by Leslie Helm
ONCE THE ADOPTION SEED WAS planted inside me, it grew into an obsession. How could I raise a Japanese child when I continued to be so ambivalent toward Japan? How had my family’s long presence in Japan affected my father’s attitude toward Japan as well as my own? While waiting to hear from the adoption agency, I often pulled out the cardboard box of old photographs I had brought home from Dad’s. The box was soft and tired with age, but the black-and-white family photographs were crisp and sharp. They brought to life my relatives decked out in sharp suits, beautiful dresses and kimonos.
One evening, I came upon a photograph that was different from the rest. Great-Grandfather Julius sat relaxed among a group of stiff Japanese soldiers. It seemed impossible to me that this big husky German with the bushy beard could possibly be my great-grandfather. And the thin soldiers in their jackets, ribbed with braided rope and pinned with medals, seemed as unreal as the painted fireplace in the photo’s studio backdrop.
For many Helms, I would later learn, this photograph had become a touchstone, evidence that the Helms had played some important role in Japan’s history. But who were these people? I flipped over the picture, which was a copy of the original photograph. Written on the back was an inscription dating the photograph to the seventh year of the Meiji emperor’s reign, 1874. There was also a list of names identifying the people in the photograph.
One Saturday, not long afterward, I found myself sitting in a library before an encyclopedia set on Japanese history. What I read stunned me. According to the photo’s inscriptions, great-grandfather was sitting amid half a dozen of the founding fathers and greatest heroes of modern Japan.
On the top left was Nogi Maresuke. He was responsible for Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, the first time that a modern Asian power had defeated a Western power. Nogi rose from national hero to a god-like figure in 1912 when, following the death of Emperor Meiji, he and his wife committed ritual suicide to atone for a disgrace thirty-five years earlier and for leading the horrific siege of Port Arthur, which resulted in 58,000 Japanese casualties.
To Nogi’s left was Oyama Iwao, who selected the poem still used today as the lyrics for Japan’s national anthem: May my Lord’s reign continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations, until pebbles grow into boulders, covered in moss. Yamagata Aritomo, standing on the right, introduced universal conscription and became the architect of Japan’s modern army, modeling it on Prussia’s military. Right behind Julius was Saigo Takamori, modern Japan’s greatest hero. He led the military forces supporting the young Meiji Emperor to defeat the shogunate, thus ending two-and-a-half centuries of Tokugawa shogunate rule in Japan. When Japan abandoned samurai privileges and began adopting Western customs, Saigo would later lead a doomed samurai rebellion against the new government, a story dramatized in the movie The Last Samurai.
I was skeptical of what I had found. For one thing, the young Saigo in my photograph looked a lot different than the man pictured in the history books. Despite this discrepancy, I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe that our family was special—that I was not just another gaijin. If my ancestors had made some important contribution to Japan, perhaps I would feel more pride in my family’s long ties to the country.
To unravel the Helm story, I began with Great-Grandfather Julius’s memoir, as recorded by his brother in 1916 and written in German. The English translation, which is forty-two pages long, begins with a long account of how Julius was pulled out of school at fourteen and sent to apprentice at one farm estate after another, often laboring from three in the morning until eleven at night. He worked the fields and learned to keep accounts. He learned that “rapeseed, peas and potatoes had to be manured, while white oats and rye crops were raised without manure. Each cereal crop had to be followed by a foliage crop so the leaves of the plants would protect the ground against weeds.” My relatives always liked to joke about how Julius left Germany in 1868 to avoid a marriage his mother had arranged with the only daughter of a wealthy landlord. But it was clear from his autobiography that Julius was unhappy working as a farm manager for overbearing Prussian landlords who would berate him for the tiniest failing, including a stray potato found by the side of the road. Julius had chosen not to manage his father’s four-hundred-acre farm in Rosow, north of Berlin near the North Sea, because he didn’t want the responsibility of supporting his mother and nine siblings. Later, he would forever be finding ways to take care of them, but at twenty-eight, when an unreasonable boss insisted that he plow ground that was still frozen, he walked away, deciding to seek his fortune in America, where he could be his own boss.
When Julius arrived in Minnesota, however, he could only find work as a common laborer. At one farm he slapped a fellow workman who called him a “damn Dutchman.” When the man took up a boxing stance, Julius, who didn’t know how to box, held him in a bear hug until the landlord came to split up the fight. At another farm, his Irish employer wanted to marry Julius to a niece. When Julius saw a farmhand lose his arm in a thresher at yet another farm, he concluded America was not the place for him. In 1869, he took the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco with plans to board a ship to China. Since the recently completed railroad was now carrying mail from the East Coast, ships that had previously carried the mail had been put on new routes to Asia. Julius missed the China boat “by the length of my nose,” so he booked passage on the next ship, The Golden Age, which happened to be headed for Yokohama.
As I read great-grandfather’s story, I found myself admiring his decision to keep pushing beyond the familiar for something new. He was like no Helm I had ever known. The Helm relatives I knew were people caught between cultures. Like my father, and like me, they were quick to feel slighted, turn defensive and lash out in anger. Most had lived on three continents and spoke four languages, yet they never felt at home in any one country. The Helms I knew believed they were better than the Japanese, yet, of mixed blood and unable to read or write Japanese, they often felt insecure in the country of their birth. By contrast, Julius was as rooted in his German identity as an old oak tree, yet had no compunctions about pushing into new frontiers. Many years later, my son, Eric, with his powerful build, his sharp wit, his patience and his competitive drive, would remind me of Julius.
On weekends, I began to frequent the Yokohama Archives of History housed in the former British consulate, an historic brick building near the port. Saito Takio, a curator at the archives, helped me track down the dozens of Helms who had lived in Yokohama during the past century, each recorded in annual directories that listed foreigners living in Asia. Saito also showed me a lithograph of a dairy farm that had appeared on the cover of a history of dairy farming in Japan. “Helm Diary [sic],” it said. Julius had operated one of the first dairy farms in Japan. As Japan’s key portal to trade with the West, Yokohama was the entry point for virtually every Western product first introduced to Japan, including the first bakery, telegraph and train.
Japan didn’t always take well to this Western presence. Angry samurai determined to expel foreigners from Japan’s sacred soil had slain some of the first residents of Yokohama. Even nature seemed intent on keeping outsiders at bay. Typhoons, which brought what the Japanese called kamikaze (winds of the gods), had destroyed invading Mongol fleets twice in the late 1200s.
When Julius’s ship, The Golden Age, approached the Japanese coastline, it too was hit by a violent storm. The ship was a hybrid of sorts, sporting both sails and steam-powered paddle wheels. Toward the end of his journey, as he recounts in his memoir, Julius left his stuffy cabin for fresh air. He sat on the wood frame that covered the side wheel and felt the cool salt air whip against his face. He could feel the vibration and hear the sound of paddles churning below him. Above him, like a spear pointed at the stormy sky, the towering mast shivered and tipped as gusting winds filled the sails. Feeling cold, Julius went to his cabin to fetch a coat. When he returned to his seat, he was stunned to see a bare paddle wheel sending spray into the whirling wind. �
�During the short time I had been gone, a large wave had torn [the wooden frame] entirely away.” Had he not left for his jacket, he surely would have died. But instead of fear, Julius felt exhilaration. All his life he had been pushed around, first by his father and later by his bosses. Now the only thing pushing him was the wild wind—and it was at his back.
The next morning, Julius awoke to discover the mast had broken and the engine room had flooded, extinguishing the boilers. The passengers helped clear the debris from the deck so the crew could re-fire the boilers. The ship limped into Yokohama’s harbor passing lush narrow valleys sided by terraced hills and villages with thatched-roof houses. Yokohama harbor swarmed with sampans, some with squared sails, others powered by bronze-backed men who pushed back and forth on a single oar that reached out the back of the boat.
The Yokohama of 1869 was a bustling town that handled the import of cotton yarn, oils, vegetables, meats and machinery, while exporting tea and silks. Before the arrival of foreigners, Yokohama was a village of eighty households far from the main centers of commerce that stretched from Tokyo to Osaka. Now, as trade flourished, so did the population, as thousands of Japanese merchants gathered from all over Japan to engage in trade. In 1869, less than a decade after Japan opened itself to foreign trade, nearly seven hundred foreign vessels entered Yokohama harbor. Yet, as late as 1871, there were still only 1,586 Europeans and Americans living in Japan, a few hundred of whom lived in the recently opened port of Kobe, 260 miles to the southwest. Some described the foreign settlement as having a “wild west” atmosphere because of the many grog houses, gambling dens and brothels the sailors frequented. Prostitutes were often kept in street-front cages on display for customers. One British visitor described the foreign population in Yokohama as “the scum of Europe,” although there were also more proper gentlemen’s clubs that European merchants frequented.
Julius describes in his diary how his first task upon arriving in Yokohama was to find himself a new bow tie, perhaps in hopes of differentiating himself from the common riffraff. Leaving the pier, he walked down a street lined with shops selling lacquer pillboxes, sumi-e scrolls and ivory carvings.
The Customhouse of Yokohama, 1870. NEXT PAGE: Map of early Yokohama, 1893.
To the south was the foreign settlement of two-story stone and brick buildings. The settlement, first constructed in 1859, had burned down
in 1866 and recently had been rebuilt. Two years before, the foreign settlement had also been expanded across a canal that had once served as its southern boundary. The settlement now included the two-mile stretch of hills where a community of Victorian homes had sprung up, a neighborhood called The Bluff. Along the canal, at the foot of The Bluff, was Motomachi, a shopping street where foreigners went to buy books, groceries and medicine, and where I would be born in a small clinic 86 years later.
To the north was the more densely populated Japanese town of tile-roofed compounds. There Julius would have seen peddlers balancing on their shoulders long poles with large hanging baskets filled with shellfish or vegetables. Hawkers, each with their own shrill sounds audible above the street noise, peddled their wares.
As Julius strolled through the town, he must have smelled pungent roasting teas wafting from large warehouses where the tea leaves were fired to dry before exporting. Everywhere he went, Julius would have seen colorful banners as if Yokohama had been dressed up for a special occasion. And so it was. “The town was in the state of grand festivities because of the horse races,” wrote Julius.
Julius found his bow tie at a general store owned by Krause, a German. Krause introduced Julius to a German butcher who offered him room and board in exchange for work. He then apprenticed himself to a German baker. Thanks to his size—he was over six-feet tall—and his great strength, Julius finally found a well-paid job at the US Consulate in Yokohama tracking down sailors and dragging them back to their ships. He hated the work and was relieved when Carroll & Co., an American company that supplied provisions to ships, offered him a job as warehouse keeper. He was in charge of transporting goods to the ships on one of the small sampans he had admired on his arrival. Julius lived frugally in a small room in his employer’s warehouse, making one dollar’s worth of coal last through the winter of 1870 by using no more than a single lump per day.
Japan encouraged the introduction of Western technologies; the year Julius arrived the first telegraph was built and construction was begun on the first railway. However, Japan was also wary of its foreign guests. Its leaders knew that the West’s colonization of China and consequent introduction of the opium trade had contributed to its decline. So Japan limited the movement of foreigners, requiring them to obtain a special passport to venture beyond a twenty-five-mile radius.
In early 1871, Julius received a summons from Max von Brandt, the German consul general in Yokohama. A stout, pompous man, von Brandt told Julius he had just returned from a trip to Wakayama, the domain of an important warlord several hundred miles to the west. There, von Brandt had witnessed something remarkable: A German sergeant named Carl Koppen was in the process of transforming a band of sword-bearing samurai into a modern army. “Before Koppen came, we were barbarians,” von Brandt had heard one Japanese officer say. “Now we are like Europeans. We want to become Prussians.” Von Brandt had heard Julius had experience in the Pioneers, Germany’s engineering battalion, and said Julius would be well paid if he traveled to Wakayama to become a military adviser.
Some of Julius’s experiences in Wakayama are recorded in a book I brought home from Dad’s library called Oyatoi Gaikokujin (Foreign Hired Hands). It describes the activities of some of the two thousand or so Westerners the Japanese government had hired in the nineteenth century to help the nation on its path to modernization. I tracked down the author, Shigehisa Tokutaro, a history professor at the Kyoto City University of Arts. His son answered the phone. “How unfortunate,” he said. “My father just died last month. He would have loved to have met you.”
I was crestfallen. I had started my search too late. But the son gave me the name of another professor, Umetani Noboru, who had taken over his mentor’s work. I met Umetani at a small coffee shop in Tokyo. He was a friendly man with a generous smile. He came with copies of articles about Julius’s work in Wakayama that had appeared in the English language press in Japan in the 1930s.
I showed Umetani the picture of Julius with the soldiers. “If the names on the back are accurate, this is a remarkable photograph,” he said. Saigo Takamori, the legendary leader of the famous samurai rebellion, Umetani explained, hated to have his picture taken and had never been photographed. If this were really Saigo, it could be the only photo in existence of one of Japan’s greatest heroes.
“But the man in the picture doesn’t look like Saigo,” I said.
Umetani explained that the picture of Saigo used in textbooks was not a real photograph, but a composite. He showed me the line below the cheekbones where the photo of one person’s broader chin and cheek had been grafted onto Saigo’s younger brother’s narrower upper face. Umetani suggested I visit the curator of the Wakayama City Museum to gather more information.
When I finally made the trip to Wakayama, a once-powerful castle town about 360 miles west of Tokyo, the curator of the museum showed me an exhibit he had put together about the German advisers who had worked in Wakayama, including Great-Grandfather Julius. When I showed him the names on the back of the photograph, he raised his eyebrows. We went through dozens of books in the museum, but we could find nothing to confirm the men in the picture were in fact the names written on the back of the photograph.
On a subsequent visit, however, the curator gave me something valuable: a manuscript that a German scholar, Margaret Mehl, had recently completed on Carl Koppen, the man Julius had worked for in Wakayama. The manuscript contained entries from Koppen’s diary, letters he had written and scholarly analysis of the period. That summer, while vacationing on my sister’s houseboat in Utah’s beautiful Lake Po
well where our family had gathered for a reunion, my mother, who was born German, helped me translate large chunks of the Koppen diary into English.
With that translation, Julius’s memoir, anecdotes from the museum curator, newspaper articles and other research, I recreated the story of Julius’s work as a military adviser. I was searching for information that would tell me something positive about my family—something that would demonstrate we had made an important contribution to Japan. What I found was something different altogether.
JULIUS AND HIS YOUNGER BROTHER, Adolf, who had recently arrived from New York on Julius’s invitation, left Yokohama in the spring of 1871 on a small coastal ship. They landed at dusk the following day at Wakanoura, a half-moon bay of sandy beach. Julius and Adolf were led on horseback past temples placed around the perimeter of the city to serve as the first line of defense. Then they passed the walled residences of the city’s nobles from where they could see, high above the city, Wakayama castle with its elegant sloping roof glowing in the moonlight.
In a compound at the foot of the castle, they were greeted by Koppen, a short, stocky Saxon with a receding hairline. Koppen had asked his personal cook to prepare a special French meal for Julius and Adolf. After dinner, Koppen explained the rules: They were not to fraternize with the Japanese soldiers; they were not to enter Japanese homes; with the exception of certain servants, Japanese were not to enter their home without written permission from the Wakayama government; they could leave the training grounds only if they were accompanied by guards. “The guards are there to protect you,” Koppen explained, puffing on his pipe. “But they are also there to keep an eye on you.”
Wakayama’s position in Japan was a delicate one, Koppen explained. As a key pillar of the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan for 250 years, Wakayama had amassed great power, becoming one of the wealthiest domains. But the Western warships that had abruptly ended Japan’s isolation a decade before, had also undermined the power of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In 1868, Satsuma and Choshu, two southwest domains, overthrew the shogun, moved the sixteen-year-old emperor from Kyoto to the shogun’s castle in Tokyo and established a council of advisers to rule in his name. Japan remained a feudal land in which power was divided among hundreds of domains, each headed by a lord who maintained his own army. Wakayama had decided to modernize its army following the Prussian model in hopes of restoring the domain to its previous prominence.