyo Junkie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Early in his new book, Robert Whiting refers to the \u201cYamate Line,\u201d and most readers who have been to Tokyo in the past half-century will suspect a misprint. Few visitors to the Japanese capital could avoid the subway train in question, which runs in a loop through such well-known districts as Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Ginza. But they\u2019ll know it as the Yamanote Line, a romanization of its Japanese name (literally \u201cmountain\u2019s hand,\u201d equivalent to the English \u201cfoothill\u201d) first adopted in 1971. But by then, the Californian Whiting had already logged almost a decade in Japan, having been sent there by the United States Air Force in 1962. \u201cTokyo is the best city in the world,\u201d he remembers a master sergeant saying when informing him of his posting: \u201cYou\u2019ll be over there with all those geisha girls, riding around in rickshaws. Ten million people. More neon signs than you can imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The neon comes up quite often throughout Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys \u2026 and Baseball<\/em>, as one of the city\u2019s few constants during a period of ceaseless change. Whiting closes his memoir with his 77th birthday lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Nihonbashi: \u201cIt occurred to me over our gelato that there is very little left in Tokyo that is older than I am, given how this city keeps on renewing itself.\u201d He arrived nearly 60 years ago to \u201cthe biggest construction site in the world,\u201d a transformation motivated by preparation for the 1964 Summer Olympics. Still, there were plenty of attractions amid all the dust: there were \u201cdeluxe movie theaters with 70mm screens, and pachinko pinball parlors jangling noisily all day long,\u201d beside \u201cnoodle stands, yakitori<\/em> shops with their smoky grills, food marts, and discount shops,\u201d beside \u201cancient temples with serene gardens of gravel and rocks and inner courtyards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in many pre-Olympics development binges of the 20th century, an overarching goal was to bring the infrastructure of a \u201cbackward\u201d country up to the standards of the modern West. \u201c[D]espite the frantic rebuilding, less than a quarter of the city\u2019s twenty-three sprawling wards had flush sewage systems at all, making Tokyo one of the world\u2019s most undeveloped (and odiferous) megalopolises,\u201d Whiting recalls, olfactory memories supposedly being the most deeply recorded of them all: \u201cTokyo was also rat-infested. Some 40 percent of Japanese had tapeworms. There were no ambulances, and infant mortality was twenty times what it is today. Moreover, house theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night.\u201d This is a far cry indeed from the city world-renowned for its safe streets at all hours, its high-tech bidets, and its far-reaching, precision-engineered train networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early in his new book, Robert Whiting refers to the \u201cYamate Line,\u201d and most readers who have been to Tokyo in the past half-century will suspect a misprint. Few visitors to the Japanese capital could avoid the subway train in question, which runs in a loop through such well-known districts as Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,27,47,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-japan","category-los-angeles-review-of-books","category-tokyo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5668"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5672,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5668\/revisions\/5672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}