Read an Excerpt
The Only Woman in the Room
A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts
By Beate Sirota Gordon The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 John W. Dower
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13265-5
CHAPTER 1
Homecoming
It was Christmas Eve, 1945.
As the propeller plane started its descent, I took out my compact and checked my reflection in the mirror. Although I had left New York more than two days before, there were no shadows under my eyes. I looked the way I felt, energetic and eager. Excitedly I applied lipstick and changed from summer clothes into a skirt and sweater, simultaneously praying and vowing as I did so: "Somehow I will find my mother and father."
The war had ended, but the thirty or so other passengers aboard the transport were all military men. Our flight from Guam had followed the route the B29 bombers used to take; after eight hours, we were finally approaching the coast of Japan. At the shoreline, the blue of the sea turned green where the waves broke in a swirl of lace. Beyond the beaches, farms and paddies came into view, arranged like so many playing cards, reminding me of the orderliness I had always associated with the Japanese. I was returning to Japan after an absence of five years. The dark green woods, gray-tiled roofs and narrow roads of the land I had longed to see again lay spread out below me. But then, after miles of fields and gardens, the scenery changed abruptly. Charred ruins and solitary chimneys stood up from the bare red earth like nails. This was the "land of the gods" that had once thought itself invincible. I had seen newspaper photos, of course, but the reality—especially from above—was utterly different. Soon we were at the outskirts of Yokohama. Atsugi Airport was close by, but the pilot deliberately circled for a while at low altitude, perhaps to show his passengers the sheer extent of the Allies' victory. It was an effective presentation. Looking down, I knew beyond a doubt that the Japanese were finished.
The soldiers on the plane whistled and flocked to the windows, exulting openly, but I felt numb with shock. We were all American citizens assigned to the General Headquarters of SCAP (Supreme Commander Allied Powers), where General Douglas MacArthur was directing the Occupation, but at that moment I was brought up short by the differences between us. To me, Japan meant home, the country where I had been brought up and where my parents still lived. Silently I said another prayer for their safety.
The plane banked away from Yokohama toward Atsugi Airport. Below us, I saw many other planes spread about, all American military aircraft, looking like great steel birds that had flown down to rest. A couple of them had red crosses on white backgrounds. Formerly a special base of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Atsugi now looked as if it had always been an American facility. Our transport continued to descend. On the ground several jeeps were moving about, and I caught glimpses of steel-helmeted soldiers and a single army tank. The soldiers on our plane had fallen silent, as though by agreement, and the cabin was filled with the noise of the engines. We touched down with a bump. The sun was already setting on this short winter's day.
We had flown from New York to the naval base at San Diego and from there to Hawaii. The next day brought us to tiny Johnston Island, then on to Guam and, at last, Atsugi. It was a trip of more than thirty hours.
It did not feel like Christmas Eve at Atsugi. A squad of soldiers appeared, marching back and forth, jeeps drove by, and fighter planes and transports were taking off and landing constantly. I could see Japanese men wearing white armbands and working under close supervision. It was apparent from their uniforms that they were former naval personnel, and their insignia showed high-ranking men among them. Presumably they still hadn't received permission to return to their families.
One of them caught my eye. Having grown up as a woman in Japan, I automatically looked down. But his response was to bow deeply. It seemed unthinkable: a Japanese serviceman deferring to me, a twenty-two-year-old Caucasian woman. For the second time I felt a stab of dismay at the totality of Japan's defeat.
There was already an immigration and customs office at Atsugi to deal with the numerous Allied personnel arriving there. Passport control was a formality. The soldier in charge merely looked at my photo, then at me, stamped "Occupied Japan" in my passport, thanked me and handed it back. He ignored the entries for my date of birth, birthplace (Vienna) and occupation. If he had checked the last, he would surely have questioned it. On my passport application I had written "research expert," but a State Department official had left out the word "research" and entered only "expert."
A jeep and driver were quickly found for me and my two suitcases, and we headed for Tokyo. Along the dusty road, all the signs were printed in English as well as Japanese. We passed through Yokohama, the damage caused by aerial bombardment—so dramatically visible from the plane—unfolding in scenes as still and silent as a frieze under the bleak December sky. What buildings had been left standing were smudged and blackened with smoke; not one of them had a pane of glass intact. Yet in the burned-out areas between the buildings rice had been planted, and the fragile green shoots of onions and winter radishes were visible amid the sea of red-brown rubble.
Night had fallen by the time we entered Tokyo. My heart was racing. As soon as I had learned that I would be returning to Japan, I had sent my parents a cable, so I hoped they would be waiting either at our house in Nogizaka or in the lobby of the Dai-Ichi Hotel in Shimbashi. We reached the Ginza. Shimbashi lay straight ahead, but first I had to leave my baggage at the billet assigned to me. Since I was the first civilian woman in occupied Japan, there was no separate billet for me; I had to stay with the WACS (Women's Army Corps) in one of the few buildings to have survived the fires. I left my bags in a room that housed six, and went off in the waiting jeep to the Dai-Ichi Hotel, which had been turned into living quarters for high-ranking GHQ officers. I pushed the front door open and entered eagerly.
The lobby was dark. I expected to hear my mother and father call my name, but apart from two naval officers, the place was deserted. I looked everywhere, even in the rest rooms, and inquired in vain at the reception desk for "a middle-aged European couple." At this point the two officers called out to me. They probably hadn't seen a young non-Asian woman in months, and wanted to know what the problem was.
"I was supposed to meet my parents here," I explained. "I sent a cable from New York." My voice rose sharply and wobbled.
"A cable?" one of the officers repeated, clearly amazed at my naïveté. "Haven't you seen the conditions here—after the bombing? Where did you send it? Isn't it obvious that a cable can't be delivered?"
The other man saw that I was near tears.
"What are your parents' names?" he asked kindly.
I told him their names and my father's profession—pianist—but I felt devastated. The possibility that the cable hadn't been delivered had never crossed my mind.
"Leo Sirota? Someone as famous as that shouldn't be hard to find." These encouraging words from the direction of the reception desk did not register at first. My thoughts were filled with the recent memory of blood-colored rubble. How in the world was I going to find my parents in the midst of all that? I couldn't stop crying. The only thing that gave me hope was the fact that two months earlier, in mid-October, I had been informed by a Time magazine correspondent that he had met my parents in Karuizawa. Common sense told me they must still be alive.
"I know about your father," the young woman at the reception desk said in English, coming over.
"You know him?" I exclaimed, automatically speaking in Japanese for the first time since coming back. "Have you seen him?"
The woman stared at me in surprise.
"You speak Japanese very well," she said, forgetting my distress.
"Have you seen him?" I pressed.
"I heard him in a concert on the radio yesterday," she told me, collecting herself.
It must have been a live performance, since there were no tape recordings at that time. Impulsively, I called JOAK, the main broadcasting station, and learned that my father had in fact left for Karuizawa, some five hours north of Tokyo, early that morning. They were kind enough to give me the address, which I recognized immediately—it was our summer house. With the reassurance that my parents were alive, my spirits lifted. I asked the receptionist at the hotel to send a telegram, which read simply: "I am waiting for you at the Dai-Ichi Hotel in Shimbashi. Kisses, Beate."
The officers were still sitting there.
"Are you in the armed forces?" they wanted to know.
"I'm an American civilian," I said.
"How did you manage to get here as a civilian?" one of them asked.
The other interrupted him before I could reply.
"You must have come as an interpreter. Your Japanese is so good."
"I lived in Tokyo as a little girl," I explained, "so I picked it up then. I wanted to see my parents again, and ordinary civilians aren't allowed in Japan, so I found a job as a civilian attached to the army, and that's how I got back home to Japan."
The two men showed no reaction when I described Japan as "home," and did not quiz me any further. Having come to Tokyo directly from the battlefield, they wanted to hear news of their home, so they persuaded me to sit down with them by ordering me a hot chocolate. As a newcomer to war-ravaged Japan, I didn't realize how precious a thing like that was, but the steaming drink did help remind me that it was Christmas.
The next day, I decided to try to find our old house in Tokyo, which meant going to the motor pool for a jeep and driver. Buses and streetcars were off-limits to Allied personnel, to prevent putting further strain on already overtaxed Japanese facilities. I asked the driver in Japanese to take me to Nogizaka, the Tokyo neighborhood around Nogi Shrine where my family had lived before the war.
The man sat up, startled.
"Where did you learn Japanese?" he asked.
"I was brought up in Japan from the age of five to fifteen—in Tokyo." It was dawning on me that this was a story I would be telling often.
"Are your parents American?"
"They're Austrians of Russian origin, and I was born in Vienna."
"Why did you come to Japan?" was the next question.
"My father is a musician, Leo Sirota, the pianist. He's well known here."
"So," he said, sitting back, "you're the daughter of a musician."
The driver continued to ply me with questions, but as we approached the central areas where fires had raged he fell silent. Even here, however, there were signs of revival. The Hibiya streetcar, whose route followed the Imperial Palace moat, was already running again. The passing streetcars were all overcrowded, with people clinging on, front and back. Seeing young women with babies strapped to their backs hanging on to the doors, I couldn't help crying out in Japanese, "That's dangerous!" The babies' cold-nipped feet, dangling from quilted jackets, were as red as persimmons. When the jeep passed the Diet building, I noticed that the vast, empty area in front of it was being cultivated, with wheat and vegetables planted in rows.
But when we neared my old neighborhood, the atmosphere changed. There were a few buildings left standing, but I could see no private homes. Everything I remembered had vanished. Only the dark green woods of Nogi Shrine, rising out of the now familiar reddish-brown surroundings, appeared untouched.
"My house is very near here," I told the driver.
I got out at Nogi Shrine and just stood there for two or three minutes, looking down the hill in confusion. If one walks down the hill, the shrine is on the left. Past the shrine, there had been houses on the right. Now the houses were simply gone. What I saw was utterly changed from what I remembered. Even so, I kept looking.
"No. 10 Hinokicho, Akasaka-ku, Tokyo." I murmured the address to myself as I walked down Nogizaka Hill searching for the Western-style house in which I had lived for ten years. The houses of our neighbors—the singer Nobuko Hara, the Chinese consul, the White Russian, the German—had all been destroyed. Nor was our house where my feet told me it should be. What I was looking at were merely traces of it, the square foundation stones. My eyes swam, and the rust-colored mounds of earth became swollen and distorted. In the end, I was only able to recognize the remains of the house from a stone pillar, now scorched by flames, one of two that used to stand next to the front steps. A chill ran through me. The war had damaged not just stones and mortar but the very stuff of people's memories. Where was my friend's house? Was the street that led to the school still there? What about the storekeeper?
Trying to revive my fast-fading and by now thoroughly disoriented recollections, I rode around in the jeep for a long time. Finally, I came across the house of a German singer we had known, a Mrs. Netke, and knocked at the cracked glass door.
"This is Beate Sirota," I shouted in German.
Pale and thin, Mrs. Netke very cautiously opened the door and stuck her head out. When she saw me, a look of recognition lit up her watery blue eyes.
"Your parents are probably in Karuizawa," she told me. "During the war, all the foreigners living in Tokyo, even those from the Axis countries, had to go there."
The morning's grim sights had made me briefly forget last night's telegram to my parents. Mrs. Netke's words jolted me back into the present, and I was suddenly anxious to return to the Dai-Ichi Hotel in case news had come. Although she was eager to talk about the past, I hastily said goodbye and jumped into the jeep.
There was nothing new at the hotel, however. The postal service was in such disarray that there was no way of knowing whether my telegram had even arrived. The two naval officers were sitting together in the same place in the lobby, so we picked up where we had left off, chatting about New York. But while I was regaling them with accounts of the latest concerts and movies, I was privately calculating how long it would take for my parents to reach Tokyo if they had received my telegram. The trains ran so infrequently they might not arrive until evening. After a while, I couldn't hide my preoccupation any longer. To cheer me up, the officers invited me to visit their ship, which was lying at anchor in Tokyo Bay. Even after fifty years, I have not forgotten the laughing, sweating faces of the sailors or the strange metallic beauty of the ship's cannons, which I knew must have been used to fire on Japanese.
By 5:30 I was back in the hotel.
"Beate!"
It took me a moment to recognize my father. He was wearing an old black cashmere coat that I remembered, but his cheeks were hollow and his face was deeply lined. Only his voice was the same. He hugged me hard and kissed my cheek.
"How is Mama?" I asked him anxiously.
"She's ill," he admitted. "She's suffering from malnutrition, which is why she couldn't come. But don't worry. When she sees your face, she'll get better in no time." When my father smiled his wrinkles deepened, and he looked much older than his sixty years. But his eyes still twinkled.
We sat there holding hands and talking. Each of us had painful wartime stories to tell. My father dwelt in particular on the fate of his relatives in Europe. The Sirotas, like my mother's family, the Horensteins, were Russian Jews. Between the two families, there were dozens of relatives in Austria, Switzerland, France and the Soviet Union. My mother was one of sixteen children; her father had been widowed twice and married three times. My father had four brothers and sisters. His younger brother, Peter, Maurice Chevalier's agent, had been living in Vichy France but was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Luckily, Peter's daughter Tina escaped. My father's nephew Igor was killed in the Normandy Invasion, and my mother's nephew Josef, who lived in Switzerland, had been reported safe. But the relatives living in Austria had all been deported to Nazi camps. Whenever the words "concentration camp" came up, the lines in my father's face seemed to grow even deeper.
As we were talking, the chandelier lights suddenly went out.
"That's the second time today," a voice in the lobby said.
I held my father's hands tightly until the lights came on again. His strong pianist's fingers felt as bony and rough as a tree's branches, but their warmth was reassuring.
We talked for hours, but finally I had to return to the WAC billet. My father stayed overnight with one of his pupils, whose house had escaped the fire-bombing, and set off alone the next day for Karuizawa. I had to start work, but I promised to follow him to Karuizawa as soon as I could.
The next morning I reported to GHQ. In Washington I had been told only that I would be working for the Government Section of SCAP in Tokyo, so I had no idea what the job entailed. On that first day, I was interviewed by the deputy chief of the Government Section, Colonel Charles L. Kades, who decided to assign me to the Political Affairs Division, headed by Colonel Pieter K. Roest. I was embarrassed to have to ask my superior for a favor so soon. If I had been working for the Japanese, I would have hemmed and hawed, but this was an American world. When I explained my parents' situation to Col. Roest, he quickly granted me leave.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Only Woman in the Room by Beate Sirota Gordon. Copyright © 2014 John W. Dower. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
