(4) Much Ado about a Storm

This is an episode that happened when I was 20 years old, and was in the Dormitory of Tokyo Woman's Christian University, where I stayed for four years until I graduated.

On a full moon night in autumn, I heard a shouting from below the window, "We, Mitaka Boarding Students of Tokyo University have come to storm your dormitory!" I was just looking up at the full moon by the window upstairs, so  I was startled at the shouting !   I leaned forward to look down at them.
There were more than ten boys in the shadows of trees. Just after shouting, they made a big rumbling sounds, hitting the lids of pans and pots, kettles, buckets with sticks,  all of them having some things to make sounds with them.

That's a storm ! Oh, there such a storm existed in Japan, I was surprised to experience it for the first time.  So excited, I watched how things were going on from the window. 

 I had once read a newspaper article about American Storm. The boys raided a girls' dormitory, making a fuss and frightening them,  and both seemed to have a good time with them.

Mitaka Boarding Students were running around our dormitory to and fro sometimes knocking  on  the windows of the ground floor, calling made-up names, sometimes hitting the pans, they looked busy but enjoyed it very much. I was also amused at  by  their movements.

But, on the other hand, the staff of our dormitory were in horror on the ground floor, "What's that?"  "Aren't they villains?"  "Or right-wingers?"  "How those men came here in the night.  Let's phone the police!"   (I heard that later.)
They didn't hear those boys'  first declaration at all , so they decided at once to call the police.

Soon we heard the sounds of an unromantic siren, and the policemen ran into the campus toward the boys,  who all at once scattered in every direction in the moon light.

I saw a man,  who was a custodian usually living in the basement of our dormitory,  running after the policemen,  shouting, "There's even a man, though it's a girls' dormitory! " I couldn't help chuckling along with a surprise at  his boldness.

When I went down to the ground floor, the staff and the dormitory adviser were still wondering who they were.  I told them about their first declaration　that the boys had come from the Mitaka Dormitory of Tokyo University to storm us !  Then  to hear this, they all relaxed and were convinced.

Later, the dormitory adviser had a call from the police;  the boys were all arrested and asked to give a written apology, and  also their pans, pots, kettles and sticks were all confiscated.

I felt sorry for them,  because that wasn't so much an ado, but just a game !

20 years later, I wrote a series of Dormitory Story (3 Vols.), and in the second one, I wrote about this episode. 

Then 15 years later, when I worked for a junior college as a part-time lecturer,
the college president enjoyed those books very much, and said, "There is a man in this college, who once was a Mitaka Dormitory student.                        I recommended him to read them. He is a dean of Sociology."

One day, I had a call from a man, who said he was my fellow worker  in the college. He was the dean of Sociology, and he said he was four years junior to me, and he became a Mitaka Dormitory Student, just after I left the University and the dormitory.

He said, "The fact is I was made to go to storm your dormitory.  On entering the Mitaka Dormitory, the upperclassmen declared to us that it had been decided to storm the dormitory of Tokyo Woman's Christian University every year. And so we had to go and join it."

I was surprised to know that those first beginners were arrested, their things confiscated, and asked to write apologies, and yet they didn't care a bit, and decided to make it one of the traditions to hand down to the juniors. We admired their guts, and laughed on the phone to each other.

According to his story, he enjoyed the storm with other classmates, and the girls didn't call the police any more. They brought  drums, cymbals, pipes, and castanets with them, not the pans or other things like the first students.

We didn't know how long those storms were continued.   Isn't there anyone who knows when it ended,  or anyone who joined the storms?  If there is, please let me know.