Well, I'm back from a very successful ELNA convention in Austin, an experience marred only by the heat and the hassles with security going and coming (there were four flights involved, and at three of them we encountered security delays; in one case, TSA in my opinion mistreated my wife, though they probably were just "going by the book"). At least none of the hassles lasted long enough to cost us a flight connection.

PoppaGator asked (and I promised to reply to):

Your parents must have had some connection to Japan or some special reason to send you to Japanese school in Seattle and then to live in Tokyo for the following year. I don't mean to pry ~ you've been most forthcoming ~ but your story presents as many questions as it answers!

My parents didn't have any preexisting special Japanese connection, prior to the 1966-67 school year. (They were both active in FIUTS, and my mom founded and directed the English Conversation Classes for the Wives of Foreign Students at the University of Washington, so they had lots of contact with foreign students, but not any more with the Japanese than any of the dozens of other countries that had students (generally grad students) at the UW.) My dad was the American Baptist campus minister at the University of Washington from 1953 (while I was in utero) until his death in 1968. After 14 years at the post he was given a year's paid sabbatical, and was able to land a position at Waseda Hoshien, the Christian student center affiliated with Waseda University, Tōkyō, as a Visiting Fellow filling in for a missionary who was on furlough stateside. He had about a year's advance notice so we were able to spend the school year attending Japanese Language School on Saturdays. From the rental house that we called "home" at 2-17-40 Koishikawa, Bunkyō-ku, to the American School would have been over an hour's commute each way, but we were just three or four doors from 礫川学校 (Rekisen Shōgakkō), the third-oldest public elementary school in Japan, so it was a no-brainer, given their willingness to have us, that we would go there. I was put back two years, into 6th grade, and my siblings were each put back one year: Akio (Graham) was in 5th, Saburō (Alan) in 3rd, and Sumiko (Peggy) in 1st. In due course I graduated (my 6th-grade class photo) and became a first-year middle-school student (what we call a seventh-grader in the US) — and by default also a first-year student of English as a Foreign Language, an experience that probably primed me for Esperantism.

Haruo