OUR ARRIVAL

  In the summer of 1995, I visited Okinawa for the first time in many years. At the touching dedication of the Peace Memorial, my thoughts returned to the day, nearly fifty years ago, when I first saw the beautiful island of Okinawa.

  It was Thanksgiving Day, 1946, and also my mother's birthday.  I was an eight-year-old girl from Boston, Massachusetts, who, at that time, had no idea that the island would be my home for the next twelve years.  I had only one thing on my mind: seeing my father for the first time in nearly four years.

  Our trip on the General Hodges, a converted Navy hospital ship, took nineteen days, and I was seasick every one of them.  Still, I'll never forget the thrill of seeing Fujiyama, rising from the morning mists while dozens of tiny rainbows danced around our ship. Our arrival was not what we had expected, since we were a day early and no one was there to meet us.  "Maybe it's the wrong island," I suggested.  My mother stared in stunned silence at the bare, brown hills.  There wasn't a single building or tree in sight.  Hours later, a jeep sped toward us in a cloud of white coral dust, and my father jumped out, looking older and thinner than I remembered.  After an exciting reunion, he took us to our new home.

   This was a small Quonset hut, which resembled a tin can lying on its side in the mud.  We had two rooms on one side, separated by a shower from the rooms of the two officers who lived on the other side.  There were no shower doors, and the only way to ensure privacy was to sing, loudly, while showering.

   For a city girl, the most dismaying thing I discovered on that first day was that we had no bathroom.  On my first visit to the outhouse, I opened the door and saw a gigantic gray, hairy spider.  My screams woke the entire compound, and so I was allowed to use the only indoor toilet available the one at the dining hall.  There,  I lifted the seat and was face to face with a huge rat, frantically swimming in the bowl.  Although I'd learned some useful Japanese phrases before we left the States, they'd forgotten to teach me how to say, "There's a rat in the toilet," so I yelled the only thing I could think of, "Danger!"  Two cooks burst into the room, armed with butcher's knives, prepared to rescue me from some unknown peril.  They were very kind, if very amused, when they saw the source of my fright.

   My next disaster came when I plucked a small, red pepper from a bush.  I'd never seen one like it and held it up to my face to smell it.  I must have squeezed too hard, for it popped and the tiny seeds shot up my nose.  I really thought I was going to die.  Hours later, after having my nose rinsed endlessly with cold water, I went out exploring again.  I returned with a lovely, recently- shed snake skin, and received a long lecture about the dangers of habu, or pit-vipers.

   Somehow, I survived my first day on Okinawa, and, despite my many misadventures, I went to bed that night with a smile on my face.  My family was together at last.  I was home.

HAIR

Back in the States I never gave much thought to my hair.  Like most little girls in the 1940s, I wore it shoulder length.  It was straight and rather stringy, and I pulled it to one side and held it off my forehead with a shiny barrette.  But when I arrived on Okinawa, my hair became extremely significant because it was blonde.

Back in 1946, very few Okinawans, especially the children, had ever seen a blonde child.  Every place I went, people came up to me to touch my hair and
comment on how pretty it was.  I reveled in the attention my hair brought me and actually became convinced I was someone rather special. Then the first beauty shop opened in Awase, and my mother decided we both needed "permanents."  Naebo tried to warn us by telling another of her fables, this one about a friend who had all her hair burned off while getting a permanent wave.  We should have listened.

At the beauty shop, our scalps were soaped, rinsed, rubbed, and then soaped, rinsed and rubbed all over again, until they felt as if they'd been sandpapered.  Then a woman with the build of a lady-wrestler appeared and
began to massage our necks and shoulders.  She pummeled, pinched, pounded and mauled us with an enthusiasm that seemed to mount as our pain increased.  We were rescued by the entrance of an American woman who showed some interest in the procedure.  "Try it, you'll love it," my mother gasped. Thankfully, our masseuse moved over to that woman's chair, and before we could catch our breath the styling process resumed.

For the next hour, three giggling girls wound our hair around plastic rods, taking only two tea breaks during the process.  The waving solution was applied, the single light bulb was turned on overhead, and we sat and steamed
while the three girls drank more tea and ate their suppers.  Then we were unwound, soaped, rinsed, and rubbed once more, and at last we were handed mirrors to admire the wirelike coils of hair bobbing on our heads.  The whole process had taken six hours.  "Good permanents," said the girls.  "They should last six or seven months."

Our hair resisted all efforts to make it lie down, and our heads were so sore we couldn't even brush our hair for three days.  And just as Naebo had warned,my mother had a three-inch strip of hair burned off straight across her
forehead.  To keep the girls from feeling bad, she assured them she liked the high forehead effect because it gave her an oddly intelligent look. As if to reproach me, my hair began to darken shortly after that.  It turned to a boring brown and no longer attracted crowds of admirers.  I was, once again, just an ordinary little girl.