Copyright © 2011 Kanda Gaigo Alumni Association(KGAA). All rights reserved.
Following language school in Tokyo, we were finally assigned in 1951 to the city of Kyoto in order for my parents to begin their mission work there. Our residence in Kyoto was just below Daimonjiyama. My father began his work and soon founded the Kyoto Baptist Church in 1952. He soon found the property for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board to open the Japan Baptist Hospital in Kyoto in Kitashirakawa. And in 1955 my father began to build another church in Otsu.
In my childhood, I rode my bicycle downtown to Kawaramachi, and the Teramachi shopping street. There was a record store there and I became friends with the Japanese kids whose father owned the store. I loved to listen to music and collected hundreds of records. It was very natural to have conversations with this one boy of my age who helped me with my Japanese. It seemed while growing up in Kyoto that I was equally engaged with Japanese and American friends.
Missionary kids are relatively permanent in a country until they go to college, but army kids, came and went every one or two years with their parents on military assignments. As my sister, brother and I were comparatively long-term students in the school, we got to know the Japanese community and Japanese friends. Thereby, we were able to somewhat develop our Japanese language abilities without formal language training, which the Kyoto American School did not offer. The school began asking me to engage with the local community in many kinds of communications when necessary, even on the problems that occasionally developed.
From 12 or 13 years old, it became natural for me to build bridges between Japanese and American people. That was my “karma,” or as my father would call it, my “mission.” So until 17 years old, I was involved in intercultural mediation roles for the school. All through high school I was learning skills of communicating interculturally with Japanese friends in the community.
When I went back to the U.S. and attended Wake Forest University in 1958, I was influenced by growing up in Japan with missionary parents and chose to major in Comparative Religions and Philosophies of the world. I wrote in the yearly album for all students to see that my hometown was “Tokyo, Japan,” because that is where my parents lived. American college students would ask me if that was in China because they knew nothing about Asian geography. The ignorance of American college students at that time about anything outside of the United States was very offensive to me. Of course, I was equally ignorant about things in America. (2/9)