Stories of My Life

I was the only full-time woman on the faculty, but there was one other woman, the drama teacher who came in several mornings a week. At the end of the year she confessed that whenever she was in the building during the first few weeks of school she had stood outside my classroom. She wanted someone to be there for me when I came running out crying. But I never did. Knowing full well what had happened the previous year, she finally said to one of the students: “Mrs. Paterson seems to be doing all right. Is everybody behaving for her?”

“Oh, yeah,” the boy said. “We don’t dare do anything. She has this look.”

Me in a kimono

Japan Days

When I tell people what I was doing in the years 1957–1961, most of them are visibly shocked. It seems in this day and age it would be more forgivable to say you were once a prostitute than to reveal the fact that you were once a Christian missionary. I’ve been asked point-blank: “What right do you have to force other people to accept your religion?” The easy answer to that is, of course, that it is impossible to force another person to accept any idea, secular or religious. I suppose the conquistadores could threaten a population with death if they didn’t accept baptism, but even that didn’t guarantee a change of heart or mind

And actually, during the four years I spent in Japan, the heart and mind that changed the most was my own. As a child, I hated and feared the Japanese—they were the enemy, and if anyone had told me when I was nine that someday I would go to live in Japan, I would never have believed him. The Japanese had bombed and devastated China. The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.

In the fall of 1941, we settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where my father’s assignment was to start a new church out from the center of town. Before there was any church building Daddy led Sunday afternoon services in the home of a family in the community. That particular Sunday afternoon the phone rang in the middle of the service. Mr. Taylor left the room to answer it, and minutes later appeared at the doorway, visibly shaken. “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said. I still remember the terror I felt. The invasion the soldiers had promised my father in Tsing Tao had begun. It was the end of everything.

I’m sure I was only one of the millions of American children who played commandos, collected scrap, and spent much of my meager allowance on war savings stamps. But I did it with a fervor none of my classmates shared. I had actually seen the enemy face-to-face. I knew they had to be defeated before they invaded San Francisco.

When I entered graduate school to train for missionary service, I expected to go to Taiwan, which was as close to my beloved China as it was possible to be in the mid-fifties. But when I went for my interview with the mission board, it became clear that Taiwan would not be a possibility. Back in Richmond, I had a Japanese friend, Ai Kuroki, who somehow persuaded me that if I gave the Japanese people a chance I would come to love them. I loved and respected Ai, so the summer after graduation I went to the training program for new Southern Presbyterian missionaries in Montreat, North Carolina, to prepare for work in Japan.

One of the instructors was a linguist whose job it was to help us hear and repeat the sounds peculiar to the languages we would have to learn to work in our chosen countries. A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language. So whether the nascent missionary was going to Brazil or Mexico or Congo or Taiwan or Korea or Japan, we all memorized this particular sentence: “A Samaritan woman came to draw water.” The Japanese Bible had skipped the word Samaritan and translated the sentence so it read roughly: “A certain woman came to draw water.” Which after more than fifty years I remember as: Are no onna no hito wa mizu o tori ni kimashita. I’m sure the well-rehearsed sentence helped me learn how to hear and pronounce Japanese when I finally got to language school three months later, but otherwise it wasn’t a great deal of help. I mean, how often could you work this, your one beautifully memorized sentence, into a conversation?

It was put to the test my first day in Japan. The freighter on which I traveled docked in Yokohama before proceeding on to Kobe, which was my destination. We had the day free while the ship unloaded cargo, and I was determined to go into Tokyo and see my friend Ai Kuroki. I’d had no way of letting her know when I would get to Japan or if I’d even have a chance to stop in Tokyo, but I had her address. I’d just go and surprise her. A shipmate who heard I was going to Tokyo asked if she could go with me. Somehow we changed some dollars into yen and found a tiny taxi to carry us into the big city. And big it was. During the war, hardly anyone studied English, and the only Japanese I knew concerned a certain Samaritan woman of questionable morals, so asking directions became more than a challenge. We somehow found our way to a police box located in the neighborhood designated by Ai’s address. I didn’t realize that what I had in my hand wasn’t really a street address with a house number, it was a block address. Some kindly neighbor walked by as the baffled policeman tried to figure out who we were and what we wanted. She motioned for us to follow her and led us to a house, pointed at it, smiled, nodded, and went on her way.

I opened the sliding door, stepped into the little vestibule, and called Ai’s name. At first there was no answer at all. Then at last an elderly woman came shuffling out of the house and knelt on the edge of the tatami. She looked at us and said something which, for all I knew, was “What on earth?” I bowed as low as I could, but all I could say in Japanese beyond thank you, good-bye, and good afternoon was: Are no onna no hito wa etc. It seemed wiser to stick to English. I showed her the address with Ai’s name on it, but it was obvious that English was not her second, third, or any number language. Nevertheless, she shyly gestured for us to come on into the house. We had enough sense at least to leave our shoes behind in the vestibule before we stepped up and followed her into a large, mostly bare tatami-matted room and sat on the cushions she spread out for us. Then she disappeared. Minutes passed. Many minutes. There was no sound in the house at all except perhaps for our own heavy breathing. Finally I got up and began to wander around. I didn’t even know if we were in the right house. But on sneaking into an adjourning room I spied a group photograph. On close examination, I found Ai’s familiar face.

I raced back to whisper the good news to my friend and sat down again to wait some more. Finally, the little woman came back and gestured to me to follow her. She had already brought my shoes around to the back door. We went out of the house and into the house of a neighbor, where a telephone was handed to me. At the other end I heard Ai’s voice, warm and welcoming. She was at the school where she taught, but she would come and get us as soon as she could because some of her students were arranging entertainment for us and then, if we had time, we would go to dinner. Meantime her mother would take care of us. Ah, of course, that was who our elderly hostess was. While we waited, Ai’s mother served us tea and chatted on about something we naturally could not understand. When Ai arrived she took us in hand and gave us a wonderful evening. A group of her high school girls danced for us and I had my first Japanese meal, which I remember as delicious and beautifully arranged on a series of little plates and bowls. Already I was beginning to love Japan.

The next day we sailed for Kobe but we couldn’t dock because a typhoon was predicted. We would have to ride the storm out farther from shore. All the passengers were anxious about the prospect. Well, at least my final day had turned out to be such a happy one. I went to my cabin and wrote a letter to my parents thanking them for all they had meant to me for the past nearly twenty-five years. How I thought a letter might survive when neither I nor the ship had, I don’t know. But it seemed the thing to do. Then I went to bed and to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning I mentioned the fact that the typhoon had somehow bypassed us and was met with incredulity. “You slept through that?” Apparently, the other passengers had spent a terrified, sleepless night as gigantic waves rocked the freighter. I don’t know what happened to my farewell letter, but I don’t think I mailed it.

I spent the next two years in language school in Kobe. It was designed as a total immersion experience. Our teachers—all female except for the principal—were not allowed to speak English to us nor were we permitted to use English in the classroom. The best teachers were also the best mimes, acting out the meaning of new vocabulary words. Japanese is a difficult spoken language, as how you speak and even your vocabulary depends on who you are and to whom you are speaking.

Each day we went to school from nine to twelve. During the first hour the teacher reviewed with us the previous day’s new lesson, helping us practice what we’d been introduced to. Sometimes, as we could understand more, the teacher would expound a bit on parts of the lesson so we’d better understand how to use what we’d learned. In the second hour, with another instructor, we were drilled on everything we’d learned so far, and in the third hour, yet another teacher introduced the day’s new lesson. Along with our workbooks and vocabulary cards, we always carried home with us the admonition to practice, practice, practice.

Now, it happened that in the spring of my first year, I was given the opportunity to move into a beautiful Japanese house in the nearby city of Ashiya. The owner of the home was a widow of a prominent lawyer and because times were hard, she had taken in an American missionary friend of mine as a roomer. June was moving out of Mrs. Kimura’s upstairs and suggested that I might like to take her place. “Mrs. Kimura will teach you so much that you’d never learn in language school,” June said. “She has been the best teacher, both of language an

d customs, that I could imagine.” I was thrilled by such a prospect. I had just lost my American roommate, so it was perfect timing for me. June made the introductions and it was agreed that I should come the following Friday, make the final arrangements with Mrs. Kimura, and move in a week later.

On the Friday morning before my visit, the new lesson contained a wonderful proverb. The literal translation of the original was “A professional would run away bare-footed.” This saying, the teacher explained, had to do with an amateur who was so good that, seeing such excellence, the expert would be so embarrassed that he would forget his shoes at the door in his haste to retreat.

I practiced the proverb for the whole train ride to Ashiya. What greater compliment could I pay my future landlady than to tell her what a wonderful teacher she was, why, even those calling themselves teachers would rush away in haste before her excellence.

We inspected the gorgeous tatami-floored rooms upstairs, all four of which were to be mine. We visited the exquisite little garden and drank a cup of tea together. Finally after a wonderful hour or so, she saw me to the door, where I put on my shoes and thanked her again and said how very much I was looking forward to living in her house and learning from her. June had told me so much about what a wonderful teacher she was. “No, no,” she protested, in a show of Japanese humility. “I’m no teacher.” It was my perfect opening. “Oh, yes,” I said, “a professional would run away bare-footed.”

Her face seemed to go totally white. The atmosphere that had been all sunshine turned ice cold. Mrs. Kimura bowed briskly and abruptly disappeared into the house. Puzzled, I let myself out.

On Monday morning the first-hour teacher reviewed the lesson of Friday. “By the way,” she said. “Don’t ever use this proverb, especially never repeat it to a lady. It will sound as though you are calling her a prostitute.”

I think I screamed. “Why didn’t someone tell me this on Friday?” I was appalled. What should I do? Mrs. Kimura would never want me to cross her threshold again, much less let me live in her house for the next eighteen months. It was a nightmare. I was so proud of my great progress in the language and here I’d committed an unforgiveable faux pas to an elegant Japanese woman that I’d wanted so much to like me and mentor me. I finally called June and, though I didn’t actually tell her what had happened, I asked her to find out if Mrs. Kimura was still expecting me to move in on Saturday.

She was. No mention was made by either of us of the previous week’s visit when I came as planned and spent eighteen delightful months learning, as June had promised, much more than any school or text could teach me. For example, Mrs. Kimura would listen as I talked on the kitchen phone. “Excuse me for being rude and listening in on your phone conversation,” she’d say, “but if you’d put it this way, it would be polite and people would understand you better.” She was a devout Buddhist, but she would often conclude some hint on etiquette with the phrase: “You wouldn’t want to embarrass Jesus, would you?”

When I left her home, which by then truly seemed to be our home, she was distressed to see me go, especially since I was leaving her to go to the island of Shikoku that to her was like rural Mississippi is to a Manhattanite. “It’ll ruin all the beautiful Japanese I’ve taught you,” she mourned. “You’ll come back speaking Awa ben.” Which is to say, like a hick. “But you must write me, you must practice your characters, and I’ll mark them with red and send them back.” So much for the woman who claimed not to be a teacher.

Just before I left for Shikoku I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened.

I had many amazing friendships during my four years in Japan. While I was still at language school in Kobe, a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Eiko Takahashi, a young woman not much older than I. Eiko spoke no English, and I was just learning Japanese. The war had robbed her of a high school education and she had endured a disastrous marriage and the loss of a child. We couldn’t have been more different, but somehow, we quickly became friends. One day, quite out of the blue, she said to me, “For a long time I’ve been searching for a religion that would help me understand the meaning of my life, and I’ve never found one. I’ve often wondered about Christianity, but I haven’t known how to find out about it. Would you mind if I went to church with you sometime?”

Now, you would think that I, the so-called missionary, might have been the one to first mention church, but I wasn’t. As missionaries go, I, apparently, wasn’t going very far very fast. But when Eiko asked for an invitation, I was happy to comply.