In Tokyo, the Party Is Over

By S. Chang

Japan is entering the New Year in a kind of frenzied euphoria, a mixture of Scotch, sake and dread. The party is almost over, the Japanese seem to be saying, so why not enjoy it while it lasts? TIME Tokyo Correspondent S. Chang reports:

With its night still pierced by nearly all of its famous neon jungles, Tokyo is something of a dragon's palace. It is an outlandish monument to nonchalance in the face of a fuel shortage and economic repercussions that will hurt Japan far more than the U.S., and even more than Western Europe. But behind its hectic face, there is a clearly sensed feeling of desperation, the atmosphere of a Japanese Walpurgisnacht.

The atmosphere is so volatile that anything can happen. The friend of a woman about to be hired by the Toyokawa Credit Bank happened to say to an acquaintance, perhaps jokingly, that the bank was about to go bankrupt. Within 13 hours, 4,800 depositors had withdrawn $5,000,000 from the bank and eight of its branches. "I still don't know what hit us," groaned Bank Chairman Bunichi Matsui.

In Shinjuku, Tokyo's equivalent of New York's Greenwich Village or London's Soho, the facades of at least 1,000 clubs throw off all the colors of the rainbow. Inside, the thermostats seem to have been raised, not lowered; customers peel off their jackets, and even the bikini-clad B-girls perspire in the heat. At a restaurant on the Ginza, the headwaiter reports a more-frenzied-than-usual pace of drinking. "They drink as though this were their last big fling," he says, both gratified and concerned by the booming sales.

Though filling stations are closed on Sunday, as they are in most of Europe, expressways are as clogged with drivers as usual. On a recent Sunday, 10,000 cars ferried Tokyo's sporting set to the biggest turnout ever at the Nakayama Racecourse. The betting set a record of $44.3 million. "There's something unhealthy about the way they played it this year," observed one official at the Ginza offtrack betting center. That same day, 300,000 shoppers crowded the Mitsukoshi Honten, Tokyo's largest department store, to snatch up a record $8,900,000 worth of goods.

No real shortages have cropped up in Japan yet, but panicky consumers have denuded stores of items they think will be scarce, like toilet paper and detergents. Caches of perhaps as much as 500,000 gallons of oil and oil products have been illegally hidden round the country. Earlier this month, a stray golf ball led to the discovery of one hidden store near Osaka; when the golfer scrambled down a ravine in search of the ball, he also found 625 drums of oil. Already two taxi drivers have committed suicide because of fears that the fuel shortage would put them out of business.

The feeling of despair is only heightened by the fact that the Japanese have more money than they have ever had. Year-end bonuses total $21.4 billion. With the expectation that this may be their last year of prosperity, most Japanese seem bent on spending as much of it as they can.

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