This meant that, in our role as conquerors, we first had to set ourselves up as such, and, from that foundation, imbue Japanese society with the ideals of democracy in general and American democracy in particular. Thus the curious dichotomy of assuming imperial trappings, then behaving unimperiously.

The presence of whole American families was important to making this work. Had dependents been left at home, the Japanese would not have had the opportunity to view democracy-in-microcosm, as practiced on a familial scale. They would have seen it only as filtered through a military establishment, which is to say that they would not have seen it at all, however benign occupation policy might have been otherwise.

And so, I found myself wandering about Yamashita Park in the cold, wet, and windy March of 1949 as a military dependent, but also, I realized years later, as an example of democracy, American-style—a red-white-and-blue laboratory rat for the Japanese to observe and learn from.

The lessons—theirs and mine—began early. The initial encounters remain clear to me today. There was the toothless old man leaning on a cane while seated on a park bench, who rose slightly and bowed smilingly at me as I passed. There was a group of young boys about my age dressed in tatters who hesitantly approached me, not begging, but out of curiosity, shyly querying me in the few English words they knew: “American? Name?” I replied with my childhood moniker: “Jamie.” More smiles, then: “Ah, so! Jamie-san!” It stuck.

And everywhere were the Japanese army veterans, readily identified because they still wore their uniforms, now stripped of insignia and shabby for lack of resources to update wardrobes. If you looked their way and smiled however tentatively, they would grin and bow in return.

This was the fabric, and its weave would deepen. As a child in Yokohama, I often traveled alone among the Japanese, afoot and by bicycle, but also for some distance on buses and trains. I went to movies on my own at night, then walked home through neighborhoods that remained bombed flat; I shopped in Japanese markets by myself; I shared candy, popcorn, and other distinctly American treats with Japanese I encountered, exchanging smiles and nods and bows with children and adults alike.

I had Japanese playmates my age. They played baseball on a field across a ravine from our house,

The awesome destruction which our bombers had wreaked on Yokohama in the waning days of the war also could be seen from our front gate. Our house faced west from atop the ridge of an ancient volcano now called Yamate-Cho that fronted on the harbor. Any clear morning, on leaving for school or whatever, I was greeted by two sights: sunshine glinting off Mount Fuji, which rose majestically on the far horizon, and the plain before it, still blackened from (I was to learn years later) a horrific firestorm that Curtis LeMay’s B-29s had visited upon Yokohama on May 29, 1945.

A rail line cut through the ridge not a half-mile downslope from our house, and never would the term "other side of the tracks" have more meaning. To the east of the tracks, Yamate-Cho and the south harbor area were much as they had been before the war. The ridge itself was totally untouched by bombs, expressly because it was dotted with luxurious houses such as ours, European consulate housing built in the 1920s, the tactical intent having been to spare the area so it could serve as postwar housing for the victors.

But immediately west of the tracks, the ruin began, and even as late as the time we lived there, it was only haphazardly punctuated with hopeful exclamation points of new construction.

Curiously, for all the evidence of war, the subject itself was never broached. I recently asked my 92-year-old mother about this, and she confirmed my memory: It was understood, a policy of tactfulness; the war was not to be flaunted, certainly not to the Japanese. Military-assignment rotation policy at the time helped ensure that no ill will would surface. So, with the exception of MacArthur’s personally anointed wartime staff and cronies whom he chose to retain, Pacific Theater veterans were sent home for reassignment to Europe or elsewhere—and vice versa. My own father was a case in point; his wartime service was in North Africa and Italy.

The American school I attended, Nasugu Beach Elementary, was an even starker example of this taciturn policy. Only four years earlier, the building had held Allied prisoners of war. This I knew then; only years later did I learn that it also likely was the scene of Japanese atrocities.

Looking back, I question whether this total avoidance of what was then a very recent past did not contribute to Japan’s current attitude of denying wartime guilt. Yet even if it did, on balance, I think the policy was for the best; certainly, it made this child’s life easier.

Nor were there overt displays of racism. In our family’s circles, at least, it did not

Yet, for all this, I came to feel very much at home. We left Japan in the fall of 1950. The war had ended a scant five years before; I was not quite 12. And, when I lately asked my mother if she ever feared for my safety or encountered hostility or resentment, she replied, “Not once. If there was any, they held it in; they never let it show. In all your childhood, I never felt you were unsafe.”

Nor did I ever feel apprehension. One reason has to be a child’s natural innocence, but another and more profound one must be the egalitarian doctrine that governed our presence there.

This was driven home to me from before we went to Japan. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my father announcing at dinner one evening in our modest house in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland that we were going to Japan, outlining what our life would be like, and then sternly admonishing me that under no circumstances was I ever to order a servant about. Yessir!

The lesson stuck. One of our house servants was a young man in his early 20s named Yoshi; he was our gardener and also what, in an earlier era, I might have called my “boy.” As such, he sort of looked out for me: accompanied me on some excursions, met me at the school bus stop with an umbrella when it was raining, taught me rudiments of gardening, tried (without success) to improve my baseball playing, instructed me in his forte (sketching), even helped me with some of my school studies, although his own English was sparse.

But not once do I recall directly telling Yoshi to do anything. I was taught that, whatever I might need from him must first be put as a request not to my mother, but to Horiko, who would determine whether Yoshi should assist me. In fact, so much did he and I work together as companions and not at all in any master-servant context that the memory of the sole occasion of my becoming short with him—a bit of childhood truculence involving a drawing exercise that annoyed me—embarrasses me to this day.

Protocol at home helped prepare me for official duties of the occupation, in which I was often involved in an ex officio emissarial capacity because of my father’s unusual position and the way

As chief procurement officer (later comptroller) of the 8th Army, my father, far more than most other Americans, had to cross boundaries. It was his job to negotiate with Japanese for provisions and facilities, and, as with so much else, business matters were conducted according to Japanese tradition, which meant first getting to know one another on a familial scale.

So, it followed that my mother and I often accompanied my father on his business trips, for which I was excused from school. Many of these were to Kyōto, some 300 miles west, where my father had established a friendship and working relationship with a Japanese nobleman, Count Hirohashi.

Getting to Kyōto was no casual undertaking. It meant an overnight trip aboard the private railway car. Often, the three of us were alone on this car, but sometimes, another American quartermaster officer and his family, including a boy my age, accompanied us. The car featured a private room for everyone and a lavish living-dining area at its rear. My mother recalls that the car had three servants, including a cook, steward, and general maid. Most of the time, it was hitched onto the rear of regularly scheduled passenger trains, but without access from our car to the others.

We would leave Yokohama in the early evening, in time for a leisurely dinner aboard. The night’s sleep was disturbed by the train lurching to a halt in the darkness, to slowly negotiate track work. Rebuilding went on around the clock; I remember waking up and raising the window shade to look out at hordes of Japanese workers illuminated by track-side floodlights. We would get to Kyōto sometime the next morning.

I well remember Count Hirohashi’s house in Kyōto, a large, yet light and airy affair set amid dense evergreen trees, with an exquisite private garden outside my room. On this occasion and others when we visited Japanese families, we lived on their terms (albeit, at an exalted level), including sleeping on tatami mats and trying to negotiate Japanese toilets.

My duties? Other than generally to behave myself, I had to show utmost respect for our hosts and their home. It helped that they had a son, although he was a teenager. I recall being entranced by the garden, but the other boy would get bored with me and soon enough leave me to my own devices.

Meal time, here and on other occasions when we stayed in Japanese homes, involved a delicate exercise in face-saving. This is because local fruits and vegetables were not then generally safe for Americans

In any event, meals in Japanese homes began with our sitting cross-legged on tatami mats around the family dining table. A maid would bring in a large tray of hors d’oeuvres, including raw fruits and vegetables—and a box of Ritz crackers. (Clearly, Nabisco was an early postwar exporter to Japan.)

The hostess would decorate our plates with samples of the fresh produce (we assumed it would not do much harm in small amounts)—and a generous handful or two of the crackers. I ate a lot of Ritz crackers in those days. The main course itself was thoroughly cooked, which served to kill most bacteria, although I do recall some occasions of food poisoning.

We went other places in the railway car. My mother especially remembers the time we rode it aboard a ferry from the main island of Honshū to the northern island of Hokkaido, and how what she now terms a “swarm” of Japanese laborers, perhaps more than 50 people, with no power-machinery whatsoever, struggled to maneuver the car from the land-bound tracks to the pitching ferryboat. They got the lead pair of trucks aboard the ferry, but then the lurching boat kept causing the tracks to misalign, leaving the car to skew back and forth while the workers struggled to inch it forward and simultaneously tried to control the heaving ferry.

I have a vague recollection of this occasion. I better remember being bored once on Hokkaidō, waiting with my mother in some chilly hotel, sleet falling outside, while my father did his business, and how, that evening, we returned aboard the private car for the trip home; altogether, it was a three-day journey for a six-hour business meeting.

While the railway car was for official long-distance business, and my father had an Army auto and driver for his frequent trips up to 8th Army headquarters in Tokyo, we were on our own for private jaunts. Because most rural Japanese roads had yet to be rebuilt—some still had bomb craters—long-distance auto travel was precluded.

It was just as well, then, that our favorite destination was a relatively close-by resort hotel, the Fujiya. This was (and still is) a great sprawling luxury retreat, with magnificently varied, meandering gardens and a host of recreational outlets, especially for my parents, a golf course, and fishing and boating for me.