I actually have first-hand, though limited, experience of that kind of world. When I was eleven, my father was Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Kwansei Gakuin University, and we went and lived in Nishinomiya, Japan (it's near Kobe) for two terms. The university must have been quite wealthy in terms of land ownership -- they had a good-sized campus, some land in the mountains for field trips, and we were put-up in a house that was enormous by local standards, a Western-style except for the disused servants' wing that I'd sometimes explore.
A number of of the westerners I met there were, in retrospect, the equivalent of Old China Hands -- in particular the American couple who begged us to take the Trivial Pursuit game their relatives had sent, because they hadn't lived in the U.S. for twenty years and none of the pop-culture questions made any sense to them. Then there were several Japanese-Canadian couples, whose kids did or didn't qualify for dual citizenship depending upon whether their father or their mother was the Japanese parent; the Japanese Christian minister whose wife was a Mennonite (New Order) from the Prairies; the elderly Methodist siblings who were the niece and nephew of Canadian socialist politician J. S. Woodsworth, and who did their best to teach me to read katakana while I was there. I never met any of the Outerbridge family, who were still alive in those days but living in Canada, but I later read some of their memoirs and published letters. W. M. Vories, who'd designed the campus, was long dead, but even allowing for the hagiographic tone of the biography I found in our house, he must have been a remarkable man.
My own father got an odd kind of respect from the older university staff once they discovered that his father, a clergyman, had known the school's former president Dr. C. J. L. Bates, and had performed his burial service -- when our grandparents came in person for a visit, midway through the year, they were literally greeted with a red carpet and questioned for memories of the great man. Really it was a very strange year, the more I think about it.
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A number of of the westerners I met there were, in retrospect, the equivalent of Old China Hands -- in particular the American couple who begged us to take the Trivial Pursuit game their relatives had sent, because they hadn't lived in the U.S. for twenty years and none of the pop-culture questions made any sense to them. Then there were several Japanese-Canadian couples, whose kids did or didn't qualify for dual citizenship depending upon whether their father or their mother was the Japanese parent; the Japanese Christian minister whose wife was a Mennonite (New Order) from the Prairies; the elderly Methodist siblings who were the niece and nephew of Canadian socialist politician J. S. Woodsworth, and who did their best to teach me to read katakana while I was there. I never met any of the Outerbridge family, who were still alive in those days but living in Canada, but I later read some of their memoirs and published letters. W. M. Vories, who'd designed the campus, was long dead, but even allowing for the hagiographic tone of the biography I found in our house, he must have been a remarkable man.
My own father got an odd kind of respect from the older university staff once they discovered that his father, a clergyman, had known the school's former president Dr. C. J. L. Bates, and had performed his burial service -- when our grandparents came in person for a visit, midway through the year, they were literally greeted with a red carpet and questioned for memories of the great man. Really it was a very strange year, the more I think about it.