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Other tourists follow a different vision: that of the slender, small-boned and submissive women of the East who have long haunted the imagination of the West. They are visible in the statuary, paintings and bas-reliefs of a thousand temples, in the ceremonial dancers who weave their intricate and flowing patterns in palace courtyards, in shops and streets and paddies, or bathing with modest nudity in roadside canals. Most famed are the tawny bare beauties of Bali and the tiny, remote girls of Solo in Indonesia. For those who wish to pursue the investigation more intimately, Manila has an infinitude of dance halls and brothels. Tokyo provides beautiful girls in endless, well-displayed quantity from the nude chorus line at Nichigeki Music Hall to brassy burlesque shows complete with U.S.-style striptease. Tokyo, like Paris, is the place for a gay night out. Like Paris, it can also be ruinously expensive.
There are some tourists who find Asia an endless torment. They are dismayed by ramshackle hotels, the stupefying odors of human sweat and excrement, the maddening delays and disappointments caused by the faulty Asian time sense. The special quality of the East must be searched for, and tourists who lack energy spend their hours sitting in dank hotel lobbies in Rangoon or Nara or Kuala Lumpur wondering why their travel agents sent them there.
Kamikaze Taxis. But from Tokyo in the north to Colombo deep in the Indian Ocean, governments and businessmen are frenziedly trying to please all types of tourists. New resorts are being built and old ones modernized. In Japan, baseball, amusement parks and horse racing compete with such traditional attractions as the drum pounding, seasonal festivals in honor of dolls, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums and cherry blossoms. Tokyo, the world's largest city, has more bars and coffee houses than Rome and Paris put together. Nightclubs are either as big as gymnasiums or so intimate that the hostesses have no place to sit but on the patron's lap. Police are learning English in preparation for the 1964 Olympic Games and have launched a safety drive against Tokyo's kamikaze taxicabs. Some $400 million will be spent to improve Japan's lamentable highways, and brand-new cruise ship's with air-conditioned cabins cleave the smooth waters of the enchanting Inland Sea with its 700 islands, seemingly sprung straight out of Japanese paintings.
Thailand has great charm and an air of mystery. Bangkok, with its rivers and winding canals, is an Asian Venice filled with hundreds of temples rising above the sluggish klongs like gilt and gaudy dreams. India, for most tourists, is limited to Bombay (where they land), Delhi (where they go to see the Taj Mahal at nearby Agra), Banaras (for its burning funeral ghats) and Calcutta (famed for slums and the Black Hole). Many tourist wonders lie off the beaten track but lack good hotels. Exceptions: the rose-pink city of Jaipur and Purion the Bay of Bengal, only 18 miles from the Black Pagoda at Konarak, famed for its delicately erotic carvings of gods and goddesses. Malaya is orderly and well-kept, almost resembling a rural England with tropical trimmings, and has 30 golf courses and fine beaches where the swimming is made more exciting by the presence of poisonous water snakes. Singapore still boasts Raffles Hotel but has lost much of its racy, raffish tradition.