Excerpt from Chapter 16, Bridge to The Gods: Tales From Kyushu

In his long career as a professional golfer, my father met many famous people along
the way: American presidents Eisenhower, Bush (both), Clinton, and Obama; Hollywood
actors such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Clint Eastwood; singers, comedians,
champions from other sports, prime ministers, kings and queens, sumo wrestlers, and
famous novelists among others. The novelist with whom he played the most golf was
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Fleming had great affection for my father, and
when they became friends in Britain during the 1960s he made my father promise
never to read a James Bond book. ‘They’re really rubbish,’ he said. Loyal to his promise,
my father has never read one. My mother said that Fleming was the most charming man
she ever met.
That Ian Fleming had a connection with Kyushu, and with the area of sea and islands
that I could see from my balcony in Itoshima, was a delightful surprise. Dr Andrew
Southcott MP gave me a copy of You Only Live Twice after we had dinner in Tokyo with
Hiroshi Takaku and Shunichi Yoshida, president of Asahi Broadcasting. I didn’t start
reading it for a couple of weeks, but as I got through the chapters it suddenly became
very interesting as Bond and his Japanese host, Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese spy
agency, arrived in Kyushu. Years ago, I had watched the movie You Only Live Twice,
starring my father’s friend Sean Connery, but there was nothing about Kyushu in it. All
the action took place around Tokyo and in Mie Prefecture. The book, however, is
completely different. Bond and Tiger go to Kyushu in pursuit of the villain, Ernst Stavro
Blofeld, who is disguised as a wealthy Swiss botanist living in a castle down the coast
from Fukuoka.
Blofeld – Dr Shatterhand, as he called himself – had acquired an old castle and set up a
garden of poisonous plants within its walls, along with a pirhana-infested pond. When I
first read this, I thought of the site where Nagoya Castle once stood (written differently
in Japanese from the city of Nagoya in central Japan). The Nagoya Castle in Saga
Prefecture, a few miles the other side of Karatsu, was once the Shogun Hideyoshi’s base
as he was preparing to invade Korea. It sits on a hill overlooking the Genkai Nada Sea.
Looking across Karatsu Bay from my house I could see the hills where the castle once
stood. There were some large islands offshore, too.
In Fleming’s book there is an island called Kuro just offshore from Blofeld’s castle.
Kuro is home to a community of ama, the women who dive for pearl oysters, abalone,
and other shellfish. Bond goes to Kuro in disguise, falls in love with a beautiful ama girl
called Kissy Suzuki – she had a brief but unpleasant career in Hollywood, hence the
name Kissy – and swims across the narrow strait to penetrate the castle dressed as a
ninja and assassinate Blofeld.
All this suggests that Fleming himself came to Fukuoka to survey the area to create the
story for You Only Live Twice. He certainly came to Japan and spent a fortnight travelling
with his friend Dick Hughes, who was based here as a correspondent. Hughes knew
Japan well. Beyond doubt, much of the detail about Japanese culture in Fleming’s book,
though somewhat crude in its descriptions, would have come from Hughes, and from
Fleming’s own interrogation of Hughes’s friends in Japan, including a few spies, police
officers, and local journalists.
These days it seems only men dive for shellfish. I saw them often, both out in their
boats and in the fishing ports wandering around in wetsuits. In most fishing villages in
Japan you see wetsuits hanging on pegs outside the houses here and there. Women do
occasionally still dive for abalone and sazae shellfish, and for uni sea urchins and
wakame seaweed. Fleming must have seen the ama at Toba in Mie Prefecture diving for
pearl oysters on his way to Kyushu. In the book, Bond and Tiger Tanaka travel to Toba
and then take a boat from Osaka down to Beppu to enjoy the hot springs.
I suspected there were once ama in Itoshima, as well as other fishing ports along the
Kyushu coast. What seemed obvious as I read the chapter about the island of Kuro,
Bond, Kissy Suzuki, and the attack on Blofeld’s castle, was the need to go and look for
myself. I had a canoe and plenty of snorkelling gear, weekends on my own, and a deep
curiosity about the whole affair. I had met Dick Hughes as a teenager and read his book
Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting the Far East, with its wonderful chapter about
Fleming’s visit to Japan. Sayuri, had she known, would not have been too happy about it,
but in the back of my mind I wondered whether a current version of Kissy Suzuki
existed on one of the islands. The question was, which island was Kuro?
I thought it unlikely that Fleming would have gone all the way to the Nagoya Castle
ruins. In the 1960s, when he visited, there was no expressway heading west from
Fukuoka, just narrow local roads. From what was written in the novel it seemed obvious
that Hughes’s friends had taken Fleming on a boat trip from Fukuoka down the coast to
Itoshima where he saw the beaches, the cliffs, and the small island of Himeshima which
I saw every day from my house in Funakoshi. More than likely then, Himeshima was
Kuro in the novel, and the coast of Itoshima around Keya was the locus in quo of You
Only Live Twice, at least in the book if not the movie. What a discovery, I thought.

#jamesbond
#golf
#peterthomson
#ianfleming
#youonlylivetwice
#kyushu
#fukuoka
#ama
#kissysuzuki
#itoshima
Peter Thomson with South African golfer Louis Oosthuizen
Himeshima, the island in Fukuoka Prefecture where Ian Fleming had James Bond
conceal himself in You Only Live Twice. In the book the island was called Kuro.
Sunset behind Himeshima, the island in Fukuoka Prefecture where Ian Fleming had
James Bond conceal himself in You Only Live Twice. In the book the island was called
Kuro.