Rhythms, Rites and Rituals - Dorothy Britton

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went into our house to see if Alice and the baby were all right. Alice had been in the kitchen where the stove had broken apart, setting fire to the tea-towels hanging above it. They put out the fire as soon as she and the cook could stand, and Alice struggled up the stairs to the nursery, which was a shambles, with heavy globs of wall plaster jumbled in a heap where the baby’s high chair had been. To her great relief she heard the voice of Kin-san, my nanny: ‘We’re here Madam, under the bed.’ Kin-san told Alice she could see out into the garden as the space between walls and floor kept opening and shutting. The frame of the house had stood, thanks to Frank’s reinforcing. As aftershocks kept coming, Alice’s first words to Frank were a frantic, ‘Find sister Dorothy!’ as Frank disappeared.

      There was a strong wind, and soon Alice was aware of an ominous crackling as a high wall of smoke and flames headed their way. It was terrifying, and she wondered if it was the end of the world. Fires had broken out all over the city. It was lunchtime, and thousands of broken charcoal-burning stoves had set the wooden houses alight. After what seemed an age, the wall of fire miraculously stopped advancing. Eventually, Frank returned, exhausted, clothes singed and reeking of smoke, too tired to explain. It transpired that as a result of Frank’s courageous example and efforts, the fire had been brought under control and finally put out after only fifty houses had burned. He had climbed up himself onto burning roofs and organized bucket brigades with water from the nearby canal, and they had managed to demolish enough houses to make a wide path across which the fire could not leap.

      Almost the whole of Yokohama burned to the ground, but thanks to Frank, Isogo was saved, and became a place of refuge for thousands. Later, the grateful citizens got together a petition to have his efforts appropriately recognized, but he was so modest that he stopped them, saying, ‘I did no more than any Englishman would do.’

      After spending a few nights in the garden, rushing into the house in between aftershocks to get necessities, they decided to try and leave. Frank hired a fisherman to row him and Mother and Kin-san and me around the headland of Honmoku into Yokohama harbour, where several steamships were standing by. The P&O Dongola was just about to weigh anchor. Frank called up to a man in the bow: ‘Can you take us aboard?’ They agreed, and we managed to climb up the remaining narrow gangway. We found that it was mostly the badly injured foreigners who were on board, but Alice’s sister was not among them. Frank had hoped against hope to find her there. Landing at Kobe, Frank settled us at the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, and returned to Yokohama by train with medical supplies and food for his men. He quickly got the factory going again so that the workmen could have employment. He also persuaded the Japanese navy to bring up timber by destroyer from Shizuoka, and with this he organized the speedy building of a temporary British Consulate.

      Frank never stopped looking for his sister-in-law. After weeks of harrowing and gruesome search, he finally found her unrecognizable remains – with those of her friend Edith Lacy – crushed flat together in the rickshaw under tons of masonry, identifiable only by Alice’s bank book and Edith’s hat, which were found nearby. The two girls are buried together in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, and since war’s end the YWCA have held an annual memorial service at their grave on 1 September.

      For those weeks after the earthquake, mother and toddler and nanny found comfort in beautiful, historical Kyoto, where famed missionary, Mary Florence Denton, one of the founders of Doshisha College, and its first president, so kindly took us under her wing. During that time, Frank, together with the now widowed Tom Chisholm, lived in our house, shaken but standing, which they shared with a contingent of military police – kempeitai – on security duty in view of the nearby prison whose criminals had escaped, and the spreading, though unfounded, rumours of rioting Koreans.

      CHAPTER 6

      Hayama

      WHEN MY NANNY Kin-san – whom I called Ten-ten – and Mother and I came back about a month later from Kyoto, Daddy rented a house for us at the seaside in Hayama, and my earliest memory is of the scary rugged drive from Isogo in the back of a lorry. I also remember we were not allowed to sound our motor car horn in Hayama because Yoshihito, the Taisho Emperor, was lying ill in the Imperial Villa Annex. And I remember, too, the tragedy for me of falling into a mud puddle and ruining a lovely new outfit my great aunt in Oregon had sent me! It kept me wondering for years as to where it had happened. Believe it or not, the puddle was still there, when back in post-war Japan in the 1950s I came upon it suddenly, up a little lane, giving me a curious feeling of having come full circle!

      The house we rented was at the top of a steep flight of steps from the beach. English friends of ours had spent the summer there, and were having a pre-prandial drink on the lawn on that day, 1 September 1923, when the earth began to shake and the seawater suddenly receded, revealing unfamiliar rocks and leaping fish, before coming back in three long heaves, hurling great waves up against the walls of the royal villas. ‘GONE TO THE HILLS’. The message our friends had scratched on the wood of the front door was still there when I came back to Japan in 1949. Fortunately, that particular tsunami reached no higher than the garden, which was about 17 feet above sea level.

      As I write this, three years after the magnitude nine Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, I am still overcome with sympathy for the victims of that even worse disaster. Those enormous tsunamis swept away town after town and thousands of people on Japan’s north-eastern coast. Thinking about their ordeal, I have finally understood, after all these years, why my father could not bear to look at a doll I had once made which my mother had forced me to hide away, out of his sight. It hurt my feelings at the time. I had never received an advertised ‘walking doll’ my parents had tried to order for me, a small lonely only-child, and when I was a little bigger I had tried to make a doll my size to keep me company. But it was so badly made, that its ugly face and straggly hair must have reminded my Father of all the gruesome corpses he had seen when searching for my Auntie Dorothy’s remains!

      That ‘GONE TO THE HILLS’ house was leased to missionaries, and had a tiny organ, which I tried to play and found great fun. But there were ghosts, too: one night two scary little dogs appeared on my bed. My screaming woke my parents, who assured me there was nothing there at all. But I can still see them clearly in my mind even now. Two little dogs like the ones you see in old Japanese prints. The servants were sure it was because I was born in the Year of the Dog, and they planted tiny red flags all around the house to keep them away.

      The missionaries wanted us out by Christmas, which my mother thought rather un-Christian of them, seeing that we were earthquake refugees, but fortunately we managed to find another house to rent. It was next to the park that was right beside the Imperial Villa, and we had it for a couple of years as our beach house.

      We enjoyed life in Hayama by the sea, and one day at the local railway station, Mother made friends with a lovely Japanese lady who spoke perfect English. When they discovered they each had a little girl the same age – both not quite two – they determined that we should meet. But to their amazement, they found we were already bosom friends, playing together down on the beach, watched over by our nannies! Wakako Okubo became my oldest and dearest friend. She was the granddaughter of historically famous Toshimichi Okubo who played an important part in the Meiji Restoration and the opening up of Japan.

      The island country had been closed to the world for over two hundred years, from 1638 to 1868. There had been an emperor, of continuous direct descent, based in Kyoto since time immemorial. But in 1192, the then Emperor ennobled a clan leader for fighting the aboriginal Ainu, and called him Shogun, meaning Barbarian Subduing Commander-in-Chief. This first Shogun went on to establish a military government which came to be known as the Shogunate.

      The Shogunate took over Kamakura as their base, but eventually, the greatest Shogun of them all, Tokugawa Ieyasu, set up his capital in Edo, now known as Tokyo, and established such a tightly-controlled, fool-proof régime that his family held the seat of power for almost 300 years. To minimize the possibility of his vassal feudal lords rising against him, he required them to maintain residences in Edo as well as in their home fiefs, and to live in their Edo residences for several months each year, as well as leaving their

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