After we had a cup of tea, the delicious green tea in handleless cups that accompanies any operation, important or trivial, in Japan, the contract was brought out. It was typed on white paper, beautifully lettered by hand on the cover, tied up with purple ribbon and sealed with the imperial sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum. It provided, besides the salary, "all necessary living expenses, including house rent and utilities, motor car, provisions, laundry, payment of employees (domestic servants and secretary) and traveling expenses in Japan," as well as travel from Japan at the expiration of the contract.

Though even in my first hasty reading of it I knew it was a generous contract, designed to provide in every way for my comfort and safety and to protect my interests, I did not realize until I had been there a long time how much more was given to me, the American tutor, than to the Japanese who served the Imperial Family or taught the imperial children in the schools. This is perhaps a good place to say two things. One, that in all my experience in Japan I was never aware of jealousy or resentment on the part of my Japanese colleagues who had less and worked more; and second, that in all their dealings in regard to the contract, financially and otherwise, I found the Japanese not merely prompt and scrupulous but generous as well. There was a further clause to which I paid scant attention at the time but which as I have studied it later takes on more significance "In all respects the scale of living provided by the party of the first part for the party of the second part shall be such as will uphold the propriety of her position as a person whose entrance into the Japanese area has the interest and sanction of the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers."

It had not entered into my thinking that I came as one of the conquerors, but I had, of course, and here it was quietly stated. I thoroughly disliked that position, and the fact that some of the courtesies, some of the consideration, some of the deference that I received so abundantly in Japan came from that basic situation was one of the never entirely conscious burdens that I was thankful to shed when I returned to the United States and began again to drive my own car and pay my own house rent and utilities. For my part I was to "perform the following duties:

As a matter of fact, I am thankful to say, many more duties came to be added to these, but that was part of the unfolding story of the years.

As I moved forward to the round table on which the contract lay and put my name to it, I was swept by a sense of the strangeness of the destiny that brought me here in this imperial fastness within the Moat, a feeling that became familiar with the years but never faded or lost its keenness.

Later that day I met Mrs. Matsudaira Tsuneo. No relation to the Grand Steward, she was the wife of the former Ambassador to Great Britain and to the United States and mother of the lovely Setsuko, who after her education at the Friends School in Washington, had returned to Japan to marry the Emperor's younger brother, Prince Chichibu. Mrs. Matsudaira, gray-haired, serene, humorous, and wise, truly deserves the title of "a great lady." She was to be of the greatest possible help and support to me, and I was to see her frequently. When I asked her for guidance in the intricacies of court etiquette and procedure, she said simply; "Just be yourself and don't worry," advice which proved not only reassuring but sound. It got me through.

The other caller that day was Mr. R. H. Blyth. He is an Englishman who has found his home, physical, mental, and spiritual, in the East. For years he taught in the University of Seoul in Korea; he married a Japanese girl, and came to Japan, intending to take Japanese citizenship. The war intervened, however, and he was interned. After the war he taught English at the Peers' School, as well as a number of other schools, and had a house on its campus. In the spring of 1946, when the Crown Prince's class began the study of English, he was engaged on the recommendation of Mr. Yamanashi, the President, to tutor the Crown Prince one hour a week.

He is a charming and scholarly man of middle age, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, with a wide knowledge of Japanese life and culture. A kind of modern Lafcadio Hearn [a Greek born Irish writer and journalist, who came to late 19th century Japan after an interlude in the United States, acquired a vast knowledge of Japanese customs and folk tales and married a Japanese woman], he writes of English literature for the Japanese and of Japanese poetry for the westerner.

He gave me much interesting and helpful information that day about the Crown Prince and the Peers' School, and then he said: "Tomorrow when you meet the Crown Prince, he will say to you, `Thank you for coming so far to teach me."' He paused, and added with a smile, "I have told him that you will answer, `Thank you for welcoming me so kindly."' It was a more artificial approach than I had intended, but I promised to try to remember my line in this little dialogue...

I saw the Crown Prince for the first time together with his father and mother. The occasion was without precedent. It was a beautiful, mild October day, and I had been in Japan not quite forty-eight hours. Mr. Asano Nagamitsu, the round, genial secretary of the Peers' School who did so much to help me at first year, arrived to escort Takahashi Tané (Vining’s Japanee secretary, also a Quaker) and me to the Palace. We left our house at two in order to be at the Imperial Household Building at two-thirty. About halfway there, Tané suddenly cried out in an anguished voice, "Do shimashol" (What shall I do?--the first Japanese words I learned. The next one was dozo--please.) The pass had been forgotten! Back we went to get it, Tané and I abashed, Mr. Asano laughing merrily. Then he explained that we really didn't have to be there until two-fifty; he had made allowance for just such contingencies. So we reached the Palace in good time, and went as we had done the day before to the office of the Grand Steward. I had brought from Philadelphia some chocolates for the imperial children, and I now produced them. They were taken away to be presented before the audience. While we waited I was introduced to Mrs. Takaki Tatsuo, who, with Mrs. Matsudaira, was to be a beloved friend and mentor. Mrs. Takaki had lived for many years in New York, where at least two of her children had been born. After her husband's death she had returned to Japan and for twenty years she had been a lady-in-waiting and interpreter to the Empress. A woman of quiet and compelling charm and great sweetness, she has made it her particular mission to bridge the gap between Americans and Japanese, and she had among the Occupation a host of admiring friends. Presently Mrs. Takaki and an elderly, rather severe, lady-in-waiting and I went to the audience chamber. As we walked down one long corridor after another, Mrs. Takaki explained that the big room formerly used had been destroyed during the war but that Their Majesties liked the smaller room better. The famous Phoenix Hall, of which I had seen pictures, was gone, with the rest of the Palace built in 1889. It had not been bombed, it was burned by accident. On the night of the great raid of May 26, 1945, the B-29's had left and the all-clear had sounded, though fires were still raging all over the city. From the blazing War Ministry Building across the Moat, big bundles of flaming papers were caught up by the wind and blown over the walls into the Palace grounds, where they fell onto the Palace itself and set it afire. In spite of all the efforts of the fire department, the buildings were consumed in a very short time. Since then the Emperor and Empress had been living in a small concrete building, originally a library, over the air-raid shelter, deep within the walls and hidden gardens of the inner enclosure. Rooms in the Imperial Household Building had been fixed up as audience chambers, drawing-rooms, and other apartments for their use during the daytime.

It was in one of these rooms that we now sat and waited. The room was spacious and uncluttered, ornamented with beautiful wall-hangings and gold screens.

After a moment or two the door opened and we stood up. The Emperor, the Empress, and the Crown Prince came in. Mrs. Takaki presented me to each in turn. We all shook hands. Their Majesties said that they were so glad that I had come and they had been looking forward to my arrival eagerly. Now it was the Crown Prince's turn. I waited for the prepared speech. But Prince Akihito had a mind of his own. "Thank you for the candy," he said.

He was twelve years old then, a lovable-looking small boy, round-faced and solemn but with a flicker of humor in his eyes. He wore the dark blue uniform of all Japanese schoolboys, long trousers, a jacket high in the neck and hooked down the front under a line of braid. At the collar was the mark of his school, a small silver cherry blossom. Like all Japanese schoolboys, his head was shaven close to the scalp; his short black fur of hair was glistening and his skull was well shaped, without the bumps and hollows that make this haircut so unbecoming to many boys.

The Emperor waved his hand to indicate a chair to me and we all sat down. My first impression of the Emperor was that he was a shy and sensitive man and a friendly one. The Empress was a beautiful woman with the rather long, aristocratic face seen in some of the old prints, though unlike them her face lights up with a most charming and infectious smile. She was not wearing the traditional kimono and obi (wide brocade sash) but the simpler court dress developed during the war. That day she wore one made of soft gray-green silk; it had a kimono top and a full long skirt, with a narrow belt tied at the waist. She had tiny satin slippers to match. Of a comfortable motherly figure, she still looked much younger than her forty-two or forty-three years.

The audience lasted half an hour, and its atmosphere was unstrained and natural. We chatted easily on a variety of subjects, Their Majesties speaking in Japanese and Mrs. Takaki translating so smoothly, so skillfully that it scarcely seemed to come through a third person. They inquired solicitously about my trip and the conditions of my house. Her Majesty regretted that it was furnished with "odds and ends," and I replied that the furniture was lovely and I thanked her for all that had been done for me.

I said that I had come to Japan with friendship in my heart and in hopes of making some small contribution to the cause of peace among nations; I spoke of the honor and privilege of teaching their son and of my determination to do my best for him. The Emperor replied politely that it was an honor for their son that an American lady of such knowledge and understanding should come to teach him.

The Emperor inquired after Dr. Stoddard [George Stoddard, President of the University of Illinois and head of the U.S. Education Mission to Japan, March 1946] and also after Esther Rhoads, of whose work with LARA [Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia] he was informed. Both Their Majesties thanked me, as an American, for the food that had been sent to Japan by the United States government during the previous summer of severe food shortage. We spoke of the Emperor's trip to Europe as a young man and he regretted that circumstances had prevented his visiting the United States.

The Empress said she would be glad if I could teach the princesses not only English but other things as well, that they had very little experience. I replied that I should like very much to have them come to my house and show them things that American girls enjoyed. Her Majesty said that was exactly what she wanted…

People have asked me what I called him. Denka—Highness—was what the Japanese called him, both teachers and classmates. In his family and around the court, he was called Tousama, Honorable Eastern Prince, and by his father it was shortened to Toguchan, chan being the affectionate ending. Prince Akihito was the form considered suitable for foreigners, and that was what I called him, except in the lessons in school.

Before I went for the first time to meet my classes in the Gakushuin, I was asked if I wouldn’t like to have a Japanese teacher sitting in the back of the room throughout my lessons to keep order. “There had never been a woman teacher beyond the Primary School of Gakushin before, and furthermore many students were interpreting this new “democrasy” to mean that they could do exactly as they liked, and the teachers were afraid that I would have trouble in controlling my classes. Remembering what fiends we were to the French and German conversation teachers when I was in school, I thought it quite probable that I might have difficulty, but I did not think that having a Japanese teacher as a policeman in the room was a satisfactory solution.

One of the most fertile sources of foreign-teacher-torture, I remembered, was derision in all its varied forms of the way in which they mangled our names in pronouncing them. So I thought that I would eliminate that hazard at any rate by giving all the boys English names. There were other reasons also for the decision. One was that in their English textbooks the names for the children were all Japanese—Taro, Jiro, Yoshiko, Fumiko—and I though they ought to learn to pronounce the English names. Then too I wanted to establish during that one hour as much of the atmosphere of an American classroom as possible. In the third place I thought it would be a good experience for the Grown Prince for once in his life to be on exactly the same level as the other boys, with no title and no especial treatment at all.

Accordingly I made out a list of boys’ names alphabetically arranged for each section, and I marched into Section A the first morning very calm outwardly but feeling a bit adventurous within.

The boys all stood up. “Good morning, boys,” I said. “Good morning, sir,” they replied with one voice. I laughed and they laughed. Then I told them that you said Sir to a man but you called a woman by her name. The boys sad down and looked very expectant, their black eyes shining.

“My name is Mrs. Vining,” I said, and turned to the boy who sat at the first desk on the right-hand side. “What is your name?” He told me.

That is your real name,” I conceded, “but in this class your name is Adam.”

He looked surprised, as well he might.

“Now,” I announced, “I am going to give you all English names.” I went back t the first boy. “In this class, your name is Adam. Please say Adam. Please say, ‘In this class my name is Adam.’”

It took a little while to get the idea over, and in the process we had some practice with pronouns…

I reached the Prince and said, “In this class your name is Jimmy.” There was no particular reason for Jimmy, except that it just happened to be one of my favorite names.

He replied promptly, “No. I am Prince.”

“Yes,” I agreed cordially. “You're Prince Akihito. That is your real name. But in this class you nave an English name. In this class your name is Jimmy.” I waited, a little breathless.

He smiled cheerfully, and the whole class beamed. I realized that he probably had thought I hadn’t recognized him, seeing him for the first time among the other boys. Also I think that he had always been identified in his own mind with his prince-ship and was unable at first to think of himself as a boy among other boys.” …

Princess Kazuko and Princess Atsuko had shed their school uniforms and wore pretty blue tweed suits; Princess Takako, with her short black hair cut straight across her forehead, her shy smile and her dimples, looked enchanting in a yellow wool dress. Prince Masahito was small for his eleven years but quick, lively, eager, and full of fun: a very winning child. All five of them seemed happy to be together, and the girls evidently regarded the occasion as an adventure. From time to time they were swept by gales of giggles.

This was to be not a lesson but a "social hour." The chamberlains were not present, and Mrs. Matsudaira interpreted whenever the imperial English broke down, as it frequently did. The Crown Prince drew me to the window to see spread out on the steps below some shells and sea urchins that he had found. A chamberlain obligingly brought out the new puppy, Aka, a fluffy ball of red-brown fur, and walked him up and down the path. I had brought a game of anagrams, Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats, and a photograph of my own West Highland white terrier, Hamish, whom I had left at home in America. We had tea and sandwiches and little cakes; there was no cover over the Crown Prince's sandwiches this time, and indeed it never appeared after that first birthday party.

I did not see the Crown Prince again for several weeks, for after his return to Koganei he came down with a feverish cold, and before he was well I was laid low by a sharp attack of influenza myself. I could not have been better cared for. General MacArthur's physician, Colonel D. B. Kendrick, prescribed for me; my own household nursed me devotedly; the Empress sent orchids; and one morning I was aroused out of a feverish doze by the strains of "Londonderry Air" sung by lovely fresh young voices in the living-room downstairs. "Home on the Range," in Japanese, came next, and then, softly, "Ave Maria." My class of senior girls had had a free period, and they had walked a mile and a half from the school to bring me chrysanthemums and to sing to me.

After the Crown Prince and I were both well again, a second private lesson each week was added to the schedule, to my great satisfaction. Now I saw him three times each week, once in the classroom with the other boys and twice alone, or rather, with Mrs. Matsudaira and a chamberlain.

I thought that he led a very dull and restricted life, and I longed to set him free, to give him a chance to develop enthusiasms and interests. Even the few steps from his house to the school and from his house to the Kokaden he did not take alone, but always was accompanied by a chamberlain. After weeks of suggestion on my part, progress was made to the point that although the chamberlain still accompanied him to the school building, they parted and went inside by different doors! What was still sadder, he did not even seem to feel the need of greater freedom. When Mrs. Matsudaira, who understood and sympathized with my concern, told him that he should come to his lessons alone, his answer was "Why?"

The weather that winter was cold and sunny. We had one five-inch snow that lingered on the ground in patches for about a week, but little rain or sleet. The schools were bitterly cold and there were many absences among the children. Three boys in the Crown Prince's class dropped out with tuberculosis. Milk that winter was available only from the drugstore and on a doctor's prescription, for sick babies, but I was able to get powdered milk for them from LARA. Transportation was hideous. Trains and street-cars were cold, dirty, and often windowless as well as jammed to the roof. People climbed in through the windows after the aisles and steps were filled. Cloth of all kinds was so scarce that even the worn green plush upholstery had been cut off by passengers and taken home to patch clothes. It was not unusual for people to have their ribs broken in the crush, and I myself saw a pencil that had been splintered in a man's breast pocket. One of my pupils wrote, "My foot are stepped on, my hair are drew, my hands are caught. I feel like canned sardine."

Most of my pupils spent from two to five hours a day in these trains. They sat all day in icy schoolrooms. At Koganei, which was several degrees colder than Tokyo, the temperature was often in the low twenties and the boys would put their feet on the lower bars of their desks to get them off the cold floor. Some of them wore overcoats in class but most wore only their thin wool uniforms with sweaters underneath. Many of the uniforms were shabby and ill-fitting, obviously outgrown or not yet grown into; most were neatly patched at seat and knee and elbow.

The Girls' School had been greatly improved during the winter vacation by building up the partitions along the halls and by painting the plaster walls. The missing panes in the windows had been replaced, but the windows were small and not very much sunshine came in to take the edge off the penetrating chill. I wore a topcoat and often gloves to teach in, and wool stockings, but even so I got chilblains. The students' hands, including the imperial children's, were red and puffy with chilblains. Yet somehow they all managed to keep cheerful, to put their minds on their work and to study hard.

As the winter went on, it became obvious to me that the Crown Prince was happiest and most himself when he was with the other boys. I saw him in the classroom between classes, always in a knot of other boys, laughing, alert, and interested. Sometimes I would see him racing down the corridor to the room where they played ping-pong. There were three tables, and he awaited his turn to play, like anybody else, roaming the aisles between tables, picking up the balls that went astray and tossing them back, commenting on the game. The boys called him Denka-Highness-and outside the school they bowed to him and kept their distance, but in the school building and on the playground he was one of them, and the difference in his demeanor and his whole expression showed how that normal and happy relationship fed and watered his soul.

For this reason and to increase the opportunities for contact outside the schoolroom, I was eager to have two of his classmates join one of his private lessons each week, and when the new term began in April this was done. I chose the boys myself in consultation with the chamberlains and English teacher and, privately, with the Prince, and each term new ones were selected. I was always interested in the Prince's comments on his classmates, for he had a keen sense of character and he sometimes suggested boys whom I would not myself have thought of; in one case it was because he thought it would help the boy. The basis for choice was, first, character and personality, and second, at least a moderate ability in English. I liked to have one whose English was a little better than the Prince's and one whose English was not quite so good. The Prince himself stoutly resisted anyone who could speak very much better than he!

That first winter especially, people outside our immediate circle were interested in what I was teaching the Crown Prince and had large ideas of what I might accomplish. One February afternoon the Women's Committee of the United Christian Church gave a tea for me and presented me with a beautiful piece of handwoven tapestry in a design of mandarin ducks. This was an expression of the hope which many Christians felt and which others put to me in far more blunt terms, that I should convert the Crown Prince to Christianity.

There were also other misconceptions of the purpose of my work there. A prominent editor, for instance, asked me if there was any resistance to my democratization of the Imperial Family.

This was not what I had been invited for. I had been asked simply to teach the Crown Prince English. But early in my stay in Japan, Grand Steward Matsudaira said to me, "We want you to open windows on to a wider world for our Crown Prince." It seemed to me then that through the medium of English I could present to him the ideals of the western world and help him to understand the essential spirit of that democracy which Japan was embracing with a hasty and bewildered sort of zeal in reaction from her great disillusionment with military dictatorship.

I never tried to indoctrinate him with any specific dogma. I tried only to expose him to the best that I knew. Religion, I have always felt, must be caught before it can be taught, and democracy is learned at least as much through living and doing as through an intellectual understanding of its theory. There were some to whom this point of view was a great disappointment. I reminded them that the Crown Prince's English at that time encompassed no more than a simple discussion of the pictures in the d'Aulaires' Abraham Lincoln and a folk story, "The Monkey Wants Its Tail," which appeared in an American first grade reader, and recommended patience to them.

Much earlier I had realized that I must clarify my own ideas of the essentials of democracy, not only for the sake of the Crown Prince but for others who asked me. The first essential, I thought, was respect for the worth and dignity of the individual. The second I found best expressed by William Penn when he said, "That government is free to the people under it where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws." As a Quaker, I believe in regard to the first, that humanism is not enough, that the individual's worth and dignity derive from the light of the divine within his soul, and that when George Fox, the first Quaker, told his young followers to "walk cheerfully over the earth answering that of God in every man," the kind of answer he had in mind was social justice for everyone and a peaceful environment in which each soul can live out its fullest potentialities. So it was natural that my aspirations for the Crown Prince should take the form of a prayer, which I wrote during that first winter and which was a comfort to me when there seemed so little that I could do for him but to pray. It went like this:

One of the first of the educational reforms instituted by the Occupation was the abolition of the old textbooks with their ultra-nationalistic propaganda and the writing of new ones by Japanese educators under American supervision. It was an essential step but the first results were disappointing. The new textbooks were sterilized, no doubt, but dull and commonplace in subject matter and because of the paper shortage, unattractive in appearance, meager little pamphlets printed on coarse gray paper.

The former practice of issuing entirely different texts for boys and girls, emphasizing the superiority of the one and the subservience of the other, had been discontinued, but distinctions still lingered on. In the English text which my boys were using I found this page: "What are these boys doing? They are sailing a boat. They are driving a motor car. They are carrying a big box." All were activities to give a boy an impression of power and importance as compared with the girls on the page, who were mending their stockings, sweeping the street, feeding the rabbit—not the horse or the dog, but the timid and lowly rabbit!

I wanted something better for my students, and with money that had been given me for "teaching aids," supplemented by some of the proceeds from an article that I had written for Harper's Bazaar, I bought American textbooks for all of my classes. The book I got for the boys was a Macmillan first grade reader called “We Grow Up,” a book with a variety of simple stories of nature, family life, community work and play, folklore, and so on, in which the values of friendliness, cooperation, initiative, freedom and responsibility are implicit. There was great excitement when these attractive new books with their cloth bindings, white paper, and bright pictures were given out.

The boys in the spring looked less tired, less pale than they had in winter, though they were still very thin. "Since defeated the war, Japan has suffered from food," one of them wrote in the diary that they all kept in English during one week of the vacation. One public-spirited lad wrote: "I went on Dr. Kobayashi to inject to keep off the eruptive typhus. It was a painful injection, but I beared it for the public health." Another boy had changed from a sallow, languid, indifferent child to a vigorous lad with a look of purpose in his eyes and his work improved proportionately. I learned that his family had moved from the air-raid shelter, in which they had been living ever since they were bombed out of their house, into a wooden barrack. "Now I feel like studying!" the boy said.

In the private lessons with the Crown Prince I used a book about turtles and stories from school readers. We had an increasing amount of free conversation. His spring holiday had done him a great deal of good. I thought he came back from it looking happy and stimulated, although a year or so later he told me, "I could not really enjoy it. There were so many people, and only to look at me."

He was able now to tell me in fair detail about his experiences, and when he did not know a necessary word he began to find circumlocutions for it. Though at first he spoke always of "the Emperor," now he began to say more naturally "my father." His admiration and love for his father were evident.

In speaking of trips and traveling one day I opened the subject of traveling beyond Japan. "Some day you will visit many countries," I said. "What countries would you like best to see?" He answered, after some thought and with rather an impish look, "England."

I agreed that England was beautiful and said that I loved England, as I do. I told him a little about the England I knew. He said he would also like to visit America and I asked him what he would like to see there. He listed mountains, farms, cities, rivers, wild animals, fish, and Indians. When I asked if he would like to see American schools he replied, "A little." He was also interested in visiting France and Italy but did not want to go to China at all. I told this story afterwards because his honesty pleased me, but the time came when I wished that I had not, for the Japanese newspapers picked it up and repeated it ad nauseam with embellishments and distortions and to my last day in Japan I was trying to clarify what the Prince actually had said about preferring England to America. As he grew older and more fluent in English, he said that he wanted to visit both England and the United States, but that as Europe was the fountainhead of American culture he wished to go there first.

His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish and I felt that they needed broadening. The mechanics that fascinate so many boys had no appeal for him at all, and I was no one to turn his attention in that direction, but I tried constantly to arouse his awareness of people, through stories, history, and observation. One day, I asked him to notice the different kinds of people he saw as he drove from Koganei to the Palace and report to me at the next lesson. He came up with quite a good list: boys, children, babies, pupils, men, women, storekeepers, Americans, Australians, farmers, workmen-and gentlemen.

One of the private lessons each week now included two of his classmates, and I started this series of lessons with a game. It was called "Cargoes," and it involved a map of the world with the shipping lanes, a stack of "Cargo cards," and four ships. The ships stopped at a port to unload a cargo of rice or pig iron and take on a cargo of coffee or sewing machines. They ran into fog and had to turn back or a favoring wind sent them forward. There was a good deal of vocabulary practice in the conversation about the game. Incidentally, although the track on the map led to Yokohama no cargo was provided for Japan. At that time there was a rather widespread feeling of despair in Japan that she had nothing the world wanted and that her trade was forever gone, a feeling which this aspect of the game would only emphasize. Accordingly I doctored one of the cards and provided Yokohama with an export of pearls, wishing that I might as easily settle the actual situation, for Japan must have trade and markets if she is to buy the necessary food to feed her people.

In the Joshi Gakushuin, now that the Senior girls had graduated, I had two classes corresponding to our eleventh and twelfth grades. Princess Kazuko was in the latter, Princess Atsuko in the former. For those classes also I had got American texts, a Macmillan reader called Wide Wings and one by Rowe Petersen, If I Were Going. These provided a basis for simple conversation, and I gave the girls also from time to time poems to memorize.

Because it is difficult to teach three girls of such different ages, I recommended a change in the Tuesday afternoon arrangements, and in May this went into effect. One Tuesday the two elder princesses came, and on the next, the youngest princess and the Crown Prince's younger brother, Prince Masahito. The first time the little ones came—Tane and I referred to them in private as the "princelings"—it was another breaking of precedent. Mrs. Matsudaira therefore was one of the four adults who accompanied them, the others being Miss Natori and two chamberlains.

The children, who were obviously happy to be together, had a little while in the garden looking at the tadpoles and goldfish in the pool, and then we went inside. Prince Masahito was introduced to the western custom of ladies first and was made to stand back and let Princess Takako precede him, to the amusement of all. It took a year or more of reminders before the habit was established, and then it held only for my house, and the interior of my house at that. Beyond the doorstep was Japan, and the prince went first.

On that first day I shepherded the princelings to the study upstairs, leaving the four grownups to be entertained by Tané in the parlor. This was, however, the first time that Prince Masahito had ever been alone in the room with a teacher; even in school there was a chamberlain in the room. Presently there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Matsudaira and the two chamberlains tiptoed in, "just to peek." They stayed a little while and watched our work, and then slipped away. A little later they came back again for reassurance. But the next time the younger prince came to my house, he was accompanied by only one chamberlain, who looked in upon the lesson only once. After that we had no visitors during the lesson.

Lessons began again as usual. The Crown Prince and I read together Pilgrim’s Progress in the abridged edition with Robert Lawson’s beautiful illustrations. At school I dictated to the boys each week a quotation which they were to memorize for the next week, and after dictation and recitation they took turns reporting in English on books they had read. I was interested to see what sort of things they were reading: translations of French, Russian, and Scandinavian novels, books on science and philosophy, no travel and very little biography, but on the whole a more mature selection than their contemporaries in the United states would be undertaking. The quotations I gave them were Shakespeare’s “To thine own self be true,” Penn’s statement on government, Washington’s words during the troubled sessions of the Continental Convention in 1789: “If to please the people we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God,” and Robert Bridges’s “I love all beauteous things.”

Princess Kazuko came to my house with her sisters as she had done before she was married; Mr. Tatatsukasa joined us at tea. Twice a week I went to the Empress. Two or three times the lessons were held in the Kaintei, where I talked into a wire recorder, so that the lesson might continue after I had gone.”

One day Mr. Tajima [member of the Imperial Household Ministry] came to my house with a message from Their Majesties. During my remaining time in Japan, he told me, they wanted me to put the lessons second and my own interests first; and they wanted me to see something more of the country before I left. I was to have a trip, wherever I wished to go.

After Mr. Tajima had delivered the imperial message, which he always did directly without anybody else in the room. Tane was called in to interpret and we talked about my successor. The position as I had held it would come to an end, but they had asked me to recommend someone to give the Crown Prince two hours of English conversation a week. Esther Rhoads was my immediate choice. Her character and personality, her long and successful experience of teaching English in Japan, her work for LARA, which had taken her all over Japan and had given her a knowledge of present-day conditions that would bring something new and valuable to the Prince, all these made her, I felt, the ideal person. She was already dong the work of two or three people as a part-time member of the LARA staff, and principal of the Friends Girls School, and she was not at first sure that she should take on this added work, but in the end she consented. It was arranged also that once a month she should have a lesson-tea with the princesses and that Tane should carry on their weekly lessons. Now the public announcement of my departure cold be made, and this was done on September twenty-fifth. The Emperor’s very kind and more than once expressed concern that my last days there should be happy resulted in a succession of imaginative and generous acts to give me pleasure that fairly overwhelmed me.

I was to see the other boys [and the crown prince] again too, singly and collectively, before I left, but this was the final time in the classroom and I felt sad as I faced them. They recited the quotations that they had memorized and then I said to them:

Mount Fuji had withdrawn behind a cloud the day I left Japan as she had done the day I came. Tané and I clung to each other for a moment before she went down the swaying steps onto the dock. As the stretch of gray water widened between the ship and the little figure tirelessly waving a white handkerchief, my mind went back over the past four years.

I had seen extraordinary things. I had seen a broken and bewildered nation pick itself up from its ashes, make an about-face seldom if ever equaled in history, and start a new life in a new direction with determination and vigor. I had seen, in the unlikely soil of war's aftermath and military occupation, the growth of friendship between former bitter enemies. I had seen the great, nail-studded gates of the world's most secret court swing open to admit a foreigner to a position of trust. I had seen a chubby small boy develop into a poised young man.

What of that boy, who will some day be the Emperor of Japan? What promise does he offer for the future? He will not have political power, but in a free Japan he will have great moral influence. What kind of man will he be? What he is not may in some ways be as important as what he is. The lack of initiative that troubled me when I first knew him, he has to a considerable degree overcome. With his great natural dignity is combined a shyness which sometimes seems like hauteur; and the ability to suffer fools gladly, which is so great an asset to any public figure, is apparently missing. The charm which is his when he makes an effort to please will bring him friends and also expose him to the resentment of those for whom it is not manifested. On the other hand, he is not facile, and he is not fanatic, not a person of easy agreements for social purposes or of sudden enthusiasms and coolings.

He gives his faith slowly, but once he has given it he is steadfast. He is honest, with himself and with others. He is modest. He has a better than average mind, clear, analytical, independent, with a turn for original thought. He has a strong sense of responsibility and a deep love for Japan and her people. He is aware of his destiny; he accepts it soberly. Cautious and deliberate, he has the true conservative's ability upon occasion to break radically with tradition. He has a sense of humor, that invaluable balance wheel and safety valve, and he has that quality without which there can be no true greatness: compassion. One of his friends wrote to me-and it is unusual for one sixteen-year-old to see it in another sixteen-year-old-"He knows pity "

I had come to Japan hoping to make some contribution, however small, to the cause of peace. Now Korea was aflame and no one knew where the fire might spread next. The United States and Russia were on the verge of a war that would be the final disaster for both, and I saw Japan's new democracy in danger of being crushed in the struggle between the giants. The very spirit of reconciliation which seemed so good and so desirable might draw her into war as America's military ally. I had been asked to open windows on to a wider world for the Crown Prince. I had tried, but who can say to what extent I had succeeded? But certainly many windows had been opened for me--and perhaps through me for others--both on Japan itself and on that ancient, ceremonious, hidden world within the Moat. Through windows, whichever way they face, comes light, and light, I thought, is good.

Vining, Elizabeth Gray. Windows for the Crown Prince. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1952; 26-31, 48-50, 71-75, 92-95, 295, 298-99, 317-318.