by Leslie Helm
John lived with his Japanese mother and sister, about a fifteen-minute walk from Dad’s house in Yokohama. His American father had left the family and returned to the United States shortly before the war. John sent his letter from the home of his aunt in Renton, Washington, written in broken English.
John had been close to starvation when American troops found him and put him on a boat to San Francisco. “I’m eighty-five pounds, about three times the size of turkey,” he wrote. Schultz described how food grew scarce in Japan as the war dragged on. “In 1942, even the fish and vegetables were rationed. In 1943 they gave us half of the food what we need. In 1945, we could not get anything. The fishermen did not go out to fish because they were afraid of the submarines and seaplanes. The government even tell the people to throw out all the jazz records or be punished. They said that they cannot fight against America when they are listening to the American music.”
One day, when John was still fourteen, a Japanese policeman arrested him for walking near a beach considered a security area. John was beaten so badly he was bedridden for more than a week.
Then on May 29, 1945, the B-29 bombers roared over his house. John wrote: “The air raid began at nine o’clock in the morning and finished at eleven o’clock. Two hours after, there is no more Yokohama left. Americans dropped average of two bombs for every people of Yokohama. For me I got one extra bomb. We got three of the hundred pounds incendiary bombs into our house. I think you know how small my house was.”
In the chaos, John lost sight of his mother and sister, and spent the whole night looking for them. He found their bodies the next morning in a canal where they had gone to escape the fire, only to be asphyxiated by the smoke.
“That day, I can’t even understand what the people are talking about, because I lost my mother and sister at once. The word that I cannot forget was the neighbor who told me that ‘Your mother and sister must be glad because they were killed by the American bombs.’”
I wonder how Dad reacted to that letter. He used to tell us as children that America’s firebombing of Japan’s civilian population ranked with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima among the most heinous acts ever committed. The American forces used weather forecasts and detailed maps to calculate the best conditions for creating a firestorm that would kill the most people. They knew Japanese houses of wood and paper would quickly burn. But for maximum damage, they waited for dry days when the winds were heavy before sending out the B-29 Superfortresses to drop their giant drum cans.
“The drums would crack open in the sky, and it looked like tin cans were falling out,” said one of Dad’s friends who lived through the bombings. Those “tin cans” were the size of steel milk jugs and packed with jellied gasoline. It was napalm, later heavily used in Vietnam. The napalm was dropped in a circle around heavily populated areas so that the wind and heat drove the people to die in hellholes in the center.
Everyone who lived in Yokohama at the time has stories about what they did when the firebombs fell. Mori Taro, an old Japanese man whose family had worked for Helm Brothers for generations, remembered how he and his sister, as teenagers during the war, were forced to work in a Toshiba factory near Yokohama assembling balloon bombs that were then filled with helium and set adrift, on air currents, to America’s West Coast. (Six people in Oregon would be killed by the bombs.) He and his sister were working at the factory when they heard the “death wind” created by the American bombs as they screamed toward the earth. They and the other children in the factory linked their arms while a yakuza labor boss led them through the burning city to the safety of a riverbank. He was lucky. Those who hid in their backyard shelters baked to death. The fire was so hot it vaporized the asphalt on the streets. In Tokyo, a witness wrote of “a borealis of horrible beauty that hung over the city and turned the night to day,” a description that resembled descriptions by witnesses of the firestorm that followed the 1923 earthquake in Yokohama.
In addition to Yokohama and Tokyo, sixty-five other Japanese cities were burned to the ground. Somewhere between 200,000 and half a million civilians burned to death in what Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, who served under General MacArthur, called “the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history.” General Curtis Le May, the architect of the bombings, later admitted that had America lost the war, he would have been convicted as a war criminal for the people that he, in his own words, “scorched, boiled and baked to death.”
WHEN DAD FIRST ARRIVED IN Yokohama in the summer of 1946 after a long voyage from Seattle, the city looked peaceful as seen from the bridge of the USS Mitford Victory. “At the entrance to Yokohama Bay, we saw ten or so wrecked ships lying idly in the beautiful green waters. A little further on, we came across the cholera fleet, a bunch of ships carrying Japanese soldiers who had been quarantined when disease struck them.”
Grounded battleships still dotted Japan’s coastline in 1946.
As the ship entered Yokohama harbor, Dad saw the coastline where he had spent his summers. “The sun was in my eyes, but I still could make out the roofs of our [summer] house on the hill and Uncle Charlie’s. The trees there looked as pretty as ever and the cliffs were a very familiar sight.”
Past the first breakwater, the ship took on an old Japanese pilot who guided it safely into the harbor. Dad could see the Hotel New Grand, the American Consulate and, just behind them, the familiar façade of Helm House with smoke rising from its chimney.
Dad had mixed feelings about the scene he encountered as the ship docked at the pier. “The Japanese coolies, most of whom seemed young boys and old men, swarmed on the quay. The GIs threw cigarettes and candy, and they jumped for them like animals,” he wrote. Returning now as an officer in the conquering army, it must have been easier for him to regard these defeated people as less than human.
The following morning, when Dad’s unit took a train to a nearby base, he saw for the first time the power of the firebombs. “All around Yokohama station, up through the outskirts of Yokohama and Tokyo where we passed, there wasn’t one pre-war building standing—nothing but these huts that had been cleverly put together from the wreckage.”
A week later, Dad took leave to visit his German Uncle Willie and his Japanese cousin Walter at their homes on Helm Hill in Honmoku. The area had somehow survived the fires. On his way up, Dad spotted his former cook. “She didn’t recognize me even after I called out to her,” he wrote his mother. “In fact, I had to convince her and then she cried to beat the band.”
It was an emotionally confusing homecoming. Dad was happy to find his German aunts Louisa and Elsie well, but was disturbed by reports that his Uncle Willie had operated a lucrative black market out of the basement of Helm House, where the Germany Navy had been headquartered during the war. Word was that Willie was one of the wealthiest men in Yokohama near the end of the war as a result of his black-market activities.
Then Dad went to see the ruins of his old house, a ten-minute tram ride away. “Bits of pottery and porcelain are scattered all over, my bicycle is twisted and mangled by the fire but somewhat recognizable,” Dad wrote his mother.
Thinking of Dad’s first days in war-torn Yokohama, I wondered, Did Dad harden his heart to what he witnessed because he had to believe that America was justified in its actions? Although he didn’t like what had happened in Yokohama, it was easiest to blame the Japanese militarists who had launched a war that had ended in so many deaths. Since the war had begun, Dad had sought to separate himself from Japan, and that must have made it hard for him to feel compassion now for its difficult plight.
Perhaps somewhere deep down, Dad was aware that, but for a quirk of fate, he might have been in John Schultz’s shoes. I expect Dad would have resisted that thought. He would have told himself that John was different. He was not really an American. John’s mother was Japanese, and he lived in a Japanese house. He had that stilted way of speaking English so common among half-Japanese kids.
TOP: Helm House occupied by German navy officers during WWII.
BOTTOM: Helm House occupied by us army officers after the war.
I believe that was Dad’s reaction because, I am embarrassed to admit, it was my reaction, too, when I first read that letter. But in successive readings, it soon became clear how absurd it was that we Helms, because we had the wherewithal to leave Japan before the war, considered ourselves to be different. Dad, who was also mixed blood, could have been John. And John had suffered at least as much as the Japanese. The huge gulf I had always felt existed between me and “the Japanese” was an illusion that generations of Helms had created for our own comfort. It is the knowledge of how long I had deceived myself that makes me cry each time I reread John Schultz’s letter.
BETTY, WHO RETURNED WITH JULIE much later in 1949, as soon as the Occupation forces would allow them to enter the country, would suffer from a different realization. She walked amid the rubble that was once her house, picked up a shard of pottery and wept. She understood that it wasn’t just her home and her collection of old pottery that she had lost. She lost the Yokohama she had come to know and love with its dance clubs and old-world charm. These were gone forever. In its place was a desolate landscape, a defeated people. Armies of women had been pressed into prostitution to serve their new masters, the US Occupation forces. But in those first years of the Occupation, Betty’s son Don would rekindle his love for Japan in a place far from colonial Yokohama.
ALONG THE WESTERN COASTLINE OF the island of Kyushu at the southwestern edge of the Japanese archipelago are craggy promontories that sink their rocky claws into the rough waters of the East China Sea. From that shore extends a chain of tiny islands that seems to exist in a world of its own. The locals call it Kujukushima [the “Ninety-nine Islands”], which is another way of saying “infinity” in Japanese. Perhaps it is the sheer number of uninhabited islands peppering this coast and calming its waters that gives Kujukushima an odd sense of timelessness.
Or perhaps the goddess Izanami, when she created the Japanese archipelago by dropping bits of brine into the ocean from her heavenly spear, gave the spear a final flip at the end, like a calligrapher with a paintbrush, to create this fine spray of emerald islands.
There is an amorphous quality to the landscape: The blue-grey sky, the dark green sea and the dense bluish canopy over the islands all seem to blend one into the other. That posed a challenge for me on a summer day in 2002, when I sat in a motorboat roaring past the islands, scanning the landscape for a familiar landmark. I was looking for an island paradise my father had discovered after World War II and described in long letters to his mother.
As I searched, I was reminded of the haunting Japanese fairy tale about the fisherman Urashima Taro who was carried on the back of a turtle to the undersea palace of the dragon king, where he fell in love with the king’s daughter and lived a life of beauty and splendor. Somewhere among these countless islands was such a paradise. There was a palace crowned by an elegantly sloped tile roof perched on a private lake stocked with fish that the palace cook prepared for his fabulous feasts. The island’s vegetable gardens produced gourds the size of watermelons, and wisteria blossoms hung from arbors like purple clouds, giving off a fragrance sweeter than lilacs. I knew that on this island paradise lived a beautiful girl of noble birth. I knew all this because my father had taken pictures of that island paradise. He had written letters to his mother about his love for that princess.
I was looking for that small island and the girl who had captured the heart of my father, then a young lieutenant serving in the US Occupation of Japan. Now she would be an old woman, but perhaps we could talk about my father as a young man as we sipped tea and gazed out over the sea. Or so I imagined.
Those post-World War II years were strange times. The Japanese, a people who had once vowed to defend their island to the last man, had unexpectedly welcomed American soldiers onto their soil, if not into their hearts. For Dad, and for Japan, it was a time of glory and of humiliation; joy and heartache; devastation and renewal.
BEGINNING IN JANUARY 1947, DAD spent two years living in a Quonset hut on Hario Island, a speck of land in a large sheltered bay about twenty miles south of the Kujuku Islands. A handsome, dark-haired man with a winning smile that made him look a little like a young Frank Sinatra, Dad had been sent to this distant outpost to interrogate the Japanese soldiers who had been released from Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and brought to this port for processing.
On the day Dad arrived in Hario, he hiked to the highest point on the island to take in the breathtaking views of the bay edged by flats where salt, so precious in those days of scarcity, was harvested from the sea. Rows of barracks along the shore held thousands of Japanese soldiers who had just arrived from the Soviet Union and were waiting to be processed. Dad wrote that the unpainted buildings with their elegant tiled roofs were “like a woman who worries more about her hat than her clothing.”
Repatriated Japanese soldiers are transported to shore, 1947.
Dad made his way down to the water’s edge and watched as the repatriated soldiers, looking thin and tired, trudged off the rusted diesel boats that brought them from the Russian freighters anchored in the bay. They were the tattered remains of a mighty army that had conquered most of China. When the Japanese army was already on the edge of defeat, the Soviet Union, violating its neutrality agreement with Japan, had swept into Manchuria and captured more than 600,000 soldiers, putting them to work in labor camps across Siberia. Now, eighteen months later, they were on their way home.
The job of Dad and his dozen or so fellow officers, as described in intelligence files declassified in 2002, was “to uncover Soviet agents among Japanese repatriates for exploitation as double agents.” The men were usually quick to admit they had been trained as spies. Some claimed the Soviets had coerced them at gunpoint; others said they pretended to be spies so they would be better fed. They described how the Soviets taught them to hide their radio equipment in the large ceramic pickle jars most families have. Another mission for Dad and his fellow officers, called Project Stitch, was to gather information about the Soviet Union’s industrial and military buildup in Siberia.
Don Helm with actress Takamine Hideko.
Perhaps it was during this period that Dad developed the imperious voice that could make policemen tremble. When a Japanese sergeant refused to answer a question, finding it difficult to take seriously this baby-faced boy, Dad would humiliate the battle-hardened veteran with his acid tongue and thunderous voice.
Today, American soldiers, even officers, are often looked down upon in Japan. But during the Occupation, even low-level officers had social status. Dad could order policemen to buy rice and soy sauce for him on the very same black market that American military police were trying to shut down. He could ride the trains free by standing in the front cab with the driver.
The officers often had important visitors. “The other day a couple of movie actresses came into town and of course we had them come over to our place to shoot the breeze,” Dad wrote his mother. “Never thought that a Japanese girl could look so pretty. Takamine Hideko by name, quite an eyeful I can assure you.” Takamine’s fame in Japan at the time was on the order of Doris Day in the United States.
Dad also adopted some of the racist attitudes of his colleagues. In letters to his brother Ray, he referred to Japanese as “gooks.” In one of his letters, he mentioned that he was being asked to teach English to his Japanese-American colleagues. He said they spoke “St. Josephstyle English,” a reference to the scrambled English and Japanese spoken by many children of mixed parentage at his Catholic high school in Yokohama.
One day in March 1947, Dad must have felt as if he had opened one of those ugly oysters the region was so famous for, only to find in a thousand-to-one odds a perfect pearl. Exploring the coastline, he was invited by a boatman to tour a gem of an island with “cherry trees and large, stately, well-shaped pines.” The island had a large inner lak
e and was owned by a family with a beautiful daughter named Miki. “I went crazy about her toute-de-suite for she was a beauty and her personality developed from a Shanghai life was terrific,” Dad wrote his mother.
Miki had been a newspaper reporter in Shanghai and, after the war began, had become a nurse. Dad had craved female company, yet the only women available to him were prostitutes in the nearby port of Sasebo. Most respectable Japanese women disappeared when they saw an American soldier coming.
More than fifty years later, I ventured to Kyushu to find this particular island and Miki. I rented a car in Sasebo and drove north until I saw a sign for the Saikai Pearl Sea Resort, which advertised ferryboat tours through the Kujuku Islands. I pulled into a large parking lot and asked shopkeepers if they knew an island called Fukurogaura, the name my father had mentioned in his letters. Nobody had heard of the island, but one lady suggested I talk to the director of the nearby aquarium.
The director was a young man full of energy. He laid out a large, detailed map on the table and pored over it, but could not find an island of that name. I pulled out a copy of a picture Dad had taken of the place. It showed an island shaped like a horseshoe with the two narrow peninsulas connected by a bridge that looked like a Roman aqueduct with a dam below it. Behind the dam was a beautiful inland lake. On its right was a large, elegant villa. The caption in my father’s writing said, “Miki’s island.”
“Hmm, this looks familiar,” the director said. He often went diving in the area to collect sea life for his aquarium. He recalled seeing something that reminded him of the picture. “I’m curious,” he said. He had an hour before he had to pilot the next ferry tour and said he would take me to the place in his speedboat.