Magazine version in the Nikkei Asian Review 23/6/2016
Q: What understanding of Japan did you come to this country with?
PAUL: We don’t know much about Japan except what we’ve read or seen on film.
JOHN: And we don’t believe all that.
Press Conference at the Tokyo Hilton, 29/6/1966
It was fifty years ago today – more or less. In late June 1966, The Beatles landed at Tokyo’s Haneda airport for a programme of five concerts over three days at the Budokan, the newly-built showcase of Japanese martial arts.
The tour ended with two concerts in the Philippines and a bizarre stand-off with Imelda Marcos. Two months later the group stopped touring altogether. In November they recorded the ground-breaking Strawberry Fields Forever.
If The Beatles were moving fast, so was Japan. Like China today, it was at the tail-end of a turbo-charged period of economic growth that had generated massive urbanization and a vibrant consumer culture. The population was young and growing and thirsty for the latest trends from abroad.
At the same time the student movement was becoming increasingly militant, with the American use of Okinawa as a staging point for the Vietnam War a flashpoint issue.
Into this maelstrom came The Beatles, the biggest act on the planet and symbol of youthful hedonism and the crumbling of traditional values. Prime Minister Eisaku Sato was opposed to their presence on the hallowed ground of the Budokan, which had never staged rock music before.
Old-school intellectuals agreed. On his TV discussion programme, the kimono-clad Ryugen Hosokawa, a former Asahi Shimbun journalist, dismissed the Fab Four as “beggarly entertainers.” Chairman of the Budokan Matsutaro Shiroki – also a media magnate and heavyweight power-broker – was likewise suspicious of what he called “The Petles.”
HELLO / GOODBYE
Terror from the extreme right was still a reality. Six years earlier the head of the Japan Socialist Party had been murdered by a fanatical rightist. In 1970 famed novelist Yukio Mishima was to commit seppuku during a theatrical attempted coup d’etat. So it was no laughing matter when threats were made to assassinate The Beatles.
The group was confined to the Tokyo Hilton (now the Capital Tokyu), though John Lennon did manage to sneak out for a brief shopping trip. There was heavy security for the concerts, with 3,000 police marshalling an audience of 10,000. Veteran agitator Bin Akao of the Great Japan Patriotic Party cruised around outside in an armoured loud-speaker truck.
Inside the house lights were kept fully on and standing up was strictly forbidden. So intense was the glare that Lennon kept his eyes closed most of the time. After a set of just 30 minutes they were gone.
Many celebrities attended, including movie director Nagisa Oshima, later to direct Empire of the Senses and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, future Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara and Yukio Mishima himself. Mishima was not impressed, spending more time observing the hysterical girls behind him than events on stage. “Illusion is a frightening thing,” he concluded, ironically in view of his own grisly denouement.
A more insightful comment came from another great writer, Shusaku Endo, who likened the response of the audience to religious ecstasies, as seen in some churches in the southern United States. The public was certainly entranced. A TV feature on the concerts achieved a 60% rating.
JAPAN’S LONG AND WINDING ROAD
The generation in its formative years when The Beatles were in their heyday came to adulthood in the inflationary 1970s, experienced Japan’s extraordinary 1980s boom and then the subsequent years of stagnation and financial crisis. Many are in influential positions today.
As Shigeharu Suzuki, the Beatles-loving chairman of Daiwa Securities, puts it “the Japanese economy has been on a long and winding road.” According to Ryuichi Isaka, CEO of retail giant Seven & I, The Beatles’ music is “more of a universal language than English.” He should know, having won over sceptical American employees by singing All My Loving. In the literary field, best-selling author Haruki Murakami has published works entitled Norwegian Wood, Yesterday and Drive My Car.
After that tumultuous 103 hour sojourn in the summer of 1966, The Beatles continued their relationship with Japan on an individual basis. In November Lennon met an avant garde Japanese artist who was to have a dramatic impact on both him and The Beatles. In his remaining 14 years of life Lennon visited Japan with Yoko Ono several times, probably encountering the katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes) that supplied him with the album title Shaved Fish.
Paul McCartney remains a huge draw in Japan, with many three generation families attending his 2015 concerts. His 1980 arrest at Narita Airport and ten day detention for drug possession is now a distant memory.
The only time George Harrison toured after 1974 was in Japan, in 1991. Ringo has brought his All-Starr Band to Japan many times and appeared in TV commercials for footwear and chu-hai canned cocktails.
I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE AS YOU ARE ME…
In 1966 Japan was primed for The Beatles. Elsewhere in the world they symbolized challenges to tradition and authority. In Japan there was another dimension, which was national rather than personal. The four young Liverpudlians stood for possibility, the triumph of the outsider and escape from history.
The fact that they were not citizens of the American superpower, yet were world-beaters in such an essentially American form of expression as rock’n roll must have delivered a subliminal message of hope to Japanese in many fields of endeavour, including business.
Subsequently Japan has taken The Beatles to its heart, as proven by its dozens of Beatles’ tribute bands. At the Abbey Road club in Tokyo you will find a Japanese “John Lennon” who has been playing Beatles songs for three times longer than the original Lennon managed.
Film critic Donald Richie drew a wry parallel with gagaku, eighth century Chinese court music which persists in Japan long after disappearing from China. Likewise, Richie predicted, a thousand years hence Japan will have “something called The Beatles. It’ll be four people with guitars, and nobody will know exactly what it is, but it will be the only place in the world that will have it.”