On September 21, 1962, at 9:30 a.m. in a hospital in Santa Monica, California, Shigeko gave birth to a plump baby boy. Despite the scientific conclusion that A-bomb survivors were not bearing a disproportionate number of abnormal offspring, she had nursed a tiny terror that other expectant mothers did not share. Her first words upon hearing his cries were, “How is my baby? Is he all right?” “Perfect,” a voice assured her. “Thank God,” she sighed.
Lying with her baby in the hospital bed, the miracle of birth was magnified in Shigeko’s mind by the circumstances of its conception as well as the uncertainties attending its delivery. This is going to be a very special child, she thought to herself, who will someday grow up to be an important man. She christened the baby Norman Cousins Sasamori.
The boy was six months old when Shigeko moved back to Connecticut; shortly after that, Cousins found her a position as a live-in nurse with his friend and neighbor, the celebrated photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who had been stricken with Parkinson’s Disease. Shigeko had no previous knowledge of Mrs. Bourke-White, so it was difficult for her to know how remarkable a person she had been before her illness. The woman she shopped and cooked for, exercised and bathed, was an invalid whose speech was impaired and coordination so poor she had difficulty writing or walking. Once a week, therapists came to work with her. Following the instructions of the physical therapist, Shigeko would walk Mrs. Bourke-White back and forth across the room and move her arms up, down, and around. After the speech therapist left, she would lead her through vocal exercises, first the vowels and then the consonants. It was a basic English lesson for Shigeko as well.
She got to know who her ward had been by sharing her favorite pasttime of looking over her old photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, Moscow under siege, Gandhi before his assassination. There was nothing to pity in this activity; the woman seemed proud of her accomplishments, and confident she would take more great pictures. Shigeko and little Norman were the subjects of numerous character studies, though unfortunately most of the photos were blurred because Bourke-White’s hands were so palsied she could not hold the camera steady. One time she asked for Shigeko’s help because she could not remember how to change lenses. Shigeko had never owned a camera, never even taken a picture, so she did not think there would be anything she could tell the famous Life magazine photographer that would help. Luckily, however, it was a Nikon camera with directions in Japanese, so she was able to oblige.
Shigeko was Margaret Bourke-White’s home-care nurse for just over a year before the regular nurse returned and she found herself out of a job. Over the next three years she tossed about, trying different positions. She went back to Japan to learn a trade from her brother, who had branched out of the family oyster business and opened a restaurant. But she was unable to serve a serious apprenticeship because of her duties as a mother, and when she wrote that she was ready to come back to the States to stay, Norman Cousins brought her back and set her up in an apartment in New York City and helped her find work at Mount Sinai Hospital as a nurse’s aide. She managed fairly well for a while, but was not able to spend the time with her son she thought a mother should, and eventually resigned.
When Shigeko originally returned to America after the project, the plan had been for her to learn English, enroll in a training course, then get a job and take care of herself. Eight years had passed now, she was no closer to picking up a trade, and a child had been added. There were those who felt she had overstayed her welcome, but Norman Cousins continued to think of her as a free spirit he liked having around, and so he moved her back into his New Canaan home, this time as a working member of the household, doing the chores of a domestic servant. It was also true that she was an intimate part of the family circle, and over the next two years she did her best to repay the family for what they had done for her.
At last she decided the time had come, for the sake of the Cousinses as well as herself, to strike out on her own, and she decided to move to Boston. After staying with friends until she got to know the area, Shigeko rented a second floor apartment in a Victorian mansion in the quiet suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, where she mounted various efforts to establish herself as a “healer.” Some proved more successful than others. The period of time she was employed as a nurse’s aide at a hospital found her changing sheets and emptying bedpans again. When she decided she needed a practical education of some sort, she took a course in shiatsu, a massage technique applied to acupressure points; but when she placed an ad in a local paper offering individually customized massages, she found herself on the receiving end of strange phone calls from men who thought she was running an Oriental massage parlor.
By far the most rewarding was her free-lance work as a home-care therapist with the physically handicapped. The majority of her patients were victims of accidents or strokes who found it impossible not to respond positively to this charming and lovable woman who used her own past — often in quite unexpected ways — as a touchstone for understanding the healing possibilities within oneself. The simple, direct way she had of combining a traditional regimen of rehabilitation with an exalted belief that people were not necessarily limited by their circumstances worked medical wonders.
As a single mother, she was unable to work on a full-time basis, however, which would have made things extremely difficult if she had not been subsidized all this time. The new Maverick she drove, the regular allowance and the credit cards, were supplied by Norman Cousins, who had fully understood her need to go her own way, to the point that he was still willing to underwrite it.
Throughout the 1970s, Shigeko continued to practice home-care nursing and to raise her son. From time to time, she was interviewed by the press and would candidly voice her opinion on a range of subjects. When asked if she ever brooded about the past she replied, ‘I’m too busy.” Did she ever think of returning to Japan to live? Only to visit, she said, for she intended to die and be buried in the soil of the country which had given meaning to her life.
Then in the early 1980s, after more than a decade during which the idea of nuclear war was all but dismissed by the public, the possibility was again on people’s minds. This burgeoning awareness of the nuclear threat produced the largest antinuclear demonstrations since the early 1960s. What had happened in Hiroshima paled in comparison to what would happen if there were a nuclear war now — by this time there were at least 50,000 nuclear warheads in existence, and their megatonnage was equivalent to more than one million Hiroshima-sized bombs — but Hiroshima was indicative of the gruesome reality of an atomic bombing, and a new premium was placed on the survivors as they were called upon to relate their first-hand experiences. Shigeko became a sort of professional witness, giving testimony to groups and gatherings all over the United States, and telling them that the way out lay in loving one another.
Back in Hiroshima there were those who were critical of her performances for peace, which they found too theatrical, and she was accused of trying to aggrandize herself. Certainly she did enjoy her new feelings of importance, of being cast as a star in the great drama of her time. But she felt deeply that at last the events that moved her life along were building to something more dynamic than her own concerns, and were vitally relevant. When she spoke she often was heard to say she was representing others — all the innocent people who died in Hiroshima and will have died in vain if there is another nuclear war; the children who would be killed if more bombs are dropped, or will have to live their lives like her, with burns and scars. And she was thinking of them and their silent support when she titled her autobiography, published in Japan in 1983, “Go on, Shigeko.”
*
Under normal circumstances, Toyoko Morita would not have received serious consideration as an applicant at Parsons School of Design. Her qualifications did not meet the standard admission requirements, her drawing ability was as awkward as a child’s, and her appearance was still not altogether presentable. Upon meeting her, Anne Keagy, who was Chairman of
the Fashion Design Department at the time, doubted she would be able to fit into the art school scene, knowing as she did that the students there tended to be not only more appearance-conscious than the average person on the street, but more outspoken. On the strength of Toyoko’s determination and Norman Cousins’s appeal, Ms. Keagy agreed to take Toyoko on, however, more or less as a charitable extension of the Hiroshima Maidens Project.
For her entire stay, she lived with Ida Day and her husband in Forest Hills, Queens, a convenient commute by subway to midtown Manhattan where Parsons was located; and she devoted herself to her studies with a passion that impressed those who were familiar with the Japanese as a people who traditionally took their education very seriously. Occasionally she took advantage of the leisure activities offered by the Days — for a change of pace she would sometimes attend a concert at Carnegie Hall where they were season-ticket-holders or spend a Sunday in their sailboat — but her work was of paramount importance and Toyoko filled most of her free time reviewing her notes, sketching, or paging slowly through fashion magazines. It was true that Toyoko was highly motivated from within, but the pressure of knowing that a lot of people in both Japan and the United States were watching and counting on her added to the already burdensome weight of doing advanced studies in a foreign country.
Over the course of that first year it became evident that, despite certain liabilities, Toyoko had a number of things going for her. She was a quick study, as demonstrated by the phenomenal progress she made in her drawing ability. Where at the start of school her best sketches looked like everyone else’s rough drafts, by spring, when the class took a trip to the Bronx Zoo to pencil animals, her tigers veritably leaped off the page. It was also clear that she had a natural sense of design. There were those who could take classes, visit museums, fabric houses, and department stores, and expose themselves to all manner of learning and influence and still never know what colors and materials went together. Others, like Toyoko, could take one look and usually get it right.
At the end of the first year (when her classmates went home for Christmas and Easter to relax and celebrate the holidays, she returned to Mount Sinai where Dr. Barsky put the finishing touches on her surgery), she was happy when she read her end-of-the-year evaluation report. Her instructors wrote that she had undeniable talent, she was a conscientious worker, and she showed abundant potential. School administrators expressed such a high opinion of the work she had done that the President of Bergdorf Goodman, the exclusive Fifth Avenue store known for its exquisite jewelry, fashions, and furs as well as being something of a laboratory for promising design students, hired her on a part-time basis over the summer vacation. She only worked one day a week, on Saturdays, as a seamstress in the alterations department tucking shoulders and waists and shortening hems, but the experience enabled her to become better acquainted with the construction of Western clothes.
The true confirmation that she was on her way to becoming an established designer came, however, when Toyoko was notified that she had been awarded one of the name scholarships set up at Parsons to cover the tuition of a second-year student. It was important for her to know if it was given to her on merit or was simply an extension of the largesse that had paid her way until now, so she went directly to the Chairman, Anne Keagy, and begged to be told the truth. She was assured, “You won, Toyoko, because you deserved to.”
She came into her own during her second year. The stage had passed where she felt she had to prove that her presence at Parsons was not just a matter of connections and charity; and over the summer she had taken an English class at Columbia University, so she was able to participate more fully in class. Though at no time had her fellow students made her feel like a “special case” (in fact the entire student body seemed to her to be composed of highly idiosyncratic individuals who were more apt to see the poetical implications of walking around disfigured than the practical limitations), now there were those who wanted to sit near her in hopes of picking up pointers from the way she did things. Years later, a classmate who went on to become a Seventh Avenue designer would recall her work habits (“so precisely ordered it was like having a tea ceremony going on next to you”), her technical virtuosity (“distinguished by the meticulous attention to detail and superior quality of craftsmanship that have become a trademark of Orientals”), and her creativity (“Clothes at Parsons were designed as one-of-a-kinds, haute couture, and Orientals, while they made excellent copyists, were traditionally weak on the artistic part...but Toyo, she could make a piece of fabric look like a rose”).
Capping the successful completion of her second year at Parsons, Toyoko’s scholarship was extended to cover her third and final year; and that summer, as part of a special Parsons study group, she spent some sixteen weeks in Europe receiving seminar instruction from European couturiers and visiting museums.
A $400 grant from Parsons paid the tuition costs, but her travel and living expenses were provided for by private monies raised by the Ridgewood Society of Friends, who had sponsored her during the Maidens Project, “to make sure that Toyo [does] not have to walk from Paris to Rome and then swim home without her supper,” as the fund-raising letter read. The truth of the matter, however, was that most of her supporters were looking beyond Toyoko as an individual and thinking that the better the training she received — to which this trip would add greatly — the better the position she would be in to provide for others when she returned to Japan.
Ida Day was the architect behind this undertaking; she had a glorious vision of an exclusive custom-design dress business that would be operated by and employ only women injured in the bombing of Hiroshima. As she imagined the “Hiroshima Shop,” Toyoko would design the clothes which, in turn, would be made by other Hiroshima Maidens skilled with needle and thread, and the opportunities did not stop there. Such an establishment conceivably could open up other possibilities: Two girls who had been making ends meet with a small knitting business could depend on it as a new marketing outlet; some of the eighteen women who had not been chosen to go to the United States for surgery and had been unable to find decent work would now be able to learn a respectable trade.
All through Toyoko’s last year at Parsons, Ida Day continued to make plans for setting up a “Hiroshima Shop.” Since it was her opinion that the customers who could support such a business were in Tokyo, not Hiroshima, and the staff would need a place to live while they worked, she placed a priority on finding a place in downtown Tokyo that could double as a home and a business. When an exchange of letters with Helen Yokoyama resulted in the discovery of a small two-story house that sounded suitable (“In location it is ideal, for it is in a district where many Americans live,” Helen wrote. “It is near a market known for its clean vegetables [no night soil for fertilizer]...[and] it is on a corner and cars can be parked on two sides”), she turned her attention to raising the money to get the venture off to a running start. In a guest editorial printed in both the Friends Journal and the Saturday Review, she made the appeal: “If [anyone] would now like to share in this final phase of rehabilitation, financial contributions to furnish the house, buy sewing machines, or pay the first few months’ rent for Toyoko’s shop would show the people of Hiroshima that the friendship of American friends did not conclude with the girls’ return.”
It all sounded good to Toyoko, who was content to let her benefactor undertake the necessary arrangements and attend to the details while she continued to apply herself to her studies in the belief that getting top grades would be the best preparation for the days to come; and her dedication was duly rewarded when she was one of only three students in the school to graduate with honors. At the annual May fashion show, when several of her designs were displayed, they evoked such enthusiasm from fashion editors that the New York Times printed a feature article about her that was highlighted by a tribute from the Chairman of the Fashion Design Department at Parsons. “In the time [Toyo] has been here she has improved more and worked harder
than any other student,” Anne Keagy was quoted as saying. “Now. she has exceptional scope as a designer.”
She spent most of the month of June measuring women for clothes, as she had already established a clientele of about fifty American customers whose orders (mostly cocktail and evening dresses to be made of Japanese silk) assured her an initial run of business after she opened her shop. In July, her four-year sojourn in the United States came to a close and she flew home to Japan. By August, she had moved into “Hiroshima House,” and in September, Ida Day arrived. Mrs. Day had arranged to inaugurate the grand opening of the “Hiroshima Shop” to coincide with the height of the Tokyo showings of the latest Italian and French fashions, and announced that the internationally trained designer Toyoko Morita would make her debut with a fashion show-luncheon at the fabulous Imperial Hotel on October 7. She promptly set about promoting the event, making the rounds of the newspapers, contacting members of the American community living in Tokyo, making up posters, and sending out invitations.
Toyoko, quite naturally, was thrilled. The only reservation she had concerned the name of the shop. She did not think “Hiroshima Shop” had a smart sound to it. She thought there were associations that would turn customers away. And she had come to the point where she wanted to separate her career from her past. For Ida Day, who had felt all along that a personal triumph for Toyoko would symbolically manifest a triumph for the Hiroshima Maidens in general, it was a plausible line of thought; it would even make the shop more promotable. So together they settled on a new name: Toyo, Haute Couture.
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