Word: ginza
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...Ginza. Though smaller than California in area, Japan, with 97 million inhabitants, is five times as populous. Moreover it is caught up in a vast migration from rural areas to cities, especially to the 350-mile-long megalopolis stretching from Tokyo to Osaka. The result is a spiraling real estate inflation that has lifted Japan's urban-land price index 670% since 1955, has made land in Japan the most expensive in the world. Frontage on the gilded Ginza shopping thoroughfare in central Tokyo sells for as much as $18 million per acre v. top prices of about...
...after dark, when traffic diminishes, that Tokyo really begins to build. Bulldozers and steamrollers emerge like nocturnal predators; the smell of hot tar and the chatter of jackhammers shatter the night. In Shinjuku, Tokyo's Greenwich Village, and along the Ginza, an army of orangehelmeted workmen swarms out to remove temporary planks covering the streets, while trailer trucks roar up to dump fuming loads of fill into yawning caverns. Thousands of lights sway in the evening breeze, sending crooked shadows under the neon. At dawn, the trucks and workers disappear like cockroaches. Then the city's kamikaze...
...made, as well as great directors such as Akira Kurosawa. Tokyo has 32,000 restaurants-nearly twice as many as New York. The best of the Japanese establishments can cost as much as $30 per person for food and geisha entertainment, but at sukiyaki and tempura houses like the Ginza's Suehiro and Tenichi, prices are moderate. Tokyo also has excellent Western dining spots, such as Lohmeyer's (German) and the Crescent (French), as well as Liu Yuan, a four-story Chinese restaurant that ranks with the best in the world...
...minimum, Tokyo boasts 30,000 establishments where a man or woman can have a drink. Prostitutes used to be everywhere, but a 1958 antiprostitution law scattered them to the winds, except for those who reappeared' as "bar hostesses." In the Ginza, Akasaka, Shimbashi, Shinjuku and Asakusa districts, such swank bars and nightclubs as Le Rat Mort offer unusual entertainment at prices that can be as exorbitant as anywhere in the world...
...last, the government all but declared water illegal. Noodle restaurants had to cut down their cooking, bathhouse hours were restricted, swimming pools closed. On the narrow side streets, police water trucks-usually employed to quell riots-filled housewives' buckets with water hauled in from nearby rivers. In the Ginza nightclubs, B-girls pushed dry martinis, urged thirsty tourists to "drink your whiskey without water and help save Tokyo...