The Olympics are continually evolving, but all throughout the years the Games have a simple appeal: The best athletes in the world gather and compete to see who is the fastest, the strongest, and the most acrobatic. On top of it you have pageantry: the opening and closing ceremonies can be as compelling as the games themselves.

In 1964 LIFE staff photographer Art Rickerby went to Tokyo to capture the 1964 Summer games in all their glory.

The Tokyo Olympics made history because it was the first the time the event was staged in Asia. That was also the first time the Olympics were broadcast via satellite—before that, improbable as it sounds, video tapes had to be flown across oceans before the competition could be seen by overseas viewers.

From the perspective of LIFE managing editor George P. Hunt, who covered many Olympics, the Tokyo event also stood out for the control exerted by Japanese officials. “The Games were precise, stiff and formal,” Hunter wrote, looking back in 1968. “The Japanese have a penchant for over-organization. The government even put a lid on the hot spots in Ginza.”

That management style which seemed novel to Hunter has become the standard, no matter where the Olympics are held. Host cities spend many billions to stage the games, and media companies invest heavily to broadcast them. They prepare with the same intensity as the athletes, and they do what they can to make sure all goes as hoped.

And the 1964 event, as always, made for not just plenty of athletic drama but some pretty pictures as well.

Opening ceremony at the track and field stadium of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

West and East Germans march together at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Arthur Rickerby/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Japanese athletes marched in at the opening ceremonies of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Arthur Rickerby/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

(Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock)

Japanese trumpeters at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock)

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Japanese track athlete Yoshinori Sakai lit the torch at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Olympic torch at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The opening ceremonies of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sunrise at the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, home of the swimming and diving events of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1964 Summer Olympic flags, Tokyo, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Opening ceremony at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A snack vendor at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Al Oerter of the U.S. team won a gold medal in discus at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

US swimmer Don Schollander (second from left) competed at the 1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

US gold medal winner swimmer Don Schollander celebrated at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

US gold medal winner swimmer Don Schollander at 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

USA swimmer Cathy Ferguson cried after winning gold in the 100-meter backstroke at the 1964 Summer Olympics. (L) Christine Caron of France won silver, (R) American Ginny Duenkel won bronze.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The USA women’s swim team signed a kick board after winning gold in the 4×100-meter medley relay, 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics. L-R: Cynthia Goyette, Kathy Ellis ,Cathy Ferguson, Sharon Stouder.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

(Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock)

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

US sprinter Edith McGuire at 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

USA diver Larry Andreasen at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

US athlete Hayes Jones in Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics, Japan

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Soviet heavy-weightlifter Yuri Vlasov at 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Medal ceremony at Lake Sagami for the Women’s 550-meter kayak pairs event. West Germans Roswitha Esser and Annemarie Zimmermann won gold. Second place went to 15-year-old Francine Fox and 35-year-old Gloriane Perrier of the US. In third place were Hilde Lauer and Cornelia Sideri of Romania.

Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ginny Duenkel (C), Marilyn Ramenofsky (R), and Terri Stickles (L) on the victory stand following the 400 meter race at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 1964.

Arthur Rickerby/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Majesty in Tokyo: The 1964 Olympics appeared first on LIFE.

In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling willfully toward oblivion.

In Rougier’s photos—pictures that seem to breathe both reckless energy and acute despair—we don’t merely glimpse kids pushing the boundaries of rebellion. Instead, this generation of lost boys and girls seem to be trying to tell us something something reproachful and perplexing about the world we’ve made.

The teens and other young adults portrayed in Rougier’s pictures, Morse noted in a 1964 LIFE special issue on Japan (where some of these images first appeared), are “part of a phenomenon long familiar in countries of the Western world: a rebellious younger generation, a bitter and poignant minority breaking from [its] country’s past.”

All through that past, a sense of connection with the old traditions and authority has kept Japanese children obedient and very close to the family. This sense still controls most of Japan’s youth, who besiege offices and factories for jobs and the universities for education and gives the whole country an electric vitality and urgency. But as its members run away from the family and authority, this generation in rebellion grows.

In notes that accompanied Rougier’s film when it was sent to LIFE’s, Morse delved even deeper into the lives, as he perceived them, of runaways, “pill-takers” and other profoundly disengaged Tokyo teens:

Nowhere in the world does youth seem to dominate a nation as they do in Japan. They are overwhelming and everywhere, surging, searching, experimenting, ambitious at some times, helpless and without hope at others. Isolated on a tight little island, they have not, except on the surface, become international like their counterparts in freewheeling Europe.

Seeing the well-scrubbed faces of the black uniformed male students and middy-bloused girls swarming through Tokyo, physical-fitness minded young men galloping through the Ginza, and the bright young things clamoring after a teen-age idol, it would seem to the casual observer that here is a country with a youth as wholesome and happy as a hot fudge sundae.

This is not true at all.

A large segment of Japanese young people are, deep down, desperately unhappy and lost. And they talk freely about their frustrations. Many have lost respect for their elders, always a keystone of Japanese life, and in some cases denounce the older people for “for having gotten us into a senseless war.”

Having sliced the ties that bind them to the home, in desperation they form their own miniature societies with rules of their own. The young people in these groups are are bound to one another not out of mutual affection in many cases the “lost ones” are incapable of affection but from the need to belong, to be part of something.

Both the article in LIFE and the story told in Morse’s ruminative and, in some ways, far more devastating notes make clear that this “lost generation” was not even remotely monolithic. While they might, to varying degrees, have shared a genuinely nihilistic outlook toward their own and their country’s future, the runaways, rock and roll fanatics (the “monkey-dance, Beatles set,” Morse calls them), pill-poppers, “motorcycle kids” and innumerable other subsets of Japan’s youth-driven subculture attest to the breadth and depth of teen disaffection to be found in 1964 Tokyo.

That Michael Rougier, meanwhile, was able to so compassionately portray not only that disaffection, but also captured moments of genuine fellowship and even a fleeting sort of joy among these desperately searching teens, attests to the man’s talent and his dedication to share the story of what he saw.

—Liz Ronk edited this photo gallery for LIFE.com.

Kako, languid from sleeping pills, was in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The teen in the center was the 17-year-old leader of a crew of jazz fans. He was known only by his nickname, “Naron,” a popular sleeping pill brand.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These motorcycle kids were one of numerous subsets of teen subcultures in Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Listening to jazz, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lost in the music, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These fans rocked to the Tokyo Beatles.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans danced to the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocking out with the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocking out with the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A fan (right) and a “Tokyo Beatle,” 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fans screamed for the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Tokyo Beatles backstage, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Tokyo Beatles backstage, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

MMichael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko often ended her long nights sprawled on a futon in a friend’s room.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Naron” and an unidentified girl at dawn after an all-night beach party, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sometimes Yoko went down to the port in Yokohama to watch the ships sail off to the places she only wished she cold go.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

The post Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964 appeared first on LIFE.