The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [119]
There were also gay bars – what Yukio Mishima called gei pati in his novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), serialised in the early 1950s. Gei was written in roman script, indicating that it was already in common usage. Hibiya Park was a popular pick-up spot. I only have the unreliable Mishima as a guide: ‘He entered the dim, clammy lamplight of the rest room, and saw what is called an “office” among the fellowship. (There are four or five such important places in Tokyo.) It was an office where the tacit procedure is based on winks instead of documents, tiny gestures instead of print, code communication in place of a telephone.’
There was a need to be entrepreneurial. This young generation was known colloquially as Apure, ‘après-guerre’. An Apure is a ‘college student who frequents dance-halls, passes examinations by hiring a proxy, and may engage in un-orthodox money-making activities’. The key was their unorthodox way of surviving, as much as their aspirations to achieve an American standard of life. They had managed to disrupt norms concerning how to work. ‘Since the war tardiness has become the norm,’ wrote one Japanese commentator of these Apure. They might be late to work, dishonest in exams, yet they were also known as hustlers, able to make money out of nothing. Hustling meant being able to wear aloha shirts, nylon belts or even rubber-soled shoes, called the ‘three sacred regalia’ in an ironic reference to the three sacred symbols associated with the Emperor. In the years after the defeat there was a slew of new magazines aimed at young men, with articles on ‘How to save Y1,000,000’ or ‘How to Become a Millionaire from Scratch’.
In Tokyo in the summer of 1948 the hit song was ‘Tokyo boogie-woogie’. It blared out from loudspeakers on the streets and from nightclubs advertising themselves. ‘Tokyo boogie-woogie/Rhythm ookie-ookie/Kokoro zookie-zookie/Waku-waku.’ This is the start, says the press, of kasutori, pulp culture: it will overwhelm us. Vulgar and brash, hedonistic, limitless.
Shops spill into the streets. There are white-robed veterans begging on the streets, unscrewed tin legs or arms in front of them, a sign out with a list of the campaigns they had fought in. Children roam everywhere. War orphans with stories of parents dead of typhus in Manchuria, begging, stealing, feral. School kids shouting out for chocoretto or cigarettes, or the phrases they have learnt from page one of the Japanese–English Conversation Manual:
Thank you!
Thank you, awfully!
How do you do?
Or, as they have learnt it in phonetic form: San kyu! San kyu ofuri! Hau dei dou?
The sounds of the pachinko parlours, the cacophonous cascading din of thousands of small metal balls ricocheting around the machines. You could buy twenty-five for the equivalent of a shilling and, with dexterity, could sit for several hours under the strip-lights feeding them in. The prizes – cigarettes, razor blades, soap and canned food – can be sold back to the owner for another cupful of balls, another few hours of oblivion.
Street life, the sprawl on the pavement outside a bar of drunken salarymen in their thin black suits with their thin ties over woollen overshirts. The peeing in the streets, the spitting. The comments as to your height, or hair colour. The everyday litany of the kids calling gai-jin, gai-jin, ‘foreigner, foreigner’ after you. Then there is the other Tokyo street life: the blind masseuses, tatami-mat makers, pickle-sellers, the crippled elderly women, the monks. Then the sellers of skewers of pork and pepper, ochrous tea, fat chestnut sweets, salted fish and seaweed snacks, the smells of grilling fish over charcoal braziers. Street life