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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!