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From the outset, Dan Whitmore—known to Vancouver punk and metal fans as both Dan Scum and the frontman of the band Powerclown—sets a boundary. “I’m not going to get into how I wound up carrying a whole shitload of sadness into Japan,” he says, “but obviously my life changed instantly.”
He’s talking about the events of December 11, 2017, when he was busted at Narita International Airport with over 20 pounds of meth hidden in his guitar case. He was subsequently arrested, charged, convicted, and sent to prison in Japan.
Some people he would meet in prison had been “blindsided” by their arrests—what he calls victims of bait and switch techniques, where they’d been asked to deliver something they thought was a harmless package.
Whitmore wasn’t that naïve.
“I didn’t know exactly what I had, but I knew I was going there with something,” he recalls.
He was nervous, but had received assurances: “We wouldn’t send you if we thought anything would happen.”
Then the plane landed and he knew he was fucked.
“There were announcements that they were on high alert for drug smuggling, and all the customs entry points had suitcases open,” Whitmore tells the Straight. “They were looking through everyone’s bags. It was all I could do to just keep my composure—and keep my mouth shut.”
Whitmore’s arrest made headlines in Vancouver, the drug bust reported by most major outlets in town. Even those who’d never heard of his greasepaint-fixated Iron Maiden tribute band Powerclown—a former fixture at the Cobalt—knew a Vancouver musician had been arrested in Japan for smuggling meth. Since his release, he hasn‘t talked to the media about the experience. But he was willing to open up to the Straight.
Japanese authorities found the drugs in his guitar case, grilling him for the next 12 hours. Then he was taken to a holding cell where he stayed for six weeks, along with 23 other foreigners in similar positions.
So what did he do? He took the advice of his embassy.
“I knew not to try to fight the charges,” Whitmore recounts. “There’s a 99 percent conviction rate in Japan, so if they charge you, you’re going to jail. And the apology is really important. I made an apology at the end of my trial, and that carried a lot of weight. Guys who had similar amounts who didn’t apologize, who fought the charges, got a longer sentence and bigger fines.”
He initially hoped he would just be deported, but the reality sank in when he asked his lawyers when he could go home. They told him he was looking at a minimum of four years.
Whitmore would ultimately serve seven years in three prisons, two in Japan and one in Canada. It seemed shorter to think in months.
“If you think, ‘Okay, let’s focus on getting through the next month,’ then the months tick away,” he says. “Once I embraced it, it was kind of peaceful.”
After an initial eight months in solitary, Whitmore was transferred to a communal cell with five Japanese inmates where he worked, slept, and ate.
“We were only let out for showers and, once a week, for exercise. And every moment outside your cell is taken up with order, discipline, and rules, rules, rules. It’s like being a cadet in the military.”
Whitmore felt like a bull in a china shop, noting the Japanese have kata—strict rules of decorum—for everything.
“I had to really just observe them,” he says, “to just get in line and do everything the way they do it. Then things are more harmonious.”
Language was also an issue: he spoke no Japanese on arrival.
“There was a six-month course in Japanese, but it was basically the equivalent of learning the King’s English and living in East London, right?”
As Pennywise might note, some clowns float. Cat Ashbee.
Meanwhile, learning from other prisoners was difficult because no talking was allowed during work, which mostly involved menial tasks like assembling pens. When he was allowed to talk, on the exercise field, he seized the opportunity to visit fellow foreigners, so he could relax and speak English.
By far the funniest story he tells is when a Japanese prisoner asked him if he liked “manko” (a vulgar word for vagina), and he responded that it was okay for studying. He thought the guy had asked him about manga.
Mostly, things weren’t so fun. Amnesty International has several web pages detailing the harshness of Japanese prisons, but Whitmore views their charges through the lenses of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
“According to us, those are human rights violations, but according to Japanese, ‘This is how we do things in Japan,’ ” he says. “Japanese are raised with this level of discipline and ‘We run our prisons this way.’ If you don’t like it, don’t go to Japanese prison.”
Free as of last October, Whitmore is surprisingly articulate and reflective—not qualities you’d necessarily expect of an ex-con heavy metal clown. (The singer, who fronts Powerclown under the name Dicksee Di’Anno, reunited with the band for a show at the Waldorf the night before our meeting).
Today he often thinks of friends he made in prison who got even rawer deals than he did—people busted for smuggling contraband they were tricked into carrying. He’s scheming on ways to get a letter to friends he made on the inside, which he’s technically not allowed to do; but he knows better than anyone how much a letter from home can lift your spirits.
Determined to turn a decidedly challenging experience into a positive, he’s also taken up involvement with William Head on Stage, Canada’s only inmate-run prison theatre company, based in Victoria.
“It’s the only situation where the public comes into a penal institution to see a full-blown play put on by the inmates,” he says. “I wrote a couple of scenes for their play last year!”
It was called Hatched, and ran in October, the month he was freed from prison in Canada, where he finished up his sentence.
Whitmore also has drawn the attention of a Japanese penal reformer, Konomi Kato, who did her doctoral thesis on William Head on Stage. She recently travelled to Vancouver Island for the purpose of interviewing Whitmore, who now lives in Victoria. She even went to see Powerclown.
“Because I was in a Japanese prison, that gives her special interest in me,” Whitmore says.
Ironically, having learned the hard way how to fit into Japan as a foreigner, Whitmore is not allowed to go back, and even had to sign a piece of paper saying he would never try to return.
Would he even want to? And how does he feel about Japan, given his experiences?
“Obviously, it’s a very refined and ancient culture,” he says. “It’s definitely its own microcosm, and it was not lost on me, for sure. Lots of shit was annoying, but other shit was kind of cool. I’m part Japanese now!”
And he’s been changed for the better, he says, grinning. Whitmore notes that, before his Japanese experience, he lacked discipline.
“Now,” he says, “I have a little more discipline.”
Whitmore says it with a Japanese accent. He’s clearly still a clown at heart.