“Places We Remember”by Hal Drake
I once owned a chip off a cornerstone of Japan’s economic miracle. It was lost long ago, alas. It was so simple, fashioned by proficient fingers and sold for easy profit—an old fashioned phonograph, of the kind wound up by teachers to bore kids during music-appreciation hour. But this one had a small, battery-powered amplifier and three spatula-like prongs that folded out to make a turntable. No heavy cabinet or complicated console. The whole thing folded up to be carried like an attaché case, an ancestor of the boom boxes that bother Sunday morning sleepers today.
I wonder how many of those the Japan Victor Co. sold? How many GIs like myself, on R&R from Korea, bought one to take back to a bunker or tent, to be played and broken or abandoned.
The $14 I paid to take it out of a Yokohama shop was my small contribution to that miracle, along with the 100YEN apiece I gave to two schoolboys who battered my boots with a shine brush outside Yokohama station. I have to wonder if they now own auto agencies or hotels.
I did something else that trip. I rode a coal-powered cab, one of the fume-spitting flivvers that ran off what the driver shoveled into the stern.
They mottled the skyline but in those days, nobody worried about pollution. If I had that phonograph now or came by one of those cabs, I think I’d donate them to the Museum of Natural History as an example of how sheer human effort can be a bridge from poverty to profit. Few, if any Americans, certainly not a 21-year-old soldier, could feel the changes pulsing through Japan, or imagine that a recovered adversary would soon be a close ally and resented trade rival.
P20.
There was an American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, four years old then, but uniforms still outnumbered business suits. Most Americans lived a sheltered and comfortable life, on military compounds or grounds that had been commandeered or reclaimed, such as the old American Club, founded in 1928 and refounded in 1948.
Every comfort and convenience was close at hand-Mars bars, an American newspaper, a British-style tabloid, even a constant American voice on the radio.
That’s the first thing I recall hearing when I came back as a civilian in 1956—the brush-on-canvas voice of one Walt Sheldon, a very professional Far East Network broadcaster who could do anything from a stacatto newscast to a well-modulaed hour of classical music. He was often seconded by chirrupy-voiced Hiroko, who joined Sheldon in relating lore and culture.
“Mister Sheldon, why do Americans say ‘square meal’?”
“Why, I don’t know, Hiroko, being as they re mostly served on round plates. And now, it’s time to Enjoy Japan…”
And there would be bowl games and title fights, State of the Union from a succession of presidents and the entire Series, short-waved or transcribed — always direct after satellites were launched.
It was lavishly typical of Americans to import the comforts they couldn’t do without, and so it was with FEN. First born at NHK, it was seized as war booty in 1945, then moved to United Nations headquarters at Ichigaya and finally to outlying bases allowed by the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.
There was an odd mixture of talent at FEN micro-phones: seasoned pros like Sheldon, drafted farm boys with dry drawls, a Cajun whose speech sounded like Deep South, and Brooklynese, along with some well-remembered local productions.
There was that time, around 1947, when a terse bulletin broke into a musical interlude, telling of how a sea monster had raged ashore at Yokohama and was trashing the town. Later bulletins attested that it was trampling police cars and kicking aside barriers, and stomping straight down the highway to Tokyo. A between-us-Yanks joke was lost on the Japanese who believed every word. Police were marshaled. Local citizens seized up clubs and axes.
Finally, the monster reached the capital and ambled up to the FEN microphone, consenting to an interview.
“Oh, I’m the Reluctant Dragon…” It was a tune from an old Disney cartoon.
The next day, some FEN pranksters traded their mikes in for mops.
But on another night, the bulletin was urgent and authentic. A Japanese fuel dealer had sold an American businessman what he thought was kerosene for a space heater, discovering later that it was high-octane gasoline that could reduce a small wooden rental to blazing splinters. Frantic, the dealer called the police who contacted FEN, and that customer heard the warning just as he was about to light his heater.
FEN was founded and run for overseas troops and military families, although anybody could listen and everybody did. That made network officials cautious about what was broadcast. They had to be careful with “Tokyo Calling,” a long Sunday afternoon of news, music and vintage radio shows, some of which went back to the war years.
Fibber McGee and Molly might suddenly joke about Victory Gardens and sugar rationing, or a racial slur could slip out, such as the time Billy Mills and the King’s Men sang a robust song that warned Japanese they were foolish to “pick a Yankee target,” using that wartime epithet for Japanese. There was surprisingly little flurry about that.
Although I was told that FEN Program Director Milt Radmillovich was absolutely furious.
And there were the English-language newspapers, folded beside breakfast napkins or seized from rush-hour vendors on train platforms. The Japan Times, a descendant of the pre-war Advertiser, was a comprehensive mosaic of international and business news, a rival of the Daily Mainichi that was more local than global.
The Japan News, which became the Daily Yomiuri, was back then a British-style tabloid that could be folded double and read standing up on a crowded tram. It was full of British news, British features and an engaging comic strip called “Jane,” whose heroine ran naked from panel to panel.
The most American newspaper, of course, was Pacific Stars and Stripes, founded as a contemporary of FEN in 1945. It kept far-from-home Gls and other Americans fully informed on the doings of Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Willie Mays.
Stripes was written and laid out at the Japan Times and printed several blocks down at the Asahi Shimbun, going from commandeered presses into military hands and, at some outlets, the expanding commercial community. It was all there—the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight, the arrest and trial of Japanese accused war criminals, the looming crisis in French Indochina.
The Asahi Evening News certainly had the best roundup of worldwide editorial opinion and good domestic political reporting. Those who had more than glancing contact with the press might wander into No.1 Shimbun Alley and rub shoulders with the deadline literati at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan-good food and grog, cold Kirin at the turn of a spigot. But drinking there frequently meant listening to the bitter miseries of frustrated professionals who jousted with authority about what could be learned or printed.
That authority, of course, was General Douglas MacArthur, the American shogun who ruled from a castle beside a castle, pacing a well-worn rug in his office at the Dai-Ichi Building across from the Imperial Palace. He fashioned the policies and directives that would reform Japan and assist its economic recovery. MacArthur insisted that Japanese products, such as transistor radios, be pushed across PX counters. At the same time, he imported quality-control experts who banished production-line chaos and taught workers the organization and teamwork we see at Sony and Toyota today.
MacArthur’s policies were arbitrary and dicta-torial, but they got results. In 1952, Toyota turned out its first postwar auto—a wide-axled roadster that might have been fashioned in the mid-1920s and looked to many as if it should have been horse-drawn rather than motor-powered. How many scoffing Americans saw that and confidently counted Japan out as a competitive force in the automotive market?
Occupation traces were vanishing, but ever so slowly. There were still street signs and traffic markers in yellow and black, the signet colors of the Army Ist Cavalry Division that ran the town like a medieval estate and proudly stepped off in the annual Fourth of July parade across the Imperial Plaza.
A day off or a night out? Well, there were the movie theaters— old, large palaces like the Yurakuza, which had once premiered silent classics like “The King of Kings” and now showed “My Darling Clementine” or “The Return of Frank James,” perhaps a popular prewar feature like Jeanette Mac-Donald and Allan Jones in “The Firefly.”
There was music, too, and not just the wail of a reed flute. Brassy jukebox fare and git-fiddle country blared over FEN. Entrepreneur Eloise Cunningham defied Occupation frowns on fraternization to organize her Music for Youth concerts, bringing Japanese and Americans together for the thrill of Vivaldi and the thunder of Beethoven-even though MPs might show up to pry her patrons apart. I recall, as I worked at Stripes, that Eloise came in every year with particulars on her next concert, an annual pain but a benevolent one.
Before the baton went up, concert goers might meet at International House, which had garden-like grounds, reasonable accommodations and a fine library. Academics from India and Idaho mixed easily. One frequent patron, Donald Richie, would become film curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art and was the last-word authority on any movie made since the days of the hand-cranked camera.
A place to eat was no problem. Tokyo abounded with good restaurants then, enjoyed without second-mortgage expense. A rare and succulent steak at the Tokyo Plaza, with baked potato and trimmings, cost all of ·3,000-cash that wouldn’t get you past the potted palms of any classy place now. Peasants like me patronized Charlie Manos Russian restaurant, where luscious piroshki cost $50 and a diner down to his last ·500 could eat lavishly well.
Close to the complex of theaters at the Shibuya Pantheon was a long alleyway of sushi counters.
Maguro (tuna) went as cheaply as 40yen a mouthful – a steerage-class smorgasbord.
At the Rhinelander in Kasumicho, a former professor of German literature at Niigata University puffed a meerschaum and frowned over his chessboard as customers savored delicious schnitzel and draft beer that was rich and cold.
There was a fine engraving of a dignified 16th century elder on the varnished oak wall, a classicist Doktor Karl Fischer venerated.
“Mozart?” I inquired innocently.
“Goethe,” Fischer corrected sharply.
Close to the Ginza was Ketel’s, founded by a former German colonist in the Kaiser’s concession at Shantung. Captured when the Japanese joined the Allies in World War I, Ketel was shipped to Japan, taught his captors the butchering trade and wound up opening a first-class eatery. His daughter, a natural hostess, served up juicy knockwurst with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut, a kind of Bavarian bangers and mash. I liked the steeped-in-history feel of the place.
My favorite was the long-gone L’Ambre in Shibuya, with a came of a frowning Beethoven on the door and a kind of Carnegie Hall atmosphere inside. Raptly silent patrons applauded the classics and there was always that one old fellow who waved an imaginary baton as he paced Stokowski and Toscanini.
Night life? Well, it varied. There were pricey places like Manuelas and the Latin Quarter, which were really for the expense-account trade, more affordable bistros like the 88, where you could hear prime-cut jazz by Larry Alley or Billy Banks, the brassy humor of Kenny Pierce or the music-hall banter of Leo Prescott. Al Shattuck ran a lively and reasonable place.
Oh, yes, there was cold draft and a slapped-off-the-grill burger at the Hamburger Inn, or Harry’s Bar, which should have been laminated as the first authentic GI bar in metropolitan Tokyo. A few alleyways from Roppongi corner, Harry’s held its ground for years as other GI places, such as John’s Bar, folded and vanished, and was a dying curio in its final days.
Change was constant and expensive, particularly as there were deliberate assaults on the strong dollar. People clung to life raft places like Chaco’s Steakhouse and Tony Romas, if they dined out at all, and memberships in the Tokyo American Club were valued more than ever. It was all there in one business-or-family package, from boardroom to ballroom, the Garden Café and Foreign Traders’ Bar, swimming pool and video tape library.
Comforts could be preserved, contained and shared as Americans mingled with Japanese members and those from 50 other countries. American members were fewer as home-office accountants groaned over expense wrought by a stronger yen.
It was no longer easy to place a daughter in the gentle hands of Sister Marie d’Huart at Sacred Heart or a son through the conscientious education and drill-sergeant discipline of Brother Andrew at Saint Mary’s.
The dollar depreciation was a hard blow to the American School in Japan, which turns 75 this year. Founded for children in the foreign commu-nity, it has also welcomed Japanese, every semester a strut in a cultural span. My youngest son went there, from grade nine through graduation, and I must still commend the patient and dedicated effort of headmaster Ray Downs to educate a youngster who was too often more interested in karate than the history of mathematics.
I lived right next to the campus and loved those fund-raising carnivals, where Bozo the Clown might make a surprise appearance and you could buy flea-market odds and ends and a mustard-slathered hot dog from a portable stand-genuine and authentic Americana in Japan.
Not that I ever ignored that outdoor food bazaar at Sacred Heart—the scent and taste of Indian curry and Korean bulgogi, washed down with New Zealand Steinlager. I was close to that place because I was close to Mary and Corky Alexander, who sent four daughters there.
Corky was an old friend and longtime professional colleague when he decided the foreign community needed a clarion, a weekly newspaper that would be its voice and chronicle in Tokyo. He started out on shoestring savings and investment, knocking on a lot of doors.
We all wished him well but had misgivings, having seen so many such efforts founder and crash. But I wrote, for that first Tokyo Weekender and write for it still, through the 26th anniversary of a successful ambition. The Tokyo Weekender looks set for the next millennium and beyond.
So many changes in so many years, or perhaps so few, moving so fast after those first few foreign tradesmen landed in 1945.
Time turns backward for nobody, so I can never again savor that first-morning ride from Haneda, through an industrial suburb and down the Ginza.
Moored balloons still bobbed from the rooftops of theaters and department stores, trailing streamers that looked like rope ladders, lettered with characters extolling this attraction or that product. “Oh!
Rosalinda!” was playing at the old Theatre Tokyo, and a painted mural beckoned people to see a stage musical at the Takarazuka, once the Ernie Pyle Theater.
Later, I took a long walk through the back alleys of Ginza, first passing kids in school uniforms who were lined up to see a French film with Jean Gabin.
I moved on to my first doubtful and cautious taste of raw tuna at one of the small sashimi shops, and passed a Buddhist temple to hear, for the first time, the atonal chant of the sutras.
Four blocks later, I stopped to hear, unbelievingly at first: “Yah!” Stomp! Stomp! “Das ist die Lichtensteiner Polka, mein schatz!” and I walked down a flight of stairs to find a rathskeller that might have been brought plank-and-nail from Munich.
I told myself then that I was in one of the greatest towns in the world.
It was, and still is.
Hal Drake first saw Japan on his way to and from the Korean War. He joined Pacific Stars & Stripes in 1956, working in Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Thai-land, the Philippines and Vietnam. He went on to become a senior writer and columnist for the paper, until retirement in 1995. He is currently chairman of Netword International in Australia.
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