“Seamen?”
“No, yachtsmen.”
There was a pause—and then the guard waved us on. I thought nothing more of the incident, but many months later Moto rather sadly brought the incident up.
“You never on our side,” he accused us. “Never—really.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like Cape Town—you let policeman call us Japs.”
Only one who knows the fierce pride of the Japanese can understand how they hate and resent being called Japs. I was completely in the dark.
“When did anyone ever call you Japs—without my correcting them?”
Finally, after much digging and probing, we pieced the story together. Moto described the circumstances at the Cape Town docks and suddenly the scene came back to me. I recalled the guard, peering in the back window and asking, in quite neutral tones, “What about those chaps?”
The Japanese didn’t know the word “chaps” and had thought they were being insulted. Almost a year later I was given a chance to explain, but it was too late. The damage had been done.