by Leslie Helm
“The entire first floor had collapsed under them,” explained Trudy, Charles’s daughter, as she recounted what happened that day. They were lucky the roof had been made of light corrugated iron instead of tile, which would have crashed down on them. Julie looked over to see Charles dust off his three-piece suit and pull a pocket watch from his vest. From the watch chain, which was attached to a button on his vest, hung a two-inch tiger’s tooth given him by a ship’s captain as a good luck charm. Charles opened the watch cover and put the watch to his ear. “It’s still ticking,” he said.
“I’ll see to things here,” Julie told his brother. “You’d better get back to your family.”
Charles’s family was spending the summer at their vacation home on Helm Hill in Honmoku, a seaside village three miles away. Charles and his wife Louise were respected members of the Yokohama community. They frequently invited for dinner the ship captains who were important customers of the Helm Brothers’ stevedoring and forwarding services. Julie had always been the quiet one, and I suspect he envied the confidence and social ease of Charles and his wife Louise, who arranged flowers at the Union Church. She had become the matriarch of the extended Helm family, and everyone referred to her as Auntie Mama-Lou.
At two minutes before noon, Auntie Mama-Lou was making jam on a big stove using figs from her orchard. Her two daughters, Trudy, thirteen, and Lillian, nine, and her son Walter, fourteen, were sitting together on the couch in the veranda. They were reading comics from two weeks’ worth of the Los Angeles Times that had arrived on a recent freighter when the house began to sway violently. Japanese houses, with their wood beams notched together, were meant to flex during an earthquake and thereby dissipate its force. But this temblor was too powerful. Trudy would later recall how the house swayed so sharply the sliding glass doors along the veranda popped off their rails and crashed down into the house, sending shards of glass across the room. A big beam supporting the roof overhang groaned horribly and then fell. In the kitchen, the stove toppled on its side and coals spilled across the floor. Trudy screamed. Later she recalled, “I was sure it was the end of the world.”
Auntie Mama-Lou grabbed the big jar of coarse salt she kept on the shelf for making pickles and dumped it on the hot coals. Then she rushed the children out of the house and through the garden gate. Just as she thought she had gotten her children to safety, she put her hand to her mouth in horror. “David! Where’s David?” She had agreed to take care of her nephew, David, and his two sisters for a few weeks. How could she have forgotten? The maids must have put two-year-old David down for his noontime nap. Auntie Mama-Lou rushed back into the house. She gasped when she saw that the heavy wardrobe had fallen forward, crushing the crib where David had been sleeping.
On The Bluff, the cook who was taking care of Louise and Charles’s main home in their absence was pleased to see how well the grand old Victorian had withstood the earthquake. The cook doused the stove and returned everything that had been thrown to the ground back to its proper place. Then she locked the doors and set off on foot on the walk to the Honmoku summer house. She would have good news to report to the mistress: the house was safe.
Julie, still standing inside the fragile shell of the Helm Brothers’ headquarters, was in shock, as he would later tell my father. He had been through many earthquakes. He often laughed when newcomers to Yokohama would turn white just because a lampshade had begun to waver, but he had never experienced anything like the one that had brought this building to its knees. He quickly made his way to the safe. He spent the next five minutes picking up the pay envelopes and cash strewn about. He put the notes in neat piles, secured them with rubber bands and returned them to the safe. There was an aftershock and the roof swayed. Julie knew it could collapse at any moment. He quickly locked the safe and made his way out onto the street headed for home.
For the first time, Julie noticed the full extent of the devastation. Virtually all of the buildings in the area, most of which were built of brick, had collapsed. A thick cloud of dust and a strange silence hung in the air. People seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if in a trance. As Julie walked down the street, the whole city seemed to gradually awaken. Soon he could hear cries and moans from every direction. The mid-day sun was blazing. Here and there he saw wisps of smoke rising from the ruins. Later Julie would learn that many of the hibachis restaurants used to prepare lunch had tipped over, spilling hot coals and starting fires. In the distance, he heard the clanging bell of a fire engine. Then he heard a sharper cry.
“Over there!” a man shouted. Soon half a dozen men appeared. When my relatives retold the story, they would laugh about how a mob of Japanese carried sharpened bamboo sticks and chased Julie through the city. But it couldn’t have been funny to Julie. Later, he heard that the mobs were hunting down Koreans. They apparently mistook Julie for a Korean. Julie darted through back streets, clambering over fallen telephone poles and tangled wires. When he stopped to catch his breath, he felt trapped. Ahead of him was a raging fire; behind him were the vigilantes.
Charles had barely made it to the Motomachi tunnel, which led to Honmoku and his summer house, when he faced townspeople running in the opposite direction. “Fire!” he heard someone yell. He drifted to the side of the road and looked up to see the entire area around the tunnel a wall of flames. Charles turned and joined the crowds headed back toward the canal. At the canal, firemen were pumping water in a valiant but vain effort to slow the fire. The water mains, busted during the earthquake, had rendered the fire engines useless. Hundreds of people were now jumping into the canal to escape the heat, but Charles knew how polluted those waters were. The pond in the park, Charles thought, as he later told the story to his daughters. When he reached the park, six blocks away, he discovered the pond was already filled with hundreds of people up to their knees in water. Water mains beneath the park had burst and flooded the area. The park had once been the location of Yokohama’s entertainment quarters. During the fire of 1866, hundreds of prostitutes locked into their brothels had burned to death. The foreign community had designed the park in part to act as a fire break.
Charles climbed into the pond, not bothering to remove his shoes and pants. There he waited, occasionally pulling out his watch to check the time. A man offered him a cigarette. Charles had never smoked before, but he found the smell of the tobacco familiar and comforting—it camouflaged the greasy odor he began to detect amid the smoke, the scent of burning flesh. Charles had always assumed his wife and children were safe in the summer house. Now as he watched the firestorm, he wasn’t so sure.
Auntie Mama-Lou tried to move the large wardrobe from on top of the crushed crib, but it was too heavy. She looked pathetically at the corner of the pink wool blanket sticking out from under the wardrobe. My great-aunts said Auntie Mama-Lou berated herself, telling herself that she should have known better than to place the crib next to such a heavy piece of furniture! She should have grabbed the child on her way out of the house! But where was the child’s nanny? And where were the two girls? Suddenly it dawned on Auntie—David and his two sisters had left with their nanny the day before. By now they would be safe in their parents’ arms in Kobe.
With a sigh of relief, Auntie Mama-Lou ran out into the street to join her children. A chasm about five feet wide and ten feet deep had opened up in the mud road, and somebody had thrown a wooden shutter over the crack to act as a bridge. When they got to the orchard, it was hot. Louise pulled some leaves off a fig tree and gave them to the children to shade their heads. The servants had placed shoji doors on the ground and put futons on them for makeshift beds. With nothing more for the servants to do, Louise released them to join their families. She worried about Charles. Why hadn’t he come home? By late afternoon, the cook had joined them to report the good news that their main house was safe and locked up.
Motomachi, the little village at the foot of The Bluff, was ablaze. Hundreds of people who had jumped into the canal to escape the fire had drowned
. The fire, fed by heavy winds, was now rapidly consuming houses along Jizozaka, the steep road up to Charles’s house. The road had been named after the temple halfway up the hill that honored the guardian deity of children. Charles’s main house was soon in flames. Now hundreds of foreign residents and their servants were running away from the fire toward the sea cliffs carrying their valuables. Several priests heard sounds from the St. Maur International School farther up The Bluff and stopped to pull survivors from the wreckage. A few of the sisters had been saved, but most of the nuns and all of the children were trapped inside.
“I have a great big stone on my chest. Take it off. Oh, take it off please!” a priest heard one of the girls inside call out, as a family friend would later recall in a lengthy account of the earthquake.
“Be calm. Help is coming!” the priest shouted encouragingly. It was a lie. Already the fire was descending on the school. The priest called to the girls to join him in prayer, but as he did, he heard bloodcurdling screams. Twenty-six children and ten nuns died in the school that day.
Farther down the road, another man called for help. It was Mr. Meyer, an employee of Helm Brothers. His leg was caught under a heavy beam that fell when his house collapsed. A few good Samaritans had stopped to help him, but the beam was too large to dislodge, and they could already feel the heat from the advancing fire. Mr. Meyer begged them to cut off his leg so he could escape, but nobody was willing to undertake the gruesome task. They left him screaming as he was engulfed in flames.
A large crowd had now gathered on The Bluff along the edge of a fifty-foot precipice. A few residents knew a path down and led the way. When one old lady refused to move, a man grabbed her bag of valuables and threw it over the cliff. The woman quickly scrambled down. Soon the smoke hid the way and the crowds were overcome by the smoke and heat. Some desperate mothers jumped to their deaths, hugging their young children in their arms.
In downtown Yokohama, Julie felt trapped, blocked by a wall of flames. When he looked back, the men who had been chasing him were gone, evidently scared away by the approaching fire. Julie made for the sea wall. He climbed down some steps and stood in the water as he watched Yokohama burn. It was a dazzling sight. Telephone poles lit up like giant candles and then came crashing down. As the wind picked up and the flames grew higher, pieces of wood, paper and all manner of litter filled the air, carried by the heat and the wind. As Julie watched, he calculated the damage: the warehouses, the residences and the offices. How many employees survived? And what of the horses? Helm Brothers, he quickly concluded, was ruined.
In Honmoku, Auntie Mama-Lou and her children huddled together on futons in the fig orchard as they watched gangs of men carrying lanterns run up and down the street. They were searching for Koreans, a neighbor told them. “The Koreans have poisoned the wells,” he said. In the ensuing days, thousands of Koreans were captured and beaten or stabbed to death.
The fire was still burning in the distance when Louise and her children woke up in the orchard and made their way several miles along the water to the foot of The Bluff where a large congregation of foreigners had gathered. They were waiting to board a tugboat that would ferry them to the Empress of Australia, which was anchored offshore. Auntie Mama-Lou tried to keep the children from staring at the dozens of blackened bodies that washed up against the sea wall. After several hours, it was finally their turn. A nice man helped Auntie Mama-Lou lift the children into the tugboat. On board the Empress of Australia she found Charles there looking for her. Charles told her the shipping companies were offering free passage to Kobe and on to America. It appeared that the United States had offered citizenship to foreign residents who were victims of the earthquake. Charles told his wife to take the ship to Kobe with the children and stay with Jim’s family. There was little food or shelter in Yokohama now. He promised to join her when matters were in hand, then got a lift on a tugboat back to shore.
A day later, the ship Empress of Canada arrived to help in the evacuation. The passengers were transferred to the ship from the Empress of Australia. Now, with 1,400 refugees aboard, the Empress of Canada steamed off to Kobe. That night rich and poor slept side by side like sardines on the deck of the ship. There were few Japanese on board—they had been left to fend for themselves.
In the morning, as Julie surveyed the damage, he realized there was no point in counting up Helm Brothers’ losses. Yokohama was now nothing more than a vast wasteland of blackened rubble. It was as if Yokohama had shed its foreign skin in the intense heat. The only sign that this land had ever been a great international port was the occasional brick chimney, steel safe or the ridiculous sight of a bath tub floating twenty feet above the ground, held up in the sky by its iron plumbing while the house had collapsed around it.
One hundred and forty thousand people died in Yokohama and Tokyo that day in 1923. In Yokohama alone, at least 31,000 of the city’s population of 441,000 died. In Tokyo, the death figure was more than double that. A vacant lot where city residents had gone to escape the fire had become a giant crematorium when the warehouses around it burst into flames and 44,000 people burned. Some two-thirds of the buildings in Yokohama were destroyed, most of them by fire. Forty-five percent of Yokohama’s workers were instantly unemployed. Most of Yokohama’s foreign residents were quick to abandon the city.
Anybody who had felt the world tremble that day, anybody who had run from the firestorm, would find it difficult to ever feel completely safe in Yokohama again. Newspapers reported that insane asylums were filled with people who could not take the strain. Many foreign residents returned to their homelands in Europe or the United States. Some emigrated to Australia or New Zealand. Most of the rest moved to either Kobe or Shanghai.
THE DAY AFTER THE QUAKE, Julie made his way amid blackened timbers and rows of corpses, across cracks in the earth and piles of rubble, to the office where he had been when the earthquake hit. As he had expected, Helm Brothers’ warehouses had all collapsed. In 1866, following a devastating fire in the foreign settlement, foreigners had chosen to build in brick. But if buildings of brick could resist fire, it was now apparent that they were useless against a major earthquake. The city offices, banks and churches made of stone were now crypts burying the dead. The livery, where the horses and wagons were kept, was made of wood and had survived the temblor, but it had burned down in the aftermath like the rest of Yokohama. Nobody had thought to let the horses out.
Searching through the crumbled remains of the old office, Julie found the safe. It looked to be in good condition. At least they would be able to pay the employees their wages. Julie turned the dials on the combination lock, opened the heavy fireproof door of the safe and reached in, but everything had turned to ash. Now there wouldn’t even be enough money to pay the workers. The company had fire insurance, but he suspected—and he would be proved right—that the insurance companies would find a reason not to pay out. The Helm Brothers operations in Kobe and other ports around Japan had tended to operate at a loss. Without the operation in Yokohama to support them, they would quickly go bankrupt.
The only money the brothers had left was a few thousand dollars deposited in a New York bank account. They questioned if they should take that money and make a new life elsewhere. Julie could move to New York to be with Betty. But what would he do for work? And would Betty still want him without his wealth? Julie wondered if he even wanted to live in an unfriendly city like New York without money, the one security he had always relied upon.
Julie and Charles spent the next two days with a small group of Westerners helping the police line up and identify the bodies of the foreigners who had died. The police didn’t want to touch them for fear they would be accused of stealing from the corpses. The Japanese government was expected to send troops to help, but with communications systems down, the government was relying on carrier pigeons.
Immediately, Julie and Charles put their employees to work. They used the barges that had survived the fire to help unload and del
iver emergency materials. They built a shack to serve as the company’s temporary headquarters. Later they traveled to nearby forests to collect wood to build new barges and tugboats.
As foreigners left Yokohama, Charles and Julie used the money they had deposited in New York to acquire property in downtown Yokohama and on The Bluff. Julie also loaned money to friends who wanted to rebuild their homes in Yokohama.
So often did Japan experience fires and so often did it bounce back afterward that there was a saying in Japan: “After fire, prosperity.” And so it was with the Helms. Their commitment to Yokohama in its darkest days set the Helms apart. Yes, they were outsiders. Yes, they were foreigners. But Yokohama was their home. And their fates were tied to this land in a way true to few other foreigners, most of whom fled the ravaged city. Some have suggested that the Helms profited from the hardship of others. Perhaps, but they also fought to rebuild Yokohama. Although I have never found concrete evidence of it, one oldtimer in Yokohama whose grandfather had worked for Helm Brothers told me that he had heard Helm Brothers was given special favors by the city of Yokohama in its business dealings because of its contribution to the city after the earthquake.
Auntie Mama-Lou and the children arrived in Kobe on the Empress of Canada where they were greeted by Jim and Elizabeth, and taken to their family’s expansive home in Maiko with its beautiful gardens. While the Helms in Yokohama had escaped disaster, there was trouble closer to home. A week after the earthquake, Jim’s daughter, Dora, who was thirteen and had just returned from Yokohama with her siblings, grew hysterical when she heard of the Yokohama earthquake. “The anxiety seems to have started some kind of brain disturbance,” reported the Japan Weekly Chronicle, which covered the foreign community. “She complained of headaches and when her relatives arrived from Yokohama on the fifth, the disease had made such progress that she could take but little interest in them.”