O.G in the Ginza

Sunday afternoon/evening was family day in Tokyo. Especially in the early years, before we each formed our own social networks, the five of us were like a floating island in a sea of exotic and unfamiliar marine activity. Dad was starting a company from the bottom up, so to get the momentum going, he had to devote a lot of time and energy to the business. As well as taking care of her three young boys, Mum, also helped out at the office when she could. We used to all go in to the Roppongi office together, especially in the evenings sometimes after the staff had left. (There were five or six in the beginning which eventually grew to  twenty plus full time.)

An empty office has a certain kind of feeling about it. Like some of the buzz from the daytime activity is still lingering, slow to settle to silence before the next morning’s pace revs up again. My brothers and I would find a chair in the conference room, sit at the large table, draw pictures or do some reading. There was also a room dedicated to the telex machine - which was like a hefty electric typewriter that had a dedicated phone line. The messages would, before being sent overseas, be recorded onto 3cm thick paper tape with tiny holes punched encoded onto it to keep the ‘online’ time to a minimum as it was expensive in those days.

Received messages would be printed out at about 60 wpm on the enclosed roll of perforated paper. It was a mechanical forerunner to the net. When it would start up, my brothers and I would hear it erupt and run in to witness the magical communication as it beamed across the oceans. Sometimes we would sit in the room and wait, hoping to be startled by the noisey and frenetic, clicking beast, playing with the spent paper tape snakes.

The Sunday tradition was for us all to go together to a movie on the big screen in one of Tokyo’s many cinemas. We would travel where the good flicks were - usually either Shibuya, Ginza, Hibiya - rarely Shinjuku in our second hand, late 60’s, white Toyota Crown. If we were going to Shibuya, sometimes we would first stop by Yoyogi park and ride around on the bicycle track on the free hire bikes. If we were near the Ginza, we would make the most of the Sunday main road closure and stroll up and down the broad, fancy shop lined Ginza street. Evidenced in the photo, from the early seventies, our Dad is looking simultaneously hip and debonair in his Sunday attire in the middle of Ginza Dori.

The movie session options were listed in an English language weekly called Tokyo Weekender (started in 1970), available from the local Azabu National supermarket every Friday. As well as the movie listings there was one movie review per week by the editor, a colourful character called Corky Alexander. There was no IMDB, of course, but the family was pretty good at choosing good flicks. There were no ratings in Japan, so as kids we were privileged to see films that were M and R rated back in Australia. I like to think of it as an important part of our education. Mum and Dad would judiciously get us to cover our eyes during scenes of excessive violence or overt sexual activity. Sometimes my fingers just would not close properly.

After the film, we would go out to a restaurant. My favourite was Italian. I talk about it at length in the book, but the owner/maître d of our regular Italian spot was later jailed for his covert criminal connections and activity. He gave us kids free banana splits, so not that we knew anything but even if we did, we would not have snitched.

At the time, the whole Japan experience was what was happening. It wasn’t till I was a bit older that I realised how lucky we were to even be there and what a trail blazer our father was to conceive of and manifest a successful, independent, self started business in Tokyo way back then. He has told me about some of the many early challenges - everything was new - but also mentioned that they were some of the most satisfying years of his life. He went from sleeping on a futon on the floor of a tiny office space (for the three months before the family arrived) to building an international recognised, thriving and efficient company that connected Australia (and later, the rest of the world) to Japanese industry, trade and business. Bravo, Dad.