Telling Stories out of School: Alumni Impact Award

Lois Hammersberg Lowry ‘54, the acclaimed author known for captivating young readers with her thought-provoking novels such as The Giver, Number the Stars, and The Messenger, recently added the 2024 ASIJ Alumni Impact Award to her many accolades in recognition of her contribution to the world of literature. She joins previous recipients pioneering spinal surgeon Wise Young ‘68 and ALS campaigner Hiro Fujita ‘98 in accepting this recognition from the alumni community. A two-time winner of the prestigious Newbery Medal, Lowry attended ASIJ from 1948-50, a period when the school, much like Japan itself, was rebuilding after the Second World War. Lowry’s ability to tackle complex themes with grace and sensitivity has earned her a dedicated readership worldwide, solidifying her place as a celebrated figure in children's literature. We spoke with Lois earlier this year, about her experiences of life in post-war Japan and how her time abroad may have shaped her writing career.

You moved to Tokyo as a middle schooler — what was that experience like? Were you upset that your family was going to Japan?

I was living at that time in Pennsylvania, the town where my grandparents were, because my father had gone off to the war. He was in the Pacific during the war, and then he was in Japan with the occupation. And so my mother had taken the children back to the little town where she had grown up and where our grandparents were. And I went through elementary school there. And then when I was in sixth grade, we got word from Tokyo that they were going to allow us to come over and join my father. I turned 11 at the end of sixth grade and I was very excited about that — it seemed like an adventure to me, and I was looking forward to new experiences and learning new things. And of course, I assumed, wrongly, that I would immediately be able to speak Japanese and I would be wearing Japanese clothes and eating with chopsticks.

How did reality match that expectation?

We ended up in Washington Heights, which was sort of a fake American village. My sister [Helen Hammersberg ’51] was three years older, she was 14, she had a boyfriend. She didn’t want to leave Pennsylvania, so it was a very different experience for her. It was probably tougher for teenagers to make a move like that, but at 11, I was very open to that experience. One thing that came as a blow to me,  being a bookish child, was that I was not going to be able to take my books with me. I had a bookcase in my bedroom filled with my favorite books at that time. But when I got to Tokyo, it wasn't very long before I discovered two libraries, one in Washington Heights was a small library. But the second, and this probably no longer exists, was called the Ernie Pyle Library. Ernie Pyle had been the journalist who was killed the last week of the war and there was a big building in downtown Tokyo and the library that it housed was okay. And there were all the books I had loved back in Pennsylvania. They were still there. I couldn't own them anymore and hug them, but I could read them again. And that meant so much to me and interestingly.

This seems surprising now in retrospect, but … I was allowed as a child of 11 when I arrived, to take a bus into Tokyo, into the city, into the Ernie Pyle Library by myself and that was quite safe at that time — and it may still be … I roamed that city. Of course, it was not the skyscrapers that it is now, much of it was still rubble from the bombing, but it was a very safe and to me, an interesting place to explore. I just remember it very, very fondly.

What was your experience once you started school?

It was 1948, but to me, it feels like yesterday. Unfortunately — and this happened to me a number of times in my life being a military child — I arrived at a new school as a new student after school had already started … I know that my homeroom teacher [Mrs Fullerton] in seventh grade was the daughter of a military general. So she was a military person, too. My science teacher was a woman from New Jersey. Why do I remember that? How did I even know she was from New Jersey? And her name was Gertrud Wettstein. Science was not my thing, I was a good student of English and literature — I was a good student in all my classes, but science wasn't my top interest. And yet she made it interesting for me.

Did you get to connect with Japanese culture at all as a child?

Many of us who were military kids lived at Washington Heights [located where Yoyogi Park is currently] and took the bus each day to school. Other kids, military and otherwise, lived in what we referred to as Japanese houses. And those were very nice homes that had been commandeered by the American military and taken away from their owners, I suppose. And so many of my friends lived in what we called Japanese houses and I would I would visit those houses and have pajama parties at some of them. And I always wished that my parents had chosen to live in a Japanese community instead of Washington Heights, which was such a fake little American community with its little movie theater and its grocery store. I don't know, my parents were not adventurous people, and I suppose they thought that would be familiar and safe. But I always yearned to be out there in the Japanese community.

Did you study Japanese at school?

I believe Mr Hashimoto taught Japanese, but he taught it in high school, and it was not available to me … I would have had it been available because it's the thing I wanted to do. My sister had no interest and so she didn't study Japanese, but I didn't have the opportunity. So, you know, we — my contemporaries — would pick it up, a certain kind of primitive baby Japanese. In fact I was back in Japan not that many years ago, maybe ten years ago with a tour — I had discovered the Smithsonian Museum ran these tours to various places, and one was going to include the Inland Sea of Japan. And I'd always wanted to go back there because I had spent vacation time down on an island in the Inland Sea, and suddenly I saw this tour that was going to be by boat and was going to go to the island where I'd been. So I went back to Japan for that and the tour began. Everybody met in Tokyo and then went by train to get on the boat. We were still in Tokyo and I went out by myself downtown. We stayed at the Imperial Hotel just for a couple of nights and I was out walking around and it began to rain, and I ducked into a coffee shop just to get out of the rain. And it was very easy to go up to the counter and get a cup of coffee. But I looked around and I saw some sugar, but I didn't see any milk. And so I turned to the person behind the counter and asked in Japanese for milk. Suddenly that word came to me. If you had said to me, what's the Japanese word for milk, I would have said, I have no idea. And yet there I stood, and that word deep in my brain came back. So I regret that I did not end up fluent in Japanese.

Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? Did your time in Japan inspire that?.

I think from the time I was even younger than that, I knew that's what I wanted to do and to be. As I mentioned earlier, English classes and good English teachers were always my favorites. I've never, with one exception, written about that time as a child in Japan, though. Somebody asked me to contribute a short story to an anthology and I believe the theme of the anthology had to do with displacement or being in a foreign place. I did write a story about me as a child in Japan then, but that's the only time I've ever done that.

About four years ago you published a book On the Horizon that looks at the twin tragedies of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. How did that come about?

That book deals with a couple of things and tries to put them together in a way. Let me figure out how to describe it. When a book of mine called The Giver won the Newbery Medal, at the same ceremony, the Caldecott Medal is given for illustration and that year the Caldecott Medal was given to an illustrator, an artist named Allen Say, for a book called Grandfather's Journey. Allen Says is Japanese and he grew up in Japan and then moved to the United States as a young adult and changed his name. So at at the breakfast the morning of that ceremony, he and I had breakfast together and he gave me a copy of his book. Grandfather's Journey is about his own grandfather going from the United States back into Japan and beginning to feel he didn't know which was his home country. So he gave me a copy of his book, and he drew a little picture and signed his name, and I gave him a copy of my book, and I wasn't going to draw a picture for a guy who's a famous illustrator, but I wrote my name in Japanese and he said, how is it you're able to do that? And I said, oh, I used to live in Japan when I was a kid.

What a coincidence!

And he asked, where did you live? And I said, Tokyo. I should add that he's exactly my age … and I told him where I lived. He said that's where he lived and blah, blah, blah, we narrowed it down until he said, “Were you the girl on the green bicycle?” And in fact, my father, when I arrived in Japan, told me he had a surprise for me and he had bought me a bicycle. And of course, Washington Heights had a wall around it, but didn't have a lock to the gate. You could come and go and I used to ride that bicycle out all the time around the streets. And Washington Heights was right by Meiji Shrine, which is still there … I used to ride my bike around there, and I used to ride by a Japanese school, and I would stop and look at the kids, and they would look at me. And one of them was Allen Say.

What is your connection to Pearl Harbor?

I was born in Honolulu in 1937, and my father was a very good photographer, though that wasn't his profession. He had a movie camera back in the days when not everybody had a cell phone with video function, so we ended up with a lot of home movies. No sound to them, of course. And I've seen those movies a 100 times, because when I was growing up, we didn't have television so on a boring night we'd get dad to get out the movie projector and show the home movies once again. When my father was getting old, I took those reels of movie film and had them transferred onto videotape for him. And before I sent him the videotapes, I put one into my VCR … I had some friends over, and I made them look at the video of baby Lois on the beach at Waikiki. And one of the friends who was there had been a career naval officer, and he knew Honolulu. And he looked at this and he said, "Do you know how to stop the film?" And I figured it out and we stopped it. And he said, “Look on the horizon!” I'd never noticed it before, but kind of shrouded in mist is the outline of a ship. And he said, that's the Arizona. So this was just before Pearl Harbor was bombed, just before the Arizona sank and killed 1100 men.

I began to be haunted by that, by that visual portrayal of this child — I was three years old in 1940, laughing on the beach — and behind her this ship full of doomed men moving slowly across the horizon. And I didn't know what to do about that image for many years until I finally put it together for that book. So the first third of that book is about that ship, the Arizona, my childhood playing on the beach there with that in the background, and I did the research on the young men who died on that ship and wrote about several of them.

Then the second third of the book begins in Japan and the bombing of Hiroshima and Allen … He lived in a little town 60 miles away. He saw the sky when the bomb went off. It was after that that his mother took him and his sister to Tokyo to live. And so the second half is about individuals, including Allen, who were there on that day, incidentally, the same time of day I included in the book. One of the men on the Arizona … they found his watch and it had stopped at 8:30 in the morning and in the museum in Hiroshima, there is a watch that stopped at 8:30 in the morning in 1945. The second third of the book is about them and that set of events. And then the third part is me in Tokyo, looking across the playground at Allen and connecting the events in a way. I don't know what I hope it accomplishes, but hopefully some kind of understanding, putting together, or comprehension if there's ever to be any kind of comprehension for those tragedies.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

You know, I'm so often asked that, and I always feel inadequate because I don't don't really have any good advice. Every kid who loves writing and wants to be a writer is already doing all the things one does, which is being observant and noticing things and writing things down and making up stories. I do notice that kids today, and maybe this is because teachers encourage it, tend to get together with other kids and exchange and discuss writing, which is something that never happened for me. I was very isolated in that particular realm of my interest. Of course, the obvious thing for anybody who wants to write is that they need to read a lot and everything.