60 Years Ago, 2 - The Diary

One day a couple of months ago, on 19 June to be exact, I climbed up on a stool to reach the top shelf of a bookcase in the bedroom in search of a book I thought was there.  I didn’t find the book I was looking for; but I noticed a bundle of notebooks tied with a string.  I had no idea what they were except that they might be my early schoolwork. I was curious and brought the bundle down, dusted it, and untied it, and to my great astonishment, it was a set of diaries in five volumes, all in Japanese, the first of which started on 5 August 1951 with the last one ending with the entry for 10 January 1954. I had totally forgotten about them; they covered the years preceding my departure from Japan and the subsequent year and a half spent at Santa Rosa Junior College. I was between 18 and 21 in those years; I sat with them and immediately spent a couple of hours reading the months preceding the propitious date of my voyage to America.

This was totally fortuitous. Not long before this encounter with the past, I realized that, come August, I would have lived in America exactly sixty years, 60 out of 80 years of my life -- nearly 80 or 80 as of next January, 30 January to be exact.  The thought itself was staggering; reading what I wrote in my youth sixty years ago was truly awesome. 

When I reflected on my last days in Japan, I recalled the letters I wrote home every week, often more than once a week, mostly to my mother, in the first few years in America; I didn’t make copies of the letters I wrote but I wanted to read the replies I received; these I had carefully kept with me, the numerous letters from my mother as well as those from my father although they were fewer, but I couldn’t fine them anywhere.  I searched all over the apartment, not once but several times, to no avail. They may well have been lost in the move to New York from the house in Swarthmore. Then, I found the diaries.  I then realized, too, that the diaries were better account of the events of those days, more complete and more thorough.  The entry on the trans-Pacific journey was cursory; but it was enough to reformulate it as the Blog essay, 60 Years Ago - The Voyage. 

In the following weeks over the summer, I perused the diaries off and on.  The time-warp experience was nostalgic but also revelatory, and very strange as well.  The entries were thorough and meticulous; there were no missing dates so far as I could detect.  Time and again I was surprised to read about my thoughts and activities I had totally forgotten and yet on reading I have been discovering that with all the changes that happened to my life over these 60 years, I have not changed very much as a person -- to my delighted dismay.

I have been writing diaries on line since 1989 in English, somewhat sporadically that year, starting on 1 April, and then more consistently from 1990 but selectively recording the events and activities each day as a third-person account.  Previous to that, starting on 27 May 1978, I wrote a family weekly in typescript.  Starting in July 1995, from the time of the death of my love, Tokiko, my diary entries, addressing her, became more thorough first-person accounts, and I continue persistently to this day.  These are very detailed, covering routine activities as well as special events, and in this respect they are, without my realizing, exactly like my first diaries. 

In the years 1951-52, my senior year in high school, I was busy investigating a way to go abroad to study.  I had to do this entirely on my own since my parents did not know English and I did.  I had my plan set for America, though I could have gone to Paris, as my Francophile sister, seven years my elder, had secretly hoped I would, since I learned French before English (thanks to my sister’s instigation during the war).  Opportunities to go to America, even as a student, was still severely restricted, and I was quite pessimistic.  But by the spring of 1952 possibilities started to open up, and I was busy writing to colleges and universities and exploring the sponsorship by an American citizen as required of exchange students.  I had much errands to do, for myself as well as for the family, and I was constantly on a train between my family home in Ofuna and Yokohama, where my school was, and Tokyo.  I was an eager Catholic, doing volunteer work at school and church, and I had a chicken coop with a half dozen hens to get eggs for the table (as it was still a time of food shortage), and I raised chicks, too.  In spite of the busy schedule, to my great surprise, I was continuing practicing Japanese music -- naga-uta on the traditional instrument samisen, that I was initiated into by my mother a few years earlier (at my insistence, as I remember).  I also continued commuting to Kamakura for my lessons in Chanoyu (Tea Ceremony).  I often complained in the diaries how boring classes at school were.  Still, I had schoolwork full time, and it was not unusual that I stayed up well past midnight till 1:00 and sometime 2:00, like my daily schedule today. 

But more surprising, and even endearing, is my theater and concert hopping, just as in my current retirement years since 2001, even from spring to summer in 1952, when I was running all over the place to obtain documents and permits for traveling abroad, which was materializing by then.  It was predominantly the Kabuki that I attended, sometimes day and night, leaving the theater on occasion to pick up a paper, and returning to see the rest of the day’s performance.  Little wonder that I know the Kabuki repertory so well; I know quite intimately more than a half of the plays in the 11-volume Compete Works of Kabuki.  Moreover, I wrote down the titles and cast and a thumbnail critique of each performance I had seen, more thoroughly than I now do. 

I found one fascinating entry, dated 11 August, only three days before departure. I went to Tokyo and did a round of errands from the shipping company to a bank, and then to the Consulate, and a lunch with a family friend, and between these I stopped at a theater to see some Kabuki plays, and then in the evening, I stayed in another theater with my mother, and returned home at 11:00, where I found my father in fuming rage, shouting at me. He didn’t mind my interest in theater but I should know the limit or else I will end up a pauper.  Then, I added a comment; He was fuming not because of my theater-going but because he had to wait an hour and a half at the Consulate where he went in my place to pick up the visa, so I should remain cool and not get upset.  I realize now that with only three days left to go aboard, I was perhaps overdoing.

More than I do now, too, I wrote haiku poems, often in a group of three or four, interspersed in the diary text.  It irks me that they are hardly puerile -- in fact, not bad at all.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.