Japan: How to Keep the Olympics Clean

During Tokyo's International Sports Week, a sort of rehearsal for next year's Olympics, autograph hounds be sieged athletes from 34 nations at the highly respectable Dai Ichi Hotel. Many of the proffered "autograph albums," however, displayed not space for signatures but fetching photographs and the invitation: "There's a lovely girl waiting for you outside."

The incident sorely embarrassed the authorities, and deepened a growing concern in Toyo No Kunshi Koku (the Oriental Country of Virtuous Men) over the kind of image that Japan will present to Olympic visitors. For reasons of face, few top officials are willing to admit that the problem exists, but Seitaro Kawakami, chief of "crime prevention " in the Tokyo police, concedes: "Our work is becoming feverish be cause we simply must make Tokyo truly worthy of being the Olympic host city."

Smut Blackout. Police in Tokyo and other cities quietly started their cleanup campaign early this year. For one thing, they banned the manufacture and sale of a variety of ingenious aphrodisiac devices such as battery-powered vibrators, for whose production Japan is famous. Plainclothesmen were posted at the special "sex drugstores" where the gimmicks had been sold.

Another target was the flood of pornographic literature that has been un controlled in Japan, protected by "free dom of the press." In the town of Kofu at the base of Mount Fuji, bookshop owners voluntarily banned 37 sex magazines from their counters. Their movement spread across the nation; in the southern city of Moji, book dealers and youth leaders burned 1,500 copies of "undesirable" magazines. By last week Japan's 7,000-member Federation of Book Retailers had joined in the black list, and at least four of the publications were out of business.

Lights Up. The morality crusade has a long way to go. Tokyo still has 1,200 all-night tearooms, cozily dark and equipped with commodious private boxes, which offer all kinds of opportunities. Detectives make nightly rounds of the tearooms to enforce lighting regulations (minimum illumination after 11 p.m.: ten luxes, or enough to read a newspaper one foot away — not that many patrons spend their time reading). But when the police walk in armed with a light meter, the hat-check girl in some tearooms pushes a hidden but ton that quickly increases the illumination to its legal level.