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Love and Marriage Across the Hate Barrier
I was too young to question her assumptions or to point out that she herself had married a caucasian. My natural father had died in my infancy. My mother came from a noble family that had become impoverished after falling into disfavor with officials of the American Occupation Forces. But thanks to an expensive English education, my mother could support us by working for a translation service. A few years later she married an American businessman who had used the bachelor businessman ruse of having her assigned to all his translation jobs. My real father had died before I got to know him. At the age of five I had no trouble accepting the friendly American as my father. I wanted my mother to be spared loneliness in old age, but I was not given to making easy promises. Not even when my mother tickled my ribs mercilessly did I make a promise about the nationality of my future wife. In those days I expected to marry a kind and proper Japanese woman like my mother, but I felt it was premature to make such promises before I had received my primary school certificate. I attended a foreigner's school in Yokohama along with the kids of other American and English businessmen and diplomats. I had the odd experience of growing up a minority in my own native land. I came to understand that the caucasians in our land enjoyed a higher status than native Japanese due to the powerful hand of military, economic and political forces. Even I came to feel myself above the other Japanese. It was natural. I spent my days in a westernized world that was off limits to other Japanese. In those days Americans were nobles and Japanese were paupers. [CONTINUED BELOW]
It's a remarkable blessing that adult-world social status and politics are not allowed to dictate interactions among school kids. I was made to feel accepted and my talents valued, so much so that I saw myself as enjoying a higher place than many of my western schoolmates. On some level I must have known that their acceptance was conditional, but I was either oblivious or secure enough to flirt with and date the white girls in school. I met Melissa in the tenth grade. I was taken with her delicate complexion, bright blue eyes, and most of all, her sweet Georgia drawl. She saw something special in me as well. To this day, I can only speculate that it may have had something to do with my strange artistic temperament.
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