DOROTHY BOUCHIER was a poet, composer, teacher, author and translator, who was bilingual in English and Japanese and bridged English and Japanese culture. She was so in tune with Japanese culture that one of her mother's Japanese friends described her as ‘Japanese wearing a Western skin’.

Dorothy Guyver Britton (Lady Bouchier), who died on 25 February 2015 aged ninety-three, was born on Valentine's Day (14 February) 1922. She had been due to visit London in early March to make a presentation to the Japan Society on her newly published memoir, which is memorably entitled Rhythms, Rites and Rituals and is subtitled My Life in Japan in Two-step and Waltz-time.

Dorothy lived in a sea-side cottage built by her father in the late 1920s in Hayama, about an hour by train from Tokyo and a short walk from a summer villa used by the Emperor and Empress. One day, many years ago at the British Embassy the Empress found herself sitting next to Dorothy, and, after enquiring where she lived, promptly declared: ‘So we are neighbours!’ Thereafter, from time to time, a chamberlain would telephone to say the Empress would like to come to tea. These visits would blossom into musical afternoons. On one such occasion, they performed an arrangement for flute, voice and Irish harp of The Last Rose of Summer in both English and Japanese, joined by Danish flautist Marie Lorenz Okabe. The Empress, who plays the harp as well as the piano, ‘then played and sang for us a charming lullaby she had composed’. On another occasion during a visit to Dorothy's cottage the Emperor said how nice it was to hear the sound of the sea. Unfortunately, at their own villa, the walls were so thick that they could not hear the waves.

Dorothy Britton was born in Yokohama as the only child of Frank Britton, an English mechanical engineer, and his American wife Alice Hillier. Earlier in his career Frank had been Chief Engineer on board the Shinano Maru which famously was the ship that first spotted the arrival of the Russian fleet off the straits of Tsushima resulting in a great Japanese victory marking the end of the Russo-Japanese War in May 1905. Latterly, he became managing director of the engineering company Toyo Babcock.