Japanese Jailbird (2006)

Only when the handcuffs were snapped shut, when the man from the British Consulate told him that the offence with which he was being charged carried a maximum penalty of eight years, when he found himself sleeping on the floor of a Japanese prison did Paul McCartney recognise the trouble he was in.
          One of the richest, most famous and most loved men in the world, able to do anything he wanted or go anywhere he wished, his life had in a moment been reduced to that of a common prisoner.
Deprived of any possessions with which he might do himself harm, not even allowed a pencil to write a diary, he found himself alone in a cell, being watched when he used the lavatory, and having to indicate to the guard when he was ready for the toilet to be flushed.
          Most worrying of all, though, was that he had virtually no idea how his wife, Linda, and their four children, who always travelled with them on tour, were coping, or when he might see them again. Meanwhile in an adjoining cell was a fellow on a murder charge.
All this happened in Tokyo in December, 1980, when, after flying in for an nine concert Wings' tour, one of the McCartney suitcases was opened by a customs officer. Inside, lying on top of some clothes, was a polythene bag full of marijuana.
          At that point all the McCartneys' luggage was searched. Seven further bags of pot emerged. Immediately Paul owned up. They were his.
How McCartney managed during the following ten day incarceration, never knowing whether he would be there for weeks or even years, has until now never been made public. When asked about it, Paul has usually smiled it away with a glib joke.
But as the surfacing of a privately published book, Japanese Jailbird, written by McCartney after he returned home to Britain, its manuscript stored in a bank vault ever since, shows, there was nothing funny about it at the time.
          In fact as Japanese fans chanted or sometimes sobbed outside the prison, inside his cell, McCartney was becoming paranoid. Was fingerprinting really just "normal procedure"?
Meanwhile back in Britain there was a strong scent of deja vu in the air as news first came through of his arrest. Some conspiracy theorists ludicrously accused Yoko Ono of tipping off the Japanese customs that McCartney was on his way to Tokyo carrying a bag full of drugs.
          No rational person believed that, but what could Paul have been thinking of, his friends wondered. Hadn't he already been arrested three times for the same offence in Scotland, Sweden and California, giving him a drugs record which had made it difficult for him to get permission to tour in Japan in the first place. He knew the Japanese took a strong line on smoking pot. Did he really think they wouldn't search his bags because he was an ex-Beatle?
          So it seems. Because instead of taking the expected limousine trip from the airport to a waiting luxury Tokyo hotel suite, suddenly he was being led away by the Drugs Squad for mug shots, measuring and searching. "Drop your trousers," he was ordered, surprising the prison guards when they saw that he didn't wear underpants.
          More questioning followed, and would continue every day for ten days. Name, address, profession…where did he get the marijuana, was it all for his own personal use? Yes, he answered.
After that a somewhat surrealistic question repeatedly cropped up about the medal given to him by the Queen, an MBE. (John Lennon had, of course, sent his back.)
Did he hold any rank at Court, he was asked. No, he said, explaining jokily that "MBE means Member of the British Empire and it is quite a minor award in the scheme of things, but 'it's good enough for me'." The rigid stratification of Japanese society stretched, it seemed, even to a curiosity about rock and roll pot smokers.
          Soon, instead of lying with Linda in a emperor-sized hotel bed, he was alone in his solitary cell number 4, a twelve feet by nine feet cage of bars and chicken wire, and given a list of rules to read. There could be "no rudeness, no fighting, no indecent acts between inmates", and no music.
Had he been able to laugh at anything that night this might have provoked at least a smile. Probably for the first time ever a Beatle was being forbidden to make music. But the prison guards meant it. When he was caught absently whistling to keep his spirits up, there was a quick caution. "No music!"
He didn't sleep well that first night in jail. His bed roll was built for the average Japanese prisoner and his feet stuck out at the end.
          At six in the morning the lights came on again. Shown by a guard how to fold his blankets and store his mat and pillow, he was then told to wash, which he did, carefully following the actions of two other prisoners. Always he had to remember to leave his sandals at the door to his cell, and always he kept forgetting.
          Daily inspection followed. With his one remaining blanket folded neatly in three on the centre of his reed mat, he sat cross legged on it as numbers were called out. When he heard his number, which sounded to him like "I need your knee", he had to shout out in a robust way, "Hi", which, he presumed, meant "present".
          Sitting there at roll call he must have wanted to pinch himself. A famous Beatle yesterday planning a multi-million pound tour, with a personal staff of hundreds, overnight he'd been reduced to answering to a number. It was bizarre.
So was the prison breakfast pushed through a letter box into his cell. Consisting of three hot dog rolls, plastic sachets of margarine and jam, with seaweed and onion soup to start, the smell almost made him gag.
          It wasn't the kind of room service he'd expected to receive in Tokyo, but he did his best with it, not knowing when his next meal might arrive. Then, never one not to be busy, he exercised alone in his cell.
          Interestingly, at no time in the memoir does he even pretend to be indignant about his fate. That came later when it struck him that he "was being punished for something he believed to be basically harmless". While he was in prison he felt, he says, "guilty and dirty inside", blaming himself entirely, eager to "get a reputation for good behaviour and perhaps earn some slight remission". Already he was a model prisoner. Who wouldn’t be in those circumstances?
As a Beatle he'd always been remarked upon for his charm and diplomacy, so it isn't surprising to read that in his first prisoners' recreation period he quickly joined in with others. Playing a makeshift a game of who could leap the highest up the side of a wall and leave a print, he came joint top. He was always competitive, too.
          But soon on that first day it was time for more questions. Handcuffed again, the cuffs being hidden from the Press and fans waiting outside the jail by a green towel, he was driven back to see the narcotics agents who arrested him. His palms were sweating and his neck itching as he went over his statement.
          At noon he was told that Linda was coming to see him. "And from then on I spend the time listening for her voice," he writes poignantly.
It was to be a short, five minute meeting, in which he decided not to tell her about the eight years he'd been warned he might be facing. Linda, carrying tangerines and salad for him, was accompanied by a Japanese lawyer.
          Later asked to sign his statement of guilt he looked his narcotics agent inquisitor in the eye: "I don't know if there’s any point to this," he begged, "but I want to ask you, as a man and a father, to do anything in your power to help me." The agent said he would. But would he?
          Back at the jail again the astonishment at his presence must have been wearing off as other prisoners began to ask him to sign their T-shirts. While one of the guards, amused at Paul's standing on his head yoga pose, challenged him to some arm wrestling. Little by little, as though wooing an audience, he was making friends, making life more bearable for himself.
          Every little event broke the monotony, he records, so he was amused when, while shaving, one of the other inmates made fun of his hairy arms. In Britain he would normally be considered unhairy, but as the Japanese have little body hair he was the "local ape" there.
Day after day as he was taken handcuffed backwards and forwards between the prison and the narcotics department he had to run the gauntlet of Press and fans. Sometimes he thought of singing Help or Band On The Run as he passed them, but the situation was too serious.
Meanwhile the constant questions, covering the same material, as he and his interrogators drank green Japanese tea, was puzzling. "I am not your enemy," the narcotics agent kept saying. "I am here to help you." But was he really? Paul couldn't be sure.
Quickly he began to pick up some Japanese, and soon, in the absence of a pen, began scraping a piece of plaster off the wall of his cell to make a mark on a homemade calendar. Counting the days---just like in the movies.
          As in London there were questions in the House of Commons about his imprisonment, and in Japan probably high level wishes that the customs officials had not been so curious about the contents of a former Beatle's bag, he was at last taken to see the prosecutor.
"If only I'd known how long this was going to last I could probably have relaxed and almost enjoyed this weird adventure," he would write later. But he didn't and he couldn’t. It could still take years.
A couple of days on it was the judge's turn to interview him. He was, he writes, "inscrutable". Well, of course he was!
          Admitting everything he asked the judge to consider his wife and children. It didn't work. The judge promptly gave him another ten days. And then what? Paul didn't know.
In the meantime the judge had also ordered that there could be no books, no magazines, and no visits from his wife. Only his lawyer could see him, and of course, the fans who waited outside the prison and pursued the police cars whenever he was moved around Tokyo for questioning.
On one trip he asked the guards where the Budoken stadium was. Had things gone according to plan he and Wings would have been playing there that week, idolised by thousands of Japanese fans. Instead he was on his way back to his solitary cell.
          Linda and the children meanwhile were in a hotel across Tokyo, where they'd been joined by her brother, lawyer John Eastman. "If I'd know what Paul was really facing, I'd have fallen apart," she told a friend later. "They told me he might be detained for a few days or weeks, but people caught with less pot were in in Japanese prisons for years. Well, they made sure I didn't hear the word 'years'."
          In jail, however, Paul was clearly already beginning to work the system. When messages of goodwill began to reach him from around the world, he got a message out through his lawyer suggesting that Linda send him a telegram. She did, signing herself Suzy
          Noticing him reading it and becoming suspicious a narcotics agent asked: "Do you know her?"
"Yeah. Big fan," said Paul, and put the telegram away.
          A couple of days later he told one of the English speaking prisoners who liked racing that he'd once bought a racehorse for his father, who had died a few years earlier. That night as he fell asleep listening to the fans outside the prison chanting and singing his name, he dreamed that he, Linda and his father were walking up a hill to a pub. It felt warm and friendly.
          Most of the prison guards were now pleasant, and amused when he took a communal bath, prisoners only being allowed a bath once a week. As usual he followed what the others did exactly. "It surprises me how easily I have become institutionalised," he would later write in his book.
Bit by bit prison life was becoming more bearable, with Linda now sending in a packed lunch of an avocado salad, a sandwich, a slice of lemon meringue pie and some fresh orange juice. "The height of luxury," he thought.
          And as the daily questioning became increasingly boring, he managed to divert himself by correcting the narcotic agent's English, giving him marks out of ten. The young man was grateful.
He doesn't say it, but you can see between the lines, despite his situation and fears, the pendulum of emotional power swinging his way. He didn't get where he is in the world by not being able to exploit the situations in which he's found himself.
          Back in his cell one of the other prisoners shouted to him, asking for a song. It wasn't the massed thousands he'd expected to be performing to in Japan, because all he could see was his cell wall, but he sang Red Red Robin, You Are My Sunshine and Ain't She Sweet.
          Perhaps disappointingly for the prisoners, there were no Beatle songs, although one thanked him. "Paul, thank you. I am very happy." But this time no guards reminded him of the "no music" rule, either.
          In their eleven years of marriage he and Linda had never been apart for more than a night, so when she was allowed in to see him after a week it was "weird…the few days' separation and the unspoken words bringing a feeling of awkwardness". It didn't help that they had to communicate this time through a prison grille, Linda telling him that their two year old baby James had been pointing at the telephone and saying "Daddy".
          Seeing him may have been a shock for Linda. Accidentally catching sight of himself in a mirror for the first time in days he was surprised at how rough he looked. There are no mirrors in Japanese jails.
          The end came suddenly. After a visit from a British Consulate official who seemed surprised at the handcuffs and the glass divider, rumours began among the guards of an impending release. He daren't believe it.
          But suddenly he found himself being told to put on a new suit brought in for him. Only two of his fellow prisoners were in their cells as he left. He shook hands with both of them through their letter boxes, promising to write to one.
          The guards were happy for him, "but there is a hint of sadness that it is coming to an end…With emotional handshakes we say our goodbyes and I am collected by the immigration authorities".
          And with that Paul McCartney was released and immediately deported from Japan, no doubt to the relief of everyone.

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