by Leslie Helm
“You could slam the front door shut in one apartment and you wouldn’t even hear it in the apartment next door,” a Helm Brothers employee would recall decades later.
British, Japanese, German and American flags flew on a row of flagpoles alongside the symbol of Helm Brothers. Visitors could see over the roof of the nearby Hotel New Grand and watch sunsets through the prism of Yokohama’s industrial smog. For those who stayed at the hotel, that smog was just another sign of Yokohama’s emergence as a major industrial center, an economic power whose growth would drive Helm Brothers’ prosperity far into the future.
Every morning, dozens of new employees poured into the building in freshly pressed uniforms. There were maids to clean the rooms daily, cooks to provide meals in the fancy dining room and boysans to respond to the customers’ every whim. They were all a part of the Helm Brothers family. “Every maid hired was the daughter, sister or mother of a Helm Brothers employee,” recalled Ozawa Matsuko, a former maid at Helm House. Her father was a carpenter who had built barges and tugboats for Helm Brothers. The Ozawa family lived in a row of houses Helm Brothers had built for its employees near the dock where the company built and repaired the boats.
Helm House’s success in attracting diplomats and wealthy business executives as residents made it the envy of Yokohama real-estate developers. In his novel Alien Rice, writer Kawasaki Ichiro, who served as a Japanese diplomat between the two world wars, quotes a “Mrs. Hertz” (a lightly veiled reference to Grandmother Betty Helm) commenting on the success of Helm House. “After my husband built Hertz House, many Japanese real-estate people came to get the building plan and other information. When we declined, they sent a spy to steal the plan from us.”
With the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for 1940 when Japan would be center stage, Julie believed that Helm House had been completed at the perfect time. He could not have known that another world war would soon shatter the peace and that Helm family members would once again be scattered across four continents. Instead of being a beacon for a new era of internationalism, Helm House would be a flickering light in that waning era. Its apartments’ Western conveniences would come to symbolize not the comforts of modernity, but the decadence of Western materialism.
NEXT PAGE: Helm Brothers employees behind Helm House, ca. 1939.
Once Helm House’s operations were in place and the company running smoothly, Julie decided to take his family, including my father, Don, then eleven, on their first vacation to the United States and Canada. In San Francisco, he bought a brand-new 1938 Ford and drove the family across the recently completed Golden Gate Bridge. Dad was impressed by the wide roads and the tall buildings of San Francisco. The family went to Yosemite where they saw the firefall launched over those immense granite cliffs. Dad stared in wonder at the endless miles of wild forests, mountains and deserts where there was not a soul in sight. His parents were dazzled by the news of great progress. One day it was the Mallard, a steam locomotive reaching a high speed of 126 miles an hour. A few weeks later, it was millionaire Howard Hughes flying around the world in ninety-one hours.
When Julie and Betty returned to Yokohama in the fall of 1938, the mood was somber. The Japanese government, now dominated by militarists, had decided in July to relinquish hosting the Olympics, in part because the government needed the money to pay for its war in China. Instead of an international celebration, the government decided to have an even more elaborate celebration than planned for the 2,600th anniversary of the year when the first emperor, Emperor Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess, began his reign.
Julie learned that his brother Jim, who had been running the Kobe branch of Helm Brothers, had become uncomfortable with the growing anti-Western sentiment in Japan and had decided to move to the United States. Although Helm House proved to be a great success, Julie must have understood that the factories going up north of Yokohama were busy producing steel and ships and armaments to support the fighting in Manchuria. I wonder if he heard the stories of how Japanese soldiers had butchered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanjing and whether he believed them. Did he begin to see an ugly side to Japanese nationalism?
Did Betty, too, begin to look at Yokohama through new eyes? She had often seen school kids at the train station waving their flags to give the soldiers a warm sendoff. She had seen women in front of the train stations and department stores asking passersby to add a red stitch to the red sun on a Japanese flag. Such a flag with a thousand stitches sewn by a thousand different women was supposed to protect their men from bullets. The practice had always seemed quaint to Betty, but in the months that followed her return from America, she began to see another increasingly common sight: mothers receiving small wooden boxes wrapped in white cloth, the ashes of the sons they had sent off to China.
Parents stoically accepted the sacrifice for the good of the nation. “Great Japan, Great Japan. Its emperor is a descendant of God,” went a poem Japanese children were required to learn in school. “We have never lost to our enemies. Day by day our country shines greater with glory.” Japan believed it was invincible.
And what did Betty and Julie think of the alliance between Japan and Germany, their parents’ homelands? Initially, Betty must have felt some pride. I have first-day-of-issue stamped envelopes Betty collected that commemorate Japan’s 1937 Anti-Comintern Pact with the future axis powers, Germany and Italy. One shows portraits of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Konoe Fumimaro, the Japanese prime minister. Another stamp shows an eagle marked with the swastika and the rays of a rising sun, together fighting back the scourge of communism, represented by a river of blood.
Julie preferred not to think about Germany. And since it was so far away, he didn’t have to. Not, that is, until his younger brother, Willie, decided to take his children to Germany for their education.
On May 28, 1940, Julie arrived at Sakuragicho Station to see Willie off. The family was already there, all dressed up and waiting for the train to take them on the first step of their long journey across Siberia to Germany.
A Japanese reporter asked questions of the family and then stood by while a photographer took their portrait. No doubt the newspaper editors felt Japanese mothers sending their children to die in Manchuria would find comfort in a story about a Western mother who was sending her children to a war zone in Europe.
But Julie was saddened and confounded by the sight of his forty-nine-year-old little brother embarking on this dangerous journey. Julie may have wondered, What had compelled Willie to take four of his children to be educated in Germany just eighteen days after the Nazi army had poured into Belgium and France? Julie’s older brother Charles had died and Jim had moved to California. Julie did not want to lose Willie too.
There was so much about Willie that Julie did not understand. Why, at age seventeen, had he volunteered to fight to protect Germany’s colony of Tsingtao from the Japanese army—an army that represented his mother’s country and which his father had helped to train? Why, after five years in a prisoner-of-war camp, had Willie given up his safe job at Helm Brothers and rushed off to Manchuria? He had returned penniless from Manchuria with his white Russian wife, Agnes, and six children, including two from Agnes’s previous marriage to Bobrovnikov, the former Russian consul general in Manchuria. Even so, Charles had welcomed him back, given him a job at Helm Brothers and even taken in Alex, Agnes’s son from her previous marriage whom Willie had refused to adopt. And when their sister, Marie, was dying of cancer, she had felt sorry for Willie and left him her entire fortune. With his money, his big family and the rising status of Germans in Japan, Willie should have been happy in Yokohama.
Perhaps Willie had inherited Julius’s restlessness, his drive to explore. But perhaps Willie’s need to keep moving had less to do with Julius’s impatience than with the absence of a place he could call home. After all, his father had him change schools nine times in six cities on three continents over twenty years.
An article that appeared in the Japanese ne
wspaper the day after Willie left Yokohama shows a picture of him with the four children he was taking to Germany: Myra, Willie Jr., Dorothy and Rudi. They are standing on a crowded train platform as curious bystanders peer over their shoulders to see what is going on. The two boys are wearing suits with Hitler Youth pins on their lapels and carrying packages wrapped in brown paper tied up in string.
“Rudi seems to be happy about leaving,” the article says. “When her young daughter begins to cry, mother Agnes scolds her,” it continues, praising the strong will of the “German” mother.
In Berlin, Willie left his three children with cousins who would see to their education. Then he visited a minister in charge of trade with Japan in an effort to win business for his Yokohama company. As he later described the meeting in a letter to the US Occupation authorities in an effort to persuade them he should not be labeled an “enemy alien,” he was turned away by the German minister because he had an American brother and because he had Japanese blood. The Nazi regime, he wrote, “treated Eurasians in the same manner as Jewish people.” The war in Europe continued to escalate as Willie headed home to Yokohama in July 1941.
Richard, who stayed behind in Yokohama with his mother and sister, recalled being pleased by the news of war, because it meant his strict father, Willie, might not come home to Yokohama. “It’s not a nice thing to say, but he was that strict.” Once when his father found the water running from the garden hose, Richard recalled, his father had forced two of his brothers to whip each other until one of them finally confessed to the crime.
At the end of July 1940, not long after Willie left for Germany, President Roosevelt put an embargo on scrap metal exports to Japan, hoping to force the country to pull out of China. A year later, he stepped up the pressure by imposing an oil embargo. Japan had already sacrificed so many of its youth to conquer China and had no intention of retreating. The stage was now set for war in the Pacific.
DAD, THEN THIRTEEN, HAD FOND memories of the summer of 1940 at their villa on Helm Hill. “I spent more time sitting on that pier enjoying the cool breezes, watching the Korean women dig for clams,” he once wrote me in a letter responding to questions I had asked about his youth. “My friends and I would play twenty-one for shells all day long.” Among Dad’s friends were Germans, Armenians, Australians, British, Russians, Americans and Portuguese, but everybody spoke English and nobody cared what nationality their friends were. The foreign community in Yokohama was a place in which a family like the Helms could have brothers of German, Japanese and American nationality and nobody found it any more remarkable, say, than two brothers in New York dividing their loyalties between the Mets and the Yankees.
On September 27, 1940, when Japan signed its tripartite alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, which acknowledged Japan’s primacy in Asia, things began to change. The Japanese government began its crackdown. Teahouses and dance halls in Yokohama that offered “Western” forms of entertainment were shut down as decadent. Authorities banned commonly used English words and insisted everyone employ Japanese words to describe objects of foreign origin. Instead of beruto, the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “belt,” for example, Japanese were now required to use a Japanese term meaning “waist rope.”
In October 1940, the American Embassy sent out the first of a series of letters advising Americans to leave Japan. Charles’s widow moved to California. Her daughter Lillian, who had married a British man who was also half-Japanese, was turned away in San Francisco because the Exclusion Act prohibited people of certain Asian nationalities from entering the country. The family was forced to live out the war years in Argentina. Her father-in-law, Charles Bernard, the British tea merchant and artist who had lived in Japan most of his life, chose to stay with his Japanese wife, fully aware of the risks he faced.
In Yokohama, a few Germans began to fly swastika flags in front of their residences. Foreigners, who had largely escaped the hand of Japan’s increasingly totalitarian state, now felt its bite.
Julie had laughed some years before when his older brother Jim had told him of a visit the family had gotten from the secret police. A neighbor had seen Jim’s daughter, Joyce, roll up a newspaper and pretend to use it as a telescope. The police suspected the girl was making fun of the Taisho emperor, a mildly retarded youth, who was said to have peered through rolled up papers during an official ceremony. The police were satisfied when Jim assured them that his daughter would not have dared mock the emperor. Now the military police visited foreign residences and interviewed maids, recruiting some as spies. Even though Tsuru-san had by then left the Helms’ employ, the police visited her at her new home where she lived with her husband to ask about Julie.
In spite of the repeated warnings from the American Embassy and the departure of most of his American and British friends by the end of 1940, Julie would not leave Japan. Now the US Embassy warned that it could not take responsibility for American citizens who remained. Friends pointed out that if he tarried, authorities might bar him from leaving because his knowledge of Yokohama harbor could be useful to the enemy in time of war. In the summer of 1941, Julie finally booked passage on the Kamakura-maru, a ship bound for San Francisco. He planned to return to Yokohama six months later after depositing his family in California. He would not return for nine years.
Yokohama’s South Pier, ca. 1915.
There is a photo of the family sitting on thick tatami mats laid out along the deck. Julie, Betty and the three boys had their shoes off and sat around a low round table covered with rice bowls, sake flasks and dozens of dishes. Betty is holding a pair of chopsticks and tending to a skillet filled with beef and vegetables cooking over a hibachi. Dad, now fourteen, is wearing a vest and tie, and looks anxiously at the camera. Julius had warned his children that this easy life would come to an end. They would face a different life. They would have to do their own chores, carry their own weight. Dad’s youthful face, alone among those at the table, seems uneasy—sensing perhaps that nothing would ever again be quite the same.
LIFE WAS FULL IN TOKYO in that first year following our adoption of Mariko and Eric. I still worked long hours, but now would come home to a house buzzing with activity. Marie, who had once worried that children would get in the way of her career, was now on maternity leave and happily absorbed in her new role as mother. When I got home from work, she would be playing on the carpeted floor of our Tokyo apartment with Mariko and Eric while a tape recorder blasted out cheerful Japanese children’s songs with bright marching rhythms. Mariko would run to the door to greet me. If I looked tired, she would tilt her head slightly and say, “Are you okay Papa?” When I picked her up, she would hug me so hard her face turned red. Then I would pick up Eric and toss him in the air until he laughed with joy.
Once the children were in bed, I would put my laptop on the dining room table and get back to work. Often, I was still working at two in the morning when it was time to feed Eric. I would lay him on my chest, put the nipple of the milk bottle in his mouth, support the bottle with the crook of my elbow and type my article while he finished drinking. I could feel his chest move as he sucked on the bottle. Often, when I put him back into his crib, I would stroke his fine black hair, moist with sleep. He had long eyelashes that curled up like a girl’s, like mine. I thought of his joyous belly laughs and wondered with a pang if he would one day stop laughing, as I had when my father had become a fearful presence in the house. Then, as if to reassure myself, I thought of my father’s favorite Sinatra song about the “very strange enchanted boy” who brought to the world a message of love.
In the morning, I kissed Eric on his forehead and then set out for work. I put Mariko on the child seat at the back of my bicycle, buckled her in, put on her helmet and took her to her bilingual nursery school. As I pedaled down the street, I pointed to a car and said, “Red car,” and she repeated, “Red car.” Then I said, “Big red car,” and she would repeat after me, exaggerating the big by opening her eyes wide. Mariko was quickly p
icking up English words, although it wasn’t always clear whether she understood what they meant. She liked to sing, “There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name, Oh! B-I-N-G-O.” The “Oh!” came out of her as an explosion, as if this was one word she could comfortably pronounce in English. Her favorite song, which she learned from Marie’s mother during a visit, was “America the Beautiful,” which she would end grandly with “from she to shining she.”
Almost every day we had to stop at the train crossing as the red lights flashed and the traffic bar came down. We didn’t mind. We liked to stay right next to the bar on our bicycle so that when the train blew past us we could feel the rush of wind on our faces. Mariko would give a belly laugh that grew louder and more joyous with every passing week. The sadness that we saw so often in her eyes in the first weeks after her adoption was now rarely apparent.
It quickly became clear that Mariko had a flair for the dramatic. If you told her something remotely silly, she would open her eyes wide, raise her eyebrows and open her mouth in an expression of total surprise, as if this were the most incredible thing she had ever heard. Then her cheeks would blow up like a chipmunk and she would explode into loud giggles. She loved to wear dresses, and she often stuck out her stomach as if proud of her rounded belly.
I tried to come home early now so I could spend time with the kids. Eric was almost one and walked confidently around our little apartment kicking a small ball. I would pick him up and throw him in the air and feel a thrill as he gave a full-throated squeal of delight. Often I built towers out of blocks just so Eric could knock them down.
The children brought me more joy than I ever dared to hope for. Work, too, was fulfilling. My stories were still often critical of Japan, but my perspective had been subtly changed, grounded not just in logic, but also in empathy.