Japan (The beginning of Chapter 1)

by Alison Hammer Winans

When I was four and we lived in Tokyo, I was always happy to be outside, never lonely while surrounded with life unfolding and changing, the incessant whirring of cicadas, white butterflies dancing around the roses and camellias, brown furry caterpillars dropping off the Japanese pear tree, the constant movements of an ant column. I stared cross-eyed at the busy mass of ants, seeing it as a heaving, swirling reddish-brown carpet, then refocusing my eyes, I singled out one or two individuals, following their journeys as they touched feelers with ants coming the other way. Or maybe I was lonely, but was too young then to know it, as I said to one of the ants, “Will you be my pet?”

Sometimes I squatted for what seemed like hours on the shaded soil beside the chapel next to our house, playing with woodlice. With careful fingers I poked the many-legged creatures, heading off their escape and tapping on their bony armoring with twigs, testing how long it would be before they rolled up into a grey ball. And I would pick up the hard little balls, marveling at the tightness of their protection, rolling the crisp dryness around on my palms, not understanding that they curled up in fear. Then I put them down and waited, seeing how long it was before the ball unfolded, and quick legs tried to scurry away, until again my hand corralled the poor creature. It sounds cruel, but at the time I was aware only of curiosity.

From our partially westernized one-story house, my mother called. I passed the bamboo fence, jumping from stone to stone along the path, stopping briefly on the front step to sit on one of the grey stone lions, as I looked up at her. Her dark brown, naturally curly hair and soft blue homemade dress gave her a wholesome look, while the 50s style accentuated her motherly figure and well-defined ankles. “Come on, Alison, stop dithering. I can’t wait all day for you.” My parents were given a wardrobe of hand-me-down baby clothes embroidered with the initial “A” prior to my birth in 1954, which eliminated their plans to call me Rosemary. Hence I became Alison Mary. They were hard-up Anglican missionaries without the money to buy everything for their first baby. Even if they’d had more money, Japan, a war-torn country, was busy constructing its infrastructure, and the growth of the consumer economy was a few years away.

I patted my steed, whispering in the stone lion’s ear, “You’ll always be here, won’t you?”

My mother sat me down in the genkan, the shoe area, to remove my shoes before washing my dirty hands. Although there were wooden floors instead of tatami, traditional woven straw mats, we nevertheless followed the Japanese custom of wearing slippers inside. “I don’t want everyone tracking in dirt,” my mother said.

It was time for my lesson—she was teaching me, a fast learner, to read and write, because no English was spoken at my Japanese kindergarten. Both my parents took their responsibilities seriously to raise well-disciplined offspring with an academic education, good food and sensible clothes. A physics graduate, my mother put a scientific career on hold to support my father in his endeavors, instead getting a part-time job teaching English at a girls’ high school. I relished my lessons, making rows and rows of loops, patterns and letters, although I wasn’t always well-behaved enough for my mother, and in the solipsistic way of children, always thought I’d committed some transgression when the day came that my lessons ended. Looking back, it was likely due to the slow disintegration of her health.

After my lesson it was suppertime, eaten around the white triangular table in the corner of our roomy kitchen. From my place on the window seat, I waited for my father to come home. Although he had really wanted to be a missionary in China, a plan thwarted by the Cultural Revolution, he learned to speak Japanese fluently, throwing himself into teaching at the seminary on the outskirts of Tokyo, where we lived surrounded by small farms. Between the trees outside the window I saw him wearing a black shirt with his white “dog collar” and baggy grey trousers, racing home in a hurry. Such a busy man he was with all his extra jobs, being chaplain to the embassy, lecturing at the university and preaching in Japanese and American churches. But there was always time to greet his two little girls in a warm hug, “I hope you’ve been good girls today,” and later there would be a bedtime story.

The fifth member of our household was Granny, my maternal grandmother, who lived with us ever since my sister, Liz, was born. Widowed early in life, she was as much at home with a paintbrush and hammer as she was with a kitchen knife, a garden trowel or a baby. Capping all that, she was a retired seamstress whose hands flew making our dresses. Unlike my mother, she was earthy, gregarious and energetic saying, “No peace for the wicked,” as her thin lips turned up in a smile.

“Don’t ever leave,” I said to her.

“I have to go home when you are five, but you’ll come to visit next time you come to England.” There was the vain hope that my fifth birthday would never come. I always wanted to make time stop moving, but I turned five anyway and that was when things started to fall apart. I continued trying to make pets out of wild creatures. Twice I caught a butterfly and took it home, carefully putting it in the glass case that was meant for my Japanese dolls, but although I gave my captive grass, leaves and flowers, it died. After the second attempt I learned that lesson. I pestered garden snails the same way I did woodlice, poking, prodding, picking them up, and watching the slimy helpless body sucking itself into the shell. One day, I took a dozen snails home to my mother saying, “Can we keep them?”

Being a scientist and having grown up with a garden herself, she supported my explorations. “We’ll put them in jam jars with paper over the tops so they can still breathe.” They went in the spare bathroom three or four to a jar, with rubber bands securing the paper lids and overnight they ate through the paper, so that we found them halfway up the wall, behind the toilet, in the sink, even in the spare bedroom and my father’s study. “Oh dear,” said my mother, “I didn’t think about that.” It was a good thing it hadn’t been my idea.

Liz was my enemy, as a younger sibling would be, after giving me only two years and four months to enjoy the privilege of being the only child. Being unable to pronounce my name, she called me “Agon”—one more reason to hate her. We were so rigorously trained that most of the time we did not even think of getting into trouble—but we fought. We used to bite, kick, pinch, punch and scratch, and pull each other’s light brown curly hair. At the age of six when I started biting my nails, Liz, with her long nails, got an advantage in our fights.

Her other advantage was her “Mummy, Agon’s been mean to me,” little sister crying routine that used to get a certain number of yen docked from my pocket money whenever she used it. So it made economic sense to be friends. We were the only kids living on the seminary campus, besides two aloof Canadian boys (one called me a baby) and one young English boy, so as Granny always said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” After all Liz was my only sister, and I had to admit that her big eyes, gray-green like mine, halo of corkscrew curls, and the way she carried her pale pink teddy bear everywhere did make her an adorable playmate.

There was plenty to do inside the house; we had dolls, jigsaw puzzles and trains. But the house was becoming a prison, with “Be quiet, don’t do that, stop running around, you’re not doing it right,” and so on. So I escaped to another world through my books or we went outside. Behind the chapel, one of our favorite play spots, we lay on the ground, arms and legs stretched out long, rolling like logs shrieking and giggling down the grassy hill. Beyond that was the sandy field where long grasses grew in the summer and we made secret hiding places. Despite a lack of adult supervision, invisible reins still attached us to the house, reins that stretched as we got older and ventured further. Liz and I roamed the grounds climbing trees and riding our tricycle, with one of us on the seat peddling and the other standing on the platform between the rear wheels.

During the hot, humid growing season, my father in long shorts dug up the bamboo shoots that grew wild in our yard, trying to catch them when the tip just showed above the earth. “Look, you see that? If you let it go, it’ll grow up to my knee by tomorrow and be too tough to eat.” We sat on the back step with the heavy foot-long shoots in our laps to peel off the layers of brown fibrous skin until we got down to the tender yellow flesh. My father cooked them in his creative specialties—sukiyaki and fried rice. This was around the time when he did most of the cooking and said to my godmother, “I have to be mother as well as father to the girls.”

On occasion, we would make the rounds of the seminary students’ accommodations, entering the two-story U-shaped building and going down the long corridors knocking on doors, hoping to scrounge sweet treats from the kind Japanese men. Maybe they said, “Iirashai (welcome),” and seeing our cute little gaijin (foreign) faces, “Doozo, doozo (please come in and make yourself at home).” And they would bring out bean cakes, tangerines, candy, white sugar on white bread. We would sit there politely stuffing our faces, bowing and saying, “Domo arigato,” lapping up the typical Japanese respect for children.

Then we lied to our mother, “Oh, we were just in the field,” as this was during her very restrictive diet phase that she also imposed on us. Her Canadian chiropractor told her to eat protein and starch at separate meals, to avoid white flour, white sugar and milk. In those days when environmental illness, chronic fatigue syndrome and some psychological disorders were not even named, this chiropractor was the only person who helped my mother.

We ate some weird but delicious foods like fresh carrot juice every day at supper, and my father rolled up chicken in fried tofu strips instead of making sandwiches for school lunches. For breakfast, as well as a handful of vitamins and the customary egg, we had wheat germ mixed with vegetable oil—crunchy and nutty, and yogurt. They kept a jar of hard candies on top of the highest cupboard, and doled out one each after lunch and supper. No more. No more puddings, only fruit for dessert. We could not even escape by going out for tea or a birthday party, as the host would have a list of all our restrictions. Liz and I rebelled secretly after getting off the school bus, buying small boxes of caramels with a Disney token in each box, that we ate as we walked up the hill from the village, Nakamachi, back to the seminary. We ended up with a great collection of Disney characters.