Issue:
June 2025 | Obituary
Takao Tokuoka, reporter, correspondent, author, translator and friend
January 2, 1930 – April 12, 2025
Takao Tokuoka was one of two Japanese reporters to whom the novelist Yukio Mishima entrusted his manifesto hours before committing ritual suicide. A former Mainichi Shimbun Southeast Asia correspondent and longtime FCCJ member, Tokuoka died peacefully on April 12 at his home in Yokohama. He was 95.
Tokuoka wrote 26 books, co-authored six others, and translated another 24 works on subjects ranging from the Vietnam War to a love triangle in the Yokohama foreign settlement. But his association with nationalist novelist Mishima would become the defining aspect of his career.
On November 25, 1970, the day Mishima and four of his followers staged a mock coup d’etat at a Japanese military base in Ichigaya, Tokuoka and an NHK reporter were asked by Mishima to go to the base, where they were handed copies of a manifesto lamenting Japan’s descent into materialism and loss of national spirit in the decades since defeat in World War II.
A third recipient of Mishima’s final message, Columbia University Japanologist Donald Keene, contacted Tokuoka, kindling a collaborative relationship spanning two decades starting with Keene and Tokuoka undertaking a months-long “voyage of mourning”, visiting locations associated with Mishima’s life and works, and culminating in Tokuoka becoming Keene’s translator of several volumes of the latter’s works on Japanese literature. Segments of the Keene-Tokuoka travelogue, initially serialized on the pages of the weekly Sunday Mainichi, appeared in book form in 1973, 1981 and, finally, in 2020.
Although not a frequent visitor to the Club, Tokuoka was a close friend of fellow member and Mishima confidant Henry Scott-Stokes. It was Tokuoka who translated Scott-Stokes’ Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. In 1996, Tokuoka himself would win the Shinchosha Literary Prize for Gosui no hito, in which he recounted his own personal observations of Mishima.
There was more than a hint of Mishima-style anti-materialism in Tokuoka’s own writings. In Yellow Yankee, one of his early books, based on his years as the Mainichi’s Southeast Asia correspondent, he wrote: “In predawn Bangkok one encounters two kinds of people, Buddhist monks seeking alms, and Japanese businessmen on their way to the golf course.” Yellow Yankee singled out Japanese expatriates in Asia, criticizing them for what Tokuoka saw as the insensitive materialism of Japan in the era of high-speed economic growth.
Unusual for Japanese journalists who came of age in the early postwar decades, when restrictions on foreign travel made it difficult for all but a few Japanese to acquire near-native competence in foreign languages, Tokuoka’s English was as expressive as his Japanese. In 1955, two years after he graduated from Kyoto University with a degree in English Literature, he was given leave from the general assignment desk of the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun to take up a Fulbright fellowship at Syracuse University.
A decade later he was in Bangkok making side-trips to cover the war in Vietnam and in 1972, when three members of the Japanese Red Army Faction opened fire on passengers at Tel Aviv Airport, killing 28 people and injuring 80 others, it was Tokuoka who was sent by the Mainichi to cover the trial of the lone surviving attacker, Kozo Okamoto. (A devout Catholic, Tokuoka spent time off visiting Christian holy sites in Jerusalem.)
A trait Tokuoka shared with Mishima was open contempt for mediocrity. On returning from one overseas assignment to cover breaking news, he recalled that the first task of rival reporters from the Tokyo dailies was to set up a kisha kurabu (press club) and demand regular briefings from Japanese diplomats. As a translator, he was often called on to rescue work botched by others. He related coming across a description of the 16th century Japanese warrior Oda Nobunaga entering Kyoto and celebrating victory by throwing furniture in his path. The passage written originally in English had described Oda as “throwing out his chest as he walked”.
His reputation for fast, accurate and context-sensitive translation guaranteed constant demand for his services. Tokuoka translated works by Lee Iacocca, Richard Nixon, Edwin Reischauer, William Safire, Alvin Toffler, and many others. He recalled his frustrations with the Japanese tax office, which would not allow him to spread his earnings from the Iacocca translation over a period of several years, an option that would have been permitted in the United States, but not in Japan. Still, he was able to build a new house from his earnings as a translator.
To describe Tokuoka as a workaholic would be to understate his commitment. Even while putting in full hours as a Mainichi reporter and later editor, he wrote a regular unsigned column for 29 years for the conservative Shokun! magazine. In the magazine’s final issue in 2009, the year it ceased publication, Tokuoka finally revealed his identity to his many readers. In 1990, five years after retiring from the Mainichi, he lost 80 percent of his eyesight – the result of an operation following a misdiagnosed brain tumor. But even in near total blindness, Tokuoka continued to work tirelessly for another three decades, receiving the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize for lifetime achievement. A work of historical non-fiction delving into a murder, the outcome of a love triangle in the foreign settlement in 19th century Yokohama, earned him a prize from the Japanese Association of Mystery Writers.
Tokuoka-san made no secret of his conservative views. He distrusted China long before it was fashionable to do so. He revered the Imperial Institution, and when I had the honor of representing the Club at Emperor Akihito’s first news conference in 1990, Tokuoka-san introduced me to friends as “one who has spoken directly with the crane”, an honorific reference to words uttered by an emperor. At the same time, I was struck by Tokuoka-san’s ability to move seamlessly across boundaries of language and culture in work and play, yet another trait he shared with the novelist he admired.
Andrew Horvat is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Japanese Research, University of British Columbia. Previously, Horvat worked as Tokyo-based correspondent for Canadian, U.S., and U.K. news media. He is a past president of the FCCJ.
