I was thrilled to find this photo, which my mother marked as “Debarking in Tokyo - October 1947,” because of its story. It is a tale told thousands of times as American families reunited after World War II. Here’s my story behind this photo, which I had never seen before I discovered it in an album in a steel file cabinet that contained my father’s military papers: Several years before World War II broke out in 1939, my father’s assignments comprised organizing and upgrading the U.S. Army’s depot system, which would have to be ready to supply our soldiers should war break out and the U.S. be involved. He introduced inventory systems and newfangled forklift trucks, pioneered the use of electronic adding machines, and eventually rudimentary data-processing devices to expedite inventory control. The three test depots were in Kansas City, Missouri (where I was born), San Antonio, Texas, and Ogden, Utah. He was deployed to Japan in mid-1946 to serve as General Douglas MacArthur’s Quartermaster. The test it posed was to accommodate the soldiers and their families comprising the U. S. Army’s Japan Occupation Force. For the next 16 months, my mother and I lived with my maternal grandparents in Little Rock, Arkansas. During that time, my Grandfather died, and I was hospitalized with pneumonia twice. As hard as this was on my mom, the challenging part was getting ourselves to Japan.

Once we received the telegram that we were approved to join my dad, my mother and a good friend, who also was heading to Japan, undertook a road trip from Arkansas to Seattle. By the time we reached the Army billet there, I had developed a nasty cold and was running a fever. Army regulations prohibited anyone with a temperature from boarding a troopship to Japan. During the week we were billeted at the Seattle port, I had to be checked out daily in the Dispensary. Each time, my mother would tell me to put the thermometer above my tongue, which I managed to do, so no one noticed my fever. No sooner had we sailed out of the harbor, I got a lot sicker, so I received treatment in the ship’s Dispensary. My mother felt so guilty she hardly ate anything. Then we hit the typhoon! For hours the vessel rocked and rolled so forcefully that she belted me into the top bunk with her dress belts and a sheet from her bed below. Then, for hours, she stood by the bunks holding on for dear life. By the time we reached Tokyo, I was a bit better, but my mom was exhausted. When I found this picture, all of those memories came flooding back. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this photo, but I see my dad looking excited to have his family with him; my usually smiling mom looking like she wanted to sleep for a week, and I look clueless. I’m confident I was annoyed at having to wear the darn scarf because of my cold. What a fantastic photo! This image also reminded me of the staff car ride from the port to our temporary quarters in Yokohama. Traffic was terrible, and we got stuck in a line of cars next to a streetcar island on our left. An elderly Japanese gentleman, standing to the right of our vehicle, wanted to catch the streetcar that was about to arrive at the island, but the autos were bumper to bumper. Without warning, he made a flying leap over the car but landed squarely on our vehicle’s hood. I was in the front seat with our driver, so I found myself staring through the car window at a grinning Japanese man, resting securely on all fours on the car’s hood. He dismounted, unharmed, and we all went on our way. I presumed that he caught the bus. A lot of priceless memories in a single picture! Note: I discovered the tiny clipping below in my Uncle Jack Billingsley’s suitcase, which, remarkably, found its way into our empty horse barn and was found in 2017. The article, no doubt, was published in the Arkansas Gazette. It was not dated, but from Jack’s notation, I learned that our 1945 halfway-around-the world trip began on October 6, and ended in Japan 12 days later — just the kind of information that my OCD Uncle Jack would record.