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Japan's Conspiracy (2) Reference List 026
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Mariko Terasaki Miller to speak at ETSU's December commencement
East Tennessee State University November 29, 2000 JOHNSON CITY Mariko Terasaki Miller, East Tennessee State University's 1998 Outstanding Alumna and an Honorary Consul-General of Japan, will return to her alma mater to deliver the fall 2000 commencement address on Saturday, Dec. 16. The graduation ceremony begins at 10 a.m. in Memorial Center. On May 1, 1995, the Government of Japan officially appointed Miller an Honorary Consul-General of Japan in Casper, Wyoming -- the first woman ever to hold the title. That achievement was announced a week early during her April 1995 visit to the ETSU campus to speak about her personal multicultural odyssey. 的 am an internationalist. I was brought up as an internationalist. And I come, by rights, to this internationalism. I was born in the international section of Shanghai with an American mother, a Japanese father, a Scottish doctor, and Chinese and British nurses,・Miller has said. Mariko Terasaki Miller is the daughter of the late Gwen Harold Terasaki of Johnson City and the late Hidenari Terasaki, a Japanese diplomat, who met at the Japanese Embassy in Washington and were married in 1931. The story of the Terasaki family's early life, the return to Japan after Pearl Harbor and the war years there, Japan's surrender, and the American occupation is told in Gwen Terasaki's book Bridge to the Sun, published in 1957. A movie based on the book had its world premiere in Johnson City in 1961. Miller received her childhood education in Shanghai, Havana, Peking, Washington, and Tokyo. In 1941, her father was again posted to the embassy in Washington. Our family arrived back in this country on March 20, 1941, and I spent the most wonderful, lyrical summer, which, in retrospect, became so poignant, at my grandmother's home on Holston Avenue (in Johnson City). I had never lived in this country before. I had never had the freedom to play in the neighborhood,・she said. Hidenari Terasaki played an important role in the desperate, last-minute efforts to avert war between America and Japan. After the end of World War II, he was appointed advisor to the Emperor and as the official liaison between the Palace and the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Mariko Terasaki left Japan in 1949 to pursue a much-interrupted education and earned a B.A. degree from ETSU in 1953 with a major in English and a minor in French. She married Mayne Miller, an attorney active in politics, and they moved to Wyoming, where she still resides in Casper. As an Honorary Consul-General, her role is to strengthen and expand good relations between the people of Wyoming and Japan.・/p> Though raising a family of four sons, Miller found many issues, both domestic and international, so compelling that she became involved in politics at the state and national levels. She served on the Democratic National Committee for five years and was elected to the executive committee of the DNC in 1976. She has served on the steering committee of the National Women's Political Caucus, as board member of Americans for Democratic Action, and on the Wyoming Commission for Civil Rights and the Wyoming Commission for Women. In 1981, Mariko, a book by the well-known nonfiction writer Kunio Yanagida, was published in Japan. And, on Aug. 15 that year, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender, NHK (public) Television presented a three-hour docudrama about Miller and the experiences of the Terasaki family. This film, described as profoundly anti-military and anti-war,・caused a sensation in Japan and was viewed by an estimated 80 percent of the population. Miller made her first speech, at the age of 17, to the Johnson City Rotary Club in 1949 -- beginning several decades of speaking engagements with civic, political, academic, cultural, and church groups in America. She has also traveled extensively in Japan and spoken to a wide variety of business groups, women's groups, and at universities and junior colleges. The Tokyo Jaycees hosted a 1983 multi-city tour that was co-sponsored by the American Embassy and the Japanese Foreign Ministry. In 1990, Miller learned that included among her father's diaries and papers was a document revealing the Emperor Showa's reflections and comments on the major events occurring after his ascension to the throne in 1928 and continuing until the end of the Pacific war in 1945. It is considered to be one of the most significant discoveries in contemporary Japanese history. A book containing the Emperor's Monologue,・passages from the diaries of Hidenari Terasaki, and a chapter of reminiscences of Miller's parents, written in Japanese by Ko Shioya, was published in March 1991 by Bungei Shunju Publishing Company. ETSU's commencement ceremony is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the ETSU office of university relations at (423) 439-4317. For special assistance or seating for persons with disabilities, contact the ETSU office of the registrar at 439-4230. |
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Gwen Harold Terasaki, Author, 84
New York Times Obituaries December 21, 1990 Gwen Harold Terasaki, whose book "Bridge to the Sun," about her life as the wife of a Japanese diplomat during World War II in Japan, became a best seller and a movie, died on Saturday after a brief illness. She was 84 years old. Mrs. Terasaki, a native of Johnson City, Tenn., married Hidenari Terasaki in 1931. After spending the war years in Japan, she returned to Tennessee in 1949 with their daughter, Mariko. Her husband died in Japan in 1951. Mrs. Terasaki moved to Wyoming in 1986. "Bridge to the Sun," published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1957, detailed the family's experiences during the war. The movie came out in 1961, with Carroll Baker playing Mrs. Terasaki. In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Terasaki is survived by two grandsons and two great-grandchildren. |
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Aso family's 'slave' link under scrutiny
Japan Times April 25, 2006 Family link to forced labor increases pressure on Japan's foreign minister While Taro Aso's public statements as foreign minister have done little to help ease tensions between Tokyo and the rest of Asia, a family connection to wartime forced labor has raised further questions over his ability to oversee good relations with Japan's neighbors. During World War II, the Aso family's mining company used thousands of Koreans as forced laborers. The legacy of Koreans, Chinese and other Asians being forced into slave-like working conditions across the region during the war, has become an issue in Tokyo's maintenance of normal diplomatic relations with its neighbors. Aso's family background has led some to suggest that his position as foreign minister is untenable. Meanwhile, a recent study by a group of historians in Kyushu has shed new light on the role of the Aso family in using Korean labor before and during the war. The Korean pit workers, according to the historians, were systematically underpaid, underfed, overworked, and confined in penury. The workers were under 24-hour watch and released only with Japan's 1945 defeat. Aso himself ran the Fukuoka company from 1973-79, when he entered politics. During that time he did not address its history of using forced labor, nor has he since. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to inquiries on the issue. According to one German Embassy official in Tokyo, speaking on the understanding of anonymity, while family lineage on its own would not be held against an individual, the foreign minister's actions make him an unsuitable foreign minister. "Because Aso's family connection gave him the opportunity to address wrongs in the firm, and he did not do so," as well as comments that "seem to defend criminal policies of the past," Aso would "not be acceptable" for a post such as foreign minister. "He might get into Parliament," said the official, "but not the government." Japanese media scholars have expressed concern at the the lack of detailed reporting on Japan's corporate forced labor, and Aso's family's role in particular. "As Aso is a candidate for prime minister in September his attitudes and his behavior are political issues," says Tatsuro Hanada of Tokyo University. "The question of his qualifications is an important subject that should be opened to the Japanese public." Takesato Watanabe, of Doshisha University in Kyoto, finds it alarming that Japan has kept in office a minister with links, however distant, to such a contentious issue. "He should be replaced," he says. Hanada, Watanabe, as well as Ofer Feldman, an author and Japan political scholar, blame Japan's kisha club system for media silence on the issue. The Aso family coal mining business dates back to the 19th century in Kyushu's rich Chikuho coal fields in Fukuoka. Aso's great-grandfather, Takakichi, founded the Aso mining firm in 1872. At one time it owned over half a dozen pits in Kyushu and was the biggest of three family corporations mining an area producing half of Japan's "black diamonds." The Aso Group has changed names more than once and in 2001 entered a joint venture with Lafarge Cement of France, the world's largest cement maker. Aso's younger brother Yutaka remained president of what became Lafarge Aso Cement Co. Last December, the French ambassador in Tokyo awarded Yutaka the Legion d'Honneur at a champagne reception. Guests of honor were Taro Aso and his wife, Chikako. The issue of the foreign minister's family links to Korean wartime slave labor has already arisen in meetings between Japan and South Korea. Choi Bong Tae, a member of a bilateral commission studying the issue of forced labor, told reporters in November that the Japanese side had provided no information on the Aso company and others it had named. A spokesman for the Aso Cement Co., a successor company of Aso Mining, said that it would be difficult to provide such data since records aren't available from that long ago. However, the study conducted by the Kyushu historians has documented new information on the role of the Aso family in using Korean labor before and during the war. Eidai Hayashi, Takashi Ono, and Noriaki Fukudome have used official and local library resources to gather contemporaneous statistics and reports on the conduct of the Aso family's mining operation. According to the company's own statistics, by March 1944, Aso mines had a total of 7,996 Korean laborers, of whom 56 had recently died. Some 4,919 had managed to escape. Across Fukuoka, the total fugitive figure amounted to 51.3 percent. At Aso Mines, the figure was 61.5 percent. According to data seen by the historians in Kyushu, Korean workers at Aso Mines were paid a third less than equivalent Japanese laborers to dig coal. It amounted to 50 yen a month, but less than 10 yen after mandatory confiscations for food, clothes, housing and enforced savings (to discourage attempts at escape, though which often remained unpaid) were deducted. Workers toiled for 15-hour days, seven days a week, with no holidays. A three-meter high wooden fence topped with electrified barbed wire ringed the perimeter. Workers were guarded. In 1939, the Japanese government passed the National General Mobilization law, which forced all colonial subjects, including Koreans, and those in Taiwan and Manchuria, to work wherever needed by Tokyo. According to the historians, however, Aso mines was shipping Korean laborers to Kyushu as early as the mid-1930s, before the law was passed. Although precise numbers are unknown, an estimated 12,000 laborers passed through the company, some necessitated by a strike of 400 miners in 1932. After 1939, the historians calculate, the number of Asians kept in forced labor in the Chikuho region swelled to over a million. Aso has hit the headlines of late with a string of comments that have enraged Japan's neighbors. In January, he said that Emperor Akihito should visit Yasukuni Shrine. He has also been seen to espouse rightwing tenets of Japanese racial supremacy. Speaking at the opening of the Kyushu National Museum in Fukuoka last October, he described Japan as "one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race, the like of which there is no other on earth." |
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Osaka pref. gov't put off redemption of 293 billion yen in bonds.
BREITBART.COM December 30, 2008 The Osaka prefectural government put off the redemption of bonds worth 293 billion yen for three years through fiscal 2006 in a bid to avoid the dishonor of seeking fiscal reconstruction under control of the central government, prefectural officials said Sunday. Although the local government has not fully explained the measure to the assembly, the officials in its finance division claimed it has no intention of concealing the deficit and that the postponement is not illegal and is inevitable. In order to reduce its deficit, the government of the major western Japan prefecture has borrowed 50 billion to 100 billion yen a year for its general account since fiscal 2001 from a fund amassed for its debt repayment, according to the officials. But an increase in the redemption of 10-year bonds from fiscal 2004 has raised fears it would have to seek state aid for fiscal reconstruction as the fund, if used for redemption, would have run out in fiscal 2007, the officials said. The Osaka government has hence increased refunding of bonds due for redemption and put off actual redemption for the total of 293 billion yen, they said. Although the central government told local governments in 1992 to repay 42 percent of the principal in 10 years and refinance the rest in bond redemption, the Osaka government has been refinancing all the debts. The outstanding balance of Osaka prefectural government bonds was about 4.3 trillion yen in fiscal 2006, which ended in March 2007. Although it aims to return to the black on a single-year basis in fiscal 2010 through administrative and fiscal reform efforts, it is still uncertain if it will manage to trim the refinancing, the officials said. |
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Top Osaka candidates target education, debt, Kansai airport
Japan Times Jan. 11, 2008 The three main candidates in the race for the Jan. 27 Osaka gubernatorial election, which officially kicked off Thursday, have different positions on various policy issues, particularly on education, financial reform and the future of Kansai airport. On education, Toru Hashimoto, a 38-year-old lawyer and TV celebrity backed by the Osaka chapters of the Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, New Komeito, favors emphasizing interpersonal relationships between students and teachers, and the importance of respecting group norms. He supports specialized education for students interested in sports or the arts, and indicated he favors establishing classes for academically gifted students. Sadatoshi Kumagai, 63, a former Osaka University engineering professor with the backing of the Democratic Party of Japan and other opposition parties, has a "back to basics" approach to education, with an emphasis on making reading, writing and arithmetic more interesting and pleasurable. He believes this is needed to create a future workforce capable of supporting Japanese society. Kumagai favors more cooperation between schools and the business community. Shoji Umeda, a local attorney recommended by the Japanese Communist Party, opposes privatization of schools or bringing in managers from the private sector to run them. He feels too much media and political fuss is being made over the central government report on Osaka students' worsening academic performance. He proposes that class sizes be limited to 35 students, that the integration of high schools, which is causing class sizes to swell, be stopped, and that the number of day-care centers be increased. On Osaka's massive debt, Hashimoto favors selling off to private industry and towns and villages those prefectural projects that are in the red. He has pledged to cut the salaries and bonuses of prefectural employees and review the entire structure of third-sector funding. Kumagai would cut the number of bureaucrats by 20 percent over the next two years. He vows to introduce a more efficient management system and to consult with the business community on ways to cut costs. He has promised to leave a social safety net for the elderly and children. Umeda says the prefecture is in deep trouble because corporate taxes were cut too much, too much money has been spent on wasteful public works projects and there is unnecessary financing for "dowa" assimilation projects for the "buraku" (former outcast class) community. He would raise taxes on small and medium-size businesses, and seek state support while making prefectural finances more transparent. As for Kansai airport, Hashimoto wants to move all flights connecting Itami airport with Tokyo and Fukuoka to Kansai airport, although he admits this would be politically difficult. He wants more Kansai flights to Europe and North America. He has proposed reducing highway tolls for freight firms using the airport. Kumagai agrees with Kansai Economic Federation plans to make the entire Osaka and Kobe bay area, including the airport, into a vast, global cargo hub. Umeda says he would conduct a review of airport-related projects and take a look at current airport usage and projected demand, and, after consulting voters, adopt a more "realistic" view of what airport projects the prefecture should fund. |
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School of corruption
Asahi Shimbun July 1, 2008 Money talks. This is also true, it seems, when it comes to passing exams to become teachers or being promoted to managerial positions at schools. We are appalled at the corrupt nature of the educational community in Oita Prefecture revealed by a string of scandals. Allegedly, an elementary school principal and others sent cash and gift certificates to senior officials on the prefectural board of education to ensure their children passed examinations to gain teaching jobs. In response, the board officials gave those students extra marks, according to police. Even more appalling, a former official who was No. 2 on the prefectural board pointed out the names of about 10 applicants to a subordinate and ordered him to ensure they passed the exam, police said. If that is true, it appears the prefectural board systematically engaged in dishonest practices. The corruption not only involved employment examinations. An elementary school principal and two vice principals turned themselves in to police, admitting they had handed gift certificates to a senior prefectural board official to gain managerial promotions. This widespread dishonesty is disgusting. All of those arrested, including the former top official suspected of taking gift certificates worth 1 million yen, are teachers. How can they explain their actions to students? We urge the Oita prefectural police to conduct a thorough investigation to identify and expose all those involved in the alleged bribery. Otherwise, students will never regain trust in teachers. The applicants who would have passed if others' scores had not been padded must find this situation intolerable. And those who did well and passed the test on their own will likely be viewed with suspicion, too. The latest scandal has infected the entire educational system, and it appears the dishonesty in Oita Prefecture was not an isolated case. In fact, a bribery scandal in connection with teachers' employment was exposed in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1990. Two years ago, a former education board official received a suspended sentence in Osaka Prefecture. We also often hear stories about applicants or others asking veteran teachers to act as go-betweens to obtain teaching positions, although it is not always clear if money changes hands. One reason for this unhealthy situation is that prefectural boards of education are closed organizations in which teachers handle all the administrative matters, including hiring and personnel appointments. The system was adopted to preserve "independence of education." However, it also appears to be a way for educational officials to do whatever they wish, dishonest or otherwise. In response, the Oita prefectural education board decided to conduct employment tests for teachers in conjunction with the prefectural personnel commission. Why not take this opportunity to leave the hiring of teachers in the hands of the commission, as is done for prefectural government employees and police? Furthermore, to improve transparency in employment and personnel appointments, the board should also consider using third parties, such as the Oita citizens ombudsman, a nonprofit organization that has pointed out past allegations of cases of unfairness in teacher hirings. It is impossible to verify the rigging of exam scores because the Oita prefectural board only retains applicants' exam answer sheets until the end of the school year, and so has already discarded the sheets of applicants hired for the 2008 school year, which started this April. Answer sheets should be kept for at least several years. To recruit good teachers and enhance the quality of education, teaching personnel appointments and recruiting must be carried out fairly. Instead of thinking of the Oita scandal as someone else's problem, boards of education across the nation must take a hard look at themselves and take steps to improve education. |
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Showdown at Budokan
Japan Times July 2, 2006 It was 40 years ago today, and The Beatles were rocking Japan The rightwing reactionaries were arriving in their menacing black-and-white trucks, blasting military music. The politicians were shaking their fists and telling people to go to a garbage dump. The police had locked down all entrances to the Imperial Palace grounds. Riot police lined the road leading to Tokyo's Haneda Airport. Girls stood in the streets crying. The fight for political control centered on Nippon Budokan, the two-year-old martial arts hall beside the Imperial Palace grounds. The political stakes were high. There were 35,000 police deployed over the course of the four-day struggle. Military coup? No. The Beatles in concert. The year was 1966, and Budokan was a marvel of Japanese architecture that symbolized the rebirth of the capital and the whole country from the ashes of war. Just 19 years after its abject capitulation, Japan proclaimed its resurrection with three events: The inauguration ceremony of the first shinkansen (bullet train) line, which sliced the tedious 10-hour journey between Tokyo and Osaka to a jaw-dropping 4 hours. That quantum leap came just in time for the second of those three epoch-making events, Tokyo's hosting of the 1964 Summer Olympics -- the first occasion the international competition had been held in Asia. The third of those landmark events was the opening of the Budokan, a stadium in the city's heart dedicated to the martial arts of kyudo, kendo, judo, karate and all disciplines associated with honor and the Shinto spirit. Sited between Yasukuni Shrine and the Imperial Palace, it was reportedly built on the site where soldiers pledged their lives to the Emperor before joining their wartime units. Following a request from Japan, judo had been included at the Tokyo Olympics for the first time as an official Olympic sport -- a move that proclaimed to the world that Asian culture was standing on the world stage along with European and Anglo-Saxon cultures. Japanese xenophobia But if Japanese culture was to make its way onto the world stage, then wouldn't other cultures inevitably show themselves on the Japanese stage? Two years after the Tokyo Olympics, four young men landed in Haneda Airport. Delayed by a typhoon, they were several hours late. The newspapers declared that as one typhoon had left, another had just arrived. It was the first test of what the post-Olympic future of the Budokan Hall would be. Would it remain a sacred venue on hallowed land, or simply become another concert hall? On one side were the four most popular musicians on earth at the time; on the other, four Japanese opinion leaders, including the prime minister. The Fab Four of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr -- none of whom knew the intricacies of Japanese xenophobia -- were criticized by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, who declared that The Beatles were not an appropriate act to perform at such a respected venue. As media coverage built up and rightwing groups opined that rock music made young people crazy and would break down social order, Sato was joined by Tatsuji Nagashima, the promoter who had arranged the five Budokan concerts with The Beatles' management, but then changed sides and protested against them; Hosokawa Ryugen, an influential Asahi Shimbun journalist; and octogenarian Matsutaro Shoriki, founder of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and the Tokyo Giants baseball club. As first president of Budokan Hall, Shoriki had originally agreed to host The Beatles but later changed his mind after hearing alarming reports of long hair and girls screaming uncontrollably. He was told that the contract could not be torn up. With The Beatles on one side, and four pillars of the Establishment on the other, you could call it a faceoff between the Fab Four and the Drab Four. The Beatles themselves first sensed trouble while they were still touring Germany. There, they were shown a news report saying that Japanese rightwing groups wanted to capture them on their arrival in Tokyo and cut their Mop Top locks. Fearing trouble from rightists at Budokan, the Metropolitan Police Department met with fire department officials 10 day before The Beatles' arrival to coordinate crowd control and disaster response. They even arranged for some 40 armored personnel carriers to be brought in to overpower any rightwing trucks in the area. When it became clear there was to be no stopping the concerts, and that they might even become a turning point for Japan's culture, the war of words intensified. Hosokawa and other critics appeared on television talk shows, both criticizing the concert plan and highlighting their ignorance by on occasion referring to the Liverpool quartet as "The Peatle." In other debates, critics began calling for the band to play not at Budokan but at Yume no Shima (Dream Island), an ironically named garbage landfill zone. For Budokan Director Matsutaro Shoriki, this was no mere trifling debate: he had faced political pressures from nationalists before -- and had the scars to prove it. Decades before he had founded a Japanese baseball league and invited U.S. teams to play in Japan. Rightwingers saw this as a sellout to Americans and a form of cultural pollution. As a result, Shiroki was ambushed by sword-wielding would-be assassins and was lucky to survive being stabbed. Next came pressure on the Japanese youth: Tokyo schools began ordering their students not to attend the concerts, even though most of them were on the weekend. This snowballed into a move to stop students playing electric guitars, based on the fear that rock music would turn young people into delinquents and hooligans. At a preconcert press conference, a reporter asked The Beatles if they thought their behavior might have a negative influence on Japanese culture. Paul responded by asking if it should be considered a cultural invasion if a Japanese group were to appear in England. John, making an oblique reference to World War II and the expanding Vietnam War, quipped that singing was much better than fighting. Ringo commented, "It's amazing security, you know. I've never seen so many people guarding us." To this, a reporter responded, "Well, we want to make sure that you're not hurt while you're here." Ringo replied: "But we don't want the security to hurt the fans. Don't be too rough with them." Meanwhile, police were ripping banners out of the hands of rightwing squads outside the Budokan as the rightists berated them through megaphones. Scheduled to give one concert on June 30, and two each on July 1 and 2, the Fab Four thought they would get a chance to see the sights on the morning of the 30th. But the Tokyo police said their officers would not take responsibility for their security on a slated sightseeing trip to the nearby ancient capital of Kamakura. Plainclothes police That official decision was tantamount to grounding the band in their hotel, and George and Ringo obliged by staying there giving interviews and waving at fans through closed windows. Resenting their confinement, John and Paul each came up with their own plans for escaping from the Capital Tokyo Hotel (now the Tokyo Hilton). With a member of the tour entourage in the lead, Paul tried to sneak out of the main lobby but was stopped by guards. After a great deal of haggling, he was placed in a car with plainclothes police officers and given a short tour of Meiji Jingu Shrine and a portion of the Imperial Palace grounds. They briefly got out of the car to have a walk around, but when photographers spotted Paul he was quickly shuffled back into the car and returned to the hotel. One news source later noted that The Beatle had been spotted in the palace grounds "no-neku-tai" (without a necktie). John fared much better. Borrowing the ID badge and camera of a photographer on their team, he posed as a member of the press corps and used the badge to walk past the lobby security guards and into the street. From there he made his way to the Omotesando boulevard running away from Meiji Shrine, where he is reported to have bought souvenirs at the famous Oriental Bazaar shop. Then he went to the swish Azabu district nearby, where he was fitted for a new pair of glasses before returning to the hotel. He is said to have purchased on the outing a ceramic figure that was included in Peter Blake's collage design for the cover of 1967's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Apparently, back at the hotel Paul complained that he had only managed a few minutes out in the open air -- while John had gone on a shopping spree and returned with trophies to prove it. The Beatles played the five concerts with little incident inside the hall. The authorities had braced for two main threats: that the kids in the audience would go crazy, and that rightwing nationalists would get violent outside. Neither happened. The main floor area was kept empty to stop anyone approaching the stage, and the fans were confined to the mezzanine and balcony areas from where they watched the shows from over a sea of police hats. In the aisles, security guards stood at the end of each row, while another security ring of white-gloved officers stood between the stage and the seats, and another security ring sealed off the venue. Ambulance teams were at the ready. In an effort to downplay the presence of a Western band with long hair, promoters arranged for several Japanese bands to perform as opening acts. Elsewhere, because of the limitations of amplifiers at that time, The Beatles were often frustrated that the screaming and wailing of hysterical female fans elsewhere drowned out the sound of their instruments. At the Budokan, though, security was so suffocating that fans didn't even dare to stand up. In fact, the police announced over megaphones before the concert that anyone who did stand up and make any disturbance would be arrested. Consequently, the crowd noise during the meager half-hour they were allowed to play -- enough for just 11 songs -- was among the lowest The Beatles had experienced. Photos from the concerts show the four playing against giant billboards for Lion toothpaste, with the audience barely visible in the distance. At the end of each concert, the authorities left no chance for an embarrassing mob scene by fans, or a violent incident by demonstrators in their trucks. The Fab Four were bundled into a police-escorted convoy and returned to the hotel within 10 minutes of taking their last bows. Afterward, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the fans, many of them "haiteen" (late teenagers), were treated like children by the condescending authorities. Then, as The Beatles waved goodbye to Tokyo on their way to Manila, newspapers ran headlines such as "The Beatles typhoon has passed." Photos showed George on the stairs to the plane carrying a suitcase in each hand, and Paul with a camera, taking photos of the crowd. Absence of disturbances Reports in The Japan Times and elsewhere not only pointed out the absence of disturbances during the Budokan concerts, but felt it worth noting that fans did not cause any trouble at the airport farewell. The "Sgt. Pepper's" album cover with the Japanese figurine on the ground near John went on to be voted one of the most memorable design images of the 20th century, and The Beatles sold more than 1 billion records in their careers. Since then Budokan -- whose flip-flopping founder Shoriki Matsutaro died in 1969 -- has remained a popular stop for rock bands touring Asia. Deep Purple and Bob Dylan recorded live albums there, and the full-on likes of Kiss and Ozzy Osbourne have performed in the hall. It will even host the Black-Eyed Peas in July this year. |
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I’m going to stop wearing underpants.
AMPONTAN December 18, 2008 - Katsu Shintaro Mr. Katsu was a leading force in the Japanese entertainment industry as an actor, producer, and director. The son of a kabuki actor, he starred in 26 films as Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, as well as a spin-off television series. He also had too much of a taste for drink and drugs, and the above comment came during a press conference with Japanese reporters after his arrest at the Honolulu Airport on 16 January 1990 for carrying pot and cocaine in his underwear. At the same press conference, he joked that he intended to start a new business as a haberdasher and sell Katsu pants in which anything could be hidden. Now, now, no wise guy comments from the back row! The actor was supposed to have played the lead in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha mentioned above, but he left without finishing the first day of filming after a serious disagreement with the director. |
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Okinawa / Cultural background
Okinawa Time The people of Okinawa are racially and linguistically the same as the rest of Japan. However, the culture has developed differently because of isolation from the main islands. Taiwan, China, and the South Sea islands are close neighbors. Okinawa has suffered many historic tragedies. They were under a dynasty control from the 12th century, then the isolation policy by the Edo government, dual control by the Satsuma clan, the Ming Dynasty of China, and the policies of the Meiji government. Governmental discrimination continued, followed by the fierce battles World War 2(Apr, 1945). Over third of the island’s population died during World War 2. The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. The battle ended on September 7, 1945 and Okinawa was occupied by the U.S. After Japan was given its independence in 1952, Okinawa remained under U.S. control. In 1969, President Nixon and Prime Minister Sato agreed that Okinawa should be returned to Japan, and May 15, 1972, President Johnson ratified the return. Read more information from Okinawa Prefecture’s “OKINAWA TODAY“ Operation ICEBERG, as the plan for the Okinawa campaign was officially called, marked the entrance of the United States upon an advanced stage in the long execution of its strategy in the Pacific. Looking for facts of past and new Okinawa today? Take a look!! |
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