I yelled back, “Over here!” and he came and sat on the tree stump that Kagane had just vacated.
After a comment on the night and the freshness of the air, Mr. Warren lit a cigarette and asked, “How’d you learn to speak such good English?”
“I went to an American Catholic school. I learned English from native speakers.”
“Have you ever thought of coming to America? There’s a lot of opportunity for a young man like you. You could certainly do better than washing dishes at a country inn.”
I hesitated. “That is kind, sir. But America is very far away.”
Warren shifted around to face me. “Look here, Junichiro. You’re a high school graduate who speaks wonderful English. We’ve got a big university in my state of Wisconsin, and it happens to be right in my city. How would you feel about coming to study there?”
I laughed. “I am only the son of a farmer, sir. Such things could never happen for me.”
“I’d take care of it, don’t you see? I could easily arrange for the payment of your college fees. It’s a bit late to register, but we should be able to swing it—the university owes me, considering how much money I give them. And I could send you a ticket for your passage over.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Mr. Warren, I could never accept …”
“Of course you could,” he said, waving away my protest. “And call me Paul. Is this something you would like to do?”
“Sir, in my fondest dreams, I never—”
“Well then it’s done,” he cut me off, standing up again. He held out his hand, and I had already met enough Westerners by then to know I should shake it strongly. “I’ll see you in Wisconsin,” he said.
Although I was intrigued by Mr. Warren’s generous offer, I did not mention it to anyone else. I was afraid that his proposal was the result of sake and the mountains, an idea that would quickly dissolve once he returned to the States. While Mr. Warren did tell me, on the morning he left, to “remember what we talked about,” it did not surprise me when weeks passed, and then two months, without any word from America. It had all been a fantasy, one brief flash of possibility, as when a beautiful girl smiles at you from across the room and then returns to the arm of her escort. By early August I had resigned myself to returning home and helping my family with the harvest before seeking work at the ski resorts for the winter. But then one afternoon, a week before the end of the summer season, Ishimoto summoned me up to the front desk.
“For you,” he said, handing me a package. It was wrapped in brown paper and covered with colorful stamps. “From USA,” he added in stumbling English.
I took the package from him—it was lighter than it appeared—and saw that it had come from Wisconsin.
“The Warrens?” asked Ishimoto, and I nodded, unable to speak. His wife emerged from the back room and they both watched me like excited parents. At that moment something occurred to me. “Did Mr. Warren speak to you about this?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ishimoto, and he could hardly contain his grin. “He asked if I thought you should go to America, and I said that we couldn’t wait to get rid of you.”
I laughed and opened the package, and there it was—a train ticket to Tokyo from Karuizawa, a ticket for passage by ship from Tokyo to San Francisco, and a bus ticket from San Francisco to Madison. Dear Junichiro, said the hand-written letter. Please accept my apology for waiting so long to write you. It took a few weeks to arrange your travel and your paperwork for entrance to the university, but everything is finalized now. Please make the trip to Wisconsin as soon as you can, and we will get you settled here before school starts in September. You will be staying in the house of one of my good friends. You’ll have a private room, and you should be very comfortable. The letter went on to describe how exactly to obtain my visa, and what paperwork to bring with me when I came. I had to sit down to absorb the implications of it all, and I shakily translated to the Ishimotos, who were as thrilled as if they were making the trip themselves.
It is hard to explain, now, exactly why I was so captured by the idea of going to America. I loved Japan, its mountains and rice fields and serene, still temples—but there was also something in me that felt contained there; that needed a different setting in which to grow. It was perhaps a mark of my arrogance and immaturity that I believed I had to leave in order to do so. But the picture of America that had been painted by my teachers at St. Francis, and the expansive, entrepreneurial American spirit embodied by the Warrens, had enticed me to believe that America was the place of bounty and hope, or, as some said in Japan, the Land of Rice. And so I traveled home to my village four days after my tickets arrived, prepared to break the news to my family.
The first person I had to tell was my father. Although he was only forty-five at the time, I thought of him as old. He was as steady and silent as the mountains we lived in, not gregarious or hard-drinking like the other men I knew, and I was always proud to have such a respectable man as my father. The whole family was aflutter because everyone was home. The house was alive with the sounds of my mother cooking and laughing, and of the four of us children loudly recounting the events of the last few months. It pained me to know that I would deflate this happy scene with the news that
