In April 2010, I e-mailed Simon Partner, professor of Japanese history at Duke and director of the university’s Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, to ask for help finding a translator to accompany me on my trip to follow Smith’s footsteps in Japan. He suggested that I post an advertisement on H-Japan, an international online scholarly discussion group devoted to Japanese history and culture. With Simon’s editorial input I drafted a notice and he posted it for me:
I am seeking a Japanese-English translator/assistant to travel with me in Japan and the Pacific during the approximate period of October 25–November 8, 2010. I am completing research for a biography of photographer W. Eugene Smith. The trip will follow in Smith’s footsteps to Minamata, Tokyo, Saipan, Okinawa, Leyte, Iwo Jima, and Tarawa. We will be accompanied by Smith’s former wife Aileen Mioko Smith on some parts of the trip. My biography is the culmination of thirteen years (and counting) of work. I am looking for excellent Japanese language skills, a helpful personality, and an interest in the topic. All expenses paid. Japanese residents preferable.
I received more than fifty responses. Most of them were from bilingual graduate students seeking work that paid. Not many of them expressed distinct interest in the content of my project.
Then, on May 7, a unique response caught my eye. It was from Tom Gill, a British professor of Japanese studies at a university in Yokohama. He told me I’d be hearing from his eighteen-year-old Japanese-British daughter, Momoko, and he encouraged me not to discount her because of her age.
A few days later, I received an engaging, articulate letter from Momoko, who told me she would be taking a gap year before entering college. She said she was a jazz drummer enthralled by what she’d seen of Smith’s photographs of musicians to go along with his fabled work in Japan and the Pacific.
Momoko’s e-mail query was the most affecting one I received, and she followed up with a couple more to see if the job was still available. We arranged a telephone conversation. She told me she was born in England and spent her first five years there, then ten years in Japan, before three for high school in Santa Barbara. Her eloquent articulation of interest, plus persistence, impressed me. I asked Simon Partner if someone that young could be an effective interpreter for me in Japan. He responded that if she was good enough, then, yes, she’d be fine.
Everything pointed toward a forty-four-year-old white American man traveling in Japan with an eighteen-year-old Japanese-British woman. It never occurred to me the parallels, that Smith was fifty-three when he went to Japan in 1971 and that the Japanese-American Aileen was twenty-one.