Darrell Houston

’45 A-Bomb Deaths Unverified by U.S. WASHINGTON (UPl) A U.S. Defense Department spokesman Friday disclaimed immediate knowledge of a report that 23 American war prisoners were killed in the atom bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The Pentagon spokesman said the department’s historian would have to make, a detailed search of records before the account could be verified. In Tokyo, Hiroshi Yanagida, a member of the Japanese Military Police during the war, said 23 of the war prisoners he was in charge with were killed. He said the Pentagon must have known of their deaths. – From the Japan Times of July 12, 1970 Prologue I recently visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drawn there by a nagging blend of curiosity and guilt. I wanted to write something, particularly about Hiroshima, but it seemed trite – and somehow obscene to add my belated jottings to that sad chronicle of two murdered cities and at least 260,000 victims of man’s inhumanity to his brothers and sisters. Unlike the Tralfamadoreans in Vonnegut’s book about the Allied destruction of Dresden, I

Tokyo   …They came, their legions undulating like animated kanji script, their shellacked helmets bobbing lavender, red, pink, orange, white, yellow and black, by the tens of thousands…. They moved like a cleansing wind. Their crusade banners, proud and lofty, rode the rising breeze from bamboo poles that cleverly unscrewed, on the order of trick pool cues, into three wicked clubs. It wasn’t long before those weapons were put to practical, and violent, use…. Counterpointing the guttural incantations of the serpentining marchers, the crescendo gave one the feeling that an entire emerging generation – a generation that doesn’t give a Buddha’s damn about tradition, the Gross National Product or Expo ’70 – had lifted its voice In one cosmic, gonadal shout of rage…. – From “The Armies of the Lafcadio Hearn Night,”the author’s fourth newsletter report from Japan. In Japan, television and the student riots go together like rice and soy sauce, or dried squid and beer. On a rating scale of ten, the demonstrations would score at least a high twelve. And why not?

Tokyo– It had been the wettest monsoon season in decades, only the rats, frolicking in the sewers and among the mounds of garbage heaped on street corners in every machi suburb, had not wearied of the downpour. By mid-summer the city lay limp and mildewed, while down the New Tokaido in Osaka half the Expo ’70 pavilions had three inches of water on their floors. Ampo Day – the day marking the automatic continuation of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty – broke murky and humid, but dry. And Tokyo, even by early afternoon, was jumpy, with a kind of seismographic expectancy in the air. The earthquake was coming, no mistake about that. The only question was: how long will it last and how much damage will it do? Two days before, despite the deluge, nearly 150,000 people across the nation had protested the perpetuation of the treaty at more than 200 rallies sponsored chiefly by the Japan Socialist Party and Sohyo, the mammoth trade union council. There had been some violence – triggered mostly by radical student cadres

A Strong Case Against the Soka Gakkai Dr. Hirotatsu Fujiwara, although he does not completely approve of the appellation, is the Marshall McLuhan of Japan. One of his many published works, “A Critique of Mass Media From Personal Experience,” is a sort of Confucian counterpart of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” and draws largely from Dr. Fujiwara’s background as one of Japan’s best-known radio and television commentators. His other books were a bit more scholarly, dealing mainly with that bewildering blend of confusion and consensus that is politics, Japan-style. He holds a doctorate in political science from Tokyo’s Meiji University – where he has also served as a faculty member – and is the author of the definitive biography of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida. In his own evaluation, Dr. Fujiwara is a man “with a political conscience, and a political consciousness.” He is also a man with more than his share of courage. Because with every bit as much conviction as one encounters In the pontifications of Professor McLuhan (and, thankfully, without the horrendous puns) Dr.

The Hare Krishna chanters on the Ginza said ‘go to Suwanose…’ I think it was the sight of Babe Ruth’s old Yankee uniform that finally convinced me that I had to flee the international ego-trip, that is, Expo ’70, and be off in quest of either the Old Japan, if such a place still existed, or at least a facsimile uncorrupted by cotton candy, Fanta grape soda, glasses of tepid Russian tea and that sleek travelers-check camaraderie that leaves one at the end of a day of pavilion-hopping devoid of any viable Nipponalia beyond the fact that the conversion rate of yen to dollars is 357 point something or other. The Babe’s baseball suit droops there forlornly in the wire-mesh upright casket formed by his onetime clubhouse locker, part of the first exhibit one encounters upon entering the American pavilion. But it is all rather pointedly ignored by the endless queues of Japanese fairgoers. They jostle past this bit of athletic shrinery as if they were trying to cram aboard the Yamate Line’s 5:15 commuter