Betty Phillip shares her memories of Japan
By the side of her bed in Braeside House 91-year-old Betty Phillip keeps an engraved silver jewellery box with an oriental design. The box reminds her of her adventures as a young married woman – when she and her family lived for seven years in Japan.
Betty Phillip and her husband Laurie, who was a surveyor, moved to Japan in 1953 with their young daughter Linda. Looking back she says it was: “Wonderful. It is a beautiful country. We had lots of parties – lots of social life. We spent all our weekends at a sports club which had tennis courts, playing fields. It was a lovely place. It was very free.”
Her husband worked for the Lloyds shipping company which brought them into contact with a lively community of ex pats living in Japan.
“We lived in Yokahama village. Japan was very different at that time. It was not developed – the roads around where we lived were dirt tracks.”
At the time the Europeans living in Japan did not mix socially with Japanese people – however Betty Phillip remembers the Japanese women who worked for her being: “very pleasant and easy to get on with.”
She and her friends may not have realised it at the time but they were living in a country on the brink of transformation.
The country with dirt track roads and a rural way of life was about to become one of the world’s great economic powers – and one of the most highly modernised societies on earth.
“My husband went back several years after we came back and he was amazed. He said it had changed tremendously during that time.”
After the first four years she and her husband took a six month break in the UK and made the difficult decision to enroll their daughter at boarding school in Britain.
“It meant we were three years without her. It is not easy to see them go,” she remembers. After returning to the UK in 1959, Betty and her husband (both from Glasgow), settled down in England. After he retired the couple made the decision to return to Scotland to live in Crieff, Perthshire.
Over time Betty has been gradually losing her sight through age related disease. Home life became so difficult that in July 2008 she came to Braeside House where she is now minutes away from her daughter who lives in Edinburgh.
But that little silver box by her bed is a constant reminder of her youth and of a very different time – which she always remembers with a smile.
Story written by Claire Smith
