Former longtime Tokyo residents Marcel and Elise Grilli left abiding imprints here. Over many years, Marcel wrote a column on music for The Japan Times. Elise, art critic for the newspaper, produced books of outstanding merit on the Japanese art scene. They came to Tokyo in the late 1940s with their 5-year-old son Peter and his younger sister Diana.
Diana is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. Peter is president of the Japan Society of Boston, the oldest of more than 35 Japan-America societies in the USA. A frequent visitor to Japan, he came here recently mainly to prepare for the programs celebrating the centennial of the Japan Society of Boston. In marking his 60th birthday while he was here, he said that his special occasion together with the trip brought back "a deluge of memories."
As a child, Peter played with neighborhood friends who were all Japanese children. He was a distinguished student at the American School in Japan. He said: "I think lots of kids who really enjoyed growing up here didn't feel like Americans when they went to American universities. They felt like Japanese." It seemed natural to him from high school to opt for Japanese studies. He entered Harvard University.