by Leslie Helm
The following morning, Koppen took Julius and his brother to the military training grounds where they watched as Koppen put the Japanese soldiers through their drills. The soldiers’ uniforms consisted solely of a black wool tunic and a hat made of paper painted with black lacquer. Julius chuckled at the way many of the soldiers used sticks in place of rifles, like children playing at war. But once they began to goose-step down the field, Julius was impressed at the way their legs rose and fell in unison.
When the exercise ended, there was a single crisp whack as the soldiers all clapped their guns and wooden sticks to their shoulders at precisely the same moment. It was an impressive performance at a time when Western observers believed it was beyond the ability of Asians to move in a disciplined manner.
Koppen showed Julius a Prussian-made needle gun, so-called because a needle strikes a cartridge to create the explosion that releases the bullet. Unlike the traditional musket, in which bullet and gunpowder are loaded from the front of the barrel—a time-consuming process—the needle gun could be quickly loaded from the back.
Julius had seen the gun before. In the summer of 1866, when war broke out between Prussia and Austria, he had been assigned to Prussia’s First Army, a force of 93,000 men commanded by Prince Friedrich Karl, the Prussian king’s nephew. When the prince, eager for glory, prematurely ordered an attack on the backbone of the Austrian Army, a force twice its size, many of his colleagues in the infantry believed the rapid-firing capabilities of this needle gun had saved them from suffering far heavier losses. The Prussian soldiers could shoot as many as five bullets in the time it took the Austrian forces to load their muskets once.
Upon hearing of Julius’s training as a Prussian pioneer, Koppen immediately appointed him head of a new engineering battalion. On his first day at work, Julius gathered his men at the training ground. With the help of a Japanese assistant who spoke rudimentary German, Julius quickly put the men to work. “I gathered the materials and turned an old barge into a pontoon for a pontoon bridge,” wrote Julius. “Then I picked out the sixteen strongest men to carry the pontoon, but the results were pitiful.”
The soldiers, Julius noticed, were mostly old men or boys. His interpreter explained that as samurai they had never engaged in manual labor. Most were unfit. Like the empty castle and the fortified temples, these soldiers were an anachronism. Samurai, the warrior class, accounted for about five percent of the population and were at the top of the social hierarchy followed by peasants, artisans and merchants. But by the 1800s, after centuries of peace, they had evolved into a class made up largely of administrators and social parasites.
When Julius told Koppen that his samurai could not perform the required work, Koppen said nothing. His answer came soon afterward when he sent Julius a hundred new recruits. They were all strong young farmers. The year before, in spite of opposition from many samurai who believed commoners would flee at the first sign of danger, Wakayama became the first domain in Japan to institute universal conscription. All twenty-year-old males, regardless of class, were required to serve in the army for three years. Koppen had taken the first recruits for his infantry. Now a new crop of men were supplied to Julius. Their first task was to learn discipline: to obey without question. For this, Julius made them goose-step up and down the training ground day after day.
When Julius announced to his soldiers that they would build pontoon bridges, the men were eager to learn. They completed their first pontoon within a few hours by lashing together old fishing boats. Unlike the samurai, these farmers were strong and could lift the pontoon with ease. They quickly assembled six more. A few days later, Julius taught them how to anchor the pontoons in place and then lash planks on top. In this way, they built a bridge across the broad castle moat. The soldiers who gathered at the bridge were skeptical. “Sure there is a bridge,” said one of the men. “But will it hold?”
At Julius’s command, the whole company marched over the bridge and back. “The astonishment never ceased,” Julius wrote.
Soon Julius had them working on new projects—they gathered timber to build tunnels and trenches.
Julius and his German colleagues believed that to fight like Westerners, the Japanese had to live like Westerners. Accustomed to a diet of fish and vegetables, the Japanese soldiers were forced to eat meat. Instead of eating and sleeping on the floor, the soldiers sat on chairs and slept in beds. Traditionally, the samurai shaved the crowns of their heads, allowing the rest of their hair to grow long so it could be arranged into a long queue and pulled forward in a manner to make them look fierce. This elaborate hairstyle required an assistant’s help. “When Koppen explained to the Japanese that the Prussian soldier was only allowed a few fractions of a second to fix his hair,” Julius wrote, “they finally agreed to sacrifice their queue.”
Progress often required challenging taboos. The soldiers could not march in straw sandals, so Koppen had arranged for a German tanner and shoemaker to join their small group in Wakayama. The German advisers dined each night at Koppen’s home. “So what is this word naosu that the men shout at me all the time?” the shoemaker asked one night over dinner.
Koppen exploded with laughter. “That is what the leather workers who fix sandals call out when they offer their services in the streets.”
The Japanese were making fun of this foreigner for doing “unclean” leatherwork that only untouchables in Japan handled. The German tanner was not amused.
If the Germans were undertaking a cultural revolution inside the training camp, outside it Julius witnessed a Japan that looked much as it had for centuries. I wish I could have walked beside my great-grandfather as he explored a land where peasants still measured the passing days by phases of the moon and daylight was divided not into hours but into six equal periods, with each period expanding in the summer and shrinking in the winter.
Farmers walked on the paddles of small water wheels to lift water into their paddy fields. Most carts were pulled by hand. Captain H.C. St. John, a naturalist and hunter who traveled in Wakayama in the early 1870s, describes in Notes and Sketches from the Wild Coasts of Japan how badgers and deer wandered freely through the villages. Herons, cranes and mandarin ducks settled among the paddy fields, unalarmed by villagers who planted rice stalks nearby. St. John discovered, however, that when he approached a bird while hunting, it would immediately fly away. “The duck and geese knew at once I was not a Japanese and therefore not to be trusted,” he wrote.
If Julius experienced the peace and stability that existed in much of Japan before Westerners arrived, he may not have been aware of the brutal cultural traditions that helped to maintain that social order.
When I was fourteen, I began to learn about some of those Japanese customs. I visited a workshop in the northern mountains of Japan for a school field trip. I watched an old man polish a spherical piece of wood and pass it on to an old woman who painted a sweet face on it with a few dabs of red from her paintbrush. The two were making kokeshi, the armless cylindrical dolls you can find in souvenir shops across Japan.
I have never looked at the dolls, or at Japanese culture, in quite the same way since the old lady told me what she believed the word meant. Years later, as I considered adopting a Japanese girl, the words would haunt me. “Kokeshi literally means ‘to erase a child,’” the old woman explained to us. Traditionally, she said, the dolls had been used by farmers to remind them of the little girl they had drowned at birth so they would have one less mouth to feed. I later learned that many historians question the connection between infanticide and kokeshi dolls. Yet the historical record shows that female infanticide was so common in Japan that as late as the mid-1880s there were some villages in Japan with twenty-five percent more boys than girls. Japanese villages had found an efficient, if chilling, method of maintaining a stable population.
Regular public executions were another way Japan maintained social order at the time. Even petty thieves could be decapitated, their heads stuck on posts for public
display as a warning to others. Western newspapers published pictures of such scenes to support their view that the Japanese were barbarians. Foreign advisers like Great-Grandfather Julius, of course, were busily teaching Japan European tactics for killing people far more efficiently.
In the old Japan, samurai armies were relatively small. In that fateful summer of 1871, after the Meiji emperor had been in nominal control for three years, he had only a few thousand soldiers at his command. A warlord with a modestly strong army could still take control. But to make Wakayama a power to be reckoned with, Koppen needed more guns. In July, Koppen sailed for Germany to buy 4,000 more needle-nosed guns and to hire another half-dozen military instructors.
Word spread of Wakayama’s efforts to modernize its military. “In a small Japanese region still closed to foreigners, German institutions are having a far-reaching influence,” a reporter wrote in the July 21, 1871 issue of the German newspaper National Zeitung. The reporter questioned whether it was such a good idea to be teaching the Japanese the ways of modern warfare, but determined that the German advisers were helping to elevate the soldiers of Wakayama morally and socially. “Peace through war,” the reporter concluded. The New York Times ran a similar story in the summer of 1871.
While Koppen was in Germany, Julius continued to train his men. Soon he had five hundred men under his command. But on August 29, 1871, shortly before Koppen was scheduled to return with his guns, the Meiji emperor ordered the daimyo (lords) of the nation’s three hundred domains to disband their armies and resign their posts, passing real control to the central government.
“The [emperor’s council of advisers] had planned this coup d’etat [against the lords] for some time, but delayed it because of some doubts about the loyalty of the warlords,” wrote Julius in his reminiscences. “They took advantage of Koppen’s absence as well as Wakayama’s shortage of arms and war materials to eliminate the armies of the warlords.”
Historians today differ over whether Wakayama ever truly posed a threat to the Meiji government as Julius believed. It is remarkable how Japan’s lords succumbed so quickly to central government rule. A feudal system that had been in place for seven hundred years was dismantled peacefully in a matter of months.
Sometime later, three thousand Wakayama samurai gathered at the daimyo’s offices for a farewell ceremony. Julius did not write about this scene, but according to historical records, all the paper doors and shoji screens were removed to create one massive room. The samurai sat in their colorful ceremonial robes as the daimyo thanked them for the loyal service they and their ancestors had provided over the centuries. Many samurai could not hold back tears as they were released from their service—demoted from loyal samurai with status and monthly stipends to ronin, leaderless men with no choice but to find new occupations. Some went to work as servants in foreign households; others pulled rickshaws. Most samurai received little more than a folding fan printed with the name of their daimyo. Only the most senior retainers received pensions.
Before heading back to Yokohama, Julius took a final tour of the castle grounds and recalled fond memories of how he first taught those peasants to build a pontoon bridge. Historian Shigehisa Tokutaro called Julius “the father of military engineering in Japan.” Later, back in Germany, Carl Koppen would become a heavy drinker. Reading about Japan’s military victories against China and Russia, he would tell anyone who cared to listen, “Those are my boys.” Julius, too, would take quiet pride in what he had taught his soldiers.
I wonder if Julius ever had doubts about what he had helped to create. Julius could not have imagined that in the ensuing decades, the Prussian system of conscription Wakayama had introduced to Japan would be introduced in the national army and expand wildly as Japan pushed into Asia. By World War II, the Japanese armed forces exceeded eight million men. A quarter of them would die in battle, and they would be responsible for the deaths of as many as twenty million people in China alone.
WHEN JULIUS AND ADOLF RETURNED to Yokohama in 1872 with the gold they had received in payment for their work in Wakayama, the town was in the midst of a cultural revolution. Barber shops had popped up and were doing a thriving business cutting off the top knots of samurai and trimming their hair in the Western fashion. A railroad to connect Yokohama with Tokyo was near completion. And gas lanterns, which the Japanese called magic lights, had been installed along the main boulevards.
Adolf found work teaching German. Julius tried his hand at trade and failed before going back to work for his former employer, Carroll and Co. Sometime during those next two years, Julius met Hiro, my great-grandmother, and fell in love. Today it is hard to understand how unusual that special relationship was for its time. I cannot imagine it was love at first sight. Hiro must have been initially repelled by Julius, a man whose shoes would have seemed like buckets, whose nose would have appeared grotesquely oversized and whose hairy face and arms would have seemed beastly. Over time, she must have become accustomed to these Western features. Perhaps she was attracted by Julius’s self-confidence, his strength and his kindness.
Julius, too, would have initially given little thought to Hiro, this small, but tough-minded woman. But he would have come to enjoy the special meals she fixed. He would come to appreciate her slender figure and find alluring the slope at the nape of her neck as she bent down to serve tea or sweep the floor. One day, perhaps, he discovered that he was obsessed with Hiro. Prudish Lutheran that he was, Julius would resist the temptation to make her his mistress. At a time when Prussian Protestants had little tolerance even for Catholics, Julius must have assumed that his mother would disapprove of him having any kind of relationship with a Japanese woman.
Over time, Julius started to look at the world in a new way. Yokohama was part of a different world. Few in Japan believed there was any shame in having a mistress. Indeed, it was a sign of status. Wealthy men were expected to have mistresses. And if Julius’s mother might have disapproved of Hiro, she was two oceans away. What his mother would have wholeheartedly approved of was Hiro’s frugality. I imagine Hiro substituted delicious local vegetables and fish for the expensive imported meat and potatoes Julius had been eating. One day in early 1875, Julius asked Hiro to share his room and hired another maid to clean his house. That was the beginning of their long life together.
YOKOHAMA, TOO, CONTINUED TO UNDERGO great change. In 1873, a delegation of Japanese diplomats returned from a two-year tour of Europe and the United States with shocking news for Japan’s leaders: The country was behind the West not just in military might but also in virtually every other area from transportation to communications. The good news was that most of the West’s advances had been made in the previous fifty years, as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. By aggressively importing Western technology, the delegation declared, Japan could quickly catch up.
The Japanese government began employing hundreds of Europeans and Americans to help establish key institutions such as schools and government agencies, and to build lighthouses, telegraph lines and shipyards. Julius’s brother, Adolf, was appointed professor of German at the newly created Tokyo School of Foreign Languages.
An uncle once told me that Adolf had received a samurai sword from the emperor for teaching German to members of the Imperial family. I was skeptical at the time, but while reading the diary of Kido Takayoshi, the Meiji emperor’s powerful counselor and the man responsible for his education, I came across a simple entry on December 12, 1875: “I met with the German Helm,” Kido had written about Adolf in his diary.
Yokohama in those days still had a rough, frontier atmosphere, and Western women were rare. Liaisons between Western men and Japanese women consequently became common. British diplomats, even as they complained of Yokohama’s loose morals, often sneaked out to apartments where they kept courtesans.
These relationships were almost always illicit and when the men returned to their homelands, as they usually did after a few years, their mistresses were invariably lef
t behind. If there were children involved, perhaps there would be an extra stipend. Was this the nature of the relationship between Julius and Hiro? Did he sometimes stroll the Bund, letting her walk three steps behind, as a Japanese wife should? Or did he keep her closeted at home, out of view of the gossiping Western community?
I like to think Julius stood up for Hiro from the beginning, but I doubt it. I remember the day in 1999, when my dad’s cousin Lillian guided me to a neglected section of the Foreigners’ Cemetery in Yokohama to help me find a grave. She was seventy-eight, so I held her elbow as we walked down uneven stone steps toward a dark corner of the cemetery. Lillian was the youngest daughter of Julius’s eldest son, Karl. Her dark hair and eyes made her look vaguely Spanish, and even at her advanced age, she was still beautiful.
“It’s somewhere around here,” Lillian said in a voice high and thin, waving her arm across a terraced area of overgrown weeds and shrubs. I moved from gravestone to gravestone pushing aside bushes and wiping away, with my bare hands, the moss that had collected on the gravestones. Finally, I found it: the name “LINA” was engraved in large letters across a grave marker the size and shape of a milestone. The date, written in small Japanese letters, and the inscription, engraved vertically on the lower right, read: “December 31, Meiji 8.” The eighth year of the Meiji emperor would have been 1875. Hiro and Julius’s first child, Lina, had probably died at birth. Carved into the stone above the name was a wisteria blossom.