Looking back on the affair in 2014, historian Nicholas J. Cull of the University of Southern California put part of the blame on presidential-level interference in the script process. “To borrow a metaphor from the incident which started the whole thing,” wrote Cull, “they were at sea in a flimsy craft and were broken in two by the impact of a powerful oncoming vessel; ironically, in the case of the movie that vessel was the Kennedy White House.”
A few weeks after his inauguration, Kennedy received a surprising, emotional message from his past. It was a letter from his Solomon Islands savior Biuku Gasa, who wanted to share his feelings on Kennedy’s entering the White House. “This is my joy that you are now President of the United States of America,” wrote Gasa. “It was not in my strength that I and my friends were able to rescue you in the time of war, but in the strength of God we were able to help you.”
Kennedy wrote back a fond letter that read, “I can’t tell you how delighted I was to know that you are well and prospering in your home so many thousands of miles away from Washington. Like you, I am eternally grateful for the act of Divine Providence which brought me and my companions together with you and your friends who so valorously effected our rescue during time of war. Needless to say, I am deeply moved by your expressions and I hope that the new Responsibilities which are mine may be exercised for the benefit of my own countrymen and the welfare of all of our brothers in Christ. You will always have a special place in my mind and my heart, and I wish you and your people continued prosperity and good health.”
Kennedy continued to think of his old brothers-in-arms Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, and he held on to the hope that he could see them again someday.
In the Oval Office, John F. Kennedy also still thought of Japan and of former captain Kohei Hanami of the Amagiri. Ten years after his abortive and near-fatal stay in Tokyo, JFK began considering of the possibility of returning to Japan to meet with Hanami and his fellow Amagiri veterans.
It was a trip Kennedy’s friend Gunji Hosono had also suggested in a series of letters to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and so in February 1962, RFK and his wife traveled to Japan on their own state visit, as the first stop on an around-the-world goodwill tour. RFK’s Japan trip was also to serve as a testing of the waters for a possible JFK presidential visit that would follow, perhaps in the presidential election year of 1964.
On the afternoon of February 6, 1962, Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, entered a packed auditorium at elite Waseda University in Tokyo, on the second day of a planned eight-day visit to Japan.
A riot was erupting at their feet.
Standing before a giant pair of Japanese and American flags, Robert Kennedy took the stage and faced an audience of thousands of Japanese students in a state of utter bedlam, packed into an auditorium designed to hold less than half as many. Thirty-five hundred students were jammed into the hall, and four thousand others surrounded the building.
There was shouting and screaming as pockets of communist agitators spread through the crowd, bent on throwing RFK off the university grounds. Much of the buzzing crowd was welcoming, but smaller sections were chanting insults at Kennedy, and at each other, including, “Okinawa!” “Cuba!” “Kennedy go home!” “Shut up and sit down!” Scores of reporters and photographers swarmed around the stage, encircling Kennedy and his party, which included rising young Japanese politician Yasuhiro Nakasone, who later became prime minister of Japan.
A live national TV feed was broadcasting the scene to millions in Japan who had recently bought their first-ever black-and-white TVs from Sony and other fast-rising Japanese manufacturers. Across the country, horrified Japanese citizens, ordinarily polite and gracious hosts, could see that their distinguished foreign guest, the brother of the president of the United States, no less, was being gravely insulted by a crowd that was out of control.
RFK had with him no personal security other than a few nearby U.S. government aides. There were no uniformed police or security guards anywhere in sight, as by tradition they were not allowed on the grounds of the university. Ethel Kennedy and their State Department translator stood by his side, equally defenseless.
Robert Kennedy had been sent to Japan by his brother President John F. Kennedy, as a prelude to what they both thought would be the first-ever trip there by a sitting American president. The presidential visit would culminate in the “photo op” JFK and his father had wanted to stage for more than ten years—of an emotional reunion between the survivors of the PT 109 and veterans of the destroyer, Amagiri, that sank her. Another memorable photo eleven years earlier of General Douglas MacArthur towering jauntily over a formally dressed Emperor Hirohito had made the point, in dramatic fashion, that the two countries were at peace and working together, with Japan clearly as the vanquished junior partner. This new photo would enshrine the postwar relationship of the two nations as full partners in a way that no proclamation or treaty could. In the meantime, media images of Robert Kennedy and his wife barnstorming through Japan could project a young, vigorous image of America to all generations of Japanese.
The visit was inspired in part by the persistent enthusiasm of the Kennedy’s old friend from Japan, Gunji Hosono. Robert Kennedy later explained, “Every few weeks I would receive a letter [from Hosono] stressing the importance of a trip to his country, and about every ten days a visitor from Japan would arrive in my office, armed with an introduction from Dr. Hosono. He would shake hands and sit down and immediately begin to urge that I go to Japan as soon as possible.”
But now, on just the second day of RFK’s trip, not only did everything seem about to unravel, but it appeared Kennedy could be in immediate physical danger. In fact such a reception was not unprecedented. Two years earlier, when Dwight Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, arrived in Tokyo to plan a trip to Japan by President Eisenhower, he was attacked by protestors, evacuated by helicopter, and promptly fled the country. The Eisenhower trip was canceled.
The local CIA station in Tokyo warned RFK of fresh intelligence reports predicting the situation at Waseda could become dangerous and urged him to cancel the event. One report said that mobs of students would snake-dance around the auditorium, another account predicted picketers would link arms to blockade Kennedy. Forewarned, RFK nevertheless decided to brave the crowds and try to enter the university for a scheduled forum with students. Outside the auditorium, a mob of three thousand young people surged around Kennedy and his party, and there they all seemed friendly and joyous.
Inside, however, the story was very different. Kennedy recalled: “the building seated about 1,500, but 3,000 were jammed into the hall. They filled the aisles, the orchestra section, the balcony and spilled out into the corridors.” The disrupters in the crowd may have been small in number, but their shouts of “Free Okinawa” and other slogans echoed the frustration of many Japanese who still resented the postwar U.S. occupation that ended ten years earlier, were humiliated by the continued American occupation of Okinawa, and worried that Cold War tensions would pull Japan into a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Japanese, of course, knew better than any other people the stakes of nuclear conflict.
As flashbulbs popped and the crowd applauded in welcome, Robert Kennedy began speaking into a table-mounted microphone. Screams of protest erupted, along with a thunderous stomping of feet. Toward the front of the audience, a student activist named Yuzo Tachiya began yelling at the top of his lungs. He had helped distribute thirty thousand fliers around campus earlier in the day to draw students to the event, and he had worked out with the faculty how the event would be structured and translated. Tachiya objected to Kennedy breaking the agreed-upon format, by using his own translator and making a speech. Tachiya wanted a debate instead. And he wasn’t going to shut up until he got it.
RFK remembered, “At first I thought if I ignored him he would subside.”
So he continued right through the shouting: “The great advantage of the system under which we li
ve—you and I—is that we can exchange views and exchange ideas in a frank manner, with both of us benefiting. . . . Under a democracy we have a right to say what we think and we have the right to disagree. So if we can proceed in an orderly fashion, with you asking questions and me answering them, I am confident I will gain and that perhaps also you will understand a little better the positions of my country and its people.”
But “bedlam was spreading,” recalled Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler Jr. “The Communists were yelling ‘Kennedy, go home.’ The anti-Communists were yelling back, and the others were yelling for everyone to keep quiet. So Kennedy stopped talking.”
RFK said, “There is a gentleman down in the front who evidently disagrees with me. If he will ask a single question, I will try to give an answer. That is the democratic way and the way we should proceed. He is asking a question and he is entitled to courtesy.” He beckoned to Tachiya, “You sir, have you something to tell us?”
Robert F. Kennedy, during a grand tour of Japan in 1962 intended to pave the way for a planned presidential visit by his brother, faced a chaotic scene at Waseda University. Pandemonium reigned, but Kennedy remained calm, inviting lead heckler Yuzo Tachiya (pictured) onto the stage. (John Dominus, Time-Life)
Yuzo Tachiya was pushed up onto the stage. Kennedy shook his hand, and then did something that may have astonished and impressed the multitudes of Japanese citizens watching spellbound on network TV. At the center of the stage, in a gesture of respect, Robert F. Kennedy politely bowed to his heckler.
He took Tachiya’s hand and led him carefully to the microphone. The crowd roared its approval. “Bob treated him with great friendliness,” remembered Seigenthaler. RFK was “so cool,” recalled U.S. State Department official Brandon Grove, “so cool.”
“I’m glad to see you,” said Kennedy. “I wonder if we couldn’t see if you have a question you’d like to ask. I know that you must believe in free exchange and have something to say. Perhaps you could make your statement and ask me a question and then give me an opportunity to answer.”
Like a patient older brother, RFK put his hand on the young Tachiya’s shoulder and said, “You go first.”
As millions of Japanese citizens looked on and an interpreter whispered the translation in Kennedy’s ear, the attorney general of the United States politely held the heavy microphone for Yuzo Tachiya, as the student, who RFK noted was “taut and tense and filled with contempt,” raced through a ten-minute diatribe on a long series of hot-button issues: the risks of nuclear war, the occupation of Okinawa, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution (renouncing armed forces), the CIA’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and America’s embryonic intervention in Vietnam.
Finally, when Tachiya finished his oration and Kennedy took his turn to speak, he was cut off. “Immediately every light in the house went out as the power failed,” remembered RFK, “and the microphone went dead. For fifteen minutes there was complete chaos. I attempted to speak without a microphone. It was not possible. Everyone now began to yell—at me, at each other, at the school authorities. This only added to the confusion.”
Some students were pitching chairs at each other. But Kennedy sensed correctly that even though the auditorium power was dead, the live national TV feed remained plugged in. He could still speak directly to the entire country of Japan. RFK stood his ground and patiently endured the spectacle for nearly twenty minutes as some lights were restored and university officials scurried around to salvage the affair. A battery-powered bullhorn was discovered beneath the stage and given to Kennedy. The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer, a highly respected Harvard University Japan scholar with an accomplished Japanese wife, moved to the front of the stage, held up his hands, and beseeched the multitude in fluent Japanese to quiet down and listen to their guest.
The bedlam subsided and Kennedy proceeded, without notes, to give the students and the TV audience of Japan a point-by-point reply to the arguments of the Yuzo Tachiya, still beside him. The remarkable extemporaneous speech was a vivid demonstration of democracy in action. “We in America believe that we should have divergences of views. We believe that everyone has the right to express himself. We believe that young people have the right to speak out and give their views and ideas. We believe that opposition is important. It’s only through a discussion of issues and questions that my country can determine in what direction it should go.”
“This is not true in many other countries,” Kennedy argued. “Would it be possible for somebody in a Communist country to get up and oppose the government of that country?” He explained: “I am visiting Japan to learn and find out from young people such as yourselves what your views are as far as Japan is concerned and as far as the future of the world is concerned.”
“The audience erupted in cheers and the incident became one of the biggest press stories about our trip,” recalled journalist Susie Wilson, who accompanied the Kennedys to Japan. “I had never seen such a raw display of courage before, and I understood, in that moment, the risks one takes as an activist and what is required to sway an audience.” According to witness Brandon Grove, Kennedy “was not ruffled, or angry,” “he knew what he wanted to say,” and “he spoke from the heart about what he thought was right.”
Robert Kennedy’s impromptu display of eloquence in the midst of chaos was so moving, recalled Grove, that his own eyes were filling with tears. He looked over at another American aide, John Seigenthaler, and saw that the same thing was happening to him, too. They were witnessing America at its finest on the world stage, a glimpse of their country’s potential to inspire the world through its words, its example, and its courage in inviting criticism and other points of view while holding firm to its own ideals.
RFK welcomed other students to ask questions, and as he wrapped up his remarks he closed with a burst of soaring rhetoric that anticipated the heights he would later achieve in his 1968 U.S. presidential campaign: “We are facing many of the same problems in the United States that you face in Japan. The solution for all of us is to join as brothers to meet these difficulties. There are great problems. There are great challenges. The age of greatness is before us and we, joined as brothers, can meet our responsibilities and obligations and make this world a better place for ourselves and for our children.”
At this, a voice in the audience began singing a traditional Japanese children’s folk song called “Akatombo,” or “Red Dragonfly,” about a child’s memories of seeing dragonflies at twilight. More and more student voices joined in, and soon the entire auditorium was roaring through the melody in a sentimental serenade for their guests.
Dragonflies, as red as sunset,
Back when I was young
In twilight skies, there on her back I’d ride
When the day was done
Mountain fields, in late November
Long ago it seems
Mulberry trees and treasures we would gather
Was it only just a dream? . . .
Let’s go back,
Let’s go back together
Let’s go back to childhood,
Let’s go back to the sweet old days . . .
Dragonflies, as red as sunset,
Back when I was young
Now in my eyes, when I see dragonflies
Tears are always sure to come.
In the audience a tall teenage boy stood up and shouted a declaration to Robert and Ethel Kennedy.
Kennedy thought it might be more verbal abuse from an angry communist, but the translator whispered that the boy was apologizing for the previous behavior of some of the students. He was the school’s cheerleader in chief, and he bounded through the crowd and launched himself up onto the stage next to Kennedy and his wife.
Holding his white-gloved hands straight in the air to signal the crowd to launch into the Waseda school song, “Miyako No Seihoku,” the cheerleader swung his hands back hard and fast on the first note, and accidentally delivered a hard blow with his left fi
st directly to the stomach of a stunned Ethel Kennedy, sending her backward, doubled over in pain. During an interview for this book more than a half century later, Ethel Kennedy remembered, “In his exuberance he flung his left arm out and he caught me in the stomach. Of course at the time I was pregnant and I didn’t know it. He just knocked the wind out of me.” In a film of the encounter she winces hard, then quickly recovers with a smile to join the students and their American guests in the chorus of shouting, “Waseda! Waseda! Waseda!” Until the day he died in 1968, Robert Kennedy delighted in singing and shouting the song for friends.
It was, remembered Ambassador Reischauer, nothing less than “one of the most dramatic live TV programs in history.” He wrote, “I cannot overemphasize what a tremendous success the Attorney General’s visit was, especially the incident at Waseda University. While the latter skirted the thin edge of disaster, it turned out to be a resounding triumph that may well have a lasting effect on the student movement in Japan.” Reischauer also recalled: “At the time we did not realize what a tremendous victory we had just had. Although the microphones were dead in the hall, they were operating on all the television hook-ups, so that the whole of Japan had been electrified by [the scene]. Bobby’s calm, reasoned, even humorous presentation had come through in sharp contrast to the ranting of the Communist students. He had become in one brief moment a sort of youth hero, recognized by all Japanese, and the rest of his trip was virtually a triumphal procession.”
It was an overwhelming media and public relations coup for Robert and Ethel Kennedy, who were greeted by enormous crowds and glowing media coverage for the rest of their trip, during which they visited Japanese farms, factories, schools, and temples, toured Osaka and Kyoto, rode the Tokyo subway, held hands and plunged onto a crowded Tokyo skating rink, ate succulent Kobe beef, and watched judo and sumo displays. At the great Todai-ji temple complex in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, they lit incense and viewed the world’s largest bronze sculpture of Buddha. At a sake bar in Ginza, RFK mingled with customers and sang what he remembered as “a very off-key rendition” of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Thousands of people lined rural roads as the Kennedys’ motorcade passed through the country.
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