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TWO

A World Made Safe for Discovery

TRAVEL, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, AND THE POLITICS OF SURF EXPLORATION

PETER TROY WAS A LEGENDARY EXPLORER. His name may not resonate outside portions of the littoral world, but, to surfers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, it is every bit as weighty as those of Columbus, Cook, and Magellan. A thin, blond-haired Australian, Troy emerged as a highly regarded surfer when still in his teens, winning the Victorian novice surfing title in 1955. He might have remained a mere local figure had it not been for the postwar globalization of surf culture. In 1956, Troy’s Torquay Surf Life Saving Club hosted the International Surf Life Saving Carnival to coincide with that year’s Olympic Games in Melbourne. The carnival included teams from Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), South Africa, England, and the United States, and Troy, as the local titleholder, was asked to give a surfing demonstration. An estimated fifty thousand spectators were on hand to see the young Victorian work his way across the waves on his sixteen-foot hollow board. But it was the American contingent, riding shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable equipment—their “Malibu” boards were approximately nine feet long—that made the biggest splash. These American board designs inspired Australian replication, and the result was equipment capable of tackling breaks, such as Bells Beach, that had previously been considered unrideable.

This heralded a new era in the history of Australian surfing. The sport metamorphosed from an activity undertaken by lifesavers patrolling a particular beach to one in which individual surfers set out along the coast in search of the best possible waves. For some of these surfers, the local beaches were soon not enough. Working at the time as an accountant for Price Water house in Melbourne, Troy’s global yearnings—the seeds of which, he said, had been planted by the Americans in 1956—only intensified. “I had no desire to be an accountant but I wasn’t sure how to leave my job,” he recalled. “When I saw my first Surfer magazine, I saw a glimmer of hope. . . . I realized that here was another way of life.”¹

Troy was twenty-four years old in 1963 when he left Australia, surfboard in hand, to become what Brendan McAloon called “surfing’s first vagabond.”² Over the course of three years, he tackled Europe’s Atlantic Seaboard, surfed the warm waters of Hawai‘i, helped popularize his beloved sport in Brazil—now a competitive Surfing powerhouse—and explored the African coast. He did so by air, boat, foot, road, and rail. He toasted the children of Europe an diplomats, sweated through a South African gold mine, rode in stuffed freight cars with Peruvian peasants, and consumed his fill of cheap wine in Franco’s Madrid. Surfer christened him “one of the most effective roving ambassadors for the sport.”³ And the travel bug never left him. Troy would be back at it years later, discovering, in 1975, the world-class right-hander at Indonesia’s Lagundri Bay with two of his Australian compatriots. By the time he died in 2008, he had visited well over 140 countries.⁴ Troy’s travels are now the stuff of legend. In that long-ago era before blogs and YouTube, he wrote occasional dispatches for the monthly surfing press. This not only made him something of a minor celebrity but also situated him as an exemplar of Cold War surf culture.

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Surfing had come a long way from its near extinction decades before in that cluster of small Pacific islands in which people rode waves while standing. A Hawaiian tradition that had almost disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century had become, by 1945, a minor global pastime; then, in the decades following the Second World War, surfing emerged not only as a sport enjoyed by millions of enthusiasts worldwide but, significantly, as a form of cultural encounter that might go some distance in bridging national or political divides. A variety of factors contributed to surfing’s phenomenal growth. Foremost among these was the sport’s embrace by the American culture industries. In films ranging from Gidget (1959) to the “beach party” pictures of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Hollywood appropriated surfing and its youthful, seemingly carefree lifestyle while designating Southern California the presumptive center of the surfing universe. Television likewise took to the sport. Gidget made her small-screen debut in 1965 with a young Sally Field in the series’ title role, while ABC’s Wide World of Sports, recognizing surfing’s striking visual qualities, had begun regularly pumping contests into American living rooms in 1962. Surf music became a popular genre, with performers such as the Beach Boys, Dick Dale, and Jan and Dean emerging as best-selling performers. Surfing even entered the world of American letters. Eugene Burdick published The Ninth Wave in 1956—Burdick would shortly thereafter coauthor the influential Cold War novels The Ugly American and Fail-Safe—and Tom Wolfe, that paragon of New Journalism, released his collection of essays The Pump House Gang in 1968.⁵

Surfing—or at least some version of it—had entered the commercial mainstream. Yet the surf culture popularized in the 1960s was essentially a moneymaking artifice. For every Bikini Beach (1964) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) that purported to reveal the ways of the surfer, there was a shoestring-budget documentary—a traditional “surf flick”—relegated to high school and civic center auditoriums up and down the coast. This more organic community would itself soon reach the mainstream, but not before establishing a foundational element of contemporary surf culture: the primacy of travel to the modern surfing experience. Surfers, like waves, move across and along the oceans. If the first half of the twentieth century was marked by the revitalization and growth of Hawaiian surf culture and its first tentative steps into the wider world, the second half was characterized by widespread global interaction, with surfers ready participants in the rise of Cold War travel cultures. The expansion of the white middle class in the 1950s opened up new horizons for those afflicted with wanderlust. Places that were once only reached following weeks-long transoceanic voyages could, with the growth and increasing affordability of commercial air travel, welcome wide-eyed tourists after flights lasting mere hours.

For no destination was this truer than Hawai‘i, where the tourism industry exploded in the fourteen years between the war’s end in 1945 and the establishment of statehood in 1959. But it was not just about plea sure travel. The growth of Hawaiian tourism coincided with the escalation of the Cold War, and Hawai‘i, which was already situated at the heart of American power in the Pacific, became even more militarized as Cold War tensions increased.⁶ If not for this militarization, however, surf history might have unfolded quite differently. The armed forces brought several major figures in the development of modern surf culture to Hawai‘i, including Bruce Brown, whose The Endless Summer (1966) made him surfing’s most influential documentary filmmaker, and John Severson, the founder of Surfer magazine. Both Brown and Severson further exposed the rich Hawaiian surf to California’s wave-obsessed youth.⁷ Yet even for those without military ties, Hawai‘i had become surfing’s mecca. It was the place mainlanders went to assert their wave-riding chops. By the 1960s, a surfer could not be said to have reached surfing’s heights unless he (or, far less frequently, she) had successfully ridden O‘ahu’s North Shore.

And yet, for a number of surfers, the distant trip to Hawai‘i was not enough. Surfing was increasingly about the search, the journey, the discovery. In this vein, a number of young men (and it was almost exclusively men) set out to chart something of the littoral world. Their voyages were not the “Grand Tours” of previous centuries. Yes, they revolved around pleasure. And yes, they dripped with the trappings of empire. But those undertaking the journeys were not generally members of the landed elite, their itineraries were fluid, and the object of their gaze was not the patrimony of the West. These were young men looking for waves, most often in relatively untouristed destinations, and they relished their cultural exchanges along the way. The discoveries were undoubtedly important to them, but “the search”—as the wetsuit and apparel maker Rip Curl later designated an influential advertising campaign—was just as significant. These were essentially backpackers with boards, seeking out those quieter parts of the planet where they might be alone—or close to it—with the locals and the ocean. And like their backpacker counterparts, wandering surfers were, as Peter Troy put it, “always trying to enter the life of [those] locals.”⁸

Troy’s early travels are illustrative. He began his global jaunt in 1963 by ship, making his way across the Indian Ocean and through the Mediterranean on his way to the British motherland. It might seem natural that a white Australian would begin his excursion in Europe, though Troy was there not to imbibe the art and architecture of Florence or the café culture of Paris. It is not that “culture” did not interest the Australian. It did. After passing through the Red Sea, for instance, he ventured inland to explore the antiquities of Egypt, and he wrote home about the magnificent paintings he saw in Europe an cities such as Seville.⁹ But Troy was traveling the world to surf, and the principal culture he sought was not the high culture of the Grand Tour but the subculture of modern surfing. He began his European adventure in the Channel Islands, finding surprisingly good waves in Jersey. While there, he saved an Italian waiter from a near drowning, which earned him notice in the English press, and he took surfboard orders from the locals and offered wave-riding lessons.¹⁰ From the United Kingdom he left for France, where he entered an international contest just hours after disembarking in Biarritz. Despite his exhaustion, he won. Troy, a recently arrived and still traveling Australian, was pronounced the Europe an surfing champion.¹¹

The young Victorian then made his way to Spain and Portugal. He rode small waves in San Sebastián with traveling companion Rennie Ellis, a fellow Australian and an agent for Severson’s Surfer magazine, and he scored solid surf at the Portuguese beach of Guincho.¹² The locals were impressed. “Amazed spectators stared at us from the beach,” Ellis reported in Australia’s Surfing World. “Afterwards a local approached us and in halting English and raptured tones he told us that until then he had thought Christ was the only person who could walk on the water.”¹³ The Spanish and Portuguese—both at that time living under right-wing dictatorships—struck Troy for different reasons. In Spain “the people generally were lethargic, apparently not politically minded, poor[,] and mostly unkempt in appearance.” But the Portuguese “were very anti-communist (and didn’t dare speak their own views on politics and government to a fellow countryman in fear that he may be a secret agent of a rival party—we heard of many so-called stories to back these accusations), hard working, industrious[,] and of a general western world standard.”¹⁴ There was little doubt which country he viewed more favorably. But Troy intended to see far more than the Europe an Atlantic. Together with Ellis, he volunteered aboard an Indonesian-made ketch that took the two Australians to the Americas.

Along the way the yacht would stop in Morocco, Madeira, the Canary Islands (where Troy found “the best surfing conditions outside Biarritz”), and several places in the Caribbean.¹⁵ When Troy reached Florida, he was quickly adopted by Miami’s “surfing fraternity”—a term he applied to his fellow surfers worldwide—which showed him around the city and introduced him to the Florida waves.¹⁶ Desperate to make it to California, he found work as a driver, delivering a vehicle across the United States to Los Angeles, from where he immediately boarded a flight to Hawai‘i. He did so, he wrote to his parents, “with visions in my mind of the lei clad Hawaiian girls in costume and the balmy weather of this romantic island group blessed with the best climate of any place in the world and the venue for the International and World surfing Championships at Makaha—my dream of a lifetime almost now in reality—in fact, no turning back even if I wanted to.”¹⁷

Troy was not able to compete at Makaha; the start of the contest was moved up because of favorable wave conditions, and Troy arrived too late. He did, however, get to surf the warm Hawaiian waters, though a couple of unfortunate wipeouts at Pipeline and Sunset Beach left him with a badly lacerated face and coral abrasions on the shoulder, back, right foot, and elbow.¹⁸ From Hawai‘i he would be going to Peru, but Troy first took a return detour to California—a state whose wealth and technology amazed him. The day the Australian spent viewing the ostentatious lifestyle of Los Angeles’s rich and famous was “one of the most eye[-]opening days I have yet had the fortune to live.”¹⁹ But California was intended as a mere stopover. Traveling through Mexico by automobile and train, Troy departed from Mexico City with a friend for Lima. In the Peruvian capital, he proceeded to the coastal district of Miraflores, the heart of the Peruvian surf community, which had a long history. As far back as 3000 BCE, indigenous fishermen in Peru were riding waves on bundled reeds now called caballitos (little horses). However, the country’s modern surfing history dates only to the 1920s, when a number of Peruvians took to riding homemade boards on the beaches of Barranco, a popular community along the Lima coast. Then, in 1939, Carlos Dogny, a wealthy sugarcane heir, returned from a trip to Hawai‘i, where he had learned to surf, bringing with him a board he was given by Duke Kahanamoku. At Miraflores in 1942, Dogny founded Club Waikiki.²⁰

Club Waikiki served as the center of the Peruvian surf community. It was here that Troy discovered the contingency of surf culture: what was sometimes considered a disreputable activity in Australia or the United States could be a marker of wealth and privilege in portions of the Third World. The club was invitation only and restricted to two hundred members, each of whom paid a substantial entrance fee (approximately $1,200 in 1964) followed by monthly dues. The beachfront grounds were extravagant. They contained a squash court, two pelota courts, a shuffleboard court, workout facilities, a heated pool, dining facilities with jacket-and bow-tie-clad waiters serving four-course meals, a bar, a marble dance floor, and staff to wax and carry one’s surfboard to and from the water. Troy found this arrangement difficult to take. A “native laborer” would have to work twenty-five hours to earn the cost of his lunch, he wrote, as “per head of population” Peru had, according to Troy, “the second lowest standard of living in the civilized world.” “[T]o eat at the Club Waikiki with a hundred hungry Indians looking down on you” from the hilltop above required “some mental adjustment,” he confessed. Still, “[w]hen in Peru do as the idle, wealthy, aristocratic Peruvians do!” he wrote home.²¹ And he did. His existence was certainly not as ostentatious as that of one member, a thirty-two-year-old bachelor who owned three Jaguars and a helicopter, the latter of which he would use to go surfing during the lunch hour.²² But neither was it modest. In Peru, surfing was an elite sport. Troy did not bat an eye, for instance, when, with the 1965 World Surfing Championships held in Lima, the president of the country received a delegation of visiting competitors at the Government Palace.²³

If Club Waikiki awoke Troy to the elitism of Peruvian surf culture, Rio de Janeiro introduced him to the frenetic surf energy of Latin America’s largest nation. He arrived in Brazil in late May 1964, just weeks after the Brazilian armed forces overthrew, with American support, the democratically elected government of João Goulart. Troy had come far from his white-collar Australian roots. “[D]ressed in jeans, tattered shirt, locally made riding boots [ . . . ], long blonde [sic] hair, unshaven, suntanned, humping a bed-roll and cloth hammock and food sack, I cut quite a figure,” he wrote his parents from the bush.²⁴ Troy unwittingly became a minor celebrity after riding the waves of Rio’s world-famous coast. He appeared on the front page of Brazilian newspapers, was interviewed for Brazilian television, and was consulted by the Brazilian lifesaving ser vices. Troy undertook his Latin American travels at a time when military rule was becoming firmly ensconced across the continent. Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Latin America in 1964 was deeply enmeshed in the Cold War. In Brazil, Troy expressed no interest in politics—at least he did not comment on the military regime in his letters home—but in Paraguay, where he traveled briefly after leaving São Paulo, Troy was impressed. The country was then living under the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. Stroessner came to power in 1954 following a military coup d’état, and he ruled the corrupt (and, for much of the time, U.S.-backed) Paraguayan state—one of the worst human rights violators in South America—until 1989. Troy recognized that Stroessner was a “dictator,” though he considered him a “popular” one, and “the country has made remarkable progress” under his rule, he told his parents in August 1964. The evidence cited by Troy illustrates the extent to which tourists hailing from the industrialized West often conflate material trappings that remind them of home with “progress” in the nations they are visiting. There were, Troy wrote of Paraguay under Stroessner, “machined fence posts, town indicators, mile signs[,] and direction indicators.”²⁵

As the jaunt in landlocked Paraguay suggests, Troy spent more and more time away from the ocean. What was originally conceived as a surfing-centered voyage became a hitchhiking odyssey across vast swaths of the Latin American, European, and African interiors. There were occasional opportunities to surf, but Troy’s interests broadened with each passing mile. Still, there was no doubting the significance of his globe-trotting to the international surfing community. Peter Troy was, one of the Australians who discovered Lagundri Bay with him opined, “the grand-daddy of surf exploration,” spending years on the road with a backpack, some instruments with which to write, and a dwindling reserve of funds.²⁶ However, he was nowhere near as successful in popularizing surf exploration as were a couple of Southern California teenagers in the mid-1960s. Robert August and Mike Hynson are, to surfing enthusiasts today, house hold names. This is not because the two photogenic teens—one a blond-haired regularfoot, the other a dark-haired goofyfooter—racked up any championship trophies; neither of them, in fact, was a professional competitive surfer. Rather, August and Hynson just happened to be asked by a budding twenty-something film-maker whether they wanted to appear in his new movie.

Bruce Brown had already made a series of popular films for surfing audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, among them the cleverly titled Slippery When Wet and Barefoot Adventure. All August and Hynson would have to do for Brown’s newest project, The Endless Summer, was to travel, smile, and surf. They would not even have to talk; Brown would provide the picture’s narration. August and Hynson readily agreed, and the result was Brown’s artful chronicle of the two surfers chasing the summer, with its warm water and consistent waves, from California to Africa and points between. Shot in 1963, The Endless Summer traveled the traditional surf-film circuit of civic center and high school auditoriums in California, Hawai‘i, Australia, and South Africa over the two years that followed. But Brown was convinced his documentary could appeal to a broader audience. With Gidget and the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach-party movies having achieved wide commercial success, surfing’s popular appeal at that time was unmistakable. No major distributor would touch the untested documentary, however. Brown thus decided to rent a venue “about as far as one can get from the ocean and surfing,” a press release for the film noted, so as to screen it to an audience of surf-culture neophytes.²⁷ By any mea sure, Wichita, Kansas, fit the bill. “[O]pening a surfing film in Wichita is like distributing Playboy Magazine in a monastery,” Brown opined. “In Wichita, most of the natives think surf is a new brand of detergent . . . or something.”²⁸ In spite of what would seem, by all reasonable predictions, to have been a uniformly disinterested audience of landlocked Midwesterners, The Endless Summer proved a runaway success. Opening opposite My Fair Lady and The Great Race, the documentary “slaughtered them both during its two-week [Kansas] run,” reported the Hollywood Citizen News.²⁹ Brown then took the film to New York City, where it showed to enthusiastic audiences for a remarkable forty-seven weeks.³⁰ Shot on a bud get of $50,000, The Endless Summer would ultimately gross an estimated $30 million worldwide, rendering it one of the most successful documentary films of all time.³¹

Its cultural impact was profound. The Washington Post would dub it a “classic” account of “the sport’s golden age.”³² Members of the National Screen Council, which in January 1967 awarded The Endless Summer its Boxoffice Blue Ribbon Award—“unusual for a documentary,” the group noted—were ecstatic. “You could be 85 and never have put a toe in the water and still think this is great,” chimed one. “Who would have thought I would sit enthralled for 91 minutes by a documentary about surfing!” said another.³³ Brown came in for extraordinary praise. To Time magazine he was the “Bergman of the Boards”; the New York Times christened him the “Fellini of the Foam.”³⁴ So historically significant is The Endless Summer that in 2002 the Library of Congress selected the picture for inclusion on its exclusive National Film Registry. The movie’s signature poster, featuring the silhouettes of Brown, August, and Hynson “backlit by the sun,” has been “immortalized,” noted the Washington Post, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.³⁵ The Endless Summer theme music, composed and performed by the Sandals, helped define the surf music genre. As a global project, the film awakened thousands of surfers to the possibilities of exploration in Africa, the South Pacific, and other exotic locales, and it introduced countless people worldwide to California’s more genuine surfing “subculture” (as opposed to the caricature that appeared in Hollywood’s teenage surf movies).³⁶ Yet in ways that have not been explored by scholars, The Endless Summer also illustrates how, during the height of the Cold War, the United States came to view surfing as an ideological weapon in its anti-Communist crusade, for in May 1967 it was announced that the documentary would appear, under State Department sponsorship, at the biennial Moscow Film Festival.³⁷

It is not difficult to envision the film’s appeal to those tasked with American cultural diplomacy. In its story of two young Californians who meet the locals while looking for surf in Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai‘i, Brown’s picture is entertaining, funny, and visually striking. But it is much more than that. Through its protagonists’ carefree travel, The Endless Summer highlighted the freedom afforded Americans—unlike most of those living in the Soviet bloc—to explore and discover the nations of the world. In the stars’ quest for nothing more than good waves and fun, the film illustrated the pleasurable lifestyle promised by the capitalist system that made such leisure possible. And in the visiting surfers’ interactions with the locals—as embarrassingly racist as some of these interactions may appear to audiences today—The Endless Summer painted a portrait of the United States as a benevolent and sympathetic power at a time when, given the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the U.S. image was suffering in much of the Third World. Such people-to-people encounters, for which global tourism played a leading role, were an important Cold War weapon at the heart of America’s soft overseas propaganda.³⁸

For reasons more nepotistic than meritorious, The Endless Summer was withdrawn from the Moscow festival just weeks before it was to get under way. The Soviets told Washington that it needed to whittle down the number of films it intended to present, including just one commercial documentary. The United States had planned to show two: The Endless Summer and The Young Americans (1967), a patriotic account of high school-and college-age American choral singers performing in venues across the United States. Marc Spiegel, the Russian-speaking executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) who traveled to Moscow to consult with the Soviets, recommended The Endless Summer.³⁹ But Columbia Pictures, whose founders’ scion made The Young Americans and which served as the film’s distributor, “prefer[red]” its own documentary, MPAA chief and U.S. delegation organizer Jack Valenti notified Spiegel.⁴⁰ The MPAA, of course, represented the big American studios, while The Endless Summer was made by Bruce Brown Films and distributed by the small art-film company Cinema V. It was no contest. The Young Americans received the official nod.

Much to the frustration of the American contingent, in the end it, too, failed to show in Moscow. Its scheduled presentation was abruptly canceled by the Soviets without official explanation. Informally the authorities stated that the film was considered “American propaganda” by “high-level” Soviet viewers.⁴¹ This incensed Valenti, who had been assigned by the State Department to oversee American activities at the festival. “If the portrayal of young, wholesome Americans as they tour the United States giving concerts, climaxed by appearances in patriotic settings in Washington, is propaganda, then this was ‘propaganda,’ and about as good as could be found,” Valenti wrote to Washington. “But it was, first of all, an excellent motion picture.”⁴² While Valenti believed The Young Americans’ cancellation was ultimately a coup for the United States—the “meaning of the cancellation was not lost on Festival delegations or the world press, and thus the indirect effect was to benefit the United States,” he concluded—the MPAA chief was in fact being shortsighted. The censorship may have redounded to Washington internationally, but it had no discernible effect on the Soviet citizenry, who viewed the festival films by the hundreds of thousands.⁴³ The most effective propaganda, of course, is that which does not appear as such. If the principal reason for the American film industry’s investment in Moscow was “90% political,” as Valenti wrote to Secretary of State William Rogers, he failed to fully appreciate that the showing of Bruce Brown’s film, with its implicitly positive representations of the United States as a confident and courageous nation of economic abundance, would almost certainly have resonated with the Soviet people, as it had with countless Americans.⁴⁴ The Endless Summer, from this perspective, would have been a more inspired choice in 1967.

Those tasked with American cultural diplomacy gave surfing another chance not long afterward. The year was 1970, the place was Japan, and the setting was the first world’s fair ever to be held in Asia: the Japan World Exposition, or Expo ’70, in Osaka. Running for six months, the exposition was spread over 815 acres and featured the participation of seventy-seven countries, more than two dozen Japanese and foreign corporations, several U.S. and Canadian local governments, and three multilateral organizations. It drew an estimated 64 million visitors.⁴⁵ The general purpose of Expo ’70, like the purpose of all world’s fairs, was to showcase various nations’ geographies, economies, cultures, and societies. Yet such exhibitions, regardless of their innocuous facades, are always political.⁴⁶ In 1970, deep into the Cold War, there was no question that the United States was competing with the Soviet Union over which country would mount the most impressive national display. “Whether we like it or not,” wrote the chief of the American delegation to the director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), “we really are being thrown into a competition with the Russians over here.”⁴⁷ American officials thus took their cultural work very seriously.

The United States Pavilion, with 100,000 square feet of enclosed floor space spread over a six-acre site, embodied the vision of architect Yasuo Uesaka. Its exhibits—organized by the USIA—were designed by the joint venture team of Davis, Brody, Chermayeff, Geismar, de Harak Associates and divided into seven categories: Folk Art, Ten Photographers, American Painting, Sports, Space Exploration, Architecture, and New Arts.⁴⁸ American officials assumed the highlight would be the space exhibit, which featured several spacecraft and a moon rock brought to earth by the Apollo 11 astronauts; the Soviets were also planning a space exhibit at Expo ’70, so the moon rock afforded the Americans—who alone had undertaken manned lunar landings—an opportunity to demonstrate their national superiority. Yet competing for popularity was the exhibit devoted to sport. This is hardly surprising. Only war is more effective—and even that is debatable—in exciting people’s passions. It was there, within the sports exhibit, that, so far as I am aware, surfing for the first time became an official object of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

By 1970, surfing was already firmly established in Japan. As was true of a number of places around the world, it arrived as an indirect by-product of American military power. Japanese fishermen had ridden ita-go, which were a primitive form of bodyboards, since at least the second decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps as early as the twelfth century), and there may have been people stand-up Surfing on Honshu as early as the late 1920s. But it was, by all accounts, American servicemen stationed in Japan after World War II who planted the seeds of the sport’s modern growth and popularity. They brought surfboards with them to Japan, where they shared their equipment and pointers with a number of curious locals. These locals began building their own boards and forming clubs, and, by 1964, the clubs were competing against one another. In 1965, the Nippon Surfing Association was founded.⁴⁹ Word of Japan was getting out. Surfer reported sailors’ accounts of “perfectly formed” waves in 1962 and ran an eight-page spread on Bruce Brown’s Japanese travels for The Endless Summer in 1964.⁵⁰ Petersen’s Surfing Yearbook followed up with a short piece in 1966, and Surfer published a ten-page feature on the country in 1968.⁵¹ As they had with baseball, Japanese indigenized the aquatic pastime, developing a vibrant surf culture that, by the early twenty-first century, encompassed an estimated 750,000 surfers, seven surfing magazines, some nine hundred surf shops, and a professional surfing association.⁵² Women were particularly well represented. Japan, wrote Michael Scott Moore in 2010, “may have a higher proportion of female surfers than any nation in the world.”⁵³

Despite its growing popularity at the time of Expo ’70—Surfer had predicted in 1968 that within a few years the sport would be as popular in Japan as it was in Hawai‘i and the United States—U.S. officials appeared oblivious to the existence of a Japanese Surfing community when organizing their pavilion. They thought the sport, which they identified as “typically American,” would be of interest to the Japanese public simply because of its “uniqueness, gad[g]etry, and polish.”⁵⁴ Whatever their motivation, organizers gave surfing a prominent role in the sports exhibit. The centerpiece of the surfing material was a futuristic display of thirteen boards—five by Weber Surfboards (Dewey Weber), five by Rick Surfboards (Rick Stoner), and three by Wave Riding Vehicles (Bob White)—mounted over the metallic “sloping side” of the exhibit platform in a crude mimicry of a wave.⁵⁵

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

FIGURE 7. “Charlie don’t surf!” While that may or may not have been true—the U.S. military in fact reported that Vietnamese revolutionaries were using wooden surfboards to surreptitiously move along the Vietnamese coast—there can be no doubt that Apocalypse Now (1979) perhaps immortally associated surfing with the Vietnam War. It was addressed even more extensively in Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), Francis Ford Coppola’s extended version of the 1979 original. In this scene, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) steals an arriving surfboard from a helicopter crew while hustling surfing legend Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) away from the napalm-loving officer Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Credit: Apocalypse Now Redux © Zoetrope Corporation.

That road broadened with every passing year. As late as the early 1960s, Hawai‘i had been the ultimate object of surfing desire. Then came The Endless Summer and its vision of cultural encounter. Mexico began to beckon, as did Peru and South Africa. Countries that had not previously graced tourist itineraries suddenly found themselves flooded with board-toting visitors. Surfers are “always the first to sniff out an untrammeled destination,” wrote the New York Times.⁷¹ If there was a coast, surfers came. They blazed trails around the world, vastly expanding or even opening the tourism profiles of nations from Morocco to Mauritius. As “countercultural rebels” (more on this in chapter 5), they were what Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter called “the ‘shock troops’ of mass tourism.”⁷² Yet no area of the world attracted more attention in the 1970s than Southeast Asia, with its warm water, cheap accommodations, and jungle-fringed beaches.

Southeast Asia had, of course, been much on the minds of young surfers throughout the second half of the 1960s. With the United States enmeshed in a brutal counterrevolution in Vietnam, millions of young men in the United States and Australia—the world’s twin centers of global surf culture—found themselves confronting the possibility of military conscription. Filmgoers today can tell you all about surfing and the Vietnam War. After all, they have seen Apocalypse Now (1979). In the film, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, memorably played by Robert Duvall, calls for the destruction of a coastal Vietnamese village so that he and his men can surf a nearby break. They do so amid enemy fire. “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, captain, it’s safe to surf this beach,” Duvall shouts at a doubting member of his unit. It was during this sequence, probably the film’s best remembered, that the famous lines “Charlie don’t surf” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” were uttered.

FIGURE 8. Surfing during the Vietnam War was not just a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. It was in fact a notable feature of the U.S. military’s rest-and-recuperation circuit. The military even sponsored surfing contests. In this photograph, several competitors exit the water at a contest in Chu Lai in September 1966. Credit: Photograph of Captain Rodney Bothelo, Elli Vade Bon Cowur, Robert D. Brinkley, Tim A. Crowder, and Steven C. Richardson, September 26, 1966, ARC ID 532396, Record Group 127, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division, National Archives II, College Park, Mary land.