The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  After hostilities ceased, the B-29 was reverse-engineered by the Soviets (from crash-landed aircraft that had been interned during the war) to create the Tupolev Tu-4, and the first aircraft to break the sound barrier, the rocket-powered Bell X-1 piloted by the legendary Chuck Yeager, was launched from the bomb bay of a modified B-29.

  The 334 B-29s that flew over Tokyo from the evening of March 9th through to the early hours of March 10th, 1945, were also a break from the mould.

  For this lower-altitude raid, dubbed Operation Meetinghouse, they had much of their defensive armament removed so as to be able to carry more fuel and greater bomb loads.

  “You’re going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen,” U.S. Major General Curtis LeMay reportedly told his crews beforehand.

  He was spot on. They didn’t come together, like the Valkyrie swooping to select the dead on some Norse battlefield. The bombers came in waves of three planes every minute, 334 Superfortresses powered by 1,336 twin-row turbocharged radial pistol R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone engines (manufactured by a company originally founded by aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright).

  They flew in staggered formation from as low as five thousand feet.

  Tokyo’s residents, who had become accustomed to nightly visitations by the B-29s, paid little attention to the warning sirens.

  The aircraft had 2,000 tons of incendiary explosive — a hotchpotch of white phosphorus and napalm, the new jellied gasoline mixture concocted from a Harvard University recipe of oleic acid, naphthenic acid derived from crude oil, palmitic acid derived from coconut oil, and aviation fuel — neatly tucked away in their bellies.

  This luggage they dropped on a city with a wartime population of about five million.

  The M-69 cluster bombs, nicknamed ‘Tokyo Calling Cards’, sprayed napalm over a 100-foot area before or after landing, and then exploded; sending flames rampaging through densely packed wooden homes. Asphalt boiled in the 1,800-degree heat; super-heated flames air sucked people into the flames. U.S. aircraft returned to their bases with blistered paint underneath. The fires could be viewed 150 miles away.

  Operation Meetinghouse was the most devastating air raid in history.

  Two percent of Tokyo’s residents, between 80,000 and 130,000 people, most of them civilians, perished. The lucky ones died quickly in the initial explosions of TNT charges; others would be burned or boiled alive. 25 percent of the city —267,000 mostly wood-and-paper buildings in the downtown Shitamachi quarter — was destroyed.

  Tsukiji Fish Market (these days one of Tokyo’s most popular tourist attractions) and Kanda Market were swallowed up in the conflagration.

  One million people were made instantly homeless.

  “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night, 9-10 March, than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined,” LeMay later boasted.

  More people died in one night than the combined military fatalities in the Vietnam War for the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

  There were casualties amidst the raiders.

  About 42 of the bombers were damaged, 14 B-29s crashed, and two hundred and forty-three U.S. airmen were lost.

  While some planes were shredded by flak, several had noncombat related technical problems and one aircraft was struck by lightning. A significant number of B-29 losses were due to vortex updrafts from the fires that tore the wings off one bomber.

  A B-29 nicknamed ‘Tall In The Saddle’ crashed in Ibaraki, killing nine crewmembers. One of the three survivors was executed by the military police and the other two, interned to Tokyo’s military prison, burned to death in an air raid by another 464 B-29s on May 25.

  After seeing action in the Korean War, the B-29 was retired off in 1960 and replaced by the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress — a plane perhaps better known because of the hairstyle, a cocktail (combining Kahlúa, Baileys Irish Cream, and Grand Marnier), and the band.

  On December 7, 1964, the Japanese government conferred the First Order of Merit with the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun upon General Curtis LeMay — who had by then turned his bombing attention on Vietnam, suggesting the use of nuclear weapons and declaring, “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

  It was no accident that the gung-ho character of General Buck Turgidson, played by actor George C. Scott in Stanley Kubrick’s biting satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), was based on LeMay.

  Time to leap back from the abyss, or at least the heavy-handed content of the last article, and go somewhat lightweight here.

  I’m not often a fan of my own articles — sometimes I dig particular parts, and I’m always proud to see them in print, depending on layout — but I start nitpicking straight after they weasel off the press.

  This one, however, still reads okay to me five years after it was published in Geek magazine in the U.S. I ended up nicking a chunk of it to include in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, though F Troop was left on the cutting-room floor.

  Obon a Go Go

  Compulsorily celebrated in mid-August in most regions of Japan, Obon week is one of the country’s three major holiday seasons — which plays havoc with domestic and international travel, and raises the prospect of completely booked-out accommodation or outrageously stiff hotel rates.

  On top of these, business itself comes to a virtual standstill — as much as this is possible in an über-metropolis like Tokyo. Most shops, banks, ATMs and stores are closed for the duration of the week, during which employees, and obviously the artificially-intelligent types that run the ATMs, are coerced by their bosses to take mandatory vacation (or leave-without-pay), all in observance of this thing called Obon.

  So what’s all the big fuss about, anyway?

  While Obon is the annual Buddhist event in which to commemorate and memorialize one’s ancestors, it’s also believed that the freewheeling spirits of these dearly departed return to this world in order to visit their relatives. And — you guessed right — it all happens round Obon week.

  So the festival has shaped-up as an significant traditional custom in Japan, as well as a bit of a late-summer cleaning fiesta: people from the big cities return to their home towns to visit and clean their old folks’ graves, then scrub their own places too.

  Colourful paper lanterns are propped up in front of houses to guide the ancestors’ spirits home (just in case they’ve forgotten), there’s a swag of ceremonial food and saké on offer, and Japanese rediscover of modicum of religiosity.

  But the big deal and the biggest fun at Obon time are the oh-so-special evening dance-offs, dubbed bon odori.

  Kids and their grandparents don summer kimonos (yukata), and as the bon odori music plays, they perform a dance routine that is, in some respects, choreographed the same way throughout Japan.

  There are specific moves that I like to call “The Shoveler” and “Vogue”, but these get lost in the (written) translation here.

  The typical bon odori dance involves people lining up around a high wooden building made especially for the festival, called a yagura, which doubles as a bandstand for the musicians, taiko drummers, and guest crooners. It also bears an unnerving resemblance to the ever-collapsing watchtower in ‘60s U.S. sitcom, F Troop.

  Some dancers proceed clockwise, and some dancers sidle counter-clockwise around the yagura, depending upon the particular festival, but never the twain shall meet.

  Amidst the traditional soundtrack is inserted a bunch of enka classics and famous anime TV tunes, like those for Doraemon and Pokémon—and grandmas are just as likely to bop away at these, with adept panache, as their whippersnapper descendants.

  Somewhat creepily, it’s also a widely held belief that those spirits of deceased loved ones are jigging in step at the same time.

  There are even more traditions and customs to round out this one-week extravaganza — kids who’ve caught goldfish at carnival booths are often subsequently heard shrieking as ghost stories are told, Buddhist shrines are
decorated in outrageous new ways, processions of people march in the streets, and fireworks fill the sky. You’d swear you can even smell brimstone — but it’s probably just gunpowder.

  At the tail-end of Obon, floating lanterns are lobbed into rivers, lakes and seas in order to guide the spirits back into their world, perhaps so they can choreograph new heavenly dance moves for next year’s event.

  This piece was published via Australian cinema-oriented magazine Filmink in 2010 as put of a twin-article effort to correspond with the centennial of the birth of famed Japanese writer/director Akira Kurosawa.

  You know Kurosawa, right?

  If not, you should. In Tokyo 103 years ago — on March 23, 1910, to be pedantic about it — Akira Kurosawa was born the youngest of eight kids to middle-aged, middle-class former samurai stock. He lived to see his 88th birthday, made 30 films over 50 years, most of those productions are essential viewing for even the most half-hearted of movie buffs, and when you talk Kurosawa you really need to flaunt a thesaurus.

  Close this book and go grab one or two of the following: Yojimbo, Drunken Angel, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Stray Dog, Kagemusha, Ran, The Bad Sleep Well, Rashomon, Sanjuro, High and Low, The Quiet Duel.

  Rashomon (1950) scored the Venice Film Festival Grand Prize and an Academy Award for Honorary Foreign Language Film in 1951, while Seven Samurai won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1954; he was nominated for Best Director at the Oscars for Ran 31 years later, and then treated to the lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1990.

  Given I’m a huge fan of Kurosawa and his favourite actor (Toshiro Mifune) the slant here is obvious.

  But I haven’t put in the larger piece I did on Kurosawa, as this included quotes and opinions from various film-makers and Japanese creative types, and I haven’t been able to get permission to reprint the story in this tome — so let’s stick with the Mifune rap.

  These men have had an incredible working bond and both heavily influenced my fiction. But if you still haven’t checked out any of the movies mentioned, I recommend doing so.

  Pronto, like.

  Toshiro Mifune: Sexy Beast

  1984 might’ve been the year that the Macintosh was introduced, Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture, and Australia swapped national anthems (finally ditching ‘God Save the Queen’), but it was also the year that a major Japanese magazine conducted a national poll; when the results were in the actor Toshiro Mifune, at age 64, was declared the winner of the ‘Most-Japanese Man’ competition — singled out from all Japanese males, past and present, over the nation’s known history.

  This is no minor feat when you fathom that the Japanese trace their recorded history back two millennia.

  Mifune was prolific in the acting industry long before attempting English language roles in Steven Spielberg’s 1941 or the TV miniseries Shogun.

  His filmography at imdb.com tips the 180 mark, over a hundred of which were produced prior to his turn as Lee Marvin’s violent Man Friday in Hell in the Pacific (1968); the list stretches from his first film in 1947 through to the his death at age 77, fifty years later.

  It’s no accident that Akira Kurosawa, the writer/director with whom Mifune did his superior work, orchestrated most of these Japanese films. By the time the rest of the world cottoned on to the actor, he and Kurosawa were estranged, having made their last film together in 1965 after a partnership that lasted almost two decades.

  There’s his well-meaning rookie cop, eerily akin to a young Gregory Peck, who loses his gun on public transport in Stray Dog (1949); the ailing yakuza gangster in Drunken Angel the year before; a brash samurai charlatan in Seven Samurai (1954); his hyperactive, paranoid dynamo in the Macbeth-as-jidaigeki-drama, Throne of Blood (1957); the bespectacled salaryman with the slow-burning vendetta in The Bad Sleep Well (1960).

  Perhaps the most memorable and famous of Toshiro’s roles is the blasé, mysterious stranger in Yojimbo (1961) and its sequel Sanjuro the following year — himself the role model for both Clint Eastwood’s and Bruce Willis’s Man with No Name characters in A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.

  The stand-out collaboration is debatable, but if you want to angle things in Mifune’s corner, toward the movie in which he rattles bones most as the sexy beast/enfant terrible of old-school Japanese cinema, you’re going to have to settle on 1958, when the actor was 38 and at the height of his stagecraft.

  Star Wars aficionados interested in finding out the source material for Episode IV are duty-bound to investigate a B&W movie made that year by Kurosawa in the widescreen Tohoscope format, starring Mifune, and originally released in Japan in December — because The Hidden Fortress has most of the key elements of a plot used 19 years later when the first Star Wars movie was released.

  But in truth it’s Toshiro Mifune, above and beyond the superior script and direction, who shines.

  Cast in the principle role of General Rokurota Makabe, the actor’s turn here sparked the whole ‘sexy thing’ reference in the somewhat dubious headline for this article — and without doubt contributed to his man’s man award in 1984.

  As a samurai, General Makabe is perhaps the scariest, most fearless and honourable man alive — as well as one of the more charismatic and inspiring. He’s got that rousing leader quality, the sort Russell Crowe delivered in Gladiator, Edward James Olmos brandishes on Battlestar Galactica, and King Hal throws about in the pages of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

  It’s also the kind you just didn’t get at all from Orlando Bloom in Kingdom Of Heaven.

  Think effortlessly debonair, man-of-action panache, and gravelly speeches that’d embolden even an inert, pen-pushing sloth like myself to pull myself to my knees, yell a bit, shake a blunt spear about in the air, and cheerfully follow both his magnetic persona and/or twinkling eyes into battle — at least some of the way, before diving for cover.

  You just know that Makabe is like Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and he’ll never actually cop an injury at all. The guy wears serious bravery on his sleeve, and acts like it’s a regular wristwatch.

  Most of all, though, while the steely scowl and the gruff baritone are the hallmarks of any encounter with Mifune in the reels of The Hidden Fortress, there’s also a barely repressed machismo that hovers there as he strokes his chin in thought, seemingly not amused or divorced from the events that transpire around him — then throws back his head with riotous laughter, more than a little bit mad.

  Each facet is a thrilling moment that keeps your eyes glued on this fascinating, sexy beast of a man and his scene-chewing performance.

  The next article was written at the end of 2011 for recently revived Geek mag over in the ‘States, and I plagiarized some of it to shoe-in to One Hundred Years of Vicissitude.

  Not just the Bond references and the saké, but the Toyota 2000GT convertible (Kohana’s car), piranha, sumo, and the 48th printing of Instant Japanese: A Pocketful of Useful Phrases.

  I also nicked the Siamese vodka earlier on for inclusion in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

  The article for Geek was introduced with the following disclaimer/fill-in paragraph at the beginning:

  “The Bond movie You Only Live Twice turns forty-five this year [2012], and to celebrate JapaneseCultureGoNow!’s Tokyo-based correspondent Andrez Bergen has turned its sights on the arguable classic to answer a slew of innocuous questions. For starters, is it one of the best 007 movies, or in bed with the worst? Does it stand up to contemporary senses as well as it did in 1967? And what exactly is the correct temperature for saké?”

  007 Dies Twice

  Let me confess to you here and now that the 1966-67 production of You Only Live Twice is my favorite James Bond film, and it wasn’t just the title-sequence that snagged me.

  I’m subjective about it, of course.

  I first saw the movie on the telly back in Melbourne (Australia) when I was in primary school, and I’m fairly certain it was my first James Bond film — although quit
e possibly Dr. No or The Man With the Golden Gun preceded it. This was definitely one of my first doses of ‘Japan’, alongside the TV series The Samurai — which was oddly successful in Australia from the 1960s on.

  You Only Live Twice and The Samurai provided me with a rather skewed idea of Japan and are one of the subliminal reasons I moved to this country ten years ago.

  While You Only Live Twice tends to be mauled by disgruntled critics trying to build on their largesse, I love so much about this film. It slightly pips Goldfinger, another classic, and rides roughshod over all the Roger Moore outings.

  Even though he later said that the original novel was “Ian Fleming’s worst book, with no plot in it which would even make a movie,” Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) worked on the screenplay and Lewis Gilbert (Sink the Bismarck!) directed. There’s a thoroughly rousing score (by the late, great John Barry of course, with Nancy Sinatra — Frank’s daughter — doing the vocal work-out in one of the series’ most memorable songs), and Little Nellie remains one of Bond’s most quaintly unprepos- sessing technological contraptions.

  Here we had spy intrigue at the height of the Cold War (ahhh, nostalgia), with the evil organization that is SPECTRE fuelling fiction between the United States and the Soviet Union, while Her Majesty’s Government tries to run interference to stop matters blowing out into World War III. There are space capsules aplenty, a gaping-jawed UFO, a rousing helicopter battle, and James Bond is ‘murdered’ (in bed with a femme fatale, of course) at the beginning of the flick.

  On top of this, much of the movie was set and filmed in 1960s Japan, so we get often hilarious doses of sumo, women, nihonshu (saké), a Shinto wedding, exotic pearl divers, devious salarymen, Bond’s counterfeit Oriental makeover, and the clumsy ninja at a training school located slap-bang next to the spectacular World Heritage-classified Himeji Castle.

  Siamese vodka and piranha are also shoe-ins.