23 April 2008
 
Fukuoka

Marilyn Monroe in Fukuoka, Japan, 1954
 
The satellite trucks were set up across the alley, ready to broadcast the news, which is not complete this morning, but clear enough. Ten percent is enough to keep her alive.
 
She is never going to leave him alone. She beat him yesterday, and even if she loses in the end, there will be an eternal quality to their relationship, linked in a way that is more intimate and more brutal than marriage.
 
Hale to Hillary, and Hale to the endless campaign and the Superdelegates who will determine the outcome, regardless of what the good citizens of Indiana think next week.
 
The Senators will spend the rest of American history linked by fate and timing, a couple linked together more profoundly than even the bonds of matrimony.
 
Marriage is a powerful thing. Even the briefest of those can loom large in the public mind, outlasting the tomb.
 
Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Lefty O’Doul go into this bar in Fukuoka, see?
 
No, it is not a set up. Joltin’ Joe was on his honeymoon with the Movie Star in 1954. He was combining it with a baseball good-will tour, and Lefty was his Mentor. I don’t know precisely what Marilyn thought about it. The papers said she was in a spat with management in Hollywood, and wanted to do another picture like “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” rather than the recycled “Red Tights” story, which she said had been done four times.
 
It bored her, and a USO Tour was the patriotic way to make the studio Bosses sweat a little.
 
She was headed for Korea, to entertain the troops in the uneasy peace that followed the armistice. Joe and Lefty were going to do clinics on the island of Kysuhu. Joe didn’t need any more fame. Lefty, who left the Dodgers in 1934, was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. He had been dead for thirty-three years, so I guess you could say he made an impact.
 
Major General William Marquat was still in Tokyo, outstaying his Boss by three years. He was still administering his little M-fund, even if the Occupation was done. The fund has been valued in 1954 dollars at a value of nearly $30 Billion dollars. Think about it. In constant dollars, re-valued against all the currency fluctuations since then, the M-Fund in our time would have been a personal piggy-bank of about a third of a trillion dollars.
 
It was enough to fund a new Japanese National Police Force to replace the GI’s of the Occupation, the prototype for an army, and a Maritime Safety force, which hired Imperial Navy veterans to sweep mines, and open the passages for the invasion at Inchon.
 
When you think about some of the things Marquat did with Yamashita’s gold, it is remarkable that he is not in the Hall of Fame, too.
 
He knew that Fukuoka was the key the war, and if we have forgotten it here, it will always be the gateway to Japan from Asia. The ancient mission-house of the Imperial Chinese was just discovered under the Heiwa-dai baseball stadium in the mid 1980's.Only seventy miles across the Inland Sea was the end of the Asian Land mass, and Fukuoka was the gateway for introduction of Buddhism, Confucianism, the Chinese legal system, medicine and science.
 
Gateways, of course, attract undesirables. After the Chinese waves of the 7th Century CE, it was Mongol Kublai Khan who came calling. He tried twice, the first attempt at amphibious warfare a disaster, and the second destroyed by The Wind of God, or Kamikazi.
 
Alan was in Tokyo in June of 1950. He was a popular young man, and he enjoyed his role in the CID. But when the North Koreans went wild, and the stream of men and materials began to flood across the Straits toward the conflict, he was ordered to go set up shop in Fukuoka.
 
The black market was moving, like Willy Sutton, to where the money was.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com