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Niggardly Rewards. The shopkeeper's shop is like no other on the face of the globe. It is a strange, oriental apothecary shop where a mysterious alchemy of history has produced a foaming blend of East and West and a ferment of contradictions. Old conflicts with new, beauty with ugliness, prejudice with progress. Pride in past greatness collides with shame for the way the brief greatness was misused. Ambitions for the future collide with a poverty of the means to build with. Some 88 million people, endowed with extraordinary energy, ingeniousness and elasticity, struggle with land that can pay but niggardly rewards even to the most industrious.
The Tokyo sky, soft as the tint of a Hiroshige print, is punctured by the girders of the tallest TV tower in Asia. The Emperor's pine trees stand, as they have for generations, near the weathered walls of the imperial palace, but the trees are slowly dying from Tokyo's 20th century soot. In magnificent settings all lacquer and silk, with costumes and gestures that have barely changed for centuries, Kabuki and No players perform the weirdly beautiful theater of old Japan. To this day, young men go out into winter woods and deliberately screech away their normal voices, then painstakingly build new voices that can boom like tympani or wail like flutes for the Kabuki dialogues. Not many blocks away, in neon-glaring bars and cabarets with such names as "America" or "Atomic" or "Grumman" (for the U.S. Navy fighter planes), sloe-eyed girls in satin gowns dispense sin by the drink, and chorus girls bump and grind en masse to cheap Western tunes; not content with the miserly Occidental custom of one stripper at a time, Tokyo has blended Minsky with the Radio City Rockettes.
In the capital, as in the smoking industrial cities to the south, ugliness is what first catches the eye. Tokyo, the world's third largest (pop. 7,800,000) and one of its most sprawling cities, is a nerve-jangling centrifuge of electric trains and streetcars, buses, suicidally driven taxis (Japanese and foreigners alike call them "Kamikaze cabs"), coughing motorcycles, bamboo-loaded handcarts. Seemingly endowed with more elbows than New Yorkers, crowds surge in uncaring haste through the streets. Advertising balloons float above new glass-and-chrome office buildings, smoke clouds spew up from 10,000 rickety, small factories in the Tokyo area which produce a deluge of goods—delicate brocades, electric generators, aircraft engines, dried seaweed to eat, and cosmetics of nightingale dung for geisha girls.
Like cheap cosmetics, many of the conquerors' customs have rubbed off on the conquered. Thousands pour money into a pinball game called pachinko, played with steel balls which the Socialists solemnly insist are made to double for shrapnel when rearmament comes. The bobby-sox passion is the Audrey Hepburn hairdo (U.S. movies grossed $24 million in Japan last year and Roman Holiday accounted for $1,000,000 of it). Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom pours from radio sets, and at least three "mambo kings" are playing near the Ginza. The Japanese baseball teams have just gone south for spring training.