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The Courage of His Convictions
MAKOTO ODA combines talk and action, writes Foumiko Kometani, in his broad battle for human rights

Do you know the poet Makoto Oda from tokyo?" It was the spring of 1960 and I had just arrived at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Fleeing the hidebound art world of Japan, I had come on a fellowship to the colony where composers, writers and visual artists were afforded a climate conducive to creative work: hot meals, clean rooms, congenial companionship and spacious private studios in the woods. My questioner was a writer who had been at the colony the year before.

My reply was brusque. "Tokyo is a big city," I said, "one of the biggest in the world, with a population in the millions. Besides, I'm a painter from Osaka and don't even know many poets there."

"Just asking," the writer said. "Because I've been worrying about Makoto. He was here at the colony last year and left America with very little money, intending to return to Japan via Europe and Asia, and I was wondering if he had made it back safely."

I apologized to the writer for my bluntness. But I had just spent 12 stormy days on a freighter crossing the Pacific and another five days bouncing across America on trains; I was in a state of culture shock and confusion. If I had been asked my own parents' names, I'm not sure I could have come up with the right answer.

The writer and I soon became friends, and a few weeks later she handed me an aerogram. "This just came from Makoto. It has some news that might interest you." I read the letter from the "poet" Makoto Oda. He was back in Japan and was writing angrily, but eloquently, about the student protests against the visit of then White House Press Secretary James Haggerty. Haggerty was coming to Tokyo to set the stage for President Eisenhower's arrival for the signing of the U.S.-Japan security treaty. The "poet" Makoto Oda was especially moving in his description of the death of a female student from Tokyo University in the demonstrations. Now I was curious about exactly who this "poet" was. I turned the letter over and studied the name and return address. I was shocked.

The address was just a street away from the house I lived in as a child in Osaka. And the "poet" Makoto Oda was none other than Oda Makoto, a name I associated with the image of a snot-nosed kid running around my old neighborhood who was especially loud and unruly. He was the son of a lawyer living in the house next door to the kindergarten I attended, and had been in the same class as my younger brother Osamu. Makoto-chan had been a big-boned child and I could still recall him wiping his runny nose on the sleeve of his sweater and shouting in a voice thick with saliva. But I never played with him. In fact, I always looked down at him as the dirty kid who was two years younger than I was, even when we attended the same elementary school and later studied under the same high school teachers.

After I left the MacDowell Colony, I married and soon forgot all about Makoto Oda and my old life in Japan. I was too involved with my new life in America. Until one day a book arrived from Japan with a note from my mother. "Do you remember the lawyer's dirty son, Makoto Oda?" she wrote. "He's written this book that has become the No. 1 best seller in Japan." The book, of course, was Nandemo Miteyaro (I'll Go Everywhere and See Everything), an account of his journey back to Japan from America. It impressed both intellectuals and the emerging generation of Japanese youth and soon became almost a biblical tract for the young, no less pervasive and influential a work as was Jack Kerouac's On The Road to Americans and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger to the British. More than half a million copies were sold, and Oda, at 29, was established both as an important literary and impassioned reportorial presence.

Oda had been practically penniless during his travels: his airline ticket serving also as his meal ticket. He stuffed himself on flights, then skimped and nearly starved during his many stopovers on the ground. In Calcutta, for example, he slept on the street with the untouchables. Coming from cloistered Japanese society, he had never imagined such devastating poverty. He reported how deeply touched he was, wanting at once to escape from this endless row of hopeless humanity—most wearing only loincloths, with those possessing a single, shredding sheet flaunting it as if they were rich, and all fighting sickness and diseases like leprosy and cholera and dysentery—while he experienced the depths of shame in his heart as an irresponsible traveler passing through. Watching a desperate old woman fighting over a few bites of food with a huge, hungry dog was soul-searing enlightenment for him.

This was during the post-World War II period when Japanese travel was still severely limited and restricted, with those few going abroad opting for the West. But Oda decided that he had been cowardly and lax, like most Japanese, in his identification and fascination with the West, to the neglect of Asia and its problems. The Japanese were Asians, the book reminded us, and all Asians were our equals when it came down to the nitty-gritty of the daily battle for life's existence. This egalitarian notion came as a bracing shock to a nation accustomed to the established pecking order in which Westerners were above Japan and everybody else was beneath us.

Oda's book also affected me deeply and personally. As an aspiring painter I had always wanted to go to Europe but had come to America because it was easier for me to arrange. But now I realized that as an Asian I should know more about Asia, and my husband agreed. He also felt that since he was married to an Asian, he too had better know more about Asia if our marriage were to last.

So we set out for Japan the long way. Unlike Oda, we did not fly. We took boats and trains from New York City to Kobe, stopping off en route in Yemen, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Singapore and Saigon. It was 1962, and sailing up the Mekong River delta, there was already the smell of war in the air. In downtown Saigon, American guns and rifles were on sale at the flea markets. One did not feel very comfortable walking around the beautifully laid-out city.

By the time we returned to America two-and-a-half years later, America's intervention in Vietnam had become serious. The effects of the American air raids on Japan during World War II had left me scarred not so much physically as psychologically: I am firmly against all war. My husband and I attended one of the very first protests against America's intervention in Vietnam, at the U.N. plaza in New York City. The attendance was scant. I felt deeply frustrated. But a year later when Dr. Martin Luther King led a protest march down Broadway, we went. Many more people had come. To this day I can recall some people leaning out of the windows of tall buildings and hurling paint down upon us.

In magazines sent to me from Japan, I noticed the word Beheiren appearing more and more frequently. It referred to a group formed to support and shelter deserters from the American army in Vietnam. And linked with Beheiren was always Makoto Oda, one of the founders and the chief spokesman for the movement. Now I was even more impressed by my street urchin neighbor than I had been by his best-selling book.

Oda championed individual action as the best way to resist the war in Vietnam effectively. "Let's scrap radicalism based on words," he said. Insisting that old catchwords such as imperialism and aggression were turnoffs, he asked protesters to act because of their inner feelings and beliefs, "to like what you are doing and to finish what you start." Opposed as he was to the U.S. military's presence in Southeast Asia, he was just as virulently anti-Soviet because of the repression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and he vigorously attacked Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution.

An enduring faith in democracy and individualism is the touchstone found in all of Oda's work. "Democracy for me is not a political ideology," he wrote back in 1969, "but a set of principles for how I live. I believe in 100% freedom for the individual."

During the past three decades Oda and I have often found ourselves on the same side politically, sharing the same Osakan pragmatism, allowing for a highly skeptical regard of the goodness in human nature but at the same time seeing no reason to give up the struggle for social improvement. Oda's voice is still strong and his tone dominating, but it has never ceased championing the causes of ordinary people. Despite his rough-hewn appearance, his inner feelings remain gentle and his capacity to empathize with the problems of others has not diminished.

About a dozen years ago, I visited him in his Nishinomiya condominium facing the sea. We had not seen each other since finishing elementary school. When he opened the door a beautiful three-year-old girl was standing beside him. Before we even began to exchange pleasantries, I asked him whose child it was. "Mine," he said. I could not believe it and told him so directly in Osakan dialect. But then behind him I saw a beautiful woman. "Now I believe it," I said. Oda's wife is a Japanese-born Korean who, because of Japan's peculiar racist and xenophobic laws, does not have citizenship—another cause for which Oda is a spokesman.

His latest crusade is on behalf of the victims of the Kobe earthquake. Most were uninsured and have received no compensation for the damages suffered. Not only has Oda written a superb novel about the Kobe tragedy and its ripple-effect ramifications—Fukai Oto (The Roar of the Earth), published in its entirety in the February issue of Shincho magazine—he has also been instrumental in effecting the passage of legislation that guarantees the victims of future disasters $10,000 in government compensation. "I wrote 800 letters to politicians and their supporters in an effort to get the law passed," he told me recently. "Now I have to start working on getting the law revised and the compensations increased so that natural disasters do not become the cause for artificial human disasters as well."

After Oda graduated from Tokyo University he went to Harvard on a Fulbright scholarship and then to the MacDowell Colony. I once asked him, "If you hadn't gone to America and lived there as a student and as an artist, do you think you would have become such an activist?" He laughed, "It's ironic isn't it? America taught me to speak out, yet now they always give me a hard time. Whenever I visit America I'm stopped by immigration and detained for several hours and have to argue my way in. Maybe I'm a marked man because of my Vietnam War opposition with Beheiren."

Oda's political activism has not impeded his literary flow; in fact it seems to have synergistically energized it. He has written countless magazine pieces and more than 105 books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Breaking Jewel to be published later this year by Columbia University Press. "You know," he told me recently, "when Nandemo Miteyaro came out, Japanese journalists called me a rightist since Japanese society was veering to the left at the time. But I've never changed my attitude politically. I've always believed in working for a better life for more people. Now they call me a leftist. But Japan has changed. Not me."

I, however, have changed. At least in my attitude toward Oda. Whereas I once looked down at him as a dirty street urchin, I now look up to him as an homme engagé—a writer who has the courage to stand up and fight for what he believes—a precious rarity in modern-day but still traditionally passive Japan.

Foumiko Kometani's books have won the Akutagawa Prize and Jyoryubungaku Prize, two of Japan's most prestigious literary awards

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