Olympic City Memories

Tickets for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were incredibly hard to obtain. But I managed to secure two tickets for the final day of the track and field events through a colleague in the United States.

October 21 was a regular working day, a Wednesday, so I had to make an excuse to my boss. I went to the National Stadium with my fiancée, who is now my wife (we got married the following year).

We arrived at the stadium at about 2 in the afternoon. It was so crowded, but the atmosphere was fantastic. We watched a few event finals, including the high jump, which was won by Valeriy Brumel of the Soviet Union.

The marathon was held that day, and we watched Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila cross the finish line in first place and win his second consecutive Olympic marathon gold medal. Britain’s Basil Heatley outsprinted Japan’s Kokichi Tsuburaya on the final lap in the stadium to take silver.

Sadly, Tsuburaya-san took his own life four years later, a few months before the Mexico City Olympics.

After Abebe Bikila won the marathon, I decided to leave the stadium to get back to the office. But I discovered that all the main roads were closed to traffic because the marathon was still going on. That meant I couldn’t cross the road to get to the subway station.

It took me about 30 minutes to walk to another station to catch a train to Tokyo Station. By the time I arrived back at the office at 6:30 in the evening, everyone had left for the day.

Unlike in recent years, there weren’t many foreign visitors to Japan at that time. There were very few international hotels and flights were expensive. When I traveled to the US on business, the airfare was between ¥400,000 and ¥500,000.

In the years leading up to the Olympics, Tokyo changed a lot. Elevated highways and expressways started taking shape across the city, with Haneda Airport connected by expressway and monorail. The economy was booming.

I remember my Danish boss went to pick up friends from Haneda in his car. On the way back, he ended up in Shinjuku because he couldn’t find the exit for Ginza on the new expressway. He called me wondering where he was.

The shinkansen bullet train also started running in 1964. As I used to go to Osaka on business quite a lot, I took the shinkansen. It was very fast but not as smooth and quiet as the trains now.

The 1964 Games were the first ones to be broadcast live around the world. Color television broadcasts had started in 1960 in Japan, and there was a color TV sales boom before the Olympics. In my house, we had a black-and-white TV because color ones were so expensive—close to ¥200,000. My salary was ¥20,000 a month back then.

The 1940 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled because of the war, so we felt excited to finally host the Games, the first in Asia. The Olympics opened our eyes and inspired us to travel and learn more about the world.