effect was to benefit the United States,” he concluded—the MPAA chief was in fact being shortsighted. The censorship may have redounded to Washington internationally, but it had no discernible effect on the Soviet citizenry, who viewed the festival films by the hundreds of thousands.43 The most effective propaganda, of course, is that which does not appear as such. If the principal reason for the American film industry’s investment in Moscow was “90% political,” as Valenti wrote to Secretary of State William Rogers, he failed to fully appreciate that the showing of Bruce Brown’s film, with its implicitly positive representations of the United States as a confident and courageous nation of economic abundance, would almost certainly have resonated with the Soviet people, as it had with countless Americans.44 The Endless Summer, from this perspective, would have been a more inspired choice in 1967.
Those tasked with American cultural diplomacy gave surfing another chance not long afterward. The year was 1970, the place was Japan, and the setting was the first world’s fair ever to be held in Asia: the Japan World Exposition, or Expo ’70, in Osaka. Running for six months, the exposition was spread over 815 acres and featured the participation of seventy-seven countries, more than two dozen Japanese and foreign corporations, several U.S. and Canadian local governments, and three multilateral organizations. It drew an estimated 64 million visitors.45 The general purpose of Expo ’70, like the purpose of all world’s fairs, was to showcase various nations’ geographies, economies, cultures, and societies. Yet such exhibitions, regardless of their innocuous facades, are always political.46 In 1970, deep into the Cold War, there was no question that the United States was competing with the Soviet Union over which country would mount the most impressive national display. “Whether we like it or not,” wrote the chief of the American delegation to the director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), “we really are being thrown into a competition with the Russians over here.”47 American officials thus took their cultural work very seriously.
The United States Pavilion, with 100,000 square feet of enclosed floor space spread over a six-acre site, embodied the vision of architect Yasuo Uesaka. Its exhibits—organized by the USIA—were designed by the joint venture team of Davis, Brody, Chermayeff, Geismar, de Harak Associates and divided into seven categories: Folk Art, Ten Photographers, American Painting, Sports, Space Exploration, Architecture, and New Arts.48 American officials assumed the highlight would be the space exhibit, which featured several spacecraft and a moon rock brought to earth by the Apollo 11 astronauts; the Soviets were also planning a space exhibit at Expo ’70, so the moon rock afforded the Americans—who alone had undertaken manned lunar landings—an opportunity to demonstrate their national superiority. Yet competing for popularity was the exhibit devoted to sport. This is hardly surprising. Only war is more effective—and even that is debatable—in exciting people’s passions. It was there, within the sports exhibit, that, so far as I am aware, surfing for the first time became an official object of U.S. cultural diplomacy.
By 1970, surfing was already firmly established in Japan. As was true of a number of places around the world, it arrived as an indirect by-product of American military power. Japanese fishermen had ridden ita-go, which were a primitive form of bodyboards, since at least the second decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps as early as the twelfth century), and there may have been people stand-up Surfing on Honshu as early as the late 1920s. But it was, by all accounts, American servicemen stationed in Japan after World War II who planted the seeds of the sport’s modern growth and popularity. They brought surfboards with them to Japan, where they shared their equipment and pointers with a number of curious locals. These locals began building their own boards and forming clubs, and, by 1964, the clubs were competing against one another. In 1965, the Nippon Surfing Association was founded.49 Word of Japan was getting out. Surfer reported sailors’ accounts of “perfectly formed” waves in 1962 and ran an eight-page spread on Bruce Brown’s Japanese travels for The Endless Summer in 1964.50 Petersen’s Surfing Yearbook followed up with a short piece in 1966, and Surfer published a ten-page feature on the country in 1968.51 As they had with baseball, Japanese indigenized the aquatic pastime, developing a vibrant surf culture that, by the early twenty-first century, encompassed an estimated 750,000 surfers, seven surfing magazines, some nine hundred surf shops, and a professional surfing association.52 Women were particularly well represented. Japan, wrote Michael Scott Moore in 2010, “may have a higher proportion of female surfers than any nation in the world.”53
Despite its growing popularity at the time of Expo ’70—Surfer had predicted in 1968 that within a few years the sport would be as popular in Japan as it was in Hawai‘i and the United States—U.S. officials appeared oblivious to the existence of a Japanese Surfing community when organizing their pavilion. They thought the sport, which they identified as “typically American,” would be of interest to the Japanese public simply because of its “uniqueness, gad[g]etry, and polish.”54 Whatever their motivation, organizers gave surfing a prominent role in the sports exhibit. The centerpiece of the surfing material was a futuristic display of thirteen boards—five by Weber Surfboards (Dewey Weber), five by Rick Surfboards (Rick Stoner), and three by Wave Riding Vehicles (Bob White)—mounted over the metallic “sloping side” of the exhibit platform in a crude mimicry of a wave.55
FIGURE 6. In an indication of the role surfing might play in U.S. cultural diplomacy, the United States created a sports exhibit for Expo ’70 in Osaka, the first World’s Fair to be held in Asia, that proudly featured surfing as a “typically American” pastime. Here, surfboards were mounted along the “sloping side” of the exhibit platform in what almost seemed like the rising face of a wave. Credit: Photograph of Expo ’70, Folder: General—Exhibit Photos, Box 2, Entry #A1 1054-B: Files of the Design Office, 1967–1972, Office of the Director/Osaka World Exhibition Office, Record Group 306, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
There also appeared in rear-view projection a continual loop of fast-action motion pictures that contained surfing footage donated by Bruce Brown Films.56 And photography of Hawaiian surfing was featured on the massive Man in Sport Transparency Wall created with the assistance of Sports Illustrated.57 The American organizers were hoping to impart the growing significance of surfing across the United States, with boards representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and Hawai‘i. They did research on the mechanics and history of surfboard design and compiled a list of well-known shapers, ultimately commissioning the work of a select few.58
And, it appears, the organizers succeeded in their diplomatic objectives. The reception to the American Pavilion was overwhelmingly favorable. The media, one U.S. official noted, was “almost embarrassingly lauditory [sic].” This was just as true of the sports exhibit as it was of the overall pavilion.59 The sports materials, which included a good deal of baseball memorabilia—a sure hit in Japan—were, according to different press accounts, “authentic,” “outstanding,” and “excellent.”60 One journalist applauded U.S. commissioner general Howard Chernoff’s confidence in sport’s popularity, noting that it was “paying off in press attention” to the surfboards and several other items.61 There were, nevertheless, occasionally discordant notes, most of them from visiting Americans. The wife of a naval aviator stationed in Atsugi lamented the presence of Leonard Freed’s photographs illustrating some of the complexities of American society, with its racial injustice and poverty; the images filled her with “complete disappointment, embarrassment, and anger.”62 A mother from a suburb of Cleveland—a self-described “irritated and disgusted member of your silent majority”—complained to President Nixon that “some Japanese families (not VIPs) with children strapped to their backs” were allowed through the pavilion’s VIP entrance while she and a group of American sailors were denied this privilege; if the sailors “had stayed home, burned their draft cards, grown their hair long, and blown up a college building, they would have been treated with more respect by the American government,” she fumed.63 And an Air Force colonel who visited Expo ’70 while on leave complained,
