I had expected a quiet arrival in Tokyo in other ways. The hour was between two and three after midnight and I could not imagine anyone at the airport to meet me. I thought of one or two business associates, a few friends, perhaps, then a quick ride through dark streets to the old Imperial Hotel, and a bath and bed. It had been a long flight, after all. Sometime in the night we had come down on Wake Island for refueling but it had not seemed important. Outside the window I saw only a cluster of flat buildings and men scurrying here and there, about their business. It might have been anywhere in the middle of the night. Tokyo was another matter.
“I’m glad we are arriving at such a ghastly hour,” I had said. “There can’t be anyone to meet us.”
“Don’t be too sure,” my companion had retorted.
The great aircraft had trembled as it descended and the lights of Tokyo glittered out of the darkness.
“I am right,” I had said. “There is no one here.”
A man in a white uniform had stepped forward, “Are you—”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Then welcome to Japan,” he said. “I am with Japan Airlines. This way, please. … Just a moment, please … photographers and reporters.”
We paused. Lights focused us in the darkness and cameras snapped. Reporters crowded around us with questions and exclamations about the tidal wave.
“Thank you,” the man said when we showed signs of exhaustion. “Your friends are waiting for you.”
Waiting for us? We were speeded through customs, and our friends overwhelmed us indeed with greetings and flowers.
How did I feel? In a way as though I had come home after a long absence and in a way as though I had come to a new and foreign country. The smiling faces, the warm voices, sometimes the eyes brimming with tears, these claimed me for their own. Men and women I had known as young in my own youth were there looking as changed as I do, and with them were children and grandchildren like mine at home, the boys in western clothes, the girls in their formal kimono.
“My daughters rose at one o’clock so that they could wear kimono to welcome you,” a friend said proudly.
I know how long it takes to put on kimono properly and make the suitable coiffeur. The girls were beautiful and I was glad they and others wore kimono to make me feel at home when I arrived, at least. When I lived in Japan before the war, all my women friends wore kimono. The most modern and liberal had perhaps one western suit or dress, but this was unusual and not much approved. Now Japanese women wear western dress every day and always except for the few formal occasions of life when they put on their kimono, and many of them own only one kimono and some none at all. There are exceptions, of course. Old women wear kimono and certain distinguished women, even in business, wear kimono always. My special friend wears kimono because it is becoming to her. She has reached the position and the age when she can wear what she likes.
Behind the friendly crowd that night with its flowers and photographers, I was aware of Tokyo itself. I knew how severely it had been bombed in the war, and that now it was rebuilt, new and prosperous, a symbol perhaps of the Japan that was strange to me. Yet even the people who came to greet me seemed changed for the better, I thought. The old stiff formality was somehow gone. I heard ready laughter, not the old polite laughter, but spontaneous and real. Everyone talked freely and without fear. That was new. The sweet courtesy remained, but life and good spirits bubbled through, as though an ancient restraint had been removed. This was my first impression that night, and I shall speak of it again and again because it was expressed everywhere and in many ways.
Meanwhile the photographers were patiently following us at every step. Japanese photographers are indefatigable, philosophical, incredibly agile. They do not demand smiles or pleasant postures. Their cameras click incessantly where-ever one is and whatever one is doing. They flew about in the night like fireflies, and we were photographed continuously, embanked in flowers and encircled by friends. We moved en masse at last into waiting cars and were driven at breakneck speed to the Imperial Hotel. I do not know why it is that I have never been terrified by Japanese drivers, They dash through unmarked streets and packed crowds, shouting and warning, and yet they do not have accidents or at least I have not seen accidents. It all seemed natural enough, reminding me of other days, years ago, when I was driven in just such fashion through streets or along the edges of cliffs, up and down mountains or above the sea and roaring surf. Perhaps lack of fear is simply because in Asia I relax into Oriental acceptance and realize there is practically nothing I can do about anything.
We arrived finally and alive at the Imperial Hotel, that haven where Japan meets the world with her own grace and style, combined with an amazing amount of comfort and good service, and an hour later we were asleep in air-conditioned rooms, surrounded by flowers in Japanese baskets.
Yet for a long time I could not sleep. Memory went to work and pictures passed through my mind. The first was the vivid face of my mother, brown hair, brown skin, brown eyes. We were sitting on the wide veranda of our house in China. I was perhaps seven, a barefoot child with long yellow hair, sitting on the floor before her, hugging my knees and listening. She was telling me the story of my sister, who died before I was born.
“On the Yellow Sea,” my mother said, “between Japan and China. We had gone to Japan for the summer, to the mountains behind Nagasaki. It was before we found Kuling, in the Lu mountains of Kiangsi, here in China. It was so hot in the Yangtze Valley that I was afraid for the two children. We had a lovely summer in Japan — the air was cool and healthy up on those mountains. I wanted to stay until October, but your father said he had to be back in September. I shouldn’t have listened to him, but I always did. We came back on a Japanese steamship — the Hiroshima Maru—and the baby fell ill. I don’t know what it was — a high fever and a dysentery. She was only six months old and not strong. And I am always so seasick — I couldn’t even hold her. Your father tried to take care of me. And so old Dr. Martin walked up and down the deck with the baby in his arms. I’ll never forget how he looked — so tall and straight and the little baby in his arms.”
Here her eyes always filled with tears and I always wept because she did and crept to her side. She held out her hand to me and I clasped it in both mine.
“Then what?” I begged.
“Well, you know, dear. She died in his arms. I was lying in a steamer chair so sick! It was a breathlessly hot night, and there was an old moon, sinking into the sea. And suddenly I saw him stop and look down into the baby’s face. And I — knew.”
I felt her hand against my cheek, and I longed to comfort her and did comfort her, I suppose, in my childish way. For the story usually ended by her wiping her eyes and saying briskly, “Now let’s have a little music before we go to bed,” or perhaps she suggested an orange or a mango or a piece of pomelo.
What a volatile thing is memory! When I thought of pomelo, I remembered the delight of that sweet and juicy fruit, a relative of grapefruit but infinitely better in every way, the skin easily detached, the sections free from one another and the flavor superb. In comparison, grapefruit is a little bag of sour water and yielding that only grudgingly. I determined to find pomelo again in Japan, for I had never seen it in my own country.
From my mother’s lips, then, I first heard the names of Japanese cities, and saw in my mind’s eye, the scenes of mountain and seashore. And my little dead sister was buried in the Christian cemetery in Shanghai, as I knew, for I saw her name with the three others of our family’s children, later to be born in China, and to die there, and this before I myself was born in my grandfather’s colonial home in West Virginia.