Tokyo is two cities, two conceptions, unreconciled and even hostile. Here the schizophrenia which has troubled Japan since she was brought out of seclusion is completely expressed, in brick and stone as well as in the lives of men and women. At some points, it might be a middle western town. There are other places, but fewer, where every line is a delight to the eye. In the heart of the capital, these two conflicting ideas confront. The Imperial Palace, standing on a hill, surrounded by a moat, with the curved roofs of outhouses and bridges, the small trees placed deliberately about the turf slopes, the birds flying over the water and the trailing, tossing willows beside it, has an air of repose and majesty. Here still older people, farmers up in the city for a day or other backward folk, will often pause and bow. Opposite, there is a long line of mongrel western buildings, of all shapes and sizes and colors, but of no recognizable style, clumsy in line and florid in decoration. An art historian might perhaps be able to unravel the mess and trace each wild fancy to its origin. It is as if the architects, after gazing upon a selection of postcards from Detroit or Liverpool, had resolved to do even better and been rewarded with entire success. These unlovely unobjects, however, are as much the `real' Tokyo as the comely Palace or the courtyard of the Meiji Shrine. The fine things are not an anachronism, but no more are the vulgar an aberration.

Merely by standing here before the Palace and looking first in one direction and then in another, you may get a vivid sense of this split in the Japanese mind; but the Ginza is the place to study it, in all its horrid confusion. Amplifiers placed at intervals along the street indiscriminately bawl out a Beethoven symphony, an American dance hit, a geisha song or a chant from a Noh play. Often you may see two girls walking together, one in native, one in western, dress. The first is a graceful little creature dressed in colors that, however bright, are always harmonious, who trips along on her clogs as lightly as a young deer. The second wears a short dress, giving full value to each awkward lump in her figure, and shapeless shoes a size or two too large, to which the eye is guided by a pair of bright green or pink bobby socks. They seem to belong to different races but, very likely, they are sisters. Business men drive up and down, honking fiercely at the pedestrians, while the rickshaw men pad silently along-in bare feet. Here and there are old-style Japanese shops selling books and color prints, or works of art and craftsmanship, quiet, pleasant places, with dwarf trees planted in beautiful or curious pots outside the door, and silk cushions strewn about on the rush matting inside, where the customer may rest and consider a purchase in the leisurely style of old days. The stalls jostling each other on the curb outside, each only a few feet wide, are crammed with all the ignoble knick-knacks and gewgaws that the ingenuity of Japanese manufacturers can devise. There are tiny booths and imposing department stores. Dance-halls advertise `Avec-time To-Nite.' Avec-time is a great new attraction, where the lights in the hall are lowered and the young men, with their stickily pomaded hair, and the girls, with their garish make-up, press their cheeks tightly together and circle the floor, an expression of near imbecility on their faces. It has to be seen to be believed. There are fun fairs and cinemas; and not far away is the Kabuki theatre, where actors in gorgeous costume perform with a marvelous discipline and polish the great dramas of the past, to an audience that sits hour after hour in the unheated building, shouting with excitement or dissolving into tears as the climax of the story approaches. It is noise and muddle and vulgarity, with now and again just an undertone of calm and restraint.

The metropolitan Japanese, like the city itself, has a divided personality. He [the author, a woman, does seem to mean only “he”] walks about in the daytime in western clothes and perches on chairs at the office, and in the evening he puts on a kimono and squats on his heels. A house of any pretension at all will have one foreign room, furnished in sad Victorian style, tables with fringed covers of seedy plush, mahogany sideboards, bric-a-brac, paintings of dead pheasants or bunches of grapes, lace chair covers: almost every object that might occur to a satirical fancy finds its place in it. Into this the Japanese host will lead a foreign guest with the buoyant step of a man who knows what is what and is in a position to provide it. The other rooms are simple and elegant, all in them being carefully chosen and still more carefully placed; but the foreign room is the owner's joy and pride, because western things mean wealth, importance, utility, progress, and their ugliness is taken calmly as -inevitable. They have been swallowed whole: criticism is suspended.

It is a state of mind very difficult for a European to understand. The sense of beauty and proportion is not nearly so developed among us, nor so widespread, as among the Japanese. The humblest of them has not only a quick appreciation of a happy effect, but the power of producing something himself. But when the European does have such a sense, he applies it universally; if he loves painting, he will understand and value Sesshu [a fifteen century ink painter] as well as Rembrandt, if architecture, a perfect Shinto shrine as well as the Sainte Chapelle. The Japanese wander among the western horrors of Tokyo unmoved. They cannot choose a good foreign picture, or gracefully furnish a room in foreign style, but it does not matter to them. It is useful, they say, it is practical. But don't you think it is very horrid? It is useful, they repeat, it is practical. If you admire the kimono a woman is wearing, she immediately tells you how awkward it is in trains. One man, showing me some sofas and chairs that his grandparents had imported from England, did remark with a sigh that the quality was so good that he feared it might last for ever; but that was the nearest a approach to a judgment that I ever heard from Japanese lips.

What does profoundly disturb them, is to feel that the show is not an entire success. It is said that when, many years ago, the members of the Diet put on European clothes for the first time, they all decided, after discussion, that the trousers were meant to be worn with the opening at the back; and that when the truth was discovered, every effort was made to collect the photographs showing them dressed in this way and severe penalties threatened against any who should publish them. The mistake was not as absurd as it may sound, the different pieces of western clothing being naturally as much of a puzzle to men unfamiliar with them as would Japanese clothing to a westerner. Shortly before the war, indeed, an American lady of excellent repute strolled down the Ginza tricked out as a geisha: and I myself knew an actress of ripe years who went about in a kimono of which the color and design were meant for a girl of seventeen. Nothing could be easier than to fall into errors of this kind. But while the Japanese were ready to sink into the earth with shame if they thought all was not precisely in order, the American lady continued on her way, through a sea of smiling faces, with entire assurance.

Very soon after arriving in Tokyo, I was invited to the house of a Japanese business man, who had never left the country but who prided himself on being westernized and cosmopolitan. The dinner table was laid with knives and forks and there were menu cards written in a French no stranger than would have been the case in England. The food was undoubtedly western, although there were slight deviations in the way the courses were arranged: the soup, for instance, was preceded by a very satisfying game pie, and boiled eggs were introduced at a moment when one might rather have looked for fruit or cheese. The conversation was a credit to all who took part in it. The party was ruined for my host, however, by the conduct of his butler, a country boy with matted hair and huge meaty hands, who joined an impenetrable stupidity to an intense desire to please. I was the only woman invited, and this lad, very properly according to Japanese ideas, would hand me the dishes only after all the male guests had been served: His employer signaled to him, gently at first, then urgently and at last with savagery. He merely wrinkled his low, honest brows in bewilderment. Then his employer beckoned to him and muttered viciously in his ear, but either he could not understand the order, or the heart failed him to carry it out, for all went on as before. As time passed, beads of sweat appeared on my host's forehead. It was not from real concern as to when I should get my food, since the western politeness to women must have shocked him as much as most Japanese, being contrary to nature, precept, and custom. His own wife had been relegated to the kitchen from which she emerged only for brief intervals, giggling nervously behind her hand, to see that everything was going well. He was simply haunted by a fear that I should go about laughing at his ignorance, and that his friends would get to hear of it.

These endeavors to follow a way of life, at least in its outwards forms, that in their hearts they could neither . admire or enjoy were nothing new in the experience of the metropolitan Japanese. They had been making them ever since the fall of the Shogunate [1867-68] had ended the country's seclusion and opened the way to the Emperor Meiji's reforms. Voices had, indeed, been raised against the foreign thought; gradually a reaction had arisen which the military had used to the full in their efforts to unite the country behind them. The west, according to these people, was flabby, decadent, and hedonistic: Japan, in some mysterious way, was `spiritual'. There is no doubt that millions of Japanese vaguely believed that these `spiritual' qualities of theirs would somehow triumph over any mechanical contrivances that the Americans might be able to produce in the course of war; and on one occasion a General went so far as to tell the public not to be dismayed by the sinking of Japanese ships, or the fleets of bombers that were destroying their cities one after the other since, if need be, all the kami or spirits of Japan would rise up and destroy the invader. The fundamental unsoundness of this gentleman's thinking was, however, brought finally home to the people in August 1946, when the atomic bomb turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into burning waste lands in the space of a few seconds. Loathing the west as never before, they began from that time to ape it with a renewed determination.

Tokyo to-day, then, is bewildered and divided. It is likely that the gangsters and the communists are the only people in it with a clear idea of what they are about. Outside their simple, restricted world is another, of muddle and make-believe, suffering and frustration. Here and there, the distress that the defeat brought with it openly appears. At night the railway stations, and particularly the one at Ueno, are full of homeless people, thieves, prostitutes, and the orphans of the war. These little creatures are all engaged in the black market, and they are very sharp little business men, whose connections often spread over a large part of the country. They travel up and down in the trains, to Osaka or Sendai or further, never paying a fare, stealing from the other passengers and comparing notes on commodity markets with small colleagues whom they meet on the way. You see them, tattered and filthy, smoking cigarettes and chatting among themselves, in the daytime, when business is slack. At the approach of the police they melt into the landscape, and, if they are caught and sent to one of the Government reformatories, they break out and return to the streets as soon as possible.

I visited one of these reformatories, out in a suburb. The rooms were large and bare and clean, with little furniture and no amenities other than those the children provided themselves. The warden was a decrepit, toothless old fellow, in a shabby soldier's tunic, who shuffled about the place in loose straw sandals, creating an atmosphere of lifeless depression wherever he went. As we came into each room, the little bullet-headed boys all smiled politely and saluted us on their hands and knees. They thanked me for coming to see them and declared, to a man, that they were happy to be here in this fine place. Their flowery speeches and polished ways were captivating indeed, but the warden spoilt everything by giving a few details of their past careers. Every one had broken out of the home more than once, all had lived by their wits in the underworld, several were professional. pickpockets and some were violent. They organized themselves into gangs, the little boys being controlled by the bigger, and these in turn by grown criminals. Often they had begun innocently enough, preferring, as a normal child would, to pick up their living in freedom among the excitements Sick of the town rather than to receive three bowls of rice a day from the state, with tedious exhortations thrown in; but sooner or later they fell in with the gangsters and were trained for a life of crime.

One day some of us spoke to a little fellow who was peddling cigarettes and boot polish outside the Asakusa station. He looked about ten years old, although he was probably more, as nearly all Japanese seem less than their age to European eyes. His only garment was a khaki shirt many sizes too large, stolen perhaps from a G.I., from which his legs protruded, black and skinny as the legs of a crow. Scabs had formed all over his head, and he had sore, running eyes. He told a heart-breaking story of how his parents had been killed in Manchuria, and his elder brother had brought him, after many narrow escapes, home to Japan: and how all his other relatives had perished in the air-raids, and there was no one to care for him, and no means of his leading an honest life: and how he had tried to get into orphanages and. missionary centers, but in vain, for his papers had been lost and nobody would believe what he said. Deeply moved by this recital we gave him some money, and his gratitude and delight were charming things to see. But a few days later we spoke to another waif, this time outside Tokyo Central and, with the tears rolling down his cheeks, he pitched us the same yarn word for word, so that we were left with a grave suspicion that someone had been trifling with us.

The pompom girls are another depressing feature of contemporary life in the capital. Pompom is a word from the southern regions meaning stomach, and the name is applied to girls who go with foreign soldiers for the sake of food, cigarettes, and sweets. They are a squalid tribe of harpies, loud of voice, vulgar and without manners of any kind and, while there seems to be nothing Japanese left in them, they somehow contrive to be more degraded than any European whore. In the daytime, they stroll about in cheap, smart dresses from the PX, noisily talking and laughing, almost invariably chewing gum, or enraging hungry citizens in trains and buses by a display of their ill-gotten gains; and at night they lead a furtive little existence, plying their trade in dark corners and doorways, pursued by foreign and Japanese police alike, but sure of their clientele. Walking late in the evening through those parts of Tokyo frequented by the troops, you will come on some very remarkable sights indeed. No overfed and idle men stationed as conquerors in a foreign country can be expected to behave as they would at home, but for the brutality of their ways they surpassed anything I have seen, and added to it a kind of nauseating exhibitionism which is apparently special to themselves.

The Yoshiwara, or red light district, makes an interesting contrast to this western method of approach. I spent an afternoon in it, in the company of Mr. R., a European journalist of magnificently frivolous disposition. “I really cannot bother to count up the cows in Japan,” he explained. “Economics appall me. Politics are meaningless.” He must have been the owner of his paper as well as the Tokyo correspondent.

He passed all his days in the Kabuki theatre, visiting the colorful portions of the city and drinking tea with actors and artists. For some reason, the Yoshiwara had an overpowering fascination for him, and there was nothing he liked better than to show other foreigners round it. We took with us an interpreter, a nervous little man with the brim of his hat turned up in front like a Hollywood comedian, who repeatedly begged us not to tell anyone that he had come on this expedition, and a Japanese painter, whom Mr. R.. had found in one of the Asakusa dives and from whom he had become almost immediately inseparable. The man was about thirty-five years old, with a fine head, long hair, and gentle, melancholy eyes, and he was always dressed in a threadbare serge suit, wooden clogs, and a loose, flopping straw hat, such as peasants wear in the hot weather. His wife had been killed by robbers soon after the war and her family, who had never liked the marriage, took his only child away, and now he pursued a lonely, uneventful course of his own, meditating by the hour in dingy tea houses and bars, and sometimes selling a picture. You might have found him looking perfectly at home in the Café Flore, or perhaps tripped over him towards closing time in the Wheatsheaf, he was so universal a type of bohemian artist. There was something very sweet and engaging about him, and it was no wonder if Mr. R. had fallen under his spell; but, as neither could speak the other's language, this singular friendship could only nourish itself with vague smiles and the exchange of cigarettes.

The way to the Yoshiwara led past a strange and horrible cemetery where two thousand people, burned past recognition in one of the great air-raids, were buried together in a common grave. It had been the first occasion that the Americans had used their technique of showering petrol on the city before scattering their fire bombs, and the people had continued walking unconcernedly about the streets, thinking it had come on to rain. A few minutes later, hundreds of them were transformed into living torches. Here in this burial ground were their remains, with nothing to celebrate them but a few round Buddhist tombstones, like small tree stumps, which had been put there by families who believed that some of their own were among all that charred debris. There was no railing round the place, nor was any attempt made to keep it decent beyond the setting of little flower vases here and there in front of the stones. Dogs were freely roaming the grass, and a workman stood in the middle of it, relieving himself.

The old Yoshiwara had been for the greater part destroyed, and in its place were a number of new buildings, some of them elegant little villas with a garden fenced off, and others were shacks. One house, larger and more impressive than the rest, and looking like a Baptist chapel, had the single word DREAM in bold, bright letters across the front. We walked down the main street, with girls dressed in handsome, if somewhat gaudy kimono, peeping archly from every window or running out to salute Mr. R., evidently by now a familiar spectacle, with low bows and welcoming smiles: some also hurried to put a record on the gramophone. The painter smiled dreamily and the interpreter set up a worried muttering to himself in Japanese.

At this moment Mr. R., who had previously taken up such a hostile attitude to statistics, displayed a sudden thirst for information of an exact and tedious nature. He dived now into this brothel, now into that, with the vivacity of a Government inspector. The perspiring interpreter would be expected to ask some formidable old woman in charge of an establishment what was the price for one night and how much of that was given to the girl. If she said that her fee was five thousand yen, and that the girl received half, Mr. R. made a careful note of it and then demanded to see one of the inmates, with the obvious intention of checking her statement. A great deal of embarrassment was caused in a short time, in this way.

One of the girls subjected to Mr. R.'s examination was a demure, dimpled little creature with a wash of pink all over her face except for a quarter-inch of yellow left at the edge. She was dressed in a startling shade of cyclamen, with a green and silver sash, and her smile glittered gold in the sun, but she behaved with the modest composure of a star pupil brought out to make an impression on prospective parents. The company sat down to tea: we refused a suggestion of Japanese coffee, having tried it before: and Mr. R. proceeded to fire question after question at the child, while the proprietress, screeching suddenly like a parrot, hurried away to deal with a commotion that had broken out in the rear of the house.

The girl said that she had been working in a tea house on the Ginza, where the clients had been very noisy and rude. She would never have put up with it, if times had not been so hard. Her family thought she had done well to leave it and come here, into a first-class establishment where she would have a chance of earning good money. No one had forced her into this kind of life, and she could leave it whenever she chose, and there was no binding contract with the old woman we had seen, as girls were no longer sold into these places by their fathers. The last part o€ this statement was not strictly true, but we let it go by, and we understood why she had been chosen to talk to us when she added that she had only been there two days. To every question that was put to her, she promptly replied, in the squeaky, affected voice that Japanese women often put on when they are trying to make a ladylike impression, and smiling persistently like a satisfied pussy-cat.

At last even Mr. R. was content and, having been shown over the villa with its charming, simple rooms, beautifully tiled baths and the little garden, in which a pious hand had set a little image of Jizo [small Buddhist images, popular with women and children and often placed by the wayside as well as in gardens], we took our leave with copious mutual salutations and a pressing invitation from the old woman to come again. By now the information that the mad foreigner was back, and this time bringing his wife, had spread through the whole neighborhood, and we were wafted towards the jeep on a breeze of giggles, like the tinkling of row upon row of glass ornaments, from inside each of the little houses.

“It is all very wrong,” said Mr. R., as we drove away. “There should not be charm in these places. Let us see in all their ugliness the naked features of vice. Let ignominy be attached to it. Did you observe the demeanor of that girl? She spoke as if her occupation were the most estimable in the world. Oh, the Japanese! I greatly prefer the pompoms, or the dreary houses of Europe.”

He was clearly delighted with his afternoon, and longing to visit the quarter again. The experience had been an instructive one for me, too, since there was a legend that the Yoshiwara, so intimately connected with political gangsterism in pre-war days, had been done away, under the new laws of democratic Japan; and now I had seen it with my own eyes, flourishing quietly but openly, and given an official blessing, as it were, by the imposing police box at the top o£ the main street.

Life in Tokyo follows the pattern of life in any defeated or occupied capital. People who counted before, are today ruined and forgotten. Affairs are in the hands of men too obscure or too ambitious to be afraid of collaborating. The former ruling class lives from the sale of such valuables as remain to it, heirlooms, household treasures and, finally, their wardrobes; they call it the onion life because every time they peel off a coat, they cry a little more. Suicides are frequent among them, but with a stranger they discuss the change in their fortunes as if it were the best joke in the world. Wealth and power, if not prestige, have passed into the hands of a set known as the “new-yen” people, who have risen to the top in the economic chaos following the collapse and who are now in control of the hugely ramified black market. There is the usual flood of sensational and pornographic literature, and a crop of earnest, short-lived political magazines that veer uncertainly from one extremist point o£ view to another. For the great majority of the people, the only concern is to get food enough to keep body and soul together. The women go regularly out to the countryside around and buy surreptitiously from the farmers, who, after the manner of their kind everywhere, make a good thing out o£ the city's distress. These forays are a hazardous undertaking because, on the way home, the traffickers are liable to be pounced on by the railway police and to have their booty taken from them. It is only important criminals who can operate in safety. These, safe from Allied and Japanese authorities alike, give their huge banquets, on a scale more lavish and more sumptuous than would have been considered good style in the old days of prosperity, in the restaurants and geisha houses which, by law, are forbidden. The halls are full of dance-crazed young people, and the newspapers of articles and letters denouncing them. Fortune-tellers, quacks, charlatans of every sort, are thriving, as always in a time of misery and confusion.

In spite of it all, the city is outwardly calm and dull. It appears to be inhabited by millions of petits bourgeois without a thought in their heads but to get to their shop or office on time. There are none of the street incidents, the sudden flurries of rage, such as are apt to occur in place where there is great hardship. Tokyo housewives never storm shops; at most they will meekly ask leave of the authorities to hold a demonstration on the Plaza and, being told that it would be highly inconvenient, bow low and depart without a murmur. No one protests at having to wait an hour or more in the rain before he can board a tram. The manners of the people, except where they have come much in contact with the members of the occupation, remain perfect; despair in this strange, inhuman town conceals itself with a polite hiss and a giggle.

Before their eyes there is always the spectacle of another, foreign world in which there is plenty of everything. The inhabitants of this exotic world walk about in beautiful strong shoes and new clothing. They have a great many good things to eat, and throw away almost as much again. The best buildings, hotels, houses, and theatres have all been taken over by them: the real owners may not go inside except by invitation. Such contacts as the people have with these privileged strangers are chiefly for the purpose of taking orders, but they are also allowed, even expected, to entertain them richly and frequently, and to procure yen for them by the marketing of their surplus clothes, stockings, shoes, sweets, liquor, and tobacco. Wedged into their tramcars like herrings in the hold of a trawler, the citizens may observe these fortunate beings flash about the capital in shiny motor-cars. The sounds of their revelry shatter the peace of the night. They work in spacious offices, warm as a reptile house in winter, in summer deliciously cool, to which in many cases a wireless playing unbrokenly gives a pleasant atmosphere o£ home. They live in comfortable houses and are waited on hand and foot by obsequious servants paid by the Japanese Government. A six-storied PX on the Ginza furnishes them with all the heart could desire, from dough-nuts and chewing-gum to orchids and silk panties with the words Forget-me-not embroidered on either leg. In their free time they can dance, drink, play poker, or attend the Ernie Pyle cinema, where a portrait of Ernie is flashed on the screen, like Royalty, at intervals through each performance, together with appeals, at first conciliatory, then stern, and finally menacing, for more decorous behavior on the part of the audience. Never in their lives before, they joyously agree, have they had it so good.

The townspeople appear to be unconscious of these visitors, but they are not. They watch them closely, discuss their every move and pass each scrap of information on. The speed at which a piece of news concerning a foreigner travels along the Tokyo grape-vine is almost uncanny. Everyone seems to know when Colonel X is going to change his Japanese mistress before the gallant officer has quite made up his mind about it himself. Everyone knows how much money changes hands in what transaction, and how Mrs. Y goes about it when she wants a silver fox fur, and what General Z told the Prime Minister in confidence when they last met. The foreigners complain that they never know what is going on in the minds of “these people,” but “these people” know exactly what is passing in their minds and play up to it in a way that it is a real privilege to watch.

For many years they have been trying to learn western ways and now the west itself has moved in among them. They are reminded of its presence whichever way they turn at every moment of their daily lives. It is not in every respect, perhaps, quite as they had imagined it to be, but it is colorful and interesting. They neither criticize openly nor admire, but study; and if they speak of it all there is apt to be certain ambiguity in their words. A student once remarked: “The theory of democracy is a little perplexing for us at first. But while the occupation remains here, our people can see for themselves what, if all goes well, they have a chance of becoming.” A pleasant and encouraging little speech, and uttered with smiling courtesy, but capable possibly of more interpretations than one.

Tracy, Honor. Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan. London: Mathuen & Co, 1950, 1-14.