LITMIR.BIZ

      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, as did others, about the “ill kempt, long haired, dirty clothed, hippie[-]type singers” performing for those waiting to enter the pavilion.⁶⁴ As Chernoff reported to Washington, the Americans registering complaints were generally upset “because we wouldn’t let them jump the long lines, or because they felt we didn’t exhibit what they would have exhibited.” They ignored “the fact that ninety-six 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