Previous: Chapter 3: The actors, Part I
Chapter 4. Mieko’s story
In which kagetsuko gets answers from an unexpected corner
It had been puzzling me that there were no publications resulting from the 1975 collaboration between the teams at University of Hawaii-NOAA and the USSR Computing Center in Novosibirsk. From the archived official communication between Lt. Dr. Nathan Lightman of NOAA and Dr. Alexey Chinchuluun of the Computing Center, the work during the initial visit of the former to Siberia had been very promising, and the return visit of the latter to Hawaii should have led to publishable results. I had enquired with the official institutions, but their replies were bound to be slow, if they came at all. Another way was to try and find someone who had known Nathan Lightman. Aunt Mieko had been living in Hawaii from before the time of the events, and she was well-connected. It was a long shot, but I’d made up my mind to ask her. We chatted regularly anyway so I’d arranged a call.
She was looking good as usual. The Hawaiian sun was streaming through the window and lit up her features. For as long as I’d known her, she’d had her hair in a kind of short frizzled bob with bangs just skirting her eyebrows, and not a grey hair in sight. Maybe that was the effect of the cosmetic software, but I didn’t think so. Superficially she seemed very severe, but if you knew her better you couldn’t miss the twinkle in her eye and the slightly amused turn of her mouth. She really was my favourite aunt. I didn’t want to start right away with my enquiry, as that seemed a bit rude. Instead, I asked her how she had ended up living in Hawaii.
“It’s not a very interesting story,” she said, “and it was a long time ago. It all started in 1972. Your uncle and I had both started our final year at Waseda. He did economics, I did maths. He got lots of job offers because he was a good student. One afternoon he came back from a Sumitomo recruitment session brimming with enthusiasm. ‘Mieko,’ he said, ‘how would you like to move to Hawaii?’
As you know, my parents had died in the Chile earthquake tsunami, so nothing tied me to Japan. I felt a thrill. Hawaii had always seemed a distant, unattainable paradise to me. ‘But what about your parents?’ I replied.
‘Mum has a brother who lives there, so I think it will be OK. The offer is really good too, I think dad will be proud.’
Shigeru could be very convincing. Not only did his parents agree to the move, they even proposed to pay for our wedding. I think his mother felt sorry for me because she had also lost relatives in the tsunami. We got married at the Hachimangū shrine in their home town Kamakura. I was crying all the way while we walked in procession along the dankazura, I was totally overwhelmed that they would do this for a poor hāfu orphan like me.
“Hāfu?” I said, startled. I’d never known that.
Aunt Mieko made a brushing motion with here hand. “My mother was Singapore Chinese. My father met her when he was posted there by his company, at the end of the war. It’s not important. Shigeru’s aunt is Hawaiian, so they were already used to the idea.”
“Sumitomo had just opened an office in Honolulu and they had a lot of openings there. But they must have thought very highly of Shigeru: he was being fast-tracked for management. They arranged everything: the travel, a house in East Honolulu, a car. I still remember how it felt in those weeks. The house was huge by Tokyo standards; the weather was fabulous; everything was new and exiting. It really was like paradise.”
I didn’t want the story to take a sad turn, so I changed the subject to what I knew was one of her favourite topics. “I bet the beaches were amazing too! Didn’t uncle Shigeru love surfing?”
“And so did I, I loved it. But Shige, he lived for nothing else. I only realised much later, but surfing had been his real motivation for the move. He had this friend, Tōru, who was one of the famous Hokkaidō surfing pioneers, you know?”
I’d never even heard of surfing in Hokkaidō, so I just made some non-committal noise.
“Well, I think it was Tōru’s stories of surfing at Waimea Bay that sold him on Hawaii. He never told me, I think he was afraid to jinx it. We learned to surf in our spare time, but we were both very busy so it was mostly something for the holidays.”
With a look of admiration, she continued “But Shigeru was patient: he worked for the company for several years, until he felt he’d paid them pack for their trust in him. Then he quit. I had taken on maths tutoring and thanks to aunt Haunani I got a lot of students so we managed to save quite a bit of money in those short years. With our savings, we bought a small house with a workshop, not far from the Ala Moana Center, and we started a bicycle shop.”
She rolled her eyes for a moment “It seemed a crazy idea to me but it quickly became a success. I think Shigeru had been planning this for a long time, and used his work contacts to secure good supply contracts. We sold Japanese bicycles, the new Kuwahara frames with Shimano parts, and they were really popular. We soon got really good at repairs too. A year later we were able to employ somebody full time, and finally Shigeru could begin to surf in earnest. There was a new surf board shop that had opened up a few blocks towards the beach, and that’s were he got his first custom made board.”
A faint smile played on her lips then, and she had the look of someone replaying a fond memory “I remember the first time we went into that shop. I had expected some tall blond American, but the owner was a Mongolian-looking guy, only a few years older than me. He greeted us in Japanese and introduced himself as Alex. He spoke in a peculiar way, not with the usual English-inflected drawl, but with a strong Russian accent.”
“Russian?” I pricked up my ears. This was unbelievable: my aunt knew a Mongolian-looking Russian called Alex in the seventies. What where the odds?
She nodded “I never asked him, of course, but both his English and his Japanese had a strong Slavic influence. He was a genuinely funny guy as well, always made me smile, and very smart too.”
It could hardly be a coincidence, but I had to make sure. So I asked “Did he run the shop all by himself?”
I guess that was a bit of an odd question, but aunt Mieko barely raised her eyebrows. “Funny you should ask that. When the shop opened, it was just him, but not long after, he was joined by his partner, a good-looking America guy called Nathan.”
“His partner?”
Aunt Mieko gave me a look as if I was a bit slow “Well yes, they were a lovely gay couple. After it became legal, I think that was shortly after we arrived, a lot of them came out.”
So, totally unexpectedly, I had the answer to our riddle. There could be no doubt about it: Dr. Alexey Ider Chinchuluun of the Computing Center in Novosibirsk had come to Hawaii and stayed there, and had opened a surf shop with Lt. Dr. Nathan Lightman of NOAA. What an amazing twist. I tried to imagine what had happened. Probably, when Nathan visited Novosibirsk, they had fallen in love. Then, on his return visit to Hawaii, he must have defected so they could be together. But the US authorities wouldn’t have allowed him to continue his scientific work, for fear of spying or for political reasons, not to upset the Soviets. So he set up a surf shop, and Nathan joined him to run it. And so none of their research work was ever finished. That would explain the lack of publications.
“He was charming,” aunt Mieko went on. “Shigeru and I both liked them a lot, and we often hung out on the beach together. Nathan was a very good surfer, he had been doing it for years, but Shigeru soon got even better than him. Alex never got the hang of it, he was even worse than me. Their shop still exists, it’s run by a granddaughter of Nathan’s brother. It now has a coffee shop now as well, and I sometimes go there when I feel lonely.”
Uncle Shigeru had died in a typhoon more than twenty years ago, and aunt Mieko had never remarried. She had a very active social life, but you can be lonely even while you’re with other people. “Such an amazing story,” I sighed happily. “But what a risk you took! Giving up a respectable, secure job, just to go surfing.”
“We were both much the happier for it” said aunt Mieko. “We had a lot less money, that’s true, but Shigeru’s life had been very stressful. It was really a relief. The surfer community was full of lovely people too. It was great time.” She looked at me with that severe twinkle “You’re still young, Natsuko-chan. Don’t throw away your youth for security!”
Ever the firebrand, my dear aunt Mieko. We said our goodbyes and I closed the call.
Next: Chapter 5. The actors, Part II