[A]ll around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis. (Actually, the “summer” Games were held in autumn; organizers thought October in Tokyo would be smarter than sweltering July.) Those first Tokyo Olympics served as a debutante ball for democratic, postwar Japan, which reintroduced itself to the world not only through sport but also through design.

The preparations turned Tokyo into a citywide construction site. The author Robert Whiting, who was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Tokyo in 1962, describes the pile drivers and jackhammers that delivered an “overwhelming assault on the senses.” Pedestrians went about with face masks and earplugs, and salarymen drank in bars protected by dust-blocking plastic sheets. Japan was just a few years out from becoming the world’s second-largest economy, and the 1964 Olympics were to be a pageant of economic revival and honor regained.

Trolleys went out, elevated highways came in. The city got a new sewer system, a new port, two new subway lines, and serious pollution. Slums, and their residents, were mercilessly cleared to make room for new construction, some of it grand — like the exquisite Hotel Okura, designed in 1962 by Yoshiro Taniguchi (father of the MoMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi) — and much forgettable. The new shinkansen, or bullet train, hurried between Tokyo and Osaka for the first time just one week before the opening ceremony.

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