by Leslie Helm
In Japan, my mother insists, the German Youth was like Girl Scouts. But one of my mother’s friends recalls singing “Deutschland Uber Alles” (“Germany Over All”) and giving the Hitler salute during German Youth meetings.
In 1942, Opa was offered a position as a professor teaching German at two of Japan’s top institutions, Gakushuin and the University of Tokyo. Annelise worked as an editor for The 20th Century, a German journal published in Shanghai that avoided Nazi propaganda. As a teenager, my mother attended the German school in Tokyo. One day, she heard sounds in the sky and looked up to see unfamiliar planes. “Those are American planes,” a classmate said knowledgeably. They were B-25s engaged in the Doolittle Raid, a strike that would cause little damage but was a psychological blow to Japan, which believed its homeland was invulnerable. Afterward, Mother’s family was asked to participate in the neighborhood group responsible for putting out fires in the event of a bombing. When a boy from the neighborhood was sent to war, they were asked to put a stitch in a Japanese flag, one of a thousand stitches which, worn under the shirt, was supposed to protect the soldier.
One weekend, there was a knock on the door of their house in Tokyo. It was a young soldier on leave from China. The soldier had come to thank the family for sending its good wishes along with the stitched flag.
Opa invited the young soldier in for tea, as he recalled in his memoir. The boy entered shyly and sat on the chair at the dining room table. He was not much older than my mother, who was seventeen at the time. When Opa asked him about conditions in China, the boy fidgeted with his hands and rubbed his spine against the back of the chair as if he had an itch he couldn’t reach. Then he answered with surprising frankness: “The newspapers say that every soldier dies shouting, ‘tennoheika banzai!’ (long live the emperor!), but they all die crying for their mothers.”
As the war progressed, the schools where Opa taught became military facilities and he was asked to leave. My mother was sent to a family to do her compulsory six-month service as a housekeeper, as required of all German girls when they reached age twenty. Her brother, Roland, was sent to Hakone, a mountain resort where the German school had been relocated. This decision was made by Josef Meisinger, the Gestapo chief in Japan, according to Opa’s reminisences, because he wanted the children isolated from their parents and “educated by a uniformed campus leader.” Meisinger had been transferred to Japan by submarine because superiors were unhappy with the atrocities he committed in Poland that had earned him the moniker “the butcher of Warsaw.” At their new mountain school, Roland’s teacher chastised the students for not shouting “Heil Hitler!” with enough vigor. “I want you to say it so loud that the rafters shake!” the teacher commanded.
The next day, when the students shouted “Heil Hitler!” the teacher was shocked to see the lamps begin to sway back and forth. Roland was expelled from the school when a classmate reported that Roland had attached a fishing line to the lamps and had pulled the line just as the students were shouting their salute. Roland was happy to rejoin his family.
Robert Schinzinger’s ration card during the us occupation.
In the middle of 1944, American pilots began dropping leaflets in major cities announcing that massive air attacks were planned. The Japanese government ordered a mass evacuation of children, women and foreigners from the city to the countryside. Children were put to work farming the land. The Schinzingers moved to Karuizawa, a mountain resort.
In the early years of the war, Mom and her family ate relatively well. Shipments of sardines and tuna that Germany had ordered from Japan, but which could not be exported because of the British naval blockade, were distributed among the German community in Japan. Similarly, when Japanese or German battleships intercepted Allied freighters at sea, the coffee, sheep tongue, lard and other Western food they captured would be passed out to the Germans.
But as the war continued, food began to run out. Mom and her brother Roland would bicycle from farm to farm exchanging clothing and various household items for fruits and vegetables. Once they came across a farmer who supplied canned fruit to the Japanese army and they came home with several weeks’ worth of fruit. They picked up horse dung in the streets and night soil from the family’s outhouse to fertilize their garden. As winter approached, they dug root cellars to store their winter provisions. The cabins in which they lived had not been winterized, and the cold was penetrating. The only stove was a small tin box. Mom wore a wool hat and gloves as she swept the kitchen and did her chores.
By early 1945, food was scarce. The rations from the Japanese government, which once included rice, miso and soy sauce, were now down to a head or two of cabbage every few weeks. Mom collected edible weeds like dandelions that her mother made into soups. What neither Opa nor his children had noticed was the gradually declining health of their mother Annelise. She had been starving herself so she could give extra portions to her husband and children.
Robert Schinzinger and Barbara teaching German on NHK, Japanese public television.
One day in March 1945, a man from the German Embassy appeared at their cabin door with a bottle of wine to tell them that their house in Tokyo had burned down in the Allied bombings.
Mom, then twenty years old, drove back to Tokyo with the embassy official to see if there was anything worth salvaging. After they had descended the mountains and begun making their way through paddy fields, they saw in the distance a huge dust cloud. As they approached the cloud, Mom understood. It was a mass exodus of people from Tokyo.
“At the head of the procession were cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles that stretched for miles,” Mom later recalled. “Then came the thousands of bicycles; then there were men pulling wooden carts; and finally the refugees on foot, a mass of humanity that extended for as far as I could see.” During those months, Tokyo shrank from seven million residents before the war to a city of less than two million, as people relocated to farms in the countryside.
One day my mother was at a friend’s house listening to the radio as the emperor, in his thin voice speaking a strange, otherworldly dialect, declared surrender. She remembered afterward a deathly quiet in the town. On August 28, thirteen days later, she celebrated her twenty-first birthday.
The end of the war did nothing to end the food shortage. Mom moved into a hotel in bombed-out Tokyo to work for a US Army PX, a kind of supermarket used by GIs where, one day, she found herself serving General Douglas MacArthur’s wife and son (page 204). Later, she found a job translating into English documents that had been flown in from Germany which would be used in the Tokyo war crime trials of Japanese leaders. She lost each job when her superior learned she had been part of the German Youth.
One evening, Opa telephoned his daughter and told her to find penicillin for her mom who had come down with meningitis. Mom spent all night contacting her friends, desperately searching for medicine. Finally, the next morning, she found a US Army doctor who had a small supply of the rare antibiotic. She rushed onto a train with the medicine. But when her train pulled into Karuizawa Station that evening and she saw her father’s hunched figure standing alone on the platform, she broke into tears. She knew she was too late.
Roland, then nineteen, built his mother’s coffin and, with his father’s help, put Annelise’s body in it and nailed it shut. Mom helped Opa and Roland push the cart through the snow to the cemetery. The three of them watched in silence as the cemetery caretaker lowered the coffin into the grave and, without ceremony, began shoveling dirt over it.
Sixty years later, when I was visiting my mother in her apartment at the senior home where she was then living, I discovered the stack of diaries she had been keeping since she was a little child, I asked her to read the entries from the war, which she did, effortlessly translating the German into English I could understand. Tears streamed down her cheeks when she began to read a poem her father had written after her mother’s death:
I still hear your sad, quiet words:
“It wou
ld be good to die in spring, when May flowers bloom and birds sing.”
But before May came with its shine to the woods
I had to put flowers on your grave.
The ground was still frozen.
Now today, from the south, comes a whisper of warm air.
It brings the memory of spring.
The forest wants to turn green.
“Spring is a good time to die,” you said.
But I am left alone in the autumn.
“She was too young,” Mom said to me as she wiped her eyes. Annelise was forty-nine when she died, the age I was that afternoon as I sat with Mom. Mother’s eyes were red, and her hair was whiter than I remembered. But as I sat beside her, holding her hand and holding back my own tears, I felt that forty-nine was also too old—too old to be coming across, for the first time, this window into her heart. I felt privileged to see it now, but also cheated that she had closed herself to me for so long. I had waited too long to take the time to sit beside Mom on her bed, as I did that afternoon, to listen to her story.
MOM AND DAD MARRIED ON the three-day weekend of George Washington’s birthday in February 1951. How strange it is to think that if California’s anti-miscegenation laws, which banned inter-racial marriage, had not been struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1948, my father would not have been allowed to marry my mother because of his mixed-Japanese heritage.
It was also ironic that Mom had been a beneficiary of America’s racist laws. The United States had a quota of immigrants for each country. Mom had had no trouble getting a visa to enter the United States because she was born in Japan and fell under the Japan quota. The Japan quota of immigrants was always undersubscribed because, under US law, people of Japanese blood could not immigrate to the United States. To enter America under the Japanese quota, you had to be born in Japan, but because of the exclusion laws, you could not enter with Japanese blood!
One of the few surviving photos of the wedding shows Dad and Mom looking out the side window of their car. Mom has her head on Dad’s shoulder and is looking up at the camera with a big smile. With her dark, shoulder-length hair curled up and her lipstick shining, the black-and-white picture made her look like a Hollywood star. Dad, with his arm around her, looked out the window with a shy grin, as if a little surprised that he was the one driving away with the prize. A poster taped on the car door read, “Brand New Mr. and Mrs.”
Mom was wearing the brown dress her mother had picked out for herself from among the second-hand clothes offered to the family after they had lost everything in the Kobe flood.
The war had decimated the assets of both of their families, so they started their married life penniless. Mom and Dad had to choose between spending their scant savings on renting an apartment or buying a car. They chose a Studebaker, and Dad moved into Mom’s room at a UC Berkeley professor’s house where she did housework in exchange for room and board.
From the beginning, my parents were like two volatile chemicals: she, smart and opinionated; he, arrogant and insecure. Not long after they were married, they were invited to a bridge party. Dad began sniping about Mom’s poor playing. At first, Mom ignored him, but when his comments turned nasty, she lost her patience.
“Stop it, Don!” she finally said, gritting her teeth and glaring at him. Dad couldn’t resist delivering a final barb with a self-satisfied grin. Mom grabbed the card table and lifted it up, tipping drinks, cards and all onto Dad’s lap. Everybody was stunned. She looked at Dad’s shocked face and broke into laughter.
They had been married less than four months when Dad was offered a job interpreting for eight members of Japan’s parliament who were on a three-month tour of the United States. They were coming to study US democracy at the invitation of the US Department of Defense. As an officer in the Occupation, Dad had had great authority. Now he saw his role as a kind of guide, helping these men understand the US system of civic engagement. The Japanese politicians didn’t see things that way. They regarded Dad first as an interpreter and second as a servant. The task would call on Dad’s skills as an interpreter developed in the Army Language School and as an officer in the Occupation, but it would also ignite the worst of his prejudices and insecurities.
Dad often found himself embarrassed by the Japanese politicians, his “herd,” as he began to call them. “Previously I had respected the Japanese people as being modest, well-behaved, understanding and clear thinking,” Dad wrote Mom.
Now Dad discovered the politicians were intolerant and self-centered. They were rude to the bellboys, secretaries and bartenders who served them, and particularly toward their own countrymen of lower standing. For example, one day the group was attending a lecture on education. Also attending that lecture was a group of Japanese teachers and principals who happened to be visiting Washington, DC. Much to Dad’s consternation, his entire “herd” stood up right in the middle of the lecture and walked out.
It was simply too demeaning, the politicians later explained to Dad, for Japanese members of parliament to be put in the same lecture hall as a group of Japanese teachers. In any case, they added, they were sick of all the boring lectures. They wanted to meet President Truman and General MacArthur. They also wanted to do more sightseeing. Dad was furious. In that commanding voice that once brought veteran soldiers to heel, he told them that the US government was paying for their trip and they would do what they were told. With two thousand dignitaries visiting Washington, DC, at any given time, he said, they shouldn’t expect special treatment.
“They are as low a breed of humanity as I have ever met anywhere,” Dad wrote. “God help Japan if [they] should ever reach any important positions.”
Dad was also frustrated by the patronizing attitude of the American politicians who met the Japanese. One US senator said to the Japanese: “Y’all just put away your samyuraii swords and we’ll git along just fahn.” Dad chose not to translate that line.
The group was pleased when they got to meet Joseph Dodge, the hard-nosed Detroit banker who helped put Japan’s inflation-wracked economy on the path to recovery, although Dodge proceeded to give the men a tongue-lashing for the role of the Japanese government in coddling big corporations with subsidies and protectionist tariffs. They also met with John Foster Dulles, who was representing America in peace treaty talks with Japan. Dean Rusk, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, held a reception in their honor. Dad was always embarrassed when the Japanese men would crowd around these important men asking for their autographs.
Dad’s Japanese politicians called him at odd hours to negotiate problems with the hotel staff or arrange for private weekend trips. When one of the men asked Dad to help arrange for a prostitute, it was the last straw. Dad moved out of the hotel and into a boarding house nearby.
Dad was clearly lonely. He wrote long letters declaring how he yearned for Mom “like a modern man thirsts for civilization, moths are drawn to the light, fish to water, man to air, anarchists to freedom.” Years later, Mom would say that their relationship might have lasted longer if she had communicated more with Dad through letters. When he wrote, Dad opened himself up in a way he never could in person.
In one letter, Dad promised to argue less and listen more. But there was intensity to his love then that I never saw at home. In one letter he wrote: “I want to see you so much, to touch your hair, to kiss your lips, to lie with you through the night, to talk to you of our life and plan and think, to quarrel with you and even make you cry—just to make up afterwards—that feeling of relief, a crisis past. I would like to shower with you, scrub your back, wash dishes—if you would wipe them, go out dancing with you, dine with you—look at you and see you near, so close as to be a part of me, my life, my world, my thoughts.”
Dad’s Japanese improved daily and he was proud when he stood before the US Senate to translate a speech by the senior Diet member in the group. “It was my most wonderful victory yet,” he wrote.
But the more confident Dad grew, th
e more condescending he became toward his group. In one letter, he refers to the senior Diet member, a man more than twice his age, as “my boy Kimura.” Dad told Mom: “They have no finesse, warmth, savoir faire and anything but a kind-hearted peasant’s heart with a nouveau-riche accent on their power, prestige, money and position.”
Dad increasingly acted like a representative of the group rather than an interpreter. When he appeared on an NBC radio talk show with some of the men in his group, he not only translated what the Japanese had to say, but also took up much of the scarce time expressing his own opinions.
At the end of July, when their stay in DC was over, Dad took the group of Japanese politicians on a whirlwind tour of the United States. They met with police chiefs, prisoners, county clerks and reporters. They took the Empire State Express to visit a farm in Syracuse. In Mt. Vernon, Ohio, which the State Department had used for a widely distributed public relations film about “typical America,” there were lavish dinners and luncheons in their honor. Crowds followed the Japanese politicians everywhere, asking for their autographs. Their every activity made the local newspapers. “Tired Japanese Take Day Off, Will Leave for Chicago Tonight,” The Mt. Vernon News reported on the day of the group’s departure. In Kansas City, the reporters picked up on their comments about communism in Japan. “Japs Fear a Red Surge,” blared the Kansas City Times. “Modern Kitchens Interest Japanese Diet Members,” The Salina Journal reported, quoting one Japanese politician who noted: “If a housewife has time for nothing but housework, she can’t take an active interest in government.”