THE LOOMING OLYMPICS .. .AND THE OVERFLOWING CUP

Nothing that I can remember caused greater excitement in Japan or triggered a bigger building boom than the news that the 1964 Olympic summer games had been awarded to Tokyo. The whole country was ecstatic, and there was a national resolve to make the Tokyo games a shining example of Japan's organisational brilliance, architectural and technological genius and superior good taste. The Tokyo Olympics was to mark the end of its post-war reconstruction phase and announce its arrival as a major power on the world stage.

A stupendous amount of work was to be done to realise this ambitious agenda. Apart from building stadiums and large hotels, the city needed to clean up its air and its traffic chaos, introduce road and traffic signs in English, and train thousands of guides, telephone operators and Olympic personnel in adequate conversational English. Existingplans to widen certain Tokyo thoroughfares and bury unsightly telephone cables were brought forward.

One vexing problem was Tokyo's virtual absence of sewers for waste matter. The periodic emptying of domestic septic tanks by gangs scooping the waste up with wooden honey buckets’ was an old and nauseating tradition every resident foreigner was familiar with. It was decided that time being too short to consider alternatives, the city would simply ban the emptying of septic tanks during the Olympics, thus avoiding offending the visitors’ noses unnecessarily. The lingering smell of human waste often found wafting up from the underground septic tanks on a warm day when walking through any narrow city street, could not be eliminated by such prohibition.

The construction of the country's first high-speed railway, to be known as the Shinkansen was well underway. It would halve the transit time between Tokyo and Osaka and form a vivid demonstration of Japan's state-of-the-art transport technology. The traffic congestion in Tokyo was being tackled with a network of elevated toll roads, raised high above some of the city's most famous streets and canals, casting everything below into permanent gloom.