Review | Tokyo Junkie: Robert Whiting’s eyewitness account of how Japan’s capital has changed in the past six decades

Tokyo Junkie
by Robert Whiting
Stone Bridge Press

Westerners have been visiting Japan and recording their observations for more than 150 years, for the most part measuring everything they see by a yardstick configured in their own country. Their books tell us more about the disposition and biases of the authors than the country they are purporting to examine.

When Robert Whiting arrived in Japan, aged 19, from the United States, he was, by his own admission, no exception. Tokyo Junkie tells how he became an astute eyewitness to the country’s progress and made it his home. An account of a radically changing city during the past six decades, it is a refreshing, enlightening and self-reflexive story.

Whiting arrived in Japan in 1962 – a good time for the country. Before the 1964 Olympic Games and the inauguration of the Shinkansen bullet train, Tokyo was, in many ways, a conglomeration of villages. It was transfigured by the end of the century into a gargantuan conurbation, the so-called Tokyo Zone, home to more than 38 million people. And yet Tokyo remains a vast net of developed villages.

Whiting takes up several issues, among them the plight of the 460,000 Koreans sent to Japan during the 35-year occupation of that country and whose families remain residents, despite discrimination against them; the disconsolate life of the salaryman during the three decades of rapid growth from the 1960s to the 1980s; the power the yakuza wields in politics; his encounters with influential brokers in the media; the raunchy requisites of Japan’s nightlife; and the cultural underpinnings of the Japanese sports world, into which he has delved in earlier books, including You Gotta Have Wa (1989), about Japanese baseball.