by Leslie Helm
Dad knew that only a gangster would buy a house in which a tenant was still living, since Japanese laws made it so difficult to get the tenant to leave. Only a gangster would be willing to live in a showy house with such a stink of wealth: only a yakuza, that is, or a half-caste foreigner.
The Maiko house, as the Helms called it, was legendary for the beauty of its large garden. One day in the fall of 1992, I happened to be in Kobe on assignment, so I took the train to Maiko, about half an hour away, to look at the house. It was easy to find because Jim’s daughter had explained that it was by a wooded park across the street from the octagonal house, now a museum, where Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen lived in exile in the early 1900s. The Maiko house was surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall of white plaster topped with blue tiles. I rang the doorbell. When nobody answered, I climbed a tree to get a better view. I was nervous. As far as I knew, the house, one of the few pre-war buildings left in the area, was still owned by a yakuza. Recently I had written a story about a gambler who had been killed by yakuza for failing to pay his debts. The assassin had scaled a wall much like this one and slain the gambler with a samurai sword. What would the yakuza owner of the Maiko house think if he saw me sitting in a tree spying on him?
Julie Helm, ca. 1907.
From my vantage point in the tree, I could see over the wall onto a stunning garden that included a dry brook of smooth river stones lined with large craggy rocks and a thirty-foot-high stone pagoda. The house was built on one side of dark wood siding, while the other side was built of exposed half-timbers and white plaster.
Eighty years earlier, Jim had hosted a party here for his younger brother Julie and his bride Betty. It felt strange and thrilling to think that somehow, through earthquakes and fires, this building had survived. I had seen a picture of Grandmother Betty as a young woman looking exotic with her hair cut short and wearing a tight-fitting dress from the flapper era. She didn’t look the least bit Japanese, although she was mixed race, Japanese and Caucasian. There are also many pictures of her holding me, although I was too young to remember her. I wondered what she would have thought if she could look over the wall, eighty years into the future, and see me sitting in a tree trying to imagine her life with Grandfather Julie.
I never knew Grandfather Julie. He died before I was born. My father kept a photo of Julie on his dresser. He had a big nose that was out of sync with his narrow face. His ears stuck out and his thin lips were curled down at the edge. Somehow Julie’s face and his features didn’t mesh.
Would my grandparents provide the key to understanding my father and his awkward relationship with Japan, and ultimately, with me? I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Julie and Betty living in the early 1900s in both Japan and the United States as half-castes.
ALTHOUGH JULIE WAS A COMPETENT man who did a good job managing the family business, he never received much respect from the Helm family. “Well, you know, Uncle Julie was the bookkeeper,” one great-aunt told me a little contemptuously. “He would give us pocket money and then tell us not to buy candy. It was silly. The only reason we wanted money was to buy candy.”
As I thought about it, I realized I knew little about Julie as a young man. In a family photo taken when he was about eight years old, there is an intensity in his big eyes that drew my attention to him. At fourteen, when he completed eighth grade at St. Joseph’s College on The Bluff, Julie went to work for Helm Brothers. Later he would help his Uncle Gustav in Virginia with his accounts, study at his aunt’s school in Germany and complete an accounting program in New York. “I believe Dad had a very difficult upbringing with little or no adolescence,” explained my Uncle Larry. “From the age of fourteen, he was working in an adult world that told him emotions were a sign of weakness.”
When Julie graduated from accounting school in 1912 at age twenty-five, he was appointed secretary and treasurer of Helm Brothers, working under his older brother Charles. The job proved to be a perfect fit for Julie. He had a mind for numbers and a sharp eye for cutting costs. He recorded every penny the company spent and established strict rules to eliminate waste. A pencil had to be worn down until it was less than an inch long before it could be replaced. Bits of string any longer than the distance between an outstretched thumb and forefinger were added to a ball of string always kept on hand. Julie began to collect old clocks, admiring their intricate, predictable mechanisms and their white faces painted with elegant numbers. These seemed to be the very embodiment of his well-ordered life.
Though he was wealthy and his English perfect, being of mixed blood, Julie was barred from the Union Club, the exclusive lunch club on Yokohama’s Bund where the expats hung out. Many of the foreigners in Yokohama were envious of Julie’s ability to speak Japanese and to be at ease in any Japanese setting. Once, after a few drinks, my father told me how, as a child, he had walked into his father’s office to find a large man with a bald head bowing deeply before his father, a little too deeply. It was only much later that Dad would understand the man was a yakuza and he was either in Julie’s employ or deeply indebted to him. I would later discover that Helm Brothers had little choice but to work with the gangsters who represented the day laborers the company employed to load and unload ships for a new transport company Charles had established called Toyo Unso. A man who always appears in pictures of Helm Brothers employees wearing sunglasses was the man charged with dealing with the labor groups. A retired Helm Brothers employee told me the man in sunglasses once returned from an encounter with a yakuza with knife cuts all over his face. He had refused to be intimidated. In the early 1920s, when laborers were becoming increasingly militant and frequently threatened the company with strikes, these men of the underworld played a key role in cowing the workers to assure labor peace.
Julie’s wife, Betty (Stucken) Helm, ca. 1928.
In 1922, when his father died, Julie was suddenly wealthy. He began to have fun, frequenting the racetrack and having a relationship with a Japanese courtesan. He frequently went drinking with his two friends, Mike Apcar, an Armenian who exported Japanese antiques and imported Ariel motorcycles from Britain (he once took an Ariel halfway up Mt. Fuji as a marketing gimmick), and an Australian who ran the Japanese subsidiary of an American record company.
In November 1922, Julie took a trip to New York that changed his life. The trip was ostensibly to establish contacts with a shipping company in the city. But in truth, Julie had been intrigued by a letter from his older brother Jim, who was then staying with his mother-in-law in Brooklyn. There was somebody there Jim wanted his brother Julie to meet.
Julie had always been a little envious of his older brother Jim, who seemed to be everything Julie was not. Jim was tall and athletic, and his performance in crew races and other athletic feats would often appear in the local Kobe English newspaper. By contrast, Julie was short and somewhat awkward. While Jim sported a great bushy moustache, Julie could hardly grow stubble on his face. Jim had light skin and could easily pass as Caucasian, while Julie was dark and might pass perhaps as someone from Latin America. While Jim was at ease in society gatherings, Julie avoided them.
Jim had a cosmopolitan air about him. He had worked at a bank in St. Petersburg, Russia, and as an executive at a large New York corporation before taking over Helm Brothers’ Kobe operation. What was most impressive of all was that Jim had wooed and married a musically accomplished Caucasian-American girl. True, his eldest brother, Charles, formerly Karl, and his younger brother, Willie, had also married white women, but Charles’s wife was a first cousin, and Willie’s wife was a widow with two children.
In Kobe, where Jim ran Helm Brothers’ local branch, he and his charming wife moved in high circles. Jim raced in regattas, joined a water polo team and contributed large sums of Helm Brothers’ money to various charitable causes. His wife, Elizabeth, a brunette with a commanding presence and a beautiful voice, served two terms as president of the Kobe Women’s Club and often sang at special occasions. Still it
was hard to escape the issue of race. Jim would never forget overhearing his friends talk about him in the locker room at his sports clubs. “Jim’s a good sort,” one man said. “Yes,” said the other. “He knows his place.”
Among the many ladies in the foreign community who Jim’s wife Elizabeth had befriended in Kobe was Betty Stucken, a charming, well-brought-up Eurasian girl whose father came from a good German family. When Betty moved to New York in 1920, Elizabeth had suggested Betty room with her mother in Brooklyn. It was Elizabeth’s idea to match up Julie with Betty.
Julie must have been filled with both excitement and foreboding as he disembarked from his ship in New York. Ever since attending accounting school in New York as a young man, he had developed a special affection for the city. He liked the crowds of people brimming with energy and purpose, the sense of freedom and the anonymity amid the polyglot of races and languages. What he may not have been aware of was the extent to which racism had infected every element of American society.
Earlier that year, the US Supreme Court had affirmed legislation denying Japanese immigrants the right to American citizenship. American politicians and citizens were becoming increasingly bold in their racist pronouncements. “If you were to go abroad and someone was to meet you and say, ‘I met a typical American,’ what would flash into your mind as a typical American, the typical representative of that new Nation?” Senator Ellison Du Rant Smith of South Carolina would later ask the US Senate in support of a new measure to prevent all people of color from migrating to the United States. “Would it be ... the son of any of the breeds from the Orient, the son of the denizens of Africa? ... It is the breed of the dog in which I am interested.”
Eugenics, which sought to prove the superiority of whites over other races, was all the rage among “scholars” in the United States. Edward Byron Reuter, who would later serve as president of the American Sociological Society, asked rhetorically in his 1918 book, The Mulatto in the United States, whether the United States would continue to be welcomed among the club of civilized nations if the proportion of non-whites in its population kept increasing. Eurasians, he said, “stand between two civilizations, but are a part of neither. They are miserable, helpless, despised and neglected.” Why? “In infancy [the half-caste] is nursed, and in youth pampered by his native servants upon whom he is dependent. As a consequence, all the strong traits of manhood are feebly developed in him ... In manhood he is wily, untrustworthy and untruthful. He is lacking in independence and is forever begging for special favors … Socially the Eurasians are outcasts. They are despised by the ruling whites and hated by the natives.”
I wonder if Julie didn’t sense this new attitude in the glances of the man at the bank who cashed his check or the taxi driver who took him to Jim’s mother-in-law’s brick townhouse in Brooklyn. I wonder if it didn’t give him pause when Jim and Elizabeth introduced him to the pretty Eurasian girl who was living with Elizabeth’s mother.
Long afterward, Betty and Julie might have smiled at what Julie would later admit had been a carefully arranged meeting. But at the time, I wonder if Julie didn’t feel vaguely insulted that Jim, who had been so proud of his white wife, would feel that a Eurasian girl was good enough for his younger brother. Julie was acutely aware of the relationship between skin color and class. When he saw Joyce, Jim’s ten-year-old daughter, and David, his two-year-old son, Julie might well have intuited that David, with no hint of the Japanese blood in him, would live a comfortable life. He would marry a white woman and his children would not be identifiable as Asian in any way. By contrast, Joyce, who had black hair and lovely Asian features, would find her way littered with obstacles.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Decades later, when Joyce married a Portuguese man from Macao, Jim and Elizabeth would refuse to attend their own daughter’s wedding to this dark-skinned man. In his will, Jim granted his darker-skinned daughter just half of what he gave to his two other lighter-skinned children.
In the eyes of Betty, then twenty-three years old, Julie must have seemed far less the prize than her friend Elizabeth had promised. Julie looked like an odd old man. At thirty-five, he was already bald and had a huge purple birthmark on his head. His large ears stuck out awkwardly. He was short, quiet, and though he played the mandolin, a little boring. It would not have occurred to Betty that she and Julie had much in common even though both their fathers traveled to Japan from Germany a half century before and married Japanese women. Although the Helms were rich, Betty’s father, Edmund, came from old wealth.
Jim Helm’s children: Joyce, Ruth and David, ca. 1926.
By the end of Julie’s two weeks in New York, as I imagine the meeting, he had fallen for Betty as if he had fallen from a horse carriage, hit his head on the pavement and stood up to find the world a different place. He had never known anyone as beautiful, talented and vivacious as Betty. He loved to watch her paint in Central Park, her lips pursed, her eyes focused. He loved to hear the soft Japanese words and lyrical French she threw in her conversations that spiced up her English. It intrigued Julie that Betty seemed to be proud of her Japanese blood. She had studied Japanese sumi-e painting and bonseki, miniature landscapes. She had learned to read and write Japanese, something none of the Helms had ever attempted.
At the same time, Betty was very much the modern Western woman. Her slim body looked stunning in the body-hugging flapper fashions of the time, and Betty delighted in taking the staid Julie to the dance halls then popular in New York. Watching Betty dance, twirl and laugh gave Julie a sense of joy that was foreign to him. When he talked to her, her eyes sparkled. He wanted to buy her furs and jewels. It was as if all the money he had been saving all his life finally had a purpose.
It took much longer for Betty to fall for Julie. He was not the tall, handsome man she had envisioned for herself. Still, she found with Julie a sense of security she craved, for Betty was hardly the carefree woman she appeared to be.
Betty’s father, Edmund Stucken, came from a wealthy merchant family in the large German port of Bremen. His mother, born in Cuba to a family of German diplomats, died while giving birth to Edmund, and so the boy was raised by a bevy of nannies and tutors. He moved to Kobe in 1870, at age twenty, just a year after Julie’s father, Julius, had arrived in Yokohama. Stucken, who may have been trying to avoid being sent to the front in the Franco-Prussian War, received a stipend from his wealthy father and had established his own trading company that represented the Tsingtao Brewery, a German beer company in China.
In a publication of the Club Concordia, a German club, old timers recalled Edmund as a debonair man with a handlebar moustache who would put his brandy snifter on the club’s grand piano and sit down to play a stormy rendition of Beethoven’s “Tempest.” Edmund married a Japanese woman who died, like his mother, in childbirth. His daughter Betty, at age four, was sent to live at a French convent in Tokyo with her two sisters.
Toward the end of World War I, Edmund, as a German, had to shutter his business. To save money, he pulled his children from the convent school and let his servants go. Betty was disturbed when her father started coming home drunk and collapsing on the living room couch. When Edmund died in 1920 at age seventy, his obituary in the Japan Chronicle noted how he had fallen “on evil ways” toward the end of his life.
Soon afterward, at age twenty-one, Betty traveled to New York. She worked as a secretary at the New York branch of a large Japanese trading company. She quickly learned that Americans saw Japanese women as exotic playthings. In 1917, “My Yokohama Girl” was a popular tune whose refrain was “My Yokohama pearl. Run away, run away, run away in your silk pajama.” Then there was the song “Yokohama Lullaby” about a “Yama mama” who sings a Yokohama lullaby to her “Happy little Jappy.”
Betty began dating a well-educated Japanese man at her office. He took her to see the Charlie Chaplin comedies and Valentino romances that she loved. One evening he mentioned that his mother had arranged a bride for him and he would soon b
e returning to Japan to be married. It hurt Betty deeply that this man she had opened her heart to had never seriously considered her. Betty would always wonder if it was because she was only half Japanese.
Julie, by contrast, clearly loved her. When it came time for Julie to return to Japan, he asked Betty if he could see her again. She told him that she would like nothing better.
But life was not to be so simple. The US Congress would soon pass the Exclusion Act, which barred East Asians from immigrating. If Betty traveled to Japan, she might never be able to return to the United States. Julie, a US citizen, had planned to return to New York the following fall to woo Betty. Instead, he found himself caught up in an event that the insurance companies would call an “act of God,” but that even God might have disavowed.
THE YEARS BEGINNING WITH World War I, sometimes called the Taisho era after the imperial reign that followed Meiji, were Yokohama’s golden era. Japan had expended little money in the war effort, yet, as a victor nation, it was permitted by its allies to occupy German interests in China and the Pacific islands. Japan also did a booming business supplying its allies with war materials. Trade soared, boosting the fortunes of both Yokohama and Helm Brothers. I imagine it was a little like the early Meiji period when Great-Grandfather Julius first arrived, and after World War II when I was growing up in Yokohama. Foreigners and Japanese alike flocked to a city that seemed to combine the best of Japan and the West—a place that seemed open to new things. But that era of prosperity would be short-lived.
September 1, 1923, eleven fifty-eight in the morning. Summer was winding down, but it was still hot and humid in Yokohama. The sun was heating up the corrugated steel roof of the Helm Brothers building at #43 Yamashita-cho. Julie and his older brother Karl, who now called himself Charles, were on the second floor drenched in sweat as they stuffed yen bills into long slender envelopes for their employees’ payday that afternoon. They were almost finished, and Julie was beginning to place the envelopes back in the safe when the floor rose abruptly and then lurched to the side as if the building were on the back of some giant creature that had suddenly awoken from its slumber. Julie was thrown to the ground. He heard a distant roar like the sound of the surf. When he came to his senses, a yellow cloud of dust hung over him. And outside of what had been a second-story window, he saw a bicycle lying on its side.