Spam From Japan

These lines from the 1969 song “Francine no Baai” (フランシーヌの場合) stayed with me long after the late evening enka/oldies ranking extravaganza had ended. It offered a window on a specific place, time and person, but omitted the event. What had happened to Francine in Paris on the morning of Sunday March 30th?

A Google search for Shintani Noriko, the singer who recorded the song, has links to recordings of this song and reveals she’s a pacifist whose song is considered important enough to be included in overviews of postwar music in Japan. Looking up world events and seeing if anything was listed under March 30th in English proved fruitless.

To discover the story of Francine, I needed to search in Japanese. I soon found that her full name was Francine Lecomte and, bizarrely, that didn’t help my search in English any more than before. However, the Japanese Wikipedia has tons of stuff on the issues surrounding the song and 1960s counterculture in Japan. From the page on Shintani Noriko:

“Francine no Baai” is about a 30 year-old French woman called Francine Lecomte who, on March 30th 1969, burned herself to death in an anti-war protest in Paris. The record went on sale on June 15th, declared to be Anti US-Japan Security Treaty Day since the same day in 1960 was when Kanba Michiko was killed in a student protest outside the Diet building,. Around 800,000 records were sold, making it a huge hit.

Worth noting is that none of these pages have an English equivalent and, as you can see, this incident IS listed in the Japanese timeline for March 30th. However, while the case of Francine is largely unremarked upon in English, it was reported by the Asahi Shimbun and taken to heart by a number of Japanese protesters at the time. To find out more about postwar Japanese protests in English, you can read a limited preview on Google Books of Organizing the spontaneous: citizen protest in postwar Japan by Wesley Makoto Sasaki-Uemura. You can also listen to the song itself by clicking on the embedded YouTube clip below.