PUNISHMENT FOR GOING MISSING

For a European, there was no straightforward way of living a bachelor's life in Japan in the 1950s. You had to concoct your own cocktail: a dash of this, a spoonful of that, a drop or two of some secret ingredient you did not want to talk about. The aim was to do your job while having a good time and not pine away from loneliness or boredom.

For some this meant nurturing a full-scale expatriate identity: a social life of sports, holidays and friendships built around one's own native community, with nary a glance at the locals and their strange customs. For others it was the opposite: going native — Japanese wife, rice and pickles, futons at night. They usually did not last long with their foreign employers, opting instead for some way to earn a living in Japan as a small-firm manager, independent trader or adviser to some Japanese company eager to boost their exports. The culturally inclined might eke out an existence as freelance writer or teacher of English. And then there were those practising brinkmanship, if you will excuse the word: cliff-walkers who challenged their employer's rules against ‘getting too involved’ with Japan's culture or its people, male or female, but who stopped short of actually dropping out.

I was still too green and too recently arrived to be ready for a weighty choice like this, but the early signs were that I might eventually turn out to be an example of the third kind. The way I celebrated my twentieth birthday, in February 1952, was a case in point.

In a small steak joint up near the top of Kobe's Tor Road — one of the city's few eating places patronised by foreigners and ‘on limits’ to the American military — I had met, a week or two earlier, an American GI, Joe Haring, and some of his buddies. I think they worked in the 8th Army Hospital in Kobe, decent, polite young men, eager to make friends. Joe in particular showed an interest in everything I had to say (which cannot have been much), especially about Holland, as one of his grandparents hailed from there. In the end, after his bored buddies had left he invited me to dinner in his little off-base house in downtown Kobe, where he lived con-and- ofP with his Japanese girlfriend.