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Along the craggy coastline of Honshu stretches the "Tokaido corridor," pegged at one end by Tokyo and at the other by Kobe. Within its compass lie Japan's six largest cities and an urban-industrial complex that produces 67% of its manufactured goods—along with most of the problems of identity and adaptation found in today's Japanese society. Under the chill gaze of sacred Mount Fuji, a man-made morass of concrete, steel and glass belches smoke and grime in a manner quite contradictory to the verses of the 8th century poet Akahito Yamabe, who wrote:
So lofty and awful is the peak of Fuji
That the clouds of heaven dare not cross it.
Apart from the clouds of industry, Fuji today is challenged by both the contrails of Japan Air Lines' 22 jets and the blue exhaust of Honda's Formula I Grand Prix cars, which snarl in blurring white circles on a race track at Fuji's base.
Nearly half of Japan's 98 million citizens live within the Tokaido corridor. Yet there are patches of refreshing relief from the pressures of mankind: groves of gracefully pirouetting pines, solemn stands of cedar, miniaturized terraces redolent of tangerines and tea. A bone-rattling bus ride from Nagoya can put a harried city dweller aboard a boat on the Gifu River, where—with a giant bottle of sake and the boon companionship of a river geisha—he can watch the cormorant fisherman sweep downstream.
Pushers & Smoke. The Tokaido, studded with quaint inns and hubristic history, can now be traversed in three hours flat by means of the Hikari, a sleek supertrain whose name, if not quite its speed (125 m.p.h.), means "light" in Japanese. The city dweller of the Tokaido is confronted with problems endemic to urban life everywhere. His highways thunder to the rush of 15 million speeding trucks, cars and motorcycles. Commuter trains on Japan's excellent railway system must hire "pushers" to jam the passengers into the steamy cars. A lack of sewerage results in the use of "vacuum trucks," the odoriferous tank cars that daily pump out the cesspools of the cities. And while the Japanese are better off economically than all other Asians, worldwide they still rank only 21st (after the Italians) when it comes to per capita income: $740 a year. The average Japanese family of 4.05 persons lives in only 2.94 rooms, and only one Japanese in 46 has an auto.
The cities in which they live along the Tokaido have characters all their own. Yokohama is an industrial jungle that spills multicolored smoke from its mill plants, obscuring the intestinal tangle of pipelines and giant tanks constituting the Mitsubishi petrochemical works. From Nagoya, with its aircraft plants, its brooding feudal castle and gold-scaled carp, one can view gleaming reaches of the sea dotted with high-prowed tankers and freighters—a reminder that Japan is the world's leading shipbuilder. Near Toyota City, home of Japan's biggest automobile manufacturer, graze herds of hand-massaged, beer-fed beef cattle, source of the best steaks in Asia. Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, was once a quiet, quaint haven of shrines and gardens, temples and teahouses; today it is fighting off the threat of factory-produced textiles that compete with its exquisite, hand-woven silks.