The Land od the Rising Yen

information
about, towns to which they did not even fly. And finally they found me a
delightful Greek island and a hotel room at the height of the season, where I
could settle down and write this book. Courteous, smiling officials were always
at my disposal throughout all this, acting as if they were pleased to see me
turn up once again, with yet another impossible request. I think of them not
only with gratitude but with almost filial piety.
     
    I have spoken candidly about Tokyo’s ugliness and shortcomings. But there is a reverse side to the coin.
    Old Tokyo is slowly disappearing. The
town has suffered much from earthquakes and aerial bombardment, and many houses
have been pulled down. New, large office blocks go up in place of the small
houses, and the sky-line of Tokyo changes rapidly. Because of the fear of
earthquakes — Tokyo has about twenty a day, most of them unnoticed except by
seismographs — the erection of high buildings used to be forbidden; now new
ways of using steel, and the compulsory building of two, three or four basement
floors, has made tall blocks possible. The result of the new office-block or
skyscraper mania is that Tokyo is losing its peculiar, individual ugliness and
acquiring an international, customary ugliness which we meet all over the world
and to which we are becoming resigned.
    But not all is ugliness in Tokyo. There are a few — I repeat, a few — good buildings and impressive temples
and shrines; there are a few — and I must repeat again, a few — parks worth
visiting. And the overcrowding, the lack of space, has one advantage, pleasing
at least to the eye. Everything has to be small in Tokyo: houses, rooms, shops
— even, one feels, people, to fit into the small houses. Long side-streets
consist of tiny houses only, and this often creates a toy-like, unreal yet
engaging quality, with small women tip toeing along in their kimonos and
equally small men sitting, motionless, inside their tiny shops.
    Tokyo at night is a very different place from Tokyo in daytime. After the offices have closed and the commuters have left town, Tokyo puts on a new face. Millions of neon-signs are switched on and nowhere in the world
are they more attractive, more bewitching, more maddeningly fast-moving than
here. The cafés, bars and night-clubs, sushi -places, yakitoriya, Chinese restaurants and Korean barbecues, theatres, cinemas, cineramas,
strip-tease joints and many other establishments open their doors and a new
type of leisurely, pleasure-seeking or simply admiring awestruck crowd mills
around the Ginza and other entertainment districts. This wild, high and
mondaine night-life goes on and on and on — until 10.30 at night. Then people
jump into taxis and drive home at breathtaking speed, facing a thousand deaths.
Some night-clubs stay open till much later, but they are exceptions. By 11 p.m.
all the gaiety and sin is over (earlier on Sundays); even the naughty girls —
most of them — are home and in bed, alone.
    A town is not its buildings alone; it
is its atmosphere, its ambience, its feel, its pleasures, its sadness, its
madness, its disappointments and above all its people. Tokyo may lack
architectural beauty but it has character and excitement; it is alive. I found
it a mysterious and lovable city.

KYOTO
     
    ‘ If Tokyo is ugly, Kyoto is beautiful,’ many people will tell you. This statement,
put in this way, is not true. Tokyo is ugly but only with reservations;
and the same goes for Kyoto’s beauty. To be sure, Kyoto is full of impressive
temples, gardens and shrines of immortal, breath-taking beauty, grace and
majesty; you can see great, impressively — sometimes almost oppressively —
powerful works of art; and the surrounding mountains are lush and enchanting
yet serene; inviting yet forbidding. You can find more beauty, man-made and
natural, in Kyoto than anywhere else in Japan, but the city itself, with its
three million people, its mad traffic, its heat and noise, cannot be called
beautiful; in a way — as we shall see — it is uglier than most Japanese cities.
    Kyoto used to be called Heiankyo in the old days; it
became the capital of Japan in 794 and remained capital for well over a
millennium. It is quieter, more reserved, more formal in manners, better
dressed and more elegant than busy, modern, industrial Tokyo and is well aware
of its real or imaginary distinction. There is a nostalgic and pathetic,
slightly comic yet endearing, dignity in all former