A Brother Is A Stranger

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Text originally published in 1946 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A BROTHER IS A STRANGER

BY

TORU MATSUMOTO

AND

MARION OLIVE LERRIGO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR 5

DEDICATION 6

INTRODUCTION 7

PREFACE 9

PREFACE 10

1 12

2 17

3 22

4 27

5 32

6 36

7 40

8 43

9 48

10 53

11 60

12 64

13 70

14 75

15 80

16 83

17 89

18 95

19 101

20 107

21 112

22 117

23 122

24 128

25 135

26 140

27 146

28 155

29 159

30 168

31 172

32 178

33 183

34 192

35 198

36 207

37 212

38 220

39 229

40 239

41 247

42 253

43 264

44 275

45 285

46 291

47 296

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 303

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

We in Japan have a saying, A brother is the beginning of a stranger, because on the father’s death the oldest brother acquires such absolute authority as the head of the family that the younger ones and he cannot easily be friends. After our father died, my eldest brother assumed the dictatorial authority of father, as sanctioned by Japanese law and custom. I wanted to live my own life, and I did; but I had to fight for it against the old Japanese tradition that superiors must benevolently govern their inferiors, and inferiors gratefully obey. I have experienced both bitter sorrows and bursting joys, May the young people of a new Japan obtain the happiness of my wife and myself without the struggle we have been through.

T. M.

DEDICATION

To

EMMA

Enough cannot be said. . .

T.M.

INTRODUCTION

by Pearl S. Buck

THE SOONER we of the earth can stop thinking of peoples as wholes and think of them as human beings, each person individual and different from any other and yet all alike in their right to a good life, the sooner we shall have peace. The international police force about which so much has been thought and said in the last quarter of a century should be a police force for individuals, never for nations and peoples as wholes. Evil, like good, begins in the individual, and wars begin with individuals, making the most of mass misery. If misery could be mended in time enough to prevent the evil individual from using it for his own ends, there would be no more wars....

This book is the proof of what I have written above. Here in the midst of a people whom we have been trained and induced to think of as wholly evil, or at best wholly subject and weak, is this man, neither subject nor weak, and certainly good. He is a real Japanese, born and educated in Japan. The only early Western influence on him was a Christian mother.

He understood his non-Christian father but he loved his mother, and her sincerity and indomitable will went into the making of his own character, and prove beyond doubt that there is nothing inherently subject or spineless in the people of Japan. Their yielding to their militarists was not without a struggle, a struggle they might have won, had the democratic peoples aided them while there was still time.

Toru Matsumoto is an unusual man, and yet I am sure there are many like him in Japan, and many more who could be like him. There is no general trait of character which can be applied to the people of Japan as a whole. They are exactly like all other peoples in their variety, including ourselves. Any other conclusion is nonsense.

In reading this book written by one Japanese man, I should like to draw attention to the natural gentleness of his character. Knowing him as I do, I am sure he would always prefer the ways of peace. This is not only because he is a stubborn Christian who is unusual enough to try to practice his religion. He is actually a gentle person. When he is goaded to violence it is only because his back is against the wall. I doubt even then he would fight for himself. He did fight for someone he loved, when he felt the wall at his back. The people of Japan have long been made to feel that there was a wall at their backs. But they do not enjoy violence.

This book is the truest and most complete book of life in Japan, with all its good and evil, that I have ever read. It also contains something of life in the United States, as seen through generous Japanese eyes. I commend to you particularly Emma, the heroine of the book. It is easy to see that Toru fell in love with her partly because his mother had prepared him for such a woman. Mothers perhaps do not realize clearly enough that they have this function, and that they help in the choice of their sons’ wives merely by being the sort of persons they are; if admirable, then training their sons to admire fine women, and if otherwise, then driving their sons, perhaps by opposites, to unfortunate choices. At any rate, Toru ought to be grateful to his mother for leading him straight to Emma, who provides a sound foundation upon which he can trustfully build.

I like this book, and I like the family whose story it is. I am glad they are a Japanese family, for this makes them important at this moment in the world’s history. Yet they are only one of many such families. What cause for encouragement!

Pearl S. Buck

PREFACE

THE WRITING of this book has taken four years. I started it while at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, in 1942. What I have written is all true except where my memories failed me. I kept no notes, and had no access to my diaries or manuscripts left in Japan. I doubt that I can ever recover them. The names of certain individuals have been shortened; in other cases, fictitious names have been used for their protection.

The manner in which the actual writing of the book has been accomplished is unusual. My co-author explains that part. Let me here record my respect for her for having kept my story as fully and essentially my own as it is. In fact, she has brought out more of my Japanese background than I had in my first manuscript when I showed it to her. I assume, however, full responsibility for any information or opinions expressed. She has excellent opinions, but she modestly declined to inject them into the book.

I should write an adequate acknowledgment of my many debts to a large number of my personal friends who have played important parts in my life so far. But that is obviously impossible. For the writing of this particular book, however, I must thank my wife for her patience, and ray co-author’s husband, William J. McWilliams, for his co-operation. And to Pearl S. Buck and Richard J, Walsh for their encouragement and for the piloting of this book to its publication, my co-author and I join in acknowledging a special debt of appreciation.

T.M.

PREFACE

AMONG THE cherished friends whom my husband and I met at International House in New York were Emma and Toru Matsumoto. With their young son, Teddy, they visited in our home, we went on picnics together, and always we had long discussions on the relations of Japan and the United States, and the psychological characteristics and difficulties of the Japanese people. Toru was the one person we knew who understood both America and Japan and Oriental and Occidental philosophies of life so well that he could help us to understand the Japanese mind.

Then the war came, and Toru was interned. During the latter months of his absence at Fort George G. Meade, Emma and Teddy came to live with us. On Toru’s return, he joined them until they found their own place to live. Because of our old friendship, Toru let us read a story of his life which he had written while in camp. It was well written and extraordinarily revealing. I thought that I might not come out of the camp alive because some of my countrymen so fiercely resented my refusal to be repatriated, Toru told us, and so I wrote down everything, not holding back any of my thoughts, so that Teddy could read it in later years and know the truth about his father. Then too, I wanted to think through my decision. His comments on the behavior of Japanese explained so much that had been inexplicable that we said to him, Toru, you ought to make this manuscript into a book. When this war is over, Westerners must be able to understand the Japanese people if there is to be a lasting peace in the Far East.

Toru protested. In 1942 it seemed very unlikely that a book written by a Japanese would be published and read in the United States. Furthermore, he modestly insisted that he was too young and of too little importance to write a book that must be essentially his own life story. It isn’t because it’s the story of your life that we want you to write a book, but because your story makes the Japanese mind comprehensible; it bridges a gap between East and West, we told him.

Will you write it with me? Toru then asked, and I gladly agreed. Soon after the Matsumotos were settled in their own new home, Toru and I began to work on the book. Toru would come to our house, usually on a Saturday morning, bringing Teddy to play with his young friends in our block. When Emma had finished her housework, she too would join us, and the Matsumotos, my husband, and I would have luncheon together, and often dinner, if the day’s work stretched through the afternoon. Sometimes Toru cooked a Japanese meal for us, but no matter what the menu, we were sure to have long discussions, and our conclusions often determined what went into the book. Both my husband and I greatly enjoyed these pleasant circumstances and the friendly companionship which so lightened the really heavy task of writing the book.

Many of the dramatic incidents which were told in the original manuscript now appear in the same words in which Toru first related them. But he had written very little about his childhood and his school days, and both of us thought that should be remedied. Since my profession is in one field of education and Toru’s in another, both of us were interested in what had happened to the youth of Japan in the years before the war. So in the beginning of our work together Toru would relate several incidents of his childhood and school days while I wrote them down on the typewriter, interrupting to ask questions and draw out the parts of the story about which Americans would be curious. Sometimes my questions led to nothing; sometimes I stuck in my thumb and drew out a plum in the shape of surprising and interesting information.

After we had written the early part of the book in this way, several friends read it, and we were guided by their questions and comments in rewriting it. Our thanks are due to Dr. Luman J. Shafer, Mr. Bernard M. Luben, Mrs. Michael A. Cassidy, Mrs. Wilson Payne, and my father, Dr. Charles H. Lerrigo, for this service. Toru then gave me the answers to innumerable questions, either my husband’s or mine, or those of the friends who had read the manuscript, and in between our sessions together, I rewrote the chapters to include new information he had given me, and we both corrected them.

It would have been presumptuous for me to assist in writing a book about Japan under any other circumstances, since I have never been there and have no claim to expert knowledge of the country. My reasons for daring to help to write this book are two. It is the story of a family whom my husband and I count among our closest friends, and as an old friend I could poke and pry and stir around in Toru’s memory, helping him to recall through my curiosity things which he had forgotten. And since I am an average American, I think that the answers to the questions which stirred my curiosity will be interesting to many other Americans.

I am grateful to Toru for answering these questions, and to Emma for her patience during the many months when the book had to take precedence over the things which she and Toru would have liked to do together. Thanks are due to Teddy, too, whose plea, Daddy, come play with me! so often had to be answered in the words, I have to work on the book, now, Teddy. Wait a little while.

Most of all, my thanks go to my husband, William J. McWilliams, whose good judgment in criticizing what Toru and I had written was excelled only by his good humor in every crisis while we were writing it.

M.O.L.

1

THE SNOW was already high against the window when I woke. I went into our Western-style room, which was Father’s office, dragged a chair to the window, and stood on it in an effort to see out, but the snow was still above my four-year-old head. Every morning more of the window was covered. Finally the snow reached the roof of the house.

Now the trains would not run in our part of Hokkaido for the remaining winter months. Only the horse-drawn wagons on skis went back and forth.

Won’t the horses run over our house? I asked big brother Yuji anxiously. What if a horse stopped and dropped water on our roof?

Oh, I took care of that. I put a sign on the snow. It says, ‘Do not walk here. The Matsumoto family lives below.’ Yuji smiled at me. I stopped worrying.

Many of Father’s patients came from long distances away from the village of Nokkeushi where we lived. They came on foot or in wagons, and in the winter the only way they could get into Father’s office was through a tunnel in the snow.

I remember his office. It had a strange smell, as a hospital should. There were all kinds of bottles on the shelves, and instruments too. A high bed for the patients stood in the middle of the room. There were a stove, Father’s desk, and some chairs. There were always men in those chairs, and they were usually laughing with Father, who roared with his stomach.

Father was a very good doctor. Everybody said so. He was fat with a big belly. In Japan, it was quite becoming for a doctor to be fat like that. It meant that he had generosity in his person. Medicine is mercy, he used to say. That was a Chinese saying, and he believed it.

I don’t know what people come here for, he often said. They come and talk and laugh and go away, and he laughed and looked satisfied. After he treated a patient, they had tea, and smoked together before Father let him go. The patients often forgot to leave money. Oh, they will come back, was Father’s philosophy.

My father’s name was Goro Matsumoto, but no one called him by his name. He was Sen-sei to all. It meant Teacher, with respect. But he was more than respected. He loved people and they loved him.

Father’s mother, my grandmother Kiyo, lived with us. She and I became fast friends. Her hair was gray, and her face full of wrinkles like a dried plum. She called me Toru, Toru, and she loved me.

She was small, and her back was slightly bent. But that back was my main means of transportation, for she carried me everywhere on it, except in winter, when she stayed indoors. As soon as the sun had melted the winter’s snow, she would carry me to the corner candy store where she bought me drops. They were black drops, the size of a large marble, made of brown sugar. Five of them cost one sen. I put one in one cheek, another one in the other. I kept them in my mouth a long time while carrying the other three in a bag.

Mother did not approve. It was not good for my health to eat between meals, and besides, the candy drops might make my teeth decay.

When Grandmother was not walking with me, she would sit in front of the family Buddhist sanctuary and recite the liturgy for hours. She would light the candles, open the two small doors to reveal the golden image of Buddha, and clap her hands several times as she bowed piously. Every morning, as soon as breakfast was cooked, she would put the newly cooked rice and soybean soup in front of the sanctuary before she herself would sit down at the breakfast table. This was done in the belief that the spirits of her ancestors needed food on their long journey to Paradise. When she was not busy with her acts of piety toward her Buddha, she was either scolding her daughter-in-law or denouncing the pagan religion which this daughter-in-law brought with her.

Grandmother was interesting even to a young child like me because her teeth were dyed completely black. I learned when I grew older that a faithful widow followed this custom in Japan to make herself unattractive to other men in order to show her fidelity to her dead husband.

Grandmother’s late husband had been a warrior. In the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, he fell in love with Kiyo, who was the daughter of a local war lord. At that time, the right of choosing to marry for love was confined to a privileged few among the Japanese aristocracy. Ordinarily, my grandfather would have had no hope for the realization of his desire. But just then the shogun government was on the point of crumbling, following the surprise visit of Commander Perry. How amazed Perry would have been to know that his visit played a part in the romance of a Japanese warrior and his bride!

Perry came in 1853, with four black warships, demanding the opening of the country for trade. The shogun government tottered. Four battleships with guns! Japan possessed only small fishing boats and freight boats. Perry told the shogun to think it over until his return the next year. The shogun thought hard. Four big ships! On Perry’s return in 1854 the treaties were signed.

The whole country was thrown into chaos which lasted fourteen years, until in 1867 the last shogun surrendered his authority to the royal family.

My grandfather saw the signs of the times. He deserted the war lord, who was a subject of the shogun, and eloped with my grandmother. In normal times the young couple would have been searched out and punished for their elopement, but now they were forgotten. They emerged from the revolution to live an inconspicuous but happy life.

My father, Goro, was only a small boy when Grandfather died. When Goro was about ten years old he was sent to a doctor’s office in Honjo as an apprentice. He was too young to learn anything professional, but he would thus be looked after by a family of some means, with a promise that he would be trained as a doctor when the time came.

My father did not go to a medical school but learned the profession by helping the doctor to whom he was apprenticed. At nineteen he passed a government examination and was licensed to practice. He was one of the youngest doctors to be given such a license in Japan.

He opened his office in the same town, but at some distance from his benefactor. It was thought to be a courtesy for a disciple not to compete by practicing too close to his tutor. My father’s practice was an immediate success.

By the time Father was twenty-three he had married twice. Neither marriage was legally formalized, but I have heard that both young women were beautiful. But Father did not get on well with his stepbrother, Gen taro, who ran a pawnshop in Honjo, and he was getting restless. He moved to Takasaki, where he met a well-known physician, Doctor Hoshino.

Doctor Hoshino was a medical officer attached to the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment in Takasaki; but he also had his own clinic, and was famed as the best surgeon in the whole area. He was a converted Christian, and a Salvationist, that is to say, a member of the Salvation Army.

He was married and had three sisters-in-law younger than his wife, of whom my mother, Tama, the youngest, was still unmarried. Tama was now more than of age to marry, for she was twenty-four. The doctor and his wife were much concerned.

Why doesn’t Tama want to marry? they asked each other. There had been many offers, but Tama had turned them down, and the understanding captain and his wife did not press her when she said she was not ready to marry.

Tama was beautiful. She was slender, and her skin was very fair. Her hair was black, with a slight brownish tinge, what the Japanese call red hair, although a Westerner would call it black. Because red hair was not admired, she dyed her hair every three months, and then it would be beautifully shining and black. She washed, dried, and combed it carefully until it was smooth, putting olive oil on it. Then she bundled it into a ball at the back of her head in the modern fashion. After she had dyed her hair, she always used the brush on her eyebrows, but not on the eyelashes. Her forehead was squarish, and in order to make it look round she pulled her hair down a bit at the corners.

Both of my mother’s parents had died when she was young. I do not know much about her family, except that they possessed a family name even under the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns before Perry came, when one had to be somebody to be permitted that privilege. When the country was freed from the shogunate, and everyone was allowed to assume a family name, it was a great liberating experience for the masses. However, during the changes in government, my mother’s family lost their property and became poor. Then they earned a livelihood by making lanterns, which was not a thriving trade.

It was when Tama’s parents died that she went to live with her oldest sister, the wife of the doctor, Captain Hoshino. They lived for a time in Hiroshima, and Tama attended the Hiroshima Girls’ School, which was run by American missionaries. She lived in the home of an American family on the campus for a time, and there she became a Christian.

From Hiroshima the Captain was transferred to Takasaki, and there he and my father became acquainted. The young doctor looked promising to the Captain and his wife, and they asked go-betweens to propose marriage to him for Tama.

No one in the family but Tama knew then that she had wanted to marry a certain Christian minister. He apparently did not know it either, and while she waited, he had married someone else.

So one day in 1904, the year that Japan fought czarist Russia, there was a party at the home of Captain Hoshino. He wanted to marry off his sister-in-law before he had to go to the front. The party gathered in the guest room. Mother’s sister, who later became famous in Takasaki for her flower arrangements, prepared an especially beautiful bouquet for the occasion and hung the best picture scroll on the wall in back of the flowers, in the tokonoma or alcove which in Japanese homes is the place for flower arrangements and scrolls.

The go-betweens and Captain Hoshino and his wife sat with the bridegroom-to-be on cushions on the floor and waited for the appearance of the bride-to-be. Dressed in her best kimono, her hair done in the modern style, Tama opened the sliding door and brought in teacups on a tray. She approached the party without looking at them and served tea in front of each one, the young doctor last. Custom demanded that she remain silent, but she could not control the trembling of her hands or the blushing of her cheeks. Then she withdrew, and as she closed the door she lifted her eyes and looked at the man she was to marry.

He was a very distinguished-looking gentleman, Mother told me when I once asked her impression of Father on that day.

My father was a Buddhist, but he was a practical individual, and though Mother was a Christian, he ignored what seemed to him a little thing like religious difference. He accepted my mother on the recommendation of Captain Hoshino, who was prominent and well esteemed in the community. Mother was an obedient younger sister, and she simply followed the directions given her. Doctor Matsumoto and Tama were married that year in a Christian ceremony. They did not marry for love, but almost no one did in Japan in those days, and even today there are not many who do.

The next year, on Christmas Eve, the first son was born, and he was called Yuji. By this time Father was restless again. He had heard stories of new land to the north, on the island of Hokkaido. Youths seeking adventure, merchants who had failed on the mainland and wanted to make a fresh start, ex-convicts who were ashamed to live among friends and relatives back home—all were going north to this new land.

I will bring modern medicine to these people! declared my father. So he and his wife with their baby son moved to the town of Abashiri, on the island of Hokkaido, so that my father might open a hospital in an area where there was almost no medical care and doctors were badly needed. They stayed long enough to build a clinic and to train some nurses. A second son, whom they named Tomi, was born while they lived in Abashiri.

Soon afterward they moved again, to the village of Bihoro, where the work of building another clinic and training more nurses and medical aides was undertaken. The first daughter, Taki, was born in Bihoro, and two years later I arrived.

Bihoro was a place of about three hundred people whose only industry was lumbering. In that forested country living conditions were severe and called for pioneering courage. In fact, Hokkaido was often called the Siberia of Japan, The life there appealed to my father’s sense of adventure, as well as to his humanitarian ideas, and it made no difference to him that some of his patients were beggars, others ex-convicts, outcasts, or failures.

To these people my father and his medicine were the only links with the world they had left behind. He was the only educated and respected person to come among them for years, as well as the only doctor for miles around.

But while going to Hokkaido was a satisfying adventure for my father, it meant loneliness for Mother, There were no other Christians and no other educated women in the villages where we lived, and the nearest missionary was a great many miles away.

2

MY MOTHER has told me that I was born on a beautiful summery day which followed the autumn typhoons. According to the old calendar, the two hundred and tenth day was approaching, when the people might expect the biggest and fiercest typhoon of the year. A second but less violent typhoon might be expected ten days later on the two hundred and twentieth day, or about September tenth.

Neither of the typhoons did much damage in Bihoro that year, and perfect weather followed them. The bright sun was just rising on a glorious Sunday when I announced my arrival with a yell. It was September 14, 1913, the Year of the Cow.

I was named Toru, for Toru Hoshi, a statesman who had been shot while pleading in the Diet for some social reform. He was a hero to our family, perhaps because of his liberalism, perhaps because he was prominent enough to be assassinated I When I grew older, Father told me that I had to follow in the footsteps of this great reformer, but I did not like the idea of being shot, however noble the cause.

I do not remember Bihoro because we left there when I was three years old and moved to the next village, called Nokkeushi. It was a lumbering village of about five hundred people living in thinly scattered houses along one main road, with the sawmill at the end. Wooded hills surrounded the place.

Father established a small hospital there. It was in the front part of our house, facing the road, and had glass windows. Smoke drifted out of the chimneys even in summer, because Father needed hot water all the time. Mother was often busy seeing that food was prepared for the patients, many of whom came long distances.

Across the road from us was the fishmonger’s store, and a little beyond it was the candy store where Grandmother carried me to buy black drops. I wondered where all the kinds of fish came from in the fishmonger’s store. The only big ponds in the village were back of my house, and there was nothing but carp in them. I did not know that the ocean was only thirty miles away.

I liked the fishmonger’s store because my only friend lived there. She was merely called the fishmonger’s girl. Small children were not called by their names until they grew big enough, and so we were just the horse-drawer’s son, or the woodcutter’s girl, or the doctor’s son. I remember the fishmonger’s girl in heavy kimonos, her dark, round face always shining spick and span, her black hair cut neatly just above her black eyes. She could run faster than I could, because I was fat.

Just after we moved to Nokkeushi my baby sister, Masa, was born. I do not remember ever seeing Mother carry her on her back, and I do not remember that she ever carried me on her back either. As a girl at the mission school, Mother had learned American ways, and had become a modern woman. She believed so strongly in the rightness of Christianity and Western ways that she clung to them courageously even in the remote forest villages where such customs had scarcely been heard of, and where there were no other Christians.

Consequently, Mother did not approve either when Grandmother carried me on her back. When you carry a child on the back, you tie him to your breast, which is bad for both of you, Mother protested. And the boy’s legs will not grow, and will be bowlegged. But I would not get down to the ground unless I had to. Often the road was muddy, and then Grandma walked on wooden geta with tall teeth. I rode high and dry on her back.

Grandmother considered Mother’s refusal to carry her babies on her back an affront to herself personally as well as to the Japanese tradition. Grandmother had never met Mother before she came to live with us, and as Christianity was still new in Japan, she was not prepared for what seemed to her the outlandish practices which Mother followed in this new and strange religion. She thought it her duty to oppose Mother vigorously in whatever was contrary to the Japanese way.

No other mother in the village had such ideas about carrying her babies on her back, although some of them may have envied my mother the freedom she gained by Letting her children walk. Since many of the crowded one-room homes had no safe place to leave the baby lying down, the custom of carrying the baby on the back had grown out of necessity.

Grandmother also opposed Mother in her method of doing the laundry. Women were supposed to kneel on the wooden floor of the kitchen to do the laundry in a low tub. Mother thought that kneeling on the cold floor was bad for her health, especially when she was pregnant, and she insisted on using a soft, thick cushion for warmth. Grandmother considered this a radical and shocking departure from the custom of old Japan. These soft foreign ways will keep you from bearing strong sons, she protested.

Father was inclined to the modern point of view, perhaps because he was a medical man. In other respects also he upheld Mother’s innovations. The family dinner table was a very happy example of how the old ways gave in to the new. Grandmother’s sacred tradition would have required the menfolk to eat first, even the small boys. Women and little girls would have been allowed to eat only when the men were through. Food grew cold and had to be reheated by then.

Mother said this was a ridiculous waste of time, and she insisted on one sitting for the whole family. Father liked this new idea, because he was able to be with all his children at meals. Even Grandmother sat with us, though she grumbled about such impropriety. Behind Mother’s expressed reason of wanting to save time there was her new philosophy. She believed that men and women were equals, and that young children should begin to learn that fact at home. No one else in the village ever thought of such a thing.

Even more radical was Mother’s belief that there should be no class distinction in the household. Father had an assistant In the hospital, and one or two women nurses, and we usually had a maid. In other households they would have eaten after the family was served. Not so in our home.

We must not think that they are lower than we because they work for us, Mother said. And so we had all these people with us at meals.

According to the old custom, a separate tray was placed on the floor before each person and a ceremonial silence was observed during the meal, but we followed the new fashion of using tables with legs about a foot high, and large enough for several people to sit around one table. This made it easy to be sociable, and Mother encouraged us to enjoy ourselves, talking and laughing with each other. Father liked the sociability, but Grandmother kept grumbling. All this was very revolutionary.

Except on state occasions we ate in the kitchen, and it was very cozy with the iron stove nearby and the clay brick ovens in the far corner. Two tables were needed for our large household, and the large bowls of food from which our individual bowls were filled were placed on the floor between the two tables.

All of us children were delighted with another of Mother’s new ideas: each of us had an individual birthday celebration. In Japan, birthday celebrations are observed en masse. March 3 is Girls’ Day, and May 5 is Boys’ Day. The girls dress in their best, display their dolls, and eat cakes. The boys dress in their best, fly big fish made of sailcloth from tall poles on the roof, and eat cakes. No one celebrates his individual birthday, but everyone becomes a year older on New Year’s Day.

Our family was different. Mother insisted on the new way of recognizing each individual’s own personal birthday. As I look back, I think that this practice gave us an idea of the individual’s worth that was different from the ideas of other children, and I believe that one of the reasons why all the children in our family became strongly individual was to be found in our personal birthday celebrations.

My younger sister Masa’s birthday, on January 7, did not seem very important to me, because it came when people were concluding the New Year’s holidays by eating all the bits of leftovers.

September 14 was my day, and on that day no other child in the house was given such recognition. I was the hero of the day and the law in the household. I did not have to get up early; I ordered what I wanted to eat, and I was entitled to ask my best friend to visit me.

Taki, my next older sister, complained that her birthday on October 19 was hard to remember, and so she always reminded us well in advance. She preferred receiving gifts to having her favorite dishes to eat.

Tomi, the brother next older than Taki, was born on December 2, the birthday of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Tomi was the gentlest of boys.

Yuji, the oldest, boasted that his birthday fell on Christmas Eve, but he complained that his importance was overshadowed by Christmas. He asked us whether we were celebrating his birthday or the birthday of Jesus, and he never seemed satisfied with the answer. As a schoolboy, I thought that his later hostility to Christianity began with resentment on this account.

I remember too the special breakfast we had on New Year’s Day, like everybody else in Japan. This meal consisted of sticky rice cakes called mochi, cooked with vegetables and chicken or salmon, to make a sort of soup. The whole thing was called ozoni.

It seems to me that there was really no spring in Hokkaido, for summer came right along. Our gardens were full of good vegetables. I thought the best crop was sweet corn. We scratched ourselves on thorny bushes picking the sour green berries that snapped open in our mouths. We thought they were fun. Strawberries were a special treat. I wanted to eat them as soon as I picked them, but Mother insisted that we bring them all to her, to be served in the Western way. She washed and crushed them, until you could not see any strawberries. Then she served them in cups, with milk and sugar, on a declining scale according to our ages. I resented this more than I enjoyed the strawberries.

The fall meant pumpkins. Our pumpkins were as large as Father’s stomach, and they had such thick skins that Yuji had to cut them in pieces with his ax. When Mother cooked them, they were so sweet that no sugar was needed. I was called a pumpkin boy, because when I could eat pumpkin I would eat nothing else.

I liked to watch Yuji open the pumpkins with his ax. He was my idea of an athlete, and was a hero in my eyes. He was so tall that he could wind the clock that hung on the pillar in our house. The clock was made in America, and it was one of the most marvelous things in the village. It kept time correctly. No, it told time in a place where there were not many clocks. For the most part, people depended on the two daily trains and the whistles of the sawmill to tell the time, but they often came to our house to see what time it was by-our clock.

Yuji was strong, too. When we went to the sawmill to pick up chips for fuel, he could carry more than any other boy in the village. In summer he swam in the river, and I watched him admiringly as he dived and swam underwater and came up again a long way off. There were many logs and rafts in the river, and one day when I stepped on one of the logs, to show off to the fishmonger’s girl, I fell in the water. It was Yuji who pulled me out and carried me home in his arms, like a dead fish, as Taki said.

Yuji was a hero in winter also, because he could ski and skate better than anyone else. All the children went to school on sleds or skis, and all the boys made a long line to ski down to the school-house. Yuji was first in the line, and Tomi right behind. How I envied them!

I watched Yuji teach other children to skate on the big ponds back of our house. To make skates, they nailed a piece of split bamboo to each wooden shoe, or geta. The split edge of the bamboo was hard and sharp. I thought Yuji was the best skater. Other children sometimes fell, but he never did.

Sometimes Father and Yuji took out the ax and the saw and cut out a big chunk of ice around a fish. Since the ponds were not very deep, and were frozen to the bottom, the fish were frozen too in winter. Father and Yuji would saw the block of ice, fish and all, into small pieces. Mother would put the chunks into a big pan on the stove to make a delicious soup.

One of the things which I feared most in my childhood was the forest fire. "May the fall pass without yama-kaji" (mountain fire), the villagers would say. But it seemed that no autumn could pass without one. I admired Yuji because he was not afraid.

One October morning the mill whistle shrieked. Because it was not