Silly thing. She had this idea that I sailed the oceans of the world and walked through every country and spoke to everyman, woman and child – just as we do at home – and that all I had to do was keep my eyes and ears open.

Anyway I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so although I was never in any place where I thought Chappy might be at this time of my working life, I wrote back. ‘I’ll look for him wherever I go,’ I said. Then one day …

[I’m going to interrupt here. I’m inserting a little note into this translation because I want to mention that between where Aki has said ‘I’ll look for him wherever I go …’ and ‘Then one day …’ he skipped twelve years. What he tells next happened in 1958 and goes on from there. O.S.]

Then one day I was coming off one of the coastal boats when I caught sight of Mo, who had been my mate in past journeys and who had come back home for a brief time when I first took Chappy there. We had met again once or twice, but that was before the war. Mo was walking about the wharf as though looking for someone. The ‘someone’ he was looking for was me. My son Eric was waiting with the car to take me home, and I persuaded Mo to come with us, even if it was just for a few hours.

One morning Mo was leaving the docks in Yokohama when he heard someone call his name and turned to see Chappy coming towards him. They sat down together while Chappy wrote a message on a piece of paper and kept repeating ‘Aki, Hawai‘i.’ At the time we met, Mo had been carrying the note for more than a year and had been twice to Hawai‘i but not found me. I couldn’t make anything of the Japanese characters on the note, but I knew who would be able to help me. On the way home, I called in to see Ishy, who told me that what Chappy had sent me was an address in Tokyo. Ishy knew the area well.

Though I had been to Tokyo twice, it was in the early days. Now I was in a settled job in Honolulu, working on the tugs and machinery of the inner harbour, which suited my family and me. No more roaming. I’d had enough of that.