THE RESTLESS YEARS

From 1990 onward, I moved house repeatedly — sometimes with Toyoko, at other times alone. From New York we moved to London, then I moved to Amsterdam and later to London, while Toyoko moved to Tokyo, then to Sydney, where she joined IAPMA, the International Association of Hand Paper Makers and Paper Artists, which stimulated her artistic bent.

Meanwhile in Japan, the decade-long economic bubble was still continuing into early 1990. But like all bubbles, it burst eventually. In the course of 1990, the stock market collapsed, with the Nikkei index shedding 40% of its value compared to its all-time high of 38,957 on the 29th of December, 1989. Real estate prices held up for another year or so before telescoping similarly.

What followed is what's commonly called Japan's “lost decade.” It is true that there was a serious drop in economic growth, from an average of 4.3% annually dunng the bubble years to around 1.5% during the 1990s. But for seven out of those ten years, the economy did continue to grow.

My book Showa japan contains details of the 1980s bubble economy and its many manifestations in fashion, culinary trends, travel, and consumerism in general. Also, its effect on Japan's traditional values and cultural identity. It was undoubtedly a penod of great progress and wealth accumulation, but also of reckless spending and a heady belief in its own, newly-minted economic superiority.

Since I left Japan in 1974, I never lost touch with the country. I managed to return frequently during that period — fifteen times at least.

I revisited some of the places where I’d once lived. I found that of the fourteen houses and one apartment I inhabited in Japan between 1950 and 1974, only two houses were still standing. One was located in what is now Kobe's Ijmkan (foreign residences) Historic District. The other, in Omori, Tokyo, had become a Joomy relic hemmed in by small shops where once the front garden had been. Two of the vanished houses were destroyed in the 1995 Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake. All the others had succumbed to the bulldozer to make way for new structures. Even the apartment, in a fine six-story 1970s building in Tokyo's premium Aoyama district, was gone.