Japan Story Toys and Clothes

Toys and Clothes

As a privileged British child in Japan I was lavished with beautiful things, including toys.  I had Liberty print (from London) dresses, with pants to match, made by my mother who was a beautiful seamstress.  I had leather  leggings to keep my legs warm in winter, just like Christopher Robin.  Proper English children did not wear long pants, girls never, and only older boys. The leggings, (called gaiters) had buttons running up the sides, and each had to be secured with a button hook, which I learned how to do.

I had many dolls.  Nora Welling dolls from England. A favorite was a traditionally dressed Japanese doll, which I named, Setseko San, after our maid's Japanese looking daughter, who was about my age. I had a golliwog, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, an elaborate two story doll house, with tiny inhabitants. (It did not find its way to 234E.) I had a doll carriage and doll clothes with which I dressed out cat, Brownie one day, and tried to take him for a walk in the carriage.  He was grossly insulted, and leaped out, clothes and all, to return two days later with no signs of the little jacket and hat I had put on him.

My father loved having a playmate, being something of a child himself, so after returning from work, and after dinner, he would produce marvelous playtime activities.  One evening we turned the living room into a circus, with a tightrope stretched across the floor and cushions spread out for safety.  My mother called us 'homewreckers'.

 One memorable evening was when he brought home Sammy Samuels, a Charlie Chaplin puppet which he placed on his knee, Edgar Bergen style, and proceeded to do what I thought was a remarkable feat of ventriloquism.




I was read to every night a bedtime.  "When We Were Very Young", "Now We Are Six" "The House at Pooh Corner" and all the other A.A. Milne classics, were my favorites.  Also "Wind in the Willows.  Even Materlink's  "The Bluebird".  When there was no book to read, my father would make up bedtime stories, usually about a little girl, about my age, called Mifanwe.  He pronounced it as it is spelled.  She had the most interesting adventures, and when my father would pause, his imagination flagging, I would urge "Go on Daddy,".  He would temporize by saying, in a dramatic tone, "and guess what happened next?..."