Stranger In A Foreign Land

"Well hello, dear, I don't remember seeing you here before. Are you new in town?"

I heard her before I saw her, and the woman's voice stopped me dead in my tracks. I'd been wandering through the shopping mall, doing my best to blend into the sea of Japanese shoppers when she spoke -- in perfect English. And it didn't make sense, because the woman speaking was at least seventy years old, and she looked 100% Japanese.

In the small town I lived in, I knew, or knew of, just about every foreigner within a thirty mile radius. There were the foreign students at my university: a redheaded Brazillian woman, three Chinese men, another American exchange student, and a man from Zaire. There were the two foreign lecturers at the university, Bert from America and Reginald from England. There was my friend Nancy, married to a Japanese farmer, and Jack and Liz, a married American couple who taught English in town. There was the elderly Russian tailor who had a small shop near the station and had reputedly lived in Japan since before the war. And now, this woman; she had to be an American with an accent like that.

Then I remembered Liz telling me about a woman she had met in town -- a woman brought up in America whose family had moved back to Japan before the war. And I knew that this had to be her.

"Where are you from?" she was asking me now, her shopping bag of vegetables over one arm. "Are you American?"

"Yes, and you are too, aren't you?"

She smiled. "I was once, after a fashion. My parents took me to America when I was one year old, you see, and I lived there until I was fourteen."

I stood in the mall talking to this woman while the rain hammered down on the plastic awning over our heads. She had an incredible story. Her parents had decided to emigrate to America in the twenties. Japan was in a slump, and they were finding it difficult to make ends meet. Friends who had emigrated to the West Coast told them America was a wonderful land of opportunity and they longed to see for themselves. Leaving their home in Kyushu, they moved to Oregon with their two small children.

"America was all I knew," she said. "My parents bought a small grocery store and put us into the local school. But we were the only Japanese kids there, and it was tough."

"Why?"

"Because Japan was already getting a bad reputation, trying to start an empire. We were the enemy no matter how hard we tried to be American."

"What a shame!"

"It was, really. We kids felt like Americans, you see. And we tried so hard to make them like us! But after the windows in our store were broken for the fifth time -- and so much more -- my parents couldn't take any more. They decided to move us back to Japan. I'll never forget the long voyage back. We were so scared, but they told us that Japan would be better. That we would feel at home there."

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see passers by looking at us in amazement. If this lady had been young, no one would have batted an eye, but the fact that I was talking to a little gold-toothed grandmother gave them pause. That foreigner is fluent! I even heard one woman murmur to a friend. If she had gotten close enough to hear our conversation, she would have realized that we were speaking English, not Japanese.

"What a shame you were treated badly in America," I said, but the woman laughed.

"You may be surprised to hear that we were treated no better in Japan!" she replied. "I know that you are called gaijin here because I talk to many foreigners -- non-Japanese people -- and I hear that they get tired of being called foreigner. But when we came back to Japan, we were called gaijin too."

"Really?" I asked, astonished.

"Yes. We were living in Shikoku then, out in the country where my father grew up. The children would follow us around the playground, poking at us. Gaijin! they would call, Say something to us in English! She laughed bitterly. "We even took to wearing kimono, and we spoke to each other only in Japanese, never English -- but it was not enough. We could never be Japanese enough for them. Whatever we did, they could tell we were foreigners."

I shook my head, amazed.

"And then the war started," she said quietly, "and we knew we would never go back."

"Do you ever think of going back now?"

She smiled. "Sometimes. I would love to see Oregon again -- to see the forests and the ocean there. But I have a child who is badly disabled and who still needs my care. I have never been back."

When we said goodbye, I watched her disappear into the crowd. She looked so much like everyone else.

"I saw you in the mall yesterday talking to that old lady," a girl in my dorm said the next day. "I meant to help you out, but you seemed to be doing okay." She cocked her head. "Your Japanese must be a lot better if you can talk to someone that old. What was she saying, anyway? Was she bending your ear about the war?"

Braving The Bathhouse

My new apartment in Hakuraku did not have a bath.

"Just use the public bath!" everyone advised me, and they made it sound so simple. For many reasons, though, I dreaded this. I'd heard that the bandai, the person who collected your bath fee and sat perched on a little stool from where he could see out over both the women's and men's sides, was just as likely to be a man as a woman. I didn't relish the idea of some fellow being able to monitor my bathing. Come to that, I wasn't crazy about the idea of bathing with a few dozen strangers, either.

It took me quite some time to work up the courage to go to my local bath. It took me even longer to force myself to patronize the place when I discovered that our bandai was in fact a man. Once I'd gotten over these hurdles, though, the whole bathing ritual became something I very much looked forward to. In a few weeks, nothing about it seemed strange at all. Sitting in front of a spigot to shower with dozens of others not only seemed perfectly normal, it struck me as far easier and more natural than showering in a narrow cubicle, with no company at all. Getting into a piping hot bath afterwards with half a dozen strangers no longer seemed unusual either. The western concept of solitary bathing could hardly be more different than the traditional Japanese method of squatting or sitting on a small stool and showering among dozens of others in a wide open space.

Although I hated locker room showers as a teenager, communal bathing in Japan was nothing like it. Nobody made fun of me or rushed me, only a few people stared, and no catty comments were whispered about my bra size. There was something cozy and comforting about bathing with other people, watching their own cleaning rituals out of the corner of your eye. I always felt cleaner and more relaxed when I was finished, and even if I didn’t exchange more than cursory greetings with a few others, I always felt a pleasant sense of camaraderie.

“How do you put your hair up like that?” I heard an elderly woman ask another one evening, as I was getting dressed. She had long salt-and-pepper hair pinned up in a neat little bun. Only when the other woman didn’t answer did I realize that she was actually talking to me.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked, certain I’d misunderstood her. My listening comprehension still had a long way to go. I was constantly talking at cross purposes with people, getting what they said wrong and spending an embarrassing amount of time trying to sort out the confusion afterwards.

“Your hair,” she said, indicating my pinned up, inverted bun. “How do you do that? It must take you forever.”

“It doesn’t take me thirty seconds. Here – I’ll show you.” And I undid my hair and pinned it back up so that she could see.

“Well, I’ll be! You’re right – that didn’t take you any time at all! And your hair is so long! How long have you been growing it?”

“Four years now,” I said proudly.

“My! It must be a lot of trouble to wash, though – I’ll bet that takes a lot longer!”

I nodded. It did.

“And how long have you been in Japan?”

“Over ten months.”

“Maa! Only ten months, and yet you speak Japanese so well!”

I blushed and sighed inwardly. A very fluent acquaintance had pointed out that it was generally the beginning students of Japanese that got praised for their excellent speaking ability; that only when a person became truly fluent did the praise dry up. She should have known: she was working on a degree in economics in a Japanese university and I’d seen the books she was reading – in Japanese. Nobody praised her Japanese any more, but people still praised mine all the time – so much so that I was beginning to get depressed over it.

Later, when I was leaving, the same woman touched my arm. “I enjoyed having that chat with you,” she said. I smiled at her.

“You know,” she continued, “you’re the first foreigner I’ve ever talked to.”

I laughed, not knowing whether I should take her seriously.

“Really,” she said earnestly. “I’ve never had the courage to talk to a foreigner. I don’t speak English, you see, but the other evening, I heard you talking to someone in Japanese so I decided I’d ask you how you did your hair. I’m glad I did, too, or I might never have had the chance.”

I laughed again, but this time out of embarrassment. I was incredibly touched to be the first foreigner this woman had ever talked to. She was old enough not only to remember the war, but to have lived through it as a mature person, and I was seized by the desire to be able to talk to people like her about more interesting subjects than how I did my hair.

The subject of the war came up in my Japanese class when I mentioned my experiences at the local baths.

“There used to be a bathhouse just next-door to us,” the teacher said. “It was very convenient, too, having it so close. Before the war, almost no one had their own baths and we all went together to the public ones. Nowadays everyone in Japan wants their own bathroom, and it seems a little lonely.”

“Is it true they were all destroyed during the war?” a fellow student asked curiously.

“Yes, they were almost all firebombed. We figured the pilots thought they were weapons factories, what with those big chimneys. Losing our bathhouses was demoralizing, I can tell you that!”

Our teacher was one of the few older Japanese people I knew who could talk about the events of the war in a perfectly unemotional, matter-of-fact way, and she wasn’t shy about criticizing Japan’s role. At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in the war, so I didn’t realize how unusual her attitude was.

By and large, the Japanese attitude about the war was that it oughtn’t be discussed. Whenever anyone had the bad manners to mention the air raids, Hiroshima, or Pearl Harbor, someone else usually leapt to change the subject as quickly as possible. The war had happened, it was horrible, but it was over, case closed, they seemed to feel, and this suited me fine. When I was a child, I had an uncle who had been dispatched as a soldier to post-war Japan. He had never been involved in combat himself, but was something of a World War II buff and I had consequently spent countless Christmases listening to him wax lyrical on Zeroes and kamikazes. I was bored silly by talk of the war myself and found the pictures of post-blast Hiroshima and Nagasaki so disturbing that I was only too happy not to dwell on it. Over the years that I lived in Japan, however, I learned that the war was very much part of the collective memory and the case was not closed – nowhere near.

That first year I spent in Japan, signs of the war were still around me even 34 years after the fact. There was the crazy woman who reputedly had lost her entire family in the great Kanto firebombing of March 23 and could often be found at Kamakura Station raging and throwing stones at every foreigner who was unlucky enough to get within her range (interestingly enough, I knew of two Germans who were her victims). There was the little old man who stopped me in a book store one day and tried to talk to me in English. “Japanese soldier do too much bad thing China, wartime,” he said to me earnestly. “Hiroshima very bad, but Japanese wartime soldier in China do very cruel thing, too much cruel.” I gave him short shrift; now I recognize his courage in approaching me and I kick myself for the missed opportunity. There was also the group of elderly American men I met one day outside an Indian restaurant near Akasaka. They asked if I were American and I told them I was. “You living here?” one of them asked me.

“Yes, I’m teaching English.”

“Good for you. We used to live here too, a long time ago. Boy, have things changed since then.” He shook his head and stretched out an arm, indicating the soaring high rises, the glitzy corporate headquarters, shining neon signs, and crowded streets of Akasaka.

“I’ll bet they have,” I said. “I had an uncle who was stationed here just after the war and he used to talk about it all the time.”

One of the men laughed and I saw him exchange a glance with one of his pals. “Oh, we went home after the war. We were here during the war, see. So – how do you like it here, then?”

“I like it a lot,” I burbled. “I’ve been learning Japanese and I find that makes it a lot easier to help me get to know the people.”

“Does it now?” laughed one of the men. A few of the others, I noticed, seemed edgy. In fact, all the men had a strange air about them, as though they had some hidden agenda they weren’t anxious to discuss, but were bursting with all the same. Then a middle-aged woman joined them. “I am sorry,” she said in slow, carefully modulated English, “I have found that the buildings were torn down two years ago. So now we will try one more of the locations – if you will come with me?”

I watched as the men followed her through the crowded streets of Akasaka, obviously fascinated and intrigued by what they saw around them – much more so than the average tourists, in fact. At the time, I was only vaguely aware of the fact that Japan was host to thousands of allied prisoners of war – including 36,260 American servicemen. These men were treated abominally during their time in Japan, forced to work in appalling conditions with little food and virtually no medical care. And I had just met half a dozen of them.

When I look back on that first year and my shocking ignorance of the events of the war I am appalled at myself and how little I knew at the time. I lost so many opportunities to hear the stories of people who had lived through events I could barely begin to imagine. So I have to be all the more grateful that somewhere in Yokohama a woman may still remember me as the first foreigner she ever talked to.

Getting Through

Last night I had a Eureka moment with my 13-year-old and it couldn't have come at a better time.

I have just finished writing a novel about longterm American expatriates in Japan and I am now in the process of going over the text for perhaps the 200th time, checking historical references and tying up loose threads. A friend having sent me another memoir about the Bataan Death March, which one of my protaganists endured as a young man, I was reading this to make sure I had some of the details right, and I found myself rewriting one paragraph over a dozen times.

Just as I was getting to a crucial point and felt that I was beginning to make progress, along came my daughter. She had a look in her eye that said I want to talk. Normally I ignore my kids when they approach me during my off-kid writing hours. I love them, but my writing is very important to me and I don't welome interruptions. But having turned thirteen, my youngest has adopted some of those truly unpleasant teenage characteristics: a tendency to spend too much time in her room doing God-knows-what; sullen, blank stares when questions about homework are posed; a habit of Oh mom! eye rolling and exaggerated shrugs when I bring up the subject of laundry. So if she wants to talk, we will talk. Who knows when I will get another chance?

It turns out that my youngest has been making an informal study of the bullies in her class. She gave me an astute description of some of the more troubled kids who pick on others, a boy with many complex issues who has since left her school; a girl who was badly bullied herself a few years ago and is now eager to get revenge on the children who picked on her -- and some who didn't. My child has carefully analyzed the sources of bullying and broken down some of the most prevalent causes as follows:

(1) Kids who have never lived anywhere but in this town, who tend to feel as though their native status gives them certain privileges. Johnnie-come-lately types like my daughter -- she started school here at age seven as opposed to the natives' average age of five -- are often dismissed as interlopers and shunned.

(2) Kids who have been bullied themselves, either by parents or other children.

(3) Kids with obvious differences, either physical or emotional.

(4) Kids with any of the above issues, who possess natural charisma or leadership skills.

What amazed me most was that my daughter realized that (4) was the most dangerous kind of bully. It was when she was describing one such boy -- a natural leader born and raised in this town who has almost certainly been beaten by his father and suffers, not surprisingly, from a behavioral disorder -- that I suddenly saw it: a Teaching Opportunity.

Having grown up in Japan, my children see themselves as Japanese. They don't want to hear any comments about Japan that they perceive as critical or negative. During our first week here we happened to meet an elderly man whose brother was a former POW of the Japanese, and my children's first question after this encounter was "Why didn't that man like us?" All I could do was point out that the man had liked us just fine; what he hadn't like was the fact that we had lived in Japan for so many years. He would forever associate the country with the unfortunate experiences his brother had suffered during the war. We tried in vain to explain to our children that they weren't Japanese. Next, I tried to educate them about the war and its causes. I got too ambitious: their eyes glazed over before I even got to Russo-Japanese War. By the time I was ready to start on the Versailles treaty, it was a lost cause.

But last night I had the perfect opportunity: a discussion of what makes bullies. We went from imbalances of power and inferiority complexes to the origins of war, touching on many issues I have long wanted to discuss with her: colonialism, racism, cultural misunderstandings, man's inhumanity to man. Right in front of me I had the materials my friend had sent. They made for painful viewing, but I let my daughter see them. Once again, we talked about bullying. We found parallels between the classroom bullies who, having been brutalized and bullied themselves, seek to do the same to others, and the worst of the officers and guards in the Imperial Japanese Army who made the Bataan Death March the horrific atrocity it was.

I don't flatter myself that I did much more than pique her interest in the Bataan Death March and other atrocities of the war that have largely -- and tragically -- been forgotten by the general public, but ladies and gentlemen, I got through. I talked, she listened; she talked, I listened. Teaching and communication took place between a grown woman and a 13-year-old girl, and if that isn't a miracle, I don't know what is.

Later, I went back and rewrote the chapter I'd been laboring over. I put in a little about bullies and what makes them the way they are. It reads a lot better.

Out of the Air

March, 1999.

My eldest, who has a flair for the dramatic, is itching to tell me all about the film she's just seen in her social studies class.

"And the enemy planes kept coming!" she says breathlessly, as I walk her home from school. "The sky was filled with them, like so many dragonflies! Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, they went, and they dropped their bombs. In no time the ground beneath them was consumed in flames!" She pauses briefly for dramatic emphasis. "Tokyo was burning!"

Uh oh.

Off work with a cold for three days, I've lost track of the date. But sure enough, it's that time of year again: the anniversary of the Great Kanto Air Raid of March 10, 1945. No wonder they've been watching a film about it in school, and how weird it must have been for them showing it, too, with my half-American, half-British kid integrating the class. I look around quickly to see if anyone has heard; the kid is speaking in Japanese and her voice carries. I try to think of a way to phrase what I have to say.

"Honey, you know those enemy planes," I say a little anxiously, "you do know what country they were from, don't you?"

She looks up at me, a little confused. "Um, no, I don't. Germany?"

I sigh. We've talked about the war before, she and I, but she's never been in the habit of paying mind to what I say and she obviously hasn't taken it in.

"No, not Germany," I say quietly. "America."

Her jaw drops. "Uso!" she cries out, "You're kidding!"

"No, I'm not. They were from America, honey. Japan and America were at war."

"But why would they do a thing like that? When they dropped those bombs, they had fire in them! They burned up a lot of people, and their dogs and cats and houses, too!"

"Well, you see, before they dropped those bombs on Tokyo, Japan had dropped bombs too. On other countries. And they'd done lots of bad things. Terrible things, really."

"But two wrongs don't make a right!"

"I know they don't, but it was awfully complicated, the war."

"But they shouldn't have burned up innocent people!"

What can I say to this? I think about the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed by the Japanese in China, the Philippines, and Indochina. But how can I begin to tell all this to a child? Suddenly living in Japan seems a lot more complicated -- for us, in particular. I start to wonder what the Japanese mothers of my kid's classmates will tell their children about the war. Or the Chinese mothers (there are two of them at our school) for that matter.

"A lot of people were upset about the fire-bombing of Tokyo," I say carefully. "And it wasn't just Tokyo either, honey, a lot of other cities were fire-bombed."

"By the Americans?"

"Well, yes. Other countries were at war with Japan too, but it was American planes that dropped the bombs." I can't help but think that the next thing she'll learn about will be Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Great.

"I've got to tell Kunie and Harumi!" she cries. "I'll bet they don't know!"

Part of me hopes that they don't, but I'm willing to bet that they do. Only my kid seems to have remained in blissful ignorance. All I can hope is that Kunie's and Harumi's parents try to be as honest and open as I am when they talk to their kids about the war.

"Look, when you talk to your friends about the war, just remember that the whole world was at war back then. And America didn't just decide to drop the bombs on Japan for no reason. It was horrible for the people on the ground, but it was horrible for a lot of other people too, before that." My heart is filled with dread. How long will it be before she comes home having been told that her mother's country nuked Japan and killed hundreds of thousands?

"I'd be really mad if someone dropped a bomb on Kunie and Harumi," she says with conviction, kicking a stone on the road for emphasis.

"I'll bet you would." Kunie and my eldest have been buddies since they were eleven months old. Harumi and she have been inseparable since they were a year and a half. I've babysat for Kunie a few times and when Harumi spent the night at our place once, I had to cuddle her for two hours before she finally dropped off to sleep. My kid's not the only one who'd hate to see anything happen to them.

"I don't think Kunie and Harumi would like it if their country decided to drop a bomb on us either," I point out. She gives me a funny look. My kid never sees the Japanese as any different from her at all; there is no 'us' and 'them' for her yet. Once, some Japanese-British friends of ours visited relatives in the U.K. At a playground in Birmingham, their young children were taunted by others and called 'Jap.' We were shocked by this. "What would you do if you heard someone yelling that word?" we asked our kid at the time, and she bristled. "I'd say 'Don't call me Jap, you stupid foreigner!'" We were amazed that our blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter saw herself as Japanese. But she's lived in Japan virtually all her life, so I suppose it is perfectly natural that she does.

A plane drones in the sky above us and we both look up. "I'm glad America isn't dropping bombs on us anymore," she says matter-of-factly, squeezing my hand.

I nod and squeeze her hand back. I try to imagine the pilots flying the B-29s that dropped their deadly loads on Tokyo and the surrounding areas fifty-five years earlier in all the madness and confusion of war. I wonder what in the world they would think of my daughter and me, walking hand in hand along this peaceful road in the suburbs of Tokyo, having this particular conversation.

I picture them thinking it's as weird and wonderful as I do.