complicated Canon camera equipment on family vacations, and once a week we ate bowls of sticky white rice with chopsticks. Growing up, I used certain phrases and words without really knowing they were Japanese. “Tadaima” I’d say, walking in the door after a day at school. “Okaerinasai,” my mother would reply, welcoming me home. “Itadakimasu,” the whole family said before digging into a hot dinner; it was a convenient, one-word way to get around saying grace.
I took my first trip back to Japan with my family when I was sixteen. We traveled and visited Japanese friends that I knew only through the decorative New Year greeting cards they sent. Most of them, Takeuchis, Uchidas, and Abes, had known me as an infant. They treated us to elaborate feasts as we sat shoeless on the floors of their small homes.
At sixteen Japan excited me. My thirteen-year-old brother rebelled against this strange place where his knee-high tube socks and ragged baseball shirts didn’t fit the norm. On our first day in Tokyo my parents took us out to lunch at a restaurant on the top floor of a large department store. Without glancing at the menu my parents both ordered the deluxe sushi plate. My brother and I ordered spaghetti with meat sauce.
After the first few days my curiosity began to outweigh my uncertainty and the few words I knew helped me navigate my way. I discovered a sense of place, of coming home—the narrow streets, thin paper sliding doors, fresh-smelling tatami mats, and delicate cardboard lunch boxes folded into the shapes of flowers.
I started to study Japanese formally at Denison University after returning to the United States. The dark, curvy lines of the phonetic alphabet represented a secret code, and I practiced writing the forty-six symbols over and over, quizzing myself on any white space that presented itself to me: a place mat, the back of an envelope, or a blue book for an English exam. I loved learning to read all over again like a child stringing together syllables and discovering new, recognizable words.
I signed up to spend my junior year at Waseda University in Tokyo. But before going to Japan I got a summer job working at the Honda manufacturing plant in Ohio. I wanted to be a translator, but after only two semesters of Japanese I could barely read a sushi menu. The only thing I was qualified to do was to be a lifeguard at the Honda Sports Center. It was there that I met Mr. Yoshida, who was both an alumnus of Waseda and Honda’s vice president in Ohio. He took an interest in my study of Japanese and encouraged me to get a part time job with Honda during the exchange year.
After that summer I arrived in Tokyo with a list of people Mr. Yoshida had suggested I call, and was hired as a weekend Welcome Lady at the Honda headquarters showroom. I worked with ten glamorous Welcome Ladies who maintained flawless manicures and taught me to humbly say “Please accept this stupid gift” as we distributed complimentary pens to potential customers.
During that year everyone called me Kiki. It was a nickname that I made up for myself before going to Japan. My given name, Laura, would have been all right, but I rationalized that it would be good to have a name without the “L” sound that in Japanese sounds more like an “R,” turning my name into “Rora.” The truth is that I wanted a cute, attractive name. Laura sounded so boring, but Kiki sounded full of energy and fun.
The year at Waseda was a year of discovering new territory. I joined the university judo team and, with bruised shins and a broadened back, earned my brown belt. Seaweed-covered rice balls and hot canned coffee from vending machines became staples of my diet. When I finally learned to read train maps and station signs, the geography of Japan suddenly opened up into an inviting web of well-marked paths that took me all the way from the northern mountains of Hokkaido to the beaches of Okinawa. I found a Japanese boyfriend and some days spoke Japanese exclusively. Japan became my playground, a place where I was safe to fearlessly explore and reinvent myself.
After I returned to Ohio for my senior year, Mr. Yoshida hired me to work at Honda as an intern for a month. This time I had more to offer than lifeguarding skills and worked as his assistant, translating press releases and writing articles for the company newspaper. On the last day he offered me a job working at Tokyo headquarters, to start after graduation. It would be the first time an American woman would be sent to headquarters for a long-term assignment. I couldn’t believe his offer, and accepted without even asking about the salary.
He explained that I would go to Tokyo for two years, after which I would return to the United States and continue working for him. The first year in Japan would be spent working in the executive office of Honda Motor Company as an assistant to one of the senior managing directors, Mr. Chino, who had just been promoted after seven years as president of American Honda in Los Angeles. Mr. Chino had requested a bilingual assistant because part of his new responsibilities included all of Honda’s North American operations. My second year would be spent rotating through various departments at the headquarters—sales, public relations, and finance—to help me understand the organization and prepare me for work back in America.
From the beginning, Mr. Yoshida emphasized that I was joining the company, not just starting a job. After I had accepted his verbal offer, he sent me a half-page letter confirming my start date and salary. He wrote that Honda was pleased that I would be joining the company and that they hoped I would find my career with Honda both challenging and rewarding.
Mr. Yoshida set up an orientation schedule beginning a week after I graduated from college. He wanted me to be prepared when I arrived in Tokyo, so he decided that I should spend the summer studying the operations in America—starting with a month on the assembly line in the Ohio factory. After that I traveled to the offices in New York, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., and then spent six weeks in Los Angeles.
During the three-month training period I met with Mr. Yoshida regularly to talk about the company and its theories of business. He asked me to write daily reports about all the different departments I visited, not just to make sure I had learned something but because he was interested in my observations. He wanted to know my opinion about what I saw and how things worked. When we were in different cities I would fax him my reports and he would respond the next day, writing his comments in scrupulous English with the penmanship of a calligrapher. He treated me as the adult I aspired to be.
I knew very little about what it would be like once I arrived in Tokyo—the company, the job, and where I would live. Mr. Yoshida assured me that Honda would help me get settled. I sent a list of questions to the manager of the executive office, who replied with a vague, one-page letter saying that we would talk about things more after I arrived. The lack of information didn’t bother me too much. What I didn’t know I filled in for myself, relying on my memories of life as an exchange student and as a Welcome Lady, when strangers had asked to take my picture and invited me to their homes for dinner because I could speak Japanese.
Mr. Yoshida had been grooming me and I’d been grooming myself: I straightened and styled my unruly red hair and bought suits and matching high heels. A prim gold-plated watch replaced the leather thong and beaded bracelets I had worn around my wrist for the past four years. Two local newspapers interviewed me for front-page profiles, and my head filled with glamorous images of my job as the first American woman to work at Honda’s headquarters.
Working at Honda was my dream job. Although I knew almost nothing about manufacturing, I did know Japanese. I knew that words would be my passport to understanding the company and Japan. What I didn’t know then was the geography of this unexplored language—the phrases of assimilation, the words of compromise, the messages of rebellion and acceptance I had yet to learn.
Note: For this book I have relied on journals I kept while in Japan, letters I wrote home, and my memory. Some of the conversations recorded here are re-creations. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned.
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Uniform
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