Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | Q | Quadrant

How Woodstock passed me by.

Article Excerpt
WHAT WERE THE SIXTIES really like? My lifespan encompassed the fab decade but I must have been looking away at the time.

Truth to tell, I wasn't prepared for sexual revolution or an alternative lifestyle when the 1960s dawned, being engrossed in marriage, following a church wedding in 1959. A Catholic cathedral wedding, actually. I'd also achieved my first foreign assignment (to New York) as a journalist; careerism was starting to grip. When the decade closed, I was engaged in multiple fatherhood, a virtually exclusive mind-altering state.

Moreover, I spent six-tenths of the fab decade in Japan, where the counter-culture of the sixties was highly nuanced. Getting too close to my work one day, I found myself fleeing police truncheons and tear gas in the midst of bandanna-masked student demonstrators (protesting against something American, probably). A hundred or so of us huddled together in the shelter of the lobby of the Hibiya Town Hall, where I had a strong sense of not being in my natural milieu. I was somewhat reassured by the fact that whenever I inadvertently caught the eye of a bandanna-masked revolutionary, he bowed politely. What sharp weapons my sinister companions had under their Mao tunics I could only speculate.

Finally, a young man removed his mask as he walked towards me. Did this mean I must die because I had seen his face and would be able to identify him to the kempetai? No. The young man bowed deeply and asked with diffident eagerness: "May I practise Engrish conversation?"

I got closest to sixties karma in Tokyo when I was given tickets by a neighbour to an alternative theatrical performance. Its finale involved the players pelting the audience with excrement, their own, produced in the traditional manner on stage. The neighbour who gave me the tickets was an impecunious artist and I was sitting in the cheap seats, just out of range, even from ricochets. I haven't really trusted the front stalls since.

My other close encounter with the counter-culture of the times was through smoking cannabis, which I did four or five times. (Oh, and I...