Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri home where he’s living this summer in Yokohama. [Follow his blog.] Behind that video chat there’s a story to tell.

My Japanese grandfather lived in New York City in the twenties. When I was at Saint Bartholomew’s in New York, I used to look out the window of my study onto Park Avenue and through a gimlet eye imagine my ojiisan standing there on the corner of Park and Fiftieth. Chances are good that he came into Saint Bart’s. It would have been one of the most physically imposing buildings on the Avenue back then. And he was a religious man. Later in life, he taught Bible studies in Yokohama.

He was a bespectacled and bookish linguist and something of an eccentric. Every morning he would pick up his violin at precisely seven o’clock, play it for fifteen minutes, not a minute more nor a minute less, and put it down whereupon my grandmother would hand him the lunch she’d made for him and send him out the door. He kept an English dictionary in the breast pocket of his coat, and every day on the train to work he would take the dictionary out of his pocket and read it. He was already fluent in English; he liked words is all. When my mother Akiko speaks to my children about her father, she always tells them, “Your father is just like him.”

His name was Yoshiharu Tamaoki. Born in Tokyo, he came to America to study first at Berkeley and then in the City of New York, a city he would always love. That doesn’t surprise me. New York, to those who love it, is like malaria. If it gets in your blood it stays there the rest of your life.

He lived in New York for more than five years. He never would have left it, my mother says, except for a telegram that came one day from Japan.  MOTHER DYING. STOP. MUST COME HOME. STOP. Where he lived in the city, the life he left, what ship he boarded: we don’t know any of these things. His papers about these years were lost in the war. But that message — words — changed his life. He dropped what he was doing, gathered a few things, not least himself, and exchanged virtually everything he had for passage home.

What he discovered when he got there was that his mother was fine. The telegram was a ruse made up by the family. They figured it was the only way sure to bring him home. Unless loneliness for her son can be counted as illness, his mother hadn’t been sick at all.

Yoshiharu didn’t return to America. He settled down. He married Kura, my grandmother, a country girl from Nagano. They began a family. Nobumasa. Kimiko. Akiko. Yoshiko. Eichi.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States of America. My mother remembers how that news rushed to her house. When the story broke neighbors and colleagues of my grandfather descended on the Tamaoki home because everyone who knew him wanted to know what Yoshiharu-san thought. “He was reading the newspaper. He looked up from his newspaper and he said to them, ‘We will never win this war,’” my mother remembers. “There was a lot of excitement in the room, everybody was excited but not my father. He was so serious,” she says. Some thought he was being a pessimist. “No. I’ve lived in America. I’ve seen America. I know America. If you could know what I know, you would understand. We will never win this war.”

As he pointed out to me the other day, Billy Shand and my mother have something in common. Each of them has had an ancestral home destroyed by the United States government. Billy’s great great grandfather, The Rev. Peter Johnson Shand, was the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbia, South Carolina from 1833 to 1886. When Sherman burned Columbia in 1865, Trinity Church was spared but the rectory was burned to the ground. Eighty years later, Yokohama was made a moonscape by a high-altitude B-29 bombing on May 29, 1945. The Tamaoki family had already evacuated to the country. Yoshiharu had stayed behind. When he woke up on the 29th he felt sick. He didn’t have to go to work that day. But he went anyway. A man of discipline and routine, I imagine what happened. He picked up his violin at 7 o’clock, played it for fifteen minutes, set it down and thought, “I might as well go to work.” That’s where he was when the daylight bombs started falling on Yokohama.

When the bombing was over, he patted his chest to make sure he was all there. He still had his life and his dictionary. It took him days to find his house, not an easy thing to find when all the landmarks are gone. And finally when he did find it he found that all that was left of it was a pile of rubble in the middle of which was a bomb. It hadn’t exploded but it brought the house down.

So as I said, Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Meiri home in Yokohama. He’s living with the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri family while he continues Japanese language studies at the IUC. Tomoyo’s mother is my Aunt Kimiko.