At any rate, I showed him what I wanted, bringing out my plans and pictures, and discussing notes and construction. Hours passed. Yotsuda-san looked and listened quietly. Behind his impassive smile—that famous Japanese smile!—there began to glow a spark of genuine interest and understanding. Through the interpreters he began to ask pertinent questions and make sharp comments. There was no doubt this man knew his business, and that he saw, in the designs, a challenge that intrigued him. Suddenly I found myself thinking that, cracks or no cracks in the wall, this man could build our boat!
So I knelt there, with legs long ago gone to sleep, and shivered silently in my overcoat, while a long and vigorous discussion took place in Japanese. At last there was a pause, a question from Takemura-san which could be recognized as climactic, and Yotsuda-san’s answer, ending in the phrase, “Dekimasu—Can do it.”
The team summed up the four-hour meeting succinctly: “He say ‘Okay’!”
Now we had to come to grips with reality. A dream on paper is no risk at all, but the time had come to back it with a sizable wad of cash. Even though the price agreed upon was remarkably low, by American standards, it would take all the money we had and could raise. I had to face the fact that, if anything went wrong, we might be financially wrecked before we even got the boat in the water.
The contract, when completed, was a magnificent document, embodying every item and clause I could cull from legal terminology and textbooks on boatbuilding (I had eight of them). It protected us (or so I thought) from every imaginable disaster or delay, whether from act of God or from error of Nippon.
Even so, the contract contained, as I later discovered, two flaws. First, when translated into Japanese by Mr. Yasuda, the language somehow lost the force of the English version, so that the verbs “will” and “must” came out “it would be nice if” and “it would be good to.” Months later, when I came to know both Mr. Yasuda and the Japanese language better, I asked him why he had so softened the original version.
“Reynolds-sensei,” said Mr. Yasuda (“sensei” being a term of respect accorded professors and the like), “Reynolds-sensei is a very polite man.”
“Oh, I am?” I asked politely.
“Of course. And Reynolds-sensei would never say anything to make Yotsuda-san unhappy.”
“No?”