Labels:text | screenshot | newspaper | house | outdoor OCR: PERSPECTIVE When the submarine captain read the intelli- about 1,200 kilometres an hour. In a similar test, gence report, he held his head in horror. He real- just one of our cruise missiles sank a destroyer. ised that when he had given orders to shoot, he had mistaken the Japanese liner's signal on the So how was Tokyo? Until the last moment, my radar for that of the target. The shooting down of trip was up in the air. My passport was lost in the the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 over Sakhalin in depths of the Japanese bureaucracy. Well acquain- 1983 was not the first Cold War encounter in that ted with cancelled visits, I had begun to unpack. area-the Japanese were just luckier. Then, thanks to the connections of ASIA, INC. COL Two factors saved the liner. First, the captain umnist Ko Shioya, my Japanese visa flew like a had not quite taken his ship across the danger butterfly out of the doors of Boston's Japanese zone's borders. Second, the missiles were fitted consulate. with control devices that became active when the The days rushed by. Tokyo's Narita airport a missiles threatened to go outside comfortable downtown hotel; a the zone. Their steering turned seminar in a conference room filled sharply, and they fell into the water with curious faces; a short excur- only 10 seconds away from the sion around the city; US$100 mel- target. ons in a Ginza department store. A To this day those Japanese pas- Japanese restaurant Carp in a pond. sengers don't know how fortunate Back to Narita and ... that's it. they were. Although our test mis- So, I had no time to find the Ja- siles were not fitted with warheads, pan of my dreams. And for the mo- they were carrying fuel. The colli- ment that's not necessarily bad. A sion would have created an intense dream can be more attractive than explosion, the equivalent of several any reality. gasoline tankers hitting the liner at Until we meet again, Japan!
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