by Leslie Helm
In May 1993, I learned that Japanese children were getting encephalitis, a serious brain disease, from a vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, commonly known as MMR. A perfectly safe MMR vaccine was available from a US company, but Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare wanted to nurture its domestic pharmaceuticals industry and so had decided to distribute a vaccine developed in Japan even though it caused disease, often fatal, in one out of five thousand cases compared to one out of a million for the American vaccine. The story made me heartsick.
One weekend I was invited to a small town in the mountains to give a talk about “internationalism and international relations” to a group of volunteers preparing for the 1998 Winter Olympics. Often I was invited to give such talks. Japanese loved having foreigners present an “outsider’s” view of Japan. I knew they expected a speech about how Japanese should do a better job of learning foreign languages and cultures to prepare for the new global age. Instead, I addressed the other side of the same coin: Japanese insularity. If Japanese families found it so difficult to adopt Japanese children just because they were biologically unrelated to them, I asked, how could they ever hope to accept people from different cultures? That evening over drinks, a city official confessed that when he was seven years old, his father told him one day that he would soon move in with his uncle and aunt because they weren’t able to have children. The man said he cried so hard that his father decided to send his five-year-old brother instead. This man never got over the guilt he felt after he learned that his younger brother cried through the night for months.
I was disturbed to hear the story and to discover, sometime later, how common such adoptions are among families. At a time when there were still many children in Japan who needed parents, it seemed senseless to tear a small child away from his parents to send to a childless relative.
It would not be long before I would feel the brunt of that insularity—at home. One day while I was giving Mariko a bath, she slid her right hand down her leg. Then she looked straight up at me with her big dark eyes and asked, “Why is my skin so dark?” I froze.
“Your skin is beautiful,” I said, trying to be calm. “People with white skin like mine lay out in the sun all day because they want to have bronze skin like yours.” She looked at me warily, and I knew she did not believe me.
For a long time Mariko insisted on wearing white tights to her nursery school every day, regardless of how warm it was. I felt stupid that I had not understood before that she had been trying to hide her skin. Marie and I had known that the day would come when Mariko would be conscious of our racial differences, but we didn’t think that awareness would come so soon. I thought that because I was part Japanese and we spoke Japanese to Mariko, the differences wouldn’t seem so important. I was fooling myself.
Marie and I were also slow to understand fully how oddly the Japanese around us regarded our adoption. I remember laughing when two old ladies stopped to exclaim how cute Eric was. I stopped and let them fuss over Eric, who sat comfortably in a snuggly. As the ladies walked away, I overheard one say to the other in Japanese, “It’s a real wonder. I guess babies all over the world look the same.”
That didn’t surprise me, but what did catch me off guard was that even many of our closest Japanese friends would have trouble understanding our decision to adopt. They acted horrified, as if we had just walked into their houses wearing dirty shoes, breaking the most basic rule of civil behavior.
One Japanese friend I confided in about the adoption joked, “Would you adopt me, too?” A Japanese banker acquaintance was slack-jawed: “What? You’re joking, right?” An elderly journalist friend who came over for dinner a few months after we adopted Eric said nothing about the adoption throughout our dinner. Then at the end, he formally bowed his head and said, “Thank you for helping to take care of our [nation’s] children.”
“We didn’t do this for anybody else,” I told him. “We did this for ourselves. We did this because we wanted to have a family.” He nodded, but was clearly uncomfortable.
My Japanese step-grandmother, Shizuka, expressed most clearly what I came to believe was the typical Japanese sentiment toward adoption when she said to me: “Raising children is so much trouble. I can’t imagine why you would want to raise someone else’s children.”
It was difficult to explain to our friends that Mariko and Eric really were our children. Our childless Japanese friends would show a flicker of interest in the idea of adoption when we told them our story, but would quickly dismiss the idea, saying their families would never accept an adopted child. Blood lines are considered important everywhere in the world, but perhaps nowhere as much as in Japan. Even adoption in Japan is typically regarded as a way of maintaining the blood line. The idea of adopting not to keep the family name but for the sheer joy of raising children is an alien concept in Japan. One close Japanese friend said she wanted to adopt, but could not because her in-laws would not accept the child. A public relations official I knew well admitted to me for the first time that he and his wife had been unable to have children. When I asked him why he didn’t adopt, he asked some rude questions about my children’s biological parents, implying somehow that adopted children would not have the appropriate pedigree.
Once, many years later, we visited an inn in the mountains above Nikko. As we were leaving, the innkeeper looked at me and Marie quizzically, then asked, “So you must be the teachers and they are your students?” This was a ridiculous suggestion since Mariko was nine and Eric, six. Yet, this was the only way she could explain our presence together.
I thought of all the children in the orphanages I had visited who were so desperate for affection. At such times, Japan seemed like a cold-hearted place. Much of the support we received during those months came from the many other foreigners who had also chosen to adopt Japanese children. A correspondent for The New York Times had adopted two children shortly before we did, as had my brother Chris. And correspondents from the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and U.S. News and World Report were all friends who adopted Japanese children after being captivated by Mariko and Eric. All of us would get together in Tokyo for Easter egg hunts. Our expatriate friends were islands of comfort in a broader society that seemed cold to the idea of adoption. I had lived all my life as a gaijin in Japan, but had never felt quite so excluded from Japanese society as I did with adopted Japanese children.
Professionally, too, it felt like I had hit a wall. I had been very excited when I was the only foreigner to be invited in the spring of 1993 to travel with the Japanese press corps on Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s plane—a new 747 that Japan had purchased to be the Japanese equivalent of Air Force One—for a summit meeting with President Bill Clinton in Washington DC. At first it seemed a great privilege to be included in the inner sanctum of this exclusive press club. At the hotel, I sat at a long table with all the Japanese reporters and ordered the same beer they did. In the press room, we snacked on rice crackers as we posted our stories. But I soon learned I would be excluded from the the prime minister’s late night session with the Japanese press. When I insisted on attending, the club held a special session to discuss the matter and agreed I could attend as long as I didn’t ask any questions about Miyazawa’s meeting with Clinton.
It was time to leave Japan. Marie’s university was eager to have her return to teach. My employer, the Los Angeles Times, would have preferred I stay in Japan, but had generously agreed to transfer me to the Seattle bureau. Marie and I could not be certain of our family’s reception in Seattle, but soon we would find out.
NOT LONG AFTER WE HAD settled back into our house in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, I took Eric and Mariko down to the playground next to Blaine Elementary School. Mariko was quickly playing with the other kids. In the next half hour, I met a couple whose daughter had been adopted in China and a Japanese woman who had moved from Japan with her Caucasian husband in part to find a more inclusive community for her son. As I stood there
with these mothers, I felt something inside me relax. We had made the right decision. This was the place to raise our children—a city filled with multi-race families. That deep comfort was reinforced not long afterward when I took Mariko to a ballet class and discovered that one of her classmates had a Chinese-American mother and a white father, while another had a black father and a white mother. Among this wonderful mélange, we would not stand out. When our children grew older, we felt ourselves being welcomed by the community as Mariko joined baseball and Eric joined soccer.
Mariko and Eric were also warmly embraced by our extended families. We spent summers with Marie’s family in the mountains of Northern California where Marie’s grandfather, a Basque from southern France, had once operated a huge sheep ranch in Red Bluff. Each year at a special “Basque” day, there was a large family reunion at which everybody wore red berets, scarves and played Basque music. At their first such reunion, Marie’s sister Rosalie spoke of how Eric and Mariko had “slid down a rainbow and splashed into the family.” Each of the children were declared Basques and given t-shirts with the word “Basque” written across the front in large letters.
Home in Seattle, 1993.
On weekends, we often gathered with the families of my brother Chris and my cousin Barbara, both of whom lived in Seattle and had children of about the same age. Chris’s children, Marcus and Brendan, were adopted in Japan and became particularly close to Mariko and Eric. Periodically, we would visit the family of my sister Julie in Colorado, or my sister Andrea in Oregon. We felt lucky to have an extended family so supportive of our children.
For the most part, the issue of adoption hardly came up. Once, though, about six months after returning to Seattle, I was shopping in the supermarket as Eric, then eighteen months old, wiggled impatiently in the shopping cart. He kept raising both arms, asking me to let him down. Finally, I pulled him out of the cart and put him down on the floor. “Stay close to me,” I warned. Looking me in the eye with a mischievous grin, he turned and took off, running down the aisle, his belly shaking with laughter. I ran after him, scooped him up and put him back into the cart.
When I looked up from the cart, a thin, tough-looking woman was glaring at me, her hands on her hips.
“What are you doing? Put that child down,” she demanded.
“What?” I answered.
“That isn’t your child. Put him down.”
“What? What do you mean? He’s my son.”
“Can you prove it?”
Proof? I panicked. What evidence did I have that Eric was my son? My driver’s license? No, that said nothing about my children. I didn’t have Eric’s passport with me. And even if I did, I realized, there was nothing on his passport to show I was his father. His adoption papers would have that information, of course, but they were filed away somewhere at home, and in any case the papers were all in Japanese. I felt helpless and humiliated. I knew I didn’t look like my children, but I had always assumed that people could see the strong love that connected us. The notion that this woman could not believe Eric was my son stunned me.
Time stood still as my brain tried to process the absurd circumstance in which I found myself: How was I going to show this woman that I really was Eric’s father? It felt as if hours passed, although surely it was only a few seconds. When my mind finally cleared, the answer was obvious: I didn’t have to prove anything.
“Does he look like he’s being kidnapped?” I finally said, raising my voice to embolden myself.
The lady looked at Eric, who was laughing where he sat in the shopping cart. Then she looked at me suspiciously and walked away. My heart was pounding as I wheeled my shopping cart to the cashier. I was happy that Eric was too young to know what had happened, but the incident had shaken me deeply.
When Mariko would periodically say, “I wish I looked like you and Mama; I wish we were a normal family,” I had never taken her seriously.
“What’s normal?” I always replied. I would point to friends who had only one parent, others who had two sets of parents and still others who had gay parents. In most respects, we were pretty conventional. But now I understood that logic was no comfort. All it took was one comment from a friend or a sidelong glance by a parent, and my entire argument would collapse. Now I understood how Mariko felt—the jarring sense that no matter how close we felt as a family, others would look at Marie and me and assume we were unrelated to Mariko and Eric simply because we were of a different race. Perhaps that was why Mariko was so close to Eric. Perhaps that was why they never fought the way so many siblings do.
Marie and I felt that our only defense was to make our children feel special by giving them a strong foundation in Japanese culture. It helped that Teiko, our nanny in Tokyo, had agreed to come and live with us in Seattle for a few years to help take care of the children. Since Teiko spoke to Mariko and Eric in Japanese, both grew up speaking the language. Mariko had refused to speak to Marie and me in Japanese once we had returned to Seattle, so she would have otherwise lost her Japanese. To reinforce their Japanese language skills, we barred them from watching television and restricted them to Japanese videos we rented at a store in the International District. There was Ampanman, the bean-cake superhero, Doraemon, a magical cat, and Konan, the brilliant child detective who could kick a soccer ball so hard it would lay any criminal flat on his back. We also had hundreds of Japanese children’s books that we occasionally read to them.
All in all, our transition back to the United States from Japan had gone smoothly. I was happy to find a place where my children were accepted and where I could start to make a new life. Grandfather Julie and his family would find it far more difficult to make that move in August 1941, on the eve of war.
GRANDFATHER JULIE SETTLED WITH HIS family into a small house in Piedmont, California, in September 1941. Just three months later, the news of the Pearl Harbor attack hit him like a punch to the gut. There had been a great deal of speculation that Japan would attack Singapore or somewhere else in Southeast Asia. Never did he dream that Japan would be so brazen as to attack the United States directly. Now Japan—the country of his mother—and Germany—the country of his father—were allies in a war against the country of which he was a citizen, the United States. Julie quietly went through his house, packing and hiding away all the Japanese dishes, dolls and lacquerware he had on display.
Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, Julie was notified that his assets had been frozen by the US government because of questions about Betty’s citizenship.
“I have heard that next month, I will be able to draw one hundred dollars per month, the same as the Japanese,” Julie wrote in a letter to his lawyer. “Don’t you believe it is unfair to treat me, an American citizen, and my wife without nationality on the same footing with enemy aliens?”
The first time I read the letter, I found it odd. Rereading it several times, finally I realized why. “The Japanese” Julie was referring to were Japanese-Americans. In feeling victimized for being treated as an enemy, it had never occurred to Julie that many Japanese-Americans had lived their whole lives in America, while he had only lived in the country for a few years. It did not occur to him that they were classified as enemy aliens simply because, like he and Betty, they were of Japanese heritage.
Frozen assets, as it turned out, were the least of Julie’s worries. Betty had come down with pneumonia and could not leave her bedroom. For the first time in his life, Julie had to cook and clean as he did his best to care for Betty. His substantial investments around the world, including a large investment in a Philippine hat company as well as utilities and industrial companies in Taiwan and Japan, were now worthless. There was little hope of ever recovering anything.
Meanwhile, anti-Japanese hysteria was rising to a fever pitch in the United States, especially on the West Coast. “Goodbye Mama, I’m off to Yokohama for the red, white and blue ... We’ll soon have those Japs down on their Japa Knees,” went one big band tune recorded nine days after the attack. “
We’ve got to slap the dirty little Jap,” went another ditty. Much of the anti-Japanese sentiment targeted Japanese-Americans who, columnists warned, could become a “fifth column” for the enemy. “Open hunting season for Japs. No Limit,” was among the signs displayed in shop windows. Japanese were portrayed in newspaper cartoons as buck-toothed monkeys.
Julie kept his head down. He didn’t correct people when they assumed he was Latin American. When the US government posted notices in January 1942 demanding that all people with Japanese blood register themselves, Julie ignored the notice.
A month later, President Roosevelt signed an order that would lead to the incarceration of 120,000 West Coast Japanese and Japanese-Americans in internment camps across the American West.
“The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken,” warned General John DeWitt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command, to justify what the US government called its “resettlement” program.
Fortunately, my Grandfather Julie not only managed to keep his family out of the internment camps, but, with the help of his lawyer, was able to get access to his bank accounts. Still, he was under constant fear of being discovered. He knew the FBI had visited his niece Margaret in Los Angeles and had an extensive file on the family. How long would it take before the FBI followed that trail to Julie’s family and arrested him for the crime of hiding his Japanese blood?
The truth remained a secret for more than a year as Julie and his family went every Sunday to the local church, and as his three boys, including my dad, attended the local school. Then one day in early 1943 two men in suits showed up at Julie’s Piedmont house carrying little notebooks. Julie told his kids to go to their rooms and then took the men into the living room. When the men had gone, Julie called my dad and his two younger brothers, Larry and Ray, into the living room.