Washington heights was a housing project for Occupationaires, a jerry-built community erected in a few months upon the former Yoyogi Military Parade Ground. It looked like an American company town with rows of box-like stucco houses set at careful angles to insure play space and clothes-drying areas, and scrubby little transplanted trees and sparse bushes struggling for life. There was a commissary, a PX, a gas station, a movie house, a chapel center, a club, and a school, and the people who lived there need never know they were in Japan, except for the profusion of Japanese servants, who were Americanizing themselves as rapidly as possible.

The school was very bright and cheerful, well equipped and well run, and with its rows of orange school buses, which collected children from American houses all over Tokyo, it looked like any one of countless elementary schools in the United States. When I visited it I was impressed by the zest with which teachers and children worked together with no apparent discipline but self-discipline, yet without confusion or wasted energy. In June I took the Crown Prince and five of his classmates to visit it.

Two boys went from each section, and except for the Crown Prince they were elected by the boys themselves. The teachers had asked me to appoint the five boys, as was customary in such cases, but I seized the opportunity to give them a little practice in democratic procedures.

I began by putting on the blackboard the words representative, nominate, vote, elect, ballot, and teller, which I told them to look up in their dictionaries. Then I told them what they were to elect and had them discuss desirable qualities in their representatives, which also I wrote upon the blackboard. The boys who were chosen must be able, they decided, to speak and understand English; they must be interested in the American school and able to show their interest; they must be polite, saving their comments in Japanese for a later time; and they must be able to observe carefully and to report to the class afterwards. Then we had nominations and took the vote. The boy the Crown Prince nominated was not elected. He was a good boy, but his English was really not at that time quite adequate. It interested me that the rest of his section did not feel that they must vote for the Prince's choice. In all three sections the boys elected were among those I should have considered myself, if I had done the appointing.

All six boys were excused from classes for the occasion, and we met at Harajuku Station a little after nine one sunny morning. Besides the six boys and Tané and myself, the party included Mr. Nomura, Mr. Sumikura, the bright-eyed Zen Buddhist chamberlain, Dr. Sato, the senior doctor, Mr. Kikuchi, and Viscount M?ri, who was a friend of teachers in both schools and had been one link in the arrangements.

In three cars we proceeded through the monotonous streets o€ Washington Heights. Word of the imperial visitor had somehow got around among the Japanese servants, many of whom were out bowing. A few extra policemen were on duty, but the Americans appeared oblivious.

Bill Carty of the Paramount News just happened to come out of his house at the moment when the three cars passed. A very quick-witted young man, he took in the situation at a glance, and I have never seen anyone move faster. He jumped into his blue jeep, turned it around on two wheels, and whizzing past us was on the school steps in time to photograph our arrival.

Miss Marjorie Fox, the blond young acting principal, a very able and attractive girl, was at the door to meet us. She took us first to the teachers' room, where we all sat down and she explained to us very simply and slowly the history and organization of the school. The boys all listened intently and understood practically everything that was said, more, in fact, than the grownups did.

The school was accustomed to entertaining Japanese visitors, mostly teachers who came to see in practice some of the new methods which they had previously encountered only in theory, and the children went ahead with their work without paying any attention to them.

We visited a sixth grade studying South America, listened to a singing lesson in the library, where a group was learning a Japanese song, and passed on to the fourth grade, which was doing a unit on Japan under the imaginative leadership of Miss Fern White. Here we stayed for half an hour, and there was quite an interchange between the American children and the Japanese boys.

The American children were making reports on silkworm culture when we came in. After they had finished those, they showed us the costumes and properties of the play, Momotaro, which they had presented a few days before. Momotaro is one of the oldest of Japanese folk tales, and concerns a boy who was found as a baby bobbing down the river inside a peach and was brought up by the old man and old woman who found him and who finally, with the help of a dog, a monkey and a pheasant, rescued Japan from the inroads of a pack of devils from another island.

The next day, when the Crown Prince had his regular lesson alone with me, I asked him what had interested him most at the American school. He answered promptly, "The classrooms." To my "Why?" he replied, "Because the children were so free." After a thoughtful pause, he asked, "Why are they so free?"

I struggled to find simple words. "Because they are going to be free when they grow up," I said, "and they must learn how to be free now. They must learn how to work together, and how to be free without disturbing or hurting other people. The time to learn that is when they are in school."

A little later he said, "Which is better, the American way or the Japanese way?"

I never liked to make a direct comparison, and I tried to side step. "Which do you think?" I asked.

The Prince laughed, and countered quickly, "No, I asked you.

So I answered honestly, "There are many fine things about Japanese schools, but I think the American way is better. If people are going to be free when they grow up, they must learn how when they are young."

He nodded thoughtfully, then asked me about English and French schools. I told him that I had never visited English or French schools and had only read about them, but that I thought they studied more Latin, more mathematics, and so forth, but did not have so much practice in doing things as American schools did.

While the Crown Prince and I were having this conversation, Tané was talking it all over with Mr. Sumikura. He told her that the men who visited the school with the boys had been much impressed by the kindness and courtesy and friendliness which they had met there, both from teachers and pupils. I in my turn was impressed by the fact that it was the spirit of the school that had struck them so much more than the equipment. It would have been so easy and natural for them to say in effect, Yes, of course you can have a good school when you have such superior equipment, but there was nothing of that kind.

At various times later we discussed the question of freedom and discipline. They could not understand why the informality and spontaneity in the classrooms did not deteriorate into disorder. There was one aspect of the Japanese schools that never ceased to trouble me. In all the American schools that I had ever known, the students could be depended on, if a teacher was called from the room, to carry on quietly by themselves. If they did not work, they at least played without disturbing other people. In a Japanese school, on the contrary, if a teacher is called out, pandemonium promptly ensues, and neighboring classes can scarcely hear themselves think. As long as the teacher is present, however, rigid decorum prevails, and it is a rare student who speaks without being called upon or who asks a question or volunteers an opinion of his own.

Our visit to the American school was returned the following September, when six children and four teachers from both Washington Heights and the still larger development called Grant Heights came to Koganei. Dr. Yoshinari Abe, the white-haired, genial president of the Gakushuin, who had succeeded Mr. Yamanashi, came to Koganei to meet them. Two of the children were girls and four were boys.

Mr. Miyamoto, one of the English teachers, told them about the Gakushuin, its history, and its various parts, the Elementary School at Yotsuya, the High School at Mejiro, the Girls' School at Toyama, and the Middle School at Koganei.

They visited my English class first. I was teaching the Crown Prince's section at that time. I had divided the class into pairs, and each pair in turn delivered a conversation on the subject of the Olympic Games. I called on the Crown Prince and his partner while the visitors were in the room and they acquitted themselves well.

They went next to the calligraphy class, where the boys were practising difficult characters with brush and sumi (charcoal ink) while the teacher lectured on the order of the strokes and the meaning and philosophy of the character, and then to a geography class which was studying the Kanto region, in which Tokyo is situated. They visited also the Kokaden, on the steps of which a drawing class was making sketches of the trees and the playground and the fence around the Crown Prince's house. The gate was opened for the visitors and they looked in. From there they went to a gym class in which the Crown Prince took part. But the high point of the day turned out to be the chestnut grove, where they were turned loose and allowed to gather all the chestnuts that they wanted. The gardener had made some simple bamboo tongs with which to pick up the burrs, and one small boy climbed up into a tree to shake the boughs. They collected burrs to take back to school to show the others, and they stuffed their own pockets with nuts.

"Here," said one youngster, presenting his rear elevation to Tane, "you put 'em in. It's too tight for me." So she poked and pushed until she squeezed the fat brown nuts into two very small hip pockets. She told me about it later with amusement.

As time went on there were still other exchanges between the two schools, a baseball game at Grant Heights in which each team was composed of both Japanese and Americans, so that there should be no possibility of international rivalry, followed by a feast in the lunch-room. The Crown Prince did not attend this event, but Prince Masahito went to another one with a group from his class, and played in a lively game of dodgeball and afterwards conquered a nourishing sandwich of staggering proportions and a mug of hot chocolate.

Further pleasant relations developed when the mothers of the Japanese boys gave a party for the American mothers and this was returned. More than one young woman from Grant Heights spoke to me of her disappointment that she had so few opportunities to meet Japanese people and her pleasure in the occasional contacts that she had.

Vining, Elizabeth Gray. "Chapter 17." Windows for the Crown Prince. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1952, 137-142.