“Far from being dull to the dangers, acute awareness of them gives Tokyo people’s lives tone and brio,” wrote Popham, during this same period. “The satisfaction of being a cog in the most elaborate and well-oiled machine in the history of the world is given an almost erotic twist by the knowledge that the machine is poised over an abyss.” Tokyo, he concluded, is “a city helpless to save itself, and reconciled at some quite deep level to destruction and loss of life beyond all but the nuclear nightmares of other cities.”
