Chapter 143
1/24/2007
Ch 143 Walking Over Dead Bodies The Butler Did It!
Whodunnit? Clue: the butler with the tiger on the radio in this living room after morning chores?
Grandma's brother Dr. Leigh "Bud" Butler brought this Tiger statue back from Japan in 1926. The heirloom still resides in the same location and what follows is the rest of the story:
Bud got his medical degree in dental surgery and taught a couple years at Northwestern University in Chicago before going to Japan in 1917. There he became a renowned and the only foreign dentist and had offices in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kobe. He lived and worked out of the first and largest office buildings in all of Asia, the Marunouchi Building in Tokyo. When one of the world's worst (8.3) earthquakes hit this Kanto region on Sept 1, 1923, it caused the death of 140,000 Japanese. The US State Department cabled home that Bud survived but he was not able to directly write home himself until three months later because of the struggle and actually being too depressed to write. Here are a few clips of the unspeakable horrors from his first letter:
"Certainly Hell broke loose and it was only by sheer luck that some of us lived to tell the tale. I was obliged to walk from Tokyo to Yokahoma (18 miles), where I found that my Yokohama office building had been completely gutted by fire, after being damaged by the shock. All of my possessions there had gone up in smoke. I lived almost in a daze. I slept on the ground, dug burned canned goods from the ruins for food, ate rice balls when I could get them. I had lost almost everything I owned, or to be exact I lost my assets, but still had my liabilities. But it was glorious to be alive, and it was with almost savage joy that I walked over the bodies of those less fortunate than I, yet sickening to realize what poor helpless atoms human beings really (we all are in the face of mother nature's wrath.)"
Bud later walked back to Tokyo and volunteered in the relief effort spending a month of hard labor before repairing his dental office, working double shifts to pay the bills and rent while living in a tent on a vacant lot for a while or sleeping in a store room on milk cartons. He hopped a train to do dental work out of his office in Kobe sleeping in a small room in a shack there. Three months after the fact, he still was wearing the only set of clothes that he had when the quake hit.
He continued, "You over there can have no conception of what happened here. I have been thru it all, and yet I can realize only a very small part of the horrors attached. People died by the thousands like rats in a trap. We were visited by earthquake, tidal wave, landslide, cyclone and fire all in quick succession. With thousands dead, thousands homeless and penniless, hundreds insane, and millions more fleeing and scattered, you have the situation here. All we have is a future. I am going to stay and do my bit as a dentist for the profession. I may be of considerable service here."
In 1924 the Dental Federation of Japan bestowed a high honor to Bud in recognition of his relief work and efforts to improve dentistry in Japan. He was presented with a very valuable, perhaps $10,000 now, 380 year old samuari sword apparently from the Edo Period (Tokagawa Shoguns) which featured a blade of finely tempered steel with a hilt inlaid of silver and gold decorations and Japanese verse
By 1934 Bud had received high praise and a letter of recognition by the Tokyo Dental College for his contribution to dentistry in Japan. College President Chiwaki stated, "Your various endeavors past and present will be crowned with a lustre impervious to the acid of misunderstanding or time, for it is cast from the mutual understanding of both America and Japan." I'm afraid there was a veiled undercurrent of nationalism foreboding of the great war to come, during which Bud was imprisoned by the Japanese government and again lost everything he owned. Embittered by these events he returned to the United States after the war.