Club by MacArthur's staff were for hospital use and stood waist high. That's all the Club had, according to John Rich.
The next problem was staff. The army agreed to provide a chef and an assistant. Hired as overall manager was Ludwig Frank, Japan-born of English-German parentage, and a fluent Japanese speaker. His Japanese manager was a Mr. Kobayashi, whose wife was an Englishwoman. An advertisement for jobseekers attracted a line of two thousand Japanese stretching from the Press Club building to the nearby Central Post Office. Most of the applicants were rank amateurs who couldn't speak a word of English. Out of these, Cochrane and Ryan selected sixty of the best for jobs ranging from bootblack and stewards to waitresses and switchboard operators. The two bartenders were promptly dubbed Jackson and Smitty.
For a while, the Club had no access to PX facilities, but this was remedied in the following year. Meanwhile, Tom Shafer of Acme Newspictures loaded up two weapons carriers with goods from a ship leaving for home, according to The Star-Spangled Mikado, and set up a store in the lobby. He also provided a dice table and cleared more than $1,000 for the house in the first week. The house took in $2,000 by mid-December, getting the Club off to a good start. Soon, the bar also had five slot machines and a pool table and dice boxes appearing on every table.
Army nurse Rosella Browning of New York City created dining room curtains and aprons for the waitresses out of parachute cloth. Los Angeles-born Marchioness Chie Hachisuka produced shoes and materials for their uniforms.
Among the new staff members hired the following year was a smiling, fresh-faced young man who had been discharged from the Japanese Army in the Philippines as a corporal before he saw any fighting, and had subsequently attended an English language school operated by the Foreign Office. His name was Kotaro Washida. He was hired as a night switchboard operator. But he was such a gifted young man that he was quickly given other duties to perform as well. Eventually, Washida-san became the Japanese manager after Kei Kawana left, serving several generations of Press Club members in this capacity.
Other Japanese staffers whose services date from these early days include such names familiar to old-timers as "Smiley" Matsuoka, Hajime "Jimmy" Horikawa, and "Mister Ling," the Chinese accountant who kept order in the Club's chaotic financial affairs. Later came a whole slew of librarians, and Mary Ushijima, the California born nisei woman who "mothered" the Press Club members for thirty-eight years, from 1950 to 1988. The switchboard staff Mary headed was known to all and sundry as "The Best Bilingual Switchboard Staff in Japan."
In an important edict, Frank Kelley (New York Herald Tribune), Rules Committee chairman, opened full membership to all women correspondents who met the requirements of regular members. The new rules also made the wives of correspondents eligible to become nonresident members. Nothing was said, however, about residential status for women.
In November, before the repairs were completed, the correspondents said goodbye to the Dai-Ichi and moved into their new quarters. According to Hessell Tiltman, the Club had approximately 170 members at that time. By popular acclaim, the correspondents picked as the address of their new home "No. 1 Shimbun Alley." (No. 1 because what else could it be but "No. 1?" And Shimbun, because shimbun is the Japanese word for newspaper. Although the Club has moved three times since then, to this day, a letter addressed to "No. 1 Shimbun Alley" will reach the Club without fail.)
The opening was a noisy, boisterous affair establishing for the Club a reputation that few others could match. This "informal" party was followed a few weeks later by a formal opening, featuring a dinner and dance. Close to six hundred guests attended. The anniversary parties of the Tokyo Correspondents Club became Tokyo's Event of the Year, an occasion for celebration not only by its members in Tokyo but also by members, former members, and friends in outposts all over the world.
A sidebar on this party is the tale of the disappearing piano. The Club had borrowed a piano for the occasion from NHK, but, mistaking the date, had promised to return the piano two days earlier. When movers came to pick up the piano, Club officers swore they had no piano. When the movers began a search of the premises, the members moved the piano into an elevator, and kept moving it up and down until the movers finally gave up and went home in disgust. NHK got its piano back the next day.
In the tradition of Freedom of the Press, members have always felt free to express their own opinions about the Club. What did they say? Kelley and Cornelius Ryan said it succinctly in their Star-Spangled Mikado: "The club became famous for three things: . . . the food. . . the bar. . . and overcrowding." Tiltman wrote in 1965: "The Club is still infused with a unity and esprit de corps, dating back to Shimbun Alley days, that transcends all barriers of nationality and race. . . ." It has evolved "into one of the world's largest and most representative press clubs."
Correspondent and former Club Manager Richard Hughes, beloved in press club bars throughout Asia as "Your Grace" and admired for his irreverent and eloquent speech, called it "The Liveliest Club in the World." (Hughes always had a group of correspondents gathered around him as if he were holding court. One of his habits was to address a listener as "Your Grace." They turned it around and applied it to him and forever afterward he was known as "Your Grace" wherever newsmen gathered in Asia.) He described it as combining "some of the features of a makeshift bordello, inefficient gaming-house and a black market center, with the basic goodwill and bitter feuds of any press hostelry anywhere." Hughes, who was fired during a Club economy drive while he was on leave in Australia (to a bitter outcry from his supporters), described its membership as consisting of "war-weary correspondents, the world's best reporters and combat photographers, liberal, conservative and radical commentators, and some of the world's most plausible rogues and magisterial scoundrels."
"Those were the days," agrees AP's Jim Becker. Jim lost half of a mustache to pranksters while sleeping off a hangover on a sofa in the lounge. Becker, after wartime military service, joined the AP in New York in 1946, and was a center of fun and good fellowship in the Club during his days of service in Korea and Tokyo. He recalls a time when one member got locked in a telephone booth while befuddled and could think of no other way to extricate himself than to telephone his office eight thousand miles away. His office phoned "Jimmy" Horikawa, who walked thirty-five feet, pulled the stuck door open, and let their man out.
"Ah, there were drinking men in those days," Jim says with a nostalgic sigh in an article that the No. 1 Shimbun issued on the FCCJ's twentieth anniversary. "They drank in the lobbies, in the bar and in their rooms. Yes, there were rooms in the Old Press Club . . . and fellows kept things in them, like Korean War uniforms, bottles and girls."
In a more sober mood, Rutherford Poats, United Press, who was Club president from September of 1954 to June of 1955, recalls, "The Press Club was the center of social life in Tokyo for much of the Western community during its first decade, especially for Western diplomats and some professionals (lawyers, consultants, etc.) who did not feel at home among the American Club's foreign traders' set). The Club's anniversary party and New Year's Eve party were the most coveted social invitations of the year among nonpress Westerners."
Ray Falk, chief of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) bureau in Tokyo and one of the oldest active members, said, "Newcomer correspondents could listen and learn from the veterans." He adds, "Though the members could be boisterous, they respected age and experience."
Hal Drake, who started out as a cub reporter and became executive editor of the Pacific Stars and Stripes, retired in 1996 to a home in Australia. He echoed Ray's views. "I bird-dogged
