I lived in Japan three times in my life. The first time was in 1972, when I was six years old, following my stepfather’s appointment as a visiting lecturer at Tohoku University in Sendai. It was not at all common for British people to travel to Japan at that time – unlike now where everyone seems to want to visit Japan. Our friends and family asked why on earth we would want to do this. My school friends thought China and Japan were the same country. I imagined all Japanese wore dressing gowns and had chopsticks in their hair.
My parents decided to move to Japan due to the frustration they felt about Britain at the time. Inflation was high, the oil crisis was beginning to develop and there was a miners’ strike leading to a state of emergency. The Troubles in Northern Ireland meant terrorist incidents were commonplace. Britain had become known as the “sick man of Europe.”
As there weren’t many foreigners living in Sendai, there was no international school. So I went to Shirayuri, a Catholic girls private school. I was the first non-Japanese person to attend the school. You can see me in the photo with my mother, in my sailor uniform. I also had to wear a hat and carry a Randoseru backpack.
As I said in the interview at the end of my Jiji lecture, because foreigners were so unusual in Sendai, people would stop in the street to look at us and shout “wah, gaijin” (wow, a foreigner) and the school children would crowd round me at playtime to look into my blue eyes or touch my fair hair. But after six months they got bored and I was just “uchi no gaijin” (“our foreigner”). I also learnt Japanese very quickly – and the accent and natural grammatical fluency have remained with me to this day. Apparently quite easy to pick up other languages at that age as you do not have a hardwired native language yet. I even came top in composition once. My parents were very excited for me but I was more sanguine – saying it was deserved because it was the best composition.
I think we struggled a bit at first in our pre-war freezing cold ijinkan house, but by the time we moved further south to Kobe, my mother also had a job and I remember living a very good life in a nice modern house in a town between my international school in Kobe and my stepfather’s university in Osaka. I would commute to school every day by myself on two different trains and be met after Saturday morning school by my parents. They would take me for a Sachertorte in one of the local coffee shops, before wandering round Kobe’s excellent department stores and bookshops, or going to the sports club. On Sundays we attended the Seamen’s Mission church and then have lunch at the Italian restaurant opposite the Catholic church.
It was quite a shock when we returned to Britain in 1977.
(to be continued)
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