by HIROAKI SATO
NEW YORK — While visiting three capitals in Latin America on a lecture tour earlier this month, I wondered if Tokyo looked or felt like any of these cities to someone visiting it from New York or a large European city half a century ago.
The wonderment, on the face of it, was silly. The three cities — Quito, La Paz and Caracas — are all European in origin. Two of them, La Paz and Quito, are the world’s highest and the second-highest capital cities, and have little in common with Tokyo, which stands on alluvial plains.
Yet certain urban disharmonies — for example, the presence of ramshackle houses not far from the downtown where modern, gleaming towers mushroom — made me think of Tokyo of the past.
No, I never lived in the Japanese capital; I was a college student in Kyoto at the time. But because of a biography I am working on, I had known for some time that “Life” magazine had done a Japan special in the fall of 1964 to mark the Tokyo Olympic Games and that the writer it chose to make a coherent observation on the city was no less than Arthur Koestler — something I had been reminded of when a new biography of that famous writer came out: Michael Scammell’s “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House, 2009).
So, as I returned to New York, I checked Koestler’s “Life” article, “For Better or Worse: Her Course Is Set” (Sept. 11, 1964). I did not have to go far into the article to find what I had expected. Tokyo is “the first city in the world with a monorail system linking airport to urban center,” he had written, “but it has no citywide sewage system.”
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