By William Wetherall
People were fighting everywhere -- in the streets, on campuses, in the countryside, on the big screen and in the press.
The 21 November 1969 issue of Shukan Posuto is packed with war stories. It was the 14th issue of a magazine launched that August. The contents page also calls it "Post: The Opinion Weekly for Men".
My mother turned 56 on its cover date. I was 28, single, and barely certain of where I was and what I was doing at the moment. I was incapable of thinking where I would be and what I'd be doing four decades later. It never occurred to me, then, in nine years I would become the father of a girl and sue Japan for her nationality.
As a major in Japanese language, literature, and anthropology, though, I had managed to stay abreast of current events in Japan, albeit from California. April 1969 had witnessed the peak of violence in clashes between students and police at Tokyo University. I was then at Berkeley, itself a war zone by the time I returned to the campus in 1967 after a four year absence.
I had dropped out in 1963 after studying electrical engineering, a Sputnik generation techie who lost his political innocence during the Cuban Crisis of 1962. Found eligible for the draft, I chose instead to join the Army.
John Kennedy was assassinated while I was in boot camp. I was trained as a medical corpsman, the specialty I selected when I enlisted, then assigned to an ambulance company. When the Vietnam War broke out in the fall of 1964, I was retrained as a medical laboratory technician, and worked at hospitals in California and New Mexico before serving the last nine months of my three-year obligation at a general hospital in Yokohama.
I had seriously studied the Pacific War in high school, built model fighter planes, and collected some war souvenirs. I had long been interested in Asia, and a friend at Berkeley had switched from Math to Chinese. So I migrated from Engineering to Oriental Languages, as the department was called when I returned to college in the fall of 1967 after working half a year as a surveyor in the Tahoe National Forest.
I got my BA in June 1969, then worked as I had every summer with the forest service, taking advantage of my engineering background. This season, though, I stayed in the field through the fall and until the first snow, making as much money as I could while preparing to go to Japan in January the following year. I would be living with a family and teaching English, both opportunities which came through people I had met at Berkeley.
I can't remember where in the Sierras I was camped when the 21 November 1969 issue of Post came out. For sure, the woods were quieter and more peaceful than most parts of the world -- at least for humans. Other members of the food chain -- bears, mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, deer, hawks, quail, and other furry and feathery fauna, the snakes and lizards, fish, insects, and myriad microorganisms, not to forget the trees and plants -- probably have less romantic understandings of life.
Mishima Yukio
The issue features a three-page black-and-white photo feature on Mishima Yukio in uniform with his Shield Society. A cartoon in another feature shows a member of the society lifting his hat when, while walking alone, he gets a lot of attention from admiring girls.
Barely a year later, on 25 November 1970, Mishima and a few members of his private army staged a coup d'etat. After giving a speech, he ripped open his belly and a comrade cut off his head before following him in death.
All this happened a short walk from where I was teaching that day. The incident set me off on studies of self-destruction and mass media that continue today. My daughter was born on the same day eight years later.
Oda Makoto
Yet another article in the 21 November 1969 issue of Post introduces Oda Makoto's launch on 17 November of the weekly magazine Shukan Anpo, which aimed to undermine the planned renewal in 1970 of the Japan-US mutual security treaty, called Anpo in short.
The magazine reported that prime minister Sato Eisaku would leave for the United States on 17 November. He would also arrive that day.
On 21 November, Sato and president Richard Nixon would agree to the restoration of Okinawa as part of Japan three years later -- but that development was not known at the time the Post went to press. Okinawa had been under US administration since the end of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
In 1974, the year Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal, Sato received half the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly for his promotion of three principles regarding nuclear weapons -- "Never to produce arms of this nature, never to own them, and never to introduce them into Japan." His reception of the ward became as controversial as Barrack Obama's 35 years later.
Antiwar movement
21 October had witnessed the 4th annual International Antiwar Day. On this day in 1966, the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan had held a nationwide strike protesting the war in Vietnam. In subsequent years, the union called upon other labor organizations in the world to join the cause.
America mounted and supported the war in part from US bases in Okinawa and Japan. Okinawa, still under American administration, had not yet been returned to Japan.
Oda's magazine was published by Anposha, a company set up by antiwar activists, some of them involved, as he was, in an underground railroad for US soldiers AWOL in Japan from Vietnam. The inaugural edition, Post remarks, also came out in an English version.
Some of the covers of Anpo were as gory as the wars they protested. A friend who saw one wrote: "One doesn't see political passion like the good old days. Maybe I'll dust off my old Zengakuren helmet, grab me a geba-bou and march on the Diet building, just for fun. Might get my name in the paper." I, too, would make the news, since I'd have to bail (or break) him out of jail.
Twenty-nine years later, I was to publish an autobiographical short story by Oda in the journal Japanese Literature Today. Oda died in 2007, shortly before the story was translated, into Italian, with some of my notes.The Post article also connects Oe Kenzaburo with Oda's weekly Anpo project. Oe, a novelist, had already made a name for himself as staunch antiwar critic. I became deeply involved in translating some of his early short stories after returning to graduate school at Berkeley in 1973. One of these translations was later published, and I also collaborated with a friend on a translation of one of Oe's novels.
Terayama Shuji
The early issues of Post had a two-page black-and-white photo feature in the back called "Post Beauty / Monday" since the magazine hit the stands on Monday. The "beauty" in the 21 November 1969 issue consists of two photographs of a woman a la naturel against a natural background.
These are only nude shots in the magazine, which by the end of the century was the leading commuter weekly. It was banned by a number of international airlines because of its over exposure of provocative photography that included pubic hair.
The photographs were accompanied by a poem attributed to Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) -- poet, dramatist, novelist, film director, critic, essayist, actor, and otherwise jack-of-all artistic trades. The received poem, which I have translated here, is untitled -- unless the title was meant to be "Monday".
Three women have died
one of illness
one of love
one of being forgotten
At a harbor on Monday
gulls alight on the roof
I in the dark attic room
blankly watch the offing
My mother was ill
my younger sister was in love
my wife was waiting for my return
but
I on a journey
today too am watching a cloudy sky
thinking of an aimless tomorrow
Three women have died
one of illness
one of love
one of being forgotten
Armed and dangerous
I would be remiss were I not to mention the two-page feature on Fuji Junko -- now Fuji Sumiko -- then on the rise to the zenith of her enormous popularity and still high on my list of favorite actresses. Post observes that she won acclaim without having to undress.
One still shows her and starmate Takakura Ken on horses in Hokkaido, ready for trouble. Another shows her standing beside a horse, with a short rifle instead of a sword, looking more like a western frontier woman than a yakuza scarlet peony gambler.
Fuji Junko's photographs follow a two-page spread showing US Marines on live-ammunition field exercises at the Higashi Fuji Firing Range at the foot of Mt. Fuji. They had come to Japan from Okinawa to undergo training related to the Vietnam war on the eve of the renewal of the Anpo agreement.
One photo shows some farmers, in straw hats, watching shells explode on rolling hills in the distance. The title of the article is "'Foeless battleground' spewing fire".
Hunters and gatherers
All this from a weekly magazine published in Japan in November 1969. I did not buy the issue until 24 November 2009, on the eve of my daughter's 31st birthday.
My mother was 89 when she died in 2003. She had raised a pet deer from a fawn on the farm where she grew up and hated guns. Her father hunted deer and her mother's maiden name was Hunter. My grandmother put up venison in Mason jars for winter.
I qualified, as do most soldiers, as a Marksman with a rifle. I was somewhat disappointed that I didn't make the Sharpshooter grade. Before the Vietnam War began, I had become a Conscientious Objector.
Looking back, I realize that the sucking chest wound packs, IV kits, and morphine ampules borne by medics can be every bit as lethal to the cause of peace as the automatic rifles, fragmentation grenades, and flamethrowers carried by infantrymen.
30 November 2009
