Nestled in the New Hampshire countryside, St. Paul’s, a strict, private Episcopalian boarding school patterned after English models, had within three years of Japan’s surrender pioneered an exchange program with Seikei, a counterpart school in Tokyo. Two years later Tatsuo Arima, destined to become a top diplomat, joined my class. We were to work closely almost thirty years later in Washington, where he headed the Political Section of the Japanese embassy in Washington and I was in charge of the Japan desk at the State Department. Together we dealt with the problems of the day, boasting that the class of ’53 at SPS managed U.S.-Japan relations from both sides of the Pacific.
School Influences
St. Paul’s shaped me. My Japanese friends provided a look beyond the swarm of WASPs (slang for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who were my classmates. I learned to love history under the gruff, incisive discipline of a teacher named Carroll McDonald. The chance to observe history in the making would later pull me into diplomacy. So would the SPS connection with a Peace Corps forerunner in England called the Winant Volunteers.
John Winant, the revered U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during World War II, had been a master at St. Paul’s before becoming governor of New Hampshire. He committed suicide at the end of the war, as much a casualty of the conflict as any battlefield death. His friends in Britain, led by a spellbinding evangelist named Tubby Clayton, organized in Winant’s memory a summer program for college and high-school-age volunteers to help rebuild London’s war-damaged East End. Clayton’s first recruiting stop was SPS in the late 1940s. I remember sitting in the school’s chapel, a callow choir boy, mesmerized by Tubby’s descriptions of London ravaged, of Winant’s craggy appearances at blazing scenes during the Blitz (firefighters reported seeing Abraham Lincoln), and the need to rebuild. I told myself I just had to join the Volunteers. Several years later I did.
The summer before my sophomore year at Harvard, I was sent to work as a Winant Volunteer at the Brady Boys’ Club, the world’s oldest Orthodox Jewish Boys’ Club, in the heart of East London. I learned to communicate in their patois of English, Yiddish, and Cockney rhyme slang. (I nearly lost my newfound status as an honorary Jew when I tried to put mayonnaise on chopped liver.) Living abroad turned out to be fun and fascinating. Explaining the United States and its policies to kids from a different culture was a challenge. Persistent nagging by my Cockney kids to tell them what I planned to do with my life set me searching for an adult analog to my current work. I returned to college with my cap set for the Foreign Service.
In addition to intellectual rigor, SPS served up an exhausting array of things to do. I sang, boxed, rowed, and was part of the student government. The impact of these activities on the way I operated later in life, particularly rowing, was huge. My management style as an ambassador and a bureaucrat, which treasured teamwork and measured progress one stroke at a time, was formed in a racing shell.
Maiden Aunts of Influence
I was fifteen when I took a summer job at “Naumkeag,” the estate of my great-aunt Mabel Choate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Mabel had inherited the large summer “cottage” in the Berkshires. Architect Stanford White had designed it for her father, Joseph H. Choate, the New York lawyer who made his name opposing the graduated income tax and became U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (1899–1906). Mabel added what became a famous array of gardens to the working farm that served the estate. At 75 cents an hour, I weeded bricks, mowed lawns, milked cows, and did whatever the farm manager instructed. I was proud of my Social Security card, whose early number I carry to this day, and moved seamlessly between “Upstairs” and “Downstairs” at the big house.
Mabel Choate was amply sized. She strongly believed that good health depended on the vital organs being surrounded by a layer of fat. Witty and quick, responsible and philanthropic, she made herself easily accessible to all ages. Mabel had suffered from a number of ailments in her life, and apparently kept on taking every medicine ever prescribed for her. One of these was Argyrol for sinus problems. As a result, over time she turned a distinctive color. The children in our family referred to her fondly as “our navy blue aunt.” A more accurate description would be a light battleship gray. She wore a set of silver bracelets that tinkled loudly when she walked and announced her presence from a distance. My mother adored Aunt Mabel, her father ’s younger sister, and so did we.
Aunt Mabel had traveled extensively in the “Orient” as a young woman. She fell in love with the arts and architecture of China and brought home, brick by brick, an entire ancestral temple, which she reconstructed at Naumkeag. As an employee during the day, I would sweep the dragon walk and clean the spirit gate. In the evenings I would sit on the temple porch and listen to her traveler ’s tales and the lore she had absorbed. The spirit gate, she told me, was placed to block the direct approach to the temple, forcing visitors to detour around it. Evil spirits could fly only in straight lines and were thus denied entry.
Mabel imported other Chinese practices valuable to teenage boys. It was the height of politesse in old Peking (as Americans then called Beijing), she reported, to belch loudly in appreciation for a delicate dish or a fine meal. She had mastered the technique and taught it to me, empowering me to disrupt school study halls for years to come. At the time, I had no conscious sense of pull toward China. Seeds Mabel Choate sowed would sprout later.
The source of another early family link with Asia was my father’s Aunt Lina, his mother ’s sister. Mary Caroline Hardy graduated from Radcliffe College in 1902, one of the original “Blue Stockings.” The years had bowed her legs and placed wisps of moustache under her hatchet nose, but left her sharp and wise. Sunday dinner at her walk-up apartment on Sparks Street in Cambridge was a regular feature of my years at Harvard. She cooked us toothsome dishes with odd names––“Cry Like a Child,” roast chicken basted with 7Up, was so delicious you did just that; and “Train Wreck,” a beef stew with sour cream and red wine, was chaotic in appearance but equally good. Sunday nights were a haven for family. My cousins Charley and Frank and my sister Penny all overlapped with me at college and were regulars at table. Literary people like John Updike also enjoyed Aunt Lina’s company and the victuals and steady flow of sherry from S.S. Pierce.
Aunt Lina’s Hardy family photograph album showed pictures of nineteenth-century Bostonians, large males in frock coats with muttonchop whiskers and ladies in elaborate dresses shaped by whalebone corsets and bustles. Among them was a small Asian gentleman.
“Who was this?” I asked Aunt Lina, as we sat on her sofa going through the album one Sunday evening.
“That was your Japanese relative, Joseph Hardy Neesima,” she replied, and told me the story that Japanese, as I discovered years later, remember and repeat to this day. His name was Nijima Jo, a twenty-year-old Samurai who stole out of Japan in 1864, four years before the Meiji Restoration. Under the Tokugawa Shoguns, his country had been closed for 250 years, and emigration was a capital crime. But Admiral Perry’s black ships had appeared in Japanese waters ten years before, bringing evidence of a different world, new technology, and strong Christian beliefs that Nijima and other young Japanese were not permitted to study. So frustrated that he became physically ill, Nijima had to escape. With the help of a Russian Orthodox priest and an American packet-schooner skipper, he made his way to Shanghai. There, in the roads of the Whampoa River, he found an American clipper ship, the Wild Rover, owned by Alpheus Hardy, Aunt Lina’s grandfather. Nijima, an extraordinarily focused young man, made straight for the vessel and found a job as cabin boy.
By the time Wild Rover reached Boston a year later, stopping in Hong Kong and Manila among other Asian ports, Nijima had learned English, translated portions of his Chinese Bible into English, and made strong friendships with key members of the crew, most notably the captain, who arranged for him to meet the boss. In 1865, Alpheus Hardy, a handsome, imposing, and deeply religious man, received Nijima in his Boston office, standing next to a large rolltop desk.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, simply.
“This