Britton not yet two, with her aunt Dorothy
6A building similar to this came down in the earthquake and crushed Dorothy Britton’s aunt Dorothy and a friend
7Christ Church (after the earthquake), where Dorothy Britton had been christened
8Frank Britton’s office after the earthquake
9Kin-san – Dorothy Britton’s nanny
10Following the earthquake, the Britton house was temporarily used by a contingent of military police
11Dorothy with the Okubos in Hayama
12Dorothy’s fancy dress Valentine’s Day birthday party at the Britton house in Yokohama
13Dorothy aged c. six at the new house in Hayama
14Departing for England in 1935 on the Tatsuta Maru
15Dorothy with cousin Anna Rendell and her daughters Joan and Isabel
16The Butterfield’s sailing boat at Pitt’s Bay, Bermuda
17French composer Darius Milhaud at Mills College, California, in 1943
18Dorothy with the niece of the President of Haiti – the first black student at Mills
19Dorothy singing folksongs with her ukulele at a charity garden fete
20Dorothy with her Irish harp
21Dorothy back in Japan in August, 1949, with her mother and Mrs ‘TQ’
22The British Embassy, Tokyo
23Queen Victoria’s god-daughter Victoria Drummond
24Dorothy working on her cantata with librettist Elizabeth Baskerville McNaughton
25Dorothy interpreting Ikuma Dan’s talk about Japanese music for the Tokyo English Teachers Association
26Ikuma Dan conducting the CBC Orchestra performing Dorothy Britton’s cantata in Japanese
27Dorothy Britton’s musical ‘Madame Beggar’ was first performed in Nagoya
28A cartoon featuring Dorothy Britton teaching English and singing British folksongs on NHK’s weekly Junior High School TV programme
29Dorothy with her mother and the dowager Princess of Kitashirakawa and daughter Princess Sawa at their Hayama villa
30Young elephants on the deck of the Maori
31Charles Britton at his house on The Peak in Hong Kong
32Charles Britton’s yacht
33Photograph of pelagic nudibranch Glaucus
34Dorothy and Norah Britton on Ishigaki Island
35Australian zoologist Isobel Bennett on Ishigaki Island
36Basho statue at Shirakawa railway station with Dorothy Britton’s English version of his words on the plinth
37The Bouchiers: Derek, Dorothy and Boy in front of the house designed by Frank Britton
38A young Wilfrid ‘Ted’ Hall when in Bermuda
39Ted Hall, Dorothy, Derek and Anne Collier in Connecticut
CHAPTER 1
Rhythms Are What Divide Us
I WAS a bonny baby, as most small children are, and my nanny called me a bep-pin, a colloquial term meaning ‘a beauty’, ‘a knock-out’. There was, of course, the added glamour of my being a foreign baby. But my nanny soon shortened that and added chan, the affectionate suffix, giving me the nickname ‘ O-bet-chan’. All my old Japanese friends still call me that – even including one princess! And as with most Japanese nicknames, the origin is not clear.
From the moment she first laid eyes on me in Yokohama, Suzu Numano, my mother’s first Japanese friend, from San Francisco days, called me ‘The Japanese child with the Western skin’. For born in Japan, I have lived most of my life in two rhythms: the ‘one-two, one-two’ of Japanese, and English, which is mostly in waltz time. From the time I was a child I was fascinated by the differences in rhythm, and it seemed to me to affect not only the language but everyday life as well. I became very conscious of the fact that Japanese people seemed to move and walk in 2/4 time, while foreigners waltzed about. Footwear may have had something to do with it, for in those days the air was redolent with the kak-ko kak-ko sound of geta, while the heel-ball-toe with a shoe was a 1,2,3. And when they talked, Japanese people made little nods in 2/4 time, while Westerners’ heads stayed still.
By the age of three, I had learned to read and my favourite book was Through the Looking glass by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. In it Alice pokes the mirror that sits above the mantelpiece and enters the room that she sees in the mirror. It is the same room, but slightly different – a reflected version of it. Everything is the other way around. And I discovered I could enter a slightly different world in another way – just by speaking Japanese! That was my magic looking glass!
And, of course, I spoke it with the right rhythm, like the Japanese spoke it, simply having copied my Japanese nanny; so I seemed to really enter Japan and become Japanese. I thought it was tremendous fun going backwards and forwards between Japan and my parents’ worlds, just as Alice went backwards and forwards through the looking glass! And I still do. And just as Alice’s room in the mirror remained the same, people from every country and race have always seemed the same to me, with the only difference being the rhythm of their languages. I had made a wonderful discovery: that it is only rhythms that divide us!
I used to love going with my nanny to the Japanese festival at the local shrine, where the festival music, called hayashi, was in vigorously lilting 2/4 time. (‘Shrine’ is the customary English translation of jinja, the Shinto sanctum, whereas in Japan our word ‘ temple’ is only used for o-tera, the Buddhist sanctuary.) Especially out in the countryside, one of the most important occasions in Japan’s year is the annual village festival. These o-matsuri are Shinto festivals of supplication and thanksgiving for bumper crops and catches. They last for several days and are a time of general merrymaking. Fancy stalls are set up in the shrine compound, and stages are erected where plays are performed, as well as bouts of exhibition Sumo. I used to love the comic duo hyot-toko and o-kamé, and I still have a smiling okamé mask hanging in my study to keep me cheered up!
During the festival, the deity of the shrine is taken for a jolly outing in a small portable shrine carried this way and that on the shoulders of the young men of the village. Their task is made merrier all along the way by sips of saké, and by the end of the procession the god is usually rollicking all over the place, and giving its bearers a very hard time! Shrines everywhere, not only those in the villages, but every shrine in Japan has its own festival. In towns and cities the god in his portable shrine has to cope with heavy traffic and is usually escorted by one or more policemen to keep back the cars. As they warm to the task, the lads that shoulder the mini-shrine set up a lusty antiphonal chorus shouting wasshoi- wasshoi, wasshoi-wasshoi
