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Tokyo Junkie

60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys... and Baseball

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About this listen

Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-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 best-selling 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.

©2021 Robert Whiting (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing and Skyboat Media Asia Baseball & Softball Japan Sports Olympics
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A unique and interesting perspective on Japan that is easy to miss in modern discourse.

Fascinating and personal account of change

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An enjoyable listen with lots of fun and interesting moments, good if you are interested in the origins of modern Japan post war

Interesting and nice to hear a personal story

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I decided to give this a go not because I have any interest in baseball (I have less than none), or Whiting's career (I knew nothing about him), but for the promised personal take on Tokyo's evolution from the early 60s to the present - and because it was about to drop out of Audible's included with membership selection.

On the evolution of Tokyo from a couple of years before the 1964 Olympics to the delayed 2020 Olympics, it delivers nicely - I first visited Tokyo in 2003, some 40 years after Whiting, and he does a great job of filling me in on what I missed and the vast transformations the city has seen. And it turns out the other two aspects were surprisingly engaging too.

This audiobook would, however, have been vastly improved if they'd hired someone who knows how to pronounce Japanese, and if they'd refrained from doing silly (and bad) accents when other people are quoted.

A neat personal history of a city's transformation

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