an Emperor’s widowed daughter she held the position of Chief High Priestess of Shinto’s supreme shrine, in Ise. Established 2,000 years ago, it is rebuilt every twenty years.
One Christmas not so long ago, my mother wanted to learn the phrase Japanese people habitually use when they give someone a gift. My mother was not a linguist, and did not speak Japanese, but she was good at memorizing, so she said just write it down and let me memorize it. But I forgot to tell her what it meant, which was remiss of me. The Japanese are always very humble in referring to anything concerning themselves, and when they give a gift they call it a worthless, insignificant and trifling thing, whereas we imply it is ‘something nice we think you will like’. My mother was successful all that Christmas long in giving ‘insignificant, worthless gifts’ to her Japanese friends. And then much later, in the following spring, the Dowager Princess and her elder daughter Sawa-sama came for tea, and she handed Mother a gift, saying, ‘This belonged to my father’. My mother knew her father was Emperor Meiji, and in her excitement, all she could think of saying was that phrase I had taught her, but before she got to the ‘trifling and worthless’ part, I managed to knock a priceless Crown Derby cup we had off the tea-table and cause an effective distraction!
‘Trifling’ reminds me of my own new special recipe for Trifle, which my dear friend Carmen Blacker thought was delicious, and suggested it be called ‘Kitashirakawa Surprise’. It came about because I had been asked to appear on a TV programme which featured artists, writers, musicians, etc., who were invited to make their favourite dish. I decided to do a Trifle, because I thought it was probably easy. But I am not much of a cook and did not realize how difficult custard could be. Bird’s Custard was unavailable in Japan, and try as I might, mine always curdled. But it was alright at the studio, because it is apparently the custom for a professional to make the same thing, to show at the end in case there is time-consuming cooking involved – or if one’s own is not up to scratch! Next day, who should appear at the door but the Kitashirakawas – mother and daughter – wanting me to show them how to make that dessert which looked so good and so easy. I was baffled! In desperation, I explained the general idea and then got them to stay in the drawing room with my mother while I tried to sort something out in the kitchen with what I could find in the fridge. The result was superb. Far better, I still think, than regular English Trifle! My base is an immensely popular Japanese sponge cake called kasutera, from pao de Castella (Castile bread) which was brought to Japan by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. On it I dribble ume-shu (Japanese plum wine), then cover it with cut-up strawberries and kiwi-fruit, and top it with yoghurt – tasty and much healthier than custard!
In the old pre-war days we were almost the only foreigners in Hayama. Most of the Westerners on The Bluff in Yokohama spent their summers in Karuizawa and Nojiri, mountain resorts which were then mainly foreign enclaves too. So my summer friends were all Japanese. They were mostly members of the royalty and aristocracy. Right opposite our house was the villa of Baron Takuma Dan, the head of Mitsui, who had recently been murdered by extremists for promoting friendship with England. His daughter Mrs Ogura, with three lovely daughters, had a house in Baron Dan’s enormous garden. Next door to them was the villa of Count Kentaro Kaneko, who wrote Japan’s pre-war Constitution. Diagonally across the road from us was the summer villa of the Kajima Corporation, one of Japan’s leading construction companies. The director’s niece Nanako was one of my friends, too. Their extensive houses and gardens, all among the hills on the opposite side of the road, were wonderful settings for our games of hide and seek. I introduced that Western version called ‘ sardines’, in which the seekers get in with the hider and the last seeker loses. It became very popular, and it was once when all we children crowded into a Japanese futon closet at the Ogura’s that I first noticed the Baron’s cute little grandson Ikuma, two years younger than I was, who became one of Japan’s leading composers.
We all had great fun together, but only in the afternoons, for Japanese children are busy doing homework all morning, even in the summer holidays. That is why there is virtually no illiteracy in Japan. So, in the early part of the day, my companions were the ocean and its fascinating denizens. The sea was a wonderful friend. It was always there for me, and it put its arms around me and hugged me whenever I went into it. And it talked to me. Watery words of friendship and love.
And in addition to my friend the sea, there were several families of imaginary people who I imagined living in nice houses in the crevices of the rock in front of our house. I would sometimes invite an imaginary family into our house, and I still remember how real they were to me, and how I once had to stop my mother from sitting down on top of ‘ somebody’. ‘O Mother,’ I cried, ‘That’s Mrs Aroosla sitting there!’ The other day I came across a note my darling mother had made of the names of my imaginary friends, and there was a whole family of Arooslas!
One enormous rock rises up out of the sand below our house, to the right, like the prow of a large vessel, which I named The Warship Hotel, and marked with a large sign. My father, of course, lost no time in getting rid of that sign!
Another friend was Mount Fuji. I used to get up very early, while my parents were still asleep, and creep out of the house and down onto the sand, and run along to the rocks at our end of the beach. I would make myself comfortable there on one of the rocks, and gaze for hours across Sagami Bay at the mountain, always radiantly beautiful in the dawn light.
That is how I filled in my mornings while my Japanese friends were busy with their homework.
CHAPTER 9
The Japanese Language
I DO NOT think many Westerners realize how extraordinarily hard Japanese have to work, from the time they are young children, in order to memorize the basic 1,006 kanji – the Chinese whole-word ideograms they are required to learn during their six grades of elementary school. And that is in addition to the two alphabets of fifty-six syllables each, called kana, which a Japanese monk invented in the ninth century when Chinese writing was adopted, to enable Japanese people to conjugate verbs and indicate Japanese parts of speech such as particles and prepositions, because of the great difference between Chinese and Japanese. (See also page 6, note 1.)
One’s mind truly boggles to think of all those complicated writing symbols the Japanese people have to cope with, when all we have is just one twenty-six-letter alphabet, or two if you separate capitals and small letters. In comparison with theirs, our written language is mere child’s play. Those 1,006 basic kanji, which must be mastered in primary school, are just the beginning. In addition to both fifty-six syllable kana alphabets, children must finish high school with a knowledge of 1,945 kanji, which is the present post-war figure officially endorsed for current use. In 1946, the government had issued a list of 1,850 characters, recommending that people confine themselves to these. But most newspapers still use about 2,500. And now they hardly ever make use of those helpful tiny hiragana that once upon a time were printed alongside difficult kanji indicating their pronunciation.
But it was much worse before the war. Then about 6,000 kanji were in use, and I remember often seeing Japanese gentlemen working out on the palms of their hands, while conversing, what certain kanji were! You do not see that now. Having the number of kanji for current use officially curtailed after the war enables many words now to be spelled out simply in hiragana, and many of the remaining kanji have thankfully been simplified. It was the pre-war variety that I later worked so hard to try and learn during some free periods at my English boarding school!
But learning written Japanese still takes a great deal of time, since besides memorizing over 2,000 of those complicated hieroglyphics, there is also the problem as to how they are pronounced. Kanji have a far greater variety of pronunciations than our few words that are written the same but pronounced differently. Each kanji has at least two pronunciations – the kun or Japanese reading,
