I was 12 when JFK was shot. At the time, I was living in Tokyo, where I’d arrived as a kid during the U.S. Occupation. Early on the morning of November 23, 1963, my father woke me and my siblings up with his transistor radio broadcasting the news from the U.S. Army’s Far East Network: Kennedy had been shot; he was dead. “Assassinated? Assassinated?” my mother kept asking. It seemed impossible, and still does all these years later. Here’s how we read about in the Japanese newspapers.
Some of the details here are fascinating, particularly how much was known about Lee Harvey Oswald in the first 24 hours. There’s even signs of the hidden world we’d later learn so much about (see that ad on the upper left for CAT? That’s Civil Air Transport, the proprietary airline of the CIA). The assassination was a huge event in Japan in part because JFK’s cabinet was en route at the time to Tokyo, where they were to open talks with Japan’s rightist government. In fact, Kennedy was scheduled to deliver a live address to the Japanese people that night, and many had stayed up all night to hear it – only to learn the tragic news. For me it seems almost poetic justice that JFK’s daughter, Caroline, just arrived in Tokyo as the U.S. ambassador. I wish her well.
In any case, those shots in Dallas opened my eyes to a darker America and confirmed to me the trepidations I was feeling after a trip to Vietnam I’d made a few months earlier with my family. That’s when I first learned how bad that war was becoming, and after Kennedy it kept escalating and getting worse and things seemed to spin out of control. It was just the beginning of an incredible decade of strife, horror and wonder that helped shape my life. Perhaps above all, it made me love newspapers and how they could keep us all informed. Maybe I owe my interest in journalism to those dark days.
