Alcock’s Autobiography 3.1
11 May 2011
Kumiko was the only lover intimately involved in my business. Like any red-blooded profligate of my generation I had had sex with a secretary or two, and at least once I ended up hiring a woman I slept with. But only in Kumiko were my private and business lives inextricably entwined. My first wife positively disliked anything to do with the company, and by the time I married again, both Kumiko and the business were gone. We met about two years into the nine-year gap between wives.
I had asked the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana to pass along my request for a Japanese-speaking assistant. I urgently needed someone to prepare for a critical trip to Tokyo. Four applicants called the same day, but Kumiko was the only one with a relatively free schedule; also, the other three seemed too young for the job. I asked her to come to my office for an interview and hired her immediately. I then scheduled the Tokyo trip for the following week. I expected her to start the next morning and work through the weekend right up to departure. She responded to the challenge with gusto. It was as if she had been looking for an excuse to stop studying for her MA and do some “real” work.
If L__ took first prize in wisdom, Kumiko took first prize in praxis. None of my other lovers could match her sustained energy or her penchant for mastering practical things. She demonstrated this conclusively in the first three weeks. She virtually memorized a two-hour lecture I gave her on what we manufactured and how we did it. She learned quickly how to create and manipulate files from a command line prompt on our Prime 300 minicomputer both directly at a terminal and by means of a Tandy 100 over an acoustically-coupled modem. (No PCs yet.) She asked detailed questions about who my Japanese contacts were and what I had discussed with them so far. She booked the trip, and that was the last time I had to deal with travel arrangements, by myself or through an agent. From then on, she did it.
We flew business class on Thai. It was probably on that first flight together that I told her I was separated but that the divorce was not happening because of the uncompromising opposition of my estranged wife who had categorically refused every arrangement I offered for the past six years. I imagine that even at that early point Kumiko, who had entered the panic age of 28 when Japanese women felt they were about to be forever doomed to becoming old maids, salivated slightly over the fact that I was or soon could be entirely eligible. For my part, I was still hooked up with L__ although I had always been an ‘any port in a storm’ kind of man.
Kumiko had a physiological condition whereby she would sweat like a stuck pig when even mildly nervous. And she was more than mildly nervous at the meetings we had with Forestry and Agriculture, the vassal company under the Mitsui banner that I had previously selected from a field of six to represent our products in Japan. Sweat would ooze out of the pores along her nose, form giant beads and then, if not daubed quickly away, run to its tip and slide off, much to the well-concealed amusement of the other side, fourteen in all. At our first meeting we had the help of Mr. Otaki, a world class skier who, in his search for a supplier of log cabins for a ski resort, had made first contact with me in Montana a few months earlier. But after that initial meeting, Kumiko and I were on our own.
I was sweating too, thanks to a wool shirt with a tie, contrary to my usual habit. I had forgotten how much warmer Tokyo is than Montana, a typical mistake for a country bumpkin. So she and I sweated away under several hour-long grill sessions about prices, quality control, shipping methods and schedules, rate of production, construction details, engineering data and prices again. Sophisticates we were not. But later I would learn that we had impressed them, especially the top dogs, precisely because we were just who we were. Similar to the way most Americans have a soft spot in their hearts for the underdog, maybe most Japanese are naturally empathetic to the ineloquent, unadorned, the gauche.
And, at the end of the day, as a ‘Son Of a Boss’, (my dad built the company from scratch), I did know my subject: the design and manufacture of log house kits—from the timber still on the stump, to scaling in the yard, to turning a ‘napkin schetch’ into a complete set of working drawings, to dealing with the lathes, boring machines, and cut-off saws in the plant, to handling the computer system, to dealing with the workers, to the on-site construction itself. And I knew my place in the hierarchy of the feudal system known as business in Japan, i.e., my position was ‘permanent outsider’ and ‘low on the totem pole’.
After our meetings at Forestry and Agriculture’s headquarters in Tokyo we were taken to a number of potential building sites in the country and were able to stay overnight a couple times at ryokan with onsen. On those occasions Kumiko and I slept in the same room, and on the last night, I reached out from my futon, across the tatami, and lightly took her hand. This was our first intentional physical contact. She told me later that it had driven her crazy and that she didn’t get any sleep. Initially, I was aware of the electricity flowing between us but, exhausted by the trip and having convinced myself that I should allow any sexual relationship that may develop to do so without the slightest coercion, I fell asleep. Although nothing happened, that ‘nothing’ set the stage for what would transpire a few nights later, in our business hotel in Tokyo.
