NOT YET ADJUSTED to the time change, I awoke early and lay listening to the rain as it fell softly on the roof and a green world of bamboo and rice paddies beyond the house. I was in the Japanese countryside about three hours by car north of Tokyo, visiting my son Andrew and wife, Kayoko. Andrew first came to study at a Japanese university where he met Kayoko. He finished his studies in the States, and when he returned to Japan to teach English, the friendship was rekindled and grew. Soon their work as potters would have to feed three, because Kayko was expecting their first child.
Andrew is fluent in Japanese, but my knowledge of the language essentially begins and ends with a few useful phrases and the word mago—or "grandchild." With Andrew translating. I found myself clicking chopsticks, happily smiling and nodding during the conversation at dinner with Kayoko's parents. We had in common the universal, unspoken language of delight that surrounds the anticipation of a new child. I traveled halfway around the world from my home in the midwestern US for the occasion, but over the years made a vastly greater journey of the heart and mind.
I was five years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The events of World War II were so pervasive that, as a boy growing up in the nation's heartland, far from any actual conflict, I recall rationing of food, gas, and other commodities; working in seemingly endless rows of vegetables in our "victory garden" growing food "on the home front;" practicing blackout drills; learning to identity enemy aircraft. I knew firsthand about absent fathers, what "missing in action" meant, and POW camps. I saw in windows the little fringed flags of "Gold Star Mothers"—announcing they had lost a son.
