IT MAY BE true that the movement of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can seed a tornado on the other.

But whether it’s literally true or not, it certainly is figuratively true, and nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the case of 1890s businessman and opium smuggler William Dunbar of Portland, Oregon.

If we could take Dunbar out of the stream of history before about 1890, we would derail events that led directly to Imperial Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1940; to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor the following year; to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; and (maybe) to the fact that the world did not end in a multi-gigaton nuclear fireball in late October of 1962.

All this, because a politically well-connected drug smuggler in tiny, faraway Portland was unusually incompetent, and had taken a young Japanese boy into his household as a companion for his 14-year-old son.

That little boy’s name was Yosuke “Frank” Matsuoka, the future Foreign Minister of Imperial Japan and the chief architect of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, just before the Second World War.... (Portland, Eugene; Multnomah and Lane County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-11.matsuoka-imperial-japan-615.html)