I realize in mid sentence, that I am not just chatting about foreign relations with a guy in a restaurant, but speaking through him to millions of Japanese. An international incident is possible here. I attempt to turn the tables on Otsuka, but with little success. Like Baron Komura, he responds with few words, revealing little. I am like the Russian Witte, blabbering openly. I find out only that Otsuka grew up in a very small city like Portsmouth, moved to Tokyo and has worked in Geneva and in Africa.

Hayato Sakurai, the curator of the Peace Treaty exhibit opening soon at the Portsmouth Historical Society is lunching with us. Hayato, who has worked at the whaling museum in New Boston, speaks perfect English, and often translates my colloquial phrases to Otsuka. Otsuka follows the Japanese tradition of using his last name while the more Americanized Hayato uses his first.

"Excuse me," the waitress says while clearing the chowder bowls, "but you two aren’t from around here are you?"

"They are both from Japan," I explain, "and you will likely be seeing a number of Japanese visitors here soon."

In 1905, Japanese reporters were able to communicate to their newspapers by telegraph. While the delegates dined at fancy parties and banquets, a hundred foreign reporters from 40 countries hung out in local bars and watched vaudeville shows at the Portsmouth Music Hall. When VIPs were unavailable for comment or negotiations snagged, reporters often interviewed one-another to fill out their daily news quota. It was through their eyes that Portsmouth got its reputation as a welcoming community, a place where well-informed local citizens followed every nuance of the dramatic twists and turns of the treaty.

"I’ve got a friend who is Japanese," the waitress says, handing me the lunch bill. "She works in the Thai restaurant. She’s from Thailand, I think. Is that the same?"

Hayato and Otsuka smile politely. "Not exactly," they say.

I offer no excuses. Portsmouth is half-cosmopolitan, half Yankee hick. I like it that way.

Much has happened in the five years since Terada visited. I have the pleasure of showing Otsuka, not a ravished wooden hotel in New Castle, but a rejuvenated Wentworth-by-the-Sea. We dine there in luxury, and this time Yomiuri picks up the tab. Otsuka appears fascinated by the display of Japanese propaganda then going up at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. The exhibit shows what Japanese citizens knew about their glorious victories against the Russians in the 1905 war. It helps explain why there were riots in Japan when Baron Komura was forced to accept less than he had hoped for in the Peace of Portsmouth.

We take a side trip on a rainy day to Green Acre, a Bahai’ school in nearby Eliot, Maine. This is where the first "peace flag" was raised in the late 1800s. This is where many of the Japanese delegates visited in 1905 and their photos still hang on the walls of the school.

Otsuka takes a trip to the museum at the shipyard. Hayato gives him a private look at the artifacts going into one of the carefully planned centennial displays. We wander through the Rockingham Hotel where many of the foreign correspondents stayed in 1905. Otsuka’s eyes wander up the dark hardwood-paneled walls and across the ornate hand-painted ceiling. You can almost see him slipping back in time, a stranger in a strange land, a reporter on a mission.

There are those who believe that the peace brokered here a century ago still pays dividends. One successful peace, the thinking goes, can shape another. Perhaps if we reconstruct Portsmouth as it was in the summer of 1905 -- rolling and twisting all its parts under the microscope of science and the macro scope of art – we can recycle the bits into a machine to fix the future. Did we do something incredibly right back then, or were we just lucky? Is peace something we can learn to manufacture, or is it just the occasional coffee break in the endless human business of war?

For a few months, at least, in a small New Hampshire city, an entire community is talking about the road to peace. And in Tokyo, once again, people are listening.

OUTSIDE LINK: Peace Traety Centennial Web Site

Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.