Daddy rented a house for us at the seaside in Hayama, and my earliest memory is of the scary rugged drive from Isogo in the back of a lorry. I also remember we were not allowed to sound our motor car horn in Hayama because Yoshihito, the Taisho Emperor, was lying ill in the Imperial Villa Annex. And I remember, too, the tragedy for me of falling into a mud puddle and ruining a lovely new outfit my great aunt in Oregon had sent me! It kept me wondering for years as to where it had happened. Believe it or not, the puddle was still there, when back in post-war Japan in the 1950s I came upon it suddenly, up a little lane, giving me a curious feeling of having come full circle!
The house we rented was at the top of a steep flight of steps from the beach. English friends of ours had spent the summer there, and were having a pre-prandial drink on the lawn on that day, 1 September 1923, when the earth began to shake and the seawater suddenly receded, revealing unfamiliar rocks and leaping fish, before coming back in three long heaves, hurling great waves up against the walls of the royal villas. ‘GONE TO THE HILLS’. The message our friends had scratched on the wood of the front door was still there when I came back to Japan in 1949. Fortunately, that particular tsunami reached no higher than the garden, which was about 17 feet above sea level.
As I write this, three years after the magnitude nine Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, I am still overcome with sympathy for the victims of that even worse disaster. Those enormous tsunamis swept away town after town and thousands of people on Japan’s north-eastern coast. Thinking about their ordeal, I have finally understood, after all these years, why my father could not bear to look at a doll I had once made which my mother had forced me to hide away, out of his sight. It hurt my feelings at the time. I had never received an advertised ‘walking doll’ my parents had tried to order for me, a small lonely only-child, and when I was a little bigger I had tried to make a doll my size to keep me company. But it was so badly made, that its ugly face and straggly hair must have reminded my Father of all the gruesome corpses he had seen when searching for my Auntie Dorothy’s remains!
That ‘GONE TO THE HILLS’ house was leased to missionaries, and had a tiny organ, which I tried to play and found great fun. But there were ghosts, too: one night two scary little dogs appeared on my bed. My screaming woke my parents, who assured me there was nothing there at all. But I can still see them clearly in my mind even now. Two little dogs like the ones you see in old Japanese prints. The servants were sure it was because I was born in the Year of the Dog, and they planted tiny red flags all around the house to keep them away.
The missionaries wanted us out by Christmas, which my mother thought rather un-Christian of them, seeing that we were earthquake refugees, but fortunately we managed to find another house to rent. It was next to the park that was right beside the Imperial Villa, and we had it for a couple of years as our beach house.
We enjoyed life in Hayama by the sea, and one day at the local railway station, Mother made friends with a lovely Japanese lady who spoke perfect English. When they discovered they each had a little girl the same age – both not quite two – they determined that we should meet. But to their amazement, they found we were already bosom friends, playing together down on the beach, watched over by our nannies! Wakako Okubo became my oldest and dearest friend. She was the granddaughter of historically famous Toshimichi Okubo who played an important part in the Meiji Restoration and the opening up of Japan.
The island country had been closed to the world for over two hundred years, from 1638 to 1868. There had been an emperor, of continuous direct descent, based in Kyoto since time immemorial. But in 1192, the then Emperor ennobled a clan leader for fighting the aboriginal Ainu, and called him Shogun, meaning Barbarian Subduing Commander-in-Chief. This first Shogun went on to establish a military government which came to be known as the Shogunate.
The Shogunate took over Kamakura as their base, but eventually, the greatest Shogun of them all, Tokugawa Ieyasu, set up his capital in Edo, now known as Tokyo, and established such a tightly-controlled, fool-proof régime that his family held the seat of power for almost 300 years. To minimize the possibility of his vassal feudal lords rising against him, he required them to maintain residences in Edo as well as in their home fiefs, and to live in their Edo residences for several months each year, as well as leaving their wives and families in Edo as hostages at all times. Barriers were set up throughout the country, and all travellers were searched. Guards were always on the lookout for ‘arms coming into Edo and women going out’, and gatherings of more than a few people at any time without a permit were forbidden.
But as time went on another threat emerged. In the sixteenth century many Jesuit missionaries began coming to Japan, and the Japanese people converted to Christianity in droves. Then came Spanish and Portuguese traders, who were at first well received. Ieyasu, however, noted that Spain and Portugal were in the process of building up for themselves a sizeable empire in the Far East, and it occurred to him that the missionaries and the traders might be the thin edge of the wedge for an eventual conquest of Japan.
This threat may well have been first pointed out to the astute Shogun by a unique member of his court, that Englishman named William Adams – the first Briton ever to set foot on Japanese soil. He was a ship’s navigator who was shipwrecked and stranded in Japan in 1600, and became the trusted confidant of the Shogun, who kept him in Japan and made him a Japanese nobleman. From Adams, the Shogun learned much about Elizabethan England including the arts of navigation and shipbuilding, as well as some contemporary world geography and the state of affairs that existed between the European political powers.
As time went on, the Japanese government came to view Christianity as a subversive force within Japan, just as Communism does to certain democratic Western powers today. Unsurprisingly, some years after the death of Adams and Ieyasu, the Shogun’s son decided to take no chances with the foreigners. All Christians were ruthlessly exterminated (1637–1638) and no one was allowed in or out of Japan. All contact with the outside world was stopped, except for a small amount of business with China and a tiny Dutch trading post on a small, closely-guarded man-made island (Deshima) in Nagasaki harbour. This state of affairs went on for over two hundred years, until 1853 when America sent Commodore Matthew Perry with a fleet of naval vessels to force Japan to admit trade, and allow the refuelling of passing American whaling ships.
This proved a golden opportunity for the anti-Shogunate daimyo, the feudal samurai lords in Japan. Then finally, in 1868, ten years after the Shogun signed a commercial treaty with the United States, the Tokugawa military regime was overthrown by a royalist force which brought the Emperor up to Edo, changed the name of the city to Tokyo, and set up an enlightened government modelled on those of Europe.
Samurais of Satsuma (now called Kagoshima) were the prime movers, led by Takamori Saigo and Toshimichi Okubo, grandfather of my best friend Wakako. Okubo and Saigo went on to strongly advise and influence the new boy emperor Mutsuhito, better known by his reign name Meiji, and in 1871 Okubo joined three others in the major Iwakura diplomatic mission to the USA, Britain and Europe in which they spent a year and a half amassing knowledge of the outside world.
While they were away, Japan experienced very troubled times in its endeavour to marry the old with the new; various rebellions took place, including a tragic one within Okubo’s own Satsuma fief, which was being governed by Saigo, who eventually committed suicide, and Okubo, my friend’s grandfather, on his return from abroad was assassinated. He was not the only member of Wakako’s family to come to a tragic end. Her mother was the daughter of Prime Minister, and later Finance Minister Takahashi, who was murdered in the 26 February 1936, attacked by anti- government junior army officers, when three cabinet ministers were killed. The story of this remarkable man is told in Richard J. Smethurst’s From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes (Harvard University Press, 2007). He had learned to speak fluent English, and was very friendly with American financier Jacob Schiff, who invited Takahashi’s daughter to stay with them while she studied at a US college. That was why she spoke English so well when she met my mother at the railway station soon after the earthquake. Takahashi sent his son to Oxford, who returned
