My father, Yūki, graduated from the Medical Department of Kyūshū Imperial University in 1937 when he was only 24. As he had skipped the first year of junior school, he was one or two years younger than the rest of his classmates. When he was 29 years old, he married my mother, who was 24 and had graduated from Nihon Joshi University.[1]

My mother was the eldest daughter of a doctor in Yukuhashi City, which was due east of Kurakata on the other side of Mt. Fukuchi. Today the two cities are only an hour’s drive away, but in those days, it took half a day to travel between them by train.

Located in the eastern part of Fukuoka Prefecture and facing the Suō Sea, Yukuhashi City was once known as Little Kyōto and called “Miyako”, which is written with the same characters (京都) of the ancient capital of Japan. Several giants in Japanese history were born and raised in the area during the Meiji Restoration of the mid 1800s—including Suematsu Kenchō, the first person to translate the 1000-year-old novel The Tale of Genji into English; the founder of Japan’s first university, Fukuzawa Yukichi; Yasuhiro Banichirō, who had acted as one of the advisors of the Privy Council, and so on.[2] In any case, Yukuhashi must have seemed to my mother a far more sophisticated and agreeable setting than a filthy coal mining town like Kurakata.

Yūki and Chiyoko’s marriage was o-miai, or arranged, which was the norm among the Japanese in those days. Parents exchanged their children’s résumés and photos and fretted over the merits and demerits of the two families being joined in matrimony. My mother, whose family had deep ties to the region going back generations, had grown fond of the scholarly type and pinned her hopes on marrying someone who would one day become a professor much like the esteemed scholars among her relatives.

Chiyoko’s own mother, my maternal grandmother, had been an only child, so her husband had been expected to take over the family hospital. In addition to working at his own hospital, my grandfather was also the director of the hospital at Yahata Steel, which was one of Japan’s biggest steel companies at the time. It would merge with Fuji Steel in 1970 to become one of the largest steel companies in the world. My mother’s family lived in an official residence of Yahata Steel for a while and I once heard that this second home of theirs in Yahata had an automatic door. The maid would press a button and the door would open, something that must have seemed like a miracle of technology at the time. I guess you could say that my mother’s family had been well-connected and well-to-do for generations.

My mother’s grandfather, Yasuhiro Banzō, had also been a doctor. He studied medicine at Teki Juku, a school founded in Ōsaka in 1838 by Ogata Kōan, a renowned scholar of Rangaku or Dutch studies.[3] Banzō had been sent by a close relative who was a Confucian scholar to study medicine.

The school, which would become one of the predecessors of Ōsaka and Keiō universities, had a large number of famous and important alumni, many of whom became professors at Japan’s newly established imperial universities. Others, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Yamagata Aritomo, became political leaders.

When his teacher Ogata Kōan was ordered to relocate to Edo (modern-day Tōkyō) to be the personal physician to the Shōgun and consultant to the Tokugawa government, Banzō intended to follow him. His mother, however, had other ideas and made Banzō return to Yukuhashi where he established a private practice. Several years later, many of his friends from the Teki Juku moved to Fukuoka and worked as medical professors at the newly established Kyūshū Imperial University. They would sometimes come and visit my mother’s grandfather at his hospital. One of these friends of his was a Dr. Miyake Hayari (1867-1945), who was the first head of the Department of Surgery at Kyūshū Imperial University in 1910. Miyake befriended Albert Einstein when they happened to be sailing on the same ship together from Marseille, France to Kōbe Japan in 1922. Shortly before the ship’s arrival in Japan, a telegram from Sweden announced that Einstein had won the Nobel Prize, making “Aruberuto Ainshutain” a household name in Japan.[4]

While my mother’s great-uncle, Yasuhiro Banichirō, was also studying at the Teki Juku, he became friends with Yamagata Aritomo who would go on to serve as Prime Minister twice in the late 1800s. They were close friends and both of them married sisters from the countryside. According to my mother, Yamagata and her great uncle never suspected that they would become famous, so the brides they chose were ordinary women. When the men became successful later in life and gained important positions in society, they found that their simple country wives could no longer keep up. So, both men let their wives stay in Tōkyō while the men lived to the south in Odawara with their more sophisticated “second wives”. Such were the times.

I guess you could say then that mother Chiyoko had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. A year after graduating from college, she married my father. Tall for a woman in those days, she was smart, but frank. She worked hard to obey her parents’ wishes whatever they were. I’m not sure how people looked upon her, but they must have admitted that she had been well brought up, compared with the people of Kurakata. Despite that upbringing and education, I’m afraid my mother was treated little better than a capable maid once she married into the Fujita family.

When my father Yūki was suggested as a possible match for my mother, her relatives expressed their reservations:

“That Taichirō wouldn’t happen to be nouveau riche, would he?”

Since my mother’s father was still anxious about the match, he visited people who were acquainted with Taichirō and sniffed around. My maternal grandfather met one good-natured man who was so pleased to hear about the match that he praised the choice and assured him that my father and his parents were good people. Only too late did they learn that you should never seek advice from such people when it comes to arranged marriages because they’ll never tell you the truth.

My parents married on March 15, 1942 and took up residence in a home Taichirō maintained in Fukuoka City to enable my father to continue his research at the university. In January of the following year, my elder sister, Tetsuko, was born. Before long, however, Kanamé, who had always been physically frail and emotionally demanding, requested my mother’s assistance. Although there were several maids at my grandparents’ house, my mother had little choice but to move back to Kurakata and live with her in-laws while my father stayed in Fukuoka.

Japan had been at war with China since 1937 and America since the attack on Pearl harbor in December, 1941, so it was only a matter of time that my father would be drafted, too. When he got his call-up papers in ‘43 or ’44, his family went to see him off at the harbor. As was obvious from the simple uniform, his rank was much lower than that of the other doctors. Years later my mother confessed to me that she had been mortified because the others looked much smarter in the splendid uniforms of higher-ranking officers than her husband did.

I can easily imagine how hopeless my father must have appeared in his uniform. He wore thick-lensed spectacles to correct his myopia and had severe astigmatism in one eye. So terrible was his eyesight that he often could not tell his left shoe from the right and would sometimes put the wrong shoe on when he was in a hurry.

Moreover, he was never without his maids. Even as a young student, he needed two maids—one to sit near him, sharpening pencils with a knife, and another on the other side of the room to keep the background music going. His favorite music used to be kayōkyoku, or the Japanese pop songs of the 1920s and 30s. He would look things up in reference books and write down notes with background music playing all day long.

The maid would set the stylus onto the vinyl record then crank the handle of the phonograph to set it spinning. Sometimes she would even change the needle when it had grown dull. Naturally, both of the maids had to listen to Yūki’s favorite pop songs—again and again and again, sometimes more than fifty times in a row, day after day after day. To make the matters worse, Yūki was fond of one particular pop song and in the end the two maids grew thoroughly sick and tired of listening to it. Exasperated, one of them finally cried, “Yūki-botchan![4] I can’t bear to hear this song another time! I’ve had it!”

After my father entered college, a friend of his introduced him to European music, such as Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and so on and he became totally absorbed in it. I guess you could say that my father had a unique character; he was the typical absent-minded scholar, completely out of touch with the people around him.

How such a man could have ever been admitted into the Army was anyone’s guess, but after five years of total war even the least fit among us are needed. In the end, Yūki didn’t stay very long: after only two or three weeks, he was discharged. My father was in terrible shape—his skin sallow and pitted, he had lost a lot of weight and his uniform hung loosely on his thin frame. According to my mother, he looked like a withered gourd.

Everyone suspected that Yūki must have been more trouble to the Army than of any use to it. My grandfather, too, complained bitterly about his good-for-nothing son after he returned, but to tell the truth, Taichirō had actually begged a relative who was a high-ranking official in the Army to have Yūki discharged as soon as possible. He also had a professor from the university write a letter to the Army, claiming that Yūki was an indispensable doctor in Japan—Irreplaceable!—and must continue his groundbreaking research at all cost. Despite his public grumblings, Taichirō had been working behind the scenes all along to get his only son back.

Following some rest and recuperation, my father resumed his research at the university.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, my father lived in Fukuoka City and worked at Kyūshū University’s Dermatology Laboratory.

All things considered; my parents’ relationship resembled that of a long-distance marriage. And like a typical business bachelor, my father would travel back to Kurakata on the weekends where he helped out at his father’s clinic on Saturdays and spent time with his family, but by Monday morning he was gone again. Despite his frequent absence, he managed to father his second daughter: me.

By the time I was born in 1948, Misao, one of my aunts who had lost her husband in the Battle of Leyte, Philippines in late 1944, had moved back to my grandparents’ house and was living with us. There was a total of four children in the house—my aunt’s daughter and son, my elder sister and myself—when I was young.

Since ours was a big household with a large staff, my mother, Chiyoko, had little time to take care of her two children herself. The person who actually looked after me was a nursemaid named Katsué. My mother was busy preparing everyone’s meals, and entertaining guests who visited our house in place of her mother-in law.

Chiyoko was also responsible for sorting through the paperwork at her father-in law’s clinic. When the national health insurance system was introduced early in the postwar years, she was the only person who could deal with calculating and managing the clinic’s books. Around the end of month, she would sit at a table in the living room, sleeve covers on her arms to keep them from getting stained with ink, and fill in each patient’s name, disease, and method of treatment on the application form.

As for her other duties, Chiyoko prepared and served kaiseki ryōri, a special meal eaten during the Japanese tea ceremony, which was a hobby of Taichirō and Kanamé’s

Life in Kurakata for my mother was far from easy and I remember her always being rushed off her feet, but she did a good job, working from morning till night, essentially free of charge. Only now can I appreciate how little time she had for raising her daughters, especially me the younger, quieter one.

[1] Established in 1901, Japan Women’s University is the oldest and largest private Japanese women’s university.

[2] The Privy Council, or Sūmitsuin (枢密院), was a body of advisers and private counselors who were appointed by the Emperor. It was established in 1888.

[3] Rangaku (蘭学), or Dutch studies, was a foreign language curriculum focused primarily on medicine and other western sciences.

[4] “Aruberuto Ainshutain” (アルベルト・アインシュタイン) is how Albert Einstein is pronounced in Japanese.

[5] Botchan (roughly translated as “young master”) is a boy who has had a sheltered, comfortable upbringing, much like my father.

A Silent Ovation is available in print and digital version at Amazon.