The subdued light of the lanterns fell on the circle of watching faces, each absorbed in its own dream, its private memory or unfulfilled desire. When it was over there was silence, a long sigh, then thunderous applause. The lovely girl smiled and bowed and went away and though we clapped until our palms burned, she would not return.
The master of ceremonies had prefaced each event with a pleasant rattle of conversation and several times during the evening he had mentioned a tidal wave. He had said, tossing it off as a joke, that perhaps we would all enjoy the excitement of a tidal wave and therefore he had ordered one as an added attraction for the evening. None of us took this seriously until now as we woke again to reality, and he began to prattle again of the tidal wave. Suddenly I heard sharply and clearly what he said. He was not announcing a tidal wave, he was warning us of its approach.
I rose at once with my companion and left the room and crossed the street to the hotel. There all was confusion. Guests were being sent to the upper floors and streets facing the sea were barricaded. What to do! We looked at one another in consternation. Our jet was scheduled to fly at an hour after midnight. It was now just short of eleven o’clock. If life and its crises have taught me anything it is to proceed with the schedule until it becomes impossible. We proceeded by rushing to our rooms, packing our bags and taking the last available taxicab to the airport.
The airport in Honolulu, as everyone knows, is on a narrow peninsula of land just above sea level. When we arrived it was alarmingly empty. A few employees stood staring at the horizon and the cabman was in haste to be paid off. In a few minutes we found ourselves alone in the big waiting room, and were escorted by a gloomy attendant to an upper floor and a comfortable club room, empty except for a frightened hostess behind the lunch counter. She welcomed us without enthusiasm, poured coffee and then walked to the big window and stared into the darkness over the sea. We sat down on the couch and listened, perforce, to the blaring of the radio fixed into the ceiling above our heads. It was playing jazz but every other moment or two the music broke and an inexorable voice announced that the tidal wave had reached another island and that the height was mounting. In a few minutes it would strike Hilo at an estimated height of over sixty feet. We also learned that the wave was a result of the earthquake in Chile. There is a continental connection under the ocean between that deep trench off Chile and the islands of the Pacific. Strange symbolism this, by which an earthquake in one hemisphere produces a tidal wave in the other!
My meditation was interrupted by the sudden disappearance of the hostess. She had returned to the counter, murmuring something about her husband and three children. Would they be alarmed when she did not come home at midnight as usual? We could not answer her question and neither could she and without another word, even so much as good-by or good night, she left us and was not to be seen again.
We sat on in the vast room. Jazz faded away at midnight and there was only the voice, announcing the onrushing tidal wave. We considered our fate, whatever it was to be, and conversation ceased. Aircraft had been removed from the field, the voice told us, and all flights were canceled. Roads to the hotel were closed. The silence over the city was ominous. We became part of the silence. There was nothing to be done except to wait.
Suddenly at one o’clock sharp the door opened. A breathless young man shouted to us to come at once to the airfield. Our jet would take off in the next few minutes. Yes, the luggage was all on. We seized our handbags and tore after him. The jet was there, we were pushed aboard, and faster than I have ever seen a jet rise into the sky we rose. At exactly the moment we left the earth the radio announced the arrival of the tidal wave.
Mounting into the sky, I was reminded of death itself. The hours of anxiety preceding, the final instant of departure, the inescapable separation from earth and all we had known, the ascent into unknown spaces—is this not the experience of death? There is one difference. From the final flight there is no return. For us there was the hope of return to beautiful Japan.
Yet before we could arrive on earth again, the tidal wave had struck. Rushing through the upper air, we learned by radio that traveling westward, it had already reached Japan. It had traveled more swiftly than our jet to strike with cruel force upon the northeastern shores. The people were warned by the government and could not believe. In their experience, earthquake and tidal wave came as companions. They could not comprehend that an earthquake in Chile might mean a tidal wave on their shores. What strange coincidence, that we were to arrive in Japan at this very moment to make a picture called The Big Wave!
“How did you manage it?” the reporters demanded at the airport in Tokyo. “Who is your publicity man?”
They were joking, of course, and we had no publicity man, but it was true that we came riding in upon the publicity of the huge tidal wave. I was grieved that my return to Asia must be upon a storm. I was helpless except to express sympathy for those who had suffered.
I had expected a quiet arrival in Tokyo in other ways. The hour was between two and three after midnight and I could not imagine anyone at the airport to meet me. I thought of one or two business associates, a few friends, perhaps, then a quick ride through dark streets to the old Imperial Hotel, and a bath and bed. It had been a long flight, after all. Sometime in the night we had come down on Wake Island for refueling but it had not seemed important. Outside the window I saw only a cluster of flat buildings and men scurrying here and there, about their business. It might have been anywhere in the middle of the night. Tokyo was another matter.
“I’m glad we are arriving at such a ghastly hour,” I had said. “There can’t be anyone to meet us.”
“Don’t be too sure,” my companion had retorted.
The great aircraft had trembled as it descended and the lights of Tokyo glittered out of the darkness.
“I am right,” I had said. “There is no one here.”
A man in a white uniform had stepped forward, “Are you—”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Then welcome to Japan,” he said. “I am with Japan Airlines. This way, please. … Just a moment, please … photographers and reporters.”
We paused. Lights focused us in the darkness and cameras snapped. Reporters crowded around us with questions and exclamations about the tidal wave.
“Thank you,” the man said when we showed signs of exhaustion. “Your friends are waiting for you.”
Waiting for us? We were speeded through customs, and our friends overwhelmed us indeed with greetings and flowers.
How did I feel? In a way as though I had come home after a long absence and in a way as though I had come to a new and foreign country. The smiling faces, the warm voices, sometimes the eyes brimming with tears, these claimed me for their own. Men and women I had known as young in my own youth were there looking as changed as I do, and with them were children and grandchildren like mine at home, the boys in western clothes, the girls in their formal kimono.
“My daughters rose at one o’clock so that they could wear kimono to welcome you,” a friend said proudly.
I know how long it takes to put on kimono properly and make the suitable coiffeur. The girls were beautiful and I was glad they and others wore kimono to make me feel at home when I arrived, at least. When I lived in Japan before the war, all my women friends wore kimono. The most modern and liberal had perhaps one western suit or dress, but this was unusual and not much approved. Now Japanese women wear western dress every day and always except for the few formal occasions of life when they put on their kimono, and many of them own only one kimono and some none at all. There are exceptions, of course. Old women wear kimono and certain distinguished women, even in business, wear kimono always. My special friend wears kimono because it is becoming to her. She has reached the position and the age when she can wear what she likes.
Behind the friendly crowd that night with its flowers and photographers, I was aware of Tokyo itself. I knew how severely it had been bombed in
the war, and that now it was rebuilt, new and prosperous, a symbol perhaps of the Japan that was strange to me. Yet even the people who came to greet me seemed changed for the better, I thought. The old stiff formality was somehow gone. I heard ready laughter, not the old polite laughter, but spontaneous and real. Everyone talked freely and without fear. That was new. The sweet courtesy remained, but life and good spirits bubbled through, as though an ancient restraint had been removed. This was my first impression that night, and I shall speak of it again and again because it was expressed everywhere and in many ways.
Meanwhile the photographers were patiently following us at every step. Japanese photographers are indefatigable, philosophical, incredibly agile. They do not demand smiles or pleasant postures. Their cameras click incessantly where-ever one is and whatever one is doing. They flew about in the night like fireflies, and we were photographed continuously, embanked in flowers and encircled by friends. We moved en masse at last into waiting cars and were driven at breakneck speed to the Imperial Hotel. I do not know why it is that I have never been terrified by Japanese drivers, They dash through unmarked streets and packed crowds, shouting and warning, and yet they do not have accidents or at least I have not seen accidents. It all seemed natural enough, reminding me of other days, years ago, when I was driven in just such fashion through streets or along the edges of cliffs, up and down mountains or above the sea and roaring surf. Perhaps lack of fear is simply because in Asia I relax into Oriental acceptance and realize there is practically nothing I can do about anything.
We arrived finally and alive at the Imperial Hotel, that haven where Japan meets the world with her own grace and style, combined with an amazing amount of comfort and good service, and an hour later we were asleep in air-conditioned rooms, surrounded by flowers in Japanese baskets.
Yet for a long time I could not sleep. Memory went to work and pictures passed through my mind. The first was the vivid face of my mother, brown hair, brown skin, brown eyes. We were sitting on the wide veranda of our house in China. I was perhaps seven, a barefoot child with long yellow hair, sitting on the floor before her, hugging my knees and listening. She was telling me the story of my sister, who died before I was born.
“On the Yellow Sea,” my mother said, “between Japan and China. We had gone to Japan for the summer, to the mountains behind Nagasaki. It was before we found Kuling, in the Lu mountains of Kiangsi, here in China. It was so hot in the Yangtze Valley that I was afraid for the two children. We had a lovely summer in Japan—the air was cool and healthy up on those mountains. I wanted to stay until October, but your father said he had to be back in September. I shouldn’t have listened to him, but I always did. We came back on a Japanese steamship—the Hiroshima Maru—and the baby fell ill. I don’t know what it was—a high fever and a dysentery. She was only six months old and not strong. And I am always so seasick—I couldn’t even hold her. Your father tried to take care of me. And so old Dr. Martin walked up and down the deck with the baby in his arms. I’ll never forget how he looked—so tall and straight and the little baby in his arms.”
Here her eyes always filled with tears and I always wept because she did and crept to her side. She held out her hand to me and I clasped it in both mine.
“Then what?” I begged.
“Well, you know, dear. She died in his arms. I was lying in a steamer chair so sick! It was a breathlessly hot night, and there was an old moon, sinking into the sea. And suddenly I saw him stop and look down into the baby’s face. And I—knew.”
I felt her hand against my cheek, and I longed to comfort her and did comfort her, I suppose, in my childish way. For the story usually ended by her wiping her eyes and saying briskly, “Now let’s have a little music before we go to bed,” or perhaps she suggested an orange or a mango or a piece of pomelo.
What a volatile thing is memory! When I thought of pomelo, I remembered the delight of that sweet and juicy fruit, a relative of grapefruit but infinitely better in every way, the skin easily detached, the sections free from one another and the flavor superb. In comparison, grapefruit is a little bag of sour water and yielding that only grudgingly. I determined to find pomelo again in Japan, for I had never seen it in my own country.
From my mother’s lips, then, I first heard the names of Japanese cities, and saw in my mind’s eye, the scenes of mountain and seashore. And my little dead sister was buried in the Christian cemetery in Shanghai, as I knew, for I saw her name with the three others of our family’s children, later to be born in China, and to die there, and this before I myself was born in my grandfather’s colonial home in West Virginia.
I was nine years old when I first saw Japan for myself, and it was on my first visit to my own country. Our ship stopped at Nagasaki, a Canadian liner, for my father was convinced that only the English really knew how to make a ship and sail it and only an English captain could be trusted to control his crew properly. The city of Nagasaki is a seaport and in those days a small one, a cluster of houses clinging to the shore and pushed close by the high mountains behind. The people there speak a dialect and my father would not let me learn even a few words of it because, he said, it was not a pure Japanese and it was important that the very first words in any foreign language be learned with a perfect accent. He was himself an accomplished linguist and I always obeyed him. It would not have occurred to me to do otherwise. As for the name of Hiroshima, it remained for me the name of the Japanese ship upon which my baby sister died until years later, decades later, when it became the city of the dead, after the bomb fell.
The lobby of the Imperial Hotel is the place where anyone meets anyone from anywhere in the world. I descended there the next morning in an elevator whose operator was a beautiful Japanese girl in kimono. When I walked into the lobby I was approached by a pleasant-faced American woman.
“You look familiar to me,” she said. “I am from Ohio. Do I know your name?”
I smiled and shook my head. She smiled and went on. The next instant my hands were caught in a warm grasp, and there before me was an old friend from India.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he shouted. “Why aren’t you in New Delhi? Our guest room there is waiting for you.”
We sat down and exchanged promises and he told me the news of his family, his pretty young wife, much younger than he and married to him against her family’s wish, because he is old enough to be her father. But she is a determined young woman and they have been happy together and, to his immense pride, she has given him two sons. He took their pictures from his wallet as he told me about them, and I saw the family standing in their beautiful tropical garden. Ismaya was lovely in her sari, a composed and well-organized young woman, her two little boys clinging to her hands and my friend behind them, tall and handsome and white-haired.
“I look like their grandfather, do I not,” he said proudly, “but let me tell you, nevertheless, I advise parents to have children when they are old. My house will never be empty. I shall leave it before my children do, and when I am gone they will comfort their mother.”
My Japanese secretary was at my elbow. She bowed, smiled placatingly and reminded me.
“Please, now is time for press conference. Everybody waiting.”
Press conference! In Japan this is a formal and even formidable event, and so it proved for us. The day was hot, May in Tokyo is always hot. We gathered in a large room where a long table stretched across one end. Behind the table chairs were arranged in a row, and we took our places, not hit and miss, but in carefully arranged protocol. First we discussed who was to sit at the table. Then we discussed how we were to sit.
I have been in many press conferences, but there was a peculiar excitement about this one. The big room was crowded with reporters from all papers and magazines—more than seventy. Photographers were numerous but they stood quietly waiting, their cameras poised.
As usual in Japan, the press conference began with speeches from selected persons. In our case, it had been agreed that I
was to make a few brief remarks as introduction. What I said was simply that I was happy to be in Japan again, grateful to them for their kindness on my last visit and ready to report progress on our project, The Big Wave, a story of Japan. I said that we were pleased to be able to tell them that one of their own companies was co-producing with us, and that I had asked the head of that company to make the formal announcement.
While this was going on the usual pretty girls were serving us glasses of cold tea. A great innovation, this cold tea, influence of the West, certainly, for I did not remember anything but hot tea in earlier days. In the humid heat the cold tea was a blessing. The press sat by submissively without tea, listening closely. Questions are not allowed until speeches are over.
The speech in this case was a notable one. The film executive was well-known and highly respected. He was a man on the young side of middle age, of a calm disposition, complete assurance, and pleasant warmth. I do not understand Japanese, but the speech went on at some length. I wondered what he was saying, for he is usually a man of few words. Our translator told us afterward and privately what had been said. How could I keep from being moved? It was a beautiful speech in which he said that his company felt honored to be part of the picture The Big Wave. He said that once he himself had thought, some years ago, of making the book into a picture for he read it at a time of deep depression of mind, when Japan stood before the world for the first time in her proud history a defeated nation. He himself did not know how to recover his own spirits. One day he found this little book and he read it. He felt the author wished to convey through it a communication of hope to the Japanese people, a belief that as they had lived through centuries with the constant possibility of destruction through tidal waves and earthquake, and indeed had often suffered tragically from such natural catastrophes, only to survive each with renewed courage and strength, so again they would survive even defeat. Now, through peculiar coincidence, he had the opportunity in taking part, on behalf of his company, in the making of the film version of the story. Therefore he announced at this press conference that his company had joined the Americans as co-producers of The Big Wave.