December 7th, 1941

Dear George,

Well, now that it has come, I suppose you have found that you are in no way prepared for it. Since the radio brought the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor an hour ago a thousand details of our life as children over there have been flashing through my mind. The look on Utagawa’s face when he came to take me to a base ball game, his saying on another occasion, “That old man is very undemonstrative.” I remember the little girl sitting on a stone beside the road, playing with a doll, who looked up as I hurried past and said, “Naniwa haiaku” (?). There was the face of the old kuruma man, streaming sweat, as he apologized because the shafts of his riksha broke and dumped Dr Seiple and me into the dust. My old nurse coming to see me at Tokyo and to give me a pair of slippers. A certain Watanabe saying on New Years day that he was incurably tubercular but that he had been enabled to face the future with courage. There was that day when you and I discovered Crane Tree and first ate a lunch in the shade of its branches. There was old Narita san, the gardener who let me throw him when we wrestled because he knew it would make me feel strong. And last of all father’s grave which I have never seen at all, and yet which somehow seems to stand as a symbol of all that we have lost. I can only think of ships and planes as our enemies. That they have crews of Japanese like those I used to know is incredible and monstrous.

I don’t want to talk to you about the war, but only to take up our usual childish drivel about camping. I have never tried to make pemmican before, but the next time I buy a quantity of meat, a goodly chunk thereof is going to be dried in the oven at an exceedingly low temperature and then ground up, mixed with suet and packed into a waterproof bag and tested out. I believe it would be much more practical than all those cans of meat we carried last summer, if I made no miscues in the preparation. And by the way, I shall never go to a butcher for beef again. I do not know what they do to their beef, but it must be awful. The stuff we bought and packed into the Deepfreeze at such a ridiculously low price is no more like what we used to buy than a Silver Pass Rainbow is like a catfish. The children pass their plates back for more and more, and still we do not consume more than a few dollars worth a week. We have had almost no boiling meat from the whole cut. Most of it just goes into the broiler and the oven...

[Unsigned]