Seven Downs and Eight Ups: An Autobiography

By Nobuko Gerth

This is an autobiography of a Japanese woman who has lived in three countries: Japan, the United States, and Germany. She writes about her life in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, before and during World War II, which is quite different from a modern Japan of today. She came to the United States in 1953 to study sociology. She relates her life of a student, with stories of fairy tale existence and culture shocks. Then, with her husband, she moved to Germany, where she lived for thirty-six years. She tells about her life in Germany of postwar economic miracle period through the fall of the Berlin Wall and thereafter. Ever curious, her mind constantly compares Japan, the United States, and Germany through her daily life, travels, and work experiences. The book deals with her life of ups and downs. With her courage, optimism, and luck, she has always come up from the downs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481710169

Nobuko Gerth

Nobuko Gerth of Japanese parentage was born in Manchuria, China, in 1925 and grew up in Tokyo, Japan. After studying English at Tokyo Woman’s College, she studied sociology in the United States (MA). Her career includes teaching, running an Oriental store, working as an interpreter-translator, and writing essays and books in English and Japanese.

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Seven Downs

and

Eight Ups

An Autobiography

Nobuko Gerth

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© 2013 by Nobuko Gerth. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/04/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1017-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1016-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013901328

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Heritage

Chapter 2

Preschool Days

Chapter 3

Family Fun

Chapter 4

Schooling

Chapter 5

War Years

Chapter 6

Under The Us Occupation

Chapter 7

Work At The General Headquarters, Supreme Commander For The Allied Powers

Chapter 8

Interim

Chapter 9

On To Beaver College

Chapter 10

At Beaver

Chapter 11

Vacations—Work And Play

Chapter 12

University Of Wisconsin—Madison

Chapter 13

Marriage To Hans Gerth

Chapter 14

Car Accident And Roxbury

Chapter 15

The Store With The Baby

Chapter 16

Japan: 1962-1964

Chapter 17

Store Move And Germany 1967

Chapter 18

Move To The Chocolate Shop

Chapter 19

Family Affairs

Chapter 20

Move To Germany

Chapter 21

New Life In Germany

Chapter 22

Move To Glashütten

Chapter 23

Family Vacations

Chapter 24

Good-Bye

Chapter 25

Life Alone

Chapter 26

As A Guide And Interpreter

Chapter 27

As A Conference Interpreter

Chapter 28

As A Writer

Chapter 29

Friends And Travels

Chapter 30

Deliberation

Chapter 31

Return To The Usa

Chapter 32

Epilogue: My Three Mothers

To the memory of my three mothers

CHAPTER 1

Heritage

My name is Nobuko, a fairly common girl’s name in Japan in my day. Most Japanese names are written with Chinese characters called kanji. There are different kanjis used for Nobuko, and mine is rather unique. Each Chinese character has a meaning, and the character for my name means easygoing, jolly, carefree, optimistic, and the like. My parents must have wished that their fourth child would be someone easy to raise. By giving me the name easygoing child, they no doubt hoped that I would live through the trials and challenges of life with optimism.

I have no recollection of the place of my birth, Liaoyang, Manchuria, a northeastern province of China, because our family returned to Japan in 1926 when I was a little over a year old. My father had served for four years as the consul general of Japan there. I have his photo in his official attire taken at the entrance to the consulate building. He looks handsome wearing a black mustache. His swallow tailed coat has gold lace along the edges in the front and the tails, as well as wide gold embroidery around the neck and on both sleeves at the wrists. He is standing erect, carrying a top hat on his left arm, and a ceremonial saber with a tassel also on his left.

Another photo, taken at the same entrance, is of my family. There my father stands next to a white marble column, wearing a dark, three-piece business suit. Next to him stands my mother, wearing a kimono with a haori jacket embroidered with flying cranes and carrying me in her arms. I am also wearing a kimono padded with silk floss, my head covered with a knitted cap. A step lower stands my oldest sister, Michiko, my older brother, Yoshio, and my older sister, Haruko. They are dressed in Western clothes with cute little woolen hats. Only Michiko holds her hat in her hand, perhaps to avoid spoiling the big bow on her head. I suspect the photo was taken in March 1926, as a souvenir of their stay in Liaoyang, shortly before they left for Tokyo, Japan.

For my father, Liaoyang was his second assignment in China for the Japanese government, the first one having been in Beijing. At that time he was working for the Ministry of Communication, after working as a postmaster in Hokkaido. He was a graduate of the class of 1907 of the Law School of Tokyo Imperial University, the present-day Tokyo University. Among his contemporaries at the university were Mamoru Shigemitsu, who as Japan’s foreign minister signed the surrender document of World War II on board the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, and Shigenori Tōgō, who served as the foreign minister in 1941 at the outbreak of World War II.

I do not know if any of the careers of his acquaintances influenced my father’s decision to switch to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He took the examination for the higher civil service and became a diplomat. My mother used to recall, It was a wrong decision. His character was not at all suited for a diplomatic career. He was scholarly, honest, and very cautious, the type about which the Japanese say, Knock on a stone bridge before crossing. I understand he disposed of all documents marked Secret himself by burning them in the fireplace instead of letting anyone else handle them.

My father, Yoshimitsu Yabuno, was born in 1883 as the first son of the chief priest of Eikyūji Temple in Tatsube, a small village near Ōsaka. His maternal grandmother was a daughter of the medical doctor for Lord Kishiwada and married the then-chief priest of the temple. Father’s father, Gidai Yabuno, was the son of this priest and succeeded the family temple. Being the eldest son of the family, my father too was to become a priest. The temple belonged to the Jōdoshinshū (True Pure Land School), which is a branch of Japanese Buddhism developed by Shinran in the thirteenth century. It promises enlightenment by simply trusting the power of Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light.

It is well known that feudal Japan was a strict caste society consisting of four classes, the highest class being the samurai (warrior), followed by the farmer, the artisan, and the merchant (the townsman), in that order. What is not so well known is that there were groups that did not belong to any of those four classes. Above the samurai class, there were the courtier families of Kyōto, who were given titles of nobility in the new, modern Japan of 1868. At the bottom of society, there was the group called the Eta, the untouchables. Likewise, priests did not belong to any class. They were simply accepted as religious figures by all. Although the caste system was officially abolished in 1868, its customs and morals persisted far into the twentieth century, until the end of World War II.

When my father was growing up, it had been only a few decades since Japan had opened its doors after more than two centuries of national seclusion. The emerging, modern Japan under Emperor Meiji was an ambitious nation-state. The Japanese were eager to learn the new ways of the advanced Western nations, and my father was no exception. He was so eager to go to Tokyo to study that his family conceded, allowing the second son to inherit the temple. In Tokyo, my father first studied English but later switched to law.

My maternal grandfather, Jun Murakami, was born in 1864 as Tatsunosuke Kawakita in Kumamoto, Kyūshū, the southernmost of the four major islands of Japan. It was an uneasy and chaotic time for the samurai class, as Japan was moving from feudalism to a modern system under Emperor Meiji. The new government established in January 1868 had to fight against those clans that were still loyal to the last shogun of feudal Japan. The samurai of different clans were divided between pro- and anti-government factions and were fighting against each other. Tatsunosuke’s father died in August 1868 in one of those battles. He was literally one of the last of the samurai. Tatsunosuke was only four years old then.

It was a custom for a boy of a samurai family to hold a ceremony to mark the attainment of manhood. It was conducted usually between eleven and sixteen years of age. After this ceremony, the childhood name was discarded and a new name was given to the adult. My grandfather acquired the name Jun and established a new family name of Murakami, as his mother remarried. He moved to the neighboring prefecture of Kagoshima to start anew. Later he left for Tokyo to study law and finished as one of the first six graduates with a law degree from the Meiji Gakuin, a Christian educational institution established in 1877. It was a wise decision on his part because the government had made it a law in 1876 that only those who were licensed could engage in the legal profession.

Jun Murakami married Etsu Nejime, whose paternal ancestors had successively served as first counselors to the Shimazu daimyō in feudal Japan. Her grandfather was the last to serve before the collapse of the shogunate. The Nejime family is a branch of the twelfth-century samurai clan of Taira. The Taira family (or Heike clan) was the most powerful samurai clan until 1185, when it lost against the Minamoto family (or Genji clan) in the sea battle of Dan-no-Ura at the southern tip of Honshū.

My mother was the eldest daughter and the second eldest of their six children. By the time she was born in 1899, her father was a successful lawyer in the city of Kagoshima. It was several hundreds of miles away from Tokyo, and there must have been only a few licensed lawyers. He helped to start a local bank and became an influential man in the city.

They lived in the old compound of Lord Shimazu’s castle, across from his riding ground. I heard from my mother that her mother used to tell her that, for her first Dolls’ Festival, so many emperor and empress doll pairs were given to her as gifts that two eight-mat room walls¹ were not enough to display them all.

After the Russo-Japanese War ended with Japan’s victory in 1905, big houses were appropriated by the military. The family had to give up two of their largest rooms to military officers.

The house already had electricity, city water, and a telephone, but the gate’s lights were serviced by gas. Every evening at dusk, a manservant came with a ladder to light them. All the children knew then it was time for them to go home for supper after playing outdoors.

Mother attended the kindergarten and grade school attached to Kagoshima Teachers’ College across from the riding ground. The school was coeducational until the end of the 5th grade. This is a surprise to me, given the Confucian teaching of male and female must be segregated after the age of seven that was the moral code of Japanese society.

The family moved to a smaller house when Mother was eleven. She found out much later that her father had entered the race for a seat in the House of Representatives and lost. This was a financial blow to the family. It was not unusual for a young, ambitious intellectual like my grandfather to feel that he could influence the course of Japan by becoming an elected representative under the new democracy.

In less than four decades after the Meiji Restoration, Japan won two major wars, one against China and the other against Russia. My mother remembered marching in a victory parade as a first grader after the Russo-Japanese War, waving a Japanese flag. As a result of these two wars, Japan’s territory expanded to include Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), and the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, north of Hokkaido. This chain of events boosted Japanese morale, and the nationalist faction in politics gained power. At the same time, there were politicians who had visited the West and young Japanese who had studied abroad. They feared and opposed the emerging military power and supported democratic ideas.

Mother went on to Kagoshima Prefectural First Girls’ High School. It was called First because it was the first girls’ high school to be built in the prefecture. Students wore a hakama (a long pleated skirt) over a kimono, and a pair of leather shoes. She learned to play the piano, the violin, and the Japanese harp called koto. In addition, she had a beautiful voice, and her dream was to continue her education in music. She had a very pretty face, with big eyes and a well-shaped nose, and was certainly well groomed. It was said that boys used to hang around her house in the hope of catching a glimpse of her.

She was the apple of her father’s eye. Although he reprimanded her for her tomboyishness, he enjoyed her good spirit. He made her sit next to him when he changed hanging scrolls every week according to the occasion and the season. Later it became her responsibility to choose a scroll for his comment and approval. The family maintained many of the old samurai customs in terms of traditions and moral principles, and the children were accordingly taught strict disciplines.

My mother was a very proud person. I am sure that this was due to her upbringing. I know she was appreciative of her family background. Mother in turn taught us to always hold our heads high and behave honorably so that we never had to feel ashamed of our conducts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when my mother was a young girl, many Western ways of living influenced those who were able and eager to learn. My grandparents belonged to that progressive type and did not hesitate to follow a bourgeois style of living. One of their neighbors was an English missionary couple, and the lady was especially fond of my mother. It was perhaps because of her influence that my mother had lessons in piano and violin. One of her favorite Christian hymns was Joy to the World. She enjoyed singing it in English at every Christmas beyond her one hundredth birthday.

When she graduated from high school, she was told that her marriage had been arranged. It was, and still is to a certain extent, a Japanese custom to ask relatives and friends to help find a prospective bride or groom for a son or daughter, and for that relative or friend to act as a go-between. The photo of the suggested spouse, as well as details about the family, accompany such a request. Family background was an important factor because the Japanese considered marriage to be a union of two families rather than two individuals.

In my mother’s case, her great-uncle was the go-between for the marriage. He had met my father and was greatly impressed by his appearance, manners, and education. My father was tall for a Japanese man and fair-skinned. Above all he was a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and a government official, which meant prestige and the guarantee of a good life in those years.

My mother was only seventeen and my father was thirty-three. Sixteen years in age difference was unusually large. My father’s first assignment as an official of the Communication Ministry was as a postmaster in Hokkaidō, the opposite end of Japan from Kagoshima. Given the age difference and the distance, it must have been a difficult decision for my grandfather, but his uncle prevailed. My parents were married on October 30, 1916.

The young bride was terribly homesick in Hokkaidō. Standing by the gate of their official residence, she used to sing many of the songs of home sweet home, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her favorite was the song Takyō-no-Tsuki, The moon in a faraway land. Its words go something like this:

My honorable parents, blissful with my visit

My little sister, running to me with a cry of joy

I am now at home that I’ve longed for

That I’ve returned home was nothing but a dream.²

CHAPTER 2

Preschool Days

My father resolved to resign from the Foreign Ministry while he was still the consul general in Liaoyang. It was a crucial post because Manchuria bordered Russia. In the Russo-Japanese War, the most crushing defeat of the Russian army occurred at Liaoyang in 1904.

When Japan defeated China in the war of 1894-95, China was big but weak. Japan had ambitions to expand her power over China, and so did the European powers. In 1898, Russia, France, Germany, and Britain each appropriated pieces of Chinese territory in Manchuria. Russia occupied Mukden, a Manchurian-Siberian border city. Russia was the chief enemy of Japan’s plan of expansion into Manchuria.

China was afraid of the fast-rising power of Japan, and anti-Japanese sentiments steadily mounted. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, China had been unstable, not only because of foreign aggression but also because of nationalists’ attempts to create a revolution to unify the country. China was always the center of Japan’s foreign policy, and its China policy in turn determined the domestic course of action.

I do not know the reasons why my father did not want to pursue a diplomatic career. It could be because he did not agree with Japan’s ambitious China policy, or because he simply realized that he was not cut out to be a diplomat. In any case, he gave it up after this first diplomatic overseas assignment.

In the spring of 1926, the family returned from Manchuria with four children spaced two years apart, the oldest being seven years old. My father submitted his resignation and was awarded an order. The award paper certificate itself is impressive, not only in its size of twenty-three inches by sixteen inches but in its wording. The Emperor of Japan, the unbroken line of emperors who possess the grace of heaven, awards Yoshimitsu Yabuno with the Sixth Order of Merit of the senior grade of the sixth court rank with its privileges and rights. The award will be presented at the Imperial Palace on 26 April of the year of Taishō, the 2,586th year of Emperor Jimmu. (The original is in Japanese.) It bears the gold imperial chrysanthemum crest nested in a wreath at the top and a picture of the medal at the bottom center. As proof of this rank, the Order of the Sacred Treasure in a black lacquer box accompanied the award certificate. At the end of that year, Emperor Taishō died, and Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) succeeded to the throne.

The city of Tokyo that my family found was still recovering from the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923. As the earthquake occurred at noontime when people were cooking lunch on their charcoal burners, the paper and wood houses of Tokyo were leveled to ashes and more than one hundred thousand people perished.

Housing in Tokyo was tight. It took my parents a year before they settled in a rented house in a district of Shibuya. My father was preparing for his private law practice, and that meant no set monthly income. Given the number of children, my mother was eager to buy a house with his severance money from the government. My father was against the idea. He felt he should save it so that they would have some reserve until his practice was safely launched.

Then came the Japanese financial crisis of 1927, which preceded the world crisis by two years. My parents lost everything they had saved, including the severance pay. The Depression followed, which lasted till 1935. It must have been a terribly difficult time for my parents. Mother recalled that she had to ask for money from her father, who was of the opinion that my father should have stayed in a secure position in the Communication Ministry.

My preschool memories of days in Shibuya are few and fragmentary. There was a walnut, a chestnut, and a fig tree in the garden. My brother used to climb up on the nut trees and hit the ball-like fruits down to the ground with a long stick. My younger brother and younger sister were born when we were living in that house. I remember the excitement of being allowed to visit the new baby in my mother’s arms after her return from the hospital. My older sister and I often walked to the imposing residence of Prince Nashinomiya near our house. My first school was Aoba Primary School, but I have no recollection of it whatsoever. There is, however, one unforgettable memory of this period.

One sunny morning I was sitting on the porch. Uncle Tōru, Mother’s youngest brother who was a student at Waseda University, came through the garden. He was on his way to visit his parents in Kagoshima for a spring vacation. Hello, Nobu-chan, he called as he walked towards me. The ending –chan is an affectionate suffix used when speaking a child’s name. How about coming with me to visit your grandparents?

I had never met my grandparents before and had no idea of how far Kagoshima was from Tokyo or how long I would be gone from home. Just the idea of a train ride with my uncle was very exciting. Mother was already there with a small suitcase of my things, and off we went. In retrospect it is clear that the matter had been arranged beforehand so that I would get to know my grandparents before I started school. It also, no doubt, helped Mother to have one less child in the house during the vacation, when the house was full.

It was a much longer train ride than I had ever imagined. The train moved on and on for two nights, and on the third day we arrived at Kagoshima. All I remember is the very scary train toilet. My uncle took me to the door and waited outside. Once inside I had to manage all alone on that terribly wobbly floor. I could see the fast-moving rail tracks through the toilet hole. I don’t remember how I managed the rest of the trip with that toilet. I must say my uncle was pretty courageous to take a five-year-old girl for such a long trip, because he was in his early twenties! At the Kagoshima station, he hired a jinrikisha, or rickshaw, put me in it with the luggage, and disappeared. I learned later that he took a streetcar instead of hiring another jinrikisha.

My grandparents’ house was situated high up on a hill, completely hidden from the street. After passing the first and the second gates, the jinrikisha arrived at the entrance, where my grandparents welcomed me. This was the smaller house my mother’s family had moved to when she was eleven, after her father’s ambition in politics ended in failure. It was a much, much bigger house than ours in Tokyo. I remember the huge garden with many tall stone lanterns, but I had no one to play hide-and-seek with.

Every morning I brought Grandpa green tea with a pickled sour plum called umeboshi on a plate to where he sat on the veranda. That is the only memory I have of him, but I feel warmth inside me when I think of him. According to Mother, his hair turned white overnight from grief when his first son, Takashi, died at the age of twenty-two from tuberculosis while a student at Tokyo University. From all accounts, Takashi must have been an exceptionally gifted man. He had written his memoirs at that young age. When I was in the third grade, my grandfather had his seventieth birthday, and Mother went to attend the celebration. Not long after that he died one early morning from a stroke, without suffering.

Grandmother then moved to Tokyo to live with her oldest surviving son. Since he had no heir to succeed him in the Murakami family, he had adopted my younger brother, Toshiaki.

Japan was a patriarchal society. Until the new civil law was promulgated after World War II, the family heir had to be a male. A family without a son adopted a boy, usually from within their kinship group, in order to guarantee continuance of the root family. Alternatively, a family with only a daughter or daughters would adopt a man who agreed to marry the daughter and take her family name. The more prominent the family, the more important it was to make the family name survive. It was not at all unusual for father and son to have different surnames due to this custom of adoption.

Mother first agreed to this arrangement on paper only but had to allow Toshiaki to live with his uncle and aunt once his grandmother was living with them. Toshiaki was Mother’s favorite. First, he was a boy; second, he was very cute and looked very much like her with big eyes and long eyelashes; and third, he could sing well and taught her new songs that he had learned at school. He loved animals and used to beg her to let him go to Ueno Zoo just when the big animals were fed. On rare occasions he was allowed to go with Masa, our maid. He would excitedly describe how the lions and tigers grabbed huge pieces of red meat. It must have been a heartrending decision for Mother to let him go to our uncle.

CHAPTER 3

Family Fun

In the summer of 1931, we moved from Shibuya to Aoyama—37, Minami-5-chōme, Aoyama, to be exact. My memories of growing up in the Aoyama house are so numerous and dear to me that they are inextricable from my childhood in Japan. There was a streetcar stop on Aoyama Street, and from there it was about a ten-minute walk to our house, passing the main crossroad where a Methodist church stood. From there, a quiet residential area stretched. Off the major street, the road became smaller and went downhill, no longer wide enough for automobile traffic. Our house was up an alley.

It was a convenient location, because shortly after we moved there, the first Tokyo subway opened. It ran from Shibuya to Ueno underneath Aoyama Street, passing Ginza, a famous shopping and eating area in Tokyo with major department stores and shops. Aoyama Street was lined with small shops, and that was where most people shopped for daily needs. On rare occasions I was allowed to go with the maid just to look. Mother did not have to go shopping. The stores sent out boys in the morning to ask for orders, which they would deliver in the afternoon.

There was one big store called The Market, consisting of many retailers. It was a predecessor of today’s shopping mall. The big annual event of The Market was a year-end lottery, and on that occasion we older children were allowed to go and watch. In our house, my older brother, Yoshio, was the only lucky one who ever won a prize. One day he won a full-length mirror with drawers, of a kind that Mother had always wanted. We were elated and anxiously waited for its delivery. When it arrived, to our dismay the mirror image was distorted. We alternately stuck our faces in front of the mirror and had a good laugh over it.

I was the fourth child of six. This position had an advantage that I might be included in the category of the older or the younger children, depending on the generosity of Mother’s mood.

My oldest sister was born in 1917 in Hokkaidō, and was named Michiko. Michi means a way or road, and it is the Japanese pronunciation of the kanji character for dō of Hokkaidō. She used to say that she had to show the right way for her siblings to follow because she was the oldest. What confidence she had, and indeed she was our leader.

The second child was a boy called Yoshio, which means a righteous man. The kanji character for yoshi came from our father’s name. Yoshio had all the privileges of the first son and heir to the family. He was very intelligent but cunning, too, and worried our parents at times because of it.

I shared most of my childhood with my second-oldest sister, Haruko, until she married. Her name means a sunny child, and indeed she was always pleasant and easy to get along with.

Then came my younger brother, Toshiaki, whose name means bright and pleasant. He became the heir to Mother’s family.

My younger sister, Reiko, whose name means a beautiful child, was the best-looking child of us all, looking very much like Mother.

Among us six children, there was an age difference of thirteen years from the oldest to the youngest. When the youngest started school, the oldest was a first-year college student. It was fascinating to watch Mother prepare six lunchboxes of different sizes on the dining room table, first putting in rice, followed by all sorts of things she had cooked. The image of her holding chopsticks in hand, looking them over to make certain that no box missed anything, is still vivid before me. She then wrapped each box in a cloth and handed it to us. We all knew which box was whose by the design of the cloth. She never let our maid do this work.

Although I never saw Mother preparing our snacks, the first thing I did after coming home was to look in a glass cupboard where six trays of snacks were placed. Whoever returned first had the first choice. We were allowed to look at them but not allowed to return the tray once taken. It was a serious business for us to decide which tray seemed to have more food. The tray was always full of different snacks. It was the happiest time after school to take a tray and a favorite book to a sunny corner of the house.

This brings to mind an incident that happened fifty years later in Japan. One hot summer afternoon at a bakery shop, I overheard a conversation between a young mother and a saleswoman. The mother said, My fifth-grade son wants to have an egg salad sandwich for tomorrow’s picnic. Will it keep till tomorrow? She pointed to the sandwich.

Oh yes, ours will keep four to five days, was the answer.

I was aghast. Was this young woman too lazy to make a simple sandwich for her son’s outing? Any salad with mayonnaise spoils fast, and my mother did not even make such salads at home in the summer. Did this young mother want to take the risk of poisoning her son or feeding him a heavy dose of preservative? It was indeed a great shock to me.

Our house had two entrances, one for guests and the other for family members. From the guest entrance, a stairway led to the Western-style reception room. Over each of the two sofas, a leopard skin with a big head was placed. Father had bought the skins in Manchuria. We were not supposed to go into that room, but when Mother was away, my younger brother and I would put the skins over ourselves and chase each other roaring, or scare our younger sister.

Another of our favorite activities was to jump from the stairs on top of a pile of futons that had been taken out for the purpose of airing and sunning. We competed for who could jump from the highest step This, too, could be played only while Mother was away. This staircase was ideally suited for jumping. It had a steep angle going up two thirds of the way and then leveling off, making it a challenge to land far enough. I can imagine it must have been difficult for guests to go up the steep stairs with slippered feet.

Mother did not allow us to visit neighborhood children’s houses but had no objection to us playing with them. They would come after their homework was done and call from beyond the fence, Let’s play in a melodic tone of C-D-E-C-D. If we could not play, we would answer in the same tone, I’ll play later. Otherwise, we ran out of the house to play all sorts of outdoor games such as hopscotch, rope-skipping, tag, blindman’s buff, and so on till suppertime.

As we got a bit older, our favorite game was to jump over a rubber rope stretched tight between two poles, which was raised a bit by bit as we successfully jumped over. On rainy days we played marbles, beanbags, or maritsuki.

Maritsuki was one of my favorite games. We bounced a rubber handball about six inches in diameter against the floor, caught it over the back of the hand, and bounced it between our legs, alternately raising the right and left legs. We did this fancy hand and legwork while we sang a Russo-Japanese War song. It had a nice marching rhythm that went well with the bouncing of the ball. Actually, maritsuki is an ancient game, but the way we played it had no resemblance to the original game. In olden days they played sitting on the floor with a ball of cotton tied with colorful threads. The ball would not bounce high, nor were the accompanying songs military marches.

When we were small, our playroom was a six-mat room next to the family entrance. There was a very low bookshelf against the wall, which held an edition of collected works for elementary school children. Those with red covers were for the younger ones, and those with blue covers were for the older ones. From these books we learned classic Western stories such as Aesop’s Fables, The Thousand and One Nights, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Gulliver’s Travels, as well as many Japanese stories.

The playroom was the room where we could do what we wanted after we finished our homework. Mother would come in before dinner and say, Father will be home soon. Let’s clean it up. She would make us gather scattered toys into a big reed basket and put the books back on the shelf.

When Father returned, Mother would hurry to the entrance to greet him. He had a funny ritual that Mother found amusing. He would take his trousers off even before entering the entry room and hit the trouser legs against each other at the open doorway to shake any possible dust off. He was very meticulous and a stickler for cleanliness. We would all shout, Welcome home, Father. Soon came dinnertime, but he did not eat with us. He would first take a bath, which had been prepared in time for his return.

We children ate together in the dining room, the first shift so to speak, then our parents in the next shift, and last the servants in the kitchen. Later, when our grandmother had moved from Sakai to live with us, she ate with us children.

We all said in unison "Itadakimasu before starting to eat. This is a greeting that means We receive this meal with thanks. The gratitude expressed in this greeting extends to the farmers who produce and to those who prepare and serve. We were taught that every grain of rice had the farmer’s sweat in it, and we were not allowed to leave rice in the bowl. Ask for half a bowl or one mouthful if you wish, but finish what you have asked for," Mother would say.

We were not allowed to play with food, but Yoshio, my older brother, would show us how to make a landscape in the bowl with rice when Mother was out of the room. He would pile up rice and make a wavy river by pouring tea between the rice hills. We all watched him with awe.

The good-natured Masa, Mother’s helper, sat at the end of the table and took care of everyone who wanted to have a second and third serving of rice. I used to love eating hot rice just with soy sauce sprinkled over it. Masa was instructed not to give me more rice until I ate the other dishes.

My nickname was Burdock because I was thin and had a darker complexion. Haruko was just the opposite. She was a good eater and fair-skinned. I was a rather picky eater. When the dinner was a dish called chiri-nabe, fish fillet cooked with vegetables and tōfu at the table, I would run upstairs to the farthest corner of the house to get fresh air by opening the window.

Another dish I disliked was cooked dried tōfu. I hated its soft texture that oozed juice out when I bit into it. Haruko ate it as though nothing tasted better. When I made a face, Mother scolded me by saying, Look at Haruko. Learn from her. If you do not like it, you don’t have to eat it, but say nothing to spoil others’ appetites. Her message was clear: any behavior that gave unpleasant feelings to others at the table was bad table manners.

A dinner of vegetables and fish dipped in batter and fried in oil, called tempura, or breaded and fried salmon and eggplant were my favorites. These dishes required not only a lot of time but also skill to prepare for a big family, as they could not be cooked ahead of time.

The only meal Father joined us for was Sunday breakfast. Ordinarily our breakfast was typically Japanese: rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables, and so on. But on Sunday it was oatmeal for Father and whoever wanted it. It was very special because it was a Western-style food with milk.

Our dining room was Western style because my father believed that the Japanese had short legs due to sitting on the floor for long hours. For the same reason, each child had a desk and a chair for studying. Adjacent to the dining room was a fairly large, long kitchen, which had an indoor well besides the city’s running water. We took baths every night, starting with the younger ones first because they had to go to bed early. There was a small, cozy room between the dining room and the playroom, where we were allowed to stay after our baths until bedtime. I remember we younger ones sat around Father in the room as he read Heidi, translating it from English into Japanese.

My memory of Father is rather distanced, partly because we did not eat together and he did not spend the summer with us. But there was one day when I had him all to myself. At one Sunday breakfast, he asked us children if anyone wanted to go on an outing with him. The older ones kept silent, and I felt very sorry for him, so I said, I want to go. Mother packed us a picnic lunch and we left hand in hand. We took a train to an old port town called Abiko outside of Tokyo and lunched by the Tone River. I felt so happy that I was skipping along as I walked with him. I felt as though I were the only child, who could get Father’s attention all to myself. I knew he was happy too, because he whispered in my ear, Let’s call this day Nobuko’s Day.

I believe he was a quiet person, as I do not recall having heard him yell or talk in loud, angry voice. I do recall, though, an incident that scared me a lot. It happened in that room where the family gathered after dinner and a bath. Somehow, Father and Yoshio got into a fight. Father raised his arm, his kimono sleeve flying. The black shadows of their wrestling bodies on the wall looked like a Kabuki dance. Then suddenly with a thud, the paper sliding door sprang out of its track because their bodies struck against it. That effectively ended the fight. I heard from Mother that the fight was about Yoshio’s air gun. A neighbor had complained that Yoshio’s gun damaged a window pane of his house, and Yoshio denied it. In any case, I know Mother went to the neighbor the next day with a gift to apologize.

Another unforgettable image of Father was of him wearing a lawyer’s garb: a black robe with long, loose sleeves that had embroidered borders. I am not certain but I believe the hat had a shape like a Turkish fez in black. I saw him just once in this attire. As he stood in the entrance hall, he looked impressive and tall.

Although he lived some time in Beijing and Liaoyang, I do not think he spoke much Chinese. But I remember him saying a phrase that sounded like "may-far-za, which means there is nothing we can do." He must have said this quite often because this is the only Chinese I remember. The Japanese would say shikataganai or shōganai to express their resignation.

Indeed, there are situations in which we are powerless. My father was the son of a Buddhist priest. He must have learned early to accept with philosophical resignation whatever misfortune might befall him. I think this philosophy is a part of Japanese culture. Modern technologies have improved fights against natural disasters, but the Japanese face from time to time major earthquakes with concomitant tsunamis, and typhoons, and volcanic eruptions. The Japanese have no other way but to learn to live with natural disasters that visit them unannounced. Their native Shinto religion is a worship of nature. They have learned that nature is the mightiest force—it gives both comfort and destruction. It has taught them to accept the inevitable and go forward.

Despite the big age difference, my oldest sister, Michiko, always included us younger ones when she planned an event. One day Michiko organized a picnic with a friend of hers in our yard, inviting all her siblings as guests. They cooked special seasoned rice that they had learned how to make in their cooking class, which students took in the last year of high school in those days. It is one of my happy memories, because it was something totally new for us to eat outside in our own backyard instead of eating in the dining room.

For one Christmas, Michiko made for Haruko and me each a book. The content was a handwritten story she had translated from English, and the cover was a watercolor picture she had painted. It was bound by a red ribbon. It was not a thick book, but I loved it.

We did not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, but our parents gave us gifts and we siblings exchanged gifts of a sort. We were not usually given any pocket money nor allowed to shop on our own, but Christmas was different. Mother would give each of us a small amount of money to buy gifts for our brothers and sisters. What an excitement it was to go to Aoyama Street with our maid to shop, although it meant buying only some sweets. The rest of the gifts were things we had made, usually a picture or an item from our arts and crafts class at school.

One day Yoshio announced that he did not want any more of our handmade stuff but demanded instead a larger portion of the sweets. We had to comply because he had power over us. He had a printing machine with which he printed paper money with the face of Norakuro, a black dog in the uniform of an army corporal, who was a popular cartoon character of the time.

This mattered because in our house, there was a collection of works by famous Japanese authors of previous decades as well as a collection of world literature. In the 1920s and 1930s, several publishing houses sold such collections at the very reasonable price of one yen per book, which was why they were called yen books and found their way into many households. Besides these, there were books that were given to us as gifts by our relatives on different occasions, as well as old magazines. My brother had decided that the family library belonged to him, and without his paper money, we could not get at any books. To get the paper money, we had to give him some of our after-school sweets. Of course, he demanded this bribery only from his younger siblings. None of us complained about this to Mother, for we knew that sibling quarrels were to be settled among ourselves.

Incidentally, we had no restrictions as to what we might or might not read. Father was of the opinion that if a child understood what he read, he was old enough for it, and if he did not understand it, no harm was done.

The Tokyo summers were unbearably hot and humid, and people escaped to the mountains or seashores. We, too, left every summer for the seashore called Zushi, south of Yokohama. It was a very popular resort, given its proximity to Tokyo and its beautiful shoreline and safe water. We could hardly wait for the summer vacation to start on July 21 so that we could stay there for the entire vacation, which ended on August 31. (In Japan, besides the national holidays, the Ministry of Education prescribed school holidays.) We did not own a summer house, so we rented a cottage. Mother would pack pots, pans, clothes, futons, blankets, and towels in a couple of huge canvas sacks of about one cubic meter and ship them ahead by train. Had we had a cottage of our own, this chore could have been avoided. She would sew identical summer dresses for Haruko and me for the train trip, which added to our excitement.

Our parents always stayed in Tokyo, perhaps due to Father’s work. Our maid, good old Masa, came with us, but Michiko was our governess. She would set our daily schedule that looked somewhat like this: Get up at five; go to the beach and sketch; breakfast at seven; study till ten; swim till noon; lunch; rest till two; beach till five; supper and to bed by nine. Michiko enforced strict quiet for the study period. As grade-school children, our obligatory summer homework was to keep a picture diary with the note of the weather. If we skipped the diary for a few days, it was hard to trace the weather back. In high school we did not have any particular homework. Haruko and I often used the time to make paper dolls, drawing numerous wardrobes to cut out.

One summer Michiko planned a family theater and revised the story of Snow White so that all of us could participate. I believe she was eighteen or nineteen that summer. Haruko was the king and I was the queen; my younger brother was the angel and my younger sister the princess. Michiko was the wicked witch in a black robe, and Masa was the nursemaid. We were all busy making costumes and memorizing our parts. We made paper crowns for the king and the queen as well as wings for the angel with cardboard. We found a life-size baby doll in the closet of the house for Masa to hold.

On the day of the performance, Mother came with our cousins from Tokyo. Michiko, with Masa’s help, put makeup on our faces. We did not have an eyeliner or mascara. She used black calligraphy ink to line my eyes. Although it hurt my eyes a bit, I was happy to see my eyes look big and pretty. Michiko dressed my brother in her yellow summer dress and mounted the cardboard wings on his back. I remember my brother, who was still a grade school boy with a close-cropped head, looked very funny in a dress. "This will