The Life In Tokyo in the Year 1966

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A German camera crew filmed this record of family life in Tokyo more than 50 years ago. The children go off to school and the father works in the factory. It was the start of the industrial boom in the so-called Showa time. Labour was still cheap. TV sets were hand soldered. Many parts were still manufactured in small home industries. Finally, the family gathers again in their tiny homes. Futons behind the wall doors. A time Japanese are still nostalgic about. Viewer Guthrie adds:

"The breakfast at the beginning, tamagoyaki, sausage, and miso soup is the same as my wife often makes. Many parts of the city look exactly the same today as they did then. Housing then (and now) was tiny. The family house at the start of the video is half of a fourplex. It is one not-so-large room, which divides into two rooms with partitions. The toilet is an oblong hole in the floor which you must squat over, the bathtub is more like an oil drum, not wide, but very deep. These places are furnaces in the summer and freezes in the winter. The large apartment buildings shown in the video are called "dashi," and are the same size as the fourplex apartment, though they at least came with sit-down toilets. The police do the same thing now as then, give people directions. In Tokyo, even today, there is no real organization of addresses and street numbers. The sign behind the officer says 4 people were killed in traffic accidents in the district so far that month, which is an astonishingly high number by modern standards. The city then still had a lot of wide-open spaces, reminders of the war. Before the war, pretty much every square inch of the city was covered with shops, factories, and houses. No one in America would ever imagine raising three children in such a small home. Housing is still tight, and most families have 2 or fewer children. The Matsuzakaya store shown in Ginza has finally torn down a couple of years ago, and a new building was put in its place. I've lived in Tokyo several years now, it's funny to see that some parts have not changed at all since before the time I was born."

SOURCE: MICHAELROGGE