I HEARD CARMEN Blacker's name some years before I first met her. At the time, probably in 1952, I was a lecturer in Japanese at Cambridge University. Although I was happy with my work and my life in general, I also felt a kind of frustration in that there was no likelihood that I could ever live and study in Japan. It seemed impossible to me, pessimist that I was, that I would ever have enough money to make the journey. At the time, the airlines had no economy class and my salary was quite insufficient to pay for a first class flight from England to Tokyo. There was another problem: it was almost impossible to discover anything about Japanese universities. I wondered if, even supposing I managed to get to Japan, I would be able to study at a Japanese university. I wondered were foreigners admitted? Would it be terribly expensive? And other such things.

I wrote to a few people I knew in Japan and asked them if they knew anything about study in Japan. Their answers mentioned a young English woman, who was in fact studying at Keio University. Even more noteworthy to my correspondents she was also studying judo. One letter mentioned the rumour that she was incensed when she suspected that the men with whom she wrestled were not using their full strength because she was a woman. I didn't have the occasion to ask Carmen it this story was true, but I tend to believe it.

Although Carmen was in every sense ladylike, she never took refuge as a woman from the hardships of fieldwork that were more customarily endured by men. When she was observing the ntual austerities undergone by the believers in the Shugendo sect she dressed as a man partly in order to participate more easily in the ntes, but also to keep anyone from supposing that as a woman she would be unable to endure the hardships imposed upon the participants. Carmen told me that she had in fact endured all but one of the austenties. She confessed that she could not do without washing.