Yokohama Yankee

by Leslie Helm

  I felt a pang of sadness that Lina’s grave had been neglected for so long. The grave site was far from the other Helm graves, most of which were at the top of the hill. Why was there no last name on the headstone? I wondered. Was Lina born out of wedlock? Julius had written in his memoir that he had married Hiro in 1875, but was that possible? At that time, Japanese law required Japanese citizens to get government approval before marrying a foreigner. When Kido, the emperor’s adviser, helped a Japanese diplomat marry a German woman in 1876, he wrote in his diary that it was the first officially sanctioned marriage between a Japanese citizen and a Westerner.

  If Julius named his daughter Lina, honoring his mother, Caroline, he must have intended to raise her as his own. Hiro was no mere mistress. Yet, I wondered if Lina didn’t bring shame to Julius and Hiro. Did Lina’s early death feel to Julius like a divine rebuke? His Lutheran mother would have been horrified to learn that Julius had a child by a Japanese Buddhist. Hiro, who had been cut off from her own family, as I would later discover, would have borne her suffering alone. To make matters worse, Julius lost his job with Carroll and Co. not long after his daughter died.

  Julius was an enterprising man, and before long, he found new work. In Yokohama in 1876, there were only two draying companies to transport cargo between the customs house and the warehouses of the various trading houses. What kept more companies from launching their own businesses was the high cost of the horse-drawn trucks used to move the cargo. The trucks, imported from America, were so heavy they each required a large American dray horse to pull them. At the time, there were only twelve such dray horses in Yokohama, each imported at a great cost.

  Julius came up with a simple solution. He designed and built a wagon that was lighter and rigged it so it could be pulled by two of the smaller Japanese ponies that were readily available. When he found the new wagon worked to his satisfaction, he paid a Japanese carpenter to build three more. With these wagons, he set up an office at No. 124, just a block away from his home, and put his first advertisement in the English-language newspaper, the Japan Gazette: Julius Helm: Landing & Shipping Agents. He called on his friends at the stevedoring companies to drum up business.

  By 1879, he was so successful that for $6,500, Julius acquired one of his main competitors. He borrowed the money from a friend at two percent interest a month and soon made enough profits to pay off the debt. He acquired new warehouses and stables in an ambitious expansion drive. “I rebuilt the houses and stables according to my requirements, and as soon as everything was ready, I saw that my ten years in Yokohama had not been wasted,” Julius wrote in his memoir. “I was proud of myself as the owner of a profitable business.”

  The things Julius sought—the challenges, the thrill of competition, the recognition from his peers—he now found in his life as an entrepreneur. He had left Germany because he wanted to be free. And now, although he was always working, he had never felt freer. Business was the purest expression of who he was. The very manner in which he structured his business reflected his character: He insisted on absolute order, a tireless pursuit of efficiency and an unflinching loyalty and honesty with every customer. As Julius hired new employees, he trained them to his way of thinking. The new warehouses and barges, like his wagons, were built to his own specifications, and Julius found it fulfilling to see those efforts boost revenues.

  “I worked as hard as three men all week, and on Sundays you would find me with my accounts,” Julius wrote. “The more people called me a slave to my business, the happier I felt. I was working for myself and I could see the results of my efforts.”

  In 1878, Julius acquired the Cliff Dairy, one of Yokohama’s first dairy farms. He put in charge his thirty-one-year-old brother, Theodore, who had come to Yokohama a decade before and had worked in a general store. Because the dairy farm was located outside the boundaries within which foreigners were permitted to reside, Julius had to register the farm in the name of a Japanese friend. Since the Japanese did not like the smell of dairy products—they disparagingly referred to anything Western as batakusai (stinks like butter)—all the milk was sold to Westerners.

  Julius’s own household would become a big consumer of that milk. His home was soon filled with the cries of children. His eldest daughter, Marie, was born in February 1877, and his first son, Karl, followed in 1879. I wondered what Julius thought of his children who looked so unlike him. How did Hiro regard her life with Julius?

  For many years I had no idea. Hiro remained a mystery. Once, not long after I began working as a reporter in Japan, Dad took me to his favorite sushi shop on a quiet side street in Yokohama where he shared a curious story about Hiro. Dad had been loudly berating the sushi chef for the slow service, and I was embarrassed, as I so often was when he drank too much. I went into my reporter mode, my standard response to any awkward social situation, and asked Dad a question I had been curious about for some time.

  “What did you know about Hiro, your grandmother?” I asked.

  Dad turned to me with tired eyes and sighed. He wrinkled his nose and slowly shook his balding head. It was that look of resignation he had shown me so often since I had returned as a correspondent, no longer beholden to him and his money. Looking back now, as a father, I think I understand how he felt. He wanted my respect, but he didn’t know how to gain it. It was easier for him to pretend to be the uncaring, deadbeat father.

  “I never knew her. My father never talked about her,” Dad said, shrugging his shoulders. “But I have a cup with her family crest, two crossed eagle feathers. Did I ever show it to you?” I nodded. I had heard that story before.

  Then suddenly, Dad’s eyes lit up, and he put his little finger in the air. “Did I tell you she was missing half of her little finger?” He called for another flask of sake and leaned on the counter to tell the tale.

  “They say Hiro was one tough woman,” Dad began. “Well, this Japanese warlord’s retinue was passing in front of Julius’s house. The warlord was being carried in one of those kago, you know, those sedan chairs enclosed in bamboo shades. Samurai guards walked at his side. Julius’s gardener was clipping the camellia bush that hung over the compound wall when one of the branches fell at the foot of a samurai guard. The samurai, furious at the insult to his lord, pulled out his sword, kicked down the gate and ran into the compound to chase down the gardener.” Dad’s story had me on the edge of my stool. I couldn’t believe he had never mentioned this before.

  “The gardener clambered down the tree and fell to his knees. Touching his forehead to the ground, he begged forgiveness. The samurai raised his sword and was about to cut off the poor bastard’s head when Hiro jumped in front of the gardener and put out her hand.” Dad put his right hand up, palm out, to demonstrate. “The samurai was bringing his sword down on the gardener when suddenly he saw this little woman standing in front of him.”

  “‘Stop!’ she shouted. Well, the samurai stopped his sword just as it sliced through Hiro’s little finger.”

  At that, Dad beamed a smile that was so warm, so captivating, it caught me by surprise. I had often seen that smile as a child. But it had always been directed at someone else, usually a beautiful woman he was trying to charm. Now, as it came my way, I felt a surge of pleasure. It was as if Dad had opened himself up to me so I could enter his thoughts, and, with his playful eyes, had unfolded the hard fist of my resistance so he could enter mine.

  We both knew the story was probably untrue. That was why Dad had never bothered to tell it to me. By the time Hiro was living with Julius, the days of sword-swinging samurai were over. Even so, Dad had painted in my mind a vivid picture of a samurai with a fierce grimace staring down at this unyielding woman. And somehow, I knew that Dad had the exact same picture in his mind because he suddenly wrinkled his nose.

  I laughed. Soon, Dad, too, was laughing. Much later, I would come to treasure this story and that special connection I would never again experience. Dad would die before I had children. They would never know
the indescribable pleasure of having that bewitching smile directed at them.

  Sometime later, I was going through old Yokohama newspapers when I came across a story that brought back the memory of that evening with my father. The article, which appeared on the front page of The Japan Gazette on July 2, 1879, never mentioned Hiro or a samurai. Yet it was hauntingly familiar. It began:

  We have to record the story of a crime happily without precedent in Yokohama for many years past. In the compound of Mr. Helm, carrier, lived a coolie with his wife; both were in his employ. The woman bore the reputation of being very loose in her morals. At about one o’clock this morning Mr. Helm was aroused by the [maid] rushing into his room and thence into the room in which another Japanese woman slept.

  Julius followed the maid into “the other woman’s” room, the article went on to say. The maid, sobbing hysterically, said her husband was going to kill her. Seconds later, the maid’s husband, the coolie, pounded on the door downstairs. Julius tried to persuade the husband to go home quietly. When he refused, Julius went out into the street to summon a policeman. Julius had walked barely half a block when he heard the screams. He ran home to find the husband, knife in hand, fighting with the gardener. Julius pushed the men aside, and ran up the stairs to the room where he had left Hiro with his maid.

  [Julius] was horrified to find the whole place literally covered with blood and both the women in an unconscious state, bleeding profusely from wounds about the head and body, one having had her left hand almost severed by some sharp instrument. He lost no time in procuring medical assistance.

  In the meantime, a small crowd had gathered in front of Julius’s house, where the gardener lay dead, evidently slain by the maid’s husband, the coolie. Since the crime occurred in a German compound, under the rules of the so-called “unequal treaties” Europeans forced Japan to sign, a German constable was in charge of the investigation. The constable concluded that the coolie had come home to find his wife, the maid, in bed with the gardener, and had gone mad. After chasing his wife into “the other woman’s room,” next to Julius’s room, the coolie had stabbed his wife, the maid, and ran into the compound next door to hide.

  There (the coolie) committed suicide, first by stabbing himself with the sword right through the neck, and then by a deep gash in the abdomen—this latter wound almost completely disemboweled him. Mr. Helm says the husband was always a quiet man and he can only account for his conduct by supposing that he was exasperated beyond control by the conduct of his wife.

  It was a gruesome story. As I reread it, however, I realized that the coolie must have been a former samurai, for only a samurai would commit suicide through seppuku, the excruciatingly painful ritual of disemboweling oneself, which was supposed to restore honor. This was the first hint of a parallel with Dad’s story of Hiro. But it was the next passage that left absolutely no doubt:

  It must have been while attempting to protect (the maid) that the other woman received her wounds, for the cut on her left hand appears to have been inflicted through that hand having caught hold of the blade.

  The article concluded by noting that while the coolie’s cheating wife died, “the other woman,” who I now understood was clearly Hiro, had a better chance of surviving her severe wounds. What kind of courage does it take to grab the razor-sharp blade of a madman’s sword? Hiro must have been a woman of unusual spunk. And what of the children? Hiro and Julius’s daughter, Marie, two years old at the time, must have been in the corner trembling, and six-month-old Karl must have been wailing as his mother fought. The reporter probably referred to Hiro as “the other Japanese woman” because she and Julius were not married. And it must have been to save Julius embarrassment that the newspaper made no mention of the children.

  I imagine Julius scooped up his two frightened children and held them to calm their cries as he watched Hiro, on the edge of death, taken away on a stretcher. I like to think that at that moment, Julius knew how close he had come to losing his family.

  Julius had built a successful business and was raising a fine family. The carnage that ended the lives of his three employees and resulted in Hiro’s near death had shaken him. If there were records kept of the marriages that occurred in Yokohama during those years, I imagine they might show that Julius and Hiro quietly recorded their commitment to each other sometime soon after those horrible murders. Did the strong bonds that then developed between Julius and Hiro help them build a fortune and begin a family dynasty against great odds? Or were the murders an inauspicious start to the family’s troubled history in Japan?

  IN 1992, I VISITED TRUDY WEBSTER, Karl’s daughter, then living in Los Angeles. She was proud of her middle name, Hiro, and had collected a trunk full of family photos. Among them, I found one of Hiro taken in 1883 when she was twenty-nine. She seemed like an entirely different person from the woman I had seen in my father’s picture of her. Hiro had a pretty, oval face. Her mouth had a touch of insolence; her upper lips formed a pout. Her hands were slender and delicate. Hiro wore a kimono of rough grey flannel tied at the waist by a narrow obi. The small bead on the thin, braided cord tied across the middle of her sash was placed slightly off center.

  In my father’s picture taken in 1898, fifteen years later, by contrast, Hiro wore the formal kimono of a wealthy woman with sleeves displaying her family crest: two crossed eagle feathers. Seated in an arm chair, stiff and austere, Hiro looked drained of life. Her feet, encased in white tabi, the split-toe socks, rested on a low, cushioned stool. Her cheeks were gaunt with her mouth almost in a frown. Hiro’s hands were thick and swollen at the knuckles, worn from years of hard work. What happened in those intervening years to diminish Hiro, even as her fifty-eight-year-old husband, standing behind her, still looked as strong as an ox?

  OPPOSITE:

  Julius Helm and Hiro Komiya with children, (L to R) Marie, Jim and Karl, ca. 1883.

  Julius and Hiro, ca. 1898.

  Julius’s sense of obligation to his siblings must have been an enormous burden on Hiro. Most Sundays, Hiro had to cook for the whole extended Helm family that included his brothers Adolf and Theodore. Then in 1880, Julius’s younger sister Anna, recently divorced, came with her two sons and stayed with Julius and Hiro for nine months. They paid little attention to Hiro, and their long hours of conversation in German must have grated on her ears.

  Hiro, like many of Yokohama’s Japanese residents, must have felt odd to be living in a foreign settlement ruled by white men. Under the humiliating treaties of “extraterritoriality” the West imposed on Japan, Japanese authorities had no jurisdiction over foreigners living in Japan’s foreign settlements. This was why the murder in Hiro and Julius’s house had been handled by a German constable. Julius benefited from the system, according to newspaper reports of the time. Once a German judge ordered a Japanese merchant to return $350 Julius had loaned him, and another time, Julius was not found liable when he delivered a barrel of palm oil to a Japanese customer that was undamaged, yet proved to be empty.

  When a cholera epidemic struck in 1879, a German ship ignored the quarantine imposed by Japanese authorities and sailed into Yokohama escorted by a German man-of-war ship. If the captain had done the same in a European port, the action would have been regarded as an act of war. But Japan was powerless to respond.

  In spite of such arrogance, the Japanese began to treat the Germans more favorably. The Meiji government had chosen to pattern many of its institutions on German models because they reflected similar values on the important role of the state. A German noble was hired to become chamberlain and reorganize protocol at Japan’s Imperial Palace. The German constitution provided the basic model for the Japanese constitution. And in the wake of Wakayama’s success, German officers replaced the French as advisers to the Japanese army. Jealous Englishmen complained that Japan had acquired “a bad case of the German measles.”

  German merchants like Julius were also successful in Yokohama because they made an effort to learn Japanese a
nd worked hard, eschewing the leisurely lifestyle of the British colonialists who took long lunches and retired early to their country clubs. While Julius’s business prospered, he remained unsatisfied with his life. One March day in 1885, he sold his dray company to a group of Japanese businessmen and told Hiro he wanted to move the family to America. “I had always missed a particular line of business, and that was the farm business,” Julius wrote.

  Just as he waited for word from friends and relatives about the availability of land for sale in the United States, he met Paul Georg von Mollendorf, a German diplomat-turned-adviser to the Korean king who was visiting Yokohama. Mollendorf sported a long wispy beard, hair that flowed past his shoulders and round horn-rimmed glasses. Yokohama’s German Club was scandalized by Mollendorf’s appearance and refused him entry because he wore “native” clothes, the heavily embroidered, padded robes of a Korean noble. Mollendorf told Julius that his task was to help the Korean king modernize his country. He had already established a customs office and was now in Yokohama to find talent to help him set up a medical college, build railroads and develop new industries. When he learned of Julius’s training in agriculture, Mollendorf invited him to come to Korea to establish a model farm.

  Enticed by the offer, Julius put his plans for farming in America on hold. He handed over the Cliff Dairy to his brother Theodore, placed a few plows in a wagon and set out for Korea, leaving his wife and children in Yokohama. At the port of Chemulpo, Korea, now called Inchon, Julius learned that to get to Seoul, 26 miles away, he was expected to take a sedan chair carried by eight Korean coolies. The coolies, he was told, had to be paid in advance so they could eat ahead of the arduous journey. Repelled by the idea of sitting on the shoulders of eight men, Julius chose to walk, pulling the wagon he had brought with him along the muddy road to the capital.