by Leslie Helm
Hiro (Komiya) Helm, ca. 1898.
“Don’t let that bother you,” Julius told his son. “Kings and queens marry their cousins. If it is good enough for royalty, it is good enough for you.” On January 6, 1904, Karl married his cousin in a lavish wedding in Yokohama. Not long after Hiro’s fiftieth birthday, Karl and his new bride left for Lansdowne to visit his new in-laws.
Soon after Karl left, Hiro began to lose weight. She had cancer, but I wonder if perhaps her spirits weren’t sapped by being cut off from her children for so long. Julius sent telegrams calling the children home, but the trip from Germany took eight weeks. Hiro died on July 18, 1904, at age fifty. By the time the children returned, their mother had been dead for two weeks.
Julius buried Hiro in a plot in the foreign cemetery overlooking the harbor marked by a white marble gravestone. He had a portion of Psalm 90:10 inscribed in copper letters and nailed to her gravestone. It reads: “We have seventy years to live, or if blessed, as many as eighty, but it is all but toil and sorrow.”
Hiro’s courage and pluck, her “toil and sorrow,” drew me closer to her, and I began stopping by her grave site on every subsequent trip to Yokohama. I would weed the area around her grave and prune back the bushes, often wondering what her family was like and if I might ever meet some of their descendants.
Hiro had served Julius faithfully, but Julius wanted to give his children a future as Europeans. That meant separating them from Hiro and from Japan. I wondered, Was the family crest on Hiro’s kimono showing two crossed eagle feathers her effort to reconnect with her Japanese family? This strong woman had never demanded anything for herself, and in the end she had nothing left to give.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1910, Julius celebrated his seventieth birthday with a grand party at his summer villa. Paper lanterns hung across the large garden and down at the beach below. The servants had spent days preparing the feast that included roast beef, several large hams and lots of potatoes. Julius’s brother Paul was there with his wife. His sister Anna was there with her husband, two children and a grandchild. His three daughters—Marie, Elsie and Louise—were there, although Julius was disappointed that none had married. His two eldest sons Karl and Jim were there with their German-American wives. Karl and his wife had already given Julius two grandchildren. Julius’s youngest son, Willie, now eighteen, was also there. He was popular among the women with his charming smile. The only child missing was Julie, my grandfather, who was in New York studying accounting.
Julius sat on a chair in his garden surveying the scene. Periodically, a Helm Brothers employee would come by to pay his respects. Julius now employed hundreds of Japanese, and he had invited all of the managers to the party. He was immensely proud of his success.
Standing at the edge of the garden clutching something in her hand was his granddaughter Margaret, Karl’s dark-haired six-year-old. Eighty-five years later, the moment was still vivid in Margaret’s memory as she described her conversation with Julius: “Grandpa picked me up and put me on his lap. He asked me what I had in my hand. When I opened my hand to show him my coins, he asked me if I had saved that money. When I said, ‘Yes,’ he took another coin from his pocket and put it in my hand. Then he asked me, ‘So what is it you want more than anything else in the world?’ I told him: ‘I want a cousin with golden hair like Goldilocks.’”
I wonder if Julius didn’t then reflect again on the challenges his half-Japanese descendants faced. He had tried his best to help them overcome the stigma of their mixed-race heritage. He had sent his children overseas to be educated. When Hiro died, Julius married Alma, a distant cousin from Germany, so that his youngest children would have the benefit of being raised by a German mother.
He was proud of his children, and he had provided well for them. If the foreign community sometimes looked down on them as half-caste, his family was large enough and wealthy enough to have created a community of its own with large family dinners on Sundays and lavish costume parties. What Julius hadn’t foreseen were the two forces that would pull the family apart: One force, as old as history, was Alma, the new stepmother. The other was something completely new to mankind: a world war.
Julius thought he was doing his children a favor when he brought Alma to Yokohama from Germany to manage the household as his new wife. Alma, who had been active promoting voting rights for women in Germany, brought her girlfriend with her to keep her company. She was everything Hiro was not. She was tall, heavy and wore round, steel-rimmed spectacles over her icy blue eyes. She was a stern disciplinarian who held the Japanese in contempt and made her stepchildren ashamed of their Japanese heritage.
Julius’s eldest daughter, Marie, showed her loyalty to her dead mother Hiro by moving out. Later, Marie would abandon her Christian Science faith in favor of Buddhism and purchase a large piece of property by the sea in Zushi, not far from Yokohama, with plans to open a sanatorium for victims of tuberculosis.
Marie’s two younger sisters, Elsie and Louisa, had no such escape. Alma was intent on training them to be upper-class Germans, so she pressured them to study piano and art. When other mixed-race suitors came to call, Alma would turn them away, insisting the girls deserved better. My Aunt Louisa once warned me seventy years later never to go out with a Japanese girl because she would “only be after your money.” None of Julius’s three daughters would ever marry. Louisa would be the only one of her generation I would come to know, and what I remember best about her was the extremes to which she took thrift. Although Louisa was wealthy in her later years, she would hand the bus driver a ten-thousand-yen note, knowing he had no change and would have to let the old woman on for free. She once took my mother out to lunch for her birthday at the German Bakery in Motomachi. When it came time for Louisa to order, she pulled a slice of bread from her purse and asked the waitress to toast it. “My stomach is not feeling well,” she explained.
Julius at 70th birthday party with son Karl and granddaughter.
Alma’s greatest impact would be on Willie, Julius’s youngest son, with tragic consequences. Willie was a handsome boy with the same intense eyes and restless soul as his father, but with the delicate mouth and rounded chin of his mother, Hiro. At age seven, he had been sent to L’Ecole de L’Etoile du Matin, a French Catholic boarding school in Tokyo. At nine, he lived in San Francisco with his three sisters while attending the Moulder School for Boys. At eleven, Willie returned to Yokohama to attend a boys’ Catholic school. Then Alma insisted Willie travel to Germany to attend prep school, business school and to do his military service.
When Willie returned to Japan from Germany, he hopped from job to job, never quite satisfied with his work. In 1914, when Willie was twenty-two, he worked for a British trading company. Perhaps because of his good looks, his money and his cosmopolitan ways, Willie developed a reputation as a playboy. It was bad luck that he came of age when, for the only time in its history, Germany would become Japan’s enemy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan was intent on reversing the injustices it suffered following its victory over China. It created an alliance in 1902 with Britain, the world’s greatest naval power, and quadrupled the size of its standing army. In the summer of 1904, when Russia tried to expand its presence in Korea, Japan attacked. In a series of bloody battles that cost it more than eighty thousand lives, Japan defeated Russia and retook Port Arthur, becoming the first Asian country to defeat a modern European power. Japan now controlled Korea and had established its long-desired presence in Manchuria, a new frontier rich in all the raw materials Japan lacked. When World War I broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, Japan invaded Tsingtao, China, considered Germany’s “Pearl of the East.”
Willie Helm is the center of the party, ca. 1928.
Germany called on all its citizens in Asia to come to the defense of Tsingtao. Most Germans in Japan at the time did not respond to what seemed to them a hopeless cause. Willie, whose mother had been Japanese, seemed compelled to prove he was a German patri
ot, and volunteered.
Willie was assigned as sergeant in the artillery division and sent to Tsingtao, but the small German force defending the German colony never had a chance. By November 1914, a few months after Willie reached Tsingtao, German forces surrendered, and the captured soldiers were sent to Japan as prisoners of war.
I wanted to learn more about Willie’s experiences as a prisoner of war, so in 2003 I traveled to the home of one of Japan’s largest prison camps. It was pouring rain when I got off the train at Kurume, a sleepy town of 300,000 on the southwestern island of Kyushu. Tsutsumi Yukichi, an official from the town’s cultural affairs department, was waiting at the platform with an umbrella to usher me to his car. Tsutsumi wore the dark suit and tie of a bureaucrat, but he had the relaxed mannerisms of a college professor.
Over lunch, Tsutsumi told me that he first learned about the POW camp when the curator of a German museum called Kurume City Hall to say they were holding an exhibit of memorabilia from the Kurume prison camp and wanted the city’s cooperation.
“‘What prison camp?’ we said. We didn’t know what he was talking about.” Tsutsumi began asking elderly residents if they knew anything about the camp. One old man remembered a German prisoner who paid him five sen (about a penny) for each frog he collected. The man fed the frogs to his pet snake. Another man had earned money chasing after tennis balls that had gone over the prison camp fence.
Tennis? Pet snakes? It was hard to believe.
“At first the mayor was reluctant to let us dredge up old stories about the war,” said Tsutsumi. But Tsutsumi soon learned that Bridgestone Tire, the town’s largest employer and one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers, had once been a maker of footwear and had acquired technology for building tires from a German prisoner at the camp. The town decided the camp was an important piece of the town’s history.
After lunch, Tsutsumi showed me the collection of camp documents and memorabilia he had gathered for an exhibit. There was a model sailing ship in a bottle, a table of inlaid wood and other items that prisoners had built while at Kurume. There were calendars with drawings of the camp. There were printed concert programs that listed pieces by Beethoven and Wagner performed by the prison orchestra. There were photos of a dozen musicians practicing, of men drinking beer and of a man dressed as a woman walking a tightrope. What kind of prison camp was this? I wondered. I was impressed by the enterprise of the prisoners but also by the freedom the Japanese had given them.
“Willie was quite popular among the reporters,” said Tsutsumi, handing me a folder filled with newspaper clips. “Girlfriend of the Mixed-blood Helm Causes Problems” declared one headline. “Prison authorities complained that they were staying up until late at night translating and censoring letters from Willie’s Japanese girlfriend who wrote in English.” Tsutsumi laughed.
It was a funny story, but what struck me were the headlines that identified Willie as “mixed-blood Helm” as if “mixed blood” were his occupation. Worse, the tiny letters placed about the kanji characters to signify how they should be pronounced read “ainoko,” which means mixed-race child, but is also a word used to describe mongrel dogs.
What was it like, I wondered, to be compared to a mongrel dog? Was I also an ainoko? Since I could pass as white, I had never thought of myself as mixed blood. I wondered if this explained the strange attitude of Japanese to whom I revealed my Japanese heritage.
According to the news accounts, Willie had initially been housed in a large temple in Kumamoto. Willie contacted a representative of Helm Brothers in the nearby town of Moji and arranged to have a telegram sent to his father. When Julius received the telegram, he made the two-day journey from Yokohama to visit Willie. Satisfied that his son was being treated well, he donated money to the temple to help provide for the prisoners. According to prison camp records, the money was used to purchase five butcher’s knives, three vegetable knives, three whisks, five roast pans, one square wooden bucket, three forks, eight pots, three steak forks, ten cooking spoons, three scales, eight meat hangers and one rice cooker.
When reporters asked Willie about his living conditions, he told them, in a statement that was splashed across the top of the local newspaper, that the temple would be “a great place to have a geisha party.” Six months later, Willie was moved to Kurume, which, with 1,370 prisoners, was Japan’s largest prison camp: seven rows of barracks surrounded by a tall wood fence.
Although Kurume had a reputation as Japan’s strictest prison camp, Japan was eager to show it was civilized so prisoners were treated according to the strictest interpretation of the Geneva Convention. For example, the prisoners received the same wages they had received as part of the German military, even though the average salary was about six times that of a Japanese policeman. The prisoners used their salaries to buy beer, hire cooks and purchase a printing press they used to publish a weekly prison newspaper in German called The Barracks.
Willie was more comfortable than most of the other prisoners. His family sent care packages of canned milk, coffee and sausages, but after nearly two years, he was desperate to leave. So when the camp’s barber offered to help him escape, Willie could not resist.
According to a newspaper account, on the night of July 19, 1916, the barber distracted the sentries while Willie and a friend, wearing yukata, a light cotton kimono, sneaked out the gate and made their way toward the train station. Before they had gone very far, however, they were surrounded by guards.
Willie and his friend were put in solitary confinement where they received half a bowl of rice and some weak miso soup three times a day. Willie later told his children how he saved his rice from breakfast and lunch and pressed it into a ball to eat with dinner so he could feel full at least once a day. He berated himself for being so stupid as to wear his army boots under his cotton yukata. He would later tell his children that was the reason the soldiers had caught him.
The truth, I discovered, was far more interesting. One day, Jan Baerwald, a friend whose family had lived for several generations in Japan, was showing me an old family guestbook that contained the signatures of prominent visitors to Japan like Albert Einstein. We were turning the pages when a yellowed newspaper clipping fluttered to the floor. Jan’s grandparents had not known the Helms, so I was surprised when I picked up the clipping and discovered it was about Willie.
“Curious End to a Strange Adventure,” read the headline on the article dated August 31, 1916. “It will be remembered that on July 19 two German prisoners—W. Helm (well known in Kobe and Yokohama) and Hugo Tandain—escaped from the camp at Kurume but were arrested before they had proceeded far.” Evidently the article had been clipped from an English-language newspaper in Japan.
Willie and his friend were brought before a Japanese court and charged with attempted escape, the article reported. If convicted, they could have lost their privileges as prisoners of war and been placed in a regular prison as common criminals. However, in the course of the proceedings, the Japanese judge discovered that camp commander Mazaki Jinzaburo—who would later play an important role in the rise of militarism in Japan—had ordered the barber to help Willie escape, according to the newspaper account, “for the mere pleasure of having them arrested.” I wondered then if Mazaki had chosen Willie for the scheme because he was of mixed blood and had a reputation for being a playboy, something he might have associated with the decadence of the West. Willie was released from solitary confinement and moved to another prison camp.
Tsutsumi introduced me to the mayor before taking me to a nearby cemetery to visit a stone memorial for the half-dozen German prisoners who died, mostly of disease, while living in the camp. Tsutsumi handed me a bouquet of flowers to place on the grave while members of the press photographed the occasion.
“How do you feel about this?” one of several reporters called out to me. “Willie must have felt a little confused fighting for Germany knowing that his own mother was Japanese,” I said, feeling at a loss for words.
It didn’t seem appropriate to mention that having grown up reading comic books and watching movies in which the enemy was always German, I felt odd putting flowers on a memorial to German soldiers. I remembered how some of my American relatives would disdainfully refer to “the German Helms.” World War I, I realized, had driven in the first wedge dividing the Helm family.
At the beginning of the war, Japanese authorities took no action against German residents living in Japan who had not chosen, like Willie, to fight against Japan. But as the war dragged on, Britain pressured its ally Japan, to crack down on its enemy. Julius and his second son, Jim, also a German national, were forced to resign from Helm Brothers. Julius left Yokohama on April 26, 1915 for San Francisco where he boarded the Danish steamer, The United States, to Copenhagen because it flew a neutral flag. Then he sailed to Germany where he met up with his wife, Alma, and his two daughters.
Back in Yokohama, Helm Brothers was able to continue to operate because it was registered in Hong Kong and was managed by Julie, who was American because he happened to be born in New York, and Karl, who had taken Japanese citizenship so he could register Helm Brothers’ ships in his name, bypassing Japanese laws that prohibited foreign-owned boats from plying internal waterways. Taking Japanese citizenship was not easy, even then. To become a Japanese citizen, Japanese law required you to be included in the birth registry of a Japanese family. I wondered how Karl had managed to pull this off. But Karl, his children said, had always considered himself Japanese by passport only, sending his children to the German school.
Now that Germany was an enemy to Japan, Karl began to distance himself from his German heritage as well. He began to use the name Charles instead of Karl, and moved his children from the German school in Yokohama to Sacred Heart, a French convent school in Tokyo, seventeen miles away.