by Leslie Helm
“People may say some rough things,” Julie told the boys, as my uncle Ray recounted many years later. “About what?” asked Dad, then sixteen.
“They’ll say we are Japanese,” Julie said. “It’s a lie. Just ignore it. Remember, we are Americans.”
Don Helm at army language school, ca. 1945.
Uncle Ray was not sure if the two men were from the FBI or were newspaper reporters, but not long afterward, as Ray recalled, a local newspaper reported a story about Julie. Bold headlines on the front page of the Oakland Tribune read: “Piedmont Helms Japs.”
I never did locate the article with that headline, but my family’s collective memory of the article is so strong I don’t doubt its existence. Still, the article might well have been less prominently displayed than my relatives recall.
Wherever that article appeared, it had a big impact on Dad. The first time he mentioned the article to me more than forty years after Pearl Harbor, he shook his head slowly and looked at me with a stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look. Like me, he had grown up in Japan as a gaijin. He never doubted he was American. It must have been a shock then to have his family publicly identified as “Jap”—as belonging to the enemy.
At church, Dad and his family were pleasantly surprised to find their acquaintances continued to socialize with them. But at school things were different. Dad’s younger brother Larry remembers that a girlfriend’s father warned her to “stay away from that Jap.”
“They treated us like we were communists or something,” my Uncle Larry recalled. “I got into a lot of fights.”
If the FBI had learned of the family’s Japanese heritage a year earlier, Dad and his family might well have been sent to an internment camp, but by then the war had turned in America’s favor. Few now believed that Japanese-Americans were a threat, and so the FBI may have decided it would be pointless to send another family to the camps. It’s also possible, as some relatives claim, that the Helms avoided being sent to the internment camps because they provided US authorities with detailed plans of the harbors in Yokohama and Kobe, information the authorities wanted in planning an expected invasion of Japan. In any case, Julie and Betty got off with a light warning. They were told they had to stay within a ten-mile radius of their home. They were forbidden from crossing any bridges or traveling in the vicinity of any port facilities.
Years later my Uncle Leo, Betty’s nephew, revealed that Betty did violate that order at least once. Leo and his brother Ed lived with their mother Gretchen, Betty’s sister, in San Francisco. Leo, then fifteen, remembers being told by his mother to put all the family’s Japanese heirlooms, including a Japanese sword, into a footlocker and to bury it in the yard. Leo struggled over whether to do his patriotic duty and reveal to the authorities the terrible knowledge that his mother had been born in Japan and that he was part Japanese. He asked for advice from the school counselor.
“You never have to volunteer personal information,” the counselor said. “But if you are asked directly, you must not lie.”
Leo’s brother, Ed, had been accepted to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Gretchen was so proud of her son she wanted to show him off to Betty, but since people of Japanese heritage weren’t allowed into Annapolis at the time, her son would have been expelled if the family connection to the Helms had been revealed. So Gretchen persuaded Betty to come to San Francisco one day and sit at a table by the window of a certain restaurant at precisely half past noon. Then Gretchen took her son, dressed magnificently in his white cadet’s outfit, and held his arm as they paraded proudly on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, walking slowly so Betty could get a good look.
As a teenager, Dad hid his mixed heritage and set out to remake himself as an all-American boy. He joined the swim team and the glee club and played softball. Perhaps he even attempted to do what a relative had once advised: “If you keep your eyes wide open, people won’t notice that you’re slant-eyed.” But even as he was welcomed into the church youth group and was admired for his skill at dancing to the swing music of the time, there was always a part of him that was afraid of what people said behind his back.
In June 1943, after graduating from high school at age sixteen, Dad enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. As soon as he turned eighteen, he enlisted in the US Army. By then, the Germans were weakening in Europe, but American forces were still fighting the Japanese in bloody battles in Iwo Jima and the Philippines and capturing many prisoners. There was heavy demand for Japanese-speaking officers to interrogate the prisoners, so Dad was sent to the Army Language School at the University of Michigan.
I was always curious about Dad’s years in the army. At the dinner table when I was growing up, Dad constantly barked at us about our table manners. “In the army,” he would say, as if there were no better authority on matters of etiquette, “if you stuck out your wings [elbows] like that they would get slapped down.” Only now do I understand that the army was the crucible that shaped his notions of what it meant to be an American.
I received valuable insight into Dad and his time in the army some years ago when my Uncle Ray gave me a black, three-ringed binder full of Dad’s letters that his mother, Betty, had saved.
In those letters, Dad did not describe the hard knocks of army life he related to us at the dinner table. Instead, the letters revealed a sense of excitement and adventure and an emerging self-confidence. The letters introduced me to a man I had never known, and I felt close to Dad as I read about his coming of age in the army.
“ARMY LIFE AS I SEE IT is just a glorified Boy Scout camp,” my eighteen-year-old Dad wrote on March 21, 1945. “Yesterday we finished our processing and then they worked us like cows. That’s right, we were picking weeds around the barracks sunning ourselves: about fifty guys doing a job two men could do in a couple hours of hard work ... For the Laveda show (couple of girl entertainers) I wore full uniform for the first time. Fits fine. Tomorrow I leave California for Michigan.”
The Army Language School had originally been located at the University of California, Berkeley, but moved to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1941. The nisei (second generation Japanese-American) instructors were no longer allowed to live on the West Coast because they were considered a security risk. Dad’s older cousin David had enlisted two years earlier, and Dad was thrilled to find himself in the same advanced Japanese class as his cousin. David was Jim’s son, the baby who had narrowly escaped being crushed by a wardrobe during the 1923 earthquake. Dad was at once impressed and intimidated to learn David was a “brain” who usually placed first or second in the class of 145 students. Dad’s Japanese reading and writing skills were weak, but he was good at speaking. “The way some of the fellows chew up the Japanese language is highly amazing,” Dad snickered in one letter.
The students took four hours of class each morning and then were expected to study at least eight hours a day after class. They had to memorize fifty kanji characters a day, learning in one academic year a language program designed to be taught in college over three years.
There were a few students like Dad and David who spoke good Japanese because they had been raised in Japan. Most of the language class, however, was filled with students who had been assigned to the program because they had scored high on intelligence tests. Dad was in awe of these “geniuses.” He often spoke enviously of one classmate in particular, a man who had a photographic memory and could memorize hundreds of kanji by merely glancing at the complex ideographs.
Illustration for Army Language School graduation dance, December 1945.
For Dad and most of the other students, learning kanji meant making flash cards and studying them at every spare moment, whether they were waiting in line for a movie or eating at the mess hall. Dad’s eyes grew so tired reading the characters that the eye doctor ordered him to go easy on the studying. What the eye doctor didn’t know was that Dad had no choice: Students were warned that if they scored lower than a B in two consecutive tests, they would
be sent to the battlefront. For decades after World War II, many professors of Japanese studies including Donald Keene and Edward Seidensticker, as well as many Japan experts in the US State Department would be drawn from among the graduates of those Army and Navy language schools.
With so many men at war, Dad found himself meeting women who were both smart and beautiful, and he was inspired to improve himself. “I am on a campaign to educate myself in the line of aesthetics,” Dad wrote to his mom. “Art, music and literature.”
He was thrilled to be placed in positions of responsibility. “Tonight I’m in charge of quarters, the whole company is sort of resting on me for the whole evening,” wrote the eighteen-year-old soldier on embossed United States Army letterhead. “Taking in reports from the various sergeants, making reports to the headquarters etc. My ego just soars to the ceiling and even higher.”
When some of his classmates learned Dad had a black belt in Judo and asked him to teach them, Dad organized a class that attracted 150 men. “We did a lot of rolls, and then I taught them some hand tricks,” wrote Dad. Cousin David was shy and refused to be the one to demonstrate the various throws. Consequently, Dad wrote, “We have come to be known as the throwing Helm (me) and the falling Helm (David).”
In the spring and summer of 1945, as American troops fought bloody battles in the Philippines and Okinawa on their way to the main islands of Japan, Dad was tucked away in a world of his own. As he wrote home, “Mother dearest, with a wonderful buddy and a swell girlfriend Rita and schoolwork OK, I feel as if I were on top of the world and am very happy.”
JAPAN’S SURRENDER IN AUGUST 1945 was greeted with great joy in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “The dead little town went wilder than I’d ever seen,” Dad wrote his mother. “People acted as though they were drunk—everything was just so wonderful. How did you celebrate V-J day?”
Dad’s joy was dampened by his concern about Yokohama, which he knew had suffered from fire bombings. How were his friends and relatives in Japan? Had his house survived? What about the Helm business his father and grandfather had worked so hard to build? When he learned that General Douglas MacArthur landed in Japan and established his office in the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, he stayed close to the radio. “It’s good to hear the name of the New Grand mentioned so often,” Dad wrote home. “They say the surrounding few office buildings are the only ones left standing in Yokohama. That may mean the Helm House could be still standing.”
If Helm House survived, perhaps Dad’s many relatives and friends in Yokohama were also safe. But he was right to be concerned. On December 7, 1941, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, military police had fanned out across Yokohama. Police stood at the train stations and picked enemy nationals out of the crowd. British, Dutch and Americans were sent to a prison camp on the site of the race track on the edge of The Bluff where horse races had been held the day Great-Grandfather Julius first arrived in Yokohama in 1869.
OPPOSITE: Japanese parliament during US occupation, ca. 1946.
General Douglas MacArthur’s wife Jean goes shopping in Tokyo.
Those suspected of spying were handcuffed and marched off to prison. Among them was Mike Apcar, Julie’s Armenian friend who police suspected because he was an official of the Masonic Lodge in Yokohama, which the Japanese authorities considered a subversive foreign institution.
Unlike World War I, when German prisoners had been treated well by Japanese authorities, this time many prisoners faced torture. Interrogators sometimes pushed wood splinters under their prisoners’ fingernails and lit them on fire. Apcar, tortured and imprisoned for over a year, remembered how dogs licked their wounds, and did the same to his own wounds to help them heal.
Walter Helm, Julie’s nephew, was also imprisoned and tortured. Although he held Japanese citizenship like his father Charles, he was suspected of spying because he had had American friends and relatives, and his home in Honmoku overlooked the sea. The Japanese government took control of much of Helm Brothers’ assets. Helm House was rented to the German Navy, which used it as its regional headquarters. Willie and his nephew Walter managed to transfer some of the Helm family’s assets to a new German company called Gebruder Helm (the Brothers Helm), which he continued to operate throughout the war.
DAD ASSUMED HE WOULD BE shipped to Japan following the surrender, but was crestfallen when he was ordered to spend three more months in class and a month in boot camp for basic training. The University of Michigan campus that fall was transformed by returning soldiers. “There are more men than women for the first time in nearly five years,” Dad wrote home. “It seems so strange to see so many husky, good-looking fellows going to college again.”
A few weeks later, in mid-October, Dad received the first of three letters from Yokohama that his mother had copied and forwarded to him. They revealed what conditions had been like in Yokohama during the war. The first was from Dad’s former French teacher at St. Joseph College, Brother Xavier Bertrand.
Sept 15, 1945
Finally the World War has ended and we are still alive ... In the fall of 1943, the police came to tell us that all the foreigners on The Bluff must evacuate. We decided to move St. Joseph (school) in early 1944 into the Park Hotel at Gora in the Hakone Mountains. It took 30 trucks to transport the most necessary and important things. The hotel had no furnace and all were cold. One of the best things about the hotel was the warm baths of mineral water coming from one side of Big Hell [a famous hot spring].
In Nagasaki, the Kaisei School was damaged by the atomic bomb. In Kobe, Father Fage was caught in his burning church and trapped by falling debris. He was burned to death while trying to save the Blessed Sacrament. What a beautiful death for a missionary ... Our school in Yokohama was spared but our neighbor, the sisters [St. Maurs], were burned out ...
You did well to leave for America because the [American prisoners of war] were not well treated, especially towards the end. One man, Emery Jones, died there of hunger. [At the end of the war] American fliers let fall forty sacks of supplies for us. One sack went through the window of the old confession room.
Dad was overjoyed to hear his old school was still standing. About two weeks later, he received a copy of a second letter, this one from his Uncle Willie, who could stay in Japan because he was a German citizen.
Oct 24, 1945
Dear Folks,
... In March 1944, authorities ordered all foreigners on The Bluff and Honmoku to clear out. We went to Karuizawa. The good furniture as well as baby grand, phonograph, Frigidaire, washing machine, sun lamp, were placed in our go-down [warehouse] No. 90 in the settlement, which later burned down.
Bud [the nickname for Charles’s son Walter] purchased [Julie’s] house, which was not in the fortified area and therefore did not have to be evacuated by foreigners. We thought it a good idea instead of any Nip getting it. But on the morning of the 29th of May, practically all of (Yokohama) went up in smoke up to former Miss Ross’s house. In the excitement, Bud only rescued his tuxedo, swallow tail suit, still with New York laundry labels, and 85 cents alarm clock. Bud and Willie moved to Helm House.
Although (Japanese) soldiers are back, the Nips seem to be dazed that they lost the war. They ought to work since they have no food to eat; but even if they had money there is no food to buy. On the 24th of August, Nip authorities gave orders for all people living in Helm House to clear out to make quarters for US officers.
I wonder if Dad was disturbed that Willie called the Japanese “Nips” or had he heard such terms so often in the army he had also begun to look on the Japanese in that way? What had it been like going through language school and basic training hiding from friends the reality of his Japanese heritage? In the same letter, Dad learned that his cousin Walter injured his leg at the time he was imprisoned and it became infected. He would have died of gangrene if the war had not ended when it did. Charles Bernard, a British tea merchant whose son married Lillian, Walter’s sister, had spent the entire war in a prisoner-of-war ca
mp and would have died of starvation if not for the food his Japanese wife brought to him.
Dad was happy to hear his relatives had come through the war safely and that Helm House had survived. But he was saddened to hear that the Yokohama home he grew up in had burned down.
In January 1946, Dad headed for Fort McClellan, Alabama, for basic training. It was his first time in the South, and he found it surprisingly like Japan with its “pine forests, small farms, marshlands instead of paddy fields and hilly cultivated grounds.” The only difference, he noted, was the red dirt and the untidy farmsteads.
At boot camp, Dad was made hut leader, “responsible for all the actions of the new recruits, therein being father, mother, slave driver, servant, timekeeper, referee and guide.”
Dad wrote, “You have no idea how raw these recruits are, Many of them talk so tough you’d think they were strong enough to beat Joe Louis.” Dad was a skinny boy of nineteen at the time, yet he wrote of how he whipped the new recruits into shape with “a lot of yelling, swearing as I had never sworn before, threatening, encouraging and all the tricks of the trade.”
In Alabama, Dad experienced for the first time the tough physical training and irrational demands that are a staple of boot camp. He would take his rifle apart and thoroughly clean it only to be screamed at a few minutes later because dust had already covered the rifle again. He would be sent off on long runs with heavy packs on his back.
I wonder if Dad wasn’t a little embarrassed for complaining about the treatment after receiving a letter from John Schultz, a slim, sixteen-year-old mixed-race boy with wavy brown hair and freckles who had been a schoolmate of Uncle Ray and Dad’s at St. Joseph College. Had he stayed in Japan, Dad could have suffered John’s fate.