The Momoyama family had come from Miyagi Prefecture, in the northeast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, where there are still traces of the mysterious Ainu strain.
The Ainus were a primitive people, already living on the island before the principal ancestors of the Japanese came from Southern Asia.
Apparently they were of Caucasian blood.
They had white skins and blue eyes;
all their men were bearded, and many of their women were beautiful.
A pitiful few of them are left now, to subsist mainly on the tourist trade and to sing their ancient tribal chants, which have the same haunting sadness as the laments of the American Indians.
Most of them have been assimilated, but sometimes a man in Miyagi or Akita prefectures is much more hairy than the average Japanese, and occasionally a girl will be strikingly lovely, her coloring warmed and improved by a little of the tawny honey-in-the-sun tint of the invaders from the South.

Tommy Momoyama was one of these fortunate occasions.
She was taller than most Japanese girls, and had the exquisitely willowy form of the Japanese girl who is lucky enough to be tall.
Her nose was higher of bridge, her complexion so pale as to be quite susceptible to sunburn, and the fish and vegetable diet of her forebears had given her teeth that were white and regular and strong.
Her mouth, soft and full, was something for any man to dream about.
She had black eyes, long and intriguingly tilted, and the way she walked was melody.

She had been in Japan just one week.
It was an alien land, and she hated it intensely;
she was already considering putting in rebellious requests for duty at San Diego, Bremerton, the Great Lakes, Pensacola -- any place the Navy had a hospital -- with a threat to resign her commission if the request were not granted.
Anywhere would be better than the land of her ancestors.

There was nothing wrong with her job.
Tommy had been assigned to the psychopathic ward.
There were no depressingly serious cases: the ward doctor sometimes teamed up with the chaplain to serve as a marriage counselor -- sometimes the Navy sent people back to the States to preserve a marriage -- but mental health as a rule was very high.
At present the doctor's main concern was in seeing to it that Japanese salvage firms were not permitted to operate on the hulks of warships sunk too close inshore, because the work involved setting off nerve-shattering blasts at all hours.
Tommy was interested in psychiatry, because there was much an understanding nurse could do to help the patients.

But she suffered in her off-duty hours.
Such as now, when she sat at a table in the coffee shop at the Officers' Club, having coffee and a hamburger to sustain her until dinnertime.
She had changed into a cocktail dress, and the whole evening should have been before her, but already she was beginning to get a tight feeling at the back of her neck.
This was one of the Navy's crossroads -- you find them all around the world.
Ships from the West Coast rotated on six-month tours of duty with the Seventh Fleet, and Yokosuka was the Seventh Fleet's principal port for maintenance, upkeep and shore liberty.
Sooner or later, all the gray Navy ships came in here;
if Tommy sat long enough, she would be sure to see all the young officers she had met in San Diego and Long Beach.
And she wanted desperately to see someone she had known back there.

She felt, rather than saw, the approach of the good-looking young man.
He came through from the Fleet Bar, which was stag, with the ice cubes tinkling in a glass he carried.
When he saw Tommy sitting alone, the tinkling sound stopped.
He was perhaps a trifle tipsy, having been long at sea where drinking is not permitted, and consequently out of practice;
he wore a brown tweed sports jacket obviously tailored in Hong Kong, and he was of an age that marked him as a lieutenant.
Probably off one of the carriers -- an aviator.
There was a fifty-fifty chance, perhaps, that he would be unmarried, and an even more slender chance that his approach would be different.
Japan did something to a man -- and it wasn't just Japan, either, because the same thing applied anywhere overseas.
It was as if foreign duty implied and excused license;
it intimated that the folks at home would never know about it, and, therefore, why not?

Then the young man in the brown sports jacket spoke, and it was no different.

"Harro, girl-san"!
He said, turning on what was meant to be charm.
"You catchee boy-furiendo?
Maybe you likee date with me"?

"I beg your pardon"!
Tommy said out of her cold rage.
"I don't believe I know you, and I can't understand your quaint brand of English -- it was meant to be English, wasn't it"?

The nice-looking young officer fell back on his heels, open-mouthed and blushing.
At least, he had the decency to blush, she thought.

"Oh -- I'm sorry!
You see, I thought -- I mean I really had no idea" --

"Oh, yes -- you had ideas"!
Tommy interrupted furiously.
"All wrong ones"!
Then she jerked her thumb toward the door in a very American gesture, and dropped into Navy slang.
"Take off, fly-boy"!

"Uh -- sorry"!
He muttered, and took off, obviously feeling like a fool.
The trouble was that there was no lasting satisfaction in this for Tommy.
She felt like a fool, too.

It hadn't been this way in college, or in nurses' training;
it wasn't this way in the hospital at San Diego.
Everybody had accepted her for what she was -- a very charming girl.
Nobody had addressed her in broken English at any of those places, nobody had suggested that she wasn't American.
There are Spanish girls who look like Tommy Momoyama, brunettes with a Moorish hint of the Orient in their faces;
there are beauties from the Balkan states who are similarly endowed, and -- back in the blessed United States -- they were regarded simply as pretty women.
Now, having been sent halfway around the world on a job she had not asked for, Tommy was being humiliated at every turn.

She looked around, self-consciously.
Four little Japanese waitresses were murdering the English language at the counter -- Yuki Kobayashi happened to be one of them.
Everybody but Tommy seemed to think it was charming when they called, "Bifutek-san"!
For a steak sandwich, or "Kohi Futotsu"!
For one cup of coffee.
Two other Japanese girls were sitting at the tables, both quite pretty and well groomed.
One was with a whitehaired and doting lieutenant commander;
the other was with her American husband and their exceptionally appealing children.
Seeing these did nothing for Tommy's mood.
She told herself rebelliously, and with pride, I am an American!

And so she was, and would remain.
But she was learning that so long as she was in this country, and wore civilian dress in the Club, there would always be transient young men who would approach her with broken English.
There had been occasions when some of the more experienced had even addressed her in what might have been perfectly good Japanese.
Tommy wouldn't know;
after coming to America, her parents had spoken only English.

One thing was becoming increasingly sure.
She had been sent to the wrong place for duty.
There was more to service in the Navy Nurse Corps than the hours in the ward.
One had to have friends, and a congenial life in after-duty hours.

Now there was raucous male singing from the Fleet Bar.
It was terribly off key, and poorly done, and Tommy could never admit to herself that male companionship was a very natural and important thing, but all at once she felt lonesome and put-upon.
She finished her hamburger and drank her coffee and paid her check;
she got out of the coffee shop before the incident could be repeated.
Eating while angry had given her a slight indigestion.
Back in her living quarters at the hospital she took bicarbonate of soda, and sulked.

Then, after a while, she went to her mirror.
It was all true.
She certainly looked Japanese, and perhaps she could not really blame the young men.
And, still, they did not have to be so crude in their approach.

There was a letter to write to her mother, and she tried to make its tone cheerful.
She promised that she would soon take a few day's leave and visit the uncle she had never seen, on the island of Oyajima -- which was not very far from Yokosuka.
And tomorrow she would take time to shop for the kimono her mother wanted to present to the young wife of a faculty member as a hostess gown.

Tommy, of course, had never heard of a kotowaza, or Japanese proverb, which says, "Tanin yori miuchi", and is literally translated as "Relatives are better than strangers".

Actually, this is only another way of saying that blood is thicker than water.

Doc Doolittle's scheduled appearance at captain's mast was a very unusual thing, because the discipline dispensed there is ordinarily for the young and immature, and a chief is naturally expected to stay off the report.
But the beer hall riot in Subic had been unusual, too, and Walt Perry was convinced that Doc had started it through some expert tactics in rabble rousing.
Just why anybody should wish to start a riot the executive officer didn't know.
In his opinion, Doc had not grown up.

The lieutenant was not entirely wrong in the belief.
There had never been a good reason for Doc Doolittle to grow up.
He had come into the Navy too young, with the image of the fun-loving Guns Appleby before him.
The war found him much too early, and its perils -- and especially its awful boredom -- were best forgotten in horseplay and elaborate practical jokes, and even now Doc had never found any stabilizing, sobering influence.
He remained young at heart, with an overdeveloped sense of humor.
He wisecracked about the captain's indoctrination of new men, took great delight in slaughtering cockroaches with ethyl chloride, and gave no thought for tomorrow.
He was doing thirty years, and the Navy would take care of him.
The job security enjoyed by Doc Doolittle, and nearly all members of the Armed Forces, is a wonderful thing.
Actually, all a man in uniform has to do is to get by.
He may not rise to the heights, but he can get by, and eventually be retired.

Doc had been under restriction to the ship since the Bustard left Subic.
This deprived him of liberty in Hong Kong, but he told Boats McCafferty that Hong Kong was a book he had read before, and the Navy would always bring him there again, some day.
At Yokosuka he was restricted to the confines of the Base because Walt Perry, being thoughtful, knew that Doc might have to draw some medical supplies from the hospital or the Supply Base.
This gave Doc the whole range of the naval establishment, and suited him quite well.
There were two things he wanted to do: inspect one of the many caves that had been dug into the hills on the Naval Base, and visit an old shipmate.

A telephone line had been hooked up to connect the ship with the Base exchange.
After supper, Doc called Whitey Gresham, who was now a lieutenant and had a family.

"Well, Doc, you old sonofabitch"!
Whitey exclaimed, with true affection.
"Come over and have a drink.
We live down by the Base commissary.
Grab a taxi".

"I'll be there, but I'll walk", Doc said.
"I've got to run an errand on the way.
See you in about an hour".

He threw a smart salute at the gangway, went up the dock, and turned down the wide street in front of the Petty Officers' Club.