Yoyogi Park

The vast former site of the Yoyogi Training Grounds had transformed into a landscape so lavishly American – beautifully manicured lawns and wide paved roads curving between them, with two-story American-style buildings scattered in between – that it quite well lived up to its name: Washington Heights. Here, there were no power outages like we Japanese households always experienced once or twice a night, no streets strewn with rubble and mud; it was a zone of shining immaculateness.

– Fujiwara Michiko

Michiko moved to Tokyo in 1932, when she was seventeen years old. She had grown up in Hiroshima, but felt little attachment to it beyond the father, mother, and two little sisters she left behind. At what is now known as Ochanomizu University she studied to become a teacher.

War was not far off. That same year soldiers executed the prime minister in an attempted coup; the following year, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. Leftist organizers on campus were undeterred: more than once Michiko found invitations to their protests in her shoe locker. The school responded by forcing students to read histories of the imperial court. “Even if we were reds, did they really think this stuff would convert us? What a joke,” she recalls. She started skipping class to catch plays in Tsukiji and sip coffee in Jinbocho.

After graduation Michiko went back to Hiroshima. In exchange for her degree, she was required to teach at a prefectural girls school three hours outside the city. She hated every minute of it. On her first day she was the only female teacher to arrive in Western-style clothes – everyone else wore a conservative kimono with hakama. She was scolded for taking a seat at a staff meeting before the more senior teachers had arrived to take theirs. Once a week, she was required to instruct students using the same imperial histories she had so disdained in college. As soon as her “sentence” was finished, Michiko rushed back to Tokyo. “You aren’t really cut out for the way schools are nowadays,” a former professor told her. He set her up with a job in a relatively liberal organization tied to the Foreign Ministry.

Michiko stayed in the job until the war’s end in 1945. In the months before surrender, as U.S. bombers repeatedly torched Tokyo, her parents sent telegrams and letters begging her to come back to Hiroshima. Even after losing her own apartment to the bombings, Michiko refused. If she went home she’d be forced into the Women’s Volunteer Corps. Instead, she moved into a friend’s house and spent her days caring for the unkempt garden.

After Michiko learned that Hiroshima had been completely destroyed by a new type of bomb, there was little she could do. There was no way to contact her parents, and it had become nearly impossible to travel. On August 25, ten days after the emperor surrendered, a postcard came from her little sister Kazuko, addressed from a relative’s house:

“The entire city has been destroyed, and father and mother are missing. I came out here with our belongings the day before, and Yoshiko made it here too, but her clothes were shredded and she was covered in blood. Her fever won’t let up and she’s in a lot of pain. Everyone is taking good care of her, but I feel very hopeless. Please come however you can.”

Michiko rushed to Tokyo Station with her sister’s postcard in hand and, after several failed attempts, convinced the attendant to give her one of the few civilian-allocated tickets. Her youngest sister Yoshiko stopped breathing less than an hour before she arrived in Hiroshima. After they buried her, Michiko set off for the city to see what had happened to their house:

“Inside my heart there is a door as thick and heavy as a bank vault, and beyond it lies a vision of a shining summer sky.

Treading over the thick piles of debris that covered the streets, I spotted, here and there, propped up pieces of wood on which people had hurriedly written where they were going and how to contact them. Each one was like a heart wrenching cry calling out to the writer’s family. Unable to figure out the whereabouts of our house amidst the mountain of debris, I walked on and on until, eventually, I arrived at the riverbank. The white sand of the riverbed was visible through the flowing clear water. This vast expanse where 600,000 people once lived had reverted to silence – not one sound. When I looked up, in that boundless blue sky unique to Setouchi summers, I saw a shining column of pure white clouds. They appeared as though nothing had happened.”

The house was gone. Eventually, Michiko found a neighbor, and he told her where he had buried her father. Her mother was never found. After a few days, she took her surviving sister Kazuko to Hiroshima Station, where they boarded a train for Tokyo. They moved into a small apartment in Yotsuya. Both were despondent. “If I immersed myself in doing something, that might get my engine going again,” Michiko figured. “I decided to learn English.”

Kazuko, meanwhile, threw herself into studying western-style tailoring. She was already an accomplished tailor and had even designed some original outfits with her mother. Through her English school, Michiko built a network of friends among the U.S. officers overseeing the postwar Occupation. She learned that the officers and their wives ordered most of their clothing from the U.S., but had nowhere to go for tailoring. And so, she and Kazuko went into the tailoring business on the streets of Washington Heights – which survive today as the walkways and bike paths of Yoyogi Park:

“The vast site that was once the Yoyogi Training Grounds had transformed into a landscape so lavishly American – beautifully manicured lawns and wide paved roads curving through, with two-story American-style buildings scattered in between – that it quite well lived up to its name: Washington Heights. Here, there were no power outages like we Japanese households experienced once or twice a night, no streets strewn with rubble and mud. It was a zone of shining immaculateness.

The smell of cookies and butter seemed to waft through every house. Refrigerators nearly as tall as the ceiling gleamed bright white in the kitchens.

The Americans parked their cars on the street in front of their houses, just as they did back in their country. Saxe, white, yellow, grey – cars of various hues colorfully dotted the green backdrop of the lawns. To my eyes, which had never seen anything except beat-up black cars, it was as if someone had colorized a scene from a black and white American movie and made it real.

That said, when you have to make your way through it on foot as we did, Washington Heights proves far too big. The roads felt endlessly long as we walked atop the sun-cooked asphalt in that scorching midsummer heat.

On my head I would carry an old leather trunk that survived the air raids. At first I tried carrying it alternately with my right arm, and then with my left, but finally decided that was too difficult and began balancing it on top of my head. Squeezed inside the trunk were clothes we had tailored for several American households; it easily weighed 16 or 17 kilos. Lines of sweat streamed through my hair, and my entire body felt like it was on fire. Behind me, Kazuko followed silently.

At long last, we made it to the one building still standing in front of Harajuku Station – an ice shop. While they prepared our snow cones the two of us sat there silently, in a daze, watching the banner out front emblazoned with the character “ICE” flutter in the breeze.”

– Adapted from こころはいつもギャルソンヌ：私とミカの店の物語 by Fujiwara Michiko （藤原美智子）