Japan's "Futen" –
A Day in the Life of Little Boy Glue

He has a Japanese name, but nobody knows or cares what it is. His friends know him simply as Glue Boy. He never knew his father, an American Negro soldier long since returned to the States. His mother, a Japanese farm girl who came to Tokyo after the war and ended up selling her favors to American GIs to keep from starving to death, somehow managed to keep her ainoko (literally, love baby) with her. For nearly three years she kept Glue Boy hidden in her four-tatami mat-floored room while she worked in various bars in Shibuya, one of Tokyo's more popular entertainment districts.

On Getting Away From Expo
How Not to Find Gary Snyder's Shangri-la

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.

Dr. Fujiwara Takes on the 'Value-Creating Society'

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.

The Armies of the Lafcadio Hearn Night

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.

The Zengakuren: Anatomy of a Restless Dragon

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? They've got everything: drama, sex appeal, suspense, action, a kind of kabuki choreography of tactic and deployment and, above all, enough violence to sate even the most battle-hardened of video zombies.

The Sparrows of the Nowhere Night

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.

The Mishima Incident: "A Wasteful Way to Die"

It happened while Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, a few blocks away, was addressing the opening of an extraordinary session of the Diet.

"Despite her economic power," Sato said, after welcoming seven newly-elected Dietmen from Okinawa, "Japan will never again become a military power…."

At that moment, in the Eastern Corps Headquarters of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force In Ichigaya, novelist Yukio Mishima and four members of his Tate-no-Kai (Society of the Shield) army were enacting a Samurai drama that was to shake not only Japan but the rest of the civilized world as well. When the scene had played Its gruesome course, Mishima and one of his young ultra-rightist followers lay disemboweled and beheaded on a blood-stained red carpet in the office of the commanding general of the GSDF garrison near the Shinjuku district of Tokyo.

Remember When You Could See Mt. Fuji?

In Japan, pollution – whether you pronounce it with two l's or two r's – is a very dirty word. Because, for man and beast alike, there simply is no escape from it. It is in the air you breathe. It is in the rice and fish you eat. It fouls the beaches where you try to swim. It fosters some of the most baffling diseases in medical history. It pounds at people's eardrums around the clock, accelerating the flow of adrenalin and infringing on their territoriality. Some, as a result, end up in mental institutions. Family cats begin to do strange midnight dances, then hurl themselves into the sea. Animals in municipal zoos have nervous breakdowns.

Mishima: The Shock Waves Continue

In the wake of the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima, Japan's leading novelist, a profitable – and at times macabre – cultural phenomenon has evolved. The Japanese, who are much given to instant labels, call it the "Mishima Boom."

Dateline Seoul: Will Success Spoil the ROK?

This is the Oriental Year of the Boar, and throughout the Far East the English-speaking punsters are having an absolute circus with that one. But here in Korea – no matter what the zodiacal charts decree – it always seems nowadays to be the Year of the Tiger.

Triple Fare From the Madding Crowd

You begin by reverting to clichÈs, some of which are almost as old as Madame Butterfly herself:

You, as a foreigner, are a guest in Japan. Further, you are an ambassador of America.

And Tokyo's 9,834 taxi drivers have got to live, too, you rationalize. They've got wives, kids, TV sets to pay off. Some work eighteen hours a day. Many of them sleep in their cabs. The pay is paltry, averaging around $100 a month. Numerous customers, as police files will verify, simply dash off into the sidewalk crush without bothering to pay the meter tab.