As the war went on, the horror of it all grew upon her.  She read Howki’s “America.”  She didn’t believe it all, but she realized that most of it was true.  She wondered why her people were fighting to keep out the Japanese.  She marvelled that the Japanese who had adopted such lofty ideals of race culture could find the heart to go to war.  She wished she might be free to go to the government officials at Tokio and Washington to show them the folly of it all.  Surely if the American statesmen understood Japanese ideals and the superiority of their habits and customs for the production of happy human beings, they would never have waged war to keep them out of the States.

* * *

“In three days we leave Japan,” said Professor Oshima, as he sat down to dinner one evening in the early part of April, 1960.

“All?” asked Komoru, the Professor’s secretary.

“We four,” replied Oshima, indicating those at the table, “the children will stay with my mother.  I’ll need your assistance, and as for Miss Ethel, she cannot well stay here, so I have had you two listed.  Although it’s a little irregular, I am sure it will not be questioned, for I know more about American soils than any other man in Japan.”

Ethel glanced apprehensively at Komoru.  She had never quite understood her own attitude toward that taciturn young Japanese whom she had seen daily for two years without hardly making his acquaintance.  She admired him and yet she feared him.

Professor Oshima was saying that she had been “listed” with Komoru for some great journey.  What did it mean?  What could she do?  Again she looked up at the secretary; but far from seeing any trace of scheme or plot in his enigmatical countenance, she found him to be considering the situation with the same equanimity with which he would have recorded the calcium content of a soil sample.

As for Professor and Madame Oshima, they seemed equally unruffled about the proposed journey, and not at all inclined to elucidate the mystery.  Experience had taught the younger woman that when information was not offered it was unwise to ask questions, so when the Professor busied himself with much ransacking of his pamphlets and papers and his wife became equally occupied with overhauling the family wardrobe and getting the children off to their grandmother’s, Ethel accepted unquestionably the statement that she would be limited to twenty kilograms of clothing and ten kilograms of other personal effects, and lent assistance as best she could to the enterprise in hand.

On the third day the little party, with their light luggage boarded a train for Hakodate, at which point they arrived at noon.  Hurrying along the docks among others burdened like themselves, they came to a great low-lying, turtle-topped warship; and, passing down a gangway, entered the brilliantly lighted interior.

The constant flood of new passengers came, not in mixed and motley groups, as the ordinary crowd of passengers, but by two, male and female, as the unclean beasts into the ark.  And they were all young in years and athletic in frame—­the very cream and flower of the race.