Of Fish and Fishermen by Howard Zinn — Read

In June of 1966, I was invited to Japan, along with Ralph Featherstone, a black SNCC worker I knew from Mississippi. Our hosts were members of Beheiren, a Japanese group organized around opposition to the American war in Vietnam-they were journalists, novelists, poets, philosophers, movie-makers. Ralph and I traveled north to south through Japan, from Hokkaido to Hiroshima and Fukuoka, and across the East China Sea to Okinawa. We spoke at fourteen universities in nine different cities, at big meetings and small ones, at tea gatherings and beer sessions, with trade unionists and housewives. We found them virtually unanimous in their belief that the United States policy in Vietnam was not just a bit awry, but profoundly wrong. When I returned, wanting people in the United States to get a Japanese perspective on the war, I wrote an article for Ramparts magazine, which appeared in 1967 under the title "Of Fish and Fishermen, "and then, in another form, as a chapter in Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. (A tragic note: not long after our return from Japan, my companion on that trip, Ralph Featherstone, newly married, still involved with SNCC and the Movement, was killed when a bomb of unknown origin exploded in a car he was driving.)

There is an eerie ten minute motion picture called The Fisherman, in which a happy American angler hauls sleek, fat leaping fish out of the ocean and piles them lifeless on the beach, meanwhile devouring candy bars from his lunchbox. He finally runs out of food. Restless, unhappy, he sees a paper sack nearby with a sandwich in it, bites into the sandwich, and is hooked. He digs his feet frantically into the sand, but he is dragged, twisting and struggling at the end of a line, into the sea. The effect on the viewer is a sudden reverse of perspective, both horrifying and healthful, in which, for the first time he sees himself, the Fisherman, from the standpoint of the Fish.