Tokyo Junkie
First published 2021 · 384 pages · about 6 hours to read
About this book
Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic sixty-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world.
Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city's dark underbelly, interviews Japan's baseball elite after publishing his first bestselling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation.
A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, "the greatest city in the world," Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.
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Josh80/100
Robert Whiting grew up in a small town in California and came to Tokyo in the early 1960s as a GI. After his military service ended, he stayed on, working as an English tutor, encyclopedia editor, and eventually a freelance writer. Tokyo Junkie is part memoir and part ode to the city he calls home. While Whiting ranges widely in his subject matter, several recurring themes emerge throughout the…
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