Fran Kramer
This book is based on my childhood experiences in 1950’s
Japan. Japan has changed enormously since those postwar days of poverty. Anne,
the heroine, encounters this along with her discoveries of beautiful gardens.
Would an American child moving to Japan with her family discover the same things
that Anne discovered? Certainly some of the “opposites” Anne encountered
are still very true. The Japanese do many things differently from us. However,
other things have changed. No average American household could afford to hire
servants in Japan today. But if a Japanese child from a middle-income family
were to come to this country, she would be amazed to discover that her family
could afford to live in a huge house with a beautiful lawn! She would discover
a new freedom making friends the American way. Her ways of looking at the world
would be expanded. That is the point of the book.
When I first started this book around 1989 there were no books
for children that I could find on the subject of an American child integrating
into a foreign culture. There were plenty on the subject of a foreign child
trying to adjust to the American culture.
Fran Kramer has had a lifelong love of Asia. As a child,
she lived in Japan with her family and then returned as an adult in the 1980’s
working for Maryknoll as a consultant promoting the Hospice Movement and better
care for terminally ill people. Fran did all her professional work in Japanese
to include facilitating bereavement groups, and giving talks to physicians and
health care providers. She has a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s
Degree in Asian Studies and underwent an intensive two-year Japanese training
program in Tokyo and Kyoto. She taught World Religions and Meaning
of Existence at community colleges in Hawaii and worked at the Fairbank
Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University.
Mr. Takeshita walked Anne to the door. At the genkan,
the entranceway, Anne paused and said as she slipped on her shoes, "Your
grandmother is very beautiful."
"She is very old," Mr. Takeshita replied with a sad
look on his face. "She often does not know what is happening."
Anne thought he said this because Japanese always describe
family members in less than good terms. It was a way of being polite, like not
bragging.
Mr. Takeshita's voice softened. "She is a little like
this lamp," he said, his forefinger touching an old Japanese lamp sitting
in the Takeshitas' entrance way. "It's only a box made of paper with fragile
black lacquered ribs around it. But from inside the box sometimes a soft glow
shines out."
Anne asked Mr. Takeshita in a quiet voice, "Why does your
grandmother often forget things?"
"Very old people frequently forget things and she is very,
very, old, now ninety-three. Already, her spirit is leaving her. On the days
she forgets where she is, I think her spirit is just gone somewhere else, looking
for the path it must to take to the mountain when she dies."
"To the mountain?" Anne asked, thinking this was
a strange expression.
"Yes, we Japanese say that when somebody dies, they go
to the mountain."
"Why? Are mountains special?"
"Ah, yes. The mountains are sacred. That is why we always
build our temples at the foot of a mountain.
