3.  "HIROSHIMA OYSTERS"

In January of 1967, I went on a long-awaited-tour of Japan. I'd put it off for many years, mainly because I didn't like traveling, was not keen on long flights, and I was particularly phobic about non-Western or Asiatic countries because the food was unfamiliar and would no doubt make me sick. But, Japanese requests to our office for concerts had been many and gracious, and I'd finally made the decision to go. I took along my manager, Manny; Ira and Susan the secretary, now married to Ira; my sister, Mimi; and my then-current boyfriend, Paul. We would be gone for two months, three weeks of which would be spent in Japan, doing nine concerts in four major cities.

I had just been home for a while and gone through one of my many attempts at purifying my spirit by throwing out all of the clothing and jewelry I owned and liked (except for my alexandrite ring and a bunch of crosses). I embarked on this tour without the typical entertainer's trunkloads of spangled clothing, T-shirts, boots, feathers, and offbeat coats. Instead 'I brought four plain dresses, made for me by Pauline, identical except in color: one white, one dark blue, one light blue, and one grey herringbone.

My hair was shoulder length, as was Mimi's. Mimi was not feeling austere. In a hat and green suit, she looked like a Saint Laurent fashion model, traveling with a nun who'd just been told the habit was no longer compulsory but who could not adjust to civilian clothes. Ira was in chipper form, as he always was when we traveled together, sporting a tweed suit, a tweed hat, a suitcase full of Brooks Brothers shirts, and one or two conservative black ties. (He would rip the labels out when we went on demonstrations.)

Susan, only twenty-one years old, had recently had her gorgeous honey-colored hair coiffed, and the back of her head looked like a huge chrysanthemum. Her china-doll complexion and Renoir body were encased in a trench coat and silk scarf. Susan was enormously bright and organized, and she irked the hell out of Ira, who had fallen in love with her on a previous tour, and now seemed constantly annoyed at having her in the same room. She and Mimi had been· buddies for many years, and did a lot of giggling together throughout the Japanese tour.

Paul, whom I've referred to in a couple of my songs, was a lavishly handsome six-foot-four Irishman I'd met in Liverpool during the Dylan tour of 1964. He'd been standing on the front steps of the concert hall collecting money for a children's fund or some such thing. His words were gentle and ever so true. He was not yet "lost in the Irish fog." He was a decent and intelligent young man, who will perhaps always be in an austere period of his life, and he dressed in the remnants of a school outfit from Trinity College, Dublin.

Manny, looking like the proverbial kindly father, fresh off an immigrant ship, carried a great jumble of passports, visas, and vaccination pamphlets, and tried to decide who would act as road manager, as neither he nor Ira nor myself was capable of managing our own affairs. Whether Ira liked it or not, Susan was left to organize us.

I spent the overnight flight poring through my Berlitz Japanese book, trying to figure out how to really say what was written in phonetics for "hello," "how are you," "good evening," "good morning," "where's breakfast," and "I have to go to the bathroom," none of which was simple. How was one to know that the word "arigato," thank you, would be pronounced "eingato," and that when you add the "gozaimash-ta," very much, not to mention the giggle at the end, "arigato-gozaimash-ta" becomes very unlike French, Spanish, or Italian. But we were in jovial spirits, and nobody slept much.

As we touched down, we were punchy from jet lag and very pale from no sleep. As we left the plane, we were greeted by about twenty maniacal Japanese photographers, literally ready to kill each other to get pictures. They were all shouting my name, but stayed about seven feet in front of Mimi and me, as we walked arm in arm, smiling at the cameramen and looking desperately for the ladies' room. One man fell and was trampled by the others. We spotted a door with an insignia on it of a lady's kimono and excused ourselves, darted inside, and burst into giggles. I ducked my face into the cold water as Mimi disappeared into a cubicle. We tidied up, primped up, and headed out to greet more chaos. Not knowing who was a promoter, who was a friend, who was the local folksinger, or who was anything, I smiled and bowed at everyone, and everyone seemed warm and genuinely pleased to have our strange group visiting their country.

Carmen MacCrae was in the elevator at the Hilton. She had eyelashes three quarters of an inch long, and they weren't hers. Not knowing there was a Japanese side, we stayed on the European side of the hotel. Communication with the hotel personnel was difficult. Manny, who usually manages to speak Yiddish in any country when his knowledge of the local language runs out, found no way to communicate at all. There was a young woman named Deko-san who would be my part-time interpreter and helper; and there was the official interpreter, Takasaki, who would be with us at concerts, and do instantaneous translations at press conferences and other gatherings.

Our first major obligation after arriving in Japan was a press conference. Mimi was impressed with how careful I was in answering the questions, most of which were political and very intelligent, with only one or two like, "How long have you known Bob Dylan?" At the end of the conference, ,which covered everything from income taxes to the war in Vietnam, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, racism in the South, and more, someone asked me about rock music. I said it was too controversial a subject for me.

The first concert was in Tokyo. What repertoire would be right for the Japanese audiences was not clear yet, but some suggestions were made by Deko and the promoter, and the rest I did on intuition. The audiences were sweet, enthusiastic, and generous, bringing me gifts which they placed just beyond the footlights, making little bows. I learned to love the Japanese bow, and I use it to this day in concert to thank people for having come to hear me.

But something was going wrong, and it had to do with the language barrier. I couldn't seem to get points across to the people when I wanted to and was beginning to think there was a massive cultural gap between myself and the Japanese people. The problem was most acute during concerts.

The first incident occurred at the third concert. Deko-san had knocked on the door to signal it was time to begin the concert, and I'd given my little answering groan. Takasaki went out on stage and talked for five minutes to the audience. "Deko-san," I asked, "what is the man saying?" "What man?" she said. "The man who is interpreting- Takasaki-san." Deko replied, "Oh, him no say nothing." Flaring up, I replied, "How can him no say nothing for five whole minutes?" Deko said, "Pardon?" I felt rude, which I had been. I said, "How can he stand there and say nothing for five full minutes?" Deko said, "Oh, he tell them to please no smoking in hall, and other things like that." I was being manipulated. A no-smoking announcement can't last up to five minutes. My home team of Manny, Ira, Mimi, Susan, and Paul were becoming suspicious.

During the concert, I would say something mildly humorous, harmless, and probably pointless, it would be translated, and there would be a stone-faced response from the audience. Something serious (for instance, the fact that I didn't pay my war taxes in the United States) would receive a round of giggles after it had been translated. That night I exploded to Manny, and told him that I thought that Takasaki was all fucked up and didn't speak English or Japanese. As a group, we decided that I should talk to him, and actually tell him what I was going to say, so that he could practice his interpretation. I recall him sitting in the dressing room, nodding helpfully as I painstakingly, in pidgin English, drawn-out syllables, and sign language, explained to him the few political points that I wanted to make and the jokes that I thought were translatable. He nodded to everything, and I was hopeful we had made some progress.

The next concert, Takasaki seemed even more nervous than usual. It seemed to me that every time I said anything he was repeating the same sentence over and over to the audience. When I mentioned war taxes and Vietnam, the word "Vietnam" was not repeated in the translation. Was it possible that the word "Vietnam" could be so different in Japanese from what it was in English? Just as I was getting really flustered, a beautiful little Japanese girl brought a dainty, colorful gift up to the stage, and plopped it at my feet. I accepted the gift, and said "Thank you" into the microphone. Takasaki said nothing, so I turned to him and said, "Please tell her 'Thank you,'" and he said, "Aringato." I was about to start the next song when another young Japanese girl brought forward a paper origami bird, and also put it at my feet. Touched by her sweetness and shyness, and at a loss for words in the huge, silent hall, I said, "Japan is full of surprises." Again Takasaki responded with total silence. I stared at him. "Tell them what I said: 'Japan is full of surprises.'" He smiled dumbly at me. I said to him, "Do you know what a surprise is?" and discovered that my right fist was clenched and that I had a strong urge to show him what a surprise would be like in front of a few thousand people. I unclenched my fist, and he mumbled something into the microphone -- I'll never know what and, again, there was no response from the audience. I went on to the next song, but not before I put my arm around his shoulder, saying, in effect, "Don't worry about it; we'll get past these little difficulties." I didn't know this was the most humiliating thing I could have done to a Japanese man. He turned rigid and blushed, I sublimated my rage, the audience maintained a hollow silence, and the plot thickened.

We flew to Hiroshima -- first human-inhabited testing grounds for the American atomic bomb -- still in a quandary about Takasaki. We had no assurance, or reassurance, from anybody bilingual-American, English, or Japanese-as to whether or not I was being translated at all in the concerts. When the plane landed at the Hiroshima airport, I was quite airsick, and sat recuperating for a minute with a wet washrag on my head, wondering what the local promoters had in store for me. (At some point in my career I had learned not to assume that the flowers at the bottom of the airplane steps were necessarily for me, having once lunged for a large bouquet of roses and had the bestower leap backwards, clutching them to her bosom, as they were not for me at all, but for some diplomat who was following three people behind.) I did, however, assume that the child with short-cropped, shining black hair and magnificent oval eyes, dressed in the Japanese kimono, could be holding the giant- sized bouquet of flowers for me. So I pulled myself together and, along with my entourage, alighted from the plane. The child was exquisitely beautiful, and I took her hand in one of mine and the flowers in the other arm, and walked with her into the airport lobby where the city fathers were waiting to greet me.

I wanted to stay with the little girl, or at least have her on my lap, but she disappeared, and I was left sitting in a circle around a table with some of my entourage and, at the head of the table, a man I did not recognize. On either side of him were other men I did not recognize. One of them was introduced to me as an interpreter. To this day I don't know whom I was speaking to, but the first question from the lips of a man who was obviously a local somebody was translated to me by a smiling stranger: "Didn't you feel, as you were  flying over Hiroshima, that this is a city dedicated to peace?" I looked stupidly at him, felt the red tape encasing me in my chair, and replied, "Please tell the gentleman that, as I was flying over Hiroshima, I felt airsick." Something was translated, and the man smiled happily, which seemed strange. A series of similar questions followed, and I tried to give more respectful answers.

The meeting concluded, and we piled into cars and were driven toward the Hiroshima Memorial Museum. A vague and oppressive feeling overcame me, that I wanted to absorb Hiroshima at my own speed, and I might not be able to absorb Hiroshima at all. I knew there was a Quaker house in the city, and I wanted to visit the people there, knowing that one or two would speak English. Maybe someone could explain why I felt so alienated from the Japanese people. Perhaps I could learn what peace activities went on in the city, what grassroots projects might be taking place. Instead, I was being rushed to the most commercial spot in all Hiroshima, which was the war memorial museum.

When the car stopped, Mimi and I got out and walked slowly, with mixed emotions, and lay my flowers on the grave of the symbolic unknown Japanese human being. Fair enough, it seemed to me; now I wanted to be alone. "Come," our hosts said, "you must go in and see the museum." I knew well what was there, pictures of the devastation, fossils of people, shadows on the cement, photographs of broken bodies and of faces scarred and pulled into horror masks. I did not want to go in. My hosts were insulted, and I didn't care. I asked to be taken to the hotel.

In Hiroshima I was to do a benefit concert, the monies to be divided between two peace groups-one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki. We did have a chance to go and visit the peace center, where we talked with a white-haired American woman who had been living in Japan for a long time. Quakers always give me a feeling of relief and security. Wherever they are, whatever they've been through, they hold on to the one thing that is so dear to me: an unbending devotion to nonviolence.

The group was small and pleasant, and they served us tea. The room was cold, but it was a relief to have an interpreter who I felt was actually translating what I said, and a group of people who related to the things I wanted to talk about. I remember Paul bending through the tiny doorways of Japanese buildings and taking his shoes off, looking almost as tall when he sat down as he did when I he stood up, and the Japanese girls blushing at the very sight of him. Ira was animated, asking questions about the background and cur- rent history of nonviolent activities in the area. Mimi, Susan, and I sat on pillows, sipping tea and wondering about Hiroshima. Some shy "Hiroshima maidens" apologized for their appearance, and gave us strings of delicate origami birds. I wondered where the money from the benefit would actually go, and realized it was futilely small regardless of where it went.

On the night of the Hiroshima concert, there was a battle with the local promoters, who did not want any of the money from the Hiroshima concert to go to Nagasaki. Apparently, there was an argument about which city was bombed first, or worst, and how many people died; in other words, a question of prestige. It struck me as so base to bicker over which city was best known throughout the world for having had people blown to shreds that I asked Manny if he could just please take care of it and split the money fifty-fifty between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I did not want to sing until the dispute was settled.

In two hours of discussion Manny would hear long responses which unfortunately amounted to nothing. Expert at the time- honored custom of never saying no, the Hiroshima promoters and city fathers, with much politeness, smiling, bowing, and many cups of tea, never budged from their position. As it came time for the concert I could see that I would break my contract if I refused to sing; and with my bizarre interpreter, there was no way to explain my side of the dispute to anyone, let alone the press. Manny told me the city fathers would be happy to discuss the problem after the concert.

Onstage was an enormous sign in Japanese that included my name and the word "Hiroshima." I went onstage with mixed feelings, and struggled through another concert with my troublesome interpreter. By intermission I was developing a terrible stomach-ache and by the end of the concert my hands were clammy and I was sweating all over. I was, in fact, quite sick.

We were taken to the mayor's house. Raw fish was being passed around, and I got greener and greener. I wandered over to a window with Mimi and Susan. Below, schoolchildren were waving and calling up to us. I wanted to be with them, but because of all the stupid red tape I was stuck in a room full of elders who didn't interest me in the least, and even if they did, nothing would ever be translated properly so I could find out what they were really like. With the children, I could be assured that one or two of them would speak  some English. If I hadn't felt so sick, I would have slipped away and joined the children. But by then my head was literally reeling, and we returned to the hotel. For an hour I lay on the couch with stomach cramps and a weakening spirit.

When the promoters arrived I fought for my right to distribute money to Nagasaki. The promoters responded to our arguments with nodding heads and the clipped "hai," which means yes, and never the "eyeh," which means no, and the usual smiles and nods. Each time they would nod and say "hai" and smile, I would feel encouraged, but there was no cause for encouragement. The final blow came when I was informed that the money would go toward building a small monument to honor the dead. I rose from the couch, screamed that I didn't want my hard-earned money going into some fucking pile of cement, and told Manny I couldn't stand it anymore and to do what he could.

I went into the bathroom and lay down on the floor in a cold sweat. Mimi and Susan put rags on my head. The bathroom floor felt too good to leave, but Mimi finally got me into bed, where the scene escalated into a "Queenie crisis," with Ira holding one hand, Paul lying on the bed holding the other hand, and me weeping and telling them all what to say: "Don't worry, dear, you won't throw up." Logical Susan was saying that of course I wouldn't throw up; if I hadn't thrown up for seventeen years, why should I start now? Mimi was sneaking across the room to grab a flowerpot (which I wasn't supposed to see) and emptying the flowers out "just in case." And Manny was wandering through the room with a stack of Don Ho records, trying to distract me. I didn't want to hear Don Ho; I didn't want to think about Japan, or the promoters, or the stupid money, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, bombs, or anything. I just wanted to have my stomach feel better or else to die.

Instead, miracle of miracles, just after I'd been reassured by Ira for the hundredth time that of course I would not throw up, I lurched forward and gave a massive retch. Mimi had the flower pot under my chin in a flash and everyone oohed and aahed, as if I'd just given birth to twins, or perhaps triplets. No food came up, as there probably wasn't any there. I leaned my head back on the pillow. "Good God," I said, "is that all there is to it?" "That's all," said Mimi, "just like having a baby." Everybody clapped, then quietly left the room, except Paul who, patient soul that he was, stayed to see me safely through the night.

After seventeen years of thinking it would kill me, even the semblance of vomiting was quite a triumph, and I secretly wished that it would happen again that night, in which case I would consider myself a professional. Somewhere around two in the morning, my wish came true, and with the pride of a father peacock, I retched all by myself into the same empty flowerpot. Perhaps this was the end of those rotten promoters! Who cared! I was free of my phobia for the time being and could now rest through the night with no reminder of the evening's agonies, except a painfully tender abdomen. The next day involved a long train ride, most of which I spent sleeping, though I occasionally roused to munch on a banana. A doctor came to see me when we got to Osaka. He poked my stomach, and I yelped. He smiled benignly, and mumbled something to Deko in Japanese. She nodded and smiled. "What did he say, Deko?" "He say have no fever, only food poisoning. You can give concert." "Wonderful," I replied, and told Manny to cancel. Plans were made for me to return and give the concert on my day off. I slept for another night and day.

Meanwhile, Ira had been on the phone with a group of peace activists in the area. This was now the third or fourth day, and I was recuperating. The Osaka peace groups wanted me to attend a rally they were having that night. My adrenaline went up. I believe that adrenaline combats illness, and as the day went on, I had decided to commit myself to an evening out. I felt better and better, and Manny got more and more nervous about what the response would be to me leaping around with peaceniks two nights after a cancelled concert. I got gingerly out of bed, put on my dark blue dress, and went off to the rally.

In a medium-sized auditorium we squeezed our way through an overflow crowd of wildly excited" people and, entering the main room, saw ahead of us onstage another gigantic sign, a welcome in English to Joan Baez. My throat tightened and my eyes filled. Why should I get a standing ovation? What did these people know of me? Less than I knew of them. Our whole group was seated at a table on the stage. An excellent interpreter, whose name was Tsurumi, accepted questions from the audience for us. The bulk of the questions were intelligent-about the United States, its involvement in the Vietnam war; about pacifism, leftism, rightism; about how my music related to my politics. All of that was followed by a heated discussion on the ticket prices that I was charging in Japan.

Tsurumi was a fantastic interpreter, from what we could tell, and it dawned on us to ask him if he could help us out with my concert interpreting with Takasaki-san still at the helm, which was growing worse with each performance. He accepted. It was not until days later, however, that Tsurumi came dean about what had actually transpired during my concerts; he didn't want to explain. He didn't want us to feel foolish or embarrassed, he said. I assured him that we already felt both foolish and embarrassed and he said, "Well, then, I'll tell you. Takasaki speaks perfect English. He interprets nothing of what you say." I was aghast. "During the five minutes before the concert, he says nothing about no smoking in the halls. He says, 'This girl has a lovely voice. You should listen to her sing, but as far as her politics goes, she doesn't know what she's talking about. She's innocent and young, and she came here to sing to the people, not to talk. So, simply ignore what she might have to say.' What his speech did was quiet everyone who was bilingual and lessen the number of protest letters which might come in." I sighed, and gave a groan, and swore. We were all in a state of shock.

My mind raced back to an evening with Mimi, Susan, Takasaki, and myself. We did not like him, and had decided that he did not speak much English, but we'd gone to sit at his table to make an effort to be pleasant with him, as he seemed lonely and under great pressure. "How do you say 'chopstick' in Japanese?" I asked him slowly.

"Chopstick?"

I said, "Yes, you know, what you eat with," and moved my fingers as though they had chopsticks in them. He looked around the table at the three of us, and back to me. "Chopstick?"

Takasaki was playing "I don't speak English," and I began playing, "Let's be rude to the dumb interpreter."

"Oh, well, chopstick," he said finally, and gave us a word which I wrote down phonetically on a napkin. Assuming that we had crossed the language barrier with Takasaki, we chatted some more and had a cup of tea and a bowl of strawberries. A few days later when ordering lunch on the train going from Osaka to Tokyo, I clutched the napkin in my palm and, using the word Takasaki had given me, asked the waiter for chopsticks. He was confused, but nodded politely with the usual "hai," and disappeared and came back with no chopsticks. Finally, I went to the kitchen section and repeated the word. A bilingual gentleman said, "We don't serve lamb chops on the train."

Returning from this flashback, I listened to more examples of how Takasaki had evaded or misconstrued or blatantly misinterpreted many of my remarks; Tsurumi admitted that he did not understand Takasaki's behavior.

Toward the very end of our stay, during the few days we had off in Tokyo, Manny approached me, saying that there was a request for one more press conference. I asked him what in the name of God there could be one more press conference about. He said he didn't know, except that the record company wanted to present me with a gold album.

I dressed up in my press conference outfit. In a room at the Hilton, I faced a small, conservative-looking group of people, including record company representatives, and went through the formalities of accepting the gold album, smiled, shook hands, bowed, then turned to the strange-looking group and asked them if they had any questions. Four hands went into the air simultaneously. They belonged to four men, all dressed the same in dark suits and ties and white shirts, all holding notepads and pencils. When I nodded in their direction, they looked at each other momentarily, before one of them acted as spokesman.

"The man would like to know if Miss Baez was ill in Hiroshima because of eating oysters." I was baffled by his question, and requested to know why he'd asked it. He hedged, and asked the question again. He said they were aware that I'd cancelled a concert just after my visit to Hiroshima, and was it true that I had eaten Hiroshima oysters? I asked the men what newspaper or journal they were from, and it turned out they were representatives of the Hiroshima Oyster Company. The rumor had been that Miss Baez had had to cancel the concert because she'd been at a seven-course dinner, which included Hiroshima oysters which had made her sick. The Hiroshima Oyster Company wanted to clear its name of the possibility that they may have poisoned me. The irony was that the only thing I had refused to eat in Hiroshima at the seven-course dinner the night before the concert was a bowl of Hiroshima oysters, because I don't like oysters. There was no way not to offend the Hiroshima Oyster Company, but picking the lesser of the two insults (which also happened to be the truth), I said I was allergic to oysters and so had been deprived of the well-known delicacy. The four men scribbled in their notepads, got up, and hastened from the room.

One afternoon, unable to bear the degree of public reaction that took place every time I walked into the hotel lobby, I wrapped my head up in a scarf, put on navy pants, a pea coat, and boots, and ran out a back entrance and up a hill to a little shrine. For an hour and a half, I sat quietly thinking and looking for the little patches of sunshine which crept across the gravel, wondering what strange phenomenon had infected this visit to Japan. The country was known for being beautiful, its people for being gracious. What had gone wrong? I didn't find out until after I'd returned home and was settling down to work at the Institute and to write a book.

***

Excerpts from The New York Times, Tuesday, February 21, 1967: ... Press reports allege that an American, identifying himself as Harold Cooper, a CIA man, had ordered the Japanese interpreter, Ichiro Takasaki, to substitute an innocuous translation in Japanese for Miss Baez' remarks in English on Vietnam and Nagasaki's atom bomb survivors. Mr. Takasaki was cited as the source for these allegations ... This morning, Asahi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo daily, printed a long account of the affair. The newspaper quoted Mr. Takasaki as saying, "It is a fact that pressure was applied on me by a man who said he was from the CIA." Mr. Takasaki's interpreting surprised bilingual Japanese listeners when the national Japanese television network carried a tape recorded replay of Miss Baez' concert on January 27th. Miss Baez left Japan by air for Hawaii on February 2nd.

When Miss Baez had referred to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Mr. Takasaki said simply that "the show would be televised." Explaining her song, "What Have They Done to the Rain?," about the atomic bomb, Mr. Takasaki again only stated that, "the show is being televised." And when she said that she had refused to pay taxes because she did not want her money to be used to finance the Vietnam war, Mr. Takasaki gave this translation: "Taxes are high in the United States...." Mr. Takasaki explained that before the concerts began, a telephone call came to him on January 12th, apparently from the American Embassy. The caller said he was an interpreter for someone named Harold Cooper, of the American Embassy, and reportedly said, "You are free to act as master of ceremonies, but Mr. Cooper hopes that you will not make any political statements." ... Next day, a man who called himself Harold Cooper, telephoned him directly ... After saying that he was a United States intelligence agent, he asked that Mr. Takasaki change the meanings when Miss Baez made political statements ... "If you don't cooperate, you will have trouble in your work in the future." Each year Mr. Takasaki works in the United States about two months ...

Mr. Takasaki decided to cooperate, since he felt if he refused he might not be able to obtain visas for the United States in the future. Mr. Takasaki told the Asahi Shimbun that he had actually met Mr. Cooper four times, and that each time Mr. Cooper made strict demands concerning Miss Baez' concerts. He said that at one time Mr. Cooper said, "Japan is in the midst of general elections, so be especially careful about Miss Baez' statements. Since many of her fans have a right to vote, political statements made during concerts have a major influence ..." On February 3rd, Mr. Cooper called Mr. Takasaki at his home, and reportedly said, "Thank you for your cooperation. I am now leaving for Hawaii ..." .

"It was a most strange case," said Takasaki. "I knew that Miss Baez was a marked person who was opposed to the Vietnam War and who had been tacitly boycotted by the broadcasting companies in the United States. American friends also repeatedly advised me not to take on the job. But I took it on as a business proposition, since the Japanese fans were coming not to hear her political statements, but her music. I met Mr. Cooper once in the presence of a Japan Times reporter, but even in that meeting he openly demanded that I mistranslate. I tried to reject the absurd demands, but he knew the name of my child and the contents of my work very well. I became afraid and agreed."

***

Excerpts from the New York Post, Tuesday, February 22, 1967: The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo denied that any U.S. government employee had approached Takasaki, and said it had no employee named Harold Cooper.

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