The tour party that arrived at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on the afternoon of 16 January 1980 was split into two contingents on separate flights. One came from London with the band and road crew, the other from New York with Paul, Linda and their children, plus lead guitarist Laurence Juber who’d been taking a pre-tour break in Los Angeles. Since both planes were scheduled to land at around the same time, the party were to meet up at the airport and be bussed to their hotel together.
When the band and roadies disembarked from the London flight, they were surprised not to receive the strenuous going-over from customs officials they’d been warned to expect. Drummer Steve Holley and his wife, Sharon, were with Denny Laine, who had feared being targeted because of the drugs-bust on his own record (when he’d taken the rap for Jo Jo). Everybody went through without a problem, however, and climbed aboard the tour bus outside to wait for the McCartney contingent.
Paul’s Pan Am flight from New York touched down about half an hour later. There was a brief VIP moment outside the Arrivals entrance as he posed for TV cameras, holding his toddler son, James, in his arms and cheerily saying ‘Hello, Tokyo’. It would be his last experience of VIP-ness for some time.
Laurence Juber, who’d been on the same flight, was standing beside him at the moment which Juber says ‘will be seared on my memory for ever’. During what struck the guitarist as only a ‘cursory’ search of Paul’s luggage, the surgical-gloved customs officer lifted up a jacket to reveal a transparent plastic bag containing a large wedge of what was clearly marijuana.
‘When the fellow pulled it out of the suitcase, he looked more embarrassed than me,’ Paul would later remember. ‘I think he just wanted to put it back and forget the whole thing.’ Instead, the officer ploughed on, discovering a further, smaller amount of the same substance in a toilet-bag.
With that, Juber says, ‘alarms started going off, doors opened and people came running from every direction’. Both he and Paul were marched away to separate side rooms for questioning. Juber’s interrogators were specially interested in a Les Paul guitar he’d bought in New York, which they suspected of harbouring further drugs. Only after proving it was ‘clean’ by dismantling it with a screwdriver was he released.
‘I went and got on the bus, and we all sat there for a while, hoping the whole thing might blow over and Paul would come out and join us,’ he recalls. ‘Then Alan Crowder [the tour-manager] told us there was still a problem and we were to go ahead to the hotel.’
This was the splendiferous Hotel Okura, coincidentally the place where John and Yoko stayed on visits to Yoko’s Tokyo family. An entire floor had been reserved for the Wings party and Paul and Linda were to have the Presidential Suite, which the Lennons always occupied–though for Paul, somewhat different accommodation lay ahead.
Having checked in, Steve and Sharon Holley retired to rest after their 18-hour flight. Holley was woken by a phone call from Linda. ‘She was screaming that Paul had been arrested and locked up. Thinking it was a joke, I said, “Yeah, nice one, Linda. See you downstairs in the restaurant.” Then when we went down, the elevator-doors opened on a lobby full of TV lights and photographers.’
Paul, meanwhile, was alone and had taken a ride to Metropolitan Police Headquarters in central Tokyo, not knowing what he’d find there. It proved to be five hours of gruelling interrogation by a group of drug squad officers with only a smattering of English between them. The total weight of the marijuana in his case was 7.7 ounces, enough to suggest it was meant for more than just personal use and invite charges of smuggling or even peddling. He protested that he’d got it from some friends, solely for his own use, and signed a confession, drafted by his interrogators, that ‘I brought some hemp for my smoking’.
Nevertheless, despite the immensity of his fame and the major national event that Wings’ tour represented, prosecution proceedings were set in motion. A person facing such charges in Europe or America could expect to be given bail, but Japan had no such system; pending a further investigation of the evidence against him, he would be held in custody.
Rather than checking into the Hotel Okura’s Presidential Suite, he was taken to a holding wing which, ironically, shared a building with one of the radio stations that had earlier reported Wings’ arrival. After handing over all his personal effects, including his wedding ring, he was shown to a tiny, bare cell with a thin mat in place of a bed.
The only time he’d even been in such a situation before was as an 18-year-old in Hamburg, when he and Pete Best had been briefly banged up for allegedly trying to burn down a porno cinema with a lighted condom. This was an infinitely worse experience: all alone, denied any contact with Linda and the children, racked by a blinding headache and by fears absent from his earlier, brief incarceration at St Pauli’s police station. He didn’t sleep a wink but spent all night sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, terrified of being raped.
Linda was similarly in torment, besieged by ravenous media at the Okura with no idea what was going on or where it would end. For the sake of Heather, Mary, Stella and little James–who kept asking ‘Where’s Daddy?’–she did her best to put on a brave face. ‘It’s really very silly,’ she told one TV camera. ‘People are so different over here. They take [grass] so very seriously. Paul is now in some kind of detention place and I haven’t been allowed to see him. As soon as they get someone nice like Paul, they seem to make a field-day of it. I’ll never come back to Japan again. This is my first visit and my last.’
Secretly, haunted by memories of Japanese prisoner-of-war movies, she was afraid he might be subjected to torture. At this moment when he needed her protection like never before, she was unable to give it.
The immediate question for MPL in its chief’s absence was whether to abort the tour–but that decision proved to have been taken already. ‘When we’d come in from the airport, we’d seen posters for our concerts about every 50 yards,’ Steve Holley remembers. ‘Next morning, there wasn’t one anywhere, and all Wings music had disappeared from the radio.’
They could all only watch the TV news reports that second day as Paul was delivered to the Tokyo police’s Narcotics Control Department by three tough-looking plain-clothes officers, handcuffed and with a rope around his neck–‘like a dog’, as he later said. Despite having already made a full confession and apology, he was subjected to six more hours’ interrogation led by the drug squad’s renowned chief investigator, Koyoshi Kobayashi.
‘I had to go through my life story… school, father’s name, income,’ he would recall. ‘They would say, highly curious, “You are MBE?” And I would say “Yeah”, hoping that would carry weight. And it sort of did. Then they said, even more curious, “You live at Queen’s palace?” I said, “Well no, not actually… well yes, quite near.” I was hoping they’d let me off if I lived near the Queen’s house. They said, “You smoke marijuana?” I said, “Hardly.” They said, “Makes you hear music better?” I thought “God, I wonder if that’s a trap…”’
When the interrogators had finished, he was allowed a brief meeting with Linda, then remanded back to custody at Metro Police Headquarters. As his escort brought him out by a rear door, they were surrounded by around 200 young women, weeping hysterically and calling his name–the Japanese difficulty with the letter ‘l’ somehow lending it extra anguish: ‘Paur! Paur!’ The melee became so uncontrollable that riot police had to be called. ‘It was like Beatlemania,’ he would remember. ‘Only instead of going to a gig, I was going to a cell.’
By now, his lawyer and brother-in-law John Eastman had hurried from New York and his new manager Steve Shrimpton from London to organise his defence and shield Linda and the children from the media storm at the Okura. An English-speaking Tokyo lawyer, Tasuku Matsuo, was engaged to represent him at the interrogations and whatever might follow.
So far, his only visitor had been Donald Warren-Knott, an official from Tokyo’s British Embassy, which happened to be located next door to his custody block. Warren-Knott found him calm and in reasonable spirits, though full of anxiety about Linda and the children. He said he was being well-treated and didn’t seek any special privileges beyond asking for a vegetarian diet including some fruit, which Warren-Knott duly requested on his behalf. His jailers agreed to supply apples and oranges but not bananas because of the risk of an unwary guard slipping on one of the skins.
The next day, 18 January, he was brought to the District Prosecutor’s office for yet further interrogation, hustled in by a back door because weeping, ‘Paur’-ing fans were blocking the front. Under Japan’s draconian anti-drug laws, he learned, he faced a possible seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour in a penal system widely criticised for human rights violations. And no one yet could give him any firm assurances that it wouldn’t happen. ‘I was looking at bringing the kids up in Japan,’ he would later admit.
That afternoon, he was questioned by district judge Haruo Matsumoto, who then granted the prosecutor’s application to keep him behind bars for up to ten further days’ investigation. Now transferred from police custody to that of the Justice Department, he was taken to central Tokyo’s grim nineteenth-century Kosuge Prison. There he was to spend a week in company with some of Japan’s most hardened criminals, and be treated little differently.
Meanwhile, his case had aroused shock and disbelief around the world, with politicians and public figures of all sorts expressing concern on his behalf and calling on the Japanese government to take things no further. While Donald Warren-Knott from the British Embassy was discussing the case with investigator Kobayashi in the latter’s office, a phone call came through from Washington DC. It was Senator Edward Kennedy, last surviving brother of President John F. Kennedy; he’d heard Wings were scheduled to tour America the following summer and was concerned Paul might not be at liberty to take part.
George sent a message from himself and his wife, Olivia: ‘Thinking of you. Keep your spirits high.’ But the other two former Beatles expressed neither support nor sympathy for a friend who had always shared their drugs travails: Ringo merely observed cagily that Paul had been ‘unlucky’ while John made no comment.
There was also much hilarity over the size of the marijuana-stash. American chat show king Johnny Carson quipped that after Paul landed at Narita, his suitcase had remained in a holding pattern for another four hours. Less amusingly, a deranged Beatles fan named Kenneth Lambert–a species later to become horribly familiar–turned up at Miami airport announcing he meant to fly to Tokyo and ‘free Paul’, despite having neither a plane ticket nor money. During an altercation with airline staff, Lambert pulled out a toy gun and a police officer shot him dead.
To begin with, Paul found conditions at the Kosuge Prison ‘barbaric’. He was allotted a cell measuring only 10 feet by 14, with just a thin mat to sleep on. Normally hyper-fastidious about his wardrobe and personal hygiene, he still wore the same green suit he had on when he was arrested.
The day began at 6 a.m. with roll-call, when history’s most successful songwriter sat cross-legged on the floor among his fellow inmates, replying to his prison-number, 22, with a ritual shout of ‘Hai!’ The double estate-owner and employer of multiple domestics then had to clean his tiny domain, using a miniature dustpan and reed brush pushed through a hole in the door, and fold up his sleeping-mat.
Inspection was followed by breakfast, a bowl of seaweed-and-onion soup (‘not the greatest thing in the morning if you’re used to cornflakes’). Lunch was soybean soup and bread and supper a bowl of rice with dessert of an apple or orange, if he was lucky, but no banana. He was in virtual solitary confinement, allowed neither books nor writing materials. Lights-out was at 8 p.m.
The routine was broken by further trips to the prosecutor’s office, with mobs of shrieking girls at both ends. At the prison-gate, 19-year-old Minako Shitega was one of many holding a personal vigil for, as she put it, ‘the greatest fellow ever to live on earth’. A petition for his release was organised outside the Budokan Hall, where the Beatles had played in 1966 and Wings were to have given their main shows.
Such an ordeal could have broken a far more physically robust man. Paul’s salvation was the competitiveness that the other ex-Beatles knew so well, allied to the practicality of a one-time badge-accumulating Boy Scout. ‘After a few days, I became like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape,’ he would remember. ‘My natural survival instinct and sense of humour started to kick in. [I thought] “Right, I’m going to be the first up when the light goes on, the first with his room cleaned, the first who gets to wash and do his teeth.”’
Similarly, he was undaunted by the fact that almost no one around him spoke a word of English and he no word of Japanese beyond ‘Sayonara’ and ‘Konnichiwa’ (hello). He communicated with the tenants of neighbouring cells by shouting out Japanese brand-names: ‘Toyota!’, ‘Kawasaki!’, ‘Datsun!’, and that of Britain’s prime export cigarette, ‘John Player Special!’ They responded ‘Johnnie Walker!’, the name of the Scotch whisky they most fantasised about, and the ice was broken.
The inmates socialised only for a short period each morning when they smoked their daily two-cigarette ration sitting around a tin can, into which they tapped their ash. Here Paul learned to put faces and names to his fellow inmates’ numbers, for instance his next-door neighbour, a Marxist student, also on a drugs charge, who spoke some English.
Four cells away dwelt a huge man doing time for murder whose tattooed back identified him as a yakuza or Japanese mafioso. Through an interpreter, this terrifying individual asked Paul what he was in for, then held up seven fingers to indicate his likely sentence. ‘No, ten,’ Paul replied, making the yakuza roar with laughter. Later, he heard a shout from the yakuza’s cell of ‘Yesterday, please’, a request with which it was clearly wise to comply. Their guard shouted for silence but didn’t enforce it as he was listening, too, and instinctively responding even to this small audience, Paul acappella-ed three more songs.
He became quite the life and soul of those smoke-wreathed gatherings around the tin can, introducing the others to a game the Beatles used to play during their own spells of confinement in hotel-rooms or at Abbey Road. It was called Touching the Highest Place on the Wall because everyone in turn jumped up and tried to touch the highest place on the wall. Since Paul towered above his slightly-built competitors, he usually won.
As time passed, the harsh regime softened somewhat: his request for a guitar met with firm refusal but members of his entourage were allowed to bring him clean clothes, hot food and blankets. His fear of rape receded, so much so that when offered a bath in private he elected to use the communal showers. There he led a sing-song of old standards his father had loved, like ‘When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along’.
After so many years of limitless power and free will–and the stresses, both external and self-inflicted, that went with them–he found himself almost relishing the bleak simplicity, solitude and utter powerlessness of his prison life. ‘Suddenly,’ he would remember, ‘I didn’t have to do the job any more.’ Far from a penance, it came as a relief to lose all the myriad trappings of being Paul McCartney–even his very name–and revert to his status long, long ago when he’d first known John and George, as ‘just one of the lads’.
Among his musicians initial shock and sympathy were giving way to resentment. Laurence Juber and Steve Holley weren’t alone in expecting a share of the tour profits: the horn section, including Paul’s old Liverpool colleague Howie Casey, had each stood to make around $1000 per day in Japan, many times more than they’d ever previously earned on the road.
They had also counted on further lucrative work from the American tour in the summer. But after this new (and worst-of-all) drug offence, who could doubt that Paul’s US visa would be withdrawn yet again? Nor could anyone understand why he’d bothered to bring grass to Japan in the first place. Before the troupe left home, they’d been told it would be easily available via American military bases.
All the band had also been questioned by the police–as had Linda–and were now under 24-hour surveillance. To forestall any further trouble they took a trip to Kyoto, hoping that in their absence the problem would be resolved and the tour still able to happen. However, Paul’s defence team thought it wisest for them to leave the country, which they did on 21 January. Holley and Juber had been provided with first-class round-the-world air tickets, allowing them to go anywhere they liked; Holley opted to visit family in Australia while Juber returned to Los Angeles.
On his sixth day in the Kosuge, Paul was finally permitted a half-hour visit from Linda, although not the children. She brought him a cheese sandwich and some sci-fi paperbacks, and they conversed through a metal grille with guards looking on to ensure there was no physical contact. Linda was surprised, and not best pleased, by how institutionalised he’d become.
By now it was clear that despite the ferocious pretrial routine he was being put through, the Japanese government did not want the embarrassment of actually bringing him to court. Representations from the British Foreign Office through Donald Warren-Knott also played their part and on Paul’s ninth day of captivity, all proceedings against him were dropped. The reasons cited were that he’d made a full confession, had shown ‘repentance’ and, by his time in custody, had already suffered ‘social punishment’. He was therefore to be released and immediately deported.
If oddly redemptive spiritually, the episode cost him dear financially. The aborted tour’s Japanese promoters, Udo Music, had to be compensated to the tune of around £184,000 for reimbursing 100,000 disappointed ticket-holders and the advertising and promotion costs. And keeping his family and retinue at the Hotel Okura while he was in his prison cell brought a bill for around £10,000 per day.
Regaining his freedom almost ‘with a sigh’ like Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, he signed autographs for his former guards, then was given back the personal effects he’d had to check in on his arrival. One thing was missing, presumably stolen–his wedding ring. There being no time to make a complaint, he begged a paper-clip from the prison office to wear in its place.
He was driven straight to Narita airport to be put on the first available flight, a Japan Airlines one to Amsterdam. Linda and the children were already on the plane. Before boarding, as some recompense for all those cancelled shows, he grabbed an acoustic guitar and sang a few bars of ‘Yesterday’–then, with a final thumbs-up, he was gone.
Paul has never really explained what made him forget all the warnings he’d been given and pack those two hunks of hemp, not even at the bottom of his suitcase but near the top. ‘How could Linda, who was so much smarter than me, let me do it?’ he reflected in a TV interview with his daughter Mary in 2000. ‘I must have said, “Oh baby, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” There are times in your life when you think to yourself “OK, you’re an idiot” and that’s one of them. I was an idiot.’
But the truth was that he’d always taken reckless chances with drugs, and got away with it so often that he may well have thought himself invulnerable. And Linda was widely suspected of abetting him; indeed, after the Tokyo bust rumour had it the stuff had actually been found in her bag and Paul had taken the blame.
For the media-hordes awaiting him in Amsterdam, then London, he had a ready explanation. He’d been caught off-guard as a result of his pre-tour stay in New York, where pot-smoking was now so widespread and overt as to seem virtually decriminalised. The large residue of the stuff he’d enjoyed there being ‘too good to flush down the toilet’, he’d packed it ‘still [with] the American attitude that cannabis isn’t all that bad’.
He blamed no one but himself, made light of his experiences in the Japanese penal system (‘It wasn’t exactly The Bridge on the River Kwai’) and slipped in a little proselytising for the legalise-pot lobby he’d supported since the mid-Sixties. To help while away the time in his cell, he said, he’d made a mental list of all the dangerous drugs that were legal. ‘Society thinks alcohol is terrific, yet it kills. Cigarettes can kill. What about all those little old ladies on Valium? They are worse than marijuana. Think of aspirin’s danger to the stomach.’
Nonetheless, he promised he’d learned his lesson, offering a sizeable hostage to fortune in an interview with the Sun headlined ‘I’LL NEVER SMOKE POT AGAIN, SAYS PAUL’.
In Britain, the chorus of ‘How could he be so silly?’ was all the more virulent because his children had been involved. One censure that stung particularly came from ‘Blip’ Parker, headmaster of his old school, Liverpool Institute, to whose pupils he’d given a free show before turning Tokyo-wards. ‘It is hard enough nowadays to keep youngsters away from drugs without having people they look up to involved in something like this,’ said Blip–and who could disagree?
Paul would even ask himself whether, at some subconscious level, he had known just what he was doing. His enthusiasm for Wings had waned to such an extent–so he reasoned–that possibly he seized this chance to sabotage the Japanese tour in a way calculated to damage the band beyond repair. ‘It was almost,’ he told Mary, ‘as if I wanted to get busted.’
For Laurence Juber and Steve Holley, it was a bitter blow after having been Wingsmen such a short time. As well as losing their promised percentage of the Japanese gigs, they felt cheated of the opportunity to show what they could contribute as musicians. ‘We’d only done about 22 Wings appearances, on the UK tour and at the Concert for Kampuchea,’ Holley says. ‘That’s not really enough time for a new line-up to settle down together. By the time we went to Japan, we were just starting to sound like something.’
Paul on his side felt they and Denny Laine had deserted him in his hour of need, unaware that they’d been ordered to leave Tokyo by the tour’s managers. It rankled especially that Laine had flown directly to the MIDEM music festival in the South of France to negotiate himself a solo album.
Although no formal break-up was announced–yet–recrimination and disunity pulsed in the air. Urgently needing money for income tax arrears, Laine put together a band with his wife, Jo Jo, on vocals and Steve Holley, and went out on tour. His album, when it came out in December, would bring a faint, but unignorable, echo of John’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ diatribe, in 1971. The title, a reference to young women weeping inconsolably for a no-show ‘Paur’, was Japanese Tears.
Paul, meantime, had been assembling a solo album since mid-1979, a sign of growing boredom with Wings that he’d carefully kept under wraps. This was released in May 1980 as McCartney II and–like McCartney, a decade earlier–consisted of himself singing and playing everything with Linda his only backup. Not at all harmed by his recent notoriety, it reached number one in Britain and three in America.
McCartney II’s most popular track proved to be a buoyantly trite electronic dance tune called ‘Coming Up’ which became a British number two. It had featured in Wings’ stage show during the pre-Japan UK tour and for the American market Columbia preferred to release their live version, recorded in Glasgow in November 1979. When it reached number one, Paul was miffed that his studio version hadn’t been used and, instead, Wings seemed to be getting a new lease of life.
On his return home, he had recorded a video message to be shown on Japanese television, apologising to his tearful fans for his ‘mistake’ and giving a thumbs-up to his former guards. He had also written a 20,000-word account of his ordeal–a considerable feat for someone conditioned to turning out song-lyrics a couple of dozen words long in a few minutes–which sold more copies than the biggest best-selling author.
In fact, he’d always wanted to write a book–like John back in the Beatle years–but never thought he had it in him. He titled it Japanese Jailbird, had one copy privately printed for himself, then locked the manuscript away, intending to give it to his children when they grew older and sought an explanation of the traumatic scenes they’d witnessed. ‘One day when we’re old and my son’s a great big 30-year-old… I’ll be able to say, “There you are. Read that.”’
However, the McCartney II album raised doubts about just how seriously he viewed the episode and how contrite he really was. Linda’s cover picture showed him in head shot wearing a white T-shirt, like a prison ID but with a jokey ‘ouch’ expression. And one of the tracks, a synthesiser instrumental, was called ‘Frozen Jap’. Although few Westerners then had any problem with ‘Jap’, it felt less like a thumbs-up than a thumbed nose.
The track actually dated from summer 1979, well before the Japanese nightmare: Paul had meant his instrumental to suggest the iconic traditional scene of snow on Mount Fuji, and ‘Frozen Jap’ was just a rough working title that had stuck. On albums exported to the Far East, it was changed to ‘Frozen Japanese’. But, as he admitted, his late hosts still thought it ‘an incredible slur’. The fans whose response to his trouble had been anything but ‘frozen’ doubtless most of all.
At any event, here he was safely back at Peasmarsh with Linda and the children, surrounded by protecting woods and waterfalls, lulled by the comfortable whinny of horses in their heated paddock. And after all he’d been through, what else could 1980 possibly throw at him?