by Leslie Helm
In Seoul, Julius met Mollendorf and the cadre of German experts who had signed up for the mission to modernize Korea. One German had imported and planted 100,000 mulberry trees and was trying to raise silk worms. Another had been asked to build a glass factory. When the man discovered the sand in the vicinity of Seoul was useless for making glass, Mollendorf tried to persuade him to build a match factory.
Julius was excited to be part of this important enterprise. It reminded him of his early days in Wakayama. He purchased a horse and rode out to explore the open plains outside Seoul that Mollendorf wanted him to cultivate. When Julius reported that the soil was too poor to farm, Mollendorf told him to take fertile land occupied by Korean tenant farmers. Julius didn’t like the idea, and when, not long afterwards, a mud stable collapsed in a rainstorm killing his horse, Julius headed back to Japan. Mollendorf would later become infamous for trying to sell French Catholic missionaries the exclusive right to proselytize in Korea. Under pressure from the British and Chinese, the Korean king would later be forced to fire Mollendorf for secretly negotiating a treaty that would have expanded Russian influence in Korea.
Julius was lucky to have left Korea when he did. In 1886, a year later, successive smallpox and cholera epidemics killed an estimated ten thousand people in Seoul. Travelers described ugly scenes of roving dogs feasting on smallpox-scarred children left outside the city to ward off demons.
Back in Japan, Julius took Hiro and his three children to Ashinoyu, a hot-spring resort near Mt. Fuji. Julius walked the thirty-five miles, while Hiro and the children rode a horse. It would be the last time Julius lavished so much time on his family. Soon afterward, having heard about property available in Virginia, he ventured there by steamship and train. Two months later, Julius was on a real estate agent’s buggy turning down a long, cedar-lined driveway in Yorktown to inspect Lansdowne, an old tobacco plantation. When he stopped in front of the mansion, Julius decided he had found the home of his dreams. The massive house, built in the 1690s of brick brought from Britain as ballast in sailing ships, sat on 1,100 acres of farmland, forest and swamp. From the house, there was a stunning view across a terraced garden to the wide expanse of the York River. The man who built the mansion had been one of the original founders of Yorktown, and the adjacent plantation had housed two Virginia governors. On December 14, 1885, Julius signed the deed and paid $2,700 to purchase what he concluded was “one of the finest pieces of property in the world.” The sum was equal to about fifteen years of wages for a US farm worker, who typically made about $15.50 a month.
Julius immediately wrote to Hiro asking her to join him. He spent the winter repairing the house and building the barns and stables. In the spring, he bought two horses, a few cows and several pigs. Hiro, who probably spoke little or no English, set sail from Yokohama in the spring of 1886 with her nine-year-old daughter, Marie, and her two sons, seven-year-old Karl and three-year-old James. There is no record of that long journey, but my Uncle Ray, my father’s younger brother, heard a family story of how Hiro, while on that train journey, had looked through the window from her train seat to find herself staring into the face of a Native American. She didn’t know what to make of this man with the Asian-looking face dressed in shabby garb. The Native American seemed equally surprised to find this woman, who looked so much like one of his people, wearing kimono and sitting among the wealthy white passengers.
No doubt Hiro tried to see the glory of Lansdowne through Julius’s eyes. It was late spring when she arrived, so the peach trees would have been in full bloom and she would have smelled the sweet fragrance of the honeysuckle. Hiro had been raised as a farm girl and was not afraid to work in the fields, care for the animals and clean house.
But Hiro must have missed Yokohama’s energy, its boisterous open-air markets crowded with shoppers and noisy with hawkers. Williamsburg, the former capital of colonial Virginia, about twenty minutes away by carriage, would have seemed to her like a ghost town. The very vastness of Lansdowne would have heightened Hiro’s sense of isolation. Her entire village could have fit on this estate. Indeed, there was a little village of small huts in which slaves on the plantation had once lived and where a few sharecroppers were still resident.
I wonder if Hiro sensed the shadows that haunted the land. In 1622, Native Americans had massacred 347 English settlers in the area. In the years that followed, thousands of Native Americans died of smallpox, which, according to some accounts, was deliberately spread by settlers. The wife of the former owner of Lansdowne, a captain who had been a member of Robert E. Lee’s personal staff, had been murdered by renegade soldiers at the end of the Civil War in the very house in which Hiro now lived.
If Hiro sometimes felt like an outsider in her old home in Yokohama because she was married to a white man, in Virginia, where colored people were treated as barely human, she must have felt like an outcast. Her children Marie and Karl would not have been permitted to attend the local school because of Jim Crow laws banning “colored” people from attending the same school as whites. When Hiro learned she was pregnant with her fourth child, she pressed Julius to return to Yokohama.
Julius stubbornly clung to his dream estate, but there was one thing Hiro could rely on—Julius’s restlessness. Sure enough, in January 1887, midway through his second winter on the farm, Julius told Hiro to pack up. He had figured out that the plantation would never generate even a small fraction of the profits he had made with his Yokohama business. Rather than part with Lansdowne, he persuaded his brother Gustav, a tailor in New York, to take over the plantation. He would ultimately hand the deed to his brother whose family would live there through the early 1930s.
Julius moved to New York and lived briefly in a Brooklyn tenement while he worked as a longshoreman, declaring himself “lucky” that jobs had opened up thanks to a major strike, one of the nation’s first general strikes. He was a scab, though I’m sure he did not see himself that way. It was during this short stay in Brooklyn that my grandfather, Julius Felix Heinrich Helm, was born on March 30, 1887. The boy was named after his father, but Hiro called him “Julie-chan,” and the name Julie stuck. It was because of my grandfather’s chance birth in New York that he, my father and I were all born American citizens.
As soon as Julius had earned the fare, he took his family on the long journey back to Yokohama, arriving in the hot summer of 1888 where a bittersweet surprise awaited him. Julius’s youngest brother, thirty-three-year-old Paul, who had moved to Yokohama soon after Julius’s departure for Virginia, had exploited the familiarity in Yokohama with the Helm name to launch his own dray company, offering trucking services between the piers and the warehouses.
Paul generously invited Julius’s family to stay with him. Julius was proud of Paul’s success, but embarrassed that he, the older brother, had to start over at the age of forty-seven. Had he stayed in Yokohama instead of yielding to his desire to farm, he would have been master of a thriving business. It would have been Julius who arranged a job for Paul just as he had done for Adolf in Wakayama and Theodore with the dairy. Instead, with four children to support, Julius had to depend on his youngest brother for work and shelter.
“There is nothing to be ashamed of,” Hiro told her husband, as Julius would later recall. “You had the right to sell your business; you never hurt anyone; you only fooled yourself. Don’t worry about what people think. Do your best, and better days will come.”
Hiro was right. Within weeks Julius had found a job, and within months he had been promoted to manager. When Julius’s Japanese bosses learned that he had managed a farm, they asked him to raise sheep.
(L to R) Elsie, Marie, Jim, Julius, Willie, Julie, Karl, Louisa, Hiro, ca. 1895.
Japanese entrepreneurs in the late 1800s in Yokohama had a tendency to latch onto the latest fad. For a while, every Japanese company wanted to own its own steamer. Whenever a ship came into port, a Japanese company would acquire it as soon as its cargo was unloaded. The Golden Age, on which Great-Grandf
ather Julius first came to Japan, was purchased by Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Co. and became the Hiroshima-maru, the first steamship ever boarded by the Meiji emperor. Later there was great interest among Japanese entrepreneurs in rabbits because of their astounding ability to breed, and the animals were imported from California, Australia and China. Sheep were the latest fad. Unfortunately, after fattening the sheep, Julius discovered that the butchers in Yokohama preferred the larger sheep now being imported from China, and he had to sell the sheep at a loss. When his Japanese boss sold the business in 1891, Julius bought the assets and merged the company with his brother Paul’s company to create Helm Brothers.
Julius wanted to be his own boss, so he moved his family to Kobe, a port 260 miles down the coast, to open a branch office for Helm Brothers. Ever restless, he then closed the branch and borrowed 15,000 yen to buy a half share of his largest competitor, Nickel & Co. Meanwhile, Hiro was even busier. With the birth of Elsie, Willie and Louisa, she and Julius now had seven children.
Julius’s business benefited from a rapidly expanding Japanese economy. Japanese steamships now plied every port in the Pacific, and Japanese merchant houses quickly wrested much of the tea and silk trade from China. With economic power came a desire for a broader political presence in Asia. In 1894, when China sent troops to Korea to help the Korean king suppress a rebellion, Japan countered with its own expeditionary force, which replaced the existing government with a pro-Japanese government, leading to war with China. Even liberal Japanese intellectuals supported the war against China, calling it a great conflict between the forces of progress, represented by Japan, and the backward forces, represented by China.
Julius’s main competitor in Kobe was a company run by a Chinese man named Jack Yong. When Japan declared war on China, Yong asked Julius to take over his business to protect it from Japan’s anti-China frenzy. Julius sold his share of Nickel’s business and took over Yong’s.
Japan’s decisive victory over China in 1895, thanks in part to its German-trained army and advanced German weaponry, established Japan as a new power in Asia. However, Western doubts about Japan remained. In the final invasion of Port Arthur, when the Japanese entered a Chinese village to find tortured Japanese prisoners nailed to stakes, the army was said to have retaliated by massacring every man, woman and child in the village. Western observers would point to the massacre as evidence the Japanese were uncivilized, although the action was reminiscent of similar acts by the US cavalry against Native Americans not long before.
There was a surge of patriotism in Japan at its victory over China and the territory it wrested from China, including the strategic Port Arthur and territory in Manchuria and Taiwan (then called Formosa). In less than a generation, a country that had once been threatened by colonization had itself become a colonial power.
Despite its rise as an international power to be reckoned with, Japan had not yet been accepted by the exclusive club of white colonial nations. Germany, Russia and France banded together to pressure Japan to return much of the Chinese territory. Japan felt it had been treated unjustly by the Western powers, particularly since Germany then proceeded, a few years later, to establish its own colony in Tsingtao, halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, while Russia took over Port Arthur. It would take two wars for Japan to win those territories back.
In early 1897, Julius received word that his brother Paul was ill and planned to leave Yokohama for Germany. Julius sold the Kobe business back to Yong and bought Helm Brothers from Paul. This time he planned to remain in Yokohama for good.
The port of Yokohama, which had few facilities when Julius first arrived in 1869, now had a large harbor and two long piers built to accommodate the big passenger liners of the seven steamship companies that now made scheduled calls to Yokohama. Julius expanded Helm Brothers’ business to represent many of the major European shipping companies. He also added stevedoring, landing and forwarding services to his dray business. Hiro was now recognized in the community as Julius’s wife and business partner. “Helm and his wife [Hiro] rolled barrels and pushed their shoulders to the wheel unloading ships,” wrote the daughter of Robert Meikeljohn, who owned the Japan Daily Advertiser, in her unpublished autobiography.
But nationalist sentiment was rising in Japan. Newspapers warned that foreign employees of the Japanese government were leaking Japanese national secrets and demanded they be replaced by Japanese. In 1899, the Japanese government terminated the widespread use of foreigners in its modernization.
Foreign businesses also faced tougher times. Japanese trading companies, which handled a growing share of Japanese trade, used Japanese shipping companies with which they were affiliated to transport their cargo and Japanese stevedoring firms to unload it. Consequently, many foreign stevedoring firms went out of business, and Julius saw an opportunity to consolidate the industry. On March 8, 1899, Julius took Helm Brothers public, registering the company in Hong Kong and valuing it at 250,000 yen. According to the public offering document, the money would be used to acquire all of Julius’s assets, including “launches, boats, drays, carts, horses, plants, live and dead stock.” The new company would also acquire land, wharves, warehouses and carriages as well as “horses, mules and other draught animals” needed to carry out its business. Julius had to guarantee a ten percent dividend in the first year to attract shareholders.
Now, at the age of sixty, for the first time in his life, Julius had both time and money in abundance. He purchased a large piece of land on The Bluff overlooking Yokohama Harbor and built a Victorian-style mansion. It was not as imposing as Lansdowne but was far more elegant: It had five bedrooms, a library, a parlor, a living room and a dining room. Each room had a fireplace. The new dining room table, when extended to its full length, could seat twenty people. The kitchen and pantry were in a separate building that was connected to the house by a covered walkway. There were four maids’ rooms above the kitchen for the cook, the upstairs maid, the downstairs maid and the chauffeur. Julius’s gardener landscaped the large garden, planting a hillside of azaleas that bloomed white and blazing red in the spring. There was a circular driveway so that horse carriages could bring their passengers right up to the front door.
Then Julius did something which, as a parent, I find it hard to understand. Perhaps he was determined to give his children the solid education they could not get in Japan. Or perhaps he worried Hiro was spoiling the children. Whatever the reason, in 1900, Julius put another executive in charge of Helm Brothers and took his eldest daughter, Marie, and the four youngest children on the long journey to San Francisco. Hiro and their two oldest sons remained in Yokohama. In San Francisco, Julius rented a house where Marie, then twenty-three, would take care of three of the children—Elsie, eleven; Willie, nine; and Louisa, six—while simultaneously attending St. Mary’s School of Nursing. Then Julius took thirteen-year-old Julie, my grandfather, across the country by train to Virginia and left him at Lansdowne to help his Uncle Gustav with his accounts. Finally, Julius sailed to Germany to visit his mother for the first time in thirty years. “I was proud of my great success in business and enjoyed the well-earned rest long denied the ever advancing American farmer and forwarding and shipping man in Japan,” Julius wrote.
Julius spent several weeks in a sanatorium in Germany for relaxation. He attended the 1900 Paris International Exposition, looking with pride on exhibits displaying Germany’s advances in electrical, chemical and optical industries. He later took a separate trip to Berlin to inspect the elaborate new irrigation systems put in place to expand the range of arable land.
On his return to Yokohama in 1901, Julius took back the reins at Helm Brothers and proceeded to boost its performance. He liked to pick up the Japan Chronicle each day to find Helm Brothers listed on the front page with its stock price alongside the twenty or so other publicly listed Yokohama companies. Now, with money to spare, he began investing his personal fortune in mines. Perhaps it was in connection with these investments that Tanaka Sho
zo, the renowned Japanese environmentalist, visited Julius on July 1, 1903, as Tanaka recorded in his diary. Tanaka had been spearheading efforts to help villagers whose paddy fields and forests were being poisoned by sulfuric acid from a nearby copper mine. The Japanese military, in dire need of copper, was pressuring the government to allow the mines to continue operating. There is no record of whether Julius was sympathetic to Tanaka’s concerns.
Helm Hill (Hachioji-yama) in Honmoku.
About the same time, Julius bought a hill in Honmoku, just outside of Yokohama, that locals would later come to call Herumu Yama (Helm Hill). There he built a large summer villa overlooking the ocean. Only when it was completed did he finally call his children home. Hiro must have been happy to have her children back. The family gathered at the new villa on holidays and spent most of their summers there.
The following year, Julius’s youngest sister asked for money to start a school in Germany. Julius sent her a generous sum as well as new students—his four youngest children now ranging in age from ten to seventeen. This time, the two older boys, Karl, twenty-five, and Jim, twenty-one, accompanied their younger siblings on the trip. Jim would fulfill his military service requirement in Germany, while Karl would stay at a sanatorium in Switzerland to attend to his poor health.
When Karl completed his respite in Switzerland, he traveled across the Atlantic to visit Uncle Gustav and his family at Lansdowne. When Karl returned to Yokohama, he told his father he was in a fix. He had fallen in love with Gustav’s daughter, his first cousin Louise.