Describe Your First Kiss — The Awkward Little Detail That Made a Room Full of Reserved Japanese Women Prisoners of War Cringe, Laugh, and Finally Trust Their American Interrogator Just a Little

The first time Lieutenant Eleanor Price suggested they talk about “first kisses,” the interpreter actually flinched.

The reaction was so quick and so small that Ellie might have missed it if she hadn’t already learned to watch Aiko Tanaka’s face the way she watched the weather.

They were in the “rec hut,” which was really just an old supply shed the Army had cleaned out and filled with mismatched chairs. Dusty light slanted in through high windows. Outside, the Pacific wind pushed at the camp’s perimeter fence, making the barbed wire hum.

Inside, twelve Japanese women sat in a loose half-circle—nurses, clerks, a schoolteacher, a girl from a sewing factory—hands folded in their laps, eyes wary, backs very straight.

Ellie stood by the little blackboard with a piece of chalk, trying to look less like a lieutenant and more like a woman who had no interest in anyone’s secrets.

She cleared her throat.

“So,” she said brightly, “today I thought we might try something different. No medicine, no maps, no ‘where were you when’ questions.”

Aiko translated, her voice even.

When she finished, the women glanced at each other, confused.

“No questions?” Midori asked, the oldest of the group. Her hair was threaded with gray, her hands rough from years of work. “Then why are we here?”

Ellie smiled. “Because,” she said, “I’m tired of us all pretending we’re just uniforms and languages. I thought maybe we could be… I don’t know. People. For an hour.”

Aiko hesitated over “people,” searching for the right level of familiarity. She chose ningen instead of jinmin, the more ordinary, human word.

Hana Sato, the nurse with the too-quiet eyes, looked up at that. People. Not prisoners, not enemy, not “comfort unit surplus,” as one ugly memo had called them before Ellie had torn it up.

“People?” Hana echoed softly.

Ellie nodded. “I brought cards,” she said, lifting a small stack of stiff paper. Each one had a simple English phrase written in thick pencil. “You pick one, we translate, we talk. Nobody has to say anything she doesn’t want to. You can lie if you like. I won’t know.”

That earned a few faint smiles. Lying had been a survival skill on both sides for a long time now.

She held the stack out. “Who’s brave?”

Keiko—the youngest, with the blunt haircut and the stubborn jaw—snatched a card from the top before she could lose her nerve. She squinted at the English letters.

Aiko peeked.

Her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not quite horror.

“What?” Keiko demanded. “What does it say?”

Aiko shot Ellie a look.

Ellie shrugged, trying to look innocent. “Go on,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”

Aiko sighed, then turned to the circle of women.

“She wants us to… describe our first kiss,” she said in Japanese, each syllable dropping like a pebble into a very still pond.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved.

Then the reaction hit all at once.

Midori’s hand flew to her mouth. Hana’s eyes widened. Keiko turned bright red up to her ears. Two of the older clerks made identical strangled sounds somewhere between a laugh and a protest.

“You can’t ask that!” Keiko yelped. “That’s— that’s—”

“Shameless,” Midori supplied, half-scandalized, half-amused.

“Indecent,” added Yumi, the shy schoolteacher, though her eyes were already sparkling.

Aiko pressed her lips together and stared very hard at the floor. Ellie caught the motion of her throat as she swallowed back either a laugh or a groan.

Ellie blinked.

“Well,” she said, “it sounds like the translation worked.”

She held up both hands in mock surrender.

“Nobody has to answer,” she said. “It was just… I don’t know. In my family, that’s something the women tease each other about. First crush, first kiss, first time your teeth clacked together because you were both nervous idiots—”

“Teeth?” Yumi blurted, then slapped both hands over her face as her own imagination betrayed her.

The room dissolved into horrified giggles.

Horrified giggles, Ellie thought, were a considerable improvement over the brittle silence she’d had last week when she’d asked about the bombing raids.

Behind her, on the blackboard, the English words stared back: Describe your first kiss.

She glanced at Aiko again.

The interpreter’s face was carefully neutral now, but her fingers twisted the hem of her jacket in a way Ellie had learned meant she was deeply uncomfortable.

You’re a fool, Ellie told herself. They’ve had men take every scrap of privacy from them for years, and you stroll in with your Education Corps party tricks and ask them to talk about kisses.

She almost reached for the eraser.

Then Hana spoke.

“Why?” she asked quietly. “Why that question?”

Aiko translated.

Ellie searched for an answer that wasn’t “Because it was on the card my sister mailed me.”

She sat down. Not on a chair—on the floor, cross-legged, so she was lower than the women in their seats.

“Because,” she said slowly, “where I come from, that is the kind of thing only a girl has any power over.”

Aiko repeated that, voice softer now.

“In war, men decide almost everything,” Ellie continued. “Where you sleep. What you eat. Where you go. When you live. When you die.”

That, no one needed translated. It hung in the air like smoke.

“But that first moment,” Ellie said, “the one where you leaned in because you wanted to, or you turned your head away because you didn’t, or he made a fool of himself and you laughed—”

She shrugged.

“Nothing to do with uniforms. Everything to do with you,” she said. “I thought… maybe it would be nice to remember one thing that belonged only to you, once. Or”—she glanced around the circle—“to remember that you’re allowed to say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ and have someone believe you.”

Aiko’s translation was slower this time, careful, respectful.

When she finished, the room was very quiet.

Hana looked down at her hands.

Everyone thought they knew what “comfort women” meant by now. The pamphlets said “victims of enemy exploitation.” The doctors’ reports said “history of repeated sexual use.” The officers’ briefings said “potential intelligence source—treat gently, handle with caution.”

None of that fit neatly inside Hana’s own memory—of the first time an officer had shut a door and said, “It will be easier for you if you do not fight.”

That had not been a kiss. That had been something stolen.

She realized, with a faint jolt, that she had never allowed her mind to wander back past that, to the boy with ink-stained fingers who had walked her home from school once, years earlier, and stared at her lips like he was trying to solve a problem in physics.

She swallowed.

“If I don’t have a first kiss that belongs to me,” she said suddenly, the words surprising even herself, “can I borrow one?”

The others turned to look at her.

“Borrow?” Midori asked.

Hana nodded, cheeks warming.

“I mean…” She fumbled. “I have ugly ones the war took. The ones that… don’t feel like mine. But if we are talking about things that belonged to us, maybe I can… choose a different ‘first.’”

She raised her eyes, defiant through her embarrassment.

“Who will lend me one?” she asked. “I promise to give it back when you go home.”

It was such a strange, earnest thing to say that the women were stunned into silence.

Then, unexpectedly, Midori laughed.

“You always knew how to make work for yourself,” she told Hana. “Very well.”

She turned to Ellie.

“Before we decide how scandalous we will allow this American to be,” she said, “she must tell us her own story. That is only fair.”

A chorus of agreement rose immediately.

Aiko smirked openly now. “They say you must go first,” she told Ellie. “Otherwise they will not… lend their ‘first kisses.’”

Ellie’s stomach dropped.

“What?” she sputtered. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“You brought the cards,” Aiko said, unhelpfully. “They are right. It is only fair.”

The women leaned forward, curiosity winning against modesty. For all their initial outrage, the idea of an American officer being forced to blush her way through a story about teenage clumsiness clearly appealed to them.

“Lieutenant Price,” Keiko said, deploying the full weight of her rank in a way that made Midori snort, “describe your first kiss.”

Ellie rubbed her face.

“I hate you,” she told Aiko in English.

Aiko grinned. “You wanted people, not uniforms,” she reminded her. “People tell stories. Now you must.”

Ellie sighed.

“Fine,” she said. “But if anyone laughs too hard, I will find ways to make the camp diet even worse.”

That got a round of nervous chuckles.

She searched back through her memory, past hospital corridors and field tents and the endless churn of casualty lists, to something softer.

“Well,” she began, “I grew up in a little town in Pennsylvania. Church every Sunday, gossip every Monday, the kind of place where everyone knows what color socks your brother wears.”

Aiko translated, mimicking Ellie’s small-town voice so perfectly that a few of the women smiled in recognition. Small towns were small towns, whatever language you spoke.

“There was a boy,” Ellie continued. “Of course there was. There is always a boy when these stories start. His name was Tommy Harrigan. His father owned the hardware store. He had freckles and thought he was funnier than he was.”

She could see him now—skinny, earnest, ears a little too big for his face.

“We were sixteen,” she said. “Which is… too old, I’m sure, by your standards, but in our town, still practically children.”

Midori made a face that said, Too young, more like, but said nothing yet.

“Anyway,” Ellie went on, “my parents trusted him because they had known him since he wore diapers. We walked home from the church picnic one evening. Fireflies were out. It was all very wholesome and scenic, I promise.”

“You are stalling,” Keiko observed.

“Yes,” Ellie admitted. “Because the embarrassing part is coming.”

She drew a breath.

“We got to the big maple tree at the end of my street,” she said. “He stopped and looked at me. I looked at him. My stomach was trying to leave my body through my throat. He said, ‘Ellie, can I—’ and then he just kind of leaned in without finishing the sentence.”

She made a helpless gesture with one hand, illustrating the awkward lunge.

“He missed my mouth entirely,” she said. “Hit my nose. Hard.”

There was a beat of silence as Aiko translated.

Then the room erupted.

The women gasped, clapped hands over their faces, groaned, and—despite themselves—laughed.

“He kissed your nose?” Yumi squeaked, horrified and delighted.

“Like a thirsty dog,” Ellie said mournfully. “Just— smack. Right on the bridge. My eyes watered. I made the most undignified noise. He panicked and jerked back, and in the process, he stepped on my foot and lost his balance and grabbed my shoulder and knocked us both into the ditch.”

“Into… the ditch?” Midori pressed both palms to her cheeks. “Our American allies are very… dramatic.”

“There was mud,” Ellie said. “There were grass stains. There was his little brother watching from the porch and yelling, ‘Ma! Tommy’s attacking Ellie!’”

The women groaned in sympathy and secondhand embarrassment.

“The intimate detail,” Ellie finished with a sigh, “is that technically, my first kiss tasted like nose, mud, and the peppermint Johnny had been sucking on because he was so nervous his mouth was dry. It was… not the sweeping romance the novels promised.”

By the time Aiko reached “nose, mud, and peppermint,” half the women were doubled over, cringing so hard their shoulders touched their ears.

“Terrible,” Keiko moaned, though she was smiling. “Awful. I hate that you told me that.”

“Now every time I see the peppermint candy in the canteen, I will think of… noses,” Yumi said, shuddering.

“Good,” Midori said. “That will discourage you from eating too much sugar.”

The hut rang with that peculiar sound that was half laughter, half a sort of emotional wince—the noise of women imagining something just a shade too vividly.

Ellie watched them, surprised at the warmth in her own chest.

Their faces had changed. Lines of suspicion smoothed, replaced by the universal expression of women sharing a slightly scandalous, painfully human story.

She exhaled.

“Your turn,” she said. “Someone save me from being the only one with a ridiculous nose story in the room.”

Silence fell again.

The women looked at each other, at their hands, at the dusty floor. Modesty pulled one way, the strange giddy relief of knowing their interrogator’s face had once been buried in a ditch pulled the other.

“I will go,” Midori said at last.

A chorus of surprised protests rose. Midori waved them down.

“I am old,” she said. “That means I have more bad stories than all of you, and less time left on earth to be embarrassed about them.”

Ellie bit back a smile. Some things, age did not change.

Midori folded her hands in her lap, eyes going unfocused.

“I was nineteen,” she began. “In my village, that was already nearly too old. My mother was beginning to sigh in that way…”

She imitated a long-suffering parental sigh so perfectly that even Aiko snorted.

“There was a boy,” Midori said. “Taro. He was not very bright, but he had kind eyes and strong hands. He worked in the rice fields. We had… been tripping over each other since we were children.”

She glanced at Ellie.

“We were not allowed to walk alone together,” she said. “But there is always a way.”

Ellie nodded. Teenagers were the same everywhere.

“We went to help at the temple,” Midori continued. “Sweeping, cleaning the lanterns. The priest was old and half asleep most of the time. We took too long with every task because we were trying to make conversation last.”

She smiled, the memory softening her features.

“At the end of the day, he walked me to the edge of the bamboo grove,” she said. “We could see the roof of my parents’ house from there. Fireflies were out. It was…” She made a face. “Very scenic. Like your maple tree. Perhaps this is a conspiracy between trees.”

A giggle rippled through the group.

“He said, ‘Midori, may I—’” She shook her head. “They all say that, I think.”

“Universal words,” Ellie agreed.

“I was so nervous,” Midori said, “that when he leaned closer, I thought, ‘I must close my eyes now, that is what happens in stories,’ and I did.”

She paused.

“The detail,” she said, “the one that makes me want to die every time I remember, is that I… forgot to stop walking.”

The women leaned in.

“I took one more step,” Midori explained, face red now. “With my eyes closed. There was a stone. I tripped. I fell forward. Taro tried to catch me but he was also leaning in and very stiff and very stupid, and his teeth…” She clacked her own teeth together for emphasis. “Hit my teeth. Hard.”

Keiko yelped and covered her mouth.

“There was blood,” Midori said, long-suffering. “From both of us. He said, ‘Ah! I have injured you!’ I said, ‘No, no, I am fine,’ except my lip was swelling and I lisped. It sounded like, ‘No, no, I am thine.’”

She groaned into her hands.

“The first words after my first kiss were… a wedding vow,” she said. “By accident. My grandmother would have fainted if she had heard.”

The hut exploded.

Women writhed in their seats, clutching at each other, half in agony, half in delight.

“I cannot bear this,” Yumi said, eyes squeezed shut, shoulders shaking. “This is worse than the nose.”

“Much worse,” Hana agreed, though her smile was wide. “I am never walking with my eyes closed near stones again.”

“Or near men,” Keiko muttered.

Midori spread her hands. “There,” she said. “Now you have a story you can borrow, Hana. I will take yours about… paperwork in exchange some other day.”

“Paperwork?” Ellie asked.

Hana flushed. “I was very efficient at the hospital,” she said defensively. “Everyone gave me the difficult forms to fill out.”

Midori patted her shoulder. “Her first love was ink,” she confided. “And silence.”

Hana rolled her eyes, but she looked… lighter.

Ellie watched them with something like awe.

Her ridiculous peppermint nose disaster and Midori’s tooth-cracking temple kiss had done more in fifteen minutes than three months of carefully calibrated “rapport-building sessions.”

They were still in a camp. There were still guards outside and barbed wire on the hills. There were still questions in folders, half-answered.

But inside this room, for this moment, they were just women comparing emotional scars that didn’t require a medic.

“You see?” Ellie said softly. “Not so terrible.”

She glanced at Hana.

“You don’t have to tell yours,” she added quickly. “You can stay with borrowed ones, if you like.”

Hana stared at her hands for a long time.

“I…” She stopped, cleared her throat. “My first kiss that I choose to remember is very dull,” she said.

The others waited.

“It was at school,” she began. “I was fifteen. There was a boy, Satoshi. He sat three desks ahead of me. He always had ink on his fingers.”

She flexed her own hand, remembering blue stains on nails.

“He would come to the library because I was always there,” she said. “He pretended to be interested in poetry. He was very bad at pretending.”

A few smiles.

“We walked home together once,” Hana said. “Only once. That was allowed, because it was still afternoon, and my aunt was sick so my mother could not fetch me.”

They turned down the little alley by the plum trees, she remembered. The air had smelled faintly sweet. Children had shouted in the distance.

“He asked me if I wanted to see the new book he had,” she said. “I said yes, because I did want to see the book, which had many diagrams, and also because it meant he would walk slower.”

She lifted a shoulder.

“At the gate to my house, he… stopped,” she said. “Of course. They all stop, it seems. He looked at me as if I were a particularly difficult sentence. Then he leaned in very quickly, as if he were afraid someone would shout at him.”

She smiled, the expression tentative.

“The detail,” she said, “is that he missed too. But not like your boy, Lieutenant.”

Her eyes crinkled toward Ellie.

“He aimed correctly,” she said, “but he… overshot. I was not as tall as he thought. His nose bumped my chin.”

She mimed the awkward angle.

“And then,” Hana added, “he said, ‘Ow.’ Very loudly. My mother opened the door to see what I had done to the poor boy.”

The women shrieked.

Midori actually slid half off her chair.

“Did she see you?” Keiko demanded.

“She saw his nose turn red,” Hana said. “She told him he should be more careful where he put it. He did not come to the library for a week.”

Laughter washed through the hut, bright and surprisingly clean.

Ellie laughed too. Not at Hana—at the image of a flustered teenage boy clutching his nose and a mother making a perfectly deadpan joke.

“So,” Hana said, when the noise had died down to hiccups and sighs, “that is the one I will lend.”

She looked around the circle.

“If anyone asks, my first kiss was with a boy whose nose did not know where to be,” she said. “Not with anyone in a uniform. Not behind any doors I did not close myself.”

Midori nodded solemnly. “Agreed,” she said.

One by one, the others murmured assent.

“Agreed,” Yumi said softly.

“Agreed,” Keiko added.

Ellie felt her throat tighten.

Consent had been taken from these women in so many ways for so long. Watching them reframe their own stories, even in this small, half-laughing way, felt like watching someone move a heavy stone off a tender plant.

She swallowed.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For sharing that with us.”

Aiko translated, her voice thicker than before.

Keiko cleared her throat.

“Now,” she said, a little too briskly, “we have heard about American nose attacks and Japanese teeth disasters. Someone must have had a good one. Otherwise I will give up on romance and marry a book.”

Yumi made a face. “Books do not bring rice,” she said.

“They bring peace,” Keiko replied. “That is worth something.”

Midori raised her eyebrows. “We will find you a man who brings both,” she said. “But first, let us see if any woman here knows how it is supposed to be done.”

There were groans and protests and more laughter, but one by one, more stories surfaced.

Yumi confessed, in a whisper that grew as the others egged her on, to a stolen peck in the shadow of her classroom door that had sent her bolting down the hall so fast she left her shoes behind.

One of the clerks spoke of a kiss through a paper screen—two silhouettes leaning in, lips never quite meeting because they were too shy, but deciding afterwards that it counted anyway.

Even Aiko, caught off guard by a sudden chorus of “You, too!” from both sides of the language line, admitted under duress that her first had been with a boy in California who had tried to impress her by reciting English poetry and mispronounced half of it.

“My stomach hurt from trying not to laugh,” she said. “So that is what I remember. Not even the kiss. Just the sound of him saying ‘Shall I compare thee to a simmer’s day.’”

The women collapsed.

Ellie put her face in her hands.

“From now on, whenever I hear Shakespeare, I’m going to think of you two,” she said.

“I already did,” Aiko replied.

The hour stretched.

Outside, the camp went on. Trucks rumbled. A bell clanged in the mess hall. A guard barked at someone to move along.

Inside the rec hut, the war receded a little.

They did not talk about bombs or orders or the statistics of suffering. They talked about noses and teeth and trembling hands and the way embarrassment could make your ears burn hotter than any fever.

When the time was up, Ellie stood reluctantly.

“I’m supposed to return you all to your regularly scheduled boredom,” she said. “Before the colonel decides I’ve corrupted you more than the enemy ever did.”

Midori snorted. “Too late,” she said. “You have already put peppermint and mud into my mind.”

“You have made stones and teeth very difficult,” Hana added with mock severity.

“And noses,” Keiko said darkly. “Noses will never be the same.”

Ellie bowed, hand over heart in exaggerated apology.

“I accept full responsibility,” she said. “If any of you ever trip into a ditch because some foolish boy cannot find your face properly, you may write a complaint letter to Lieutenant Eleanor Price, care of the United States Army.”

Keiko tilted her head. “And if we ever find a man who… does it properly?” she asked. “Where will we send those letters?”

Ellie blinked, then grinned.

“Send those to yourselves,” she said. “Keep them.”

As the women filed out, chattering more than they had in months, Aiko lingered.

“You took a big risk,” she said quietly in English.

Ellie blew out a breath. “I thought I’d misjudged terribly at first,” she admitted. “When you made that face? I wanted to crawl under a chair.”

Aiko’s mouth quirked. “We are… not used to speaking of such things,” she said. “Not in mixed company. Not in a place like this.”

She sobered.

“But,” she added, “it was good. I think. To remember that not every kiss we have ever had is tied to a uniform. To take that away from the war. A little piece.”

Ellie nodded.

“That was the hope,” she said.

Aiko studied her for a moment.

“What about you?” Ellie asked. “What’s the part of your story that makes you cringe?”

Aiko groaned. “The poem,” she said. “Always the poem. Sometimes, when the wind is loud at night, I hear ‘simmer’ instead of ‘summer’ and want to die.”

Ellie laughed.

“We’ll have to find you a better sonnet,” she said.

“Send it in a letter?” Aiko asked.

“Maybe,” Ellie said. “When the world calms down.”

They stood there for a moment, two women in uniforms that had been designed by men, talking about poems and teenage idiocy.

Then Aiko glanced at the door.

“They are waiting,” she said. “For the next thing. Whatever it is.”

Ellie nodded.

“Next week,” she said, “the card will say ‘Describe the first time you had to do something you thought you couldn’t.’”

Aiko arched an eyebrow. “That is every day,” she said.

“Exactly,” Ellie replied.

---

Years later, when the camp was long gone and the fence posts had rotted into the hillside, Hana Sato would sit in a small garden behind a rebuilt clinic and tell her daughter a story.

Not about the day the bombs fell, or the nights the officers knocked on the door. Those stories would come, slowly, as the girl grew older and the words grew less heavy in Hana’s mouth.

This story would be about a ridiculous American woman, a dusty hut, and an afternoon when a room full of women in gray dresses had argued about whether a nose to the chin was worse than teeth on teeth.

Her daughter would groan and cover her face and say, “Mother, that’s awful,” and Hana would laugh, the sound unexpectedly young.

“You are lucky,” she would say. “Your first kiss will not have to compete with a stone, or a ditch, or a peppermint candy.”

“You don’t know that,” her daughter would protest.

“No,” Hana would agree. “I do not. That is the wonderful, terrible thing. You will have your own story. And you will decide which part of it you keep.”

She would tap her daughter’s nose lightly.

“If anyone ever tries to tell you that all of you belongs to the war, or to a uniform, or to anything but yourself,” she would add, “remember this: once, in a place where there were guns at the gate, we laughed until our stomachs hurt about boys who did not know where our faces were.”

Her daughter would roll her eyes.

“That’s not very romantic,” she would say.

Hana would smile.

“No,” she would say. “But it helped us remember we were still… ningen. People. And that is sometimes better than romance.”

Somewhere across an ocean, Ellie Price—now Eleanor Harrigan, to her own amusement—would tell a similar story at a family gathering, her grandchildren squealing in delighted horror at the idea of their grandmother face-planting into a ditch with a boy named Tommy.

“And that,” she would say, “is why you do not close your eyes until you are sure you are standing still.”

“Grandma!” they would groan.

Aiko would send a postcard from a university town, a faded line at the bottom reading, “Found a poem that pronounces ‘summer’ correctly. Thought you should know.”

The war would be over. The camps would be closed. The files would gather dust in archives.

But in the private theaters of memory, that afternoon in the rec hut—when an “intimate detail” made Japanese women POWs cringe, laugh, and for a brief, precious hour feel like themselves again—would stay sharp.

Not because of the kisses themselves, but because of what choosing which one to remember had meant.

THE END