Tokyo today is like one of those computer simulated commercials
you see at the movies, the city of the future, all skyscrapers,
neon and life going on at numerous levels with the street
a thousand feet below. In Tokyo’s case it operates on
a modest three or four levels. The only thing missing are
the flying cars whizzing about in the air, but I’m sure
that’s not too far off. One thing’s for sure,
there’s no mistaking you’re in a Big City. It
has the Big City feel, just like London or New York and a
refreshing change of pace from Los Angeles, that suburb in
search of a city. In fact apart from the signage and the obvious
fact that almost everyone around you is Japanese you might
easily feel that you were in New York or London. The people
are fashionably and well dressed much like people downtown
in any major business city and the same international brand
names are everywhere in evidence.
A very different feel from the mid 1970’s when I last
visited Tokyo with any frequency. In those days as a publisher,
having been partially acquired by a major US financial publishing
corporation, we had been obliged to change our Japanese sales
agent from an individual with whom we had enjoyed a long and
mutually rewarding relationship, to the huge Nikkei Intl.,
publishers of Nihon Keizei Shimbun and with whom our new US
part-masters were associated. So now as a successful but very
minor part of a publishing empire we had to make our mark
with the folks at Nikkei. It was not a particular pleasant
experience. In fact it was a hard slog. The top guys at Nikkei
were a smooth lot right enough and knew how the world worked,
but it was quite another matter when it came to their line
managers. In those days most didn’t speak English and
if it wasn’t Japanese it might as well have come from
Mars. Within half a year of the change our revenues were down
60% despite a booming Japanese economy. I had to spend the
next 18 months going back and forth to Tokyo and Osaka trying
to motivate the Nikkei guys and repair the damage. My only
consolation was that if we’d scored an own goal in Japan
we had inherited a weird, eccentric and supremely unprepossessing
ad sales genius in Germany, who in the same short period recouped
everything we had lost in Japan.
Trips to Japan were a tedious round to the ant warren that
was Dentsu, who seemed to handle all our major accounts, with
courtesy calls to the various corporations who appeared to
have huge and inexhaustible budgets, which had mysteriously
run dry the minute we had moved to the most prestigious publishing
corporation in the land. Things were never as good revenue-wise
again. Fortunately our Tokyo bureau was left alone for a decade
or so more before our American masters-to-be completed the
purchase and finally ran the publication into the ground by
debasing the editorial and never truly permitting it to achieve
its advertising or circulation potential. It was a classic
case of US bad management and chauvinism, combined with lack
of imagination and an obtuse fondness for “hardball”
by soft office types and sycophantic journalists posing as
businessmen, misusing Asia’s foremost English language
publication as a stalking horse for their own essentially
botched entry into the region while kowtowing shamefully to
the area’s quasi-democratic leaders. It could have been
different and a great opportunity was missed.
My evenings in Tokyo were not much more fun than my days,
unless I could steal away to the Foreign Correspondents Club.
If I was in for it, there was the obligatory evening going
to various drinking holes with the Nikkei managers, which
neither side enjoyed much, and if I couldn’t decently
steal away to my hotel or dump it on my unfortunate advertising
director I might end up in some tiny smoke-filled boite where,
in those pre-Karaoke days, they drank, got red-faced if not
shit-faced noisy and passed the mike around. Everyone had
to sing, especially the gaijin. Now I can tone all the way
up the chakras but singing just ain’t my forte. I actually
do know the first two lines to quite a lot of songs, but that’s
it. So I was reduced to singing the first verse of “God
Save the Queen” and the “House of the Rising Sun”
sub-Burdon, vowing that this time I really really would make
a point of learning at least one song all the way through.
I never did. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help reflecting
on the salaryman’s lot. Most of them seemed decent men
and the life didn’t seem to hold a great deal for them.
Long commutes to work, long hours and a highly structured
office life with limited prospects of advancement for most,
boozy unwindings with colleagues after work and the long late
commute back home to a wife and family you could hardly see
very much of. Then up early to do it all again. It beat me
how they could get so ratted the night before and not have
a monumental hangover the next day. The Japanese, it seems
have a different metabolism. They get drunk easily, but are
mercifully spared the hangovers.
I went back to Tokyo for another spate of visits in the mid
1980’s to acquire a group of Japanese-owned publications
for a client. Tokyo didn’t seem to have changed much,
apart from the noticeable presence of soberly clad office
ladies (OL’s). Though clean and orderly, Tokyo was still
very much an Asian city.
What a difference 20 years on. Japan is now emerging from
15 years of stagnation and deflation. There has been a creeping
revolution, so incremental that while many of the old societal
and infrastructural distortions of the polity remain, in fact
everything has fundamentally changed. Pork and the political
factions have been curbed, there is now a credible political
opposition, the vast amount of non-performing and invisible
debt and zombie companies carried by the banks have been recognised
and written off, property prices have massively deflated,
the economy is finally on the move and foreign money is pouring
into the Japanese stocks. Japanese women, always a domestic
power, are now much more visible in business and the OL’s
now extend into mid-management, their business attire now
high quality and fashionable. The stultifying seniority system
in business has been breached and younger men, even women,
are now in positions of authority. The system of jobs for
life, while not discarded utterly, has changed. Today only
about 40% of workers enjoy tenure for their entire working
life. Meantime the country continues to enjoy almost full
employment and one can easily see why. At a minor intersection
I counted no less than 28 personnel dressed in three different
uniforms, well accoutred against the cold, all milling about
waving light wands at pedestrians, none of whom paid any attention.
Providing employment in such a way is something other societies
might emulate, instead of throwing people onto the scrapheap
as they do in the US or emasculating the work ethic with welfare
as they do in Europe. I certainly didn’t see any homeless
on the streets. I saw a lot of it in LA.
Tokyo is undoubtedly a well-ordered and safe city and that
makes it a nice place to be. It is also a clean city with
very little pollution and lots of trees. You can now see the
mountains beyond and glimpses of Fuji-san are no longer the
rarity they once were. The Japanese attention to detail and
finish is proverbial and most welcome. The pavements are actually
properly paved, even cobbled, unlike the uneven poured concrete
that so often sends you flying in other modern cities. Nor
does this orderliness make for a dull city. In Tokyo you can
find anything you want and then some things you never even
imagined. The Japanese really do take the best from abroad.
Go into a French or Italian restaurant and it really is French
or Italian food you get, not some Asian approximation, all
form but no substance. The owner, the chef and the waiters
will all be Japanese. It is not that they copy, they really
study and learn, give you the real thing but with a Japanese
extra in terms of service and aesthetic. I guess that’s
just as true for consumer electronics too. As for art and
entertainment, domestic and foreign, there are only a couple
of cultural capital cities that can compare.
And all the while the city is changing and evolving. If you
go to Shiodome just over the tracks from Shibuya Station,
smack in the middle of downtown Tokyo, a whole new city of
the future is growing out of the bleak industrial area it
once was. The scale is vast but it still manages to be human,
spacious and attractive; residential as much as commercial
and well integrated. The vistas now run down the River Edo
and like London, Tokyo is now opening to its river, which
now lives, rather than turning its back on what had become
an industrial sewer.
I get the distinct feeling that Tokyo is an apt metaphor for
Japan as a whole. For all the amazing growth and progress
of China in the last 25 years it will be a long, long time
before they get anywhere near the level of development of
Japan and I don’t see cultural or political subservience
on the cards ever. The last 15 years of correction, and which
continues still, plus a less robotic work ethic, now have
Japan poised to take it to the forefront of nations and on
a human scale many of our so-called advanced societies may
well wish to emulate.
