friend Wakako’s young German aunt, became a close friend of ours post-war, when she lived in the house next door to us.
In those early days in Japan, mixed marriages were looked at askance and poor Anita’s marriage was forced apart, and she eventually married a German businessman. But she told me that young Takahashi was the true love of her life, in spite of some interesting love affairs she had later with visitors to Tokyo’s Western community, including a famous violinist. She told me she thought of each as a separate cherished drawer in her heart!
Statesman and diplomat Count Munemitsu Mutsu was so opposed to his son marrying an English girl he met while at Cambridge, that they had to wait seventeen anguished years before managing to tie the knot, after which the Countess wrote that classic book entitled Kamakura, Fact and Legend. Similar cases abound in that era. But since the war I am happy to say mixed marriages in Japan are now so frequent that a club called the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese is a splendid ever-growing organization. As a teenager, watching pale-skinned women on various country’s beaches trying to acquire a healthy tan, I used to wish that inter-marriage would go on apace and produce a café-au-lait world, so that there would be no more racism at all anywhere!
CHAPTER 7
Mother Contacts
Her First Japanese Friend
ONE OF THE first things my mother did after marrying and settling in Yokohama, was to get in touch with Suzu Numano, her very first Japanese friend. Mrs Numano was now back in Japan, a widow, with her son and two school-age daughters Sumié and Chié. After moving to Portland, Oregon, from San Francisco, the handsome young Japanese consul-general had tragically died of pneumonia from a germ caught on a consular trip to China. Mrs Numano visited us several times in Hayama, and when we were back in Yokohama, the day she brought her two daughters to tea remains very clearly etched in my memory. That is probably because I disgraced myself. The four of them had tea on a bridge table set up in my nursery, covered with a beautifully embroidered Chinese tablecloth which my mother had bought in China. I was very small, and was underneath the table playing on the floor with a set of wooden letters of the alphabet. All I could see of our guests was the lower part of Mrs Numano’s elegant silk kimono, and the legs of her two girls in their school uniform black stockings. In the midst of their nostalgic conversation about San Francisco days, Mother suddenly discovered that I had cut out an ‘A’ from her precious table-cloth, using scissors and the alphabet letter. All hell broke loose. I even made it worse by blaming the nefarious act on Isabella, my doll.
But in spite of my naughtiness, dear Mrs Numano, bless her, was very taken with me as a child, and was particularly fascinated with my bilinguality, and used to tell people I was really Japanese, and just had a Western skin! Suzu and her family have remained very dear friends. One day in the 1960s she rang my mother to say that her grandson had married a Welsh girl, in Greece, and that the young newly-weds would be living in her Nagashima son-in-law’s handsome beach villa in nearby Zushi, and she hoped we would become friends.
We liked Hayama so much in those post-earthquake years, that in 1925 my father leased a small piece of land – a rock with a fisherman’s shack on it. In place of the shack he had a house built, which he designed combining both Western and Japanese features, a mere biscuit toss, as he used to say, from the sea. Isshiki beach was not crowded like those in Kamakura, Zushi and Morito, for it was too far to walk from Zushi station, and the only transport was a small horse-drawn carriage holding eight passengers, so only people with cars had villas there in those days, and were mostly aristocrats and royalty.
In 1926, when we moved into our new beach house, the Taisho Emperor died, and was succeeded by the Showa Emperor, Hirohito. The ceremony of succession took place in the Imperial Villa Annex, which was just along the road from us, and I remember watching a ceremonial procession go by, past our house, and how impressed I was by the quartet of handsome black oxen drawing a beautiful ancient carriage belonging to the local Shinto shrine.
From our house it was a short walk up a lane to the Oku-bo’s house on the hillside, and I’ll never forget the day I was old enough to walk there to play without my nanny. When I left to walk home, Mrs Okubo said in English, ‘Please give your mother my love’. I worried and worried all the way back, trying to figure out how one gave a person somebody’s love. I still recall the agony whenever I walk on that hillside lane.
Another memory that still recurs without fail on that lane is the walking doll I wanted so badly. One November evening, after I had been put to bed, I could not sleep and crept downstairs, where I found my parents busy poring over an enormous Sears, Roebuck mail order catalogue. Obviously, they had wanted to keep it a surprise, but I could not help seeing the fascinating illustration, and I discovered that they were planning to order for me for Christmas a large ‘walking doll’. I was absolutely thrilled, and could hardly wait for it to arrive. But alas, it never did. I never learned the reason, but being a lonely only child, I went on for years picturing that companion as I walked to the Okubo’s and back. Little did I know that years later it would eventually materialize!
CHAPTER 8
Royal Friends
ONE DAY ON the beach, some young princesses asked me to join them in an intriguing game called jindori (land grabbing). First you draw a largish area on the sand, where the winner of the traditional janken ( scissors-paper-stone) choice-deciding fist-toss, semicircles a portion – with stationary thumb and moving forefinger – to start a ‘battle encampment’. When the whole area is filled, the player with the largest campsite wins. It was a popular game with Japanese children in those days. On arriving home I was surprised to find my mother furious. She had been watching us from a distance. ‘How dare you teach that disgusting game to princesses,’ she said. It was the ‘scissors-paper-stone’ part she objected to. She thought that it was only used at geisha parties my father had told her about, where the loser has to take off an item of clothing!
The Dowager Princess Kitashirakawa and her daughters lived in a large, beautiful estate – complete with a handsome thatched-roof gate – next door to Wakako’s maternal grandfather Takahashi’s villa, both located just along the road from us. The Kitashirakawas became lifelong friends too. Before the war our friendship only took place on the beach, but after the war, we saw them often, because royals who were not immediate members of the Imperial Family had to become more or less the same as commoners. The older sister, Princess Sawa, who was married to a high-ranking chamberlain, regularly came to my house for the rest of her life as a member of my bridge foursome, which included Wakako Okubo too.
Not long ago, I asked Princess Sawa if her younger sister had spoken to me that day years ago when we were children, because they had perhaps heard about me from Wakako’s unmarried aunt, Miss Okubo, who happened to be their lady-in-waiting. But she said ‘Oh no! She just liked your looks and wanted to be friends with you!’ I had been playing alone on the sand in front of our house that day when the Kitashirakawas came by. They stopped, and the younger Princess Taé asked me what my name was. I told her, and then asked her name. ‘Taé’ she said. To me it sounded like tai (bream) so I asked her why she was called ‘bream’, and she replied that it was because she looked like one! She had a great sense of humour. Taé-sama very sadly died of a heart attack not long after we met again. She had married a Tokugawa of the former shogun’s family. Their father, Prince Kitashirakawa had lived in Paris with his bride as a young man. He had an honorary position at the Japanese Embassy. Later, very sadly, he lost his life in Paris in a motor car accident, while driving. There is a monument marking the place, and the surviving widowed dowager princess walked with a bad
