An American's Life in Japan before and after Pearl Harbor

Abstract

In the summer of 1934, the tangled interplay of relatives, friends, and communications with the Foreign School in Pyongyang Korea fate fully lifted me out of Bethany, my small home town in central Illinois. I was twenty-two years old at the time and had finished four years of college—one at Eastern Illinois Teacher's College and three more at James Millikin University and Conservatory of Music. But I was com pletely uneducated in the art of travel. In fact I had crossed the Illinois state line only once or twice with friends and relatives. Suddenly finding myself on the S.S. President Taft en route to Japan, I realized how sheltered and secluded my life had been. Several mis sionaries returning to their posts in China and Japan gave me their friendship and helped make the time on board quite pleasant. The two weeks passed quite rapidly. On the morning we were to disem bark, I was up before dawn and out at the railing with a few other passengers eager for that first glimpse of Japan. As the darkness gradu ally faded , in that first glimmer of light there it was—Mt. Fuji, far in the distance, a pale lavender snow capped cone rising above the folded rose-tinted mists of the Musashi Plain.