5. SAM

Matsuyama, 1935–1937

I was never as good a student at Bancho as Mother wanted me to be. So Mother, Father, and I were all pleasantly surprised when I passed the entrance exam for Matsuchu. I started in April of 1935, or Showa 10. The system of referring to years in terms of the length of the reign of the Emperor, which was something I had been taught but never really understood at Kimmon Gakuen in San Francisco, was now fully familiar.

Matsuyama Chugakko—almost always shortened to “Matsuchu”—Matsuyama’s most prestigious secondary school, graduated its first class in 1879, Meiji 12. But its real fame came in 1906, Meiji 39, with the publication of Natsume Soseki’s Botchan. Botchan is one of Japan’s most famous novels, and every Japanese knows it, or at least knows about it, the way Americans know about Huckleberry Finn. Soseki is so famous that in 1984 the Japanese government put his picture on the 1,000-yen bill.

As a bright Tokyo University graduate with no particular prospects, Soseki was recruited to teach in Matsuyama. He lasted only one year at Matsuchu, the school year 1895–96. Soseki was miserable away from the cosmopolitan capital. He had no talent for suffering gladly his foolish colleagues, pompous supervisors, and sluggish students. But he did have a talent for skewering all those local characters. The put-upon narrator of Botchan—a teacher at a higher school in a provincial backwater dissatisfied with his lot in life—spends the entire tale in a beleaguered why me mode. Botchan is endearing because some of its most hilarious scenes poke fun at the narrator himself.

For Soseki, the best thing about Matsuyama was Shiki, a young poet with whom he formed a deep friendship. And just as the Midwest s­urvived Sinclair Lewis, Matsuyama survived Soseki and Botchan. In fact, by the time I arrived in Matsuyama, Soseki and Shiki were revered local heroes. They had put Matsuyama on the map, and made it famous for the whimsical characters of Soseki’s novel and the tiny perfect jewels of Shiki’s haiku.

For me, there were lots of new things about Matsuchu. First, it was a boys-only school. The girls from Bancho who continued their education past the elementary years attended either the Prefectural Girls’ High School, or Saibi, a private academy. Officially, we no longer had any contact with them: there was a strict no fraternization policy, and boys and girls were completely separated. And that’s why one of the other new things about Matsuchu was so good. It was twice as far from Yanai-machi as Bancho, about a twenty-five minute walk. To get to Matsuchu, I had to walk almost the entire length of Okaido, Matsuyama’s main shopping street. I was usually in a group with my buddies. And we almost always saw the girls across the street, headed for their schools, which were in the opposite direction. I was always happy to see my old friends and classmates and at first had trouble understanding why suddenly they were supposed to be exotic. Without knowing what motivated me, or any of us, I was an enthusiastic participant in the hijinks the boys devised to get the attention of the girls. There were often times when the groups on the two sides of the road collapsed in giggles. But as time passed, the girls really did begin to seem exotic and alluring. We desperately wanted them to notice us.

Eventually, I really began to treasure the few occasions when I was by myself and saw my Bancho classmate Michiko Shizuyama. If I saw Michiko “alone” like this, it made my whole day, and I still hold those memories dear. Michiko’s parents were the proprietors of a small sweets and sundries shop on Okaido, and on days when I didn’t see her, I walked especially slowly as I passed the shop.

Matsuchu also featured a lot more regimentation. Of course we wore uniforms. They were on the same military model as the Bancho uniforms, but they had the characters for matsu and chu stamped on their bright gold buttons, and our caps sported a distinctive patch with the same characters. Mother was delighted the first day I put on my Matsuchu uniform, and I must admit that I was quite proud of it myself. Father commented on how different I looked from my San Francisco days and I heard him say to Mother the first morning I left the house in my new uniform, “Now that he’s getting bigger, it’s much too easy, isn’t it, to imagine the military uniform I fear the future holds for him.”

I found the rigmarole about the book bags much less agreeable. But I had to obey. We were all issued a standard bag and instructions on how to use it. On the way to school, we were to carry it slung across our chests from our left side, switching to the right side on the way home. Ridiculous, but we obeyed.

The old Japanese proverb about the nail that sticks up getting hammered down may be a bit dated today, but it was absolutely true then. Uniformity and conformity were the rule. Each day began in the broad yard in front of the school. It was our playground, but also our morning assembly site. As soon as we arrived, we ran to our classrooms, left our book bags at our desks, and then hurried to the schoolyard. Each class lined up in double rows, facing east. The home room teachers stood in front of the rows of their students. The principal, standing on a raised platform at the front of the assembly, faced the students. On the barked command of the head teacher, the students, their teachers, and the principal bowed to each other and shouted “Ohayo gozaimasu,” Good morning! The principal then turned so he too, faced east, toward Tokyo, and he, with the rest of us, followed the next command of the head teacher, “To the Imperial Palace, deepest bow!”

Also new was military training as part of the school curriculum. This was in addition to our regular physical education classes, which included calisthenics, judo, kendo, other martial arts, baseball, and other team sports. Matsuchu, like every secondary school in the country, had military officers on its faculty. First-year students at Matsuchu learned to march and handle a rifle; all of our training strictly complied with army regulations. And it took place daily. When it rained, we were excused from marching and drilling but had to listen to lectures on military history and strategy. So I was only twelve when I began hauling about one of those long rifles and first learned to name the parts. We were proud that the Model 38 infantry rifle we trained with was the one actually used in the army. I’m sure I’m not the only Japanese my age with memories of running my finger over the Imperial chrysanthemum crest stamped right on the Model 38.

The culmination of all this training, in our fifth year at Matsuchu, was the day we marched to Matsuyama Regiment and fired real bullets on the shooting range. And in the summer of our last year, the officers assigned to all the schools in Matsuyama organized a huge event. Again we were marched to Matsuyama Regiment. There the officers divided us into a Red Force and White Force, gave us orders, and set the two groups at each other in a mock battle that lasted all day. When we finally finished, we were hot, dirty, and exhausted. But we had to line up in formation again. Before we marched back to our schools, the regiment Commander inspected us, and gave a talk about how important our military lessons had been and how proud our parents and our teachers were of us. He concluded by telling us that we should be proud of ourselves and the work we were doing to prepare ourselves to serve our nation. As tired as I was, I was jolted into shock when his talk turned to China and Japan’s mission there. His use of the derogatory term Chankoro brought to mind my Raymond Weill friend and classmate Henry Fong. I thought that maybe Chink was the English equivalent, but no teacher at Raymond Weill would have tolerated hearing that term from any of the students, much less use it themselves—any more than they would have tolerated or used the term Jap.

English language training, in those days, began in secondary school, and my experiences with English at Matsuchu were always challenging—not in terms of the language itself but in terms of everything else associated with studying English. The only good experiences with English I had while at Matsuchu were outside the classroom, with Yamamura-sensei and the Grahams. Somehow I was unlucky enough to never be assigned to Yamamura-sensei’s class, but he knew about my struggles, was always supportive, and made time to speak English with me. My first bizarre experience came just a few weeks into the first semester, in algebra class. One day, Mr. Kashiwagi, the teacher, suddenly said, “Imagawa, I understand you speak perfect English. Come up to the front of the room. I think we need a demonstration.”

I was scarlet with embarrassment by the time I reached the front of the room. Matsuchu was still new, and no one knew this about me. I even think that my few Bancho friends who were with me at Matsuchu had forgotten about the perfect little English-speaking gentleman from San Francisco. I’m sure I blushed even more when Mr. Kashiwagi announced what he wanted. “Tell us the fairy tale of Momotaro in English. I think we’ll all be interested to hear something so familiar in another language.”

I stumbled through as best I could, trying not to be insulted that I was being made to perform like a trained monkey and forced to recount such a childish tale to boot. When I finished, my classmates laughed and clapped, and one smart aleck in the back of the room let loose a loud whistle. Mr. Kashiwagi silenced the commotion with a stern look and then turned to me, “Well, Imagawa, I couldn’t understand a single word, but it sounded good to me. You may return to your seat.” I did, yearning for my lost anonymity and desperately hoping this humiliating experience wouldn’t be repeated.

Mercifully, it wasn’t. Mr. Kashiwagi’s curiosity was satisfied, but my troubles with English were far from over. I thought the worst was when I realized I couldn’t, without great effort, understand the teachers on the few occasions when they actually spoke English. I got in trouble when I pronounced words correctly rather than repeating their mistakes. But the worst really came when we studied grammar. To me it seemed like astrophysics—something extraordinarily abstract and complex with no relationship to anything connected to everyday life. I just couldn’t make myself memorize and spew back all the rules, which in my view, had nothing to do with English. By the end of my time at Matsuchu, I was a C-minus English student.

Even though I was never in his class, Yamamura-sensei was my best teacher at Matsuchu. On the second day of our first year, the principal explained all the club activities, and before the end the day, Yamamura-sensei sought me out and told me that he would save me a place in the band. I loved music and took every chance I got to sing. I thought about it all week, and by the time I went to the first meeting of the music club, I had decided that I wanted to learn the trumpet. Yamamura-sensei suggested the saxophone, but I was determined—I wanted to play the trumpet. But wanting it wasn’t enough; one of the seniors had the school’s only trumpet. The next best thing was the cornet. As the cornet player, I was a member of the school’s marching band. The first-year students didn’t march in public, but we spent a lot of time practicing on our instruments, marching around the schoolyard after classes.

Our first public performance was at the opening day ceremony of our second year. I was proud to stand with the rest of the band. During the parts of Kimigayo when I wasn’t playing, I loved having the music flow through me, happy to be part of something so big and so beautiful. Two weeks later the school band marched to the station with a group of recruits. Mother came to watch the parade, and at dinner talked about how proud she had been to see me. “Isamu, do you remember the first parade we saw, when we had just returned and were staying with your Auntie and Uncle? And now, just four years later, you’re in the band yourself. You looked great today.”

We accompanied recruits to the station three more times that year, but my real initiation to the world of military bands came at the beginning of my third year, when one of the military officers assigned to Matsuchu pulled me out of class. “Imagawa, if you can play the cornet, you can play the bugle. From now on you’re the bugler.” And I was, starting with practice that afternoon.

I soon came to appreciate what at first I thought was nothing more than pure military caprice. As the bugler I was always at the front of the band, following right behind our leader, Yamamura-sensei, and when the Matsuchu students were on military maneuvers, I didn’t have to crawl across fields, roll in trenches, shoot blanks at my friends, and charge “enemy” lines. My only task was to stand by the commanding officer and sound the bugle at his direction.