ABSTRACT
On February 2, 1972, thousands of people stood on the viewing decks of the Tokyo International Airport, holding small Japanese flags, watching as a DC8 plane from Guam touched down and taxied toward them. Tens of millions more reportedly watched the scene on TV.2 As the door to the plane opened, the excited crowd roared with deafening cheers, waving their flags and shouting for its inhabitants to emerge. But when the first figures emerged onto the gangway, reporters at the scene noted, the “shouting abruptly ceased.” The first two men out of the plane, black-suited and grim-faced, carried two boxes wrapped in white cloth, the remains of two soldiers who had died in the Guam jungle eight years earlier. A moment later, a frail-looking man in a dark suit leaned forward and gingerly stepped onto the gangway. “The shouting broke out again as if in one huge voice,” the reporters wrote, growing louder as the man, waving and bowing, his hands trembling, his voice cracking, passed just yards away from the assembled onlookers (Figure 1.1).3
