Alien in Japan

Chapter 17 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

6 min readAug 4, 2024

This fake photo—created with ChatGPT—shows WM’s cargo ship entering the port of Tokyo in May 1955 after a two-month voyage from Europe.

Two Months at Sea

May 28, 1955, is “the day Japan had the pleasure of making my acquaintance,” WM reveals in a radio feuilleton for the NWDR. In early June, he reports for the first time from the country “reachable by plane in three days, or by a fast ship in two months.”

His mode of transport to Tokyo can only be surmised. Air travel would have cost him several months’ salary. Moreover, it’s arduous. Direct flights from Germany or other European countries to Japan don’t exist. It’s not until the end of the decade that jet planes are used on transatlantic routes. Propeller planes like the Lockheed Constellation or Douglas DC-7 are not only slow but also have limited ranges. Getting from Berlin or Hamburg to Tokyo by air requires multiple stopovers and numerous refueling stops — in Zurich or London, Athens or Istanbul, Beirut or Tehran, Karachi, Bombay or Calcutta, Saigon, Manila or Bangkok.

Transporting cars on commercial aircraft from Europe to Asia is not feasible. The freight cost would exceed the value even of luxury vehicles. So, the red MG definitely must have traveled to Japan by ship. And for reasons of cost efficiencies alone, WM most likely accompanied the car. His emphatic advice to his friend Will Tremper a few months later specifically not to do that — import his own car to Japan and endure the tortures and lost time of such a weeks-long sea voyage — also suggests that he did travel by ship.

Coming to Tokyo

The arrival, however, rewards the hardships. As vessels from overseas enter Tokyo Bay through the Uraga Channel, a panorama of contrasts unfolds before the passengers’ eyes: on one side, the massive Mount Fuji, still snow-capped in spring; on the other, the industrial landscape of Yokohama with its enormous steel cranes and concrete warehouses. As Tokyo draws closer, shipping traffic intensifies. Hundreds of small fishing boats navigate with their traditional lateen sails between the freighters and ferries queuing towards the port.

Unlike Berlin or Hamburg, which still bear the scars of war, Tokyo shows few traces of destruction. They’re only indirectly discernible: American-style skyscrapers, erected within a few years in the bombed-out districts, dominate the skyline. Between them, dwarfed, stands what remains of old Tokyo or has been restored: two-story wooden houses with small terraces, called Minka, built on posts with walls of clay and bamboo. Most have gardens with ornamental plants and ponds. Narrow alleys wind between them, lined with numerous small restaurants and taverns. Their guests double the architectural contrasts: Western suits and dresses mingle with traditional kimonos and haoris made of silk or cotton.

For the first few nights, WM has reserved a room at the Imperial Hotel, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1920s. In 1951, the Allies and Japan signed the peace treaty there. The Western hotel is famous for its luxury, and therefore, it is not a place WM can afford for long. Fortunately, an acquaintance has put him in touch with the German embassy:

“Günther Diehl, a foreign office legation counselor and former editor of the Hamburger Abendblatt, has announced me as brilliant but individualistic and somewhat difficult.”

An embassy member has just rented a house. His family won’t arrive until October. WM can sublet there for now:

“Six rooms, two maids, a large garden with palms, pines, and some plants whose names I’ve only learned in Japanese. But fruits hang on them, and many residents claim they are edible. At night, a large frog hops around the garden but never enters the rooms.”

Quadruple Shock

WM spends the first days exploring Tokyo and making connections. What the cityscape so clearly demonstrates also shapes everyday life: a coexistence of centuries-old traditions and efforts to modernize. Traditions predominate, including the disdain for foreigners. They are disliked and avoided. What WM experiences and tries to reflect on in dozens of letters is a combination of four shocks: He experiences existential alienation in Tokyo. The city is so expensive that he’s becoming financially impoverished. His friends and editors in Germany seem to have forgotten him. And he feels more isolated than ever before in his life.

The crisis paralyzes him. “So, I hesitated for almost six weeks to write any line that had to be more than ‘miscellaneous.’” Which doesn’t alleviate the financial worries. The alienation he feels appears to him as a puzzle, an Asian mystery that requires rational decoding. He reverts to his craft—the methods of factual reporting. What is so completely different about and in Tokyo? Why does he feel so utterly out of this world?

Searching for Reality on the Ginza

Five years ago, he analyzed the character of West Berlin by describing its central boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm. The Japanese capital’s equivalent is called Ginza:

“The Ginza is the main shopping street in the center of Tokyo. It runs from north to south through this city of eight million. There are over 10,000 shops, more than 5,000 restaurants, 9 giant department stores, banks, offices, cinemas, and all the technical facilities that come with a boulevard. But the Ginza is not a boulevard. It can’t be because Tokyo is not a city, that is to say, not like New York, Paris, or Berlin. Tokyo may be the capital of an important country, but it’s not a metropolis. A city, you see, doesn’t consist of a certain number of inhabitants, of many thousand square meters of land, of skyscrapers, or villas, not of streetcars, buses, or cinemas. A city lives from an intellectual, artistic, and social elite, perhaps only a handful of people, but they must talk to each other. They must meet. They create the spirit of a city. Without them, a city is a more or less fluidly functioning aggregate of technical means.”

Of course, tens of thousands of artists and intellectuals, scientists, politicians, and wealthy businesspeople live in Tokyo. However, they are all isolated from each other and they don’t know each other, WM observes. There are no social places where they come together:

“They work in empty space, they amuse themselves separately, and they prevent the spirit that makes a city a city, a living being. That’s why the Ginza is just a shopping street where you can shop but where you don’t meet, a street where you can stroll but alone. That’s why there’s nothing on the Ginza that couldn’t just as well exist in other districts of Tokyo, where ‘districts’ shouldn’t be understood as what one means by Eppendorf or Wilmersdorf, by Saint Germain or Chelsea. Here, they are villages; here, they are self-contained parts of a compressed whole. So, these districts belong as much to the surroundings of the Ginza as Singapore or Manila.”

Hope in the Common Humanity

This is the first explanation WM finds for the otherness of Asia: In Tokyo and Japan, there is no society in the European sense. And to that extent, there is also no place for someone accustomed to such a social and cultural life. This insight into the immutability of his alienation — what doesn’t exist, he can’t find — does not satisfy him, however. The conclusion of his reflections shows this:

“It’s the Far East, where people live who don’t like to die either, who fall in love with young girls and who save to soon buy a rocking chair. They are people who were indeed born from another world, but they are still people with hearts, kidneys, two eyes, two legs, and a head.”

In reflecting on the common humanity, WM finds a glimmer of hope. Perhaps, the innate alienation can be overcome after all?