More on Quakers and Japan

Crown Prince Akihito and Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1949. Source.

Crown Prince Akihito and Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1949.

Source.

The chief reason why I wanted to come [to Japan] is that in her new constitution Japan has renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Other nations must follow. I believe that out of her great suffering and defeat Japan will draw a new strength and a new vision that will enable her to lead the world in ways of peace.

You are the generation that will have to do it.... I come to you in friendship and in the hope that I can take a small share in helping your many distinguished teachers to prepare you for your great task.

— Elizabeth Gray Vining, speaking to Crown Prince Akihito's school class at the beginning of her service. (Windows for the Crown Prince, 1952.)

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In a couple of recent posts, I've touched on the relationships among diverse Quakers and the country of Japan (the country where my mom was born and raised). Back in July, Sergei Grushko's article mentioned Japanese students at Quaker colleges during World War II, and then my Hiroshima-Nagasaki post went on to summarize a few more connections.

Those few instances of U.S. Quakers serving in Japan or serving Japanese people made me wonder whether there has ever been a full-length study of that history. The relationship between the Quaker movement in Japan and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting seems to be well-covered in the recent book Friendly Connections: Philadelphia Quakers and Japan Since the Late Nineteenth Century. I've not read this book (it's on my wishlist!... price $156) but the review in Friends Journal gives an idea of its scope. It includes accounts of Elizabeth Gray Vining's and Esther Rhoads's roles in the education of Crown Prince (now Emperor Emeritus) Akihito.

(I highly recommend Vining's own account of her years as his tutor, and how that engagement came about.)

What might understandably be less emphasized in a Philadelphia-centered account is the major role of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in building and maintaining Quaker relationships with Japan over the last 140 years. During our years in Richmond, when I was a student at Earlham School of Religion and and Judy worked with Earlham's East Asian studies program, we got to know three of the people who contributed to those relationships—professors Jackson Bailey and Len Holvik, and Earlham's president Landrum Bolling. Jackson Bailey (nephew of biblical scholar Moses Bailey) had been a conscientious objector who served as a cook in the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. As Chuck Yates says in the Earlham brochure, "The History of Japan at Earlham,"

Deeply impacted by his time in Japan, Bailey dedicated his life to improving relations between Japanese and Americans. In his over thirty years of labor, he did not quite succeed in creating a world where war and its sorrows are impossible, but there are certainly thousands of people on both sides of the Pacific for whom those things are now unthinkable, thanks to Jack’s efforts.

(Forgive another personal aside: One of my most vivid memories of Earlham was from 1983. A graduation reception brought together Jackson Bailey, his uncle Moses Bailey, and British Quaker writer Elfrida Vipont Foulds. Foulds gave the commencement address at the graduation itself, and received an honorary doctorate. Her speech was an amazing blend of pastoral advice and storytelling which managed to captivate an audience of students and families whose highest priority had not been to sit and listen to a speech!)

The relationships of Friends and Japan on the Philadelphia track and on the Earlham track may seem to run separately and parallel, but there's considerable overlap. For just a couple of examples:

Thomas Jones of Fairmount, Indiana, married Esther Balderston of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1917, and both served as Quaker missionaries in Japan under that yearly meeting until 1924. Thomas Jones later served as president of Fisk University and then Earlham College. Son T. Canby Jones, whom we knew as a professor at Wilmington College, was born in Japan. Canby's education was in the Philadelphia orbit, at Westtown School and Haverford College, before going off to Yale.

Esther Rhoads, Crown Prince Akihito's second Quaker tutor, is another bridge person between Philadelphia Friends and Earlham. Since Friends from both of these tracks of Japan-Quaker history were involved with Tokyo Friends School, there are probably many similar overlap stories waiting to be chronicled in a more comprehensive history. Maybe such a history has already been written, and I simply haven't found it. If you know of such a resource, please share....

And if the book Friendly Connections itself has more about Earlham than the review suggests, let me know that, too.

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My own Quaker journey began in 1974. I joined Friends in Ottawa Meeting (unprogrammed, generally liberal), but within a year or so I found out about programmed Friends and a Quaker culture that was relatively more Bible-oriented than most Canadian Friends were. I found it easy to move between these different Quaker cultures, but found many Friends in each barely knew (or actually did not know) that the others existed.

Having read the accounts of U.S. Quakers and Japan, I wonder whether, several generations earlier, relations between "orthodox" Quakers in (say) Indiana and Quakers in the eastern yearly meetings were far more routine and relaxed than they've seemed during my time ... despite the lack of today's mobility and Internet channels. What might have reduced that earlier overlap? Among the totally unsubstantiated theories I've come up with was the consequences of the end of the series of organizations known most recently as the Young Friends of North America, a movement that at its height brought together young adult Quakers from all over the continent. 

Another theory: when the yearly meetings that had divided in the 19th century began reuniting, this may have had the unintended and perverse effect of accentuating the theological differences in the larger U.S. Quaker landscape. For a possible case study, see Ruth Pitman's "The 1955 Union and the Future of Friends."

Or, on the third hand, maybe we're simply talking about changes in patterns among what was always a small subset of Friends—those who are fascinated or inspired by the Quaker movement as a whole rather than prioritizing their faithfulness to the nearby communities they know best. God knows we need both priorities, and perhaps we move back and forth from one to the other as we go through life. Again, your thoughts are most welcome.

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Visiting my mother's school in Kobe.

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Jack Kirk. Source.

Max Carter remembers the late Jack Kirk. Max writes that Jack was the "consummate encourager..." which was exactly my experience. Jack encouraged me through some concrete terrors, including my first sermon in public, when my Quaker Hill Bookstore boss Fred Boots asked me to substitute for him at Paoli Friends. Jack also shepherded me through my first writings for Quaker Life during his editorship there. His obituary reveals that he, too, found it congenial to move between Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and pastoral Friends. Despite the sad occasion, I find it impossible to look at his photo without smiling. I can just hear him saying, "Let's key in on the central issues...."

Brian Drayton pays tribute to writer and documentary filmmaker John Crowley.

Turns out that Julia Curlee, CIA analyst and provider of presidential briefings, was the wrong kind of American. "The White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public."

Daily Quaker Message, from Thomas R. Kelly: "It takes no time, but it occupies all our time."

Philip Gulley knows what faith is and isn't. "While I don’t always have faith, I do know faith when I see it."

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Whitehorse and a mighty fine editor, "Come On In My Kitchen."

Hiroshima-Nagasaki shorts

(left) Urakami Cathedral cross, Nagasaki, on display at Wilmington College's Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection until 2019 (my photo); (right) graphic from Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center (source).

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Last week's post considered some of the political and spiritual difficulties World War II posed for Quaker colleges in the USA. Among the specifics of that story was the welcome that those colleges extended to a group of Japanese American students whose families had been forced into relocation camps by the notorious Executive Order 9066.

Thanks to an article posted today on the Web site of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred 'maidens'," by Alex Wellerstein, I've been thinking about other Quaker involvements with Japanese and Japanese Americans—and the nuclear bombings—originating in that war.

First in chronological order were American Quakers who had special ties to Japan before the war, and who became advocates for the incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American families in wartime. The case I knew best was Herbert Nicholson, whose nephew Ed Nicholson used to tell us stories about his uncle. 

(Ed died in 2018, and his wife of 63 years, Chris Nicholson, just died this past July 29. Aside from many other ties between the Nicholsons and Judy and me, they were great encouragers of our service in Russia.)

Another Quaker advocate for incarcerated Japanese people and their families was Floyd Schmoe of University Friends Meeting in Seattle. After the war ended, he expressed his concern for war-torn Japan and the consequences of the atomic weapons by beginning a project called Houses for Hiroshima. Of all the people mentioned in these stories, Floyd was the only one I met personally, thanks to my work with Friends World Committee in the 1980's.

The "Hiroshima 'maidens'" story mentioned above, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, also had a Quaker connection. During the young women's stay in the USA for plastic surgery, they were accommodated by Quaker families, and spent time at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. More details in this Wikipedia article. 

Those years—the 1950's—were a peak time for hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean, which led to a series of protests against those tests, the weapons being tested, and the radioactive pollution resulting from the tests. Barbara Reynolds and her husband Earle were among those who sailed into the test zones in protest. She later established the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection at Wilmington College in Ohio, USA, part of the college's Peace Resource Center. Judy and I got to know and appreciate the work of this center during the years we lived in Wilmington.

One of the remarkable exhibits in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection was a charred cross from the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki. In 2019, as described in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists post, the director of the Peace Resource Center, Tanya Maus, accompanied the cross on its journey home to Nagasaki.

There is a gap in this very brief summary: the experiences of Japanese Quakers themselves during the war. The only Japanese Quaker meeting I've personally attended, the one in Osaka, was founded after the war. I have family ties to Japan—my mother was born and raised in Kobe—but, sadly, those ties don't connect with Quakers. My mother, having survived the war and eventually moving to Germany and then the USA, never spoke to me about her war years. Her primary political concern in my childhood years was the threat of Communism.

I'd love to have more examples of connections among these themes—Quakers, Japan and Japanese people, and World War II. Please share additions and corrections.

God bless the memory of those who risked everything for peace and justice in those brutal years.

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I mentioned our own short visit to Hiroshima here.

Nagasaki shorts.

Why I got sour on Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemorative events. (I'm not necessarily proud of it....)

David Harrington Watt and Marian Ronan in Friends Journal: "The work continues: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the struggle against nuclear weapons."

A Wikipedia summary of the debate for and against the use of atomic bombs in World War II.

Nuclear History: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the stories we must never forget—an online presentation by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Tuesday, August 18, 10:15 a.m. U.S. Central Time via YouTube.

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Ezra Klein talks with Jasmin Sun about the peculiar challenges of campaigning for and against AI-related data centers.

Kathryn James: "Why is Anthropic Destroying Books?" (And why is it considered legal?)

From Friends Peace Teams: "Peace and War in Lviv, Ukraine." "...The nervous system adapts...."

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More blues from Denmark: Delta Blues Band, "Yonders Wall."

Slow boat to Japan (PS)

Children line up for photos at the Atomic Dome, Hiroshima.

It's been exactly a month today since we returned from Japan. I have already written about my two visits to Kobe (my mother's school and the search for her home address); now I'm adding a couple of final highlights.

First, as background, here are two more links to earlier blog posts. In 2014, at Judy's urging, I made my first visit back to Stuttgart, Germany, since 1966, when I was a teenager and my mother's parents were both still alive. There, among other things, I saw the high school my mother attended after she and her family were deported from Japan in 1948, and I saw the location of the home I lived in as a toddler in my grandparents' care as my parents finished grad school in Chicago. Fast-forwarding to this summer, after our retirement from teaching at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, we took the opportunity to make my first-ever visit to Japan, where my mother was born and raised.

(In passing, I have a few important comments to make below about the Institute in Elektrostal.)

Hiroshima. We made a far-too-brief visit to Hiroshima on October 4. It had been rescheduled to that day because of a typhoon earlier in the week, and it was cut short by another typhoon that threatened to disrupt rail travel back to our host's home in Osaka. We ended up having just four hours, all of which we spent at the Peace Memorial Park and Museum, easily accessible from the train station on a convenient streetcar line.

Examining the Dome's scars.

I've explained before why I avoid indulging in emotionalism over the events of August 6, 1945, but (whatever the chain of evil decisions leading to that awful moment) at Hiroshima it is impossible to avoid the evidence of the high cost that tens of thousands of ordinary people paid for those decisions. My eyes simply had to examine obsessively every visible surface of the iconic Atomic Dome building to see the scars left by the bomb's destructiveness.

The most moving exhibits within the museum were the clothing and personal effects of those caught within the zone of greatest destruction, along with the letters and diaries documenting the final hours of loved ones. We can argue endlessly about the scientists and politicians who set up that destruction, and who were themselves trapped in the supposed logic of total war. It's much harder to justify the suffering of innocent people who were seared, irradiated, and in some cases vaporized by what really amounted to a weapons test made on human subjects.

It was inspiring to see the crowds of children visiting the Peace Memorial Park. I hope that each one of them will be part of a new generation worldwide who have no illusions about the capacity of warfare to resolve conflict.

Osaka Friends Meeting. Our last full day in Japan was Sunday, October 7. It was a great joy to attend meeting for worship with local Friends, some of whom we already knew from their kind attendance at the lecture I gave at Osaka University a few days earlier. That Sunday happened to coincide with World Quaker Day, so before our meeting for worship began, we were all part of an online video meeting with Friends in other parts of Friends World Committee's Asia and West Pacific Section.

After the exchanges of video greetings, our meeting for worship began. We centered ourselves in the welcoming silence. Almost immediately I knew that, for all the distances we'd traveled, all the newness of the location, we were in an utterly familiar place.

I remembered one of my favorite short prayers, "Lord, I want to dwell in you," and understood that once again that this prayer, this dwelling place, is real everywhere. It was also true that the scale of our gathering -- there were ten of us, including Judy and me -- was achingly familiar from our years at Moscow Meeting. I'm sure that the friendly facilities, a room in a Catholic retreat house, also contributed to the impression. But I arrived with a brain bubbling with clashing impressions and family mysteries, so these congenial outward factors don't tell the full story. There's nothing that equals the comfort of bringing these unsettling items into the meetingplace of the family of faith, and placing them at Jesus' feet.

Johan Fredrik Maurer's
descendants (pdf; as of 1948).

Family quest, recap. One advantage of moving back from Russia to our Portland home was to be back in possession of our old papers and photos. With fresh eagerness, I looked at my family records. Once again the contrast is startling: for my Maurer family tree, I have abundant records going back to Johannes Maurer, who left Ulm for Copenhagen toward the end of the 1700's, and whose son Johan Fredrik Maurer emigrated from Denmark to Norway. Thanks to the Internet, I also know a lot about my grandmother Gerd's family. But I still know very little about the history of my mother's family.

However, thanks to our trip to Japan, and the advance research that our host Takayuki Yokota-Murakami had done for us, the Japanese gaps in that history are starting to be filled in. I visited my mother's school and learned a lot about its history. I learned that my family lived in Kobe since at least my mother's birth. I know where they lived, even though the house itself doesn't exist now. I know they had a summer house in the hills overlooking Kobe. My grandfather's engineering office was included in a list of German businesses in Osaka. I know a lot more about German-Japanese business and trade relationships in the years my grandparents lived there. I can guess that those relationships would help explain why my grandfather enrolled in the Nazi party in 1934, but I may never know the answer with certainty.

My mother was too young to enroll in the Nazi party, but I understand that she was in the German Girls' League. Her school's annual report for 1942 records total membership in the Hitler Youth and the Girls' League as 65 boys and girls. The Nazi party is also acknowledged in the report's section on contributors and collaborating organizations. Although I never caught any hint of Nazi ideology in my grandfather, my mother was another matter. However she may have conducted herself in her diverse workplace at Roosevelt University, at home she never hid her racist and anti-Semitic views from us. As I try to understand all this, I can't help wondering what kinds of Nazi influences reached her through school channels -- and at what age.

My grandmother wasn't on the Nazi membership list (and family lore says that she refused to join), so I don't have the details about her that the membership list gave me for my grandfather -- for example, I still don't know her birthdate and birthplace. I guess that research awaits my next trip to Germany. Also remaining in the realm of speculation: when and where my mother's parents got married; and when and why they moved to Japan.

Possibly in the "none of your business" category, except as social history, are questions about my German family's finances. I don't suppose everyone in Japan had a summer house. Having been deported to Germany in 1948, how did they come to have such a substantial home in Stuttgart by the time I was there in the mid-1950's? How did they come to be collectors of Japanese art? Even with all these remaining questions, pertinent and impertinent, I am grateful that the outlines of their lives, and of my mother's growing-up years, have become clearer.

Thank you, dear reader, for your patience with these family history posts. I'm not sure they're of any interest to anyone, but I personally love reading these kinds of stories on other people's blogs. I also have a certain amount of hope that someone somewhere with relevant experience or expertise will come across these stories and will help me fill in more of the gaps.

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On Saturday, October 27, the New Humanities Institute (NGI) in Elektrostal, Russia, held its final classes. it formally closed its doors on October 30, when its official license expired. After a week-long re-accreditation audit, the Ministry of Education had refused to renew the Institute's accreditation, forcing all students to find new places in other colleges, and dispersing a truly remarkable faculty, some of whom had been teaching at NGI for its full quarter-century history.

In this public Web site, I will not potentially embarrass my wonderful former colleagues by speculating on the reasons for this sad development. I suspect that the Ministry examiners did not interview students or attend classes, and (as on the occasions when I was personally present during such audits) simply confined themselves to examining documents. I also know how carefully the institute prepared for such visits, going to great lengths to ensure that all papers, reports, and class journals were in correct order and conformed to the Ministry's expectations.

A business card I'll always cherish.

A previous Ministry order to close the institute had been successfully challenged in court, which secured a few more years' operation. Whatever the reality behind this most recent official decision, I grieve the outcome, but will be forever grateful for our years of working with those wonderful, curious, hardworking, creative, inspiring students, and for the rich collaboration we had with our dedicated colleagues.

The decision is all the more painful in that the last two years' recruitment had been on an upward trend. This followed years of declining enrollment linked partly to the low birthrate of the early post-Soviet period. Happily, the improving demographic situation will certainly help NGI's partner institution, the School of Foreign Languages (popularly known as the Kazantsev School), whose after-school language classes for schoolchildren, evening classes for adults, and preschool programs are thriving. N.B.! That school is not affected by the closure of the institute. Since I taught at both institutions during most of our years in Elektrostal, I take some comfort that half of this marvelous educational enterprise will continue.

Back in 2011, I began a blog, 32 Radio Street, for our students at both the school and the institute. I've not added much since we left, but I'm going to keep it online for old times' sake.

Saying goodbye to our conversation club at end of NGI's 2016-2017 academic year. Photo by Maria Kazantseva.

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Mike Farley considers what it means to surrender all.

Christianism ... and the triumph of empty symbolism.

From GetReligion: For insights on the Trump-induced splits among religious conservatives, here are some logical places to look.

Overwhelmed by the daily stream of Internet updates? For Russian readers, Alexei Navalny's foundation presents a new aggregator to select the most promising morsels from Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram: trrrending.today. Meanwhile, in English, here's a new Daily Beast interview with Navalny.

Nostalgia is on the rise in Europe, observes Julian Baggini, but maybe it's not all bad. Meanwhile, what went wrong in Eastern Europe, and is there hope? (Book review of John Fetter's Aftershock.)

A database of paper airplane designs.

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A teenage memory, not long after I first fell in love with the blues: My father caught me playing the album Chicago/The Blues/Today, vol. 1, in my basement hideout, and warned me: "Don't let your mother catch you listening to that music."

From right around that time ...

Kobe: the quest continues

Staffers of Kitano district tourism office and Yuto Masumoto of Osaka University help me find my grandparents' home.
"We think that's where they lived, but it looks like that place is now a parking lot."

Continued from Stuttgart shorts; Slow boat to Japan; Deutsche Schule shorts.

A couple of months ago, when I found the notice in the U.S. soldiers' newspaper Stars and Stripes, offering the property of "P. Schmitz" for lease and giving its location, I thought I'd finally found a crucial clue to the location of my grandparents' home in Kobe, Japan. It made sense: I knew that my grandparents, Paul and Emma Schmitz, and my mother had been deported to Germany on an American ship in 1948; and my mother had always told me that their property was confiscated for American military use. The newspaper announcement appeared in May 1949. When we went off to Japan last month, I took the Stars and Stripes information with me, assuming it referred to their home.

Eight days ago, we went to Kobe to visit the current incarnation of my mother's school. Three days later -- last Saturday -- we went back to Kobe for most of the day, in search of my grandparents' home. With us we had a valuable co-researcher, Osaka University student Yuto Masumoto, who is studying Russian and who had offered to help us in our quest. Yuto was a godsend, helping us find the places and people we needed, and serving as an interpreter. In return, we gave him some Russian coaching and promised to stay in touch and send additional language resources. Our time with him was a great delight.

Many of the grander houses owned by Kobe's prominent foreign residents were in the Kitano district, so that district's tourist information office was our first stop. Two of the office's staff members took the Stars and Stripes information I brought and referenced it to their huge books of maps. Their conclusion: the address I gave them was a summer house up in the hills, not the family's city home. Did I have any other information that would help them find that city home?

Once again I leafed through the fresh information I had just received -- the stack of papers that Takayuki Yokota-Murakami's German-language colleague, Ayano Nakamura, had prepared for our visit. There was one sheet I'd been avoiding looking at too closely, simply because of its title, but it turned out to have the missing details:

A slice of the document I'd been avoiding.

There in the "last address recorded" column for party member # 3444593 was a street corner just ten minutes' walk away from where we were. "We think that's where they lived," the kind staffer told me, making a circle on the map, "but it looks like that place is now a parking lot."

That Nazi party list had other nuggets of information for me. At long last I had a birthplace and birthdate for my grandfather, which I hope will help me find out more about his life and his ancestors. But here's the item that really pulled me up short: if the records are accurate, he was a party member from the early years of the Hitler regime -- starting April 1, 1934. In my growing-up years I'd vaguely heard that he had joined the Nazi party, and also heard an explanation for his membership -- that it was obligatory for a member of the small business community among the Germans in Japan (and that my grandmother Emma refused to join). However, I'd never had such a direct confrontation with the cold facts of his Nazi membership.

Emma and Paul (and me) in Oslo.

My memories of Paul Schmitz are uniformly positive. Among other things, he is the one who gave me a copy of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the first serious book I ever read about Hitler and the Second World War. Still, I now have a few questions I wish I'd known to ask.

I also wonder what the conversations were like between him and my father's parents. I know they met; I have a photo of my German grandparents at my Norwegian grandparents' home in Oslo. Did my father's father talk about his service in the Norwegian resistance army, reporting to London on the movements of German ships, and helping smuggle people across the Swedish border? There are just some gaps that documents by themselves won't fill in.

Those were a few of my thoughts as we walked to the parking lot indicated on our map. I stood among the expensive cars and thought to myself, "This might be the neighborhood where my mom grew up." None of the buildings in the neighborhood looked as if they'd been built before World War Two. After all, what that war didn't destroy could have been leveled by the 1995 earthquake. I was going to have to be satisfied with walking the narrow streets of my mother's childhood ... and I was.

There once was a home here ....

View from the parking lot.

Weathercock House guide showing us a chart of the old foreign residences. A prominent German businessman
and his family lived here; we felt sure that my grandparents would have been part of the social life in this house.

We say goodbye to Yuto Masumoto at Kobe's Sannomiya Station.

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A finale of sorts: Slow boat to Japan (PS).

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Choose your George Soros: is he a rich Jewish investor (choose a well-worn anti-semitic meme) or a favorite atheist straw man (insert favorite anti-Zionist meme)?

The ecumenical patriarch grants independence to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. RFE/RL's comparatively even-handed coverage; various Russian-language voices.

Oscar Romero is to be canonized this Sunday. Also: setting the record straight on how Oscar Romero's faith was transformed.

How the Goblin is redefining the solar system.

Frida Berrigan thinks about cheetahs, and the inheritance of children.

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One of the commenters: "This is the most original rendition of The Sky Is Crying that I've ever heard." I agree.

Deutsche Schule shorts

Not my mother's Kobe

Not my mother's Osaka

German school today

German school in my mother's time

First annual report with my mother's name.

Student 21. Erika Schmitz.

This post is coming to you from the bullet train taking us from Osaka to Hiroshima, Japan. (See Slow boat to Japan for background.) Just a few words today about our trip two days ago to my mother's school in Kobe.

The school that my mother attended, the German School in Kobe, has changed a lot. Today's Deutsche Schule Kobe International has an English-language track as well as a German track, and pupils finish sixth grade with three languages -- Japanese, German, and English. In my mother's time, the school was located in the hills overlooking Kobe, and now it is on the Rokko island in a new eco-friendly building.

We met with the new principal, Frank Pitzner, who presented us with a book commemorating the school's first century (1909-2009). I've not had a chance to review it in detail, but I noticed that the book seems to deal with the Nazi period directly, rather than downplaying that aspect of its history as some other institutions (as Frank Pitzner observed) tend to do.

We talked about many other things, including the school's adoption of the International Baccalaureate program back in 2006. (I have memories of the same process at the Ramallah Friends Schools.) We enjoyed our brief tour of the facilities, and I especially enjoyed feeling the energy of the children streaming all around us on their way to after-school activities or to their waiting parents. We looked at some of the school's historical artifacts and photos.

None of that really equalled the simple experience of seeing my mother's name on the school rolls. It's among the very few actual points of data that I've ever seen about the German side of my family before 1948. Somehow her childhood -- her whole life before I came along, actually -- became a lot more real to me.

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We had originally planned to visit Hiroshima before these days in Kobe and Osaka, but Typhoon Trami got in the way of our plans. Instead of heading for Hiroshima immediately after getting off the ship in Yokohama, we stayed in that port city for two days until the typhoon had passed and the trains had been able to return to normal service. Our own exposure to the typhoon was limited to about three hours of strong winds and lashing rains, which we observed from the windows of our ninth-floor hotel room. We were in no doubts about the solidity of our hotel, but it was interesting to feel it sway in the wind. Other parts of Japan were more severely affected, and three people lost their lives.

Everywhere we went in Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe, street crews were cleaning up downed trees and broken branches. However, unlike our experiences on the U.S. east coast, the typhoon roared through its land path quickly, with sunny skies the very next day.

I'll return with a more typical format next week. We're twenty minutes away from Hiroshima.

[Update: Another typhoon is heading to Japan and is expected to disrupt transport in and out of Hiroshima tomorrow. I'm adding this update on the train back to Osaka.]

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Next chapter: Kobe -- the quest continues. Then: Looking for my mother's home. Finally, Hiroshima, and Osaka Friends Meeting.

Slow boat to Japan

Source.  

The year 1905 was a fateful year for Japan, Russia, China, and Korea. In the swirl of mutual suspicions, imperial ambitions, and outright bloody combat -- with Great Britain, France, and Germany pressing their own interests on the geopolitical chessboard -- two young Germans decided to make Japan their new homeland.

Emma and Paul (and me) in Stuttgart

What drew Paul and Emma Schmitz, my mother's parents, to Japan? What vision of the future were they pursuing? I also have some very practical questions: Did they go to Japan as a couple, or did they meet there? Did they go to Japan directly from Germany? What were their ports of embarkation and arrival? Later, how did they earn a living? When they were deported to Germany in 1948 (by order of the American occupation forces), I imagine their departure was bittersweet, but in all my conversations with them in my childhood and teenage years, I never thought to ask about any of these questions.

My father's family tree in Norway is voluminously documented online, but I've searched in vain online for clues about my mother and her parents. With our retirement, we have at long last an opportunity to fill in some of the blanks. Judy and I decided to travel to Japan the same way my grandparents went there -- by sea.

Routine transoceanic transportation by ship was the norm in the years before airlines took over that task. It remained the norm for my parents in my own growing-up years: I immigrated to the USA on a ship, and and my next four transatlantic round trips were on ships as well. But now, to go by ship from North America to Japan usually requires the leisure and money to book a cabin on a freighter or a luxury Asian cruise. But, periodically, ships make the crossing simply to transfer from one seasonal market to another, and the cost can be surprisingly low. That's what our ship will be doing as it leaves Canada Place in Vancouver tomorrow and heads west ... ending its service on the Alaskan cruise market, and crossing the Pacific for two weeks to begin a season of Asian cruises.

Source.  

We don't arrive at our destination -- Yokohama -- until September 30. The voyage includes eight uninterrupted days of ocean travel between Sitka and its first Japanese port, during which I hope to do a lot of background reading. One book I've loaded onto my tablet is Akira Kudo's Japanese-German Business Relations: Co-operation and Rivalry in the Interwar Period -- precisely the period I'm interested in with respect to my grandparents.

Thanks to Japanese Friend Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, with whom I served during my first term on Friends House Moscow's board, I have some clues that I never would have been able to find on my own. He and a colleague at Osaka University, Ayano Nakamura, have found out that Paul had a machine import firm based in Osaka. They also found a student record at Kobe's German school confirming that my mother was enrolled there. The school still exists ... and so I'm hoping to include that place among my visits. My Osaka University colleagues may even have found the location of my grandparents' home in Kobe.

With that information, I found one more intriguing little clue. I remember my mother telling me that the U.S. military deported them in order to confiscate their house. In an issue of the Pacific theater edition of Stars and Stripes, May 1949, in the "for lease" announcements section, there's a reference to a house labeled "P. Schmitz" with a Kobe location.

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It's possible that I'll miss a deadline or two on this blog during these weeks. I'll check in when I can.

October 4:  Deutsche Schule shorts.
October 11: Kobe: The quest continues.
November 8: Slow boat (PS).

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Conversation in a Vancouver souvenir shop:

Store clerk: "Where are you from?"

Johan: "Portland, Oregon."

Clerk: "Oh, you're Americans. Have you read the book yet?"

Johan: "What book? ... Oh, that one."

Clerk: "Read it. It's a gamechanger!"

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A Russian-Japanese peace pact this year?

On the youngest Russian protesters: Tatyana Schukina is scared that children talk like that.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine has been filling an undisputed need for nearly 70 years. What would possess a U.S. administration to cut 100% of the USA's support? (OK, I really had hoped to have a post completely free of U.S. politics, but, given my own ties to the region, I couldn't pass this story by.)

Publication of Andrea Sears's missionary attrition study is in progress.

Brazilians grieve the loss of their National Museum ... and consider innovative ways of restoring its place in their lives.

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Big Mama Thornton in Eugene, Oregon, 1971, filmed by the crew of television's Gunsmoke. (For the full Gunsmoke Blues documentary film, just go back to the beginning of this video.)

Nagasaki shorts

Cross from the Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki
(Collection of the Peace Resource Center)

It was 38 years ago today, at the end of Boston's annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki peace vigil, that Judy and I were married at Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I love celebrating our August 9 wedding anniversary, but I always pause to think about the full import of the date.

I've written about Hiroshima before, and probably will again. [Here.] Today, a few words about Nagasaki. Specifically, about how hard it is to look at this cross. It is from the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Nagasaki, a building that was located about a third of a mile from ground zero on August 9, 1945. This bomb-scarred cross is part of the collection of Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center.

The Christian cross symbolizes the sacrifice of the nonviolent Lamb who was slain for all of us, and this particular cross tells me how costly our defiance of the Prince of Peace still is. We dare not sentimentalize or trivialize the cross of Christ!

It's been over thirty years since Helen Redding, director of the Peace Resource Center, first showed me the Center's Hiroshima/Nagasaki Memorial Collection, and told me the story of how Barbara Reynolds established the collection. At the time, it seemed cruelly ironic to me that the second atomic bomb attack was on the city that many considered the center of Japanese Christianity. I don't feel that way now. There's no reason that we Christians should be shielded from any hazard that the world's innocent children of whatever description might be forced to suffer.

Update, August 2019: Wilmington College returns the Nagasaki cross to the Urakami Cathedral. (Also see the Wilmington Yearly Meeting epistle.) Thanks to Dan Kasztelan for the links. Here (video) is the story from a Japanese viewpoint.

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A week and a half ago we moved from Eugene back to Portland, Oregon, but this past Sunday we returned to Eugene Friends Church to say a proper goodbye. We sang these words during worship:

And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles' wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise

(from "I Will Rise" by Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, Louie Giglio, Matt Maher)

When I sing contemporary worship choruses, I am often tempted to substitute "we" and "us" for "I" and "me." But not with this song.

Back around the same time I met Helen Redding in Wilmington, Ohio, I had the good fortune of meeting Joe Kelly for the first time. You can read some of Joe's story in the description of the meeting he pastors in Traverse City, Michigan -- Friends of the Light. He once told me that his vision of a Quaker meeting was a community that would embody Jesus for people who had always thought they were not "good enough to be in a church."

In my olden days, The Canadian Friend subscription
records were on McBee cards for sorting by postal
code and expiration date. Source.

When I sing "I will rise on eagle's wings," I am thankful that I already know that I don't have to be Good Enough to sing those words. But I've been in the church world for over four decades -- much of that time as an employee of the church. (I started out as the business manager for The Canadian Friend at $100/month.) I love imagining these same words being sung bravely by someone who decided to trust Jesus just yesterday, or who is maybe right in the process of deciding, and whose life might not exactly have anything resembling a churchy gloss. I cherish the assurance that we will rise together. You and I and the children of Nagasaki.

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Melani McAlister writes about the homelessness that some evangelicals of color are experiencing in the Trump era. Sample:

The very term “evangelical” has become fraught for many people of color, who might never have been that comfortable with the label to begin with. For some time, a crucial reality of evangelical life has been its increasing racial diversity, buoyed by evangelicalism’s growing transnational ties. In the last few decades, U.S. believers have grown more likely to travel on short-term missions, participate in international conferences, or simply watch one of the multiracial and multinational teachers and preachers on Christian television and online. Over the last two years, however, the election of President Trump has created a profound generational, racial, political, and gender divide—one that has shaped U.S. evangelical life so thoroughly that the long-term impact will not likely be known for a generation.

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The factors that are causing global warming don't just add up, they might have a mutually reinforcing domino effect. Reading this article makes me ask again: what will be the Pearl Harbor-level alarm that will finally pierce our denial about climate change?

Today: Hiroshima/Nagasaki commemoration at Wilmington College.

Hiroshima: the anti-transfiguration.

The Quaker meetinghouse that speaks of quiet faith.

... And what we encounter in silence, says Mike Farley, lies beyond all distinctions.

Kent Thornburg on nutrition, chronic disease, and the 100-Year Effect.

Meet computer pioneer Grace Hopper (including a fascinating interview with David Letterman), thanks to Open Culture.

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For the best in rockabilly and blues, go to ... Moscow! Dennis Mazhukov introduces us to the Off Beat band.

When grief just won't come

Brothers, Oregon (elevation 4,640 feet)

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As envy goes, it's not a bad thing -- the sympathy and even admiration I feel for my friends when they're grieving their parents and, in recalling the years gone by, crediting those parents with setting them on the right path. Sometimes as I read or hear these stories, I get a funny sort of reverse nostalgia, imagining what it would have been like to have parents like that.

My actual story is somewhat different: my parents were alcoholics, racists, and occasionally violent -- to the dishes and furniture, to each other, and to the children. As they neared their respective deaths, their paths diverged dramatically: my father Harald became a Christian (Eastern Orthodox, thanks to the influence of a wonderful Greek chaplain at the VA hospital in Waukegan, Illinois). Harald became more open to sharing about his own life and regrets, before, sadly, he lost the ability to speak a few weeks before he died in 1995. I still think of questions I wish I'd asked him, but at least we made a start. In my imagination, I can bring some of his favorite growing-up stories to life ... like the homemade rockets he launched at his school in Nazi-occupied Oslo.

My mother Erika, on the other hand, did not like answering questions about her growing-up years in Japan. I vividly remember my very last visit with her, at the nursing home where she eventually died in 2007. I realized that this was maybe my last chance to know her and be known by her. She received me cordially, but turned away all my questions about Japan and the war, and after ten minutes dismissed me.

The few glimpses I had into her earlier life usually came during our parents' truly epic knock-down arguments. One memorable theme of several fights concerned which of them had seen more death and cruelty during the war. My mother held the trump cards ... her city had been bombed heavily by the U.S., and she also told about witnessing the flash of Hiroshima from her train seat on that awful morning of August 6, 1945. On the other hand, I was never sure how much to believe of her stories, because some of her claims simply seemed fantastic. Did she really go to Indira Gandhi's birthday party? Was her wartime community really supplied by German submarines, and did she actually have a teenage romance with a submarine captain? Why wasn't her family evacuated to rural locations, as the Japanese government required of many other Germans during those years?

Most of all, I wanted to know what influences formed her militant racism, atheism, and antisemitism, and why we children were not allowed to talk about sickness and death in her presence, or about religion. Any of these topics could provoke her into rage. It was only in my adult years that I began to realize that mental health was part of this picture, but by then I seemed to have lost any chance of forming a mature relationship with her.

My parents bookend a family shapshot from around 1958.
Larimer Park, Evanston, Illinois, USA.

My parents eventually evicted me from home, a few days before my high school graduation. During the stormy years before that ultimate nightmarish incident, I have to admit to some coping mechanisms of my own that didn't contribute to relationship-building. I found that, when things got tense, one way to avoid becoming the target of parental rage was to set my parents against each other. I blush to think of the times I would form a tactical alliance with one of my parents against the other, only to switch sides pragmatically as needed. My father basically survived through passivity ("preserving the family peace"), so at one moment I could sympathize with him and the trials of being married to such a volatile person, but when my mother complained about her passive husband, I might find myself seeming to take her side! On one of the rare occasions when I confronted both of them simultaneously -- that's the very event that resulted in my literally being put out on the street.

When my father died, my mother was adamantly opposed to holding a funeral. Judy and I went to Waukegan as quickly as we could after hearing of my father's death. Upon arrival, we found that Erika had ordered mortician services by writing to a randomly chosen firm from the yellow pages. Yes, she wrote a paper letter instead of telephoning or visiting, which is how she (firm believer in her "master race" identity) unknowingly chose a black-owned business, whose proprietor could not conceal his puzzlement about our family when Judy and I stopped in to finalize the arrangements.

My Canadian cousin Axel Heyerdahl and I worked with the veterans' hospital chaplain, Father George, to put together a memorial service at the hospital with both Axel and George leading the service. My mother was not present. She didn't explain her opposition to having a service, but I remembered that, when my sister Ellen was murdered at age 14, there was also no service at all. I only knew where Ellen was buried because I accidentally came across the mortician's bill on my parents' desk. ($570 in 1970 dollars.)

When my mother died in 2007, she left no instructions. (In fact, I didn't even find out she died until several days later.) My sister Renee and I arranged for a memorial service to be held at the nursing home where Erika died, and I led the service. I hope she would forgive me!

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When my friends and relatives reminisce about their recently deceased parents, no matter how lovely and often funny their stories are, and no matter how much the stories explain the survivors' good qualities, those retellings are often seasoned with deep grief. I have this hollow feeling that I too should be feeling grief, but it hasn't happened yet. I sit here and try to detect even a vestige. So far, nothing.

However, there is progress of a sort. With the advantage of decades of counseling (both giving and receiving), classes in pastoral care, and conversations with others who've had similar biographies, I'm better able to think about the social contexts that formed and controlled my parents' choices. It used to irritate me almost beyond endurance when people said, "Your parents did the best they could." It never seemed that they put much effort into doing the best for their children; they had other priorities, and we mostly raised ourselves. I interpret that cliche a bit differently now: my parents had little idea of what the "best" might be. Racism, atheism, alcohol, the culture of obedience ... all combined to rob them of tools that might have given them more choices and a higher vision.

I have also made progress in forgiveness. The biggest step happened about fifteen years ago. I preached a sermon on forgiveness at Reedwood Friends Church, at the end of which I publicly tore up my copy of the codicil to my parents' will that removed me from the family trust. That document served no purpose other than to poison my feelings about my parents, so it was a liberating act to destroy it.

(The full truth: after the meeting for worship was over, I looked at the little pile of paper scraps, and thought out loud about whether they could be taped back together. A member of Reedwood approached, and as I watched silently, her hands scooped up the scraps. She gently said, "I'll take care of those.")

Am I capable of grief in general? Yes, very much so -- my sister Ellen's death was the first of many losses that have left me in no doubt about that. The deaths of my cousin Axel and my former colleague Gordon, and many other emotional blows, were also devastating in their time. I'm reserving a space for my heart and head to catch up with the loss of my parents, sooner or later.

Do you have a similar hollow place of ungrieved loss? What sort of work are you doing that I might also learn from?

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When grief just won't come, part two.

Tracing my mother's growing-up years in Japan.

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I'm not sure whether this is how my father made his homemade rockets, but I do remember that his account involved soaking and drying newspaper pages.

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My Twitter feed is dominated right now by shocked reactions to a Pew survey showing that white evangelicals are the demographic group least likely to agree that the USA has a responsibility to accept refugees. Be shocked but don't be surprised; there is little correlation between the social label "evangelical" and actual evangelical discipleship.

Bill Yoder: Russian Baptists choose new leadership.

Bill Samuel on Pentecost.

Becky Ankeny: Hope and living water.

Excellent episode of The Russia Guy podcast: interview with David Filipov.

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The Mannish Boys in Germany...

How the Grinch stole Hiroshima (repost)

Source: Twitter  

These are my reflections from ten years ago on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. For comments at the time, see the original post.

It is the season for Hiroshima and Nagasaki observances, and once again I will not take part.

Not that I approve of the bombings or of atomic weapons. In the case of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, my mother told me when I was a child that she had been on a train at the time. She was close enough to see the flash. I have childhood memories of her leukemia check-ups (at least that's my grown-up interpretation of her need to have her "atomic blood" checked). She was always sure that the whole Pacific war was at least half the USA's fault, since (in her mind) Roosevelt had deliberately ignored warnings of the Pearl Harbor attack in the hopes that it would justify his already-planned entry into World War II. I do not personally agree with her interpretation, but I've always been fascinated by how different those events looked from her family's viewpoint in Japan.

In 1976, I was a participant in the Friends World Committee for Consultation triennial sessions in Hamilton, Ontario. One of the high points of that event was T. Canby Jones speaking on Psalm 126, "Those who sow in tears shall reap with sounds of joy." In the course of his talk he meditated on the Japan of his childhood and on his recent visit to Hiroshima. His presentation was modest and uplifting.

In 1985, I was again at an FWCC triennial, this time in Oaxtepec, Mexico. August 6 rolled around during those sessions. I think we all went to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial meeting. For some reason that is surely nobody's fault at those sessions, I was overwhelmed to the point of nausea by the public self-flagellation, the undifferentiated denunciations, the lack of any spiritual diagnosis comparable to that provided nine years earlier by Canby. I walked out.

That was my last Hiroshima memorial meeting. I now prefer to keep my mourning private (excepting, maybe, this weblog entry).

Years ago, Dale Aukerman wrote an amazing book, Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear War. If I remember correctly, he described nuclear weapons as, very simply, extension of the human fist and the impulse to say "thou fool."

I don't want to get in the way of anyone who feels that their fist and their mouth are likely to be more humane and Godly if they attend a Hiroshima/Nagasaki observance. (Or do some of us actually feel that only others need to change?) My priority is the Lamb's War. If we do not fight this noncarnal war against evil in high places, we will continue to respond too late to the buildups of earthly evil that put our Churchills and Trumans into such unbearably ambiguous dilemmas—apparently having to choose between one massacre or another.

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It is legitimate to ask Christian pacifists what we would have done in the face of the fascist threat. (Substitute your favorite representative of mass evil.) I welcome the challenge of countering the implication that our nonviolence is useless, but it IS to some degree useless at the hypothetical point of this challenge (although obedience to the Prince of Peace can never be ultimately useless).

Instead of being required to answer why pacifists would withhold the scalpel of righteous violence, I want to know why the question is always framed at the point where the patient is dying of advanced cancer. I want the Church's response to the cancer of militarism and fascism to begin long before the forces are arrayed and the bullets begin spraying. With the worldwide network of believers engaged in the Lamb's War against evil in all forms, couldn't we do better preventive medicine? Couldn't we do more to infiltrate the world's camps and divisions, subvert all official definitions of enemy, raise the alarm when flows of weapons, illicit funding, wicked and inhumane ideologies begin creeping here and there across our far-more-alert radar screens?

Unless we put more of an effort into prayerful "peacetime" vigilance, persistent and winsome evangelism, and divine subversion, we will always be caught with too little, too late when the superpatriots and the power politicians finally reveal their hand. In fact, they too are legitimate subjects of prayer and evangelism, because they are not the enemy, they are prisoners of the Enemy.

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Advice to prudent preachers.

There may be any number of ways in which the individual human life can flourish if it is disinterested in how it inhibits a flourishing community life. Contributing to a flourishing community life may limit some ways of maximizing a flourishing individual life. You can see how complicated this can get. Who can count the number of career gallows or opportunities for congregational disintegration? The prudent preacher is well advised to steer clear.

Northwest Yearly Meeting and human sexuality: to remember or to forget?

Melinda Gates says she is living out her faith in action.

Benjamin L. Corey claims to know what people mean when they say "But I believe the WHOLE Bible." Is he right?

Israeli and Palestinian women meet despite the checkpoints.

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I thought I knew what "blues harp" meant!


Elena Manja » Catch this blues! from Elena Manja on Vimeo.
Composed and performed by Elena Manja … with an electric harp in an old bodega in southern Spain. Check it out!
Komponiert und gespielt von Elena Manja … mit E-Harfe in einer alten Bodega in Südspanien. Check it out!
http://www.elenamanja.com