Paul McCartney feared prison attacks during drug arrest in Japan

The country’s tough drug laws carry a possible prison sentence of up to seven years, and McCartney has now admitted his careless decision to source cannabis from New York was ‘idiotic’.

“I was in New York and I had all this really good grass. Excellent stuff,” says McCartney in his new memoir: Wings: the story of a band on the run.

“We were about to fly to Japan, and I knew I wouldn’t get anything to smoke there. This stuff was too good to flush down the toilet.”

He added: ‘It was the craziest thing in my life – to go to Japan, where there is a seven-year hard labor sentence for pot, and be so free and easy. I put a damn big bag of the stuff on top of my suitcase.

“Why didn’t I hide him in a sweater? When I look at the images now I think, ‘That couldn’t have been me.'”

McCartney, then 37, was arrested at Tokyo’s Narita Airport as his wife Linda and their four children looked on.

Their daughter Mary, now 56, recalled: “I remember someone picking him up and feeling very confused, like this could be a problem. And then they said to mum and dad, ‘Whose is this?’ Because it was their business. And I remember they looked at each other and said, ‘Which one of us is going to do this? Because one of us has to stay with the kids.’ And then Dad said it was him, and they took him away.”

McCartney immediately confessed, told Japanese police he had broken the law and apologized.

“It probably didn’t help that I had more than I could handle in a month,” he said.

“They still wanted to know everything. I had to go through my whole life story: which schools I went to, my father’s name, our address, my income. I even had to tell them about my MBE medal from the Queen.”

Once in prison, the musician said he was overwhelmed by fear and shame.

“Now that you’ve put your wife in it, you’ve got your kids in it,” he said.

“And knowing how loyal Linda was, I thought, ‘Well, the kids are going to grow up in Japan. Linda is going to stay here.’ The only thing going through your mind is, ‘Did I really do this? You damn idiot. ”

He continued: “Then the British vice-consul told me I could get seven years of hard labor. That’s when things got extremely worrying. I couldn’t sleep for the first three days. It was five days before Linda was allowed to visit me, and since we got married I had never spent a night without her. It was quite tough. I had to share a bath with a guy suspected of murder. I was afraid to take off my suit in case I was raped.”

Still, McCartney tried to keep his spirits up by singing songs and exchanging words with neighboring prisoners.

“You had to do something or you would go crazy,” he said.

“I was trying to learn a few words of Japanese… I would say, ‘Toyota!’ They’d say, ‘Toyota! Toyota!’ And then I heard them laughing. It was crazy.”

He was released after nine days and said his farewell was unexpectedly emotional.

McCartney said: “I was happy to leave, but I had made some friends there, so the goodbye was a bit sad. As I walked around freely, I shook hands with these prisoners through the letterboxes of their cells.”