Edokko

By Isaac Shapiro

In 1926 professional musicians Constantine Shaprio, born in Moscow, 1896

and Lydia Chernetsky (Odessa, 1905) met and married in Berlin, Germany,

after their respective families had suffered continuous persecution in war-torn

Russia, or the Soviet Union, as it was known after 1922.

With Hitler's national social

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889260462

Book preview

EDOKKO

Growing up a stateless foreigner in wartime Japan

Isaac Shapiro

new degree press

copyright © 2023 Isaac Shapiro

All rights reserved.

EDOKKO

Growing up a stateless foreigner in wartime Japan

ISBN

979-8-88926-006-6 Paperback

979-8-88926-046-2 eBbook

In loving memory of my parents,

Constantine and Lydia Shapiro

Constantine Shapiro 1896-1991 Lydia Shapiro 1905-1983

My American patron and mentor Lieutenant General John Calvin ‘Toby’ Munn (1906–1986), United States Marine Corps

Contents

Preface

PREWAR YEARS: 1931-1941

1

Tokyo, Japan.

2

Harbin, China: 1931-1936

3

Yokohama, Japan

4

Honmoku and Family Life

5

British School Years: 1936-1938

6

British School Years (continued): 1939-1941

7

Countdown to Pearl Harbor

MY PARENTS’ ODYSSEY

8

Papa’s Story

9

Mama’s Story

10

Palestine, 1926-1928

11

Harbin, 1928

12

Tokyo, 1928

13

While America Slept

14

Pearl Harbor

15

1942

16

1943

WAR- BOMBS OVER TOKYO

17

Tokyo, Early 1944

18

Operation Matterhorn

19

The Air Raids Begin

20

1945

21

Karuizawa, Summer 1945

SURRENDER AND OCCUPATION

22

Wednesday, August 15, 1945

23

Tokyo Bay, Sunday, September 2, 1945

24

Yokosuka, September 1945-March 1946

25

Tokyo, April-July 1946

HAWAII

26

John Rogers Naval Air Station, Honolulu, July 12, 1946

27

Makalapa

28

Punahou

29

Colonel Toby Munn

WASHINGTON

30

June-July 1948

EPILOGUE

About the author

Preface

I can’t remember the precise moment when I decided to write this book, but it wasn’t long after I first set foot in the United States (or, more exactly, in the Territory of Hawaii) on July 12, 1946 less than a year after Japan’s surrender. I had spent the first fifteen and a half years of my life in China and Japan as a stateless boy, the fourth son of Russian-Jewish parents, both professional musicians, who had taken refuge in a relatively friendly Japan in the late 1920’s to escape from a combination of war, revolution, and anti-Semitism that was sweeping across Europe.

I quickly learned that the first question Americans would ask me was: Where are you from? When I answered, I’m from Japan, the next question would be: How come? Were your parents missionaries? That always amused me; I’d never heard of Jewish missionaries. So, I would answer, Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. They were musical missionaries, part of the group of European musicians who helped to introduce Western classical music to the Japanese.

Eventually, I would end up telling my questioners the story of my family’s odyssey: My parents were born in Russia, where their families had lived for centuries. My mother was brought up in China, my father in Russia. They met in post World War I Berlin and fled post-war Europe, first to Palestine (then a British mandate), then to China and finally to Japan, where I was born."

My questioners would then ask me how it was that I had come to Hawaii alone and so soon after the war. That would lead me to tell the story of how, a few days after Japan surrendered, I had ventured to Yokohama, where, on August 31, 1945, I found myself standing on the dockside watching the American troops land. I then would tell them about my encounter with a U.S. Army captain: how he had hired me, a green lad of fourteen, to work for the U.S. Army as an interpreter, only to have me ‘defect’ to the U.S. Navy when some officers I happened to meet on the streets of Yokohama invited me to come aboard their ship. They, in turn, passed me on to a U.S. Marine colonel, Toby Munn, who not only hired me, but brought me to America to live, an event which completely altered the course of my life.

Almost invariably, my questioners would say: Yours is a fascinating life story; you should write a book.

Some day, perhaps I will, I would reply.

Actually, I knew that I would not have the time to write a memoir until I was no longer professionally active. I also knew that, over time, memories would fade, especially memories of how I saw events and what my thoughts and feelings were at the time the events occurred. By the time I started to write this book in 2003, I had learned as a trial lawyer that the fact that recollections are truthfully recorded doesn’t necessarily mean that they are entirely accurate in every detail. With that caveat in mind, I offer the reader an account of what it was like to grow up in wartime Japan as a stateless foreigner.

I express my gratitude to all those family members, friends, and strangers who encouraged me to write this book. I am especially grateful to my wife Jacqueline, who had come to know my family well, who egged me on when I was most hesitant, and who patiently read my manuscript in all its iterations and gave me her advice on structure and language and reminded me of incidents I had neglected to mention.

Finally, I thank my brother Jacob, for painstakingly reviewing my book to refresh my recollections and to draw my attention to certain inaccuracies.

Isaac Shapiro

2nd edition

New York, 2017

Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

-Carl Gustav Jung

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.

-Carl Gustav Jung

As a child, when introducing myself to a Japanese person, I would refer to myself as an Edokko, or Child of Edo, Tokyo’s name before it became Japan’s capital in 1868.

Whatever may have been Papa’s motives in sending us to a British school, by the end of my third year at the Yokohama International School in June 1939, at the age of eight and a half, I had been transformed from an essentially Russian boy with a Russian identity, speaking almost exclusively Russian and living a Russian cultural life, into an English schoolboy, speaking mostly English outside the home and identifying myself more with British than Russian culture. I spoke to my brothers and friends only in English. I had started to think in English, dream in English, and sing in English, and to read mostly English and American books.

The Ercklentzes were German citizens and Enno was required to join the local Hitler Youth organization and wear a uniform with a swastika on his upper left sleeve once a week. In spite of that, he and I formed a close friendship. Neither Enno nor his family seemed concerned that I was Jewish.

"I grew accustomed to the vertical nature of Japanese society, with its strict social rankings and corresponding forms of address. I understood that the Japanese people thought of themselves in terms of groups, rather than individuals, beginning with the family, then the clan, followed by the school, the company, or other institution. Japanese proverbs taught me many things, among them that one learned restraint in all things (enryo) and that there were at least sixteen ways to avoid saying no. I also learned that one had to be careful not to stick out and draw too much attention to oneself. In Japanese, it was said that a protruding nail got hit, or Deru kugi wa utareru.

"Standing at the water’s edge dressed in my dark shorts and my navy-blue long-sleeved sweater, I looked out at the busy harbor. I’d stood on that very spot with my best friend, Holt Meyer, six years earlier, watching the American cruiser, USS Astoria, pull in, carrying a Japanese ambassador’s ashes, on a peaceful diplomatic visit. Now, there were more American warships crowding the harbor than the eye could count."

Suddenly, I was startled by a voice, much closer and quite loud. Hi, there! I turned quickly. A tall U.S. Army officer, in his late twenties, had joined me on the embankment. I’m Captain Kelly, he said with a broad smile and held out his hand. I took it and waited for him to continue. Do you speak Japanese? he asked. Yes, sir, I replied. Good! Then you can help me."

-Isaac Shapiro, Edokko 2017

PREWAR YEARS: 1931-1941

1.

Tokyo, Japan.

I was born in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, January 5, 1931. Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, wrote that the country in which a person is born gets under his skin. And so it was with me: Japan got under my skin, and it had a profound and lasting effect on my personality and my life, how I developed and who I became.

O-Shōgatsu, January or New Year, is the most important and most festive Japanese holiday season. In those prewar days, January 5 was the last of three individual national holidays that marked the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one. [Today, the New Year holiday is celebrated from January 1 through January 3]. Toward the end of the old year, pine and bamboo decorations appeared on every house. At midnight on December 31—which also happened to be my father’s birthday—you could hear the temple bells ring 108 times to dispel the evils of the past year.

The next day, January 1, was known as Ganjitsu, literally First Day, and its observance as Shihōhai (worship in four directions). On that day, according to a tradition dating from AD 890, between three and five in the morning—the hour of the tiger—the emperor would give reverence to the gods in four different quarters and pray for the welfare of the nation. It was also a day when the Japanese would visit their families and their temples and shrines. Finally, January 1 was the day on which all Japanese turned one year older, regardless of the date of their actual birthday.

January 3 was known as Genshisai, when the emperor would make offerings to his ancestors. My birthday, January 5, fell on a day known as Shinnen-Enkai, literally the New Year Banquet. That day, a series of elaborate parties was held all over Japan, to celebrate the advent of the new year.

New Year was my favorite holiday and the one most celebrated in our family. It was a time when we would congratulate each other in Russian, S’ Novim Godom, exchange gifts, and eat a festive meal. It was the only holiday other than the Jewish Passover that we observed as a family. Outside, we would see our Japanese neighbors dressed in their finest kimono, chattering excitedly. Children, also dressed in kimono, played the traditional game of hanetsuki, a sort of badminton without a net, in which the ball was a shuttlecock made with feathers and the bat was padded with multicolored cloth. It was known as a girl’s game, but I loved to play it.

The place of my birth, Tokyo, also became very special for me. Already as a child, when introducing myself to a Japanese person, I would refer to myself as an Edokko, or Child of Edo, Tokyo’s name before it became Japan’s capital in 1868. My Shapiro grandparents had been the first members of our family to live in Japan when they settled there after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and it made me proud to be able to say that I was the third generation of my family to live in Tokyo. Never mind that, technically, an Edokko was someone who was the third generation to be born in Edo. I fudged it and the Japanese forgave me.

I have often thought of what the eve of my birth must have been like for my mother Lydia (or Mama, as we called her). She was about to give birth to her fourth child at the age of twenty-five. I picture her restlessly pacing around our family’s simple, cramped home in Senzoku, in Meguro Ward, in the southwestern part of Tokyo. That night, she left Papa to his dreams and our forty-year-old Russian governess, Rebecca Vaisman, in charge of my twin brothers Joseph and Ariel, now four, and Jacob, aged two. I see her taking the dark and lonely ride across the city to Ogikubo in northwestern Tokyo, where the Seventh Day Adventist hospital, known as the Seiyo Byoin, or Tokyo Sanitarium Hospital, was located.

My Russian-born parents, both professional musicians, had settled in Japan in 1928 after a long odyssey and a failed attempt to make a life and pursue their careers in Palestine and China. They were by no means the first Jews to make their homes in Japan. People of Jewish ancestry, predominantly Portuguese and Dutch merchants, had begun to arrive in Japan during the sixteenth century. While the greater majority of Russian Jews seeking to escape persecution and later the pogroms during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were flocking to the Americas and Palestine, many Russian-Jewish families began moving eastward at the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, after the 1905 Russian Revolution and the violent and widespread pogroms which followed. By the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Jewish communities had sprung up in Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama. By 1931, when I was born, I was the third generation of the Shapiro family to be living in Japan.

By then, Tokyo had recovered from the destruction caused by the Great Earthquake in which one hundred thousand people of a total population of four million had died. There was now also a small Jewish community in Japan’s capital. With the expansion of the city’s limits, Tokyo’s population had increased by more than a million people to 5.5 million, and two hundred thousand new buildings and seven new bridges had been built. Streetcars and bicycles were the most popular form of public transport. But taxis and rikishas were also seen on the streets, and the first Tokyo underground railway line had been in operation since 1920. Mama would not have taken a streetcar or a rikisha in her condition. She would surely have taken a taxi, one of the many black Nissan Dats which had started to appear on the streets.

A foreigner was still a curiosity in Tokyo, and the Japanese regarded blond foreigners with special fascination. For a Japanese taxi driver, a lone pregnant blond woman in labor must have been an especially odd passenger. Taxi drivers around the world are talkative and curious, and I am sure that Tokyo taxi drivers were no exception. Once he knew that his pregnant foreign passenger spoke some Japanese, Mama’s taxi driver must have asked her who she was and what she was doing in Japan. At that point, Mama’s Japanese was still far from fluent, and being in labor, she would have replied to his queries in monosyllables.

All through the taxi ride across Tokyo, she must have been asking herself why, at the age of twenty, she had rushed into a marriage with a man whom she had only known for six weeks. How had she ended up in Japan, about to give birth to her fourth child? Yet there she was in Tokyo, at an age when she would otherwise have been pursuing a successful musical career in Europe or America. Arriving at the hospital shortly before midnight, she had to have known that my birth was imminent. I see her being helped indoors by the taxi driver and being met at the door by her obstetrician, a Japanese-American Seventh-Day Adventist named Dr. James Kuninobu.

Mama didn’t have long to wait in the labor room before I arrived, at 4:15 in the morning. She later told me it was not a difficult birth, even though she was a petite five feet two inches and I weighed over nine pounds. For most of that day, she rested alone in the hospital. That afternoon, our governess, Rebecca Vaisman, made her way across Tokyo to visit Mama and take her first look at me.

Ms. Vaisman, a professional dental technician, had been sent as an angel of mercy to help Mama, only twenty-one years old, after she had given birth to twins in Tel-Aviv in December 1926. She instantly became a surrogate mother to Mama (who had lost her own mother in 1921) and a governess to us. She lived with us as part of our family until her own death in 1968. When she was only two years old, she had become deaf as the result of scarlet fever, and her mother, a trained nurse, had taught her to speak and read lips. How a deaf forty-year-old woman who spoke and read only Russian was able to negotiate the maze of Tokyo streets and reach the hospital all the way in Ogikubo remains a mystery to me. Where Papa was, and why he didn’t come to the hospital, no one ever told me. Possibly, he appeared at some time during Mama’s stay. In any event, it was she who brought me home to Senzoku, to our tiny Japanese-style house.

Soon after my birth, Mama resumed her musical career, which she had never really given up. Following her graduation from the Berlin Academy of Music at the top of her class, she had quickly begun to give piano recitals and perform as a soloist with orchestras and in chamber music groups in Palestine and later in Harbin. When I was just five months old, the Japan Times & Mail of June 12, 1931, noted that my parents had together entertained a large audience, comprised of members of the Yokohama International Women’s Club and guests in the Little Theater of the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama. The article went on to say that there had been an insistent demand for encores.

In spite of this public show of marital harmony, Mama and Papa separated the following month. In July 1931, taking us four boys and Ms. Vaisman with her, Mama returned to Harbin, China, to live with her widowed father, Grandfather Abram Chernetzky. Diedushka, as we called him, had moved there from Odessa, Russia, in late October 1905, when Mama was just a baby, following an especially violent anti-Jewish pogrom. Now twenty-six and the mother of four children aged four years to six months, Mama decided she wanted to go home to her father and reconsider her future. Although I was quite unconscious of it, in mid-1931, Japan was in an economic slump and on the brink of a severe depression. At the same time, nationalism and militarism were on the rise. How much these external political and economic events influenced Mama’s decision to go back to Harbin, I don’t know. All I know is that we left Papa and Japan and lived with Diedushka in China for the next five years. Being only six months old at the time, I have no memory of our taking leave of Papa or Japan, so that when we returned there in June 1936, when I was five, it was like a first encounter.

2.

Harbin, China: 1931-1936

Why Mama actually decided to leave Papa and return to Harbin when she did, just six months after my birth, has been a matter of conjecture for me ever since.

As far as any of us knew, there never was another woman. We never heard even a whisper about any such possible dalliance on Papa’s part. All we knew was that at twenty, when Mama met and married Papa, she was enjoying a happy and carefree life in Berlin, supported by a doting father. And we knew that in July 1931, at the age of twenty-five, she decided to leave Papa. She found herself married to a man who had taken her to live in far-off places and who appeared to be unable to earn enough money to provide for his family.

On top of that, Papa was verbally and physically abusive. He interrupted her whenever she practiced the piano to criticize the way she played. Whenever they played together, he would stop the music frequently to lecture her about how the composer expected the piece to be played. For him, her tone and rhythm always seemed to be wrong. On such occasions, she would often get up and leave the room. Whatever the reasons, in July 1931, Mama left Papa and we moved back to Harbin to live with Diedushka on Picarnaya Street in a large, rambling, Western-style house. Mama continued to pursue her musical career, which still permitted her to spend time with us at home and to take us out for a treat and recreation. When she was busy, our governess, Mrs. Veisman, acted as her surrogate, aided by several Chinese house servants.

Diedushka was the principal man in our lives. He was a tall, handsome, athletic man with piercing blue eyes and a great sense of humor.