"Yesterday"
Synopsis:
The year is 1966, when the Beatles made their historical debut performance in Japan at the Nippon Budōkan. The personal freedom and budding sense of self expression a young girl finds in attending the concert was nothing short of a rebellious act.
Book Excerpt:
Yesterday
It was evening and Mother sat on the tatami along the tokonoma alcove. Her tea ceremony students had already gone home. I leaned against the frame of the shoji doors and watched her. She stared at a green incense container, hovering over it.
“Wow, peacock green,” I said.
“Beautiful, isn`t it,” Mother said.
“Very beautiful. Kyoyaki?”
“Yes, Seven-Treasures cloisonne.”
The lid of the container showed golden kanji-characters.
“What does it say?”
“It says good luck.”
She opened the lid and placed it beside the container. I coiled a strand of my hair.
“The Beatles. I mean the concert. Please...”
“What’s so good about their long hair?”
I put my hand in my skirt pocket.
“Delinquents do that,” she quipped.
I took my hand out of the pocket. She continued to touch the container and mumbled a name. I grabbed my shoulder-length hair. Her hands stopped. I pulled at my hair some more and twisted my face. She put the container back on the tatami and shut the lid.
At school the following Monday, after lunch, most of my classmates had gone outside, but Q-ko remained in her chair, facing the blackboard. Through open windows on our left, the ocean looked dark. I drew my chair out one row away from her and sat down.
“I still have one ticket,” she said.
“Honto?” I replied.
“My childhood friend won the lotto.”
“Lucky.”
“I must go pay for it though.”
A gentle breeze blew in. Outside, seagulls scattered and glided.
“Do you still want a ticket?” she said.
“You don’t? Can’t you go?” I asked, as I faced the podium but eyed Q-ko’s stretched out legs.
“No,” she answered in a nearly inaudible voice.
I wondered why because her mother was so lenient compared with my own. In heavy rain, Q-ko was almost always absent from school. She was scared of worms coming out on the dirt roads on the way to the school. On those rainy days, her mother called the school for her and sometimes upgraded her train pass to a first class ticket. Such luxuries would never happen to me. I had to go to school in rain, snow, or during typhoons. Asking my mother whether I could stay home because of worms or even snakes, or whether I could ride first class to go anywhere was out of the question.
I turned around.
“Your mom won’t let you go?” my voice shot up.
She nodded, meaning no and shrunk deep into her chair.
“Yes. I want it!” I gulped.
I had given up on the idea of going to the concert, but now Q-ko’s offer was another chance. If I missed this opportunity, I would never be able to talk or write about what certainly would be a once-in-a-life-time experience! When I had pleaded with Mother before, my attitude had lacked seriousness. Q-ko’s ticket was my dead last chance. The Beatles might never come to Japan again.
Tuesday evening came and to prepare for my request, I helped Mother in the kitchen and replied hai (yes), to anything she asked. The clock on the wall struck nine times. Through opened fusuma doors, a shuffling noise came from the eight-mat ocha room.
“What are you doing?” I said, stepping up from the adjacent smaller room.
“Marking tuition envelopes for the ocha students,” Mother said.
She sat before the tokonoma alcove dressed in a hemp-leaf design kimono. On the back wall of the tokonoma, a scroll displayed brush strokes of a waterfall, and at its foot, a wet, wild hydrangea flower tilted in a bamboo basket.
“Is there anything else to do? Are you waiting for the iron kettle to cool off?”
In the corner of the room, the kettle sat on a bronze stove. The Korean-style stove hid the mound of ashes and coal. I couldn’t read her mood. I entered the room and sat near the fusuma door with my legs folded underneath me. I placed my hands on my lap and exhaled.
“I have something to talk to you about.”
Her head turned a few degrees, but she continued shuffling the envelopes.
“It’s about the concert.”
“Again?”
“This is my last chance. I’ll regret it if I don`t go. Please.”
“Children should obey their parents.”
“I’ll practice ocha. I`ll do chores, before you ask. Onegaaaii.”
Mother could be absolutely unyielding; begging had only ever worked with my father. So I needed to make a stronger case. She looked at me, widening her eyes as though she were watching a yellow fox transforming into a human. Because I had many miserable fights while practicing ocha, I had quit and ever since, had become an uncooperative daughter.
“Come and sit here,” she said. She advanced her body with her legs still folded underneath her, extending both her thumbs and pushing her fists down onto the tatami like ski poles. I sat down a few feet away from her knees.
“The Beatles help my study of English,” I said.
She examined my face.
“It IS true.”
She dropped her gaze onto the tatami and pressed her lips together. A few long moments went by.
“How much is it?”
Those were such pure words—How much!— and sounded to me like an Ohm, a brush stroke of a circle drawn by Zen abbots. Mother loved the symbol so much that she owned two scrolls with it. She said that the circle symbolized unspoken, reciprocal understanding. And after all, she did understand me.
“Twenty one hundred yen.”
She went to get her wallet and handed me three thousand-yen notes.
I bowed to her on the tatami like a samurai to his lord, closed the fusuma door, and went to my room.
Two weeks before the concert, I rode the train to a ticket office in Tokyo after school. The ticket I received from Q-ko still hadn’t been paid for. At the ticket booth, many teenagers in school uniforms stood in a long line. I lined up behind a tall girl dressed in a yellow gathered skirt. She must have gone home and changed her clothes before she got there, I thought.
“What a long line, isn`t it,” I first said to her but then quickly added, “excuse me, but has your teacher spoken against the concert?”
“No, he hasn’t,” she said and folded her arms across her bosom.
“Not at all?”
“Well, he knows I’m going alone.”
“What did he say?”
“Something like, ‘be careful,’ ”she said, glancing me up and down, from my head to my toes.
“Wow, you`re lucky then.”
“Our school is progressive. We don’t have uniforms like yours.”
“Really, so it is like an American school?”
“We can go from preschool to college all in the same school.”
“How great, it’s just like an elevator,” I said.
Behind us, two boys with shaved heads, wearing black trousers and white short-sleeved shirts, whispered to each other. They must have overheard our conversation. I turned and searched their faces.
“What is your school like then? Did your teacher tell you not to go to the concert?”
The taller boy turned to the shorter boy.
“If he finds out, we’ll get into trouble!”
The shorter boy looked up and rolled his eyes.
I felt a cramp in my stomach. I hadn’t heard our school’s policy on the Beatles concert, but I wasn’t going to ask my classmates or teachers about it. If something should remain vague, this was it. There was a safety in not knowing. Not one teacher had warned me about the concert.
I had a midterm on that Friday, which was the first of July, 1966. The test ended at noon, and the concert started at two. As soon as the test finished, I took a streetcar from near the school to my cousin’s house in Honmoku, to change my clothes. My aunt wanted to give me lunch but as I stood at the wooden bench in the entryway of her house, I told her I didn't’ have time. I changed into my sky-blue street clothes in my cousin’s room. As I placed my uniform, math textbook, binoculars, and collapsible umbrella into a Union Market grocery bag, she cast her eyes on my clothes as though she had never seen such brightly colored clothes in her life. Although she was 25 years old, she had probably never gone anywhere by herself during her school years, and certainly had never worked anywhere, sheltered and protected Japanese box-wrapped daughter that she was. She practiced kimono making and flower arrangement and helped her mother around the house as obedient, traditional young women were supposed to do until they found good husbands. I slipped into my shoes and rushed out.
On the train ride to Tokyo, I listened to endless announcements that never seemed to stop. I began imagining the Beatles on stage. After five more announcements,
I glanced at my wristwatch. Japanese musicians and comedians would start performing at 2, and the Beatles would appear on stage at 3:20 p.m. If I hadn’t stopped at my aunt’s place, I could have made it earlier, but I didn’t want to see the Beatles in my school uniform and I didn’t want to go to a public restroom to change my clothes.
I hiked up my shirtsleeves and began to study for a math midterm, and by the time the train got to Kudanshita station, the air had become misty. A black-ink sign for the concert stood on the left side of the exit, and a brushstroke arrow pointed to the left.
I turned a corner and ran straight out onto the white concrete sidewalk. Thick green leaves rustled above. Soon, an octagonal building with a gentle-sloped roof appeared. It was already past three, and the grounds of the Budōkan looked vacant. The concert had started an hour ago.
At the gate, the portable-fences stood empty. I sprinted to the building, pounding the gravel beneath my feet. A few policemen stood here and there. According to the newspapers, the tight security was going to be unprecedented, but I didn’t see it.
I thought that maybe the media had been hype. A splitting, mechanical noise echoed in the ground as the opening acts, The Blue Jeans and The Drifters finished their performances. The Beatles would take the stage in fifteen minutes.
I clutched my bag and dashed to the lobby. A female usher in a bolero uniform came over and I handed her my ticket and followed her upstairs. She pointed to an aisle seat on the third row from the balcony rail.
“Sumimasen, excuse me,” I said to the girls on my right.
“It will start any minute now,” the girl next to me said.
Then a buzzer went off. My knees pushed against one another, and the knuckles holding my binoculars whitened. Policemen with hard-heeled shoes stampeded in as they were performing a military exercise. The noise snowballed into a thunder, and their gray uniforms filled the aisles of Budōkan. A high pitch whistle sounded. They sat down in unison.
“The concert will begin in a few moments,” an announcer said.
E. H. Eric, the MC, appeared on stage dressed in a black tuxedo and bow tie. “Please welcome them with big applause,” he said in Japanese and then switched to English: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Beatles!”
He extended his arm toward the right side of the stage and turned his back and walked off. Screaming arose from downstairs, but the stage remained empty. Some people had probably caught a glance of the Beatles standing back at the corner of the stage, and
I had wished I had been one of them.
Paul popped out, followed by John and George who ran up on the stage behind him. Ringo climbed up on the higher level where his drums were. They all wore whitish jackets and dark trousers, and their shirts were dark red. Paul’s smile matched monochrome pictures I had seen of him in magazines and films, but there he was, as was I, and he was in color.
A roar came up from the first floor. The audience on the second floor seemed glued to their seats. Paul picked up his guitar with his left hand.
Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music. Any old way you choose it.Paul turned to the right and then to the left. My eyes followed him, but a big pole blocked my sight. I leaned over toward the policeman next to me and stretched my neck out to get an unobstructed view. The song segued into “She’s a Woman.”
The music filled my soul. I wanted to shout, but people around me were quiet. I wished I had come to the concert with a friend, so we could shout together. After six songs, the sound faded and I squinted through the binoculars in my hands.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.Paul’s eyebrows and bangs arched like the shape of a sunrise, and his voice was like a rainbow. The audience downstairs began screaming again. The noise ballooned.
I thought a good chance had arrived at last: I felt goose bumps like a series of small lightning bolts and tried to shout, but somehow couldn`t. I told myself, hurry up, but their last song had already begun.
Hair, hair, hair. Paul’s smile shone under the bangs of his mushroom haircut, George’s hair simply swayed, John kicked his feet, and when Ringo hit the drums, his hair bounced. The audience downstairs shouted. My head spun to the right and left, and my feet pedaled. George came close to the microphone and joined in the chorus, “I’m Down.” I told myself that I had grabbed a miracle ticket, a once in a lifetime chance, and had journeyed almost three hours to the Budōkan; I simply wanted to shout, but the shout was no longer just a shout. It became a mission: something I felt that if
I shied away from, I’d accomplish nothing in my life.
I stood up and made a cone with both my hands.
“I’m down,” I shouted.
Paul bellowed, and John and George joined the chorus:
I’m down; I’m really down; don’t you know that I’m down?I shouted again. Paul, who was bent over nearly backward, let out a yodel that must have hit the roof. All my worries sputtered away-- all the stifling rules, patronizing announcements, endless tests and dark uniforms blew scattered away as if by a cyclone.
He bowed and walked off the stage with his guitar.
I’d never climbed to the top of Mt. Fuji, but if I had, the elation would have been the same. I adjusted my burgundy wristband. The time was 3:54 p.m.
When I reached home, Mother began serving bowls of rice.
“How was it?” Her face looked as though she were talking to a first grader.
“It was a suggoooii concert.”
“What did they look like?”
“Like angels from the clouds.”
“Security must have been tight,” Father said.
“Actually, there were very few policemen there when I got there. But then amazingly, they suddenly appeared just before the show.”
“It said in the paper that 2,000 policemen would be there, at the concert, and that 35,000 policemen had been assigned for the entire Beatles`visit.”
“I don’t know, but there was no way to see the Beatles up close. Not like at the Beach Boys concert,” I said.
“There`ll be a TV program on the concert at nine,” Father said.
“You know everything,” I said, looking at his gray hair.
“I will watch the program with you,” Mother said.
“You don’t have to.” I countered.
“I will, I want to,” she said.
“No, don’t.”
“Why?”
“You don’t have to like the Beatles.”
Nine o’clock came. The program started. Grandfather sat at the table, facing the television set. I sat on his right. On the black and white screen, we watched the news about a typhoon that had struck before the Beatles’ arrival. The scene changed. Young people roamed around the airport; policemen held some of them. A Japan Airlines plane with painted cranes landed at Haneda airport. The Beatles appeared wearing festival coats. The camera then followed the Beatles to the Hilton. E. H. Eric, who seemed to be taller than John, shook his hands with Paul, John, George, and Ringo in a waiting room and began interviewing them. Shorter Japanese journalists and cameramen surrounded them. Lights kept flashing. E. H. Eric said something in English, but John and Paul kept romping around the room. Their smiles were charming, and their background music, golden, but I wished that Mother wouldn`t see them.
Grandfather kept quiet. Taro came in and squatted on Grandfather’s left. The door slid open, and Mother came in. A salt-and-pepper head followed. Father, you too?
I thought as I covered my ears with the palms of my hands.
“Let me see what the hoopla is about,” Father said, raising his spectacles.
“Since when do you like the Beatles?” I grumbled.
Mother sat between Grandfather and me, and Father sat between the television and Taro. In Grandfather’s four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room, we watched the screen.
I hadn’t thought anything about it at the concert, but felt relief to realize that no camera had come anywhere near me. On the TV screen, the audience looked like ants. Nobody could have noticed me shouting after all.
Then Paul started singing Yesterday.
We listened.
“That’s a good song,” Mother said with her hands folded on her lap.
Topics/Categories:
The Beatles Tokyo Concert in 1966
Type of Work:
Publishers:
Original Published Source:
March 2007
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