Daddy and Mother were waiting for Totto at Shinagawa Station when she returned from Yugawara. She hopped off the train and raced over to her parents, only to find them in tears. Why were they crying? Weren’t they happy to see her? She had no way of knowing that they had been warned about her possibly needing crutches for the rest of her life. And here she was, sprinting toward them. Only as an adult did Totto come to understand how joyous that moment had been for them.
Totto’s right leg grew to be as long as her left leg, and she could walk and run. She was a very lucky child.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Caramel Vending Machine
Soon, Totto began elementary school.
It was in the middle of first grade that she started attending Tomoe Gakuen near Jiyugaoka Station, but she had also been taking piano lessons since age five. Once a week, she rode the train from Kitasenzoku to her teacher’s house in Shibuya, transferring lines along the way.
Something at the bottom of the stairs at Ookayama Station where she switched trains always caught her eye: a vending machine that sold Morinaga-brand caramels. At the time, there was very little to do or see around Ookayama Station aside from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Totto never did discover why this remote station had such a sophisticated vending machine. The apparatus had a thin slot into which you could drop a five-sen coin. Once you inserted the money and pressed the button, the machine was supposed to dispense a small rectangular box of caramels. But perhaps due to the shortage of foodstuffs the country was starting to experience, no caramels ever popped out.
It never occurred to Totto that food scarcity could be to blame for the empty vending machine, so every week she walked right up to it and, full of anticipation, inserted her money, pressed the button, then waited for the caramels to drop. But the only thing she ever got was a clink! as her coin fell back out into the tray for change below.
“I don’t need my money back. I just want the caramels!” Totto thought. She shook the machine from right to left, front to back, but there was no sign of the sweets. Oh, how she longed to see a box drop! She gave the machine a good shake every time she went to piano lessons, hoping that that day, it might be fixed.
She wondered later if the machine was a prototype made by a Tokyo Institute of Technology student.
✦ ✦ ✦
Once in a while, Mother came along to Totto’s piano lessons. On those days, Totto had much more to look forward to than the caramel vending machine as Mother would take her to a diner near Shibuya Station after class and ask Totto what she wanted. “Ice cream!” she invariably replied.
One such day, Totto and her mother crossed the famous Shibuya intersection in front of the statue of the loyal canine Hachiko and stepped into their usual diner, a large restaurant near what is now the Shibuya 109 shopping mall. Whereupon they were asked to share a table with a young soldier who was eating alone. Ice cream smeared all around her mouth, Totto chatted away happily with Mother. The soldier finished eating, stood from his seat, then smiled at them.
“Here, take this,” he said, and handed Mother a slip of paper that read Meal Ticket. Food was becoming increasingly difficult to come by, and tickets such as these were required to dine in some restaurants. Totto had never seen one before.
“Oh no, we couldn’t. It’s much too valuable,” Mother demurred, trying to return the ticket, but the soldier pressed it into her hand and walked away.
Totto often thought back to this moment, even after the war. Had the soldier been eating by himself because he was about to leave for duty? Did the sight of Totto and Mother enjoying some ice cream remind him of his little sisters or young relatives? Was that why he gave Mother his meal ticket? Had that soldier returned home in one piece?
The war with the United States broke out toward the end of that year.
Somewhere along the way, Totto stopped going to piano lessons.