As readers of this column last week may recall, I wrote there about a period in the early 1980s when my wife and I lived in the western Tokyo suburb of Soshigaya in Setagaya Ward. Three of our four children were born in the local hospital, and we have only the fondest memories of the old neighborhood.
In 1983, I conducted a survey of all of the goods and services offered on the kilometer-long shotengai (shopping street) running from the station up to the turnoff to our little flat. I published the list of my findings -- recently unearthed from a old box in my office -- in last week's Counterpoint. Now I have gone back to resurvey the shotengai, to find out how a Tokyo neighborhood has changed over the course of a generation.
I was amazed to discover that Soshigaya had not changed much at all. There were the same number of dry cleaners, eight, as in 1983; and only two fewer beauty salons, 13. The obsession with hair and dress of the Tokyoite has not diminished. In fact, while 23 years ago there were 11 clothing stores, this time I counted 17 -- two calling themselves "boutiques." There was even a self-styled "High-Class Recycle Dressmaker." The recycling movement was in its infancy in the early '80s, when fashion-conscious Tokyoites wouldn't have been caught dead in their own old shmatas (that's not Japanese, it's Yiddish for "rags"), let alone someone else's.