Yuko: Friendship Between Nations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I seem to have been called many things over the years. At birth in 1925, my parents, Carl and Gertrude Jorgensen, named me Richard Edward. But to relatives and friends—most of whom were good Midwesterners—I was just Dickie Eddie. In my teen years I did garden work in summers and shoveled snow the rest of the year, so I was known in my community as the gardener and the snowman. I would be known as Allendale Market’s delivery boy in the 1940s. I joined the Navy to see the world in July 1943, but became known as a hospital corpsman on the staff of the physical therapy department at Great Lakes, IL, just forty miles from my hometown.

The real beginning of the S (for serendipity) factor in my life came with the GI Bill, passed by Congress in 1944. Lo, and behold! my World War II service (1943-46) turned out to be perfect timing for this Kid From The Midwest (KFTM). I got to attend Carleton College in Minnesota from 1946-1950. At Carleton I was known as Jorgy—indeed hardly any of my classmates knew neither my first nor last names. Also, having lettered as a diver on the swim team, I became known dubiously as the only person who ever got a zero on a dive (at a home swim meet yet!).

Having my BA degree in hand, I enrolled at the University of Michigan with the goal of achieving a master’s degree in American history along with a teaching certificate, but as I was engaged in the process of taking courses to qualify for the major, I was called up as a Navy Reservist for active duty during the Korean War. Another eighteen months at—again—Great Lakes Naval Training Center. This time I was director of an information and education program. With hefty doses of grit, perseverance and hard work (including the completion of a U.S. Armed Forces Institute course in Far Eastern history), I returned to the University of Michigan campus in late fall 1952. Again, I had NCFD (not a candidate for degree) stamped all over my registration materials. It was disappointing, but the delay in the acquisition of that all-important degree and teaching credential worked—serendipitously—to my advantage.

In spring 1954, I was in the right place at the right time when I was chosen to represent the university in a new program being undertaken by an organization based in San Francisco. What came to be known as The Asia Foundation (TAF) was mounting teaching exchange programs in Japan. For this first go-around, a young representative American was to be selected from Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and UC Berkeley to teach English (and American civilization) in Japan. Each of us would be assigned to one of the provincial universities for two years. The point was to promote friendship-cum-understanding between the United States and Japan.

For me, it was the chance of a lifetime. I had joined the Navy to see the world, and never got beyond the Great Lakes! Now, in spring 1954, I found myself on the cusp of a great adventure in a Peace Corps-type program (seven years before John F. Kennedy would actually propose the Peace Corps).

It would be immersion in another culture—two years of learning how the people of another nation lived—and I welcomed becoming an ardent Citizen of The World (COTW). In the first book of my memoirs, O Tomodachi, Friend (published in 2015), I tell the story of those two years (1954-56) of living and teaching at the University of Hiroshima in southwest Japan. It was there that I took on another moniker: Jo-san, a Japanese endearment.

My stint at Hiroshima University (also known as Hirodai—as in daigaku) and living in Japan those twenty-four months would represent the first phase of my undaunted determination to see life, to see the world, and to be an eyewitness to world events.

During my second year at Hirodai, the university’s greatness became more evident every month. So it was my good fortune to have had a hand in (however slight) the developing transformation of a once fledgling university into one of the great universities of the world. Transformation was mutual, as I worked to become a professional educator. Having had the immense good fortune of living with the Ishikawa Kinichi family during many of my days in Tokyo, and of residing with Dr. Iwao Kurokawa and his wonderful family in Hiroshima, how could I not have emerged as an eager-cum-universally faithful friend of the Japanese and their culture? Each step of the way, whether in Hiroshima or Tokyo, or traveling to the four corners of the country, I might have been known as Mr. Inquisitive personified.

In this book, Yūkō, Friendship Between Nations, I tell first the wonderful story of my return to the United States via a five-month trip around the world by ship (July to November 1956, the Year of the Monkey). Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), surely my mentor at the time, heralded it best when he proclaimed: To the traveller…a foreign country…is a point of comparison…wherefrom to judge his own.

Then, in what I call my there’s no place like home interregnum, the surprise of my life came via Western Union on December 7, 1956, (Pearl Harbor Day); a telegram offering me a position with TAF in San Francisco as a program officer on the Japan/Korea desk. It was an overwhelming and heart-warming offer coming out of the blue, and this KFTM couldn’t have been happier. It seemed I was on my way to becoming a bona fide COTW!

So, one learning never ends phase of my life turns into another on the Japan/Korea desk in San Francisco. I found myself present at the creation of the first six years of TAF programs in Japan, a critical period during the peak years of the Cold War (1954-60).

TAF would become one of the most important and influential forces for developing and improving relations between the United States and Japan. In 2004, the Japan Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., celebrated the friendship 150 years strong of the two nations. In a special edition of the Washington Post, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield declared the U.S.-Japan relationship the most important in the world, bar none. I was lucky at the time to find myself assisting the director of the Japan Cultural Center in a program that brought local government officials from Southwest prefectures of the main island of Honshu to the capital city. Their three-day stay included a full-day trip to Richmond to meet with Virginia state representatives. The second day included attendance at a special commemorative ceremony at the National Archives on the Mall, marking the 150th anniversary of the treaty of peace and amity between the U.S. and Japan. A facsimile of the original treaty was presented to then-Ambassador Ryozo Kato as a replacement for Japan’s original copy, which was destroyed by the Edo Castle fire of 1859. Their final day included a visit to Annapolis for meetings with Maryland legislators.

The solid beginning to this strong and enduring friendship between nations began after World War II and developed during the first six years of TAF’s program in Japan, from 1954-59. I feel privileged to have been a small part of this beginning, first as a teacher of English at Hiroshima University (1954-56) and then as a program officer with TAF in San Francisco (1956-59)—truly a pivotal decade for TAF and for me.

At the end of Yūkō, I find myself moving into a new career, that of teacher at Berkeley High School, which launched me into a decades-long love affair with education and active engagement with other cultures of the world. But that is the tale for the third and final book of my memoirs: American Sensei.

Chapter 1

R & R and Around the World: The Non-Western Phase

Following those final R and R times in Tokyo and Osaka in spring 1956, there was one bittersweet—if not downright emotional—farewell to Japan night in Kobe, from where my Dutch freighter—the Tjisadane—would embark for points west and south. Destination: Hong Kong with stops in Okinawa and Taiwan.¹

It was Friday the thirteenth—a good or bad omen?—and by happenstance my thirty-first birthday. It was a solo celebration that evening at my favorite King’s Arms Hotel. With no apparent friendly competitors at the game of darts, and with scarcely any inclination to strike up casual conversation with the few Brits at the bar, I settled for a pint or two of ale and a fabulous Kobe beef platter before an early retirement to my room for my last night in Japan. I had about twenty-four hours left before boarding the Tjisadane, which would take me to Hong Kong: the first of a homeward-bound-cum-dream-come-true journey halfway around the world.

In a way it was hard for me to imagine that this day—this last night in the land I had come to know and love—had finally arrived. It was hard for me also to get much sleep as incredibly high expectations, along with an adrenalin count that had been building for months, kept me awake most of the night. It seemed like only yesterday that Bill and I had had that sensational stopover in Kobe en route to yet another unforgettable R and R at FLW’s Place (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel) in Tokyo.

Could the last half year of our two-year assignments in Japan have been the best quarter of them all? Perhaps so. For me, at least, definitely the best. And while 1956 would be, in old Nippon, the Year of the Monkey, it would also be—clearly in my book and convincingly shown in my letters home —One of the Best Years of my Life.

The Tjisadane (of the Dutch Royal Interocean Lines) was known as one of the longest of freighters (tonnage 9,227) of the world-renowned sea-faring Dutch. The ship had been launched in Amsterdam in the 1930s and spent most of her career plying the waters of the Western Pacific (on a route between Japan and the East Indies²). If the Brits of the world knew how to govern, the French how to eat well, the Dutch sure knew how to sail! The crew of the Tjisadane were seasoned salts of the sea, and they were friendly and incredibly hospitable as well. Then, too, most of the crew spoke my language (which was thankfully generally spoken and understood by the dozen or so of us passengers to Hong Kong).

We were barely out of the busy (even though it was a Saturday) Kobe Harbor before the passengers and even some of the crew were getting acquainted and telling stories of their stay in Japan. Except for the two ladies from Amsterdam (homeward-bound missionaries completing a teaching assignment at a Kansai-based School of Foreign Studies) it was a mostly male, and European, contingent on board. Once everyone learned of my assignment in Hiroshima, the curiosity quotient of my fellow shipmates rose to almost embarrassing heights. Everyone on board seemed to want to know when, where, what, why, and how long I had been in Japan. So animated conversations between us went congenially on through the 1800-1900 Happy Hour and beyond into the night. It was a nice beginning to our five-and-a-half-day cruise through the East China Sea and around the Ryukyu Islands.

Just as the sun was setting over the waters of the western Pacific and we rounded the southern tip of Kyushu, our ship must have had etched on its log a routine port of call at Kagoshima. There I would recall my one night sleepover in the city during my wonderful Kyushuan odyssey the year before. This time, of course, my view of the port city would be spectacularly different. What was stuck in my memory as much as anything was the historicity of the place: First, it had been the port where the Portuguese Jesuit St. Francis Xavier landed in the mid-sixteenth century, imbued with the mission of introducing Christianity to the inhabitants of the islands. Then, too, Kagoshima, along with Sasebo and maybe Nagasaki, harbored (since the 1890s) major naval forces destined for battles victorious (in 1904-05 over Russia, in 1941-42 in the Pacific over the United States) and ultimate defeat – at Midway, Coral Sea and in waters closer to mainland Japan in 1944-45. Most telling of all, however, would be my view of Kagoshima from the rail of the Tjisadane at dusk. It represented the final picture image (thanks to my 20/20 vision and my trusty Nikon) of the country I had come to love in this pivotal decade of my life.

The time aboard ship turned out to be an uncommonly restful, serendipitously joyful, educationally insightful, and a quintessentially naval experience. After the full-and-active-even-intense final weeks of my Nippondan (Japanese days and nights), shipboard routine would prove to be most relaxing, and yet enlightening almost every knot of the way. I had a tiny cabin to myself and nights of eight hours of sound sleep in a comfortable western-style bed (in a change from the futon of my dreams). After lunch naps there were grand happy hour sessions with the congenial company before, during, and after sumptuous dinners. There was nothing continental about the breakfasts either: ham and eggs any way I liked them, fruit and biscuits, etc., and even—borrowed from their Belgian neighbors—waffles to die for!

Better than the food and the mid-afternoon and overnight rest stops were the almost instant new friendships made as the freighter sailed its way through once troubled waters. A preponderance of twelve to fifteen passengers eased my way into the milieu afloat; and a more mature (experienced) crew put us all at ease security-wise. I remember thinking during this initial seagoing (sea-leg-getting) experience that I had serendipitously been plunked down with a most friendly and articulate crowd of folks well on their way to becoming good citizens-of-the-world.

It was the mid-morning talk sessions that week that proved to be – for me at least – the most edifying. All of us who boarded the ship in Kobe seemed to have had insightful things to say about Japan and the Japanese. We delighted in telling stories of our travels and living and especially our assignments in the country. Sharing our experiences and comparing notes on what came to be our mutual savorings (as well as unsavory thoughts) on life in Japan would be one of the highlights of the trip. Fortunately I had been the recipient (thanks once again to my ACC³ friends in Hiroshima) of several light reading pieces on Japan that I happily shared with my shipmates for discussion. One of these stood out and we must have spent hours of lively debate on a piece entitled, Why I Like Japan, by James A. Michener. Michener’s article appeared in the American periodical press early in 1956 and would appear in the August 1956 issue of Readers Digest.⁴

What Michener liked about Japan – the strange and charming people; the crowdedness (90 million crowded into the size of California); and the way humble people wrestled with the tiny fragments of soil; the beautiful land, in particular the mountains that were the dominant beauty of the country; and perhaps especially, the love of beauty . . . among the people of a land in which art invades all life . . . confirmed most of our own views of Japan and its people. Or was it the other way around for folks like me? When Michener wrote about the delightful people, and that as individuals they are the gentlest and tenderest I have ever known, most of us concurred. But at the same time my fellow morning seminarians could cite contradictions to that generalization. I am sure I must have recalled the gentleness of Mrs. Okamoto at the Hirodai guest quarters, or of Mesdames Ishikawa and Kurokawa – among many others who touched me deeply by their caring and affection during my stays in their homes. But then there was that woman at the entrance to one of Kyoto’s nitoclubu who less than gently and tenderly – and more than harshly – told me, in effect, to get lost, buster.

Michener went on to say: the Japanese seem always to exhibit a stoical ability to endure hardship or pain.⁵ Yes, indeed! What better evidence of that characteristic did I have those years but in my very own students, who managed to perform extraordinary feats – cheerfully – in the face of deprivation and stark paucity of resources, etc. Then there is the tradition, exclaimed Michener, that one’s duty must be performed with no public display of emotion. Very true were the unanimous voices of my cohorts and me. Another controlling tradition among the Japanese was loyalty. Loyalty to Japan, to the emperor, and to one’s immediate superior. We realized that the whole history of Japan – as far as we could tell – was practically the history of this profound tradition. This was possibly best illustrated in the current popular films, e.g. Gate of Hell, and the story of the forty-seven Ronin who in the early eighteenth century revenged an outrage against their master, then committed mass hara-kiri. Closer to home, this was illustrated by the ladies of the households I observed in their obedience-cum-loyalty to their occasionally (overly) demanding husbands. Michener’s final characteristic of the Japanese was politeness. We all agreed this was one of the most highly regarded traits of the Japanese, but there were – increasingly? – signs of impoliteness as well (perhaps more among the younger generation, or the commuters on the Tokyo or Osaka subway cars).

So Michener helped immensely to let us pass our time profitably, inspirationally, and most satisfactorily. Naturally, during the course of the cruise there would be other things to talk about, to compare notes on, to cite views of. But because we had all just come from extended stays in and throughout Japan, we all seemed to have had a compelling interest in the subject.

Also, very much to our pleasure, but perhaps even more to our liking, were the talks given by the crew of the ship and one very knowledgeable travel agent, who in one presentation cited Michener as an authority on Asia who called Hong Kong the pearl of Asia. And thus, by the time the Tjisadane pulled into Chinese waters (then Victoria Harbour of the British Crown colony), there could not have been anything about Hong Kong we didn’t know (or hadn’t asked about). Already, in anticipation of what adventures lay ahead for me, Japan seemed almost long ago and far away. But, then, not so far away for me to have realized that my assignment had been permanently – and indelibly – etched in my consciousness. As we leaned over the rail as the ship was pulling into Kowloon, I acknowledged to my new friend and fellow passenger⁶ that Japan had really been the first phase of my undaunted determination to see life, to see the world, to eyewitness world events. And that phase in Japan had been an unqualified success!

HONG KONG – MACAO—BANGKOK – SINGAPORE

Hong Kong was fabulous and fun! It was made all the more terrific by the friends from Tokyo I’d run into months before, as well as by the staff of the TAF office in Victoria, who set up personalized tours of the whole area – including the New Territories beyond which was the forbidden land of Communist China – and who saw to it that:

I would be fattened up by the very best of Chinese cuisine⁷;

I’d get to see Bangkok and Macao;

I got to stay inexpensively and comfortably at the Kowloon YMCA, complete with a pool, just across the street from the renowned Peninsula Hotel, the lobby of which would be my daily evening headquarters for people-watching;

I’d be provided with my very own personal shoppers who found the best of good buys of good goods (like summer suits, a raincoat, sports jacket and monogrammed shirts); and

I’d get to use their space and equipment for typewritten letters and cards to family back home and friends in Japan.

So what did I find most galvanizing about Hong Kong? While it was then a British outpost – referred to in the 1950s