Talk:The Wind Cannot Read

Aiko Itō

>> Yoko Tani as Aiko Suzuki (Sabbi)

I am assuming (but did not put in the article, since it qualifies as "original research") that naming the character Aiko in the film was a tribute by the author Richard Mason to Aiko Itō (sometimes better known as Aiko Clarke). In Mason's book the character's name is given as Hanako, but in the screenplay he changed it to Aiko.

Despite being married to a British citizen (Denzil H. Clarke, who amongst other things had been press attaché at the British Embassy in Peking), Itō was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien until released in order to teach Japanese at SOAS. She was one of two Japanese wives of British men drafted in to teach; the other was Otome Nishide (married name Daniels). It is well-known that Itō was the basis of the character in Mason's book, since Mason was one of her students.

A classic headstrong 'ojōsama' -- the only daughter of a wealthy merchant marine family from the Kyobashi area of Tokyo -- Itō divorced her first husband (the result of an arranged marriage) and, at the age of 23, ran off to China, leaving behind a young son. In Peking she met and married Clarke, and they remained there for six years until wartime conditions became too severe (she was on one occasion kidnapped by the Japanese secret police). They finally left China for England in early 1942. But her marriage to Clarke was not to survive the trauma of expatriation and imprisonment: they divorced not long after her release from internment, although she kept his surname for the remainder of the war. She became lecturer of Japanese language at SOAS in November 1942, and subsequently, in July of 1943, was transferred to the BBC to do Japanese-language propaganda broadcasts, having been chosen partly because she had a standard Tokyo accent (unlike Nishide). After the war she changed her name back to Itō and eventually moved back to Japan, maintaining throughout this period an on-and-off relationship with the English artist Theyre Lee-Elliott. She died in 1975 at the age of 63.

Parenthetically, Nishide's story was somewhat similar to Itō's: she met and married Frank Daniels in Japan, where he was a clerk in the Admiralty stationed at the port of Otaru in Hokkaido. When war was declared, Frank Daniels was interned, but became part of a rare prisoner-of-war swap and was able to come back to Britain, taking his wife with him. He subsequently became head of the Japanese language programme at SOAS, and Nishide taught there as well. (For her pains, on arrival in Britain she too was interned on the Isle of Man until released for this purpose -- it must be a rare case when both husband and wife are interned as enemy aliens by opposite sides in a war in direct succession).