Me in a kimono

Japan Days

When I tell people what I was doing in the years 1957–1961, most of them are visibly shocked. It seems in this day and age it would be more forgivable to say you were once a prostitute than to reveal the fact that you were once a Christian missionary. I’ve been asked point-blank: “What right do you have to force other people to accept your religion?” The easy answer to that is, of course, that it is impossible to force another person to accept any idea, secular or religious. I suppose the conquistadores could threaten a population with death if they didn’t accept baptism, but even that didn’t guarantee a change of heart or mind

And actually, during the four years I spent in Japan, the heart and mind that changed the most was my own. As a child, I hated and feared the Japanese—they were the enemy, and if anyone had told me when I was nine that someday I would go to live in Japan, I would never have believed him. The Japanese had bombed and devastated China. The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.

In the fall of 1941, we settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where my father’s assignment was to start a new church out from the center of town. Before there was any church building Daddy led Sunday afternoon services in the home of a family in the community. That particular Sunday afternoon the phone rang in the middle of the service. Mr. Taylor left the room to answer it, and minutes later appeared at the doorway, visibly shaken. “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said. I still remember the terror I felt. The invasion the soldiers had promised my father in Tsing Tao had begun. It was the end of everything.

I’m sure I was only one of the millions of American children who played commandos, collected scrap, and spent much of my meager allowance on war savings stamps. But I did it with a fervor none of my classmates shared. I had actually seen the enemy face-to-face. I knew they had to be defeated before they invaded San Francisco.

When I entered graduate school to train for missionary service, I expected to go to Taiwan, which was as close to my beloved China as it was possible to be in the mid-fifties. But when I went for my interview with the mission board, it became clear that Taiwan would not be a possibility. Back in Richmond, I had a Japanese friend, Ai Kuroki, who somehow persuaded me that if I gave the Japanese people a chance I would come to love them. I loved and respected Ai, so the summer after graduation I went to the training program for new Southern Presbyterian missionaries in Montreat, North Carolina, to prepare for work in Japan.

One of the instructors was a linguist whose job it was to help us hear and repeat the sounds peculiar to the languages we would have to learn to work in our chosen countries. A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language. So whether the nascent missionary was going to Brazil or Mexico or Congo or Taiwan or Korea or Japan, we all memorized this particular sentence: “A Samaritan woman came to draw water.” The Japanese Bible had skipped the word Samaritan and translated the sentence so it read roughly: “A certain woman came to draw water.” Which after more than fifty years I remember as: Are no onna no hito wa mizu o tori ni kimashita. I’m sure the well-rehearsed sentence helped me learn how to hear and pronounce Japanese when I finally got to language school three months later, but otherwise it wasn’t a great deal of help. I mean, how often could you work this, your one beautifully memorized sentence, into a conversation?

It was put to the test my first day in Japan. The freighter on which I traveled docked in Yokohama before proceeding on to Kobe, which was my destination. We had the day free while the ship unloaded cargo, and I was determined to go into Tokyo and see my friend Ai Kuroki. I’d had no way of letting her know when I would get to Japan or if I’d even have a chance to stop in Tokyo, but I had her address. I’d just go and surprise her. A shipmate who heard I was going to Tokyo asked if she could go with me. Somehow we changed some dollars into yen and found a tiny taxi to carry us into the big city. And big it was. During the war, hardly anyone studied English, and the only Japanese I knew concerned a certain Samaritan woman of questionable morals, so asking directions became more than a challenge. We somehow found our way to a police box located in the neighborhood designated by Ai’s address. I didn’t realize that what I had in my hand wasn’t really a street address with a house number, it was a block address. Some kindly neighbor walked by as the baffled policeman tried to figure out who we were and what we wanted. She motioned for us to follow her and led us to a house, pointed at it, smiled, nodded, and went on her way.

I opened the sliding door, stepped into the little vestibule, and called Ai’s name. At first there was no answer at all. Then at last an elderly woman came shuffling out of the house and knelt on the edge of the tatami. She looked at us and said something which, for all I knew, was “What on earth?” I bowed as low as I could, but all I could say in Japanese beyond thank you, good-bye, and good afternoon was: Are no onna no hito wa etc. It seemed wiser to stick to English. I showed her the address with Ai’s name on it, but it was obvious that English was not her second, third, or any number language. Nevertheless, she shyly gestured for us to come on into the house. We had enough sense at least to leave our shoes behind in the vestibule before we stepped up and followed her into a large, mostly bare tatami-matted room and sat on the cushions she spread out for us. Then she disappeared. Minutes passed. Many minutes. There was no sound in the house at all except perhaps for our own heavy breathing. Finally I got up and began to wander around. I didn’t even know if we were in the right house. But on sneaking into an adjourning room I spied a group photograph. On close examination, I found Ai’s familiar face.

I raced back to whisper the good news to my friend and sat down again to wait some more. Finally, the little woman came back and gestured to me to follow her. She had already brought my shoes around to the back door. We went out of the house and into the house of a neighbor, where a telephone was handed to me. At the other end I heard Ai’s voice, warm and welcoming. She was at the school where she taught, but she would come and get us as soon as she could because some of her students were arranging entertainment for us and then, if we had time, we would go to dinner. Meantime her mother would take care of us. Ah, of course, that was who our elderly hostess was. While we waited, Ai’s mother served us tea and chatted on about something we naturally could not understand. When Ai arrived she took us in hand and gave us a wonderful evening. A group of her high school girls danced for us and I had my first Japanese meal, which I remember as delicious and beautifully arranged on a series of little plates and bowls. Already I was beginning to love Japan.

The next day we sailed for Kobe but we couldn’t dock because a typhoon was predicted. We would have to ride the storm out farther from shore. All the passengers were anxious about the prospect. Well, at least my final day had turned out to be such a happy one. I went to my cabin and wrote a letter to my parents thanking them for all they had meant to me for the past nearly twenty-five years. How I thought a letter might survive when neither I nor the ship had, I don’t know. But it seemed the thing to do. Then I went to bed and to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning I mentioned the fact that the typhoon had somehow bypassed us and was met with incredulity. “You slept through that?” Apparently, the other passengers had spent a terrified, sleepless night as gigantic waves rocked the freighter. I don’t know what happened to my farewell letter, but I don’t think I mailed it.

I spent the next two years in language school in Kobe. It was designed as a total immersion experience. Our teachers—all female except for the principal—were not allowed to speak English to us nor were we permitted to use English in the classroom. The best teachers were also the best mimes, acting out the meaning of new vocabulary words. Japanese is a difficult spoken language, as how you speak and even your vocabulary depends on who you are and to whom you are speaking.

Each day we went to school from nine to twelve. During the first hour the teacher reviewed with us the previous day’s new lesson, helping us practice what we’d been introduced to. Sometimes, as we could understand more, the teacher would expound a bit on parts of the lesson so we’d better understand how to use what we’d learned. In the second hour, with another instructor, we were drilled on everything we’d learned so far, and in the third hour, yet another teacher introduced the day’s new lesson. Along with our workbooks and vocabulary cards, we always carried home with us the admonition to practice, practice, practice.

Now, it happened that in the spring of my first year, I was given the opportunity to move into a beautiful Japanese house in the nearby city of Ashiya. The owner of the home was a widow of a prominent lawyer and because times were hard, she had taken in an American missionary friend of mine as a roomer. June was moving out of Mrs. Kimura’s upstairs and suggested that I might like to take her place. “Mrs. Kimura will teach you so much that you’d never learn in language school,” June said. “She has been the best teacher, both of language and customs, that I could imagine.” I was thrilled by such a prospect. I had just lost my American roommate, so it was perfect timing for me. June made the introductions and it was agreed that I should come the following Friday, make the final arrangements with Mrs. Kimura, and move in a week later.

On the Friday morning before my visit, the new lesson contained a wonderful proverb. The literal translation of the original was “A professional would run away bare-footed.” This saying, the teacher explained, had to do with an amateur who was so good that, seeing such excellence, the expert would be so embarrassed that he would forget his shoes at the door in his haste to retreat.

I practiced the proverb for the whole train ride to Ashiya. What greater compliment could I pay my future landlady than to tell her what a wonderful teacher she was, why, even those calling themselves teachers would rush away in haste before her excellence.

We inspected the gorgeous tatami-floored rooms upstairs, all four of which were to be mine. We visited the exquisite little garden and drank a cup of tea together. Finally after a wonderful hour or so, she saw me to the door, where I put on my shoes and thanked her again and said how very much I was looking forward to living in her house and learning from her. June had told me so much about what a wonderful teacher she was. “No, no,” she protested, in a show of Japanese humility. “I’m no teacher.” It was my perfect opening. “Oh, yes,” I said, “a professional would run away bare-footed.”

Her face seemed to go totally white. The atmosphere that had been all sunshine turned ice cold. Mrs. Kimura bowed briskly and abruptly disappeared into the house. Puzzled, I let myself out.

On Monday morning the first-hour teacher reviewed the lesson of Friday. “By the way,” she said. “Don’t ever use this proverb, especially never repeat it to a lady. It will sound as though you are calling her a prostitute.”

I think I screamed. “Why didn’t someone tell me this on Friday?” I was appalled. What should I do? Mrs. Kimura would never want me to cross her threshold again, much less let me live in her house for the next eighteen months. It was a nightmare. I was so proud of my great progress in the language and here I’d committed an unforgiveable faux pas to an elegant Japanese woman that I’d wanted so much to like me and mentor me. I finally called June and, though I didn’t actually tell her what had happened, I asked her to find out if Mrs. Kimura was still expecting me to move in on Saturday.

She was. No mention was made by either of us of the previous week’s visit when I came as planned and spent eighteen delightful months learning, as June had promised, much more than any school or text could teach me. For example, Mrs. Kimura would listen as I talked on the kitchen phone. “Excuse me for being rude and listening in on your phone conversation,” she’d say, “but if you’d put it this way, it would be polite and people would understand you better.” She was a devout Buddhist, but she would often conclude some hint on etiquette with the phrase: “You wouldn’t want to embarrass Jesus, would you?”

When I left her home, which by then truly seemed to be our home, she was distressed to see me go, especially since I was leaving her to go to the island of Shikoku that to her was like rural Mississippi is to a Manhattanite. “It’ll ruin all the beautiful Japanese I’ve taught you,” she mourned. “You’ll come back speaking Awa ben.” Which is to say, like a hick. “But you must write me, you must practice your characters, and I’ll mark them with red and send them back.” So much for the woman who claimed not to be a teacher.

Just before I left for Shikoku I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened.

I had many amazing friendships during my four years in Japan. While I was still at language school in Kobe, a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Eiko Takahashi, a young woman not much older than I. Eiko spoke no English, and I was just learning Japanese. The war had robbed her of a high school education and she had endured a disastrous marriage and the loss of a child. We couldn’t have been more different, but somehow, we quickly became friends. One day, quite out of the blue, she said to me, “For a long time I’ve been searching for a religion that would help me understand the meaning of my life, and I’ve never found one. I’ve often wondered about Christianity, but I haven’t known how to find out about it. Would you mind if I went to church with you sometime?”

Now, you would think that I, the so-called missionary, might have been the one to first mention church, but I wasn’t. As missionaries go, I, apparently, wasn’t going very far very fast. But when Eiko asked for an invitation, I was happy to comply.

A couple of months later the pastor told me that Eiko had approached him and asked for baptism. I was shocked. “I don’t want her to feel she has to become a Christian just because we’re friends,” I said.

He gave me what was very close to a withering look. “I think you can trust Eiko to make her own decision,” he said. “She is quite ready to be baptized.”

But baptism was only the first step for Eiko. She wanted to truly follow Jesus and she felt she could only do that by giving her life to serve others. She thought she needed more education to do that. So she studied for what would be the equivalent of a high school diploma and went on to get a degree in social work. It took her six or seven years, but she never gave up. And then after graduation, she went to a leper colony set on a tiny island in the Japan Sea and spent the rest of her life ministering to those despised by their families and their society. Like Maud Henderson, she has been one of the heroes of my life.

While I was in language school I had the chance to travel around Japan. The city of Nagoya is famous for its pottery. In a shop there I was looking at an array of truly elegant teacups. In the display was a misshapen cup about the color of mud. It seemed totally out of place in the shop, much less on that particular shelf. I couldn’t resist lifting the lid, and gasped. The bottom of the lid was inlaid with gold. It was an experience that found its way into Of Nightingales That Weep. If you’ve read the book, you’ll recall that Takiko sees a similar cup in a pottery shop and is puzzled until she lifts the lid. It reminds her of her stepfather, the potter, whose misshapen body repulsed her as a child.

In Osaka I got my first taste of Bunraku, Japanese puppetry that inspired The Master Puppeteer, and later, while I lived in Tokushima Province, I was able to meet the old artist who made puppet heads for the theater in Osaka.

I went to the island of Shikoku in the fall of 1959. My “bosses” were eleven Japanese pastors working in the mostly rural Tokushima Province. Over the course of a month or two I visited each church, staying in the pastors’ homes, or if they were single, in the home of a parishioner. My own home was in the town of Komatsushima, right on the coast of the Japan Sea where the ferries from the main island of Honshu would dock and the nearby wharfs were crowded with the boats of fishermen. I lived in two rooms in a house on the edge of a huge rice paddy, going to sleep in spring and summer to the songs of thousands of frogs. My landlords belonged to Soka Gakkai, a radical Buddhist sect, well known for its intolerance of Christianity, but, as Mrs. Kuroda said, “Renting and religion are two different things.” We lived together quite happily for two years. They never tried to convert me, but as I was leaving to return to the States, they did suggest that if I followed their example and chanted namyo horenge kyo morning, noon, and night, I might just find myself a husband in America.

There were no other Caucasians in my town, and if I really wanted to speak English, I needed to drive my little motorcycle ten miles down the road to Tokushima City, where there were two families from the Southern Presbyterian mission. There were English missionaries and a couple of American Roman Catholic priests in the area as well, but not many white faces.

In Komatsushima, Pastor Kosumi and his wife were my home away from home. Years later when my wonderful Japanese translator met Mrs. Kosumi, she said: “Kosumi San is your Japanese Maime Trotter, isn’t she?” I’d never thought of Mrs. Kosumi, who hardly scraped my shoulder and weighed a few pounds more than my golden retriever, as Maime Trotter from The Great Gilly Hopkins, but when Hamae Okamoto said this, I realized how close she had come to the truth. Fusae Kosumi was also the kind of mother every child should have.

The nights I was in Komatsushima I nearly always ate dinner with the Kosumis. She was an amazing cook—the kind of cook that could go to anyone else’s house, Japanese or foreign, and without asking for a recipe, go home and reproduce what she had tasted. On more than one occasion when I was watching her prepare a meal, she would gasp: “Ara! Aka no!” Which loosely translated means “Eek! No red!” and slip on her geta to race to the market to buy a carrot or red pepper to make the meal perfect. It was always important for the meal to look beautiful as well as taste good.

Eiko Takahashi.

Rev. and Mrs. Kosumi, who were my dearest friends in Komatsushima. She was the one my translator called my Japanese Maime Trotter.

A visit to the craftsman who made puppet heads for Bunraku. I didn’t dream in 1960 I would be writing about Bunraku someday.

One night as she watched me happily devouring another delicious meal, she remarked that I used chopsticks much better than her four children did. “But, then,” she said, “when they were growing up during the war there was so little food for them to practice on.” Bit by bit over the two years I was there, I learned about the war years when Christians were enemies of the state and merchants were told not to sell them food. Not that the Kosumis had money for food. Once, she said, she had sold her wedding kimono for two tomatoes.

In language school we had been urged to immerse ourselves in Japanese culture, so a friend and I went to a tea ceremony set up for tourists in a public park. We stood in line for some time before we were ushered into the tea house. All I remember about that experience was that the green tea was too bitter and the bean cakes too sweet. I was trying to understand the culture, but my reaction that day was “What’s the big deal?” I didn’t get the meaning, much less the value of the rite.

I was often on the road when I lived in Komatsushima, and after a longer than usual trip away, Mrs. Kosumi said to me, almost shyly: “I’d like to do tea for you to welcome you home.” And in that humble house attached to a one-room tatami church, Mrs. Kosumi prepared the bitter green tea and sweet bean cakes. Lovingly and with enormous dignity, she went through the ancient ritual for which I was the only guest, and at last I understood.

The spring of my second year at language school I had been asked to come to the island of Shikoku and meet the pastors who were inviting me to join them in their work. As I stood in the long line waiting to buy my ticket to the ferry, I noticed an elderly woman with the milky white eyes of the blind. Before I could wonder how she could manage such a trip, a distinguished-looking older gentleman that I took to be her husband came back from where he’d gone to buy a box lunch and joined her in the line. I watched the couple for a long time, as the evident love and caring of the man for his wife was something I hadn’t seen before in Japan, where women, especially wives, seemed to be second- or third-class citizens.

Once on the boat and almost before I could sit down, a group of very loud, very obnoxious, very drunk young men came rushing over to where I sat. In this society with a great tradition of the rules of etiquette, there were no rules in those days for how men should approach a young foreign woman traveling alone. It was assumed, somehow, that she was looking for adventure and these young men were determined to provide it for me.

I moved to another seat. They followed. This continued as I went up on deck, where, over the noise of the young men, I thought I heard singing. I moved toward the sound. To my amazement the music was that of a familiar hymn. I kept moving toward the music, my little band of drunken admirers surrounding me like a hoop skirt. When I got to the scene of the singing, I realized it was being led by the husband of the blind woman I’d seen in line. At the end of the next song, still surrounded by my unwelcome entourage, I went up to him. “I thought I heard you singing a Christian hymn,” I said. He smiled and said they were. He was a pastor in Wakimachi and he and some members of his church had gone to a meeting in Kobe and were now on the way home. “Wakimachi?” I exclaimed. “You are one of the pastors I’m on the way to meet.”

I and my drunken crew joined the hymn sing. Me singing, my buddies looking on openmouthed. Before we got off the boat, one of the young men had cornered Pastor Iwaii to get the scoop on what he was all about.

Needless to say, over the next two years, Pastor Iwaii and I grew to be close friends. I went to Wakimachi every other month to teach a class on the Bible ostensibly to young people, but it proved to be the local entertainment for villagers of every age for whom a white face speaking Japanese was something of a marvel or perhaps a feature in a freak show.

When it was time for me to return to America, for what I thought would be a one-year leave, all eleven churches gave me a farewell party, but it is the party in Wakimachi that I remember the best.

In his message, Pastor Iwaii first read a verse in the Book of Ephesians that reads: “For [Christ] is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.” And the verse in Galatians in which the Apostle Paul says to the church: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.”

“Katherine,” he said, “is young. I am old. She is a woman. I am a man. She is an American. I am Japanese. When she was the child of missionaries in China, I was a colonel in the occupying army in Manchuria. She comes from the Presbyterian tradition, I come from the Pentecostal. The world would think it impossible that she and I should love each other. But Christ has broken down all the barriers that should divide us. We are one in Christ Jesus.”

If only all of us could hear that word. And I don’t believe this oneness is for Christians alone. God loves the whole world. We all belong to one another whatever our belief or non-belief.

The influence of Japan is evident in my work. My first three novels are set there, as well as the beautiful picture book The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, whose illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon garnered a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. I even had the chance to translate two Japanese folktales illustrated by the Hans Christian Andersen Medal–winning illustrator Suekichi Akaba, The Crane Wife, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and The Tongue-Cut Sparrow.

I’ve been back to Japan only twice since I left there, and my Japanese is so rusty I hardly dare open my mouth when I have a chance to speak it, but I couldn’t be the writer I became without those four years spent there. To be loved by people you thought you hated is an experience I wish everyone could have.