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By Don MacLaren

2 April 2021​

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In the early 1960s, Japan was a poor country still emerging from the ravages of World War II. Pollution was a terrible problem. Most people in Tokyo didn’t have flush toilets. Yet Robert Whiting found himself fascinated by the city when he arrived there as a 19-year-old GI in 1962. His fascination has continued unabated since then, as evidenced by his latest book, Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys...and Baseball.

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“I was as naïve as they come,” Whiting writes of his life before Tokyo. But his naivete didn’t last long as he sought out new experiences while working hard at learning Japanese. Whiting often ventured out from Fuchu Air Station, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where he worked in US Air Force Intelligence, to places like Shibuya, Ginza, and Shinjuku, where he encountered yakuza, bargirls, Catholic priests, doctors, haiku-writing bohemians and others. And though he was surrounded by numerous vices that he could have become addicted to, it was Japanese baseball that he became obsessed with.

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Though many Japanese were moved to tears because of how far they had come since 1945, there were also tears of grief and shame during the Olympics, when the Dutch judo contestant Anton Geesink won the Gold Medal against the Japanese Akio Kaminaga in the Open category. (The Japanese had requested that the Olympic committee include judo in the games.)

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Whiting writes about how Geesink’s win revealed the strong mixed and complicated feelings that the Japanese harbored toward foreigners. Sometimes, Whiting shows us, those feelings were not mixed at all, but outright hostile. Despite his criticisms though, it is clear that Whiting’s love for the country, and especially Tokyo, is much stronger than any other feeling he has – mixed or otherwise.

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Whiting does not confine his criticism to the Japanese. Americans in Japan could be as narrow-minded as any Japanese, he tells us. When Whiting’s enlistment ended in the mid-'60s and he decided to stay in Japan, many of his fellow GIs accused him of being a “Jap-lover.”

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Whiting has spent most of his life since leaving the Air Force in Tokyo. In the decades since the ’64 Olympics, the city has gone through another miraculous transformation. Whiting’s own experiences in those years have been just as fascinating.

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In 2013, Tokyo was again awarded the Summer Olympics. By that time it had become the city with the highest GDP in the world, with more Fortune 500 companies than any other metropolis. And the world had become enamored with Japanese culture; people had become hooked on everything from sushi to anime. Japan by then had also stumbled through numerous corruption scandals, and its economy had shrunk during the “lost decade” of the 1990s. By 2013 Whiting had graduated from a Japanese university, mastered the Japanese language, written numerous critically-acclaimed books (including the Pulitzer Prize entry, You Gotta Have Wa), been honored by US presidents and received death threats from yakuza after writing Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan. And he had married a Japanese woman – Machiko Kondo – who made a career as an officer for the United Nations.

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Whiting takes us on a delightful tour through all of this.

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Tokyo Junkie brings to mind two other fine books that I’d highly recommend reading after you've finished Tokyo Junkie. One of them is the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, which traces America’s role in Vietnam up to the 1970s and on a parallel level the life of John Paul Vann, an American who spent many years in war-torn Vietnam and died there when his helicopter hit trees while flying at night.

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The other book is Whiting’s own Tokyo Underworld, which traces Japanese-American postwar relations, and on a parallel level the life of Nick Zapetti, a former US Marine, who came to Japan during the postwar Occupation and stayed there. Zapetti would boast that he was the richest American in Japan, but he lost most of his money and died in his adopted country a broken man.

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Sheehan and Whiting skillfully interweave the lives of the main characters (and in the case of Tokyo Junkie, the narrator) with larger forces. This makes the books very personal stories as well as macro-political/economic narratives about places that have had an immense impact on the United States and the rest of the world.

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Tokyo Junkie is different from the two other books, however, in that both Vann and Zapetti were dark and conflicted figures. Whiting has lived through a great deal of drama in his years in Tokyo, but reading Tokyo Junkie it’s clear that his own dramatic story is a happier one.

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By the time Zapetti died he had planned to kill all those he disliked. It seems, however, he disliked himself more than anyone else. As Whiting writes in Tokyo Underworld, Zapetti told him shortly before he died that “…any man who left his own country to live in another was an ‘asshole,’ deserving of everything bad that happened to him.”

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Zapetti was wrong. Whether it is in Tokyo, or anywhere else in the world, one will find heroes, villains and fools. Zapetti belonged in one - or both - of the latter categories. By living and writing Tokyo Junkie, Whiting deserves to be listed in the first category.

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If you have any interest in learning of how a fascinating city and a fine human being have developed over the course of nearly 60 years – with many trials, tribulations, joys and successes - read Tokyo Junkie!

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​You can learn more about Robert Whiting at robertwhiting.com and tokyojunkie.com.

You can learn more about Don MacLaren at donmaclaren.com.

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