60 Years Ago. 1 - The Voyage

Last Sunday, 19 August 2012, was Tuesday sixty years ago, and I crossed the International Date Line on my virgin voyage across the Pacific Ocean.  I was on my way to America, alone, and I was 19 years old.  I stood on the bow of the deck and I was thrilled, as the ship rocked and swayed violently, with no cargo on board, and as I anticipated the great adventure ahead; and I wrote a poem on the vast emptiness of the sea and its solitude that engulfed joys and sorrows alike. 

The ship was a freighter, Kimikawa Maru, 157 meters (515 ft.) in length, 6970 tons gross, built by Kawasaki Kisen or K-Line, earlier that year, on 29 February.  It set sail from Yokohama on 14 August; as the ship, anchored away from the land, started to drift away, with my family and friends on two launches in the distance, my heart started to pound but, in my excitement, I had no tears in my eyes. The vessel sailed on the great circle, skimming the Aleutian Islands, toward Portland, OR, its destination, where, up the Columbia River, it reached in ten days and anchored in the afternoon of 24 August.

I arrived with one trunk and a suitcase, a scholarship of $350 from Santa Rosa Junior College in California, an airline ticket from Portland to San Francisco, and $30 in cash, the maximum in U.S. currency allowed at the time out of Japan.  I carried, however, an extra $100, purchased secretly for security and sewn in a waistband worn next to the skin.  In addition, I had an affidavit of support for room and board, required of an exchange student, from the family of one Louis Napier, whom I befriended when he was on furlough in my neighborhood from his duty as an electrician on the aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard and with whom I subsequently corresponded regularly for an year or two. 

For several years, in lieu of the Japanese Middle and High School, I attended the St. Joseph’s College in Yokohama, an international missionary school run by Marianist brothers, where classes were taught in English, and I was graduated on 22 June.  So, I was fluent enough in English on my arrival in America.  Still, the sight of Portland was new and exotic.  I was in care of a family acquaintance for four days, mostly rainy as I remember; I was struck by numerous cars and by women’s red coats, rarely seen in Japan, and, as I wrote in the first letter to my mother, it was as though I walked into a postcard; and hearing nothing but English spoken wherever I turned was disorienting.  I was taken to the dog race one evening, a real curiosity, and the movie Robin Hood another evening (which could only be the 1938 Errol Flynn vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz, The Adventures of Robin Hood). Then, I  was sent off on the Western Airlines flight to San Francisco on 28 August, where I was met by the Napiers.  

My mother missed me tremendously at home in Ofuna, as she had already “lost” my sister, seven years older, who was living on her own in Tokyo.  But citing the Japanese proverb, “If you love your child, send him or her on a journey,” the idea of which is that a child placed alone in an unfamiliar environment away from home will learn to overcome shyness, cultivate social grace, and develop independence, she convinced herself that she can persevere my absence for an year in the hope that she will see me back home a better person, less willful and restive, more tolerant and compassionate.  The proverb is, of course, blind to the reality that a child, at whatever age, behaves at home more as a child than elsewhere in the outside world.

One year abroad away from home -- that was my plan, nominally.  I had a larger project in my mind, however.  Santa Rosa Junior College was a choice by default, not by design; it happened to be in the town where the Napiers, my sponsoring family, was residing.  I was nevertheless eager to go as the only sure way to enter the United States.  As early as September 1951, I started writing to major American universities inquiring about scholarship opportunities, and the answer invariably explained that scholarship applications will be considered only from foreign students already in the country at least one year. A year abroad was in my plan the first necessary step to a full college education.  So, the first year stretching to two was no surprise to myself, disappointing as it was to my parents.  But the two stretched to four, then to seven as I entered the graduate school, and eventually I obtained a permanent residence in the U.S., made a career as a professor, and here I am sixty years later, totally incredulous, and willful as ever.