JOHANNESBURG TO JERUSALEM

-A journey in search of peace-

With a newly obtained graduate degree, I went to Lesotho in 1968 under the United Church of Canada and ended up teaching at the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Lesotho is a country surrounded by South Africa. I was young, naive, and probably stupid thinking that I had all the answers. Almost immediately after arrival, I became involved in the struggle against Apartheid. The reason was simple. The university had many students from South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who didn’t want to be educated in the racially segregated universities in South Africa and Rhodesia. Many faculty members – my colleagues, both black and not-so-black, were from those countries also. In 1972, I was detained by the South African Security for three days, and expelled from the country with 2 hours notice. But I could stay in Lesotho, so I did. After eight years in Africa, I went to Geneva, Switzerland to work for an international organization working for development and continued to support Anti-Apartheid movements. In 1979 I came back to Canada to work for the Canadian Council of Churches. This was when I began working with Palestinians in refugee camps in the occupied territories in a program of the World Council of Churches. And Jerusalem became a city of my frequent visits This was how I kept in touch with those two places and peoples ever since. In 1994, I was a member of the international election observer team for the first democratic election of South Africa. In 2003, I went to participate in a human rights watch in a program sponsored by the World Council of Churches in a Palestinian village called Jayyous. The program was called the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) That village was divided from its fields, orchards, and its only source of water by the separation barrier.

People say that Canada’s problem is too much geography and too little history. We have to pay more attention to our history in respect to our First Nations. On the other hand, in Israel and Palestine, the problem is reversed. It has too much history and too little land.

After nearly forty years of involvement, I came to believe that if there should be peace, we should pause from the debate about history for a while and concentrate on figuring out how two distinct peoples can share the same land. I am tired of the blaming game talking about different versions of history according to their own understanding.

Because I was a Protestant Chaplain as well as a Lecturer in Theology in the university in Lesotho, I was drawn into the Student Christian Movement (SCM), aka known in the right-wing Christian circles as “Socialist Christian Movement” because of its left-leaning tendency. My regular visit to Johannesburg in South Africa began. The SCM had its offices there. I was the Regional Director of Orange Free State and Lesotho until I was expelled in 1972. For a while, I worked in two places, Lesotho and South Africa. By 1970, South African Government ordered SCM to be separated into a white and non-white organizations. Many people in the organization complied but some of us didn’t. Those of us who did not join the new groups, remained racially integrated and changed our name to UCM. (University Christian Movement). Thus in South Africans’ eyes the UCM became a subversive organization, leading to persecution, imprisonment, death in prison, and expulsion of its members. In 1977, the organization itself was banned and became an illegal entity. I once travelled from South Africa to Malawi with ten other students and faculty in a Toyota min-van to attend a conference. Upon return, within a year, two foreigners, a Canadian and a New Zealander, were expelled from South Africa, two students turned out to be spies for the South African government, three were murdered in prison, and the rest were banned (house-arrest). I became the first Canadian to be expelled from South Africa.

I will briefly explain what Apartheid was for those who don’t really know what it was. Here’s how Apartheid worked . Apartheid is a Dutch word for separateness, but adopted as a word for a set of policies implemented by the Republic of South Africa from 1960’s until 1989. In theory, it was based on the idea that races are all equal, but they must remain separate in order to protect cultural and ethnic identity. People who advocated Apartheid were mainly from the Protestant Reformed Calvinist tradition. Accordingly, no racial mixing was allowed in terms of areas of residence, association, job categories, marriage and relationship, facilities, etc. It was a total segregation of races. Cultural and racial purity were the cardinal dictum of human condition. No two races could live in a same area, jobs were reserved according to races, no racially mixed association was permitted including the church, and any sexual contact was illegal across the racial divide. However, the way system developed resulted in a total break down of the notion of justice, and created a society of the exploiters and the exploited. Racially segregated ghettos, non-whites cheap labour who had no right to live with their family in the place where they worked, etc. were all justified according to the Apartheid laws. It was enforced by brutal measures of banning orders on persons and organizations, expulsion of individuals and groups of people, imprisonments, tortures and murders in prison.

Most of the Africans were against Apartheid, and some people, though not enough, of European descent were against them. But the opponents were not large enough group to oppose them in the policy making process, because Africans and other non-whites did not have the right to vote, and the white opposition vote was not big enough. The UCM was one of those mixed race organizations which worked hard to oppose Apartheid laws. It became one of the prominent organizations which was banned in 1977. I met and became friends of those activists like Desmond Tutu, who was my colleague in the same university department, and Steve Biko, who was a prominent leader at the UCM. He was tortured to death in prison in 1977. His story became a Hollywood movie, “Cry Freedom.” Many of my friends were killed. Steve Biko, Mapetla Mohapi, Griffith Mxenge, Rick Turner, and several others were murdered.

Among the whites in the movement were many Jewish South Africans. Harry Oppenheimer was a generous financial supporter of Anti-Apartheid organizations. A capitalist like him was never in favour of Apartheid, because racial segregation restricts free market principles and did not make any business sense. Helen Suzman was the only anti-Apartheid member of Parliament for many years. Mark Kaplan and David Adler were colleagues and my personal friends. Mark was arrested and tortured, and had to go into exile. David was banned, and placed under house arrest. Joe Slovo had been a loyal colleague of Nelson Mandela as a partner in the law office and a comrade-in-arms all his life. He spent two decades in prison. His wife Ruth First, who was also a prominent activist was assassinated in Mozambique where she was an exile. All of those individuals were Jewish South Africans.

You may wonder why I am speaking so much about my Jewish colleagues in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. It’s because I want to make a connection with my next destination, Jerusalem. There I met many Israelis who are also fighting for freedom and the human rights of all people side by side with Palestinian peace activists. This is because I believe it is important to make a distinction between criticising the policy and practice of the state of Israel and anti-Semitism. I hate many things that the current Canadian government does. But I do not Canadians, I married one. It’s the same thing. I learned the importance of this distinction in South Africa. I loved South Africans, but I hated Apartheid. I was convinced that it was an evil system which was bad for the future of the country. And as many others, I was right in this conviction. Realization of the same type of distinction regarding the state of Israel and the Jewish people came to me also in South Africa.

During the 1970’s a few events happened to make me start questioning a few assumptions I held about Israel. You must understand that, before I went to South Africa, I, as many other Japanese Canadians, always had a warm feeling about fellow Canadians of Jewish descent and this led to my unquestioning admiration of Israel. When Japanese Canadians were rejected by the Canadian government and people and were removed and interned during the Second World War, the Jewish people in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg were the ones who gave employment to the Japanese, and the Canadian Jewish Congress was one of the four organizations who fought for the rights of the Japanese Canadians. Others were the Canadian Labour Congress, CCF (now NDP), and the United Church of Canada. It seemed logical to me because of my understanding of Judaism and its prophetic tradition of justice. My Jewish colleagues in South Africa and their passion for justice re-enforced my image of them.

Two events shocked me into critically analysing this assumption during the 1970’s. One was the terrorist attack on Israeli Olympic team members by Palestinian terrorists and the resulting deaths of those athletes in Munich in Germany. Another was a military alliance between South Africa and Israel. The massacre of Israeli sportsmen horrified us. But to our even greater horror and shock, students of my university staged a demonstration praising the “courageous Palestinians” for their sacrificial act of heroism against Western Imperialism. I realized then that there was a world view I had no idea existed. It was an African’s deep resentment of the Western domination of the world. I still don’t condone cowardly and senseless acts of violence. But until then I didn’t know that there was a such strong view in the non-western world that saw Israel as an outpost of the Western Imperialism.

This realization was strengthened when then Israeli Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, started to make a regular visits to South Africa. Many signs of unofficial military alliance between two countries became apparent. It culminated in a report of a nuclear weapon test staged in Indian Ocean jointly by Israel and South Africa. I was forced to re-examine my view of Israel. The attitude of my Jewish colleagues was a revelation and a valuable lesson to me also. They absolutely condemned Israeli corroboration with the Apartheid regime, while remaining convinced about the importance of the existence of the Jewish state. In later years in Jerusalem, I found many of my Israeli friends working with Palestinians in solidarity organizations, like B’Tselem, Bat Shalom, Yesh Gvul, Women in Black. They all held the same views. Other Israeli groups we worked with were: Rabbis for Human Rights, B’Tselem – the Isarel Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Israel/Palestine Centre for Research and Information, and Hamoked. They say that many of the things the state of Israel is doing to Palestinians now are against Jewish values of justice, and bad for the future of Israel.

Former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter wrote a book on the Israel-Palestine issues, and called the current Israeli policy Apartheid. I haven’t read the book. But it is a provocative comparison. Let’s see how Carter’s analogy fits the picture. There are many features of the current practices of Israeli government that look like Apartheid. Occupation of Palestinian land resembles the way South African government exercised its power over so-called autonomous Bantustans. The West Bank and Gaza, until Israel withdrew, were so divided up by the patch work of Israeli settlements and by the access highways serving only Israeli settlers, that West Bank is hardly viable as an economy and a country. Check points made the movement of goods and persons within Palestinian territories very difficult if not impossible. The way Palestinians are treated at those check points is so harsh it’s impossible to endear Israelis to the ordinary Palestinians, who are otherwise peaceful. There is an Israeli women’s group who watch the behaviour of Israeli soldiers at the check points. They said that check point is a terrorist making mechanism where peaceful people become terrorists. The barriers, a combination of concrete walls and barbed-wire fences in reality is so porous that it clearly shows security is only an excuse for future land seizure. It reminded me of the practice of Group Area Act of Apartheid that designated only patches of barren lands for Africans and reserved urban and productive lands for Whites. I don’t know what other features Jimmy Carter speak about in his book, but these are a few examples I can think of in comparison to Apartheid.

I can say for sure is: any attempt to make the separation of people, who are bound together by a common geography into an absolute dictum, never works. Trying to enforce separation by use of force not only generates hostility and violence, but it ultimately fails, as history proves. The world is full of such tragic examples: Northern Ireland, Basque in Spain, Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, Balkans, etc. Wounds created by history of violence and bloodshed take centuries to heal. This is what I am afraid is happening in Israel and Palestine. We must support those who are working very hard to be good neighbours on both sides. We must renounce violence on both sides. Where cultural and national identities are important, good neighbourliness is the way to live together and thrive together.

However, I must qualify my use of the word “Apartheid” as applied to the situation in the Middle East. I already mentioned the similarities. But there is a fundamental difference. South Africans didn’t want to be separate. “South Africans” are one people with different cultures and races, like Canada. If you want to apply that Dutch word Apartheid to anywhere else for its ill effect, our own “Reserve” system for the First Nations is much closer to the South African Apartheid model. It was imposed by newly arrived settlers who want to take their land. There maybe some peoples who must preserve their identities, in terms of culture, language, or religion, and choosing separateness in order to do that could be necessary. For this reason, there are demands from oppressed minority people for separateness and autonomy in various parts of the world. I could first think of Ainu in Japan, who are almost exterminated; also possibly Quebec; and Scotland. Israelis and Palestinians have strong arguments for separateness because of past history of oppression and persecution done to them by others. They do have a claim for their own state. The world is still xenophobic place. But if there should be a border, it should be like a fence between good neighbours. If two peoples are determined to kill each other, no steel or stone walls can prevent hostility from doing its worst. Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to be good neighbours and friends. That’s the only way for them to survive.

My wife Muriel and I were back in South Africa last year to see my old colleagues and friends and former students. I had a wonderful time with them. Some of them have achieved such prominence that I could not see them. They were a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a Prime Minister, a President of a prominent university, etc. I could not believe how fast the wound of Apartheid healed. And the people of South Africa are thriving, no matter what nay-sayers are saying. South Africa is a success story. And Israel and Palestine can also be a success, if we all concentrate on peace-making in the present and the future instead of same-old same-old repetition of bad- old-days stories. In order to do that I would like to see all peoples to concentrate on helping peacemakers on both sides of the conflict. Just like I found peacemakers on both Blacks and Whites in South Africa during the 1970’s, I found many unsung heros of peace in Israel and Palestine who are often below the radar screen of media. It’s time for us to find them, give them strength and voice. Thank you

(This is a speech I gave to a group of students at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta on April 8, 2009)

GROWING UP IN RETIREMENT

By Tad Mitsui

I retired in two stages: officially, from full-time ministry in 1995, then from a half-time supply ministry in 2000. There was a period of two months in 1995 when I had nothing to do before taking up the half-time ministry with a rural pastoral charge in Quebec. I cannot forget the sensation of dislocation on the first day of retirement in 1995. It was a lovely spring day in Montreal. Birds were chirping in the trees as I woke up with the seven o’clock CBC news as I had done for years. Suddenly it dawned on me that I didn’t have to get up at all. I felt lost. I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I had to do except washing and breakfast. After that, what?

Happily, that morning we needed some groceries. So I walked to a supermarket. Half a block south and two blocks east. The maple trees lining the streets were still bare. The air was nippy, but smelled like spring. I had never been to a supermarket at 9 a.m. It used to be called “Steinberg,” but that old Quebec institution was gone. It was now “Metro”. Even the red of the Metro store seemed disturbing, compared to the soothing olive green of the Steinberg. I was surprised by how many men were there shopping, all looking like me, retired, looking comfortable with hush puppy shoes and light blue wind breakers, or some similar attire. They seemed to be in no hurry, looking more as if they were just hanging around than shopping, leaning on the shopping carts like they would on walkers. Some of them were just talking, visiting friends. I had never seen men just hanging around and visiting friends in broad day light, except in and around coffee shops in Little Italy on College Street or St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. But, unlike the Italian men who look like they live for those moments of visiting buddies, those men at the Metro store in Notre Dame de Grace – the English-speaking part of Montreal- looked sad.

Suddenly, I felt depressed. “Is this what the rest of my life will belike? Cheer up,” I said to myself, “I don’t have to answer to anybody. It doesn’t matter what I do; nobody will come after me or fire me.” But I felt I was nobody because there was nothing I had to do. Nobody cared if I was not there. I had to learn the first thing about life after retirement that morning in a supermarket between lettuce and celery: it doesn’t matter what I do indeed, but it does matter that I am. That day, I began to learn the lesson I should have learned during my forty years of growing up.

My mother and our cat have taught me a lot in this process. Some people may think it is insulting to my mother that I mention a cat and my mother on equal terms. But on the other hand, cat lovers will understand this comparison totally. Importance of being I look at our aging cat, who sleeps most of the time. A famous writer – I think it was T. S. Elliot – said something about a cat having three things to tell humans: ‘Feed me. Love me. Leave me alone.’ Our cat, Estra, lives exactly like that. It doesn’t bother us if she doesn’t catch mice or doesn’t go after her tail like a cute, cuddly little kitten. But Estra gives us so much pleasure. She makes our life richer just by comfortably being herself. We pray that she will live for a long time, if not for ever. She teaches me so much about aging, and about life in general, like my mother does just by being who she is.

My mother celebrated her 96th birthday in June, 2003 and passed away on Christmas Eve of the same year. Her memory was almost gone. Only rarely did she recognize me. Even on a good day when she knew who I was, she asked things like why I didn’t have to go to school that day. She didn’t see a grey-haired retired man but a school boy of fifty years ago. She was not interested in eating much any more towards the end nor was she doing anything about her appearance. She had never used to allow herself to be seen by other people, including her children, without make-up. She sleet most of the time, but she looked happy when she was awake. She raised her right hand like a queen and said “Hello” with a beautiful smile to anybody who happened to be nearby. “It makes my day when I see her smile,” saids a kind woman who visited her regularly. My mother and my cat teach me how important for an aging person, or for anyone, to keep on living fully no matter how little he or she can do.

This is an almost impossible thing for a normal Japanese person to understand. Japanese truly believe that we are what we do. If you can do nothing, you are nobody. What’s the point in keeping on living? When I announced that I was going to retire, one of my sisters, who lived in Tokyo, refused to accept such a notion. “No, brother. You do no such thing!” In Japan, there is no acceptable way to completely retire. A person who ‘retires’ there usually moves on to a job in another organization which has no mandatory retirement age – usually a small NGO or a small firm connected to the organization you are retiring from. A person with no positioni s nobody in Japan. Any respectable person in business, after retirement, would move to a position in a smaller corporation, which belongs to the “Keiren” – agroup of smaller, related corporations – suppliers or sub-contractors, which have a special connection with the ‘parent’ firm, the “Oyagaisha.” Such a job shift is called “Amakudari”. Literally it means “descending from heaven to livean earthy life among the mortals.” This expression means taking up a positionin an organization of lesser importance. There really isn’t a respectable way to completely retire in Japan. Those who cannot find a position by Amakudari could not have been a person of any significance before retirement.

So what do you do if nobody wants you? You create your own organization, often a consulting firm, set up an office some where cheap downtown and go to the office every day. Not having any position in any organization is unthinkable, unless you are a famous artist, a writer, a freestanding theologian who does not have a pastorate or a teaching job, or a well-known sage or a philosopher. My sister almost succeeded in finding me a job in Japan. It was a position of “Chancellor” of a small junior college in Shizuoka – an honorary position, of course. I was even interviewed, kind of. This is how it went: I was asked to preach at a chapel service of the college. After the service, I had tea with the entire teaching staff and lunch with the Principal and Registrar in a chi-chi restaurant with a beautiful view of Mt. Fuji. When I found later that they were serious about giving me a position, I was horrified and respectfully declined. I really wanted to retire, as I felt burnt out. My sister didn’tunderstand me. She was offended that I didn’t appreciate her effort to help me.

I spent several years working for the Church in Lesotho teaching at a university in Southern Africa. In contrast to our western way of thinking in the western society, among black Africans, a person is considered to be a full person deserving of all respect no matter who he or she is or what he or she does. In this way of thinking, the amount of money one earns or the positionone holds has nothing to do with a person’s worth. Every man is addressed as”Ntate,” which literary means ‘father,’ but it is an honorary title like ‘sir’. Every woman is ‘Mme’ (mother). “Think about flowers of the field. They are more beautiful than the riches Solomon ever produced. Yet they can be thrown into fire when they wither. Think about the sparrows. God does not allow even a single one of them to fall without his consent. And yet two of them can be sold for a mere penny.” (Matthew 6: 25 – 34) God loves us as we are, not so much dependent on what we do and how much we do it. That was a very valuable lesson Africans taught me.

But this lesson had unfortunately remained dormant in me until I retired. It scares me to think how much damage I might have done to others without putting the lessons I learned from African friends into practice in my dealings with other people. When I was thinking about retirement, I had resolved to follow a life with a set of regular activities. I was hopelessly task oriented. I had to have a “ToDo List.” My spouse, Muriel, and I have known that she would be in full-time pursuit of her career as a university professor, and I would be a house husbandafter I retired. So my time would be divided into regular pattern of physical exercise, learning, volunteering, and writing. I am realizing as I began tolive under a new regime that many things I am learning now are things I shouldhave learned long ago. I shiver when I think now what an insensitive person Imust have been without knowing those things. However, I must confess that the model for living I see in my mother and our cat is still very far from me. It will take some more time of learning to reach ‘Nirvana’ – the state of complete understanding. So I am not in my consciousness what I am, but what I do. I hope that in time I will learn to be what I am, because those things I do seem to be good lessons.

Here is what I do, and what I am learning:

On being a house husband:

As I began preparing meals, cleaning and keeping the house, I was surprised to find how time consuming those chores are. I realized that keeping the house is not an occasional project, as some men think, but it is a full time job. No, housekeeping is more than a job. It is almost like a set of regular life-sustaining body functions such as breathing and eating. You can not call in sick or take a holiday from it. It is not an option. But unlike breathing, housekeeping takes attention, energy, and creativity. Like many other men, I used to think that because a housewife is not paid, her work is pretty close to worthless – not a value-adding activity. Now I realize it is priceless.

I was planning to write after retirement, to leave some written record of my life behind for my family and for the sake of posterity. I was not necessarily thinking about writing a book. But amazingly, I could hardly find time to write. Planning and preparing meals and shopping for groceries simply take up a lot of time. I always liked cooking and cleaning the house. I used to be quite proud that Icould say I loved cooking. Cleaning the house was not my strength, but I enjoyed a sense of victory when dust balls were vanquished from the hard wood floors. Again, it was a revelation to me how time consuming cleaning the house is. I know it is late in life to realize this.

I can’t imagine how career women with children manage to take care of the household. Many men don’t feel in their heart of hearts that they really have anything to do with it. They view household chores as a favor all good men would do willingly for their spouses -from time to time. “I don’t mind, really,” we say. It is incredible to me that I had never realized how hard housekeeping is until I retired and became a house husband. And I don’t have a young child hanging on to my apron strings!

Physical exercise ;

It’s important for me to exercise regularly. I had an episode of angina in 1999. I spent a few days in hospital for observation. Nothing serious was found, but it was a wake-up call. Thus began a new regime of proper diet and regular exercise. I fell into swimming daily. I say “fell into” because I could have chosen walking or cycling, but didn’t. By default, swimming has become my regular physical activity. I used to cycle regularly. When I had full-time work in church bureaucracies in Toronto and Quebec, we didn’t own a car. Instead, I cycled to work, in Toronto from Cabbagetown through Rosedale to St. Clair Avenue, and in Montreal, forty minutes to the office in Lachine and one hour home up-hill to Notre Dame de Grace. I enjoyed cycling along the beautiful north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Muriel and I cycled quite a bit in the dairy farming country of Chateauguay Valley when we lived in Howick. Since arriving in Lethbridge, our bicycles have not been repaired from the damages of moving.

Earlier in our life in Lethbridge I walked in the coulees, but the icy conditions in the valley made me hesitate to walk there in winter. Hence swimming became my regular routine. I can still walk in the coulees, and will probably enjoy it enormously. The changing colors of different seasons, the amazing array of vegetation from cacti to wild roses, the variety of birds from Canada geese to magpies to pelicans. Yes, pelicans. I couldn’t believe my eyeswhen I saw them; even the bird watchers’ guide books do not mention them. There are also deer, jack rabbits and gophers. I will for sure enjoy walking in thecoulees.

The university swimming pool gives me a reasonable rate as a family member of the faculty. Every morning, a variety of interesting regulars appear. A dozen faces of swimmers and friendly life guards now are as familiar as the smell of chlorine. Most of them look so fit. I don’t understand why Idon’t see more unfit people like me, for whom regular exercise is a requirement.

The 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. period at the university pool is a scene from’Reality TV’. They all wear tight-fitting swimsuits, looking fit and beautiful. And they all swim like dolphins. I was amazed how many people there were at that ungodly hour swimming back and forth in silence as if obsessed. One hardly hears a human voice. It is a bit eerie. They must come before breakfast, do 20 (Olympic distance) lengths, then go to a Second Cup for latte and bagels before donning their business suits and going to their offices. No one swims like me – a slightly improved version of the dog paddle. I’ve only seen two men my age and an overweight man among the regulars so far. And I have been swimming for nearly three years.

Where are people like me, elderly or unfit, those with heart conditions who have been told by their doctor to doregular exercise? Maybe they come in the afternoon or evening. It ispossible that those elderly and/or unfit people go to specialized classes like a seniors’ exercise class with bouncing balls and stuff like that. No wonder even those reasonably fit thirty-something professors avoid the university facilities and go to the local YMCA or a community pool so as not to be seen by the beautiful people, or worse, their fabulously fit young students. Fitness is a good thing, but I’m very ambivalent about its becoming a commercialized fad.

Those few unfit-looking people who come to the swimming pool in the morning are inspirations. They have lived long enough to be unashamed of themselves; they don’t feel the need to hide anything. One morning, I saw a long line-up of primary school kids before the cubicles in the washroom waiting for their turn to finish changing. Why? Is it a kids’ culture or the influence of their parents? Why should they feel ashamed of their bodies? Is it a man’s thing? Those old or unfit people who enter the crowd of beautiful must have achieved a state of innocence like Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit. They see their reality, accept it, and are comfortable with it.

On learning the beauty of Creation:

I decided to do take up art. I had toyed with the idea of taking academic courses in political science or sociology, but decided they were too close to the way I used to think in my job. I wanted to explore unknown territory. I took up drawing. I take lessons in the basics of drawing from an instructor in the Faculty of Fine Art. I was lucky to have been introduced to an instructor and practicing artist who is gentle and patient. I also go a studio to draw with other artists. I am grateful that those people, who have dedicated their lives to making art, allow me to hang around with them as they practice their calling.

The first thing I was obliged to learn in drawing was to observe realities as they are. I realized, as the teacher forced me to look at the minute details of what is in front of me, how much I had assumed what was there. I learned that reality is not always what the left side of the brain tells you; it is not always linear and rational. I am learning to depend on the right side of the brain to acknowledge and accept what is often chaotic and irrational.

Another important lesson was that every object – live or still, nature, landscape, or human face and figure – is beautiful. There really isn’t ugliness in Creation. Ugliness is what we read into a piece of Creation from our assumption, a creation of our mind. Often our assumption is wrong. There is a book I should read cover-to-cover – I have just skimmed through it – titled, “Anatomy of Disgust.” The author makes the point that a disgusting thing to one person can be another person’s delicious food. It is a wonderful feeling to see beauty in an unexpected object. Beauty, indeed, is in the eyes of the beholder, and is in everything if you keep an open mind. I am still in a stage of discovery. I expect that it will take me years to learn to re-create the beauty of reality and indeed of God’s creation. I am even farther away from creating art as an expression of ideas. But in the meantime, I am enormously enjoying learning to re-create what is in front of me as faithfully as possible. I now shiver to imagine how I used to think, conclude and argue based on assumptions and on imagining, rather than on the realities of beautiful creation.

On seeing a rainbow in all people ;

As for volunteer work, Muriel found an advertisement for volunteers to help theat a horseback riding stable for handicapped persons. I phoned right away. The organization is called Lethbridge Handicap Riding Association – Rainbow Riding Stable. I have been happily going there once a week since early in 2001. I love horses – I think they are the most beautiful animal. I rode quite a bit in Lesotho between 1970 and 1975 and in France from1975 to 1979. Horses are a popular mode of transport in the mountainous country of Lesotho. The Africans ride a type of pony probably related to or descended from the Arabian horse, the tough little ponies that can climb mountains like mountain goats without ever needing horseshoes and can live from grazing alone. Because they are so numerous in Lesotho, horses are cheaper than bicycles. With other horse lovers on the university campus, I used to help paraplegic children from the Lesotho Save-the- Children Fund shelter learn to ride. Horses made better sense than wheelchairs in a country where a smooth surface is a rarity and where wheelchairs are probably more expensive than horses. Rainbow Riding Stable brings back happy memories; the smell of sweaty horses and manure make me forget my frustration with Alberta politics.

The stables are located outside the city limit east of Lethbridge. It takes only 20 minutes from our house by car, passing the agricultural research station of the Federal Government and a large pond surrounded by tall reeds and trees -a rare site in this part of the Canadian prairies. Many Canada geese hang around the pond. I pass the red brick buildings of a federal prison and meadows where cows lazily graze. Rainbow Stable keeps a couple of dozen elderly horses for handicapped people. They are gentle – lazy to some people – but ideal for those with less mobility. There is an instructor who was trained in the art of hippo-therapy, a woman who aspires to be a professional rodeo rider. Of course, she has a long way to go to make a living out of the rodeo circuit, if ever, so she teaches at the Rainbow Stable. Up to three learners at a time usually come for the one-hour sessions.

I help out at two sessions per day. There are paraplegics, mentally handicapped persons, persons with Down syndrome, of all ages and backgrounds. On days when it is rainy, windy or snowy, or too hot or cold, they ride in the cavernous arena. Each rider is accompanied by a person on either side, one to lead the horse and to make sure that the animal behaves, the other person to watch the rider, ready to grab the safety belt around the rider’s waist if necessary. It is intensive work. The instructor stands in the middle of the arena and gives directions. Each rider is expected to brush the horse, bring the tack from storage, saddle up, and warm up the horse by leading it once around the arena, and finally, mount. A lot of work, but enjoyable. It is wonderful to watch an unsure, frightened person develop confidence as well as skills.

Toward the end of a six-week term, the rider often has developed so much confidence and is having so much fun that we have difficulty persuading him or her not to keep trotting. Accompaniers have to run with the horse, you see. One can almost believe that anyone can learn to ride a horse, given a chance. However, one type of handicap I still have difficulty accepting is Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I feel angry at the parents that a beautiful child of any background, any race or class, has to bear the burden of their parent’s weakness all his or her life without any hope of a cure. Not fair! Of course, if you scratch the surface of our society, such unfairness is found everywhere. That is another reason for all of us to take responsibility in caring for such disabled persons. At one of the Volunteer Appreciation Day potluck suppers, I sat in front of Michael, a long-time client of the Rainbow Stable. I was a little taken aback, because this was a supper for volunteer helpers, while Michael is a paraplegic. In our conversation over spaghetti, I found that he became such a good rider that now he is a volunteer. I didn’t ask how he could do it in a wheel chair. It didn’t matter to me really. To me, he is an inspiration just being on a horse by himself.

I can almost believe that life begins after retirement. There is so much to learn and so many ways to grow. Didn’t Socrates say something like to ‘know thyself’ is the ultimate form of knowledge? I have a long way to go. And if I have to accept that self, I have an even longer way to go.

Spring, 2003.

Furuikeya(An old pond)

Kawazu tobikomu (a frog jumps in)

Mizuno oto (a sound of)

(Translation)

A sound of a frog

Jumping into

An old pond

I don’t pretend to know many Haiku poets. In fact, I know one – Basho. And I like the one above the best. I don’t feel the need to know any other.

I imagine an old pond in the back of an old, apparently abandoned, Buddhist temple. It’s been there for ever. Silence dominates. Its stagnant murky water is green,alive with algae, larvae, and god-knows what else. Suddenly, there was a soundbreaking the peace rudely, something jumping into the water. A frog. Not much splash though because water is syrupy. Wakes lingered only a few second. Silence returns. It seems like a description of my life in the world of eternity.

Aratohto (How precious is it)

Aoba Wakabano (Fresh green leaves)

Hinohikari (In the sunlight)

(Translation)

How precious is it!

Fresh green leaves

Dancing in the sunlight

Basho loved to travel. In fact, he traveled all his life, and died while traveling. Like him, I have been a sojourner all my life. I lived in many places. I loved every place I stopped, but I moved on. It is like exquisite beauty of a fleeting sunlight dancing in the fresh green leaves of early summer.

My father wrote a song about this Haiku and sung it for us often. He began with the first stanza, and concluded it with the last two stanza.

Aratohto

Tabiosumikato

Kusafukaki

Okunohosomichi

Tadoriyuku

(Translation)

How precious is it:

Traveling is home:

Groping my way

Onto a narrow path

Among tall grass

In a back country.

Okinaga Katano Yasehoneni

Furiwake no nimo Itaitashi

Tsueni Sugarite Wakeiran

The backpack on the tired old

Shoulder bones is painful :

But I keep on

Leaning on

My walking stick.

Yamawa Futara ka Uzukinaru

Is that Mt. Futara in May?

Aoba wakabano

Hinohikari

Fresh young green leaves

Dancing in the sunlight.

 It sounds like a summary of my entire life.

My father, Isamu Mitsui, loved the poem by Kenji Miyazawa.  He often said, “I want to be like him.”  The following is the one he cited often.

RAIN BEATS ME NOT

by Kenji Miyazawa

Rain beats me not, nor wind beats me,

Neither snow, nor the heat of summer,

I have a healthy body.

I’m never greedy, never petulant, always smiling quietly.

Eating two cups of unpolished rice a day,

With a bit of miso and some vegetables,

I do not count myself in any matter,

I listen well, observe and understand,

I forget nothing,

I live in a little thatched roof cottage,

In the shadow of a small pine grove in a valley.

If there is a sick child in the east,

I would go to take care of him;

If there is a tired mother in the west,

I would go to carry her bundle of rice straw.

If there is a dying man in the north,

I would go to tell him “Don’t be scared.”

If there is a quarrel or a court case in the south,

I would go to tell them, “Don’t be a bore, stop it.”

Shedding tears in a drought,

Wandering aimlessly in a cold summer,

Everybody calls me, “Dimwit,”

Nobody praises me,

I bother nobody.

I want to be like that.

The war ended in August, 1945. Tokyo was pretty well flattened by nightly bombings. My family lived in a half-destroyed concrete church building. My father was the pastor. We slept between mosquito-nets and a heavy silk drapes that used to hang behind the organ. I saw the first American soldiers on September 2^nd, fully armed and looking scared. But after a week, they were no longer armed.

American soldiers started to come to worship with us. All were fluent in Japanese. They were intelligence officers. We hardly had enough to eat; our dream was to own shoes and have change of clothes. But we were extremely happy. No more bombing. “Peace was here!” We were worshiping together with former enemies.

Winter came. We made a fire, for warmth and cooking, under a hole in the roof made by a 500 lb incendiary bomb. We burnt broken furniture.

Just before Christmas, an American came by on a big Jeep and told us to get on, because, he said, “There is a Messiah concert at the University of Tokyo Auditorium.” We couldn’t believe it. But we got on anyway, my parents, my sisters, and I. It was a windowless Jeep.

The auditorium was the only one left in Tokyo with a big seating capacity. It was warm inside despite no heating system, because of people’s body heat.

The orchestra and the choir were a mixture of Japanese musicians in their worn out army uniforms and Americans. Only the soloists had the proper outfits. The conductor was a composer of Gospel music and a preacher in a local Pentecostal Church. When the tenor began, “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,” tears started fill my eyes. In the end, there was no dry eye in the whole auditorium.

It could not have been a good quality concert. They could not have had a proper rehearsal. We had no decent food, no change of clothes, no present, but we had each other. We had family, former foes and friends to warm up the auditorium. And the best of all we had PEACE!

It was the best Christmas of my life!

I WILL REMEMBER THEM – For Remembrance Day

– I knew those soldiers-

I remember them; one German, five Canadians, two Japanese, and one American. They were all soldiers fought during the World War II. But the most important thing about them that I remember is: they were all good humans. Most of them are dead now, but some may still be alive.

I met Gerhardt at Bowman Art Centre. I never got to know his last name. He was a good artist. He saw beauty in every human, male or female, young or old, and had skills to put it on a piece of paper. He was a soldier in the German Army during the WW II, and spent sometime in a prisoners of war camp.

Garth Legge was my life-long mentor and the role model. He was the Africa Secretary of the United Church when I went to Southern Africa. He was a gentle and kind soul but a brilliant theologian. He was a fierce fighter for human dignity and worked closely with people like Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naude in South Africa. He was a pilot on the Spitfire during the WW II. And he walked like one; always his back straight.

Don Rae was General Secretary of the United Church and was briefly my boss. He was a navigator on a Lancaster bomber and did many missions to Germany. He knew exactly where he was, but never saw anything outside cooped up in a tiny cubicle behind the cockpit. He was a model of an administrator with humanity. The kindest man I knew.

I met Ian MacLeod and Frank Carey in Japan when I was still a student in 1951. We traveled together and visited many small parishes in rural communities in Nagano prefecture. Ian was a Spitfire pilot and Frank was a foot soldier. By the time I met them, they were members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (a Quaker organization), and committed pacifists. Until I met them I didn’t know Canada was different from America. They sure let me know it was. In fact, Frank recruited me to come to Canada.

Jack Mellow was my father-in-law. He was a Air Force mechanic looking after Spitfires in Southern England. When his daughter Muriel and I met, I heard that he had a few seconds of hesitation, me being a former enemy. But that didn’t last long. He loved me and I loved him. He and I spent some time once parked outside of the Winnipeg Airport just watching planes coming and going. He loved airplanes. Nevertheless, he maintained until the end that Spitfire was the best airplane, ever.

My uncle Mitsugu died when he was only 17. He is missing-in-action, and is presumed dead. He was shipped to the Island of Guadalcanal and was never found. He probably got lost, starved and rotted in a jungle. He taught me briefly in Sunday School. He was, like my father, a pacifist. Did he have a choice not to go? No way.

Hideo Katayama was also a Sunday School teacher at my father’s church in Tokyo. When he was drafted into the navy he became a language officer: Many Christians became language officers-interpreters, because many of them went to Christian schools where they had more exposures to English language than other Japanese young people. In 1948, Navy Lieutenant Katayama was executed by a firing squad as a war criminal. Many allied prisoners testified that Katayama was responsible for cruelties and deaths. In fact, he was simply relaying orders in English. His superiors did not come out to claim responsibility. They were in charge of the running of the prisoners of war camp but remained free. Katayama was a scapegoat.

Jacob de Cesar was an American airman who was shot down over Tokyo. He spent a few years in a prisoner of war camp in Tokyo. He suffered cruelty and torture, and nearly starved to death. After he was liberated, he went to a seminary in the U.S., became a minister of the church, and came back to Japan as a missionary. I met him when my father was acting as his interpreter in the beginning of his ministry in Japan. At the time, it seemed incredible to me to hear his story. Forgiveness personified. I kept thinking, “Is he real?”

Wars are fought in most cases by ordinary decent people. They are just cogs in a machine. Let us not demonize them just because they were enemies.

Another soldier died in Afghanistan ( Sgt. Scott Shipway, Sunday, September 7). I mourn the death of every Canadian soldier; the number is getting close to one hundred. We need those brave magnificent young people alive for Canada. It’s time for the NATO allies to make a radical change in a manner of execution of the war in Afghanistan.

We must win this war on ‘terrorists’ for sure (I don’t understand the term “War on Terrorism.” How can you fight a concept?) But I think the way NATO forces are going about the war is wrong. We are in a no-win situation. There are very few historical precedents where a regular army successfully fought irregular fighters i.e. guerrillas or terrorists, whichever you choose to call them. It’s like trying to get rid of bedbugs in a bedroom with a sledge hammer. There are bound to be unnecessary destruction – which is called collateral damage but it is in fact deaths of non-combatant women and children.

War against irregular combatants is a work for the Intelligence Service and the Police. For example, it is now quite clear that 9/11 was the result of a massive failure on the part of CIA and FBI. They knew something like that was going to happen but their warning was not taken seriously by higher authorities. And those agencies behaved like lackeys.

What was the response to the 9/11? Send in the army. In the case of Iraq, into a wrong country which took no part in 9/11 atrocity. Yes, Afghanistan accommodated Al Qaida thus Talibans had to be dealt with. But Talibans are a bunch of irregular fighters, a bunch of out-laws. We have the police to deal with outlaws, and the intelligent services to do the sleuth work to find them. Let them do the work properly. We know that people of Afghanistan don’t want Talibans. Let us help them to establish the credible Afghan police force, and stop our young people to perform a hopeless job.

NATSUNO MITSUI: 1907 – 2003

MY MOTHER

Natsuno Mitsui was born in 1907, on June 25 (Year 40 of the Emperor Meiji’s reign) in Shinsen, Shibuya district in the city of Tokyo as the first child of Yukichi and Takeko, and died on Christmas Eve of 2003 at Griffith-McConnell Residence, the United Church of Canada Home for Elderly Persons in Cote St. Luc in Montreal, Quebec. Early morning, she breathed the last breath holding a hand of the cleaning lady who happened to be there. She was 96 years old.

“Mitsui” was Takeko’s name before marriage. Because her two brothers died during Ruso-Japan War of the early twentieth century, the first born daughter, Natsuno was adopted by Toshiko, the surviving matriarch of the family and mother of Takeko to continue “Mitsui” name. Toshiko was a devoted Christian. So, in order to continue Christian tradition of the Mitsui family, she arranged Natsuno’s marriage with a Christian when Natsuno was still very young. By the time an engagement was publicly announced Natsuno’s would-be husband already changed his surname to Mitsui.

Natsuno went to the highschool for girls at Aoyama Gakuin – a comprehensive educational institution established by American Methodists. After graduating highschool, she was trained as a kindergarten teacher at Toyo Eiwa School for Girls founded by Canadian Methodists. During those days, the Mitsuis were a well to do family, who owned many properties near the center of Tokyo – Shibuya district. As Toshiko Mitsui grew old, not only adopted daughter Natsuno but also the whole family Takeda moved into the Mitsui property to look after the aging matriarch and to manage the property. However, because Natsuno was a Mitsui and the legal heiress of the estate, though she lived with her own fresh and blood, while Toshiko was alive, she was treated differently from her siblings. She was the only one who went on to do post-secondary education (rare during those days for a girl,) and was sent to learn piano and singing, flower arrangement, etc. as a young woman of a wealthy family. She was spared from chores like cooking and cleaning like her sisters. I remember my father excusing mother’s lack of skills in the kitchen saying, “Mama was brought up like a princess.” There should not have been any problem if she married the fiancé of the same class arranged by the matriarch. The complication was that she fell in love with a poor Theology student who came to the family as a tutor for her sisters.

For the matriarch Toshiko, because keeping Christian tradition was very important for her, giving up a wealthy fiancé she had chosen for a poor theology student who was a love in Natsuno’s life was not a huge problem. Her concern was if Natsuno could cope with a life in a manse and of poverty without any servant. My father Isamu married Natsuno after his ordination in 1931 and was adopted by Toshiko as well. His first pastorate was in Numazu. Next year, first child – a son was born: it was me, and the year after my sister Taeko was born. During those years in Numazu, Toshiko often spent time with my family in a manse, and paid for servants – a maid, a nanny, and a house boy. I remember the maid and the nanny who often carried me on her back. But such life style did not last long.

After Toshiko’s death, Grandfather Takeda (Yukichi) failed miserably in his enterprises and lost all Mistui fortune. So my mother lost all domestic help, and had to learn to cook, clean the house, and to do the laundry. She never got the hang of any of them. One of the childhood bitter memories was my aunts making fun of my mother for her clumsy housekeeping skills. I also remember that mother was always doing dishes when grandmother and/or aunts were around. She used to say that she didn’t like cooking and rather be doing dishes. We lived in a chaotic house, and ate drab meals most of the time. Our house became clean and orderly, and ate good food when Grandmother and/or aunts were around, which was quite often. That was because great grandmother, Toshiko, told them to help Natsuno as much as possible.

Meanwhile, our house – manse was always full of people. Often, they were more often than not young people who seemed to enjoy just hanging around. Table was always full of people. It seemed to me that those young people liked to be together at the manse spending endless hours chatting, playing games, wrestling sumo, or singing together with mama’s organ, etc. This life-style continued even though our family’s size increased with the addition of my two more younger sisters, Junko and Toshiko (a.k.a. Kokko) until my father’s untimely passing. I grew up assuming that a pastor’s home was like that. My mother’s less than perfect house keeping skills did not seem to bother my father. That could be the reason why mother was the most suitable partner for my father, because she enjoyed the company of people.

After the WW II, we lived in the half burned church – a shell of a building. But that didn’t deter many young people to congregate in the living quarters of the minister. Some among them later became ministers of the church. Others have become important members of churches. Downtown Tokyo was full of homeless people, and a few of them joined the crowd at the manse. There was a man named Mr. Toyota, who was picked up by my father on the street one winter, when he was suffering pneumonia. He became a resident cook and handy man around the household. He died a few years later. There was a man who was released from prison and joined us briefly. He was a member of a criminal gang and went to prison for murder. He became a Christian and hang arpound our home for a while. When one of the regulars stepped on the Bible which happened to be on the floor, he grabbed my friend by the neck and shouted, “Apologize or I’ll kill you.” Obviously he was a bit deranged. My friend later became a physician.

Father might have thought he was doing anything extraordinary, but all the work to looked after those people fell on mother. She fed them, took cared of their lice filled rag of clothes, spent time with them so long as they stayed around our home, while father was busy doing what his work required of him. She was never a house keeper, but she loved people and enjoyed their company. So though she grew up like a princess not knowing exactly what a woman was supposed to do in a home, she was a good minister’s wife according to a traditional old fashioned role of a”minister’s wife.” At least that was what father must have thought.

One wonders how such a life-style was possible with a meager minister’s salary. This was how. When father died suddenly, we were horrified to find that father had debts all over the place in downtown Ginza. Father owed so much to Kawakami Tamio Law Firm, Hakuhodo Advertising Agency, for example. My parents must have believed that God would provide. When mother and I went around asking them to delay repayment, most of creditors told us that all was forgiven because it was all for God’s work.

In her nineties, she lost almost all her memories, often she didn’t know who I was. She spent the last twelve years of her life in an United Church of Canada residence for Seniors in Cote-St-Luc in Quebec. But she was always smiling and friendly to everyone. She wanted to shake hands with anyone who passed by. She was always happy, so much so that the women who came to visit mother regularly from Howick United Church (my last pastoral charge) said, “Visiting mama made us feel happy every time.” On Christmas Eve in 2003, a cleaning lady who came to sweep the floor of my mother’s room found her smiling at her as usual. She wanted to hold her hand as usual. But she didn’t let go of the hand a few minutes later. It was only when the cleaning lady tried to get her hand loose, she found mother already in another world still smiling.  She was ninety-six years old.  Her ashes were devided into two.  One part went back to Japan and was burried at Ginza Church Cemetery in Tokyo with her husband – my father.  The other part is now burried with my ancesters in St. Louis-de-Ginzague United Church Cemetery in Quebec.

FISH FOR BREAKFAST

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on the occasion of my 50^th Anniversary of ordination

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Jesus broiled fish on charcoal. This was breakfast he prepared for Peter and others after his resurrection . I like this story, because I like fish for breakfast: Smoked salmon on a bagel, Lake Winnipeg smoked gold-eye on toast, grilled mackerel on Japanese rice. Yum! Besides I am a practical person. I don’t understand spirituality all that well. But I understand food. For me spirituality is a practical matter like overcoming hunger or working for justice. Jesus prepared a breakfast by barbequing fish for Peter and others. Jesus’ resurrection diminishes death to just another passage in our lives; it’s the end of hopelessness. It means we can start a new chapter with a good breakfast – fish on bread by the lake with friends. It sounds so happy, and indeed it was a happy time. It was a celebration.

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Another reason I like this story is the ‘letting-go’ aspect of it. Jesus totally let go of the sad past, and behaved as though nothing had ever happened between him and the disciples a few days before he died. Remember, the disciples behaved shamefully. Where were they when Jesus needed friends? Where were they when Jesus was arrested, tried and killed? They were nowhere; they ran away. Peter, the leader of the pack, even denied that he ever knew Jesus at all. He was so scared of being seen as having had any connection with the person who was on trial. Just a few hours before Jesus’ arrest, he had sworn to Jesus, “I will go anywhere with you, I will even die with you.” What a liar, what a coward, what a scumbag! Who needs enemies with friends like that? But on that beach, Jesus behaved as though nothing like that ever happened. The story of “Fish for breakfast on the beach” is about letting go of the shortcomings of others and of forgiveness.

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When I think back on my fifty years, I am overwhelmed by the amazing grace that allowed me to be a part of God’s on-going project of spreading love to the whole creation. I am a man of many shortcomings. I could very well be any one of those cowardly disciples, who were invited to that breakfast. God gave me many privileges to be a witness for amazing people doing amazing things. The people I met were brave, committed, and totally faithful to those they loved and to the causes they believed in. They were truly martyrs.

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Here I wish to explain a little about the words ‘witness’ and ‘martyr. The Greek word for ‘witness’ is ‘martrion’, which became the English word for ‘martyr’. It came from the stories of brave acts of early Christians, who never denied what they saw even at the risk to their lives. They never ceased to be witnesses to the amazing life of Jesus Christ. This is how the word ‘witness’ came to mean ‘martyr’. They didn’t seek death. They were simply determined to be truthful to what they witnessed.

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An example of such a witness is the captain of the company of Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus. He supervised the execution and saw how Jesus died. After Jesus died, he said, “Truly, this man was a son of God.” The captain was not a follower of Jesus. To him, Jesus was just another condemned prisoner. The soldier was simply following orders to execute a criminal. He had no idea who the prisoner was.

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When I think about many people I encountered in my life, I feel like this captain. Perhaps this is very clear when I think of going to Africa in 1968. I wasn’t volunteering to do anything extraordinary or dangerous. I just wanted to go to Africa. There I met Desmond Tutu, teaching in the same department with me. I met Steve Biko, in the Student Christian Movement. But most of the people I met, courageous though they may have been, nobody knows their names. But they were amazing people and did amazing things.

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Many South Africans remained nameless. Mapetla Mohapi was one of them: he was a treasurer of an organization Steve Biko ran, and I, as a supporter of Biko’s cause, had many contacts with him. He was strangled to death in his cell in King Williams Town near Durban. Nobody remembers his name. He worked just as hard as Steve Biko for the dignity of Black people in South Africa. I taught at the University in Lesotho, and worked with Student Christian Movement of South Africa during the 1970”s. After I was expelled from South Africa, I worked from Geneva, Switzerland to continue to support people who were working to change the unjust system. I think, for example, of students who were shot by the police in Soweto in 1976. I was a Canadian, I was safe in Switzerland or in Canada, but those South Africans risked their lives. It was those nameless people – as much as the Tutus or Bikos – who fought injustice, and brought down the Apartheid regime.

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Another such heroic person was an Ethiopian woman. I saw her walking towards of a feeding camp in the city of Makele in northern Ethiopia. At the time, I was the coordinator of famine relief for the World Council of Churches during the 1980”s. She was so emaciated and weak, and could hardly walk. A few people tried to help her and to hold her by the arms. But she kept shooing away the helping hands. She was proud and looked dignified like any farmer around the world. Farmers are proud people anywhere. They think receiving charity is a humiliation and a shame. Probably that’s why she stayed home trying to feed the family anyway she could during the severe drought and famine, after her crops failed. She should have given up and started to walk towards charity much earlier before she got so weak. I saw her later in the camp lying on a floor looking at a digestive cookie: the usual first easy to digest food given to extremely malnourished persons, just to give them sugar. She didn’t even have a strength to lift it to her mouth, so she was just looking at it. A nurse had to put it between her lips. She probably died a few hours later. She had a cross around her neck, like many Ethiopians who are Orthodox Christians. But I still remember her act of defiance as though to say, “Go away, I can do it by myself.” She was a witness to the power of human dignity.

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I think of the Japanese Canadians I worked among when I first came to Canada in 1957. You may know that most of Japanese who came to Canada beginning 1892 were not Christians. Those who joined the church did so rightly or wrongly believing that becoming Christians was the way to become Canadians. They believed that Canada was a good country and they gave up the old tradition and embraced a new religion despite an accusation by fellow immigrants for being traitors to their heritage.. The test of their faith came during the Second World War. The country they believed in to be fair and just betrayed them, and called them “enemy aliens,” even though there was no such evidence. All cars, fishing boats, all property, even radios, were confiscated before they were removed from the coast. I did research on this when I was working for my Master’s degree in B.C. But they held on to the Christian belief and didn’t abandon the church, believing that Canadians would eventually see the light. Now they are a part of the fabric of Canada and most certainly of Southern Alberta.

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I remember Palestinian Christian Doris Salleh, Kameel Nassr, Elias Khoury, and Alfred Noursi, in East Jerusalem, people I met when I was working for the Canadian Council of Churches during the 1980”s. They were much younger than I was. They all died young. Their daily stress of working for the well-being of Palestinian people under Israeli occupation in West Bank and East Jerusalem took a big toll on their health. Their lives were and still are incredibly difficult. But they never stopped. Many Christian Palestinians migrated to the western countries like Canada, but those friends I mentioned were determined to stay to work for their people and have paid the price.

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They are the people who expressed their spirituality in practical terms, in their struggle for justice and human dignity. They taught me so much about ministry, about being a faithful witness, about forgiveness and letting-go, and about the importance of having time for a celebratory meal together, of not giving into hopelessness. I am so honored to have known them by name, by being able to say, “They were my friends. I don’t know why I have been privileged to have met them. I guess I just happened to be there like the soldier who happened to see Jesus crucified. I was doing a job, and they were there, we often ate together, and I saw what they did. The least I can do is to tell their stories.

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WHO WAS JUDGED IN RABAUL?

On the day just before he was executed by a firing squad of the Australian Army, Navy Lieutenant Paul Hideo Katayama of the Imperial Japanese Navy wrote a letter to Rev. G. H. Young, the Chaplain of the War Criminals Compound in Rabaul in the Pacific Islands. It is dated 23^rd October, 1947.

“Dear Rev. Young:

I am sorry that I could not have my funeral service conducted by you, so I asked Mr. Sato to do it. Mr. TAKAHAI, a member of church, will also be executed. We are very calm and have a great hope to see our Lord face to face. We are very happy that we can die as “Christians.”

I wish you every success and happiness in His name.

Yours sincerely

                    Paul Hideo Katayama”

A photocopy of this extraordinary letter was given to me by Ms Hiroko Imamura, a journalist working for “Gospel for the Millions” – a Japanese evangelical monthly, who found it at the Australian War Memorial when she was researching for an article about Lieutenant Katayama in 2006. (Ms Imamura studied theology at Regent College of the University of British Columbia.)

Ms Imamura first contacted me in early 2006. She was looking for any information about Lieutenant Katayama. She thought I could shed some light on his church life, because he was a member of Ginza Church, part of the United Church of Christ in Japan in downtown Tokyo where my father was the minister during the war. While Katayama was on trial in Rabaul and subsequently waiting for execution, he entrusted my father, Rev. Isamu Mitsui, with all his correspondence for delivery. They were his letters to his wife of a few months, other family members, and friends in Japan. So Ms Imamura asked me if I remembered anything about Lieutenant Katayama.

Though, I didn’t have any memory of any personal contact with him. The only thing I remembered about him was a reference my father made in his sermon on the day after Katayama’s execution. He said something to the effect that Mr. Katayama was like Jesus: he died for the crimes other people committed. However, I don’t remember any mention made about him in the church after that sermon. I suppose 1947 was not a good year to speak too often about a church member who was a war criminal and was executed by the victorious Allied Forces. At the time, my father’s church was full of American soldiers, who came to worship with us. So the subject was dropped completely. But during all those 60 years, I had from time to time wondered what the story was all about. Then Ms Imamura contacted me.

I was not able to provide any new information beside the memory of my father’s sermon about Katayama and the names of some people in Ginza Church who might have known him more. That was the extent of my contribution to Ms Imamura’s research. The special issue of the “Gospel for the Millions” to commemorate the end of the World War II in the Pacific was published in August, 2006. Ms. Hiroko Imamura kindly sent a copy to me. In it, Lieutenant Katayama’s story was featured prominently. I was astonished by the amount of work that went into a short magazine article. She found survivors of the Rabaul War Criminal Compound, letters, his diary, photos, including materials from the Australian Archives at the War Memorial Museum. She also interviewed a former Australian military policeman who participated in Katayama’s execution. There was even a movie made in Australia about Katayama in 1990. She wrote to me that she had so much material that she decided eventually she would like to write a book about him.

What emerged from her investigation was a cover-up scheme by the Japanese military to protect the officers in high command which included a member of the royal family. It made a junior officer, Lieutenent Katayama, the sole scapegoat. The alleged war crime was the execution of a few Allied Forces airmen, who had been taken prisoners when their plane was shot down, and were charged for the deaths of civilians. They were summarily tried, sentenced to death and immediately executed. It was probably the case of what today’s military euphemism would call “collateral damage.” Katayama was supposed to be one of a group of seamen who had carried out the execution. He was probably an interpreter who read the death sentence, as his job in the navy was a language officer.

During WW II, many Christian Japanese soldiers is that because of their better command of foreign languages, they were assigned to the communication and/or the intelligence unit. They were often interpreters and/or translators. This was the case for Lieutenant Katayama. He was in the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages when he was conscripted. He was particularly proficient in English. Having an uncle who was married to an English woman must have made English part of his life. He was a language officer in the Communication Unit, and often acted as an interpreter. He had access to much military information. This is why after repatriation to Japan, he did not hesitation to voluntarily report to the Allied Occupation Forces War Crime Investigation Unit, when he heard that witnesses were being sought in a case of the killing of Allied airmen in the Pacific. He was surprised that he was immediately arrested because he was the only one who reported in for the particular case of war crime. He was sent back to the Pacific and interned at Rabaul War Criminal Compound of the Australian Army on the New Britain Islands off New Guinea. He had just married to his long time fiancé only a few months before.

During the trial, it became clear that Katayama was to be the only culprit charged in the case. As soon as he discovered that no one else had reported, he was puzzled and dismayed and spoke about this with Rev. Tamezo Harada, who was a minister who guided Katayama into Christian faith and baptism – a father figure. Just before Katayama was shipped back to the Pacific for the trial and subsequent execution, Rev. Harada came to visit him all the way from Kyuushu (the Southmost island of Japan) at the Tokyo Detention Centre where he was held. Katayama recorded the conversation with his beloved minister in his diary. They spoke about giving one’s life for a friend as the highest form of love. Reading the diary, one is struck by the almost surreal lack of bitterness on the part of Katayama.

During his detention in Rabaul and while waiting for the execution, he became friends with the Australian Chaplain for the War Criminal Compound, Captain G.H. Young. He became Rev. Young’s interpreter. Eventually, two men organized a church in the compound with regular worship services, a Bible study group, a prayer meeting, etc. Katayama became a lay preacher for the congregation doing a lot of pastoral work and teaching. It was during this period of waiting, many Australians became convinced that Lieutenant Katayama was innocent – a scapegoat setup by his superior officers. Don Ball, a military policeman, was one of then. They started to work hard to appeal his sentence. But there just weren’t enough days, as the Allied Forces became anxious to conclude the operation of the B & C class war crime courts. Even the chief prosecutor of the Rabaul War Crime Court became uneasy about the Katayama’s guilt. But it was too late.

Don Ball, one of the Australian military policemen who participated in Katayama’s execution was then only 19 years old at the time. Katayama spoke to him while he was tying him to the chair. Kataya didn’t want a blind. He said, “I’m not afraid to die.” But Ball persuaded him that it was for the members of the firing squad, so that their trauma would be lessened. Ball also remembered Katayama saying, “Thank you.” to the medical officer who marked the heart with a white piece of cloth. When his eyes were covered, he asked for a moment to say the Lord’s Prayer. Ball joined him holding Katayama’s shoulder. When the prayer was concluded, Ball ran and hid behind a rock. He could not bear watching the man shot with whom he just said a prayer. A few seconds later, Ball heard the word, “Fire.” He could not hold back tears while wrapping Katayama’s body with a blanket on a stretcher. Lieutenant Paul Hideo Katayama was executed by a firing squads on October 23, 1947. Exactly sixty years ago.

MY FATHER’S IMAGE OF A GOOD PERSON

June 24, 2006 is my father’s 50th anniversary of his death. On this day, I wanted to remember him by reciting the poem, by Kenji Miyazawa, he liked very much. My father was my hero; gentle, kind, and unassuming. He was much loved by many people. He died much too early at his age 50, while in his active ministry at Ginza Church in downtown Tokyo. The following poem humbles me when I realize that my father had such a humble life as his role model.

Tad Mitsui, June 25, 2006

NOT BEATEN BY RAIN

by Kenji Miyazawa

Not beaten by rain, nor by wind,

Neither by snow, nor by heat of a summer,

With such a healthy body.

Not greedy, never petulant, always smiling quietly.

Eating two cups of unpolished rice a day,

With a bit of miso and some vegetables,

I do not count myself in any matter,

I listen, observe, and understand well,

Forgetting nothing,

Living in a little thatched roof cottage,

In the shadow of a small pine grove in a plain.

If there is a sick child in the east,

I would go to take care of him;

If there is a tired mother in the west,

I would go to carry her bundle of rice straw.

If there is a dying man in the north,

I would go to tell him “There is no need to be afraid.”

If there is a quarrel or a court case in the south,

I would go to tell them, “Don’t be a bore.”

Shedding tears in a drought,

Wandering aimlessly in a cold summer,

Everybody calls me, “Blockhead.”

Nobody praises me,

I bother nobody.

I want to be a person like that.

Papa loved to sing.  He had an enormously resonant voice.  I remember often hearing Papa’s  voice distinctive from a congregation of hundreds.  He was aware of that too and wondered aloud if he should donate his vocal cords to a medical school.  He should have said that in his will, because his death was so sudden and unexpected that nobody thought of anything like donating his organs.  He was only 50 years old when he died in his sleep.

As I said, Papa loved to sing, and he taught us kids many songs. He often sang for us as we walked.   There were many of Papa’s songs.  But unfortunately, I can remember only four.  I looked up some old song books – children’s and otherwise –  and  tried to find the origins of those songs.  I also hoped that I would be able to remember forgotten ones if I looked at old songs in those books.  I could not find any of them.  Sometimes, I wonder if some of the songs he sang were his own creation.

Just before World War II began, the Mitsuis lived in the minister’s  apartment in Ginza Methodist Church.  It stood right in the middle of downtown Tokyo.  But after a few months, we moved from the apartment in the church building to a rented house in the Setagaya District of Tokyo.  Setagaya today is very much in the heart of urban Tokyo.  But in those days, it was still outside of the urban sprawl.  I don’t know why we moved.  Probably it was because my parents thought Ginza was too much downtown for children to grow up.  In the woods in Setagaya, there still stood old feudal estates, which had probably belonged to a magistrate or a sheriff during the feudal Tokugawa period a century before.  My uncle used to practice archery in that estate.  Farms and barns stood in the fields.  New housing developments  were just beginning here and there.  We had no bath in our newly-built rented house.  So, we went to a public communal bath house.   I remember that going to the bath-house was a lot of fun.  We could see the moon between branches of huge zelkova trees as we were walking back from the bath.  Papa sang this song in those moonlit evenings

Mr. Moon, are you traveling
Alone in the sky tonight?
There are sardine clouds
In front of you.
There are flying fish
Behind you, too.
Help yourself when you are hungry.
They make delicious dinner. *

* Note: This is, and other songs in this chapter are, a literal translation of the original Japanese lyrics.  I attempted to be more faithful to the meaning of the lyrics rather than to the rhythm of the music.  In other words, the words do not necessarily match the music.

There must have been a few more verses, but I don’t remember them Papa was a romantic and enjoyed traveling alone.  He loved people but he enjoyed solitude too.  He also loved to eat very much.  Maybe that’s why I remember this song.  It reminds me of Papa so much.

When Papa was transferred from Tobe Methodist Church in Yokohama to Ginza Methodist Church in Tokyo, he was in his early thirties.  He was young and inexperienced and did many outrageous things.  That’s why I remember him being lots of fun during those days.  I remember the week he got high school boys together and held a Sumo Wrestling tournament in a largest room in the manse.  At the end of the week, the floor was a total wreck; tatami mats, floor boards and supporting beams, the whole thing.  I don’t exactly remember why it had to be held indoors.  It must have been winter.  Next week, he mobilized the same boys to fix the floor.  At another time, he pushed all the pews to the corners of the sanctuary and stacked them all up to make room for a Kendo (Japanese Fencing) tournament.  On another occasion, there was an almighty commotion on the roof of the church.  My great grand-mother found kids playing up there.  So she told them to stop instantly and come down. To her surprise, the first one who came down the ladder was Papa, the minister of the church.  It’s a wonder that the bishop let him stay  in that church for a full term of four years.

This is why his appointment to a famous church in a big city came as a big surprise, even though it was in a position of mere Assistant Minister.   Many people came to congratulate Papa for his promotion.   The tone of their comments were sort of like, “How did you pull that off?”  But it sounded as though it was  an unexpected surprise for him, too.   It was before the church union, still in the time of the Methodist Church in Japan with its episcopal system like that of the Methodist Church in the United States.  I wonder if bishops made such surprise appointments from time to time.  At any rate, he was to be Assistant Minister to his former teacher, Dr. Saburo Imai, who was known for his stirring oratory and great sermons.  My father might have decided to accept the appointment to Ginza Church to help his old teacher and as a temporary stepping stone to get into Tokyo, where his adopted family lived.  But Dr. Imai died suddenly after only a few months, and Papa ended up being the Minister-in-Charge.  He must have then resolved to be a little bit more cautious and respectable.  He stopped being fun in Ginza.  I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that a song he taught us during those days seemed to be dealing with the question of real versus fake prophets.

There is an old clock
On the  tower of an ancient castle.
Everyday, the clock loses a minute or two.
Villagers know nothing about this.
Looking at the clock on the castle
In the morning and in the evening,
The villagers correct theirs.

Eventually, the Moon begins to shine
In the dark sky, at noon.
And the working day ends
Before dews have yet dried.

Villagers know  nothing about this still.
Looking at the clock of the castle,
They correct theirs just like
They have been doing for years.

It’s only the swallows
Who know what’s going on.
But, though they know
What’s wrong with the clock,
They are only birds.
They loop the loop in the sky
Not telling anything.

Another reason my father may have accepted the job in Ginza was to be closer to where his adopted family lived.  My father was adopted by my mother’s grand parents to continue the Mitsui’s family name.  He left his birth family and quit medical school against the wishes of his parents to go to the theological school.  My maternal great-grandparents had lost their sons in the Russo-Japan War at the beginning of the 20th century.  They adopted my mother at birth.  She grew up as a Mitsui and married my father who changed his name to Mitsui, and became an adopted son.  This is a common practice in Japan even today when there is no male heir to continue the family name.  The Mitsuis were a relatively well-to-do family.  I remember the big estate in Shibuya in the centre of Tokyo, where my grand parents, aunts and an uncle lived.  There were several tenement houses within the estate.    By the time I came to Canada, we did not own any property nor any money.  How we lost everything is a mystery which nobody of my parents’ generation spoke about.  So I never asked.  But I remember, when we lived in Setagaya, my father went to the court often with my maternal grandfather.  I have no idea if my parents’ decision to move to Tokyo had anything to do with the demise of the Mitsui fortune.

As the war neared the end, Papa’s pastoral work became very difficult.  By then, we were living in Setagaya, somewhat away from the centre of the city in Ginza, and were not fully aware of what was happening to my father’s life.  I was told later that he was often called to the Special Police Unit.  This was a special security police force that watched citizens for their seditious thoughts.  Papa did not come home from time to time.   Rumors had it that he spent quite a few nights in the detention centre.   He never spoke to us about it.  For the reason I mentioned the above and for other reasons, the time we kids could spend with Papa became very precious.

During those days when Papa was home, all six of us – Papa, Mama, three sisters, and me often sang the following action song.  We made a circle holding hands, and walked around in the circle singing, “It’s opening, it’s opening.”  We made the circle bigger as we sang “It’s opening.”  As it became smaller we sang, “It’s closing” until the circle was so small we were almost hugging each other.

“It’s opening, it’s opening.
What is it that is opening?
A lotus flower is opening.
Soon, evening comes,
And it closes in no time.

It’s closing, it’s closing.
What is it that is closing?
A lotus flower is closing.
Soon, morning comes,
And it opens in no time.”

We sang this song going around the circle over and over again.  We did this until we began to perspire.  I must have been 8 or 9 years old, when the boys of that age normally should not have been seen playing with girls, especially with one’s own sisters.  Taeko was a year younger, Junko six years younger and Kokko seven years younger.  Kokko must have just started to walk.  I now wonder why this is such a fond memory for me.  I can think of two reasons.  For one thing, we were so happy that Papa was at home with us.  Another reason is the fact that Taeko and I did not have friends outside of the Sunday School.  Because we lived away from the church, the Sunday School friends were not nearby to play with us on weekdays.  At school, teachers and class mates called us “American spies” and bullied us.  On many days, I didn’t want to go to school.  I lied a few times faking a stomach ache, and stayed home.  The situation became a little better after I became friends with the boy next door, whose father happened to be a navy captain.  When my aunt married a widower lieutenant colonel army doctor, the abuse stopped.  But I never made friends at school during the war.

The war was coming to its inevitable  conclusion and the nightly air raids became more devastating than ever.  The government decreed that all school children must be evacuated from the large cities.  Those who did not have any connections with the countryside through friends or relatives were moved to the make-shift boarding schools, which were set up in many large buildings in the mountains or country villages.  My sisters moved with Mama to my grandfather’s village in the Yamanashi Prefecture, on the west side of Mount Fuji.  I moved to Numazu City, where Papa had served his first pastoral charge, because there was no Grade 7 in  grandfather’s village.  I stayed with a family of former parishioners of Papa’s – Mr. and Mrs. Wada.  Mr. Wada was blind and a massage therapist.

Many children who were moved to the temporary residential schools were homesick.  Mothers of those children became nervous wrecks from worrying about them.  So Papa began to visit those schools for evacuee children.  He carried a paper picture show with him called “A Narrow Path in the Back Country.” *

* The paper picture show was sort of like the slide show to tell stories with still pictures – photographs or more often painted pictures.  It was a popular form of entertainment for Japanese children during the early 20th Century.

It was the story of a 17th century Haiku master, called Basho – a monk who loved to travel.  In fact, he traveled all his creative life on foot and wrote Haiku about the places he visited.  Papa showed the picture show to the children everywhere.  There was a song that went with it which he sang.  The song was based on Basho’s Haiku and his journey.  The song became my favorite.  Unfortunately I remember only the first verse:

“It is so precious!
Traveling has become my home.
I follow a narrow path
Covered with tall green grass.
Shoulder straps of my back pack
Are hard on my tired old bones,
But my staff is ever so comforting.
Futara mountain in May
Is full of young green leaves
Dancing in the sunbeams.”

Papa’s life was like the life of Basho – the life of a sojourner.  Basho traveled many places writing Haiku as he did.  Papa traveled through his life singing.  Eventually, he went back to his real home probably singing all his favorite songs.

I met Craig Williamson one day in July, 1975 at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport in South Africa.  For the next five years, I never had any doubt that he was a trusted ally, a comrade-in-arms  in a common cause, a valuable source of information and wisdom, and even  a friend.  But in 1980, I found out  that he had always been a mole for the South African Security Authority with a rank of something like captain. Though at first I felt betrayed by him, “betrayal” was not exactly the right word to use for Craig Williamson, because truthfulness for him had never been in his job description.  Deception was his nine-to-five job. He was very good at it.  Very few people suspected him of being anything other than what he was pretending to be – a dedicated fighter against apartheid.   A  few women I knew thought that he was a bit creepy, but even those who didn’t like him did not suspect him of being so monstrous as to be a spy.

I must be honest; I liked Craig Williamson.  He was always good to me and very helpful. My nature is to trust people. I don’t begin  a relationship with doubt.  I am a sucker in that was, I guess.  I feel sorry for a door-to-door fund- raiser or sales person.  Besides, Craig was out to charm me.  I was  game – a sitting duck.  My experience with Craig Williamson taught me to be a little bit more careful about people.  I suppose that is sad.  But the reality is: we have to teach children not to speak to strangers on the street.  Still, I feel sad about such reality.  I should have known better the dubious quality of human nature.

When I first met Craig, I was on my way to Lesotho from  Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I had just spent a night at the transit hotel in the airport building.   Since I had been made a prohibited immigrant in South Africa  in 1972, I always had to stay in the airport building to wait for a connecting flight . I had been what South African Government called a prohibited immigrant and had never been admitted into South Africa since 1972.  My association and friendship with those whom South African Government considered to be subversive, with people like Desmond Tutu, made me a threat to the security of the state.  Desmond was a colleague in the same Theology Department in the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, where I taught Theology.  So, I had to arrange the meetings with South African program partners either in Botswana or in Lesotho. But before leaving Rhodesia I learned that Karel Tip, President of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS had been arrested a few days earlier. Tip was one of the people I was supposed to meet in Lesotho.  So, I had no idea what awaited me in South Africa, now that he had been arrested. I must say I was scared.

Though Williamson and I had never met, he spotted me as I was lining up to check in for the flight to Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.  A heavy-set man with a bearded round face, he came to me and asked, “Are you Tad Mitsui?”  Then he said, “I’m Craig Williamson,” and introduced himself as Vice-President of NUSAS. I was glad to meet him. He said he had come in Karel’s place and that he’d fly with me to Lesotho.  He was with another heavy-set man by the name of Barry Streek, who introduced himself as a reporter for the Daily Dispatch of King Williams Town.

In May, 1975, I took up a job of Associate Secretary for Eastern and Southern Africa at the international headquarters of the World University Service (WUS International) in Geneva.  During those days, WUS International had a huge program in southern Africa, mainly in Rhodesia and South Africa.  At the time, Rhodesia was known by its colonial name even after  Prime Minister Ian Smith had declared unilateral independence.  South Africa, of course, was ruled by the racial apartheid laws.  WUS International had many projects to support anti-Apartheid activists, often student groups, and to assist black students in universities through scholarships.  In July, 1975 I began a six-week sojourn, touring Eastern and Southern Africa to meet the people who were implementing WUS programs there.
 
The last stop before Lesotho was in Salisbury (now Harare  Rhodesia. WUS International was spending millions of Swiss francs to sponsor black African students at the University of Salisbury, who otherwise could not afford to get university education despite being  academically qualified..  The situation was different in South Africa, where universities were segregated according to race.  Because of the WUS scholarship program, the University of Salisbury had more black African students than whites.  I was staying with the Dean of Residence, . A.P. Knottenbelt (many people called him Knotty on the university campus.  

The night before I was to leave for Johannesburg and  Lesotho, Knotty, his wife Peggy and I were listening to the radio in their living room, just to catch the weather forecast. We were thunderstruck by  the news report of  the arrest of Breyten Breytenbach and Karel Tip by the South African Security Police.  Breyten Breytenbach was a well-known and much loved Afrikaaner poet who had gone into exile in Paris and joined the banned African National Congress.  Apparently, he had come back into South Africa in disguise and under a false passport to visit activists and recruit white members.  Karel Tip was one of those who were on Breytenbach’s  itinerary.  The authorities knew of Breytenbach’s  visit to South Africa from the beginning, most probably because of Craig Williamson, and followed him everywhere.  Near the end of his tour in South Africa, they arrested him and  those whom he had visited.  I was again amazed by how efficient the South African security apparatus was.  I thought that my plan to find out more not only about NUSAS but also about other projects was ruined.  It was particularly important at the time to find a rationale for a white organization to keep implementing programs for the liberation of  blacks, because the Black Consciousness Movement  was gaining strength, and young black Africans were beginning to take control of the programs that were intended to benefit them.

NUSAS had scholarship programs for African students.  One of them was the South African Students’ Education Trust (SASET which was helping to finance the university education of African students through correspondence at the University of South Africa (commonly known as UNISA.)  UNISA was favoured by many black students, because the educational content was not segregated by race and provided the same curriculum to all students regardless of race.  Another program was the South African Medical Students’ Trust (SAMST which helped qualified  black students who could not afford the medical school education.  Finally, there was the South African Prison Education Trust (SAPET which made it possible for  political prisoners to take university courses through UNISA.  WUS provided most of the required funds for those programs, mainly through government grants from Denmark and Sweden.  

However, beginning in the late sixties, just as in the United States’ civil rights movement with the rise of Black Power, the Black Consciousness Movement  began in South Africa first among  university students.  The most prominent leader of this emerging movement was Steve Biko, who, as a third-year medical student, led walk-out of all the black students at the Annual Conference of the University Christian Movement in Pietermeritzburg in 1968.   It is interesting that they chose a forum like the University Christian Movement to make a statement. It was a declaration of intent for the Blacks to take charge of their own liberation.  They no longer believed that liberation was possible through multi-racial organizations.  With better education and available resources, whites always had advantage over Blacks to be in the leadership positions.  They had to see what blacks could do by themselves.  They launched the South African Students’ Organization (SASO)  for blacks only and left NUSAS in 1968.

Back to Jan Smuts Airport. Craig told me that Barry Streek had come to see me on behalf of his wife, Laura Schultz, who had been the administrator of the three scholarship trust funds – SASET, SAMST, and SAPET.  I still don’t know if Streek was  part of Craig’s spy team, or another victim.  In Lesotho, I was staying in the O.M.I.. (Oblates of Mary Immaculate) Monastery on the university campus.  All the meetings with our South African partners took place there.  Williamson and Streek came to see me there also.  They were aware that the emergence of Black Consciousness Movement was a significant development, and that a  shift in policy might be necessary.  But they pointed out that it was a reality of South Africa that the Blacks were more exposed and vulnerable to  pressure from the authorities than the Whites.  Where money was involved, such a practical consideration had to be taken seriously.  I thought they had a point.  As for the three scholarship trusts, Streek  informed me that they were in the process of becoming independently incorporated trust funds, independent from the NUSAS.  This again made sense.

Meetings with South Africans in Lesotho took place a few more times.  I was careful to meet with whites in Lesotho and blacks in Botswana.  Geographically Lesotho was completely surrounded by South Africa.  So Blacks considered Botswana more secure than Lesotho.  I also didn’t want to embarrass either groups to run into each other.  This was the kind of sensitivity we had to exercise since the birth of the Black Consciousness Movement.  I met with Craig once more in Lesotho.  That was when he agreed to carry some cash with him across the border into South Africa.  For some time during those days, the South African government was trying very hard to make life difficult for activist organizations.  The Welfare Organizations Act defined non-profit organizations as such very narrowly hence made it very difficult for many non-profit organizations to receive funds from overseas.  The Affected Organizations Act meant that a certain number of non-profit and non-governmental organizations were deemed contaminated by foreign seductive and/or subversive ideas.  A cash transfer was one of the ways to circumvent the obstacles created by such  legislation.  But it was fraught with pitfalls, such as lack of accountability and corruption being obvious examples.  The rule of law is often the first victim of revolutions and war.  Immoral or unreasonable laws legitimize irregular actions such as guerrilla warfare, which are defined as terrorism under the normal circumstances.

A year or so later, I saw Williamson again in Geneva.   He arrived with the new President of NUSAS, whose name escapes me.  WUS put them up in a cheap hotel near downtown Geneva.  Their itinerary in Switzerland was arranged by two organizations, both based on student activism.  They were WUS and the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF).  WUS began as a service branch of the Student Christian Movement, whose international body was called  the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF).  Its offices were in  Geneva’s historical la Vieille Ville on the hill near St. Pierre Cathedral on rue Calvin, where Protestant Reformer Jean Calvin had lived in the 16th century.    Our South African guests said they wanted to become familiar not only with us but also with other organizations which were working against Apartheid in South Africa, such as the World Council of Churches  and the United Nations.

I don’t remember too much about their visit except an interview I arranged for them with Paulo Freire, the Brazilian guru of popular literacy.  He at the time was in exile in Geneva and employed by the World Council of Churches as a consultant in the Commission on Education.  Another thing that remains in my mind was their opinion of Steve Biko.  The emergence of  the Black Consciousness Movement hit all the white progressive people hard.  They felt excluded from the liberation struggles.  Many accused  black militants of being reverse racists.  .  However, despite their complaints about the emerging black activism, Williamson admitted that Steve Biko was exceptional.  “He is extraordinary,” they said.  In view of Williamson’s important role in Biko’s death a few years later,  it was a significant comment in retrospect.

Williamson didn’t stay in South Africa too much longer after his first visit to Geneva.  We thought  he had become a valuable contact in South Africa because of his insightful knowledge of situation in South Africa.  We valued the information he had sent to us very much.   In fact, because of bits and pieces of information Craig sent to us in various ways, the Executive Director of the IUEF a Swede by the name of Lars-Gunnar Ericson  and I began to have a weekly morning coffee in each others’ offices to compare notes based on Williamson’s intelligence.  But this arrangement didn’t last very long, because Craig decided to come out into exile.  In retrospect, I wonder what kind of insignificant pieces of information Williamson fed us in order to gain credibility with us.  My memory has faded to allow me to analyze this more deeply.

One day in one of those coffee breaks, Ericson informed me that Craig had decided to leave South Africa.  Apparently, Craig had told Ericson that he’d been drafted into the army and didn’t want to fight Black brothers.  When this conversation took place, Craig was already in Botswana.  He walked from Kimberly, through the South African desert into the capital, Gabarone.  This escape route was a very well used one for exiles. Ericson  also told me that he had hired Craig as Information Officer for the IUEF.  Many government aid agencies got hurt very badly, including  the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA  when Williamson  was exposed in 1979.  IUEF was directly blamed for the fiasco, and was forced to disband.  In its report, the International Commission that looked into the scandal prominently listed lack of accountability in the management structure of the IUEF as a major cause.  I was so close to be tempted to make the same mistake as the one Lars-Gunnar made.

While he lived in Geneva, Craig and I became close friends.   We had meals together regularly at my apartment and in restaurants.  He particularly liked a Japanese restaurant called “Kyoto” near Palais des Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations.  It was our custom to up-date our news from  South Africa and check the project proposals coming out of South African activist organizations.   I was never invited  to his apartment.  Even after his wife, Ingrid, joined him, he always invited me to Kyoto.  He said  the food was much better than anything he or Ingrid  could ever prepare.  Even after he was promoted to  Deputy Director of the IUEF, he appeared to me as  candid as he always had been and did not  hesitate to share information and ideas with me. Whenever he touched on tricky subjects of the advantage the IUEF might have over the WUS in a subtle rivalry over government grants, he always said, “the cause is more important than an instrument.  An organization is only an instrument for the cause for me.”

Ingrid Williamson arrived in Geneva a few months after her husband.  She carried a Danish passport, so she was able to come out of South Africa and  into Switzerland legally.  As soon as she joined Craig, she registered in the Medical School at the University of Geneva.  She used to work out with a close colleague of mine – Marco Gramegna – at the university gym.  He liked her, which was quite an achievement, as Marco was a Chilean refugee tortured by the Augusto Pinochet’s police.  He knew the ways of the oppressive regimes and their agents.  Marco had a sharp nose to sniff out suspicious characters.  Marco did not trust some of my South African guests.  In fact, at one meeting which was held in Lesotho, Marco kicked out some South African guests who came asking for me in my absence.  I was very angry with him.  But even Marco didn’t suspect Ingrid.  She was a typically Scandinavian looking woman, handsome and always well dressed.    Perhaps she was a bit too well-dressed for the wife of an NGO employee.  She often traveled  back and forth  between Switzerland and South Africa, something she could do easily because  of  her nationality.  In retrospect, just because she could travel easily isn’t a reason for her doing so.  But we thought that she was helping Craig carrying information back and forth.   Unlike Craig, who  had a natural and self-possessed look, Ingrid looked uneasy, tense, and perhaps scared.  We thought that she was just shy, part of being a inrovert Northern European.

It is interesting to recall the organizations Craig recommended  as worthy of our support and the ones which weren’t, in his opinion.   One time a request came to us  through Desmond Tutu, who at the time was General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches,  from a new organization calling itself  the  “Domestic Workers Project.”  The project was headed by a white woman named Sue Gordon  and was an attempt to organize maids and nannies who were working for white families.  I thought it would be a powerful instrument.  There was no white family in South Africa without at least a black woman working as a maid, cooking and cleaning, and as a nanny looking after their children.  Many white women didn’t know how to cook or clean the house or change diapers.  If you could organize those domestic servants, it would be a terrible threat  to the security of the white community and  knock them out of their complacency.  Craig didn’t like it.  He thought that the workers were so domesticated  they would never be a revolutionary force.  He said it would simply make black women better maids and nannies.   

I am now convinced that I had been right initially.  The organization was later taken over by Leah Tutu, Desmond’s wife.  But I was almost been persuaded by Craig.  I met Sue Gordon in Lesotho.  Sue’s upper class British accent made her sound like a school mistress at an English public school.   Her appearance was that of an upper-class do-gooder.  So I had reason to believe Craig’s word.  I have to admit now that I had prejudice against a ceratin class of people.   But fortunately the WUS was very much a democratic and student- run organization, and the Project Committee approved funding to the Domestic Workers Project.  It may be slow acting but manifests its common sense wisdom in the end.  So WUS began supporting Domestic Workers’ Project.  And I am glad that Craig’s words about Sue and the group was wrong.  Other organizations Craig questioned were an interesting mixture. For some reason, they included the South African Council of Churches, which was perhaps  too theologically sophisticated for him.    Another one was the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED).  Likewise, perhaps SACHED was too professional.  So he said they weren’t revolutionary enough.  But they both turned out to be some of the most effective organizations in keeping  the momentum going against the system within the country.

One group Williamson recommended very highly was the  “Environmental Development Agency” (EDA).
I even asked the United Church of Canada to give it a helping hand,  which it did.  The person in charge was a man by the name of Karl Edwards, a white man claiming to be a student at the University of Witwatersrand.  The EDA’s aim was to train black people living in what was called “Black Homeland” or “Bantustan”  in what we would call “sustainable development”.  It was supposed to sabotage the government’s effort to impoverish  the black homeland.  I don’t think  the project  was a scheme invented by the state security apparatus, but  Karl Edwards  turned out to be a spy who got himself  hired by the organization.  I don’t know how he managed to do that.  Edwards held a lower rank than Williamson in the Security Forces.   I believe that he was a sergeant, while Craig was a captain.  Edwards and his girl friend once came to visit me in Geneva..  He stayed at my apartment.   I did not find him very bright.  I don’t think he was a university student.  Later, he embezzled money from EDA.  Other people in the EDA didn’t know that Edwards was a mole until he quit.  It was the South African police that fired him from the Security Force, thus losing his job as a spy.  

It does make some kind of sense for a puritanical Calvinistic government to be intolerant of a theft of a few thousand dollars, while approving and initiating assassination, murders, and tortures.   I don’t know how the police found out about Edward’s embezzlement.  Certainly the EDA didn’t know that money had been siphoned off.    Marco Gramegna was the one who never trusted Edwards.  He told Edwards to leave, when he came looking for me during a meeting of the Executive in Lesotho.  The police fired Edwards from the security force and returned the money to the EDA without any conviction for embezzlement in the court of law.  It was one of those strange and even stupid things that happened from time to time in South Africa.  There were so many informers, for example, in the University Christian Movement that they were often informing about other informers without knowing their hidden identities.  I am not sure why Craig commended Edwards highly.  I wonder if Craig recommended the EDA highly because he wanted a second informer with him.  But certainly Edwards didn’t live up to Craig’s standard.

One last project Craig and I collaborated on was a plan to establish a dummy company in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein which bordered on Austria and Switzerland.  For no better reason – than my own procrastination, the WUS never joined the venture.  If we had, the results would have been disastrous.  As I mentioned before, sending money into South Africa to support the anti-apartheid activists  was increasingly difficult.  In retrospect, it is interesting and revealing that we had no difficulty supporting long established organizations like SACC, SACHED, or the Institute of Race Relations.   They were competent, professional, and their integrity was beyond reproach.  They always insisted on doing everything openly, even though the South African government was openly hostile to them and harassed them in many ways including a bombing of the SACC headquarters.  It was also interesting that Craig Williamson steered clear of those above-board organizations.  At any rate, we were in search of different ways to transfer funds.   Craig came up with the idea of a dummy company in Liechtenstein.  For years, Switzerland has been known for allowing  numbered bank accounts for those people who wanted to hide their money.  But Switzerland was getting more nervous about the numbered accounts  because the country was now affluent and valued its good name.  It no longer wanted to be known as a country where dictators and organized crimes could hide their money.  In the meantime, many other small countries, including Liechtenstein,  were stepping into Switzerland’s place and began imitating the ways of numbered accounts.  So the idea was to create a dummy company Lichtenstein in order to transfer funds into South Africa.  It should look like a pure business transaction, which might be difficult fot for South African authorities to crack down, because South Africans themselves were using those dummy companies to circumvent the international sanction.  At least, that was the idea.  It was difficult for me to sell such an idea in the WUS, because the WU was an open and democratic organization.  The bureaucracy was kept on a short leash by the students on theExecutive .  Governments who provided a large proportion of funds demanded strict accountability too.  So I hesitated, and my time at the WUS  ran out.  I came back to Canada in late 1979 to take a job with  the Canadian Council of Churches.  But apparently, the IUEF went ahead and created a company called “ Southern Cross, S.A.” (Societe Anonyme) in Liechtenstein.   

In December, 1979, I was shocked by a telephone call from Richard Taylor from Geneva telling me that Craig Williamson had always been a South African spy.  Richard wanted to know the nature of  my relationship with Craig Williamson   He particularly wanted to know how much I told Craig about Steve Biko.  That disturbed me more than anything else.  I did introduce Desmond Tutu to Williamson.  We had a dinner together at a restaurant called l’Avenir on Avenue Louis Casai near the Geneva Airport in Cointrin.  But I don’t think Craig did anything about the connection with Desmond.  SACC for some reason was a “no-go” area for Craig.  But as for Steve, yes, we did talk about him a lot.  But I don’t think I added anything new to what he had already known.  In fact, Craig Williamson was a major source of information about Steve – what he was doing and his whereabouts.  In fact, when Steve Biko died it was Craig Williamson who phoned me at my apartment only a few hours after his death.  I remember vividly that evening.  Ray Whitehead, the Coordinator of the Canada-China Programme at the time, was staying at my apartment.  When I heard of Steve’s death, it was such a big shock that I nearly collapsed.  

Steve Biko for me was the hope for South Africa.  ANC had been a banned organization so long as I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement in Lesotho and in Switzerland.  I was never involved in the clandestine activities.  Among the young activists who were still working above board, Biko represented the brightest hope.  He was creative, brave, energetic, charismatic, articulate, and best of all full of humor.  I liked him a lot personally.  I felt like all my hopes were dashed.   Ray whitehead remembered that dreadful evening.  He told me so when I finally reached Toronto and started to work for the Canadian Council of Churches.  Ray came to Geneva for a WCC meeting but stayed with me partly because he wanted to persuade me to apply for the job at the CCC.   I could not work for about a week because of the shock of the news.  Now I am convinced that Craig Williamson played a major role in the arrest and murder of Steve Biko.

Coming back to “Southern Cross S.A.”, I don’t know what Williamson’s real intention in suggesting such a real cloak and dagger stuff was.  But I can say that it did create a beginning of the end of his career in Geneva.  It also ended the life of an organization – IUEF.  According to an IUEF staff person by the name of Chris Beer, who lost his job due to the dissolution of the organization, Craig Williamson disclosed his real identity by attempting to blackmail Lars-Gunnar Ericson in order to make him an agent of the South African spy network in Geneva and Scandinavian capitals.   Many anti-Apartheid organizations were based in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  Almost they were the major source of funds for anti-apartheid activities.   Chris speculated that Craig knew there were enough irregularities in the administration of funds apparently, for Lars-Gunnar to fear a full disclosure of the financial operation of the “Southern Cross, S.A.”  I ran into Chris in a bar in Khartoum in July, 1980.  I was then already employed by the Canadian Council of Churches, and Chris by another NGO in Geneva.  Secrecy does not encourage accountability, and lack of accountability provides opportunities for corruption, I guess.  According to the press when Craig’s real identity was exposed, the meeting between Craig and Lars-Gunnar took place in a bar in Zurich in the presence of another higher officer of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS).  To his credit, Lars-Gunnar refused to be co-opted, and threatened two South Africans in turn to report to the Swiss Authority.  In Switzerland, violating  bank secrecy is a serious offence, and Lars-Gunnar used that argument to scare the South Africans.  Two South Africans immediately took off to return to their country, where Craig was welcomed as a hero, I was told.

I have no idea about the extent of the damage Craig Williamson caused.  I am now sure that he was the main instigator and planner of the murder of Steve Biko.  Some of the people who were injured or killed by letter bombs were reported to have received parcels or letters from “IUEF”.  The press reported that they were all expecting post from a supporter in Geneva.  Abram Tiro was blown up by a parcel from IUEF in Gaberone, Botswana.  My close friend John Osmers, an Anglican priest from New Zealand lost his right hand and his genital when he was opening a parcel from Geneva in Lesotho.  He claimed that the bomb did not cause too much inconvenience on his part.  “I am left-handed.  And I am a celibate monk,” he said.  Michael Lapsely, another Anglican monk from New Zealand was also injured by a letter bomb in Zimbabwe.  Ruth First, a South African journalist and wife of Joe Slovo, both of whom were very close friends of Nelson Mandela, was also killed in Mozambique in the same way.  I also heard the news about a raid into an ANC camp in Swaziland led by “Captain Williamson.”

What I know and can speculate about the extent of damage this episode caused is mainly personal.  I know that IUEF could not survive.  But there must have been a great deal more damage done to the governments’ programs.  An international governmental commission of enquiry was instituted chaired by David MacDonald, who held an important position in the Progressive Conservative Party at the time.  I believe it was the time when Brian Mulroney was in power, and MacDonald was a member of Parliament.  I asked a CIDA official later if I could see the report of the commission.  I was told that it was a top secret document.  It must have been a very embarrassing incident for many governmental aid agencies.  One concrete result of the Craig Williamson incident was much more strict accounting procedures for the Scandinavian governments.  From my own experience of dealing with Canadian money from CIDA, I could tell that Canada already had a fairly strict set of procedures and requirements, which incidentally could not have prevented the fiasco created by Williamson.

I understand that Craig Williamson appeared before Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  I wondered if Desmond remembered that dinner we had with Craig at l’Avenir on Avenue Louis Casai.  I have not heard how much he confessed.  I have not heard if he was officially forgiven.  But one thing I know: he is alive and well in Johannesburg, in fact doing rather well in an import and export business with Mozembique.  When I was in Johannesburg as a member of the International and Ecumenical observer team for the first General Election in 1994, some friends in Johannesburg thought that I should see Craig Williamson.  One of them, who happened to be a journalist, found a telephone number and address.  Alas, I did not have guts to pick up the telephone.  Besides, what could I say if I see him?  I still have the telephone number.

CROOKS OF MY FAMILY

I Uncle Masuo Maruyama (Back thord from the right in the photograph)

I think it was in my last year of university in 1955. One day I received a big check from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture. I don’t quite remember the amount. In the hundreds of thousands perhaps. It was extraordinarily huge at any rate. I had no idea how I got such a big fat reward from the government. It said that it was a payment for the service I rendered in translation. I never did any such thing. I didn’t cash it, because I was convinced that there was a mistake somewhere somehow. I had nevertheless a warm and fuzzy feeling that by some slim chance I may have made a fortune and became a rich man.

A few days later, uncle Masuo Maruyama, husband of my mother’s next oldest sister, showed up in my house and asked me if I got a check from the ministry. “Yes.” I said and asked, “What is that for?” Uncle said, “It was a mistake. You have to give it to me.” He worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. It made sense; so I gave it to him and didn’t think too much about it.

A few months later, a news about a big scandal in the Ministry of Agriculture broke in the media. Many big shots in the ministry, including the minister, were involved in stealing billions of yens from the government. Several of them went to prison. Nowhere appeared the name of my uncle. He must have been a small fish. I don’t remember the exact nature of scandal, but I had surmised that somehow my uncle was involved in it because he lost his job at the same time. It was too embarrassing for me to ask questions about such a scandal in the family.

That was not the only time he got into trouble. After he lost the government job, he was employed by King Record, a huge music label in Japan. A cousin of mine was working there as a producer and he needed a person fluent in languages. My uncle had a few languages, fluent in English and French. He used to be in diplomatic service during the WW II, but lost the job when Japan surrendered to the Allies. I think it was because of a purge ordered by the occupation authorities prohibiting all civil servants , military personnel, and politicians to engage a certain number of areas of the society. I remember seeing pictures of my uncle in some tropical countries, all in white and a pith helmet – a dashing figure. He was involved in establishing the Japanese colonial authorities in Southeast Asian countries, which were occupied briefly by Japanese Imperial Military. He worked mainly in French Indo-China because of his proficiency in French language.

When he was being considered for a job at the record company, he came to my office to use my type-writer to produce a sample of his language proficiency. Obviously he lost his type-writer somehow. He didn’t last very long at King Record. I heard that he defrauded the company and stole hundreds of thousands of yens and was fired. But he didn’t go to prison. He settled out of court and paid the money back. The youngest uncle of mine mortgaged the house belonging to the remaining Mitsui estate and lent it to him. He never was employed again and died in poverty. My uncle who had lived in the house lost his place to live, and I lost the last bit of my inheritance. That’s how the last remnant of the Mitsui fortune finally vanished. I was already in Canada and didn’t hear about it for a long time. Everybody was too embarrassed to tell me about it. Maybe, they were afraid that I might sue them.

This uncle, Masuo Maruyama, was a brother of my mother’s best friend at a ritzy private Aoyama Girls’ School, which was founded by American Methodists. Mom’s friend married a naval officer. Once when I was a child, my father took me to see the battle ship, Nagato. Mr. Tamura, mom’s friend’s husband, was Captain. At the time, Battleship Nagato was the biggest in the Imperial Japanese navy. He looked so dashing on the bridge in his captain’s uniform. When he had lunch with us, he had the ship’s brass band playing music for us. I was mightily impressed. The point is that my uncle who was married to my mom’s sister came from a well connected family with the Japanese military. This also explains why he rose high in the diplomatic service quickly during the war. And how fast he fell. The captain went down with his ship in the sea of the Philippines.

II Grandfather, Yukichi Takeda – mother’s father (Second row second from the right in the photograph))

When I was in grade five, a strange thing happened in my mother’s family, which nobody bothered to explain to me. I used to think until then I was the oldest among cousins. But one day, a year older boy, a big muscular guy, appeared in my maternal grandparents house and was introduced to us as a cousin from a country , who came to Tokyo for a better school. I had never heard of him until then. In the meantime, Grandma disappeared. We were told that she was visiting her home, the Mitsui’s in a country of Nagano. Nobody told us what exactly was happening. Neither were we interested in finding out the meaning of those events.

I found out after I grew up that my maternal grandfather had had a common-law wife and a child in a back country mountain village called Ambata in Yamanashi Prefecture on the northside of the Mt. Fuji. Grandfather Yukichi was born and grew up there. As soon as his parents passed away, he sold the family property, abandoned his wife and the child, and went to Tokyo. He wanted to get a higher education. In the meantime, she with the help from her family, moved to the next village worked hard and raised the boy alone. As soon as the son became an adult, he started to work in the bush, hunting bears, deers, pheasants, and the like. He was a hunting guide also, and in the end managed to buy a hunting lodge.

In the meantime, grandfather, Yulkichi Takeda, went to a university and was qualified as a veterinarian, joined the army and became a horse doctor. He fought in China against Tsarist Russian Empire. He met a woman from a rich family and married her. That was my maternal grandmother, nee Takeko Mitsui. Takeko was a sole custodian of the Mitsui property, because her two male siblings died in the Japan-Russo war of the early twentieth century. She was supposed to hand it over to her first daughter, Natsuno – my mother after marriage. My mother was adopted by her grandmother to inherit the Mitsui name and the fortune. During those days, women had no right to own property. So grandfather Yukichi ended up being a custodian of the Mitsui property.

No one who are still alive could tell me the size of Mitsui fortune. All I remember is that there was a large property in Sinsen section of Shibuya district in downtown Tokyo. It is now a very much a metropolitan commercial center in one of the densely built-up sky scraper areas of Tokyo. There was, at the time, a large house on a hill surrounded by bushes and trees. On the bottom of the hill, there were several two story tenement houses. They were rented by business people and professors. (One of the professors was my father’s teacher at Aoyama Gakuin Methodist Seminary, Dr. Takeshi Muto, through whom my father met my mother’s family.)

After he retired from the Army, Grandfather Yukichi never had any job until he died in the early sixties. I remember him always sitting in his study reading, chanting old Chinese poetry, practicing or teaching martial art. His room always smelt like rubbing alcohol. I now suspect that he was on some drugs and/or suffering difficult disease. From time to time, I saw him dressed up in a three piece suit looking like he was going to work, but at odd hours, like early afternoon. Nobody told me what kind of work he did, neither was I interested in a grown-up’s work. He definitely showed all signs that he never like Christianity, even though the Mitsui’s were a very old Christian household, rare in Japan, and his every other member of the family was a baptized Christian.

By the time, my father was transferred to Ginza Church in the middle of downtown Tokyo, my grandparents and my mother’s unmarried siblings moved out of the old Mitsui estate, built a new but much smaller house in the suburb of Tokyo, Setagaya district. There was no more tenament houses. Setagaya, at that time, was still very much undeveloped fringe of a city, and looked like a country-side. There were many farmers’ fields around. Rice paddies, trees and forests surrounded our houses. There was no services. We had our own well, hand pumps, and no plumbing in the house. There was an old feudal sheriff’s estate next door; a huge property with impressive gate and gate house. Many tall trees grew in the property, and there was an archery.

As soon as they settled in Setagaya, we also left the manse, which was an apartment in the church building in Ginza, and moved into a rented house near the grandparents’. It was at that time, a country cousin, Shizuo, appeared in my life. Shizuo and I became good friends, and spent many happy summers at his home in the mountains. I loved it there: there were tall green mountains, a roaring river with white water rapids, and delicious wild fruits everywhere. We fished, swam, did all sorts of things in the mountains. It was a real back country. Two hours from Tokyo by train, transferred to a branch line – a milk run, two more hours by bus, and a few more hours on foot. My grandfather’s family comes from a well known feudal clan, which was defeated in a long feud with another powerful family. The remnants of the clan who survived the massacre went into a back country to hide. That’s where grandfather grew up.

At Setagaya, I began to see my father going out with Grandfather often. It was a bit strange sight to me in the beginning, because I used to have the feeling that Grandfather didn’t like Dad. For one thing, he was a Christian minister. Secondly, my mother fell in love with a pennyless theology student, who became my father in place of a long standing fiancé arranged by the family. Why did they suddenly become close? An aunt was heard as saying that it was a court case. What I gathered only recently was: my grandfather gambled everything in an ambitious enterprise and lost it all. I don’t understand why my father didn’t sue grandfather.

It was when all this was happening, my country cousin appeared and grandmother left for her home. She eventually invited all her unmarried children to her unmarried home and spent war years there away from grandfather. Uncle Maruyama and my aunt moved into the newly built house in Setagaya in order too cook for him and Cousin Shizuo. That means my grandmother didn’t know that her husband had had another wife and a child. On top of that, by then he had wasted all her family fortune. No wonder she left him.

Before I was going to Canada in 1957, I went to Grandmother to say good-bye. She kept saying by showing my then wife Chieko things around the house, “All this should belong to you.” I had no clue what she meant, because nobody had told me anything about the Mitsui fortune and what happened to it. In 1955, grandfather died. However, before he died he sent for my father and asked him to show him the way. That was exactly how he asked him to be baptized. So Dad baptized him. His ashes are buried in two places. One part is buried in Ginza Church mausoleum. Also another part is buried in a Buddhist cemetery in the mountains in Yamanashi. Evidently, his first son forgave him and allowed that to happen. So he remains a half Buddhist and a half Christian. All for conveniences. What a crook!

It is interesting to notice that both crooks of my family were connected to the Imperial Japanese military. I often wonder what kind of culture they lived in. Pride and vanity of the Samurai, but they were without honor and integrity?

Although life in the church, not in schools, dominates memories of my childhood, for the sake of marking the periods in my life, for convenience, I will describe my school experience.  I will deal with church life in another chapter.  As a child, I must have been unconsciously aware that my country was foreign, if not hostile, to my religion.  I was never comfortable in schools.  I never had close school friends; my close friends were always from the church.  I guess it was indicative of the reality Christians faced and still do in Japan.

When I  was in grade seven, there was a survey of parents’ occupation.  In the middle class neighborhood of Tokyo, most parents were engaged in the corporate and civil service sectors.  At the very end of the questionnaires was a category for Religion.  Another boy and I raised hands.  My schoolmate came to me afterwards and asked, “Where is your dad’s ‘Tera’?” Tera is a colloquial word for Buddhist Temple.  I told him what our religion was and where my dad’s church was located.  He looked at me as though I came from another planet.  I suppose our society looks at the children with turbans or yarmulke and side locks in the same manner.  Anyhow, the school to me was an uncomfortable place.  There were many Christian schools that I could have gone to, but my parents never sent any of us to Christian schools, except kindergarten.  I don’t know why.

AIRIN YOCHIEN  – “Love Thy Neighbor” Kindergarten – 1935-38

I liked Airin Yochien.   Airin (Love they Neighbor) Yochien (Kindergarten) was an easy walk of one block south and one block east from the manse of my father’s church in the port city of Yokohama, a half and hour west from Tokyo by train.  Cherry and oak trees lined the streets and furnished canopies where we lived.  Cherry trees blossomed into bright pink blooms in the spring and turned into fresh green after.   In the fall, fruits scattered all over the ground.  Then pavements were covered in dark purple from fallen cherries, and with acorns and brown leaves from the oak trees.  Both the church and the kindergarten were on the hill overlooking the port.  Cranes and ocean-going ships were familiar sights as I walked to and from the kindergarten.

Women missionaries of the American Methodist Church founded Airin.  When I went there, the head-teacher was a middle age American woman by the name of Winifred Draper.  I remember a grey haired person who spoke Japanese with heavy accent.  She was kind, always smiling, which, in retrospect is amazing considering how I behaved in the kindergarten.  After the WW II she sent me a pair of real leather red shoes.  I had no shoes then.  I tinted them black before I wore them to school; Japanese boys didn’t wear anything red during those days.

Now that I know how missionary societies were run, I wonder if the whole Airin enterprise was a Draper family venture, nominally associated with the Methodist Missionary Society.  I say this because I remember seeing Miss Draper’s parents and a sister at their home all the time I was in the kindergarten.  I didn’t get the impression that they were just visiting; they were definitely living with Miss Draper.  They lived in a huge (at least in Japanese standard) house in another part of Yokohama city where many foreigners lived.  Every year the whole kindergarten went to their home for a picnic and sports day.  That was where I saw for the first time a big back- yard with lawn.  Japanese gardens of the middle class families have hills, ponds, cedar and pine trees, and moss covered rocks,  but no grass.

I liked the kindergarten.  I think every child at Airin did.  Where else can you find a kindergarten where old friends get together for reunion every now and then, even sixty years later?  Airin was on the south side of the road surrounded by the hedge of evergreen bush.  On the back of the building away from the street was the play ground with a spectacular view of the port.   There were sees-saws, swings, a jungle gym, and a sand box.  There was a large cage many pigeons.  I must have liked, and spent a lot of time in the playground, because I remember it better than the inside of the building.

Speaking of pigeons, I remember a near disaster episode.  I always felt sorry for the caged birds.  One day when nobody was looking, I opened the gate and let all the pigeons fly away.  The whole kindergarten was in an uproar.  The whole kindergarten was in an uproar.  The children were told to stay inside.  The birds stayed on the roof of a large mansion on the other side of the street.   All the grown-ups, the teachers and the caretaker –  did everything possible to attract them to back into the cage, spreading bird seed everywhere in the play ground.  One young woman, probably a childcare student on placement sitting on the ground with both hands full of birds’ seed.  I knew that none of these measures would work.  And it didn’t.  By noon, they gave up, and came inside to do afternoon activities.  But by evening, the birds were all back in the cage waiting to be fed.  Miss Draper once told my parents that I was as bad as American boys.

I remember other incidents, though I never thought I was being bad.  At a Christmas concert, I was in a group of children singing in a choir.  At one point, I decided that I had to be the conductor, so I got up in front and started conducting.  When another group was singing, I appreciated the performance so much that I went onto the stage and danced.  My aunts said I had a reputation.  When the caretaker found that somebody varnished her new piece of furniture – I think it was a sideboard, everybody decided that I had to be the culprit.  Caretaker didn’t like the colour.  I didn’t do it, but I was not harshly spoken to or punished.

I remember two teachers besides Miss Draper.  They were Hori Sensei and Murakami Sensei (sensei means teacher.)  They both wore kimono with hakama (long pleated culotte-like trousers) and hair in the buns tightly done in the back.  I can’t imagine anyone working in those uncomfortable kimonos, but in those days kimono was the norm as a working clothes.  Miss Hori wore her hair a little bit more loosely and a little bit more stylish, while Miss Murakami smiled kindly but had an air of “ I-don’t-suffer- nonsense.”  Miss Murakami played piano when we sang.  They both must have graduated from the Canadian Methodist Women’s Missionary Society’s Junior College in Tokyo, “Toyo Eiwa”, the only childcare training college around Tokyo at the time.  My mother and a sister, Junko, both graduated from the same institution.

On a Christmas day one year, Miss Hori and Miss Murakami invited our family to their upstairs living quarters for a “proper” American Christmas Dinner.  Miss Draper sent turkey dinner so we could have a taste of American Christmas.  We all sat on the tatami mat around the low table, and put a large cardboard box which had in it everything for Christmas dinner on a huge plate.  I remember the sight of thinly sliced dry white meat, some carrots, mashed potatoes, and something brown and gooey – it must have been gravy.  We ate it with chopsticks.  I didn’t think too much of it, though it was sort of OK.  Meat was too dry and tasteless.  So I ate lots of carrots, the only thing I could relate to.  After I left Airin, both Miss Hori and Miss Murakami get married and left.  It is unthinkable today that marriage means the end of a woman’s career.  But it was a norm during those days.

It was fashionable among the middle class Japanese families to send their children to kindergarten in those days.  My friends came mostly from well-to-do families.  I remember being very impressed by colorful and stylish kimonos mothers wore when they came to the kindergarten for special occasions.  My mother didn’t have expensive kimonos, being a wife of a poorly paid minister.  I could smell expensive perfume too.  I felt humiliated on show-and-tell days when my friends brought to show off the kinds of toys we couldn’t afford.  I didn’t know that my parents couldn’t afford them until Santa Claus failed to bring me what I asked for – the same toys my friends brought to the kindergarten.  I began to hate being a minister’s kid already.

In spite of this doscomfort, Airin Yochien was much better than any school I went to afterwards, because it was explicitly Christian.  I could relate to the language, customs, and stories of the place.  Most of my friends were not from Christian homes, but Christianity was the norm in Airin Yochien.  I went to three elementary schools and two high schools afterwards, but some friends from the kindergarten were the only ones who still keep contact with me.

IPPONMATSU (One Pine Tree) ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 1938-40

Loose tummy and me

“One Pine Tree” is a strange name for a school even for Japanese.  But it was the name for the elementary school I attended in Yokohama.  Even funnier was the fact that despite the name, there was no pine tree in the school compound.  Instead, there were many cherry trees.  The Japanese school year begins in April, so it was a spectacular sight with all the cherry blossoms in full bloom when I went to the school for the first time..  So it was the season for the cherry blossoms.  I walked four city blocks south through a residential district clutching to my mother’s kimono sleeve.  The school was huge; two stories U shaped long wooden building with about one thousand children.

Classes were segregated into boys’ and girls’, but I had a woman teacher.  She had about 50 boys in my class.  I don’t remember her name, but she looked smart and tough and  I was scared of her.    I tried everything possible to avoid the school.  One day, I had a bad case of loose stomach.  The teacher told me to go home.  It gave me an idea.  Often, I had to ask to be sent home because of loose tummy, but sometimes I lied.   On one of those untruthful moments, the teacher smiled and said, “I guess you got tired of me already today.”  I was found out but was allowed to go home.  I sweated a lot.  It was no longer fun to stay away from school lying.  I never repeated the same mistake.  The teacher earned my grudging respect.  It was about this time my life long affliction with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) began.

At any rate, I don’t know how my IBS actually started.  According to one of my aunts, I had a bad case of diphtheria when I was four, and stayed in a hospital for ten days.  And she claims that my life-long bowel problem began with that episode.  Funny thing is, I don’t remember being so sick.  Besides, I would have thought diphtheria had nothing to do with the digestive system.  Anyhow, how to cope with a sudden attack of diarrhea has been a life long challenge for me.  I became familiar with friends’ homes between my home and school, where I could borrow their bathrooms in emergency.  Now I know that a sudden drop in the barometric pressure triggers an attack.  That explains why I have so many memories of running and looking for the next nearest friend’s house in the rain or snow.  Likewise, after traveling to many major cities of the world, I can boast my amazing knowledge of bathrooms in those cities.

Dawn of sexuality:

Ipponmatsu became a tolerable place a year later after a girl who came to the Sunday School found me in the playground, and decided to pick on me and have fun.  She was a couple of years ahead of me in the school but in the same class in the Sunday School.  I was smaller than average boys, that didn’t help.  She and a gang of girls started to chase me around the playground yelling something menacing.  When they caught me, they surrounded me and gave me a hard time.  It wasn’t anything close to what might be called bullying but wasn’t honorable for sure.  There was no physical abuse, but was all verbal.  This went on all through the spring.  The girls enlarged the target group beyond me, and to some other boys in my class.  The buys who started to help me get away became prisoners themselves. I began to enjoy it, even though I had to pretend to be horrified by such humiliation.  The memory is that of sweet rather than bitter humiliation.  It is mixed with the memories of springtime at Ipponmatsu,  a beautiful time with cherry trees all in full bloom.  You might call it my sexual awakening.  Some of those girls’ homes became my vital rest stops.
Speaking of sexual awakening, I have a puzzling memory during those early school days.  I remember two earliest occasions when I had a ‘hard-on’.  One of them was of a homosexual nature.  I must have been in grade three.  A classmate of mine, who was sitting a few seats ahead and two rows on the right, tilted his head back touching the desk behind him.  The boy who was sitting behind him began to stroke his hair.  I watched it and had a hard-on.  The boy hose curly hair – unusual for Japanese –  was small and good looking.   He wasn’t my friend nor was he an object of my sexual fantasy.  I consciously tried to stay away from him after that, probably because I was embarrassed.  I still don’t understand my reaction.  It could be my awakening of sensuality; hair is a sensual thing.  But I don’t remember any consciousness that comes close to homosexuality afterwards, ever.  I have always been heterosexual.

The other experience is easy to understand.  Someone took me to a revue, and we saw a chorus line of dancing girls.  It was the first time I saw women in skimpy clothes kicking up their heels showing their underwear.  But this too is puzzling, because during those days at hot springs in Japan, mixed bathing was a norm.  Seeing naked women at the hot spring was anything but erotic. Nobody in Japan made fuss about mixed bathing until the American occupation forces stopped it.  I guess sexual awakening begins with fig leaves not nakedness.

At the end of grade three, my father was transferred to a downtown church in Tokyo.  So my sister Taeko, who by then was finishing grade two, and I moved to another school in Tokyo.  Before I left One Pine Tree School, my teacher gave a little speech with me standing beside her in from of the class.  Her comments surprised me a little.  She said something about my gentleness, generosity, and kindness.  I was not a bully nor was violent for sure, but not even mischievous?   What a difference from kindergarten days!  I guess I was a little apprehensive about the school all the time.  Saying ‘good-bye’ to Ipponmatsu was not a tearful affair.

TAIMEI (Advancing Enlightenment) ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 1943, April)

A taste of high society and I hated it.

Taeko and I were in Taimei School only for a month.  It may not be worth mentioning about such a short stay, except for an overwhelming and unforgettable sense of humiliation I felt while I was there.  Taimei was a famous elite school in Tokyo, located in Ginza, the best and most fashionable business center, like Fifth Avenue by Central Park in New York.  We were able to attend the school thanks to the Universal Education Act, which was just passed into law making all the public schools available to everybody free of tuition.  The alumni of Taimei was like a  “Who’s Who” of Japanese literary and entertainment world.  The school was a smart looking concrete building with artistic murals with decorative tiles.  There were many trees, which created an atmosphere of green oasis in the middle of downtown Tokyo.  It had everything a school should have, well-equipped gym and auditorium, tennis courts, art and sound studio, in fact everything and more.

All children wore smart, expensive uniforms, and practiced snobbish customs, many of which were expensive to follow.  My parents never bought us uniforms, which by then was not required as schools were free and compulsory .  I hated to go to school without the uniform looking so different from other kids.  But the school administration couldn’t insist on uniforms, even though the old regime probably wanted to keep the old system despite the new law.   I forgot most of the strange rules because our stay was so short,  but I remember well was a prescribed menu for nutritional home-made lunch.  Teachers spot checked our lunch boxes to make sure our parents followed the instructions.  We came from a poorly paid minister’s family.  So, my mother had to cut corners from time to time.  One day, I left my lunch box somewhere in the school; another child picked up, and turned it in to the school office.  So the teacher told me to go and pick it up.  The school secretary inspected my lunch in view of many people in the office, because there were a few other lost-and-found lunch boxes.  I felt humiliated, because it was not up to Taimei standard.

After staying in the manse in downtown for only one month, we moved to a rented house in Setagaya, a suburbs on the western edge of Tokyo.  Taeko and I entered another school.  I don’t know why we moved.  But I was so happy that we didn’t have to go to Taimei.  It was only after I grew up and our family started to live in Ginza, I realized that the many of the school children at Taimei were children of geisha or of concubines of prominent people in business and politics.  Nonetheless, I hated the stuck-up atmosphere of high society.

SAKURA (Cherry Blosom) ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ( 1943 – 46)

Discrimination, persecution, and the beginning of the World War II

The school was called Sakura Elementary School.  Today, Setagaya is a bustling business and residential center.   Tokyo is made up of many centers, Ginza, where my father’s church was, being the best known.  However, when we moved to Setagaya, it was still very much rural.  We rented a newly built house which must have been a part of the beginning of suburban development; it was still surrounded by farmland and woods.  In front of our house was a large patch of market garden vegetables.  I often watched the farmer plowing the field by hand and fertilizing it with compost and manure.  I still remember the pungent smell of nourishing mixture he spread in the early spring time.  He often grew cabbages and soybeans there.  Whitish-yellow butterflies covered the whole cabbage patch.  It was dream-like scene.  There was also a huge wooded property beyond the market garden field.  On this property, there stood an old manor of the former feudal deputy governor.  The house must have been a few centuries old.  There were still many old fashioned thatched roof houses in the neighborhood.  Old pine, cedar, zelkova, camphor, and oak trees covered the whole area..

The Sakura School was old and more poorly equipped than Taimei.  It was an old U-shaped wooden building.  It was so old that wooden floors splintered.  We had to be careful with bare feet.  Japanese do not allow outside foot wears to be worn inside.  The norm in many public buildings like schools and churches is to change shoes at the entrance and wear soft-soled inside footwear in the building.  By the time the Second World War began, everything became suddenly so scarce and expensive.  I still remember the despair when I saw all candies disappeared in the candy shop.  Many children from lower income families didn’t have spare pairs of shoes and were barefoot in the school building.  The school had no auditorium or gym, neither was there a swimming pool.  The building itself smelt musty.  But there were many huge trees, cherry, ginkgo, and oak trees in the school compound.   School playground was bare earth, unlike the tarred surface of Taimei School.  The ground was muddy during the monsoon, dusty the rest of the year.  So we must have been dirty most of the time; but I didn’t care; boys aren’t bothered by dirt.  My mother cared less about dirty feet than my aunts.  When I went to my grand parents’ home a few houses away, my aunts were often after me making sure that I washed my feet before I went into the house.

My class mates came from mixed background.  There were farmers’ children, new suburbanites like us whose fathers commuted to government offices and businesses in the city centers, rural poor who lost their jobs as farm land was turned over to developers, and some ghetto children of mainly Korean background. There were even a very few Europeans.  In terms of social classification, we fit in quite well, because we were only one of many minority groups.   We were happier in Setagaya, because the population was mixed.  But still being a Christian in an increasingly nationalistic Japan was not a pleasant experience.

World War II began with an attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1945.   Militarization of the whole country suddenly became visible everywhere including in the school program.   It became more difficult to be a Christian even as a child in an elementary school.  The chapter on the persecution and mass execution of Japanese Christians during the 16th century in the history text book often triggered abuse of Christian children by class mates and sometimes even by teachers.  One time, my sister became ill because of such treatment by her teacher.  When a spell of abuse by class mates was especially fierce, I skipped the school pretending to be sick.   I was lucky to have a very nice teacher for three years, who must have known how I was treated by some classmates.  He was subtle but protective of me.  He was a good looking man and was very popular among girls, even though he was a boys’ class teacher.  He got married while he was my teacher, and a while later he brought his new-born baby to the class.  I liked him.  I even when to visit him at home.  In retrospect, I realize now that such an unannounced visit of a student must have been annoying to his family.  But I didn’t know.  I stayed a long time and ate a lot of rice crackers and drank cups of tea.

The great persecution of Japanese Christian converts in the 16th Century by the Shogun authorities was taught as a Japan’s way to fight back the advancing the western colonialism. Christianity was termed in the history lessons as a .precursor of western imperialism.   In retrospect, I am in agreement with such a view, especially of 16th Century Roman Catholic counter-reformation represented by Society of Jesus.  Christianity was brought to Japan by Jesuit priests; among them was Francisco Xavier.  The Jesuits were remarkably successful.  The speed with which the Roman Catholic Church gained massive converts, especially among the nobles,  must have been frightening to the Shogunate, which just secured the total control of the country after a nearly century of internal strife..  Protestantism, which was allowed in during the 19th Century, did not have such blatant imperial intentions, but it did represent a further incursion of westernization and hence another blow to the Japanese spiritual tradition.  The military very much wanted to spread such a view of Christianity, hence determined the tone of history text books.

Racism against Koreans and Chinese people was at its worst during this time.  Many Chinese and Koreans were brought to Japan by force as laborers.  Korean children in the school from a nearby Korean ghetto had a terrible time.  People said Koreans smelt bad and were dirty.  They smelt garlic and they dressed poorly.  Their diet, in fact, included kimchi which had a lot of garlic and is nowadays considered a delicacy.  Of course, they dressed poorly, because they were paid pittance.   They lived in poverty.  However, it is interesting that Korean children attended the same schools as Japanese children.  In that sense, there was no discrimination.  But they were so often the targets of the racist insults and ill treatments.  In other parts of Japan, there were Chinese children in the schools who were under the same circumstances.  The worst insult one child hurled to another was, “Omae no tosan Shinajin!”  – “You dad’s a Chinese!”  One thing I admire about Korean kids in my school was that they fought back.  They organized gangs and often bullied the weak Japanese kids, me being one of them.  Nevertheless, as a member of another abused minority group, namely Christians, I secretly envied their guts.  Forming a Christian gang was not possible, because there were too few of them, perhaps less than ten in a school of one thousand children.

Some schools had tiny groups of Jewish and White Russian refugees children, whose families had come to Japan via China after the Bolshevik Revolution.  I remember one particular White Russian boy.  He was admired because he was physically bigger, faster, stronger, and taller.  Also according to the lingering racial stereotype of the ‘liberal 20”s Japan’, he was seen as more beautiful because of white skin.  I never knew any Jewish child, but I suspect they were treated like the White Russian boy was treated – not  too badly.  After I came to Canada, I met a Jewish woman who had grown up in Japan.  Her first language was Japanese.  She had married a Canadian after the war and came to Vancouver.  I felt strange speaking in Japanese with a white woman.  She spoke the language like a Japanese person, unlike Miss Draper who spoke like a foreigner – with accent.  She didn’t have any bitter experience in Japan even during the difficult time of war.  She wanted to be our friend because she didn’t want to lose her Japanese language. I personally wasn’t aware of Anti-Semitism during the war years in Japan.  I found much later that the military had tried to emulate Anti-Semitism in order to harmonize with the Nazi policy.  But Japanese populace saw only color white, and continued its admiration of the white race.

THE WAR

On December 8, 1941 (according to Japanese calendar, which is a day early we were called out to the playground for an emergency school assembly.  The principal read something we didn’t understand.  It was an address by Emperor Hirohito announcing the declaration of war against the allied nations – Britain, China, Holland, and the United States.  It was written in an ancient form of Japanese language, incomprehensible for ordinary people.  The principal had to explain what it meant.  It was a cloudy day, damp-cold.  And I felt chill in my bones, because I was dreading this day for sometime.  For a couple of years since we moved to Setagaya, I often overheard my mother talking with my aunts about the possibility of a war with America.  They didn’t seem to understand what was going on politically, but knew that Japan was going to fight our friends – people we loved.  Another reason for their dread was that they knew there was no way Japan could win.  So they were talking about bombing, fighting on the streets, people killed, etc. in despair.  So while the principal was reading the news clip about the “glorious victory” at Pearl Harbor, my mind was totally dark.  “Miss Draper, help me!” was the first thing that came to my mind.

TOKYO NISHI (West) HIGH SCHOOL 1944 – 50)

MILITARIZATION OF SCHOOLS

Because I always felt inferior in school, when the day of the entrance examination for the middle school came, I had absolutely no confidence in being admitted into any public middle school.  I could have easily entered any Christian School, which at the time was considered to be easier and inferior in academic standards.  I do not know why my parents didn’t send me to a Christian School, but I know that I was good enough for any good school..  There were 48 public middle schools established by the Tokyo Metropolitan government.  Students were admitted into appropriate schools, based on the result of the entrace examination.  The best went into the First School as was named, the next best into the Second, so on.  I was so timid that took exam at the 48th School, only to find myself admitted into the Tenth.  When I saw the result, I could not believe my eyes.  So I asked my mother to come with me to see the result again which was posted on the bulletin board.  So I started my high school at theTokyo10th Middle School, which later became Tokyo Nishi High School, because the US Occupation Forces did not like the elitism and discrimination inherent in ranking the schools.  However, the elitist practices of the first ten schools still continue today in many latent manners.  Teachers still advise students that only the cream of the class apply the schools which used to be the first ten elitist  high schools.
I still remember a question at the interview: the cause of the war against the Allied countries.  I just memorized the page on the history textbook and recited it.  I did not understand what the text meant, but it was something to do with expelling the western imperialism from Asia.

The school was run like a military boot camp.  We all wore military type of uniforms and had to salute the teachers on the streets like soldiers.  As a part of the school curriculum,  an army officer – a lieutenant – and his sergeant ran military drills twice a week. I was never good at drills, in fact I always got ‘F’.  I am glad that the war ended before graduation, because Military Drills was dropped as a school subject .  So those F’s didn’t affect my average.

Of course, there were other school subjects taught by regular teachers.  Some of the teachers were fanatical nationalists, but others were not.  I remember a history teacher.  He was very funny; his class was always full of laughter.  In retrospect, he was very critical about a lot of historical accounts in the textbook.  But he always told us funny and often juicy stories, about such things as Chinese emperors’ concubines or sex life of Napoleon, etc. He never referred directly to the events in Japan in the same fashion.  But he taught us a healthy critical attitude towards authorities.  Few of us understood the subtlety of his critical views; nevertheless he was playing a dangerous game.

NUMAZU MIDDLE SCHOOL – April – July, 1945

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

By early 1945, the war was near the end.  The US Ai