Tokyo Junkie. Robert Whiting

Preface

      The late Anthony Bourdain, renowned celebrity chef and globetrotter, in an interview with Maxim in 2017, named Tokyo as his favorite city in the world and said, “If I had to agree to live in one country, or even one city, for the rest of my life, never leaving it, I’d pick Tokyo in a second.” He called his first trip to Tokyo, in general, an “explosive, life-changing event” and even compared it to the first time he ever took acid, in the way it changed every experience that came after it. “Nothing was ever the same for me,” he said, fascinated with the city’s myriad layers and the variety of its flavors, taste, and customs. “I just wanted more of it.”

      I understood what he was saying because I had felt the same way when I first came to the city over five decades ago in 1962 as a raw nineteen-year-old GI from small-town America. It was a time when the United States was at the peak of its economic power under iconic new president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Japan was still struggling to recover from the damage of defeat in World War 2.

      Tokyo, at the time, was tearing itself apart and putting itself back together in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics. You could stand in parts of the city and watch as buildings were being torn down on one side of the street and new ones constructed