by Leslie Helm
Dora died on September 10, 1923, just nine days after the great earthquake. Doctors today will say a girl cannot die of anxiety, but hospitals in Kobe were so busy taking care of the injured that she did not get the care she required. She was the only earthquake-related death in the whole Helm family.
Dora’s death was a great blow to Jim and Elizabeth. They withdrew from their social engagements and in 1924 journeyed to New York to stay with Elizabeth’s mother. Betty was still renting a room from Elizabeth’s mother, so Betty comforted Elizabeth, and once again they became close friends.
Did Elizabeth, trying to forget the pain of her lost daughter, become once again engrossed in Betty’s suspended relationship with Julie? I do not doubt it, for when she returned to Japan in the spring of 1925, Betty was with her.
Julie and Betty are married in Yokohama surrounded by Julie’s brothers, Karl and Jim with their families, and his sisters Marie, Elsie and Louise, 1925.
Betty and Julie were married in Yokohama on September 5, 1925, just two years after the great earthquake. Betty, twenty-six, wore a garland of flowers in her hair. She looked like a child bride next to her thirty-eight-year-old, balding groom. Elizabeth’s four-year-old son, David, the child who might have been crushed during the earthquake had he stayed in Yokohama a day longer, was the ring bearer. Charles’s youngest daughter, Lillian, dark-haired and with olive skin, was the flower girl.
THE SAME EARTHQUAKE THAT DESTROYED Yokohama created a giant tsunami off the coast of Hayama, a seaside resort thirteen miles from Yokohama. A young woman they called Tsuru (“crane”) because of her long white neck was taking her lunch break from her work as a maid at the Hayama Imperial Villa when she heard cries. Tsuru-san ran outside to see the ocean receding, leaving a vast expanse of beach. “Run,” people were screaming. She ran for higher ground, turning around just in time to watch as the ocean rushed in like a moving wall then crashed down on the Villa, reducing it to splintered timbers.
Afterward, when she walked back to the beach she saw thieves going through the pockets of corpses. “It was a horrible sight,” the now elderly Tsuru-san told me when I visited her at her home in Yokohama about a year after my father’s memorial. At the memorial, she had looked elegant in her formal kimono, but now, wearing a plain flannel kimono and peering at me through eyes like black marbles, she looked decades older.
Tsuru-san recalled fond memories at the Villa. She remembered one night in particular, when Hirohito, the crown prince, spent the night. The next morning, before cleaning the crown prince’s bath, she had taken off her clothes and slipped into the lukewarm water. “I bathed in the same water as the crown prince,” she said. Her eyes sparkled as she leaned her head back and chuckled, covering her mouth to hide her teeth. And when she folded his highness’s futon, she told me, putting her face close to mine conspiratorially, she laid down on the warm tatami mat where the futon had been, feeling the warmth that still remained under the futon where the crown prince had been sleeping. I was a little shocked when Tsuru-san told me this story. I had always heard how the emperor was revered as a god, so this seemed sacrilegious.
But most of the time, she continued, the Imperial Villa job had been boring. Her supervisors had always complained about her and often used to say, “You are so lazy; you should go work for a foreigner.” So after the earthquake, she made her way to Yokohama where, after three years she met with Betty, who was looking for a nanny for her first son, Don, my father.
It was good work. Tsuru-san was paid a salary that was more than that of a policeman. She lived in one of three small rooms behind the kitchen that also housed the cook. The chauffeur and his family lived in a small room above the garage. There was a chicken coop where the maids fetched fresh eggs for breakfast. In the fall, there was always a turkey being fattened for the holidays.
“We were always curious about blue-eyed people,” said Tsuru-san, using a description that referred to all foreigners. “I remember there was a popular song about blue-eyed dolls.”
The blue-eyed doll from America.
At the pier her eyes are full of tears.
“I don’t speak Japanese. I will get lost,” she cries.
“Gentle girls of Japan, play with me! Be my friend.”
In 1927, I learned later, some twelve thousand American dolls were sent to Japanese schools as a gesture of goodwill. Japan reciprocated by sending fifty-eight dolls made by the best dollmakers to America. When World War II began, the Japanese burned most of the American dolls as evil symbols of the West, but the song remained popular.
“The mistress [Betty] was kind to me. She always liked me,” said Tsuru-san. “She even included me in her will.”
While Julie would fine Tsuru-san every time she let the screen door slam, Betty always paid her back afterward. Tsuru-san knew Betty trusted her when Betty shared her system for testing maids. She would throw a few coins under the couch and then ask the maid to do a thorough cleaning: If the money was left untouched, she knew the maid hadn’t cleaned properly; if the money was gone, she knew the maid was dishonest.
Tsuru-san told me she felt sorry for Betty on the many nights that Julie would come home late, long after the children had been put to bed. On those nights, Betty would turn to the cook and say, “The master is working late. Please put away the dinner.” It became clear to Tsuru-san that Julie had a mistress. Then one day a beautiful woman in a kimono came to the door. She had the good manners and bearing of a geisha. Julie led her to the living room. Betty held her son Don in her arms while she paced back and forth in the dining room. Tsuru-san was so curious she piled up two boxes in the hallway and climbed onto them so she could peer through the small glass window at the top of the living room door. “I was standing on the boxes when they tumbled down. I fell right on my bottom.” Tsuru-san laughed. “The Master didn’t hear me. He was busy negotiating.”
Tsuru-san concluded that the lady had been Grandfather Julie’s concubine before he had married Betty. Finally Betty had put her foot down and Julie had arranged a settlement. “I think she came to the house because she felt she didn’t get enough separation money,” said Tsuru-san. “He always was such a stingy man. Served him right!”
Julie’s stinginess was partly from his father Julius. It may also have had something to do with the tough economic times in Yokohama in the aftermath of the earthquake. The silk trade, on which Helm Brothers had depended for the bulk of its stevedoring business, had largely moved to Kobe after its warehouses had burned down in the earthquake.
Slowly business began to recover. The Japanese had been impressed by the trucks and cars brought in from America to help in Yokohama’s reconstruction following the earthquake. Soon demand for those vehicles soared. Ford opened a factory near Yokohama in 1925 and General Motors soon followed. Cars replaced horse carriages as the preferred means of transportation among the rich. The occasional car or bus could now be heard honking its horn as it jostled for space with the streetcars, bicycles, rickshaws and handcarts that crowded the roads.
As Yokohama industrialized, it became a major destination for foreign travelers. In 1927, the Hotel New Grand was built. It was a three-story luxury hotel of stone overlooking the harbor that would host such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth and Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester. Helm Brothers also served many of the new world travelers. In June 1928, when the pilots John Mears and Charles Collyer arrived in Yokohama by ship, only Helm Brothers had a floating crane, a fifty-eight-ton, German-built machine capable of lifting their single propeller plane off of the ship and onto shore so they could carry on their “Round the World” voyage. The two pilots would circle the planet in a record-breaking twenty-three days and fifteen hours. The year before, Charles Lindbergh had piloted the Spirit of St. Louis on its famous flight across the Atlantic.
Hosei University baseball team travels to Hawaii.
Culturally, too, the world seemed to be converging in those final years of the 1920s. Dance halls, jazz and automobile
s—those crowning glories of the West—had already become an integral part of Yokohama. There was even a Japanese word for the flapper. Taking the first syllables of the English words “modern” and “girl,” the Japanese called these party-loving, cigarette-smoking Japanese girls moga. Cultural exchange blossomed.
Julie and Betty were swept up in the new mood. In May 1929, Julie loaned a Hawaiian friend $1,500 in gold to pay the cost of sending the sixteen-member Hosei University baseball team to Hawaii. The team arrived in Honolulu on the S.S. Shinyo Maru on May 18, 1929. Julie must have felt good when he received newspaper clippings in the mail with such headlines as “Hosei Japanese Collegians Smother Fils.” The team stayed in Hawaii for five weeks and played more than twenty games.
In October 1929, just when Julie thought everything was back on track, the New York stock market crashed. Overnight, the substantial investments Julie had made in the United States were worthless. His Hawaiian friend never repaid the loan for the fares of the baseball team. The US economy plunged into an economic downturn that led the US Congress in 1930 to raise tariffs on imports by more than fifty percent. After championing free trade for half a century—it was America that had forced Japan in 1859 to open its doors to trade—the United States was slamming the door in Japan’s face. The volume of trade passing through the port of Yokohama fell by half from 1929 to 1931. Unemployment in Japan soared. The few Yokohama banks that survived the earthquake were now knocked out by the plunge in trade. Virtually every bank in Yokohama was forced into bankruptcy by 1930.
Helm Brothers was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression when Charles died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1933, at age fifty-three. Julie took over as boss. Life steadily improved for Betty and their three children: Don, seven; Ray, three; and Larry, one. They moved to a large, two-story Western house high on a hill. In the living room was a large glass chandelier. A big pantry off the kitchen was packed with Betty’s large collection of antique Japanese ceramics.
Julie also built a summer home for the family in Honmoku, near his father’s summer house on Helm Hill. Today, the hill looks over a vast plain of highways and oil refineries, but at the time it was an idyllic place. There was a long wooden staircase with more than a hundred steps that took the kids from their summer house on the cliff down to “Society Beach,” where other foreigners rented temporary bamboo shacks. At the beginning of every summer, the foreigners paid for the construction of a wooden pier for swimming and boating that was dismantled every September before typhoons could destroy it. Up at the house, a fisherman would come by the kitchen door with a large basket filled with seafood caught that morning. The cook would select a nice fish for dinner and buy a bag of baby clams to put in the miso soup. At dinner time, the cook would ring a gong to call the children to dinner. After dinner the kids would play hide-and-seek or use a can and string to talk between houses. Too soon, summer would be over and it would be back to school and a stricter regimen.
Dad remembered dinner with his father, Julie, as an unhappy time. “He would flip my ear with his finger whenever I used my hands to eat and it would sting like hell. I was very scared of him always.”
Tsuru-san later recalled that sometimes Julie would come home to find Dad playing cards with a friend while yapping away in Japanese. Julie would grab him by the ear and drag him across the room to his office, take off his slipper and hit Dad on the bottom until he was howling. Julie didn’t want his son to end up speaking “Japlish,” a tangled mixture of Japanese and English spoken by so many children of mixed parents. How well you spoke English was a critical determinant of class, and Julie was intent on making sure his kids could pass in the best society.
One day Dad came home crying after being taunted by Japanese kids who shouted, “Gaijin mame kutte papiya, papiya. (Foreigners eat beans and fart.)” He had bruises all over his body.
A few days later, recalled Tsuru-san, Julie pushed the coffee table to the side of the room, laid tatami mats in the middle of the living room and began teaching Dad judo.
Tsuru-san remembered another disturbing incident. On February 2, 1936, Tsuru-san and the cook were warming themselves by the stove when my Dad, then nine, came rushing through the door. “A terrible thing has happened,’ he said. “Takahashi-san has been murdered!”
Betty and Julie with sons (L to R) Larry, Ray and Don.
Tsuru-san and the cook looked at each other skeptically.
“It’s true!” Dad insisted. “The gardener is dead. I heard it at the store.”
Then they both burst out laughing. How typical of a gaijin child to assume that the Takahashi-san he heard mentioned at the store must be the one that worked for him. Dad didn’t know that Takahashi was about as common a name as you could find in Japan.
Takahashi had indeed been murdered. And just as the servants suspected, it was not the gardener. But it was no laughing matter. The victim had been Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s finance minister. Early that morning, 1,483 soldiers had marched into Tokyo, occupied government buildings and murdered politicians they considered corrupt. They were stopped before they reached the Imperial Palace where they had planned to “free” the emperor.
Tokyo was thrown into chaos for three days before the leaders of the insurrection were captured. The man who had been the inspiration for many of the rebels was General Mazaki Jinzaburo. He was the xenophobic commander of the World War I POW camp who had tried to frame my Great-Uncle Willie.
The leaders of the insurrection were put to death, but the murders intimidated the politicians and made it difficult for them to stand up to the military. Without strong opposition from the central government, the Kwantung Army, Japan’s army in Manchuria, pushed farther and farther into North China, setting Japan on a collision path with the United States.
In spite of these incidents, Julie was optimistic about the future. In 1935, Yokohama felt good enough to celebrate its economic recovery in the Grand Yokohama Exposition. The city held the expo at Yamashita park, which had been built along the waterfront with rubble from the earthquake. A year later, the International Olympic Committee announced that the 1940 Olympic Games would be held in Tokyo. Japan saw the games as an appropriate way to help celebrate what it claimed was the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of Japan by its mythic first emperor.
In 1936, Julie decided it was time to build a headquarters building for Helm Brothers—one that would survive any fire or earthquake, anchoring the family in Yokohama far into the future. The new headquarters would be completed just as the Olympics was being held and Japan was center stage on the global scene. The timing could not have been more auspicious.
TWO YEARS LATER, GRANDFATHER JULIE was dressed in a tailcoat as he stood for a photograph to celebrate the grand opening of Helm House, a five-story, reinforced concrete building that would serve as the new headquarters of Helm Brothers. The firm my Great-Grandfather Julius had founded now had several hundred employees, close to a hundred barges, a dozen tugboats, two of Japan’s largest floating cranes and stevedoring operations in all six of Japan’s largest ports. So confident was Julie of the company’s survival far into the future that he had arranged for a time capsule to be placed under one corner of the building. It contained paintings by his wife Betty, who had done the interior decorating of the building. It also contained other valuables and mementos which, when the capsule was unearthed in some distant future, would offer a record of that moment in history.
Great-Grandfather Julius was present in the form of a poster-sized portrait placed at the center of the room beside an elaborate flower arrangement. Julie, perhaps aware of his father looking on, straightened his tie and pulled back his shoulders as the photographer began to shoot. In the picture Julie looks diminutive, flanked by his two tall, mustachioed German brothers, Jim and Willie.
Julie was proud of the building. It was just two blocks away from the South Pier, where passenger ships unloaded travelers from around the globe, and was visible from the harbor. In the fifteen ye
ars since the earthquake, Yokohama had quadrupled in size as it incorporated more and more of the towns and villages around it. With its jazz bars, dance halls and many movie theaters, Yokohama had come to epitomize Japan’s embrace of the West. Helm House represented another important step.
Julie took his family and guests on a tour of the building. The first floor of the Helm House included an elegant dining room with art deco lighting, a bar and the Japan headquarters of the Banque de l’Indochine, as well as the headquarter offices of Helm Brothers. From the second floor up, the building contained thirty-one fully furnished apartments designed to attract wealthy international guests with the latest in Western comfort and convenience.
It was one of the first buildings in Japan to have a telephone exchange and central air conditioning. Each kitchen had a gas range, a refrigerator, a coffee maker and a toaster, all imported from the United States. The living rooms boasted American couches and Chinese carpets. The dining-room table and chairs were custom-made in Japan as was the china, each piece stamped with the Helm Brothers HB logo.
The Czech architect, Jan Josef Svagr, who had come to Japan on the invitation of an assistant to Frank Lloyd Wright, designed Helm House’s blocky, modern look, full of angles and corners, to assure each apartment had good views and plenty of privacy, an amenity still rare in Japan.