Zeroaddzero here! Your '#Bruce in Japan' tag is so wonderful and I hope to see more! (I think I saw you write you might be getting a book about his visit soon? 👀) I've seen SO many Japanese comments under videos of Bruce; it really is a shame that he never went back - and that there's so little info about his 1985 visit.
@zeroaddzero thank you! And yes, there's a Japan-exclusive BITUSA 40th anniversary CD box set that includes a photo book of unpublished photos from their 1985 Japan tour as well as a booklet of stories about their visit. It's scheduled to come out in September around his birthday, and you can bet I will be scanning every photo, haha.
There's definitely a lack of information on his time there (hopefully after this anniversary release we'll have more info!), but one of my favorite stories I've read is that, due to the language barrier, the crowd was apparently just shouting "yeah!" to everything Bruce said, so one night when he got to the "are you guys tired?" bit, they shouted "YEAH!" and he didn't know how to react lol. Another favorite story is that Bruce was apparently really excited to ride the shinkansen and was taking lots of pictures of Mt. Fuji using a camera he bought in Tokyo, but it turns out he'd bought a really cheap camera similar to the kind a student would bring on a school field trip, and just the mental image of him excitedly taking photos from the window of the shinkansen using a kiddie camera makes me 🥺.