by Leslie Helm
The men were there to pay their last respects to Dad, but also to Helm Brothers, a family business that had sustained their families for generations. Helm House, a block of apartments and offices my grandfather built, had, at various times, been Helm Brothers’ headquarters, the home of foreign diplomats, the headquarters of the German navy, the home of US Eighth Army officers during the Occupation and the home of the Yokohama Police Department. Now it was just a nameless office building. There were a half dozen real-estate companies that still used the Helm name, but none had anything to do with us. The new Taiwanese owners of Helm Brothers, I was told, had been involved in shady dealings. In the opening scene of a Japanese thriller I read, a corpse is found in an apartment managed by the Heim (sic) Brothers, which is described as a seedy international company.
As dusk descended and the courtyard emptied, family and friends gathered a couple of miles away at the modest house where Dad had moved with Toshiko after my parents’ divorce. The house sat several feet below the level of the street and it felt like an earthquake every time a bus passed. Before land prices began to plummet in 1990, this little house, the last remaining piece of the family’s once extensive real estate holdings, was itself worth a substantial fortune.
As I slipped off my shoes in an entryway already crowded with black leather shoes, I could hear laughter. “I remember the time he shot a hole in one,” said one of Dad’s former employees. “That cost him plenty!” According to Japanese tradition, a golfer who got a hole in one was obligated to buy gifts for all his golf partners. Dad had not skimped on the gifts. Insurance companies would later offer hole-in-one insurance to cover such rare occurrences.
I poured myself a glass of Kirin and sat down in the dining room. Before long Itoh-san, a former employee of Dad’s, stood next to me. I remembered him as a thin, confused young man who seemed to tremble before my father. Now he was a sizable man with a protruding belly and a smug, knowing look.
Itoh began to reminisce about the early 1960s, when Dad broke away from Helm Brothers to launch his own business. “He helped me buy my first piece of property,” Itoh recalled. “Don said we should know what it was like to be a landlord if we were going to be in the real-estate business.”
As Itoh continued to drink, his face darkened. “I was completely against the divorce,” he said. “Your relatives liked your mother. Your father lost the support he needed to keep Helm Brothers in the family when he left her.”
It felt like Itoh wielded a poker and was messing around among Dad’s dead ashes to see if there were any live embers, to see if he could get a rise out of the man who had frequently humiliated him.
Perhaps Itoh spotted my unease because he suddenly changed his tone. “Don was just too honest. He didn’t like doing things in an underhanded way,” Itoh said. “It’s just too bad; you could have all been rich.”
AFEW WEEKS LATER, MY brother Chris and I went with Toshiko to the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery to visit Dad’s new grave. The tombstone, a flat block of polished black granite, was tucked against the shrubbery that lined the northern border of the cemetery. At a nearby water tap, Toshiko filled a blue plastic bucket with water and grabbed a couple of the scrub brushes available for visitors to use. While we watched, she squatted down and scrubbed Dad’s gravestone. After a few minutes, she handed each of us a brush. I thought it was pointless cleaning the shiny surface of this spotless new stone, but I went through the motions. Meanwhile, Toshiko arranged the flowers she had brought and placed them in the stainless steel vase at the foot of the gravestone.
“See, Don? Your children are here,” she said, looking adoringly at the gravestone. “Isn’t it nice? They are scrubbing your back.”
I cringed. I had never been that close to Dad when he was alive. After putting away the bucket and scrub brushes, we stood in front of the grave to pray. My palms felt awkward pressed together like that—two parts of me that were unaccustomed to each other. What was I supposed to do? Pray to God? Talk to Dad’s spirit? I was relieved when Toshiko raised her head and it was time to go.
In the weeks that followed, I spent much of my time dealing with my father’s estate. I was discussing business with the man who had become the president of Helm Brothers after my father left. I took the opportunity to ask him if he was aware of any Helm Brothers records.
The man looked at me stiffly. “I used to worship every day before the picture of your great-grandfather, but your family betrayed us,” the man replied with a bitterness that startled me. “Sure, there were documents. Helm House was filled with documents when your father sold the company. We had them all sent to the dump.”
ONE EVENING ABOUT A MONTH after the funeral, I was browsing the magazines on display at a train platform kiosk when I saw the banner headline on a copy of the Bungei Shunju, an intellectual journal. “Kenbei,” it read—contempt for America. I bought it and flipped to the special report. My heart quickened as I began reading the essays. This was incredible! Here were Japan’s leading industrialists and intellectuals declaring that the United States was a nation in decline. The chief executive of a giant electronics company said he wouldn’t buy American semiconductors because they were shoddy. A Japanese novelist said the noble America she had once admired had turned into a self-centered bully. An economist advised the United States to focus on its one true expertise: farming.
I thought of what Miyazawa Kiichi, the newly appointed prime minister, had told me in an interview just a few weeks before. His greatest fear, he had said, was that America, incapable of competing fairly with Japan, would start a trade war by blocking the import of Japanese products. Miyazawa’s low regard for American industry, I realized, was another symptom of this growing disdain for America.
Japan’s attitude toward the West had always swung like a pendulum. Western merchants and priests were welcomed into the country from Portugal in about 1543, only to be thrown out a century later. When Christian converts in Japan refused to renounce their faith, they were massacred by a newly isolationist government fearful of outside interference. In the mid-1800s, the rallying cry of “drive out the barbarians” that followed Commodore Perry’s arrival was supplanted by the wholesale importation of Western institutions and technology a few decades later under the Meiji emperor. In the militarist Japan of the 1930s, Westerners were reviled, but following the nation’s humiliating defeat in World War II, everything American was worshipped. My family’s fortunes in Japan had risen and fallen with those tides.
In those first two decades after World War II, when I was growing up in Japan, the Japanese rushed wholeheartedly toward everything American, but they were a cowed people. In “A Nation of Sheep,” a short story by Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo published in 1958, Japanese men seated in a bus are too intimidated to stop American soldiers from taunting a Japanese college student. Reading the story for the first time in a Japanese literature class in college, I remember identifying with the student. I hated the American soldiers for being such bullies, and I felt contempt for the Japanese men on the bus who refused to defend the boy.
As someone with deep roots in Japan, I was glad to see the Japanese finally stand up for themselves. America was a bully. Yet, at the same time I felt defensive as I always did when I heard non-Americans criticize the United States. Perhaps that was what made me uneasy about this notion of kenbei: it revealed a gulf between America and Japan that did not allow a place for people caught in between, like the student in the story—like me.
The next day, I began reporting for an article about this growing disdain for America. I talked to dozens of executives, reporters and bureaucrats. “There is certainly something wrong with American society,” a vice minister for foreign affairs told me. His office was decorated with costumed dolls, intricately carved daggers and other exotic gifts he had received from foreign dignitaries during his long career as a diplomat. “How can the United States be a model for us when they have to ask us to pay for their war [the Gulf War]?” asked the vice m
inister. Japan, he felt, could no longer depend on its “older brother,” the United States. In hierarchical Japan, few strong relationships are among equals. If America were no longer Japan’s superior, then it must now be its inferior.
My article, In Japan: Scorn for America, appeared in late October on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and was picked up by newspapers around the world. My editors loved it. A friend at the State Department said President Clinton, who was preparing for his upcoming trip to Japan, had commented on it. I loved the attention.
A few days later, the vice minister I had interviewed invited me to an expensive restaurant. Over tender Kobe beef, he expressed concern that my story would not contribute to better relations between Japan and the United States. I didn’t fully understand what he was getting at until two weeks later when, sitting at my desk, I received a packet of letters from readers that had been forwarded to me by my editor. The letters were all about my kenbei story. The first few were complimentary and I smiled, but as I read on, the blood drained from my face.
“How dare you mock (Americans) ... you spit at those who not only befriended you but taught you how to live,” wrote one man in a letter addressed: “To Every Japanese who hates Americans.”
A man who claimed to be the founder of “The Great American Majority Association” called my article “America-bashing by Jap scum” and accused me of turning on my country “like a poisonous weasel.”
One letter suggested my article be enlarged and placed on billboards near Japanese auto and electronics dealers.
My heart pounded as I continued to read the letters. The raw anger and hatred they expressed frightened me. Later I heard that anti-Japanese graffiti had popped up in parts of Los Angeles following publication of the article. I felt like a child playing with matches who had started a fire he could not control.
Had I been fooling myself? I knew Americans regarded their country as the greatest nation on earth. Of course they would be upset. Wasn’t that what made kenbei such a good story? Ever since the end of World War II, Japan had played the role of obedient disciple to its American teacher. Now, it seemed, Japan was coming into its own. It was a legitimate story. And yet, I had a nagging feeling. Was I simply reporting a trend or was I venting some deeper personal hostility toward Japan?
I pulled out one of a series of binders from the shelf behind me. These binders were my pride. They contained all the articles I had written during my decade-long career as a reporter. My research assistant had already pasted in the newspaper clip of the kenbei story and I re-read it. It was a fine story. Well, perhaps I didn’t need the part at the end about the sushi chef who insisted I eat whale meat so I would understand Japan and its whale-hunting culture. The scene was an unnecessary dig at the you-don’t-understand-us-we-are-an-island-nation-with-few-natural-resources refrain Japanese so often repeated.
I began flipping through earlier stories I had written. Then I pulled out other scrapbooks and went through them as well. Most of the articles I had written over the course of my career were critical of Japan in some way. I looked for genuinely positive articles I had written during my two separate stints as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo. I was embarrassed to discover that there were only a few. In part, I was merely reflecting the dogma of the time. When I graduated from journalism school in 1982, Japan was at the height of its economic power. Japanese companies had conquered one American industry after another, resulting in massive unemployment in many US cities. In my first job interview, a Business Week editor had asked me what I thought was key to Japan’s economic success. “Protectionism,” I answered, sensing this was a litmus test. The editor liked that answer. It showed I was not a sympathizer, that I would not “go native.” This was an economic war, and I would be reporting for the American side.
Even so, when I arrived in Japan in the fall of 1982 for my first journalism job, I tried to do everything the Japanese way. I wanted to be different from the typical expatriate. Business Week offered me a generous housing allowance. Instead of living in a modern, Western-style apartment, as we did later, Marie and I rented a large, traditional Japanese house from a retired geisha. The house had all the elements I considered most beautiful about Japanese architecture. There were two large tatami-floored rooms with sliding shoji doors that opened onto a stunning Japanese garden of massive boulders and meticulously pruned trees. The doors and the room dividers had exquisitely carved designs. The tokonoma, or alcove, had a private altar and a pillar made of a natural tree trunk.
A few weeks after moving into the house, I walked down to the local senbei shop to buy a dozen boxes of salty rice crackers wrapped in seaweed, a traditional favorite.
“What are you going to do with all this senbei?” the grizzled old man at the shop asked.
“I just moved in around the corner. These are gifts for my neighbors,” I replied. Then I bowed to the old man: “Yoroshiku onegaishimasu (I look forward to your kind favor).”
“That’s very nice. It is a proper gesture,” the man said with a smile that revealed glinting steel crowns. “But don’t expect to be treated like a Japanese person. You will always be a foreigner, you know.”
Not long afterward, I went drinking with a Japanese executive from a large electronics company. We were well into the evening when he asked: “So, how come you speak such good Japanese; do you have a Japanese wife?”
“No. My wife is from Los Angeles. She’s Caucasian. I was born in Japan,” I said. “My great-grandfather came at the beginning of the Meiji Period and married a Japanese woman.”
“Hmmm. Really? I never would have taken you for being part Japanese.”
The man looked at me strangely. I asked him where his family came from, but the conversation soon petered out. It was as if, in one instant, he reassessed me and concluded I was not worthy of his time. I was not a real foreigner, but some kind of half-breed. Perhaps I was being oversensitive, but after that I stopped talking about my Japanese blood. “I was born in Japan,” I would tell people, but leave it at that.
Something unpleasant like this would happen every time I returned to live in Japan. At first, I would feel a deep sense of belonging: the warm press of bodies on a crowded subway; the hot steam rising from a bowl of noodles; even the pungent smell of car exhaust made me feel at home. Every sensation would tap a memory bank that brought me pleasure. Then something would turn sour.
Once I took an American friend who was visiting to a small yakitori bar near my apartment. I loved introducing Western visitors to the small eateries where the best Japanese cuisine is served. When I slid open the glass door to enter, the man standing behind the bar crossed his arms in an “x” to indicate I wasn’t welcome.
This tendency to exclude foreigners was not unusual at the time. Owners of small restaurants and bath houses frequently objected to having their regulars disturbed by foreigners. “We can’t really relax when we are around outsiders. They don’t understand us,” a man once confided to me. There is even an ideology called Nihonjinron, “the theory of Japaneseness,” to describe this sense that the Japanese are a special race of people. Japanese uniqueness was often used as a reason for blocking the import of foreign products. French skis weren’t appropriate for Japanese slopes because Japanese snow was different. American beef shouldn’t be imported because Japanese intestines couldn’t digest it.
The chasm the Japanese deliberately created between us and them irritated and frustrated many Westerners. But other foreigners had their own identities as Americans or Germans. They were rooted in their own cultures. I had never lived in America as a child and had never really felt like an American. Perhaps that was why I took it personally when I was excluded from a Japanese restaurant. It was a reminder that I had no identity except as a gaijin. Although my family had lived in Japan for four generations and I spoke Japanese fluently, to the Japanese I was just another foreigner.
Sometimes there would be an almost surreal disconnect when people saw my Caucasian face and spoke
to me in Japanese. Once, about five minutes into a conversation in Japanese with an executive I had just met at a reception, the man asked: “So, do you speak Japanese?”
For a moment, I was disoriented. “We are speaking Japanese now, aren’t we?” I said finally, continuing in Japanese.
He cocked his head and chuckled. “Ahhh, that explains it. I didn’t think my English was this good.” I laughed at the time, but the remark reminded me yet again that while I might occasionally fool myself into thinking I fit into Japan, nobody else would ever make that mistake.
Now, as I went through my old newspaper clips, I realized that my frustration with Japan had found expression in my work as a journalist. I had seen it as my mission to rip off the veil of secrecy with which Japan tried to shroud itself.
The Japanese often claimed that they didn’t need lawyers because they were one harmonious family, but I wanted to show how false that was. I traveled to a remote mountain region where villagers had once scraped the arsenic off kilns used to burn arsenic ore so the powder could be sold for rat poison. When villagers started dying of cancer in the 1960s, they filed a lawsuit against the mining company. Most of the plaintiffs were dead by the time I wrote the story in the spring of 1991 and the remaining ones had just agreed to settle with the company to avoid further litigation. In my eyes, this was not harmony, but oppression.
I was also cynical about the many Japanese customs I grew up with that other visitors seemed to find so charming. How generous the Japanese were with their constant exchange of gifts. Hah! This was no quaint custom. They were imposing on each other a complex web of mutual obligations that was the source of much of their misery. I am not getting caught in that trap, I told myself.