percent of our audience is Japanese and it’s to them, rather than the Americans, that we are aiming the exhibits,” he said.65
The Japanese, conversely, “don’t write too often,” Chernoff told the USIA, and when they did it was “usually . . . because they were unable to find one of our six water fountains or because the lines were a bit long and exhausting.”66 There were, to be sure, Japanese displeased with the American participation in the fair, such as the students who organized as the Joint Struggle to Crush Expo and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.67 But most Japanese appeared to respond favorably to the American pavilion, and opportunities to strengthen U.S.-Japanese ties abounded. One of these came from Tamio Katori. Katori was a surfer from Kanagawa Prefecture who made Maiami Beach, near Chigasaki, his local break. He visited the American exhibits and was deeply impressed with the surfboards displayed there. Katori wrote to U.S. officials, asking whether he could purchase the boards for his surfing club once the fair ended. To demonstrate the seriousness he attached to the request, he also telephoned the Americans and sought them out during a second visit. Katori wished to further spread surfing in Japan, and the boards, he told the Americans, would not only popularize the sport but also contribute to what he called “the goodwill between both countries.”68 Three of the thirteen boards had been lent by Bob White and would need to be returned to the Virginia Beach shaper, but the remaining ten had been purchased by the USIA. For the United States, concurring with Katori’s request would be an effective means of disposing of a bulky exhibit while contributing to the globalization of this now most American of pleasurable pastimes and fostering transpacific amity. It was a no-brainer. The boards were sold.
The surfing display at Expo ’70 may be a minor footnote in the larger history of U.S. cultural diplomacy, but it illustrates one of the ways that surfing increasingly intersected with American global power. It also starkly illuminates the extent to which surfing, like Hawai‘i, had become naturalized as somehow American. Those U.S. military personnel who rode waves in Japan after 1945 were participants in the same twentieth-century globalization that saw such disparate phenomena as the export of Hollywood beach films and the creation of Osaka’s surfing exhibit. But this was not an exclusively American globalization. Surfing offered an increasingly global culture. The Third World “surfaris” of young wave-riding enthusiasts who built an international fraternity helped to ensure as much. Australian waterman Peter Troy may have been the first serious explorer—or at least the first to attract a great deal of attention—but he was hardly alone. The American duo Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, for instance, fascinated thousands of young Westerners with their Surfer magazine dispatches throughout the 1970s.69 Indeed, travel became, by that decade, an essential component of modern surf culture. “Just to clear something up,” the editors of Surfing magazine once wrote, “we’re not telling you to ‘travel.’ That’s a given. We surf; it’s assumed we’re all infected with the wanderlust. The allure of new waves and cultures comes with the territory, much like chronic tardiness and public displays of bro-shaking. We know you crave the road; we all do.”70
FIGURE 7. “Charlie don’t surf!” While that may or may not have been true—the U.S. military in fact reported that Vietnamese revolutionaries were using wooden surfboards to surreptitiously move along the Vietnamese coast—there can be no doubt that Apocalypse Now (1979) perhaps immortally associated surfing with the Vietnam War. It was addressed even more extensively in Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), Francis Ford Coppola’s extended version of the 1979 original. In this scene, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) steals an arriving surfboard from a helicopter crew while hustling surfing legend Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) away from the napalm-loving officer Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Credit: Apocalypse Now Redux © Zoetrope Corporation.
That road broadened with every passing year. As late as the early 1960s, Hawai‘i had been the ultimate object of surfing desire. Then came The Endless Summer and its vision of cultural encounter. Mexico began to beckon, as did Peru and South Africa. Countries that had not previously graced tourist itineraries suddenly found themselves flooded with board-toting visitors. Surfers are “always the first to sniff out an untrammeled destination,” wrote the New York Times.71 If there was a coast, surfers came. They blazed trails around the world, vastly expanding or even opening the tourism profiles of nations from Morocco to Mauritius. As “countercultural rebels” (more on this in chapter 5), they were what Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter called “the ‘shock troops’ of mass tourism.”72 Yet no area of the world attracted more attention in the 1970s than Southeast Asia, with its warm water, cheap accommodations, and jungle-fringed beaches.
Southeast Asia had, of course, been much on the minds of young surfers throughout the second half of the 1960s. With the United States enmeshed in a brutal counterrevolution in Vietnam, millions of young men in the United States and Australia—the world’s twin centers of global surf culture—found themselves confronting the possibility of military conscription. Filmgoers today can tell you all about surfing and the Vietnam War. After all, they have seen Apocalypse Now (1979). In the film, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, memorably played by Robert Duvall, calls for the destruction of a coastal Vietnamese village so that he and his men can surf a nearby break. They do so amid enemy fire. “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, captain, it’s safe to surf this beach,” Duvall shouts at a doubting member of his unit. It was during this sequence, probably the film’s best remembered, that the famous lines “Charlie don’t surf” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” were uttered.
FIGURE 8. Surfing during the Vietnam War was not just a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. It was in fact a notable feature of the U.S. military’s rest-and-recuperation circuit. The military even sponsored surfing contests. In this photograph, several competitors exit the water at a contest in Chu Lai in September 1966. Credit: Photograph of Captain Rodney Bothelo, Elli Vade Bon Cowur, Robert D. Brinkley, Tim A. Crowder, and Steven C. Richardson, September 26, 1966, ARC ID 532396, Record Group 127, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division, National Archives II, College Park, Mary land.
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