Kit Pancoast Nagamura
Parent of Alumnus
(The Internationalist Spring/Summer 2021 Vol 66)
Most readers of the Internationalist already know that Nishimachi International School was founded in 1949 by Tané Matsukata. At the end of World War II, when Tané returned to Japan after a 17-year stint of studying in the United States, she found a ravaged landscape, in desperate need of physical and psychological healing. In her vision, the best way to approach reconstruction was through education. With the help of several other key women, she opened what would become Nishimachi International School. But what was the school like in its developmental days?
In an interview via Zoom, two remarkable women with answers—Makiko Ichiura, one of the school’s first four students, and Suzanne (née Lowell) Krogh, one of the school’s earliest teachers—divulge sharp memories of Tané Matsukata and how she helped them carve out unique and meaningful lives.
Zooming in on Makiko Ichiura
Makiko, a woman with a generous deep laugh, expressive eyebrows, and a pixie-like demeanor that belies her 78 years, was the child of intellectually progressive parents with a fascination for western culture. Makiko’s father, Ken, was a widely-respected architect and friend of Isaku Nishimura, the founder of Bunka Gakuin. “My mother went to Bunka Gakuin,” Makiko says, “and was one of the first students at that school, which Nishimura started for his own daughter. There were no good schools for girls after the age of 13, you see, so he started his school, and my mother studied there.”
Education for girls and young women, Makiko suggests, was on her mother’s mind. Eiko Ichiura was not about to have her daughter relegated to a life prescribed by the social norms of the day.
“My parents sent me to Nishimachi for the bilingual side of it,” Makiko says, “because after losing the war, they realized that language was a big thing. But also, having a something, such as language skills, was crucial to making your way in the world as an independent female in those days.”
When asked if the Meiji period didn’t ensure that women received an education, Makiko shakes her head. “I’m sure you know Japanese society,” she says wryly, “so you can imagine it was hard for girls back then to have their own lives. It was the time when you finished school, got married, had kids, and let your husband support you. My mother had experienced that, so she wanted me to be more independent.”
Westernized Women
Makiko’s mother was fortunate to meet both Tané and Haru Matsukata when Makiko was still very young. “The Matsukatas were both career women,” Makiko explains, “which in those days almost didn’t exist in Japan. They looked Japanese, but they weren’t really; during the war, they had both been at Principia College [in Elsah, Illinois], and they stayed there, so they were, in a good way, ‘westernized.’ As role models, they were independent, with careers. They had a nice place to live, and a car…can you imagine that, in 1949?!” Makiko exclaims, chortling at the outrageousness of the idea. “It showed us kids what could be possible.”
The Matsukata sisters were longtime friends with another founding figure of Nishimachi International School, Yuri Murata. Yuri, a devout horticulturalist, and her husband, Masachika (the architect who later designed the 1964 Olympic Park Stadium in Komazawa) returned to Tokyo in 1945, from where they had sheltered in Karuizawa. The ruined aspect of Tokyo left Yuri “aghast” and worried about how the country would ever recover. Eventually, she, Tané, Haru, and Makiko’s mother, Eiko, found their concerns aligned; the women then began to discuss how education could best help turn things around.
The Muratas had been encouraged by the Matsukatas to build a home on the corner of the Matsukata property. That home became known as the Nishimachi House, and it was there that the first four students—Yuri’s two sons Hiroshi and Kiyoshi, Kiyokuni Hasegawa, and Makiko —attended classes. The nearby Matsukata house, today the iconic façade associated with the school “was then still occupied by an embassy,” Makiko says. The Matsukata House housed both the Swedish and Romanian embassies during the war—which might have been spared it being bombed—and it was occupied by the Venezuelan embassy well into the 1960s. “At any rate,” Makiko says, “I never studied in the Matsukata House, but at first we met at the Muratas’ house next door, on the corner of the big street.”
Haircuts Growing Roses
According to Makiko’s memory, the Murata House “had a study attached, and we had classes there…and there was a back yard. Mrs. Murata was into growing roses and things, and she’d give us haircuts, because she could use the trimmings for fertilizer! Isn’t it weird that I remember that? The yard was full of trees. The whole thing was a kind of home schooling.”
Makiko doesn’t recall any discomfort being the only girl in the class. “We all just climbed trees in the Muratas’ backyard” she says, with a mischievous grin, “that was all I knew, so it was fine.”
Despite the bucolic setting, in those early days Makiko had a significant commute to get to the Muratas’ house. “We had evacuated to Sendai during the war. Our house in Komaba, that my father designed, survived the bombing, and we returned there when I was three years old,” Makiko recounts. “But the commute [from Komaba to Nishimachi] was long. I had to take the Inokashira Line, and then a streetcar to Tengenji, then walk up the hill…and I was only 6 years old! Getting into the train was just like being pressed into sushi; sometimes I couldn’t get in, because it was too crowded. So I was late. I was late so often that Tané told my parents to move.”
Tané’s Tinkering
Tané Matsukata seems to have exercised a powerful influence over those she cared about. To solve the issue of Makiko’s arduous commute, Tané insisted that the Ichiuras move to Zaimokucho, an area near TV Asahi, so that her young pupil could walk to school in the morning. “I was, then, on time,” Makiko laughs. “I think that Haru actually bought my parents’ house, so that we could move more quickly,” she adds.
Within the first year, with both Haru and Tané teaching classes and Sanae Kiriyama hired to teach Japanese lessons, the school started to attract additional students, more than the Murata study could easily accommodate. In order to raise funds to build a new school facility, Makiko clearly remembers helping out at clothing sales on weekends. These were street-side sales of clothing donations solicited by the Matsukatas through their friends and contacts at Principia College. They received generous shipments each month. In a time when even basic foodstuffs and staples were lacking in Tokyo, clothing, too, was a hot commodity. People queued up to buy everything on sale those summer weekends in 1949.
Nonetheless, Makiko recalls that as she walked to school, “the local kids would make fun of me because I was dressed in clothes from America…the kind that at the time were not sold in the store. I’m not sure where we got them from, or if my mother sewed them.”
Thoroughly Modern Makiko
Makiko, it seems, was unperturbed. “After all, my parents were very modern—very Mobo and Moga,” she says, referring to the then slang for “Modern Boy” and “Modern Gal.” “My mom dressed in the Charleston style, and my father would carry patent leather dancing shoes in his bag and pick her up to go dancing at the Athénée Française! They never lived in a traditional Japanese house, and we always had a Western style breakfast—toast, coffee, and eggs—never Japanese home cooking. My father liked pork chops and potatoes and bread…and we even didn’t buy an electric rice cooker, which was the thing in the 1950s. I’d never seen my parents in Japanese clothing, and we called them “mama” and “papa” instead of the Japanese equivalent.”
By the mid 1950s, Makiko was studying in new school buildings, which her father helped design. “By the time I was in sixth grade,” she says, “there were, like, 16 different nationalities at the school…there were nearly too many nationalities and students. The school itself, since it was small, was all mixed and we were always together. It had a family atmosphere, communal, and it was a very happy comfortable place.”
Nancy who?
When asked about her academic performance, Makiko gives out a wee groan. “I don’t recall her name,” she says laughing, “but I had a strict teacher who taught spelling, and that class was really hard!” Bravely, Makiko agrees to share her report card from 1954-55. A glance at a copy of the report reveals that she was a polite and serious student who struggled with math, grammar, history, and Japanese, but aced all other subjects. The surprising thing, however, is the name on the card: Nancy Ichiura.
“I gave myself an American name—Nancy—because I had a haircut like the comic book character in Nancy & Sluggo,” Makiko laughs, “and Tané let me do that!”
Makiko studied at NISHIMACHI until the end of 6th grade, at which time Tané once again stepped in to guide her life. “She advised my parents on what to do with me,” she says, “so I ended up going to boarding school for three years at Keimei Gakuin, in Tachikawa, which was mostly for returnee students. Then I commuted for high school, and in my third year, I went abroad to Plymouth, Michigan as a high school exchange student.”
With Makiko abroad, the Ichiura household was left with a vacant room in their home. Tané, like a champion at the game of Tetris, immediately found a use for that space, as housing for her new overseas-hire teacher, Suzanne (Lowell) Krogh, whose story appears later in this piece.
The Art of Staying Single
On her return to Japan, Makiko attended Keio University and graduated with a degree in Aesthetics and Art History. “In those days,” Makiko recalls “girls at Keio all had engagement rings by the time they graduated. But not me. I didn’t want to get married. And anyway, my mother kept telling me, you’ve got to be financially independent before you get married! When I finished college, I was kind of idling away, and Tané saw that, and she said she needed help in the administration office, and offered me a job there. I did that for one year, then in 1967, I went to Toronto. I became financially independent, and it was wonderful that my parents let me do that. I made about 70 dollars a week, as a filing clerk and civil servant, with a college degree. My boss said I was overqualified.”
Makiko agreed, and decided to pursue her study of art, in London. “I’d majored in Japanese art history, and the more you study that, the more you realize how much came from China. So in 1969, when I heard that SOAS, at the University of London, had just started this Master’s program in Chinese art and archeology, I went. There were only three students,” she says, laughing at how the class size, at least, was familiar.
Studying the Past, Finding the Future
Makiko’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. “The University of London had just been gifted this fabulous collection of Chinese pottery, the Sir Percival David Collection, now at the British Museum,” she recalls, “so there we were, three students with wonderful teachers and the ability to touch Sung dynasty pottery.” Though at the time, Makiko didn’t have the desire to create pottery herself, this crucial influence later fueled her passion.
After London, Makiko’s next major move was to New York City, where she worked a 9-5 at Kodansha International U.S.A. from 1976-86. “But, there was a glass ceiling there,” she says, “and on top of everything, I was a local hire, so it was limiting. I met a lot of famous authors, though, such as George Nakashima. But I soon learned that authors need to be coddled…if they don’t find their books in the bookstore, they weep.” Makiko’s interviewer nods in sad agreement, and soon they are both laughing.
Makiko next moved to LA, where she landed a job as a “coordinator” for magazine Kateigaho. “I got to set up a lot of fun articles for the writers and photographers—like articles on food and female chefs, or private homes, such as the Frank Lloyd Wright homes, where the original owners were still living. In those days, there was no email or anything, so I met the crew at the airport, with a rented car, and set up everything. It was a fabulous job!”
Going around, Coming around
Even as her careening careers took her across continents, Makiko was conscientious about returning to her roots. “Every time I came home to Japan,” she says “the first thing I would do was, with my mom, go say hello to Tané Matsukata, to show her I was still alive. The last time I saw her, I guess it was in 1987, and at the time I was living in LA. Tané told me she was thinking of visiting LA, on her own, which was sort of an adventure at that time, at her age. So I offered to come pick her up at the airport. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I want to do it all by myself.’ Her independence was still so strong, and impressive. That’s the way she was. She was quiet in social situations, but privately, she was strong. No small talk, no weather talk, but strong.”
Our talk circles back to Makiko’s mother, Eiko. By 1989, Makiko thought it time to move her mother from Japan to Seattle, where Makiko and her partner had settled. “She was familiar with Seattle, had friends here, and spoke English,” Makiko said.
Eiko lived at Makiko’s house for 13 years. “She was a really creative lady,” Makiko says. “She loved knitting, but she started getting forgetful, so she’d knit half-made vests and sweaters with no arm holes and things all over the place. I felt bad for her, so I signed her up for a ceramics class instead and we made things together, but she had zero interest in that.”
Earthsongs and Grounding
However, this brought art history studies and creative urges back into Makiko’s life. She started sculpting clay works in the 1990s, and continues to this day. Her current ceramic artworks, which she shows in galleries, are architecturally solid structures that reference 4th-7th century Japanese haniwa. Her figures, clad in warrior’s armor, hold yoga poses or offer Namaste greetings, thematically combining elements of strength, self-protection, and peace.
When asked if she feels that her early schooling with Tané was important to her life, Makiko responds without hesitation: “It’s really the groundwork of my whole self! Like the footing of a house, you need a good foundation, and that was Nishimachi for me. The Matsukatas, and the entire community, made me what I am.”
Zooming in on Suzanne
On this note, the interview turns to one of Nishimachi’s earliest teachers, Suzanne Krogh. A vibrant and witty 83-year-old with light gray bob, Suzanne was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She took her undergraduate degree at Florida State University, where she developed an interest in Asian History. However, she says, “rather than get a master’s in Asian History, I’d knew I’d rather go live Asian history. I wasn’t sure how I’d get there, and I wasn’t set on Japan.”
Suzanne’s first move in the right direction got her as far as Hawaii, where she found work with a travel agency. The real trajectory was never far from her mind, though. One day, she remembered eavesdropping on a group of college-age girls at FSU. “I heard someone say something about a woman who went to Principia,” Suzanne recounts, “a woman who had started a school in Japan, and that another woman, Roxanne Hopfer, who also went to Principia, had got a job teaching second grade at that school.”
Suzanne’s spy-like surveillance skills and recall were matched by her fearless ambition. She promptly wrote to the director of Principia Upper School to find the name and address of the mysterious school in Japan.
World’s Shortest Job Application
Once Suzanne had the info she needed, the ball really got rolling. “I wrote to Ms. Matsukata a three-sentence letter, stupid really,” Suzanne says sheepishly, “and it went: ‘Dear Ms. Matsukata. I am a teacher. Do you need any teachers?’ Tané sent me a letter back and said, ‘yes, she did!’”
Of course, there was the matter of an interview for the job. Tané set up a meeting with one of her contacts in Hawaii, the wife of an admiral living near the foot of Diamond Head. As luck would have it, Suzanne was sharing a house with several friends in the very same neighborhood, just down the block.
Suzanne recalls the interview going something like this:
Wife: “Hi Sue, you remember me? I see you down the block all the time. I hear you want to go to Nishimachi.”
Sue: “Why yes, I do!”
Wife: “It’s just great, you’re going to love it. Bye.”
“That was it,” Suzanne laughs, but admits that Tané was shocked when she heard about it later. Nonetheless, destiny had things all worked out. Roxanne Hopfer, the very second grade teacher Suzanne had overheard FSU girls talking about, was preparing to leave Japan in order to pursue one of the world’s first master’s degrees in ESL, in the states. Tané needed a second grade teacher to take her place, and there was Suzanne.
Would YOU buy this script?
When informed that her life story sounds like the plot of an implausible movie, Suzanne laughs. “It gets even better,” she says, enthusiastically. “This really good-looking guy, Bud, who’d also gone to Principia, came to church one Sunday in Tokyo, and I ended up marrying him. But before that, Bud was assigned to an aircraft carrier, heading north from the South China Sea and this other guy he went to school with was heading south on the same sea. They were both communications officers, back when they used flags. So, they’re messaging each other. The other guys asks ‘What were you doing in Tokyo?’ and Bud says ‘I’m going to ask Sue to marry me.’ And the other guy says ‘What if I get there first?’ and then Bud replies, ‘I’m going to have her out of the country before you can meet her.’ Which in fact, he did. But that other guy on the ship? He went to the south part of Japan, and Roxanne Hopfer, after taking her master’s degree, came back to Japan, and married him!”
Rewinding the movie back a bit, to Suzanne’s first arrival in Japan in 1960, reveals important backstory to her life. “I had asked Tané in about three different letters where I was going to be living once I arrived,” Suzanne says, “because my salary included a place to live. Finally, it occurred to me that she had no idea where I was going to live, so I thought I’d help her. I asked if I could I live with a Japanese family for the first year. That’s when I learned that Makiko was going to the United States, and Tané would put me in her vacant bedroom!”
Just off the Boat
Anyone who has just arrived to live in Japan can probably recall those first disorienting days. In Suzanne’s case, she landed with a suitcase full of Hawaiian muumuus and sandals which had been her travel agency uniform, and about 8 dollars to her name. “Tané picked me up at the airport and on the way to the hotel, she gave me an envelope, telling me she thought I might like to know what Japanese money denominations looked like,” Suzanne recalls. “The envelope held the equivalent of about 30 dollars. I lived on that for the first month I was there. I didn’t tell Tané that, but that’s all I had.”
Since Suzanne and Makiko are on the Zoom interview simultaneously (I had to fix an error you made when replacing the é’s), it feels a bit awkward to ask Suzanne what it was like to move into Makiko’s childhood room, but the question pops out.
“It was about 9’ x 11’, and small,” Suzanne says. Makiko looms forward into the Zoom camera, nodding. “It had only a bed and chest of drawers,” Suzanne says.
“And a window,” Makiko adds, emphatically.
“And a window,” Suzanne agrees, “but what was interesting was that the bed was made up backwards, with my feet at the wall, and my head where the foot of the bed was supposed to be. Of course…it took me the longest time to find out why. The wall was due north, so I couldn’t put my head there [because in Japan, corpses are laid out with their heads directed north]. The maid could not bring herself to make up the bed the other way.”
Fashion Fun
Living with the Ichiuras had distinct advantages, though, Suzanne points out. “I didn’t fit into clothing in Japan at all,” she recalls, and since muumuus were not school teacher attire, “Makiko’s mother arranged to have seamstresses come to the house to make me a few things. But I didn’t have much money to do that, so I didn’t have a lot of clothing.”
Additionally, a mere two days after Suzanne’s arrival in Japan, newly appointed American ambassador Edwin Reischauer and his wife Haru (Tané’s sister) also arrived. “It wasn’t long before the Reischauers came to the Ichiuras,” Suzanne says, “to escape the embassy and have a good American dinner.” She and Makiko have a laugh at the irony of this.
Suzanne started work within a week of moving to Tokyo. She found the school itself “very, very basic. The playground was a gravel field, and there weren’t many toys, just some balls. Every day, someone kicked a ball over the fence. Tané had to keep apologizing to the neighbors and trying to get the balls back.”
Though the school staff and other teachers were worldly and fun to get to know, Suzanne found facing her 13-14 students was another story. “It was scary,” she said. “I had not been in a second grade classroom since I was seven years old. I had a degree in history and social sciences, and my certification was in teaching high school history. I had no clue what I was doing, none at all. I remember wandering around the room and picking up books to see what kids were reading those days.”
What Tané was Really Like
Suzanne offers a story which illustrates not only her struggles, but also Tané Matsukata’s ability to spin a situation. “I was supposed to teach my class long handwriting,” Suzanne says, slightly miserable even at the memory. “I have terrible handwriting, so they brought in Mrs. Walker from England, who taught 4th and 5th grade, and she was to teach me how to write on the chalkboard. She came up to my room every day for a week or so, then Tané came in after a few days to see how I was doing. They decided that I was hopeless. So, Tané had Ann Walker come in and teach handwriting for my class, and I was to go down to the kindergarten, where we had a tone-deaf kindergarten teacher, and I would teach music to the kids. The kindergarten teacher was then free to just prepare materials. It was perfect.”
When asked how she remembers Tané, Suzanne is quick to respond: “She was a very attractive woman, tall for a Japanese woman, on the thin side, with a lovely complexion and a really nice, warm smile.”
Was she cuddly?
“Nope,” Suzanne says, decisively, “that word would not have been in her vocabulary. She was warm, but not cuddly. Instead, she was very quietly observant. Personally she was very helpful to me. She never stepped too far into your personal territory, so, you’d tell her more than you might otherwise.”
Suzanne then recalls an incident that she feels sums up Tané’s way of thinking. A charity event for orphans was held at Nishimachi, and gifts of candy were meant to be distributed to the children. Tané insisted that the candy be packed into small bags, because she knew some children would want to eat all the candy they got immediately, and others would want to take it back, and savor it slowly. She carefully accommodated various kinds of human nature.
Clear Sighted
Though Suzanne doesn’t don rose-tinted glasses when looking back on her three years in Japan—“I got stared at, and commented about a lot,” she says, “and people would come and want to practice their English conversation, or tell me how terrible Americans are. And then, I had people who wouldn’t wait on me or would avoid sitting next to me on the streetcar, so it was not an easy thing, really,”—she nevertheless recalls brushes with famous people such as Ethel Kennedy and Shirley MacLaine. Furthermore, the whole experience gave Suzanne what she says was “a much better understanding of many kinds of people, and third-culture kids, how to help them grow, and how to grow myself as a world citizen.”
Today, Suzanne is a retired professor of elementary and early childhood education at Western Washington University, and the author of a series of books on approaches and practical guidance to early education— The Integrated Early Childhood Curriculum—the most recent of which came out last summer, 2020.
“I write these books with local teachers,” Suzanne says, “and I wish I knew at NISHIMACHI what I know now; I would have been a much, much better teacher. Young children don’t think, when they are learning about the world, ‘Ooo, I just had a good math experience,’ or ‘Ooo, I just had a good history experience.’ They think, ‘I just had an experience.’ With young children it works best, I think, if you don’t divide the curriculum into very specific areas. They should learn the things they are interested about, and bring in the things they need to know as they go along. It’s integrating the curriculum through inquiry learning.”
The Way of Time
This sounds like something Tané Matsukata would have loved to have discussed with Suzanne. Sometimes the timing on things just doesn’t work out. And other times, it works out with remarkable results.
Both Suzanne and Makiko are on Zoom, but they are both in fact at Suzanne’s house, in separate rooms for social distancing due to the corona virus. The obvious question arises: how do they happen to be together for this interview?
“That’s another really crazy story,” Suzanne says. “Nishimachi had its 50th anniversary party…and I wondered if Makiko had been there, so I looked her up in the directory and realized—oh my god!—she lives down the road from me! I was shaking. I was literally shaking. I dialed her number immediately. We’d been living near each other for 10 years…and didn’t know it.”
“It’s been fantastic getting to know this person,” Suzanne says, nodding toward Makiko, who laughs in agreement. These days, the two women often walk and travel together. Their full lives and friendship epitomize the wonderful legacy of Tané Matsukata and Nishimachi International School.