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But it is after dark, when traffic diminishes, that Tokyo really begins to build. Bulldozers and steamrollers emerge like nocturnal predators; the smell of hot tar and the chatter of jackhammers shatter the night. In Shinjuku, Tokyo's Greenwich Village, and along the Ginza, an army of orangehelmeted workmen swarms out to remove temporary planks covering the streets, while trailer trucks roar up to dump fuming loads of fill into yawning caverns. Thousands of lights sway in the evening breeze, sending crooked shadows under the neon. At dawn, the trucks and workers disappear like cockroaches. Then the city's kamikaze cab drivers emerge and proudly tell their fares: "All for the Olympics."
Lonely Are the Brave. To the 6,624 athletes who will soon swoop into Tokyo, the city has indeed offered its all. Fully $65 million has been spent to renovate and erect sports facilities, as well as an Olympic Village replete with trees and ornamental shrubs. In the Olympic Cafeteria, 150 separate menus will provide 520,000 lunches, suppers and breakfasts of champions. Dominating the Olympic Tokyo is Architect Kenzo Tange's shell-shaped National Gymnasium complex, where swimmers and basketball players will vie, while the first judo competition in Olympic history will be conducted beneath the bat-winged roof of the Budokan Hall. Last week teams from 96 nations were forming for the Tokyo Games, and sports buffs the world over prepared to descend on the city by sea and air. At least 20,000 of them a day will make the scene during the Games' two-week run.
The scene has been well prepared. Tokyo officials feared that there would not be enough hotel space for all the visitors, so they pumped $93 million in loans into the city's hotel industry. Two new hotels—the Otani, with a revolving cocktail lounge on its roof, and the Tokyo Prince —boast 1,600 rooms between them, to add to the facilities of the huge new Okura and Tokyo Hilton hotels. In addition, eight ships will anchor in Tokyo Harbor to provide floating accommodations. Other tourists will be housed at Kakone, the coolly beautiful mountain resort 58 miles west of the city. Improvements to the ryokan, Japan's traditional inns, have added 4,000 more rooms to the total.
Travel in Tokyo has always been—and will continue to be—a major problem. The best way is clearly by subway, which costs only 80 at most, and takes the traveler under the most congested sections of the city. In preparation for the Olympics, the subway has put out an English-language guide. Worst way to travel is by foot: at many intersections the Japanese have placed bundles of yellow flags, and the braver pedestrians hopefully wave them at oncoming drivers in order to secure safe passage. Lonely are the brave.
A spanking new Wenner-Gren monorail, costing $55 million, will soon whisk tourists from Haneda Airport to downtown Tokyo, while the world's fastest railroad, the 125-m.p.h. Hikari Express (TIME, Sept. 4), runs via artful Kyoto to bustling Osaka in four hours—almost half the time it took before.