— m/v Saitama Maru ~ April 21 to May 14, 1961
“Aaaaaaaallll aboard! The ship she is ready to sail!”
All the description of our leave was taken from my father’s diary, like the two earlier leaves …
Contrary to my father’s expectations and misapprehensions, the embarkation came off without a hitch. After our visitors had left the ship at 11pm, we went to our cabins and Mumps started unpacking.
We expected to sail at 0100 hours and all of us were hanging on to have the last look at Hong Kong lights. However 1 am came yet there was no activity of any kind. Daddy asked a watchman and he told him we were due to sail at 6 am, so all of us went to bed – utterly exhausted!
The beds were very comfortable but inside the cabin it was stuffy.
Before we retired the steward gave my father a chit to sign for 7 bottles of beer and 5 lemonades – US$3.30.
Dad woke up on hearing the ship’s horn and looked out of the porthole. We were passing Lyemun. Mumps and the girls were on the deck. We were all waving goodbye to Hong Kong, and I (Nona), as usual, felt a little sad about saying sayonara to my hometown but yet there was a frisson of excitement about seeing new places!
Friday, April 21 – Saitama Maru sailed from HK, going to Japan then via the Aleutians to San Francisco
Daddy went to sleep again after seeing his “harem” alive and well.
At 7:30 am the steward brought him in some tea. Breakfast was served at 8:30 and my father had quite a lot to eat. After breakfast dad returned to the cabin and went to sleep again.
Lunch was served at 12:30 pm and we all trooped in a few moments later. It was an embarrassing start to lunch as we all realised we should have been there on the dot, as the Captain, Chief Engineer, and other passengers were already seated and waiting for us. Eeeek 🤦♀️
My father found both the Captain and the Chief Engineer to be very nice chaps, especially the Chief Engineer. He enjoyed talking to them during lunch, which we all thought was pretty good.
Once we finished, we all went outside to play deck games while dad took movie shots of the action 😉
The other passengers turned out to be all Americans who had travelled together to Africa, India then all ports in the East but we noticed that, bizarrely, they wouldn’t talk to each other. So weird! One of them, a Mrs Lubin irritated us girls when she told Nata that we girls sprawled all over the room! Grumph 😠
We went in for tea at 3.30 then went onto the deck again. It was surprisingly warm and humid, which was most un-enjoyable. However we all agreed that the ship was very comfortable cabin-wise and as it was chugging along at 19 knots, there was hardly any vibration to show we were going full steam ahead.
Daddy went to sleep and was shaken awake by mom at 6pm when she heard the gong! He was surprised to think that we would have dinner at 6 but after being late for lunch, he got us girls to hurry on ahead and he and mom came in shortly behind us.
After dinner the Captain showed us his slides, which were very good. My father made me laugh when he wrote that “the 3 hags are not on speaking terms with each other and, in fact, one of the hags moved out of the cabin she originally shared with the other hag.” I wonder if it one of them was the Lubin hag! 😂
The next day we saw the mountains on Taiwan and we sailed quite close to the coast on our journey to Japan, and by noon it got pretty windy. For the first time, we felt like we were actually on the ship as she started to pitch up and down, left and right, just in time for lunch. Nata got seasick so she left without eating, while we dug into our meals!
The wind died by the time it was time for tea and afterwards, Lindy, Nata and I walked around the deck 100 times to make sure the cake didn’t settle on our hips 😉
After dinner the Chief Engineer showed his slides, which were great, but we were all very disappointed to hear that he was leaving the ship in Yokohama as he’d been transferred to another ship. He was a lovely, funny man and we were going to miss his company.
The next morning mom, dad and I played shuffleboard and quoits and although it was windy, it wasn’t very cold. After lunch we saw a few Japanese fishing boats – dad commented that the boats were quite small, about the size of the wallah wallahs that crossed Hong Kong’s harbour and the only means of getting partygoers in either HK or Kowloon who missed the ferries so needed to use them to get back home to the other side!
Since we were arriving at Moji the next day, we had a slightly more festive dinner with hors d’oeuvres and fried chicken so we went to bed feeling full and happy. However during the night for some reason the heating in the ship was turned up high and it was disgustingly stuffy in our cabins, even with the portholes open. Ugh 🤦♀️
April 24 ~ Moji
We arrived in Moji at 3am but because of a partial strike by longshoremen, we didn’t get to our buoy until 11am. The doctor and immigration officers came on board but only gave our vaccination certificates and passports a cursory glance. Daddy decided to go ashore after lunch so he boarded the tug and was taken to Moji, where he cashed a cheque, bought stamps but couldn’t find postcards anywhere! After having an ice cream at a cafe, he got back onto the tug and came back “home”. He told us Moji was a very peaceful place but oh-so-provincial compared to Hong Kong, and there was nothing there that was typically Japanese to see.
We sailed from Moji at 6pm sharp and after dinner, dad went out on deck and met the new Chief Engineer, a Mr Hakada, whom he talked with and invited him to come and see us when we were all back in HK.
April 25 ~ Kobe / Kyoto
We arrived at Kobe at 8am and parked next to the American President Lines’ ship, President Cleveland at the dock.
We were issued with our landing permits and by 9am we went ashore. We walked straight to Sannomiya Station where daddy bought 2nd class return tickets to Kyoto and at 9:52, we all managed to squeeze into a very full train.
Had to stand during the 20 minute trip to Osaka and it was during times like this that I really appreciated being tall for my age. Daddy and I could look over the heads of the Japanese passengers, while mom, Lindy & Nata had to look at their faces or hair 😏
The train emptied quite a bit at Osaka so we all managed to get seats and look out the windows to watch the countryside go by. It wasn’t particularly exciting as there were just lots and lots of houses that we passed. Some were Westernised buildings, others – which were the majority – looked typically Japanese, and there were quite a few dirty shacks in between the houses.
It took an hour but we finally arrived at Kyoto and after enquiring at the City’s Information Desk, we all got on board a No 6 tram. The conductor puzzled dad as he wouldn’t collect the fares for all of us from him and just ignored us. After travelling for some considerable time, dad got the conductor’s attention and showed him a piece of paper where the name “Imperial Palace” was written in Japanese, and asking him to tell dad how much the fare was for all 5 of us. He said 50 Yen and told us when we had arrived at our destination! Yee har!!! 😁
After passing through the gates we were told by the guard to follow another party, made up of Filipinos from the “President Cleveland”, which were just a way ahead of us so we had to run to catch up with them, There was gravel along all the paths and mom was having fits about it wrecking our shoes and when we finally turned a corner, we came face-to-face with a guard who cheerily told us that that was it. The rest of the palace was out-of-bounds so “sayonara gaijins! No more to see! Bye bye, gute fahrt, arriverderci, and all that! Don’ ret the gates bang your bum on the way out!”
