Excerpt
From Encounters: A Lifetime Spent Crossing Cultural Frontiers
by Nancy Keeney Forster
Introduction
It took me two years after the sudden death of my husband in September of 2006 to muster sufficient energy to inspect his collected papers. I knew that the Japanese tea chest in the hallway was full of manila envelopes stuffed with memorabilia, carefully labeled in his distinctive script “to be sorted later,” and the two file drawers in the guest bedroom contained documents and draft chapters of a book about the Japanese general who had been responsible for Clifton Forster becoming a prisoner of war at age seventeen. I believed that prior to handing the latter over to a university library to be archived for scholarly research, I owed it to Cliff to read what he had collected and written.
Cliff was an internationalist by birth and projected that heritage into a lifetime of crossing cultural frontiers, nurturing an inborn sense of political and historic curiosity and following a career path that aimed to solve international differences by dialogue rather than by war. It was my gift and privilege to join him on that journey as a twenty-year-old bride in 1949, and to accompany him through the rest of his fascinating and productive life.
Born an American citizen in Manila in 1924, he grew up with friends of many nationalities, at a time and place where existing and impending conflicts were more than household conversations. Home-leave travels to Europe and China brought global unrest into even starker relief. Cliff was in his senior year of high school when the Japanese invaded and conquered the Philippines and he and his friends and family were interned.
After the war, Cliff chose to major in international relations at Stanford University. He then applied to the Department of State to work with a newly established arm of diplomacy, the United States Information Service. It was the perfect match for his convictions, and he brought enthusiasm and ready-made skills to his new job.
We returned to the land of his birth for his first tour with USIS, and went on to serve in countries as varied as Burma and Israel. Ironically, given the history of his youth, the majority of Cliff’s Foreign Service years were spent in Japan. A year at Yale enrolled in Japanese language and area studies gave him additional tools to operate in Japan as it was pulling out of the ashes of war and defeat.
Retiring from the Agency to accompany me to Hawaii when I was offered a job there in 1983 (“You followed me around the world all these years and now I will gladly follow you to Honolulu”), he continued to promote learning about international affairs by working with local organizations dedicated to Asian and Pacific area scholarship and interaction, and continued to work on the book that would examine the nuances and contradictions of the life and demise of the man who conquered the Philippines in 1942, General Masaharu Homma. Cliff had secured original documents from the military trial and execution of the general; he had met and interviewed Homma’s defense counsel in Baltimore and the general’s daughter in Japan. Some chapters had been drafted, but the manuscript was incomplete at the time of Cliff’s death.
When I went into those files and the tea chest envelopes, I found more than I had anticipated. Much of the Homma draft I had not read. A letter Cliff had written his sister on release from prison camp (which she carried with her from home to home until her death at age ninety-two) I had never seen before. I pored back over the transcript from a two-day oral interview by a Foreign Service colleague for the diplomatic archives in the Library of Congress, in which Cliff summarized his experiences as an officer in the field of public diplomacy, and I flipped through the pages of his family albums. I reread the four articles he published in the Foreign Service Journal, and the fourteen-page letter he wrote in 1995, at the time of the death of the girl who had lived next door during his schooldays, to her widower, describing their Manila childhood.
As I looked through these assorted documents and recalled other unwritten stories told by Cliff, as well as the adventures we had shared, I found echoes and sequels in the headlines and background stories of today’s news and decided this material was too rich to be tucked away in archives. Cliff’s stories and insights needed to be published. I have worked with the documents he saved, using excerpts and editing for clarity, and recounted some of those tales he told and adventures we shared to provide this record of a man with a mission and a zest for life.
The chapters of this book describe history lived, encounters enjoyed, some dreams fulfilled—and others still pending. It was a fascinating journey the first time; as I relived it while compiling this account, I gained deeper understanding and appreciation of my husband’s life, my own life, and the multifaceted world we all inhabit.
Chaper One: Encounter on Sado Island
Our family lived in Tokyo from 1964 to 1970, and again from l977 to 1981. Our second time in Tokyo, Cliff was Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy. Part of his job was to oversee American Cultural Centers in various cities and he frequently traveled to meet with government, media, and academic officials in prefectural outposts. I was with him on one of these trips in the early spring of 1978, to cities along the coast of the Sea of Japan which faced the Korean Peninsula. We scheduled a day for ourselves at the close of business, to visit an isolated island where we had not yet been and which could be reached by a ninety-minute ferry ride.
A few weeks earlier, Cliff had been injured in a traffic accident while attending a conference in the Philippines; he spent two weeks in a Manila hospital bed with a view of the site where he had been interned by the Japanese as a civilian prisoner of war. Our side trip to Sado was in part a celebration of his survival and return to good health. Cliff’s account of that day and his encounter with the man who had turned his teenage world upside down was to be the first chapter of his book about General Homma.
The spring snow was still on the mountains of Sado Island as we crossed the narrow strait from the port city of Niigata. A fleet of fishing vessels passed to starboard heading for the open sea, rugged wooden ships with their equally rugged crews busily working with their fishing nets. The main port on the island was like so many other small Japanese fishing ports with its strong smell of fish, the busy food stalls and shops along the waterfront, the colorful Japanese signs everywhere, and the recorded music blasting out from small restaurants and souvenir shops catering to the tourists who were being herded onto tour buses by their leaders who carried small yellow pennants. Female bus attendants in tight blue uniforms sang out destinations and departure times in high-pitched voices.
Sado was not a place visited very often in earlier times. Separated from the crowded eastern coastal plain by a mountainous region known as the “yukiguni,” or “snow country,” it was a place apart from the mainstream. The island was buffeted by the frigid Siberian winds and its mountains and coastal areas were covered with snow during the long winter. Historically, it had been a place of exile for dissidents, the most famous being the nationalistic Buddhist priest Nichiren who antagonized the ruling Kamakura Shogunate in the thirteenth century with his political and religious reforms. Nancy and I had come to Sado to visit the site of his exile.
Since the buses were jammed with tourists and our time was limited, we decided to hire a taxi to cross the island. Both the taxi and the driver had seen their best years and we found ourselves traveling at great speed over narrow, twisting roads sending up clouds of dust. I was about to suggest that we slow down to have a better look at the scenery when he did this of his own accord. We were approaching a small town with picturesque thatched-roof houses surrounded by a mosaic of rice fields. School children returning home with their knapsacks loaded with books waved to us from the side of the road with shouts of “Gaijin!” (foreigner). They had obviously seen few of us in these parts.
As we turned a corner in the road, the driver announced that we had come to an important town, the birthplace of a Japanese general who had fought the Americans in the Philippines during World War II. I leaned forward and inquired: “Who was this general?” He said he did not know for sure but he had heard that he defeated a famous American general who had been in Japan after the war.
“Was the American general Douglas MacArthur?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously, obviously relieved that the American general had been identified. The driver then inquired if I would like to visit a memorial to the Japanese general. I said I would and we continued down the road, stopping by a small Buddhist temple adjacent to a park. “The general is over there near the woods,” he announced, pointing in the direction of a stone column with a bronze bust of a military figure.
The park was a peaceful place with tree-lined lanes on either side and a bamboo grove which stood close to the temple. Beyond the park were the rice fields and the Sado mountains, now cloud-covered in the late afternoon. Except for two or three school children and a hunched-over older woman sweeping leaves, the place was deserted.
The driver led us over to the memorial. As we approached it, followed by the curious children, I stopped in disbelief. The driver looked at me anxiously and Nancy could see that I was taken aback.
The bust was too life-like and brought back too many memories of a time many of us had tried to forget. They were unpleasant memories for the most part and the encounter with our adversary on this distant island in the Japan Sea was entirely unexpected. I moved slowly towards the bust. There was the same large head I remembered from countless photographs, the strong features, thick eyebrows and the piercing eyes. An inscription carried only his name “Masaharu Homma” and the dates of his birth and death. Nothing more. No reference was made to his military campaigns in China and the Philippines or to his execution by an American military tribunal for war crimes.
I stood for several minutes before the memorial to the Japanese general who had planned and executed the invasion strategy in the Philippines which led to America’s worst military defeat, followed by the surrender of American and Philippine forces on Bataan and Corregidor during the first six months of the war. It was a demoralizing defeat, a defeat which forged General Douglas MacArthur’s resolve to return from Australia to liberate the Philippines in 1944.
I wondered how the memorial had been placed there, and when. Certainly it was not there during MacArthur’s occupation of Japan as Supreme Allied Commander, since this would have been a violation of his policy forbidding any memorials to World War II Japanese military leaders. Having defeated MacArthur’s forces, Homma would have been particularly taboo. Presumably, some interested party had erected the memorial in the General’s hometown after the occupation.
A temple bell rang out. It was time to move on, to reach the west coast of Sado and return to the ferry that would take us back to Niigata. Before leaving, I turned back for a last look at the General. He had been portrayed well in bronze and I wondered what significance, if any, this memorial had for the local residents now, particularly those school children we had seen along the road or in the park. It apparently did not have too much significance for our driver who could not even remember Homma’s name.
As we walked back to the car, the driver spoke up. He asked how I knew about General Homma and was curious about my interest in the memorial. I paused for a moment and then decided to give him a straight answer. “My parents knew him well, though we never encountered him face to face.” I replied. “We were his prisoners in the Philippines.” I did not mention that many Americans referred to Homma as “the butcher of Bataan” for the atrocities committed by his troops during the “Death March” following the surrender of our forces.
There was an embarrassed silence as the driver shook his head. He said he was very sorry about this and hoped I had not suffered too much. I said it had been a long time ago and that we had all suffered—Americans and Japanese alike—and survived to become good friends after the war.
The sun was beginning to set in the Japan Sea beyond the Sado mountains when we boarded the ferry for the return to Niigata. Music was still blaring from the loudspeakers along the waterfront and Japanese tourists crowded the gangplank, toting their collection of souvenirs. The ship’s loudspeaker blasted out a scratchy rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Streamers were passed out to passengers and I tossed several to our taxi driver who was still standing on the pier below. He managed to catch two or three and followed the ship out to the end of the pier, holding onto the streamers while I held the other end—until they snapped in the wind. I waved to him as the vessel headed through the outer breakwater for the choppy open sea.
I saw how moved Cliff was by his meeting with the likeness of the general responsible for his internment. Encounters of this sort—echoes from the past—were very much a part of our fifty-seven-year marriage, and I always felt enlightened by the memories and reflections they inspired in Cliff. Our side trip to Sado in particular motivated him to learn more about General Homma as a fellow human being, and to reflect more deeply on the significance of circumstance and flow of history as it impacted his own life.