Lucky breaks often mean being in the right place at the right time. I found out that it also helps to study the right language at the right time. In the 1950s, because the U. S. government realized that too few Americans were learning critical languages, they created the National Defense Foreign Language program to support students to pursue non-European languages such as Japanese. I had taken the initiative to begin Japanese, so I became the fortunate recipient of an NDFL fellowship, which paid for tuition and a stipend. The last two years of graduate school I could set aside all non-academic employment, concentrating on Japanese and doctoral exams.
My study of Japanese at Chicago was mainly the written language, but I needed spoken Japanese to continue doctoral work in Japan. The NDFL program agreed to support me for a summer of intensive Japanese conversation at Columbia University in New York. Again, this program offered to pay tuition and a stipend, but it had two catches. First, I had to find my own way to New York, and second, I couldn’t afford to put up our family threesome in the Big Apple.
Virginia’s brother Kermit was in the army, stationed in Boston, and needed help with his ailing wife. We cobbled together a plan to have Virginia stay in Boston with her brother while I lived in a Columbia University dorm. For the trip to New York, I scoured the University of Chicago bulletin boards, finding someone who wanted to share driving and gas expenses to New York in his car. This grad student even consented to let Virginia and our son occupy the back seat on the trip to New York. The other student and I drove non-stop, switching off driving every few hours. I will never forget, while on one of my turns at the wheel, listening to the radio play an old gospel song, “I’ll fly away.” We did “fly away” from Chicago, but I couldn’t foresee exactly where this journey would take us, on our way to the final destination of Japan.
Arriving in New York City, we dropped Virginia and our son at Grand Central Station for the train trip to Boston, and then I got off at a dorm on the Columbia University campus.
That began the most intense educational program of my life. All of our classes were conducted in Japanese, but I and another grad student from Chicago had never conversed in Japanese. Mornings, we had two hours in the classroom practicing conversation, then went to lunch where we spoke Japanese with Japanese students. After lunch we had a two-hour session in the language lab listening to tapes; five minutes after the beginning of class, the monitor locked the door, and no one was admitted. Too many absences and you got a bad or failing grade. If we did not do well in the course, we had to repay the government the entire amount of our tuition and stipend.
That summer, a building was being constructed across the street from our language lab. The noise of pile drivers and jackhammers made it difficult to hear our tape recordings, and in the midst of summer heat and construction dust, all windows were closed; with no air conditioning, the room was unbearably hot. I labeled that lab our Manhattan prison. Following the afternoon lab session, I went back to the dorm to study the Japanese characters and vocabulary for the next morning’s class, and after supper returned to the lab for more practice with the tape recordings.
I was barely keeping my nose above water. My fellow grad student from Chicago was drowning. Mid-term, his father became ill, and he was allowed to drop the course without penalty to go home. The pace was unrelenting. Because government rules required a specified number of days of instruction, we had to have class on Fourth of July. The instructor apologized, but said she had no other choice. However, she found a way of reducing the stress. On Independence Day, we held class in a nearby restaurant, enjoying a bottle of beer while we spoke Japanese.
One of the students in our class, an ex-army man, had spent time in Japan, and married a Japanese woman. His familiarity with spoken Japanese made class much easier for him, so he could be more relaxed with his studies. He told me that the next weekend he was going to hike the Palisades Park, across the Hudson River, and I should go with him to take a break. I turned him down several times, but finally relented. We rode a bus across the Washington bridge and then took another bus to a trailhead. We descended the cliffs on that trail to the river’s edge, delighting in the greenery and fresh air. My classmate was right, the country boy in me needed relief from the concrete and asphalt of the city. I felt like a jailbird who had escaped confinement, a school child on the first day of summer vacation.
The park provided an unexpected treat, because wild red raspberries were ripe. We picked and ate raspberries until our stomachs almost burst, and our hands and lips became stained bright red. For a few hours, we basked in the bounty of nature, enjoying the vivid life-affirming plants and trees. Just across the river, the skyscrapers thrust their towers into the sky, but we were totally absorbed in the park and its refreshing fruit, forgetting momentarily the Manhattan prison across the river.
The beauty of this memory reminds me of scenes from the Ingmar Bergman film, Wild Strawberries, when the characters reveled in a lovely summer day and ate wild strawberries.
At the end of the summer, my wife and son returned to Illinois. I went to Washington, D.C for a Fulbright orientation, preparing for a Fulbright grant to work for a doctoral dissertation in Japan.
On the road trip from Chicago to New York, I had listened to the strains of the gospel hymn, “I’ll fly away.” I never imagined this trip would lead me to the hellhole of a Manhattan prison and a glimpse of paradise among the Palisades raspberries.
H. Byron Earhart 