I learned that modern buildings were constructed of bricks, red as camellia blossoms, with windows paned with clear glass. I learned that these structures housed institutions of progress and change, the new public schools, the new public hospital, and the new post office, among them.

I learned that all children, boys and girls, were required to attend four years of school, which were now public and free. I learned that many never did, as their labor was needed at home, in the back of shops, on fishing boats, and in the nearby fields of rice and barley. For those children who could be spared, we read in the modern textbooks the names of Plato, Cicero, and Franklin, a man who, same as my brothers, liked to fly a kite.

When my classmates and I were eight years old, we were learning these facts and more. We had been born at the borders between two eras, and we saw with our own eyes what it meant to be a part of the old one.

The Ōhashi Bridge was where the worst-offs found themselves. Many of the men who had knelt were now seated on the bridge with their swords, their armors, and their formal haori and hakama spread before them. Silent in their dignity, they were selling without offering. When no items of worth remained, these men sat, silent in their hunger. They were begging without asking. Some chose an honorable death and left wives and daughters on the Ōhashi Bridge to beg and sell their own honor for a handful of rice. Unlike Father, these men could not set aside their code of conduct. They saw only grubbiness and humiliation when they had to feign parity with the lesser men of the mercantile class.

Foster Grandfather and foster Father would have been on the Ōhashi Bridge but for foster Mother. She sewed for the wives and daughters of those lesser men, like the merchant Orihara’s, who paid a premium to have their kimono and yukata cut and pieced by a member of the house of Inagaki. Foster Mother sewed until her fingers stiffened with repetition or cold. Each pull of the thread was another grain of rice, each pull of the thread was another grain of rice, she mouthed to herself as she worked, her lips parting to reveal her blackened teeth, a vanity of the married women of her former class that she had refused to forfeit, a vestige of the old way forbidden since the 3rd year of Meiji. To open her mouth was to risk punishment, foster Mother understood. A woman’s fate remained unchanged, she knew.