The Nine Days Paul McCartney Spent in a Tokyo Jail
- Daniel Holland
- 3 hours ago
- 8 min read
On 16 January 1980, one of the most recognisable figures in popular music stepped off a long haul flight expecting rehearsals, interviews, and sold out arenas. Instead, Paul McCartney walked straight into one of the most sobering episodes of his life. By the end of the day, he would be under arrest, facing the possibility of years in a Japanese prison, and spending his nights sleeping on the floor of a detention centre cell in Tokyo.
McCartney had arrived at Narita International Airport with his wife and bandmate Linda McCartney, along with the rest of Wings. The group were due to begin an ambitious eleven date Japanese tour, their first visit to the country since The Beatles had caused controversy at the Nippon Budokan in 1966. Nearly 100,000 tickets had already been sold. For Japanese fans, it was a long awaited return.
McCartney never made it out of customs.
Inside his carry on luggage, officers discovered 219 grams of marijuana. It was not concealed. It was not disguised. It sat plainly among his clothes and personal effects, a casual decision that might have passed without comment elsewhere. In Japan, it triggered an immediate arrest under some of the strictest drug laws in the industrialised world.
Within hours, McCartney was handcuffed, photographed, and driven away for questioning. By nightfall, he was inmate number twenty two in a Tokyo detention centre, facing a theoretical sentence of up to seven years of imprisonment with hard labour.
A habit meets a hard border
By 1980, McCartney’s relationship with cannabis was well established and well documented. The Beatles had been introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan in 1964, and McCartney in particular had grown increasingly open about drug use during the 1970s. He had already been fined for possession in Sweden in 1972, fined again in Scotland in 1973, and saw his Sussex farm raided by police in 1975.
Japan, however, was an entirely different proposition.
Postwar Japanese drug policy had been shaped during the Allied occupation and codified in the Cannabis Control Act. Possession alone carried severe penalties. Larger quantities could be interpreted as intent to distribute. Cultural tolerance was virtually nonexistent, and ignorance was not considered a defence.
McCartney later admitted that he simply had not thought the situation through.
“We were about to fly to Japan, and I had this big bag of grass,” he recalled in a 2004 interview. “I thought, I’ll just take it with me. I can’t throw it away. That’s too good.”
It was a decision driven by habit rather than malice. Yet in Japan, habit was irrelevant.
The arrest at Narita
As McCartney and Linda passed through customs on 16 January 1980, a routine inspection turned decisive. The marijuana was found quickly. Its estimated street value was later reported as around 600,000 yen. There was a brief moment of eye contact between McCartney and the officer, a pause that McCartney would later describe as awkward rather than confrontational.
“I didn’t try to hide it,” he later said. “I’d just come from America and still had the American attitude that marijuana isn’t that bad. I didn’t realise how strict the Japanese attitude was.”
The Narcotics Control Bureau was summoned. McCartney was formally arrested, handcuffed, and led away in full view of the press. Linda was left stunned. Within minutes, photographs of a former Beatle being escorted through an airport in custody were circling the globe.
Rock photographer Bob Gruen later recalled discussing the incident with John Lennon, who offered a blunt explanation. “As a Beatle he just never expected that anybody would ever open his bag. It just never happened.”
"If he really needs weed, surely there's enough people who can carry it for him. You're a Beatle, boy, a Beatle. Your face is in every damn corner of the planet. How could you have been so stupid?".
Life as inmate number twenty two
McCartney was taken to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Centre, where he was interrogated and then placed in a cell measuring roughly four by eight feet. He was issued standard prison clothing, slept on a futon on the floor, and followed a rigid daily schedule. The contrast with his usual life was immediate and total.
“My first night was the worst,” McCartney later recalled. “I couldn’t sleep. I was frightened about the possibility of not seeing my family for years.”
For nine days, he lived as inmate number twenty two. Meals were basic and communal. Exercise was limited. Reading material was sparse. He played cards, read when allowed, and tried to keep his mind occupied.
A former detention officer later recalled, “He just looked like any other prisoner. He followed the rules, spoke politely, and didn’t complain.”
Outside the detention centre, the atmosphere was anything but calm. Fans gathered, sang Beatles songs, and held vigils. Japanese tabloids published McCartney’s mugshot. British and American newspapers treated the story as a dramatic fall from grace.
Inside, McCartney began to adapt.
“After a couple of days of terror, where you don’t know anything, you start to get a bit of an idea of it,” he said later. “You start to get a little bit indoctrinated. It’s like The Great Escape. You start to play games and think, I’ve got to keep sane here.”
A tour collapses
On 17 January 1980, the day after McCartney’s arrest, Wings’ Japanese tour was officially cancelled. Nearly 100,000 tickets had already been sold. Financial losses were estimated at around 100 million yen. Equipment sat unused. Crew members waited in hotels with no clear information.
“Paul paid Udo every penny they were owed,” said Paul Eastman (Mccartney's lawyer), “Everyone involved with the tour was fully compensated. No one lost any money, except, of course, Paul. And nobody had to wait for their money. It was all taken care of before Paul left Japan.” (McCartney told Eastman he would still like to tour Japan if officials allow him to return.)
Wings guitarist Denny Laine later recalled the uncertainty. “The whole band was in limbo. We didn’t know if he’d ever get out. We thought, is this it for Wings?”
Behind the scenes, McCartney’s management team and legal representatives worked frantically. The British vice consul visited McCartney and delivered grim news. Under Japanese law, he could be facing up to seven years in prison, with hard labour.
Linda McCartney spoke angrily to the press. “Paul is now in some kind of detention place and I have not been allowed to see him,” she said. “As soon as they get someone nice like Paul, they seem to make a field day of it.”
Diplomacy and decision
Japanese authorities faced a delicate situation. On one hand, they were determined to uphold the law and avoid accusations of special treatment. On the other, prosecuting one of the world’s most famous musicians risked turning a domestic legal matter into an international spectacle.
McCartney’s cooperation, lack of distribution intent, and the intense media scrutiny all played a role. After nine days of deliberation, prosecutors opted for a pragmatic resolution.
On 25 January 1980, McCartney was released from detention and escorted to the airport. He would not be formally charged, but he would be deported immediately and banned from returning to Japan for several years.
“I sincerely regret the trouble I have caused,” McCartney said in a brief statement. “I apologise to the people of Japan.”
Before leaving, he took an acoustic guitar and played a short medley for fans and journalists gathered in the departure lounge, a small gesture that did little to soften the disappointment.
At 4:00 PM McCartney walked out of the police station. Around an hour later he was back at the airport. He was reunited with his family after boarding the plane.
On January 26, 1980, the plane from Japan landed at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Holland. Even though McCartney was denied access to the country, he was interviewed by Dutch television:
What happened ?
I was in jail for 10 days, didn’t you hear it?
Yes indeed… How did you get out?
How I did get out… Walking on foot.
What did the authorities do? They dropped the charges.Why?
Don’t ask me, ask them. Don’t you know? Yeah, it was because it was not considered… (pausing)… l don’t know. They just told me today that I get out…
Any idea of the consequences on the whole thing?
How do you mean?
Financially…
Yeah, you know…it’s a bit of a drag financially and stuff.
Do you think you’ll ever go back to Japan?
I don’t know.
You want to go?
Maybe… I’m not sure.
You left disappointed fans over there.
True but I’m disappointed too, so that makes two of us.
Isn’t it usual that somebody else carries the drugs for you into the country?
No, do you do that?
No, but that’s what I heard.
You hear a lot of things in the newspapers that aren’t true….and on TV.
How was your treatment in jail?
It was okay, it was not bad but it was a drag being in there.
Last question, what are you going to do now?
Sleep….and go home.
Fallout and the end of Wings
The arrest marked a decisive turning point. Wings, already strained by fatigue and internal tension, never recovered. Denny Laine left the band the following year and later released a solo album titled Japanese Tears, a pointed reference to the incident.
As for whether the affair gave McCartney second thoughts about marijuana, he said, “Yeah, and third. The whole thing was too severe. Marijuana is not as dangerous as some people make it. A lot of people, especially younger people, know that. In America, even president Carter, when asked, said he favored decriminalization. We’re all on drugs, cigarettes, whisky. I was in jail for ten days, but I didn’t go crazy because I wasn’t able to have marijuana. I can take it or leave it.”
But McCartney told the London Sun, “I was really scared thinking I might be in prison for so long…and now I have made up my mind never to touch the stuff again. From now on, all I’m going to smoke is straightforward fags. No more pot.”
Some people thought McCartney had provided a bad example for his young fans. Bertram Parker, head of Paul’s old school, the Liverpool Institute for Boys, was quoted saying so in the English press. Asked about the criticism, McCartney said, “They’ve been saying that about me for years. I have always been accused of setting bad examples. I think a lot of people set worse examples, like governments. They set an incredibly bad example.”
By 1981, Wings was finished.
Reflecting years later, McCartney was blunt about his own responsibility.
“Looking back on it, I can’t believe I did it,” he said in the documentary Wingspan. “It’s wacky. The guy in customs is pulling out this huge amount, and I don’t know what was going through my head. It makes me go cold.”
“People have put it to me over the years that I was framed,” he added. “But I don’t think I was. I think I was just stupid. And I paid the penalty.”
Legacy
McCartney returned to Japan in 1990 to a warm reception, and would tour there several more times in later decades. What once seemed like a career threatening disaster gradually settled into something closer to a cautionary tale.
Looking back more than four decades later, the Tokyo arrest feels less like a scandal and more like a revealing human moment. A reminder that even the most celebrated figures can misjudge the world beyond their own borders.
On 16 January 1980, a Beatle learned that lesson the hard way.
