An American Abroad — 50 Years | Part I

Uncovering the world I found out I could live anywhere

Karen, Billy, and daughter Nanao, 1974, a week before leaving the U.S.

Growing up, I traveled outside of New York City once.

That was when my father took my brother, my sister, and me to his hometown, Yazoo City, Mississippi. Two of his sisters were still living there in the shack their sharecropper parents had left them.

A city kid, my world was my block — 159th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. For me and my band of friends — Joanne, Delores, Barbara, my younger sister, Mollie —just  going down the hill to Riverside Drive was an adventure. Convinced it was our discovery, we named it “The Lost City”.

My world grew larger, if not in reality, then in my mind, when I took an Art History class my senior year at George Washington High School. New to our school, the teacher, Mr. William Spilka, shared his passion for the world’s great art with us uptown kids from Black, Jewish, Greek, Irish, and Puerto Rican working-class backgrounds.

At the time, I’d never seen an airport, let alone been on an airplane. But I knew then that one day I’d go to those places Mr. Spilka introduced us to: the Tate Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Madrid’s Prado.

My post-high school prospects were limited at best. I’d failed the modern dance audition at Juilliard. My SAT scores were laughable — the head of the math department laughed when he delivered them.

I took off

Going to Europe seemed as good an idea as any I had about what to do next, and having saved enough money for a one-way flight on Icelandic Airlines, at age nineteen I took off.

Once in Europe, I was soon more fascinated with the people, their foods, customs, and ways of living, than the treasures in their museums.

In those days, 1965, it was safe to hitchhike even for a young woman alone, and I hitched rides the length and breadth of France, Spain, and Germany.

I suppose, like many people who go abroad for the first time, I often wondered why that country or those people didn’t do things the way I was familiar with, the American way — you know, the right way.

By the time I left Europe after one year, I’d made many discoveries, and the one that had the most lasting impact was that there was so much to learn about the world, about the different people in it and their cultures, and that the American way was just one of many, many possibilities.

Now, I think I was fortunate to have found out in my young years that our world is such a wonderful and exciting place full of endless lessons. And I could live anywhere.

That first experience of living outside the United States changed me. I haven’t been the same since.

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“Karen! Hey! How’re you doing?”

“Fine, fine. And you? It’s been a long time.”

“You’re telling me. It’s been about fifteen years. But I’ve heard all about you.”

“Oh, really — what’ve you heard?”

“That you married a millionaire, have seven children, and live in China.”

“!!??!!”

That was part of a telephone conversation with my old friend Barbara during a visit to the States some years ago. I had to set the record straight, on all counts.

“So, when are you coming home?” she wanted to know.

I used to hear that all the time. No one asks anymore.

I’ve lived in Japan for the past fifty years. Quite naturally, this is home.

“Let’s do it”

My husband and I are New Yorkers. I was born and raised in Washington Heights, Billy grew up in Greenwich Village. We’ve been friends since we were teenagers. And no, we didn’t meet in high school. Billy went to Stuyvesant when it was all boys. George Washington High School is at the opposite end of Manhattan.

We met so long ago neither one of us remembers when and where. But we figure it was probably at a friend’s party, which was a regular weekend feature of our coming-of-age years in New York City.

We were living in Vermont, when, in 1974, Billy was invited to study at a yoga and martial arts dojo (training center) in Japan. His interest in all things Japanese included his practice of Zen meditation, reading Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, and following the Macrobiotic diet and philosophy, as an acolyte of its principal practitioner in the West, Michio Kushi.

The opportunity to go to Japan was intriguing, but he’d never traveled abroad and was hesitant to pick up and leave America. Whereas I, after that first visit to Europe in 1965, went again in 1966, and lived in Denmark from 1968 to 1971.

Japan? Sure, I said. “Let’s do it.”

Have VW will travel

With our destination set for Japan, we went first to Europe. After buying a car, a rusty old 1962 VW Beetle, in Amsterdam, we headed to Denmark, where I had friends from the time my daughter, Nanao, was born in Odense in 1969.

After touring most of Western Europe, we decided we’d take the overland route to Japan. Starting out from northern Italy, we drove border to border across the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.

In 2025 it’s going to be hard to believe, and might appear reckless, that we were on the road, with a child, in some of those places. But in 1975, the only problem we had in Iran was when we washed Billy’s one pair of jeans and took turns watching them dry in the courtyard of a funky ‘hotel’ in Tehran. We’d been told what a prize item American jeans were — and the prize was stolen in the brief moment neither of us had our eyes on it.

In Kabul, our biggest problem had been trying to sell the VW. It was illegal to sell a car  in Afghanistan— so we ‘gave’ it away, and the person we ‘gave’ it to gave us the money.

We crossed the mountains of the fabled Khyber Pass in a rickety old bus, then took public transportation through Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Thailand. We were on the road for a year, camping most of the time, with 5-year-old Nanao, arriving in Japan during the summer of 1975.

After Billy completed his one year at the dojo — a place where we’d lived a life so regimented and controlled, under the direction of a tyrannical sensei (teacher) — we knew we hadn’t truly seen, or, more importantly, experienced, Japan. It was then we both said: “Let’s stay a little longer.”

That was 50 years ago.

An American in Japan—50 Years | Part II

I’ve written in detail about my overland journey and life in the dojo in my memoir, The View From Breast Pocket Mountain, Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Memoir Prize for Books.