Then it was another hundred and fifty or so to the house, a large, delicate, precisely orchestrated structure of traditional Japanese design. The front was L-shaped, preceded, as one came upon it, by an exquisite formal garden which, needless to say, required tireless attention and as much love as a small child. The irony of the location would come later when, on the far side of the long rolling knoll to the west, they would construct an ultramodern eight-lane superhighway to aid the bustling traffic to and from the heart of Tokyo. The last traces of Japan’s military might had been ground to metal powder, its imperial daimyo tried and serving time as war criminals. The Emperor remained but everywhere uniformed Americans basked in what they often laughingly referred to as ‘the atomic sunshine*. Yet Nicholas’s history lessons were to begin in another country. On February 15, 1942, his father told him when he was ten, the British garrison had surrendered Singapore to the attacking Japanese.
