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The city that in every sense serves Japan as a capital and captivator is, of course, Tokyo, the world's largest metropolis (pop. 11 million) and the one place where every success-minded Japanese must live if he hopes to make it. With its "warehouse-modern" high-rise buildings and its nightmare traffic, it appears at first glance an unsightly sprawl. Yet it is also a continuous wonder, with its department stores that have fish ponds on their roofs, its five symphony orchestras, its three new playhouses, including a striking new 1,750-seat National Theater. The Ginza, a cliché as much as a street, remains a nocturnal delight for its gauzy girls as well as for its combination of New York nerve and Zen delicacy.
Benefits of Affluence. The average Japanese is challenged and excited by the clash of tradition and innovation. He sees no absurdity in sitting on a tatami mat in loose-flowing kimono to eat a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee; Premier Sato himself practices the tea ceremony on Sundays, then goes out for an afternoon of golf. Japanese husbands still keep their wives in virtual seclusion and entertain their friends and business acquaintances in the most garish of geisha houses, but the tune in both milieus is likely to be a Western rock 'n' roll number.
The Japanese also rocks like his Western peers, to angst and overcrowding. The Japanese suicide rate is the highest in Asia (16.1 per 100,000), and hypochondria is a national disease: Japanese gulp patent medicines and pep pills at a rate that would shock the most bilious of Americans; Tokyo's "sex drugstores" offer cheap cure-alls for every imagined sexual flaw.
These conflicts are expressed less articulately by Japan's cameras, transistors and supertankers than by its arts. Japanese writers, in particular, have turned inward upon the soul of a nation in which modern technology and traditional culture uneasily cohabit. This confrontation is symbolized in the work of many of Japan's contemporary novelists, but it shows up in a lyrically macabre vein in the works of Yasunari Kawabata, 67, a classmate of Premier Sato's (Tokyo University, '24). His Sleeping Beauties, for example, is the story of an impotent old man who sleeps with drugged virgins, watching but never touching. The novel's explicit anatomical detail expresses Japan's tension between action and imagination, and opts for uncommitment out of fear that involvement leads only to tragedy.
In contrast to Kawabata is the work of Novelist Yukio Mishima, 42, who is also a pop singer, moviemaker and swordsman in the traditional kendo vein. Mishima believes in "martial power" and expresses Japan's violent streak. Other writers, like Kobo Abe, 42, author of Woman in the Dunes, and Kenzaburo Oe, 32, whose novel, A Private Matter, will be published in the U.S. soon, espouse Maileresque sentiment and pacifism, reflecting the fear of modern life felt by many uprooted Japanese.