TOKYO-City Of Work, Work And Worry

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 5

TOKYO-City Of Work, Work And Worry

(By

JOHN YEOMANS

<n th« "Sun," Sydney.. Reprinted by arrangement.]

JN Tokyo, many taxi-drivers work a 24 hour shift, six days a week. When they are exhausted, these drivers go back to the depot and snatch a few hours’ sleep on one of the beds kept there.

Most of these men have ulcers, but they would rather work at this destroying pace than share the cab with another driver who would have to be paid some of the take. Everybody in Tokyo wants money—needs money—to keep up with the cost of living. Some of the biggest unions are beginning to demand that the worker’s wage be multiplied almost by three to give him an equitable share of the national income. But whenever I caught a cab in Tokyo last month I used to wonder how the 24-hour drivers found any physical or mental strength to enjoy their earnings when they did take a day off.

I don’t think the taxidrivers are any worse off than their passengers. The daily rat race which inevitably develops in the great cities of the twentieth century seems, logically enough to have reached its worst in the biggest city in the world—Tokyo. Many visitors—and 1 must admit that I’m one—find Tokyo a vast, grim, noisy, dusty city crammed with 10 million hurrying, worrying human units, a fair percentage of whom race home each day so they can. get up in time to get to the office next day. Every possible form of transport is used in Tokyo to move the gigantic crowds.

I’ve ridden .in both the superb subway trains and in the primitive double-decker tramcars which are still kept lurching through the heart of Tokyo. Numbingly Big Tokyo is numbingly big. You can travel interminably in a tram and still be passing through block after block of nondescript offices and shops. It is as though Liverpool street had been extended to Hornsby. There are no skyscrapers In Tokyo because of the fear of earthquakes, and the average tall building is nine or 10 storeys high. Here and there are occasional outbursts of architectural imagination, but, in the main, Tokyo by day is a colourless city made of boxes of unpainted concrete. Perhaps this why Tokyo at night breaks into such an overblown splendour of huge neon advertising signs. Are the people of Tokyo secretly yearning for colour in their metropolis? It’s hard to believe that Japan, now so palpably an Important industrial nation, lost a war, underwent atomic bombardment a-d experienced a long American occupation, all in 10 years. General MacArthur used to direct the occupation from a vast suite of offices in the Dai Ichi insurance company’s building in the best business area of Tokyo. Lines used to be painted on the footpath to form a lane leading from the front door to the kerb where the general's limousine used to pull up. Pomp Now Past The passing crowds were kept back behind the painted lines for five minutes before the general and his pompladen entourage came out of the building and drove away to the American Embassy. I had a look at the footpath outside the Dai Ichi building. Symbolically, the lines have gone. All that is left is a few inches of worn paint on a couple of steps. Everywhere you go in Japanese cities such as Tokyo or Osaka (which has a population of 4,000,000, incidentally) you can smell ambition in the air—personal selfimprovement ambition, commercial company ambition and national ambition.

The Japanese feel they belong among the leading nations of the world and are prepared to prove it

Across I— Pill for P.T. rather than patients! (8-4) 6—Starts with groups dismissed. (4, 3) 10— Elemental violence is enough to make one fume. (5) 11— Monsters are partly retrogressive. (5) 12— Can’t even get rid of 5 in the eating place. (7) 13— Fascist leader in office first has to persuade. (6) 15—The bear is wild in Jugoslavia. (6) 18—Hog laid out by Spaniard. (7) 20— Company rig damaged by dog. (5) 21— Stirring tales give spice in variety. (5) 22 Man with small number is back in residence. (7) 23 Dramatically upset byGeorge Bernard Shaw? (3, 5,4)

Japanese “face” will be put to the acid test this year when Tokyo stages the 1964 Olympic Games. As you would expect, Tokyo is literally ripping itself apart to put on a good show. Important city roads have been dashingly reconstructed and a whole series of new elevated highways has been constructed in the city. The various stadia which have been built or enlarged are marvellous creations in concrete.

I thought the least attractive part of the Games sites was the main Olympic Village, to be opened officially on September 15, in which most of the athletes will live.

The houses in the village are not new, in contrast with the Melbourne Games, and are mostly unattractive little oneand two-storey wooden houses built 17 and 18 years ago as accommodation for troops of the post-war American Occupation Force and their families.

Oddly, some suburbs of Tokyo have a suggestion of Europe, almost of London.

The houses are generally small, two-storeyed and stand in their own tiny gardens. Although the walls are made of wood, paper and various froms of concrete panelling, the roofs are almost invariably of dark Roman tiles and the houses are generally surrounded by a fence or wall too high to look over. First 'Obstacle Visitors to Japan soon find themselves hard up against the language barrier. Somebody always speaks English in a big hotel or a department store but outside those you are quickly reduced to sign language, which can be exhausting. At least telephoning is easy in Tokyo: red public telephones with western numerals on the dials stand on small tables on the footpath outside every few shops. The Japanese word for “hullo” is naturally not “hullo” but it takes quite a time to acclimatise yourself to hearing an importantlooking man in Western clothes pick up a telephone and say “Mushi mushi?”

Tokyo is capable of supplying many sights which give you a jolt . . . such as the rickshaw I saw being pulled silently through a back street one afternoon. The seat of the rickshaw was fully enclosed in a canvas hood, for the passenger was a geisha being transported to an engagement, but it was the feet of the rickshaw puller which made me stare. He was wearing sandshoes split in front so that each big toe goes into its own pocket . . . and the last time I saw those sandshoes they were on the feet of the Japanese marines who made landings at Milne Bay in the Second World War.

As a form of amusement, the geisha’s songs are now only for the wealthy; for the average man, Tokyo has seven television channels, two of which are national stations like Channel 2 in Sydeny. I stayed for a while in a Japanese inn, the only European there. As I squatted on

Down i 2—Went in crimson after 10 out East. (7) 3—Unusually solid figures. . (5) ; 4—Untouched in diplomacy. (6) • 5 —A perfume’s indispensable quality. (7) ' 6—Give compensation a note will do. (5) ! 7— The saddest biblical book of all? (12) B— Surprise means this not upset. (12) 14—Brings to mind a shout - for drink. (5, 2) 16 — Fence causing rare rib > fracture. (7) 17— The girl gets a pound as usual. (6) 19— Verdi arrangement gets a spin. (5) 20— Like a dunce’s hat or an ice-cream cornet? (5)

my bedroom mat in front of the television set one night, I found a company of local actors busy performing “Richard III” in Japanese. Tokyo’s cluster of radio stations fill the air with Nipponised rock ’n’ roll; Japanese parents often worry about their teen-age children because they are becoming Westernised; even to wanting to eat bread.

There is much teen-age delinquency, as in other countries.

Stern Discipline

Yet among Japanese schoolchildren you can see evidence of a stern discipline, which must have considerable bearing upon Japan’s future achievements.

I went to a theatre in Tokyo one matinee and found the side aisles full of Japanese high school boys and girls. They stood up, motionless and intent, for more than two hours.

In big cities such as Tokyo, boys at all primary and secondary schools wear one uniform. It is a military looking black tunic with a high collar and five brass buttons, plus long back trousers and a peaked cap. The schools distinguish between one another only by small metal cap and coat badges. Japanese schoolgirls (at least in the big cities) also wear one uniform. Theirs is a strangely Edwardian sailor blouse and skirt in a very dark serge-like cloth. And the children Inside these uniforms are big. The boys are much taller than you would think and the girls are full-muscled and stocky. Several Japanese adults commented rather ruefully to me that the teen-agers’ improved diet was undoubtedly breeding a race of bigger and taller Japanese. From The Heart Soon it will be their turn to take over the running of a complicated country with a complicated history. Meantime, their parents battle manfully with the fierce pressure of modern Japanese life. But every now and then a cry from the heart struggles through. The strangest words I saw in Japan are painted high up on a wall of a coffee shop in the utterly depressing central railway station at Osaka.

A coffee shop is a strange place for this sign, for it is in English and, apropos of nothing, poignantly asks:— “What is life without love and beer?”