by Leslie Helm
Seeing the respect the American reporters gave Dad made the Japanese men also treat him better. “My group treats me now, without exception, as their equal,” he wrote. Now he began to indulge the men. He took them to a burlesque show in Chicago and frequently stopped at nickel-and-dime stores where the men liked to walk down the aisles amazed at the incredible variety of goods for sale.
By the time the Japanese politicians bid farewell, the men were emotional and Dad felt close to them. He would later agree to take other groups on tours.
Many decades later, the mayor of a midsize city, would recall how, when visiting California’s Central Valley Project on one of those tours, Dad went out of his way to show his group the shacks of the Mexican “wetbacks” who toiled in the fields. “He wanted to show us the dark side of the American dream,” the mayor said. That tour, guided by Dad, had changed the mayor’s life. He had returned home determined to introduce real democracy to Japan. But Dad would never know the deep impression he had made on many of the Japanese visitors.
By January 1953, Mom was studying for a master’s degree in library sciences while Dad was finishing a master’s in political science at Berkeley. Mom was then pregnant with her first son, Chris, and the family finally moved out of the professor’s house and into a small apartment. Their bedroom was so small Mom and Dad had to sleep separately in bunk beds. They could hear the train as it barreled through town, a stone’s throw from the apartment. Even so, Mom remembered that time as the happiest years of her marriage.
One day, upon returning from a picnic, Mom and Dad came down with severe cases of poison ivy. They were moping around trying to get sympathy from each other when they found themselves face to face: each was as white as a geisha because of the calamine lotion they had slathered all over their faces and bodies, and they just burst out laughing.
On graduating, Dad passed the Foreign Service examination and applied for a job at the US State Department. When early promises of a job never panned out and his father, Julie, asked him to return to Japan to head Helm Brothers, Dad felt he had no choice.
Mom, Dad and their son Chris thus found themselves, one sunny, windy afternoon, on a freighter in San Francisco bound for Yokohama. I have a home movie that shows Dad passing around a bottle of Scotch among his friends. Later, when his friends leave and the ship pulls away, Dad tosses the empty bottle far out into the Pacific Ocean. He would dearly miss his American friends; most of them would go on to become professors. While they would envy Dad for the money he would make as managing director of Helm Brothers, Dad would envy them for the carefree, intellectual life he assumed they continued to live. His mother, Betty, had always warned against getting involved with Helm Brothers, but it was a fate he could not avoid.
FOR DAD, THOSE FIRST DAYS back in Yokohama were thrilling. His father had built a house for Don and Barbara’s family to move into, and the daughter of a Helm Brothers carpenter was hired as a nanny. Since Dad was the first college graduate in the family to manage Helm Brothers and worked hard to learn the ropes from Julie, his colleagues were impressed. They had never seen a foreigner who could not only speak formal Japanese but could also read and write the language. Although Don knew nothing about business when he started, he learned quickly.
But in February 1954, just as Dad was beginning to feel comfortable in his new job, Julie announced that he and Betty had decided to return to Piedmont, California, to retire. Since the war, Julie said, Yokohama no longer felt like home. Dad was terrified. “Just ninety days he gave me to learn the business,” Dad would recall decades later. Perhaps Julie, who had worked for Helm Brothers since he was fourteen, didn’t realize how difficult it would be for Dad, at twenty-seven with no business experience, to suddenly take over a company. Though far smaller than before the war, the company still had dozens of employees and several lines of business. The employees were loyal and honest with Julie. They respected him. But would they transfer that respect to Dad, a man who had only just learned how to read a balance sheet?
OPPOSITE: Tsuru-san holds Leslie. Brother Chris with nanny.
At first, Dad was exhilarated by his newfound power and responsibility. Yokohama was emerging from the postwar recession and Helm Brothers was well positioned to benefit from its recovery. He plunged into the task, promoting capable young men and winning their loyalty. He consulted with his father by letter, detailing the problems and offering solutions.
Dad’s first recommendation was to shut down the stevedoring operation, which had been supplanted by Japanese companies in the postwar years and was now losing money. He wanted to focus instead on developing the extensive real estate that Helm Brothers still owned in Yokohama and Tokyo. Dad set out to build new apartments and duplexes on land left empty by the firebombing. He rented apartments not only to businessmen and US servicemen, but to the soldiers’ girlfriends, sometimes called onrii wan (only one) because, unlike prostitutes, they had a relationship with only one soldier.
Building was not easy. At a time when capital was scarce, the Japanese government discouraged Japanese banks from lending money to foreign companies such as Helm Brothers. To get around this financial roadblock, Dad had to draw from the company’s meager savings, which included money the company had received from the Japanese government in war reparations, in order to pay for the new construction.
Dad was also convinced real-estate prices would rise, and he searched for new land to buy. Although Japanese property owners seldom sold their homes, he could usually find property that the US Army or some departing foreigner was eager to sell. Dad’s early real-estate transactions were all in cash, and he once found himself walking several blocks to the bank carrying an athletic bag filled with fifty million yen, the equivalent of about twenty years’ worth of his salary.
While Dad intuitively understood real estate, his youth, his impatience and his brutal honesty left him ill-prepared for straightening out the business messes left from the war years. The property titles to some Helm land had been transferred into the names of German relatives to avoid appropriation during the war. There was Helm Brothers cash that had disappeared with no explanation. The fifty-five-ton floating crane, the pride of the Helm company, had ended up in the hands of a Japanese employee who got the contract to load onto Soviet freighters all the locomotives that Japan was handing over to Russia as part of its war reparations.
Then there was Walter, the Helm cousin who had been accused of spying by the Japanese military police during the war and imprisoned. Walter had borrowed money from Helm Brothers during the war and now wanted to return the money in worthless yen. Dad was sorry about the tough times Walter had experienced during the war, but business was business. Dad began to deduct some of the money Walter owed from his Helm Brothers’ pension.
Dad also had to contend with cousins who wanted him to give them jobs and board members who wanted to sell their land to Helm Brothers at inflated prices. Dad was less than diplomatic in handling these issues, calling the board director a “crook” and telling his cousins to look “in the wanted ads” for a job. Then there was Dad’s godfather, Uncle Jim, who constantly complained that Dad was taking too many risks. Still, Dad gradually learned the business, weeding out ineffective employees while promoting those who worked hard. With Mom’s help, he managed to keep peace with the relatives.
Some Japanese employees were unhappy. “Your father didn’t understand the soul of the Japanese like your grandfather,” said Mori Taro, whose family had worked for Helm Brothers for generations. “He didn’t understand that sometimes you have to spend 100 yen in entertainment expenses to get 100 yen in business.”
When I was born on October 30, 1955, at a small, two-room clinic on the edge of Motomachi, a shopping street at the foot of The Bluff, the nurse placed me in a tub of hot water and I screamed. Dad popped his head in long enough to make sure everything was okay, gave Mom a quick kiss and rushed off to the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club for his Sunday soccer game.
“Leslie has
the happiest and broadest smile of any baby anywhere,” he wrote to his mother Betty. “[Leslie] lifts his left hand, palm up in the air, beckoning me to pick him up. He is a very strong-minded child with a tremendous fiery temper and I fear that we are going to have trouble with him in the future.”
Not long after I was born, my Opa announced at age fifty-seven that he would marry a twenty-four-year-old Japanese woman he had met at the Cabaret Chicago, a Tokyo bar where she worked as a hostess serving drinks and dancing with customers. He called her Shizuka, the quiet one, because she seldom spoke. Shizuka, with her country upbringing, was simple and always good humored. Opa would never know that Shizuka’s father had knocked her across the room when she told him she would marry a foreigner more than thirty years her senior. “Until he hit me, I wasn’t sure if I would marry him,” Shizuka later wrote in her reminiscences. She had run away from her family because of the boredom of farm life and had ended up at the cabaret after first working at a sushi shop and then a pachinko parlor. At the Cabaret Chicago, her job was to dance with the patrons and persuade them to order drinks. Robert had come in to the Cabaret Chicago with a group of professors and he had asked Shizuka out after dancing with her. She found it exciting to go on dates with Robert to the Imperial Hotel for dinner or for coffee and cake at a nice Ginza shop. She had been impressed to see him on television teaching German and once attended one of his lectures wearing a beret so people would think she was a student. One sunny day, however, when Shizuka was walking in a park with Robert, she looked up at his beautiful smiling face with his perfectly white teeth and realized with a start that she was about to marry someone with false teeth.
A week before Christmas 1955, Dad took the whole family to attend Opa’s wedding at the Imperial Hotel. When Mom arrived, Shizuka, who wore a beautiful kimono, asked to hold me. I was then six weeks old. “I remember the look on the faces of all these respectable people when they saw me holding you,” Shizuka told me many years later. “They thought the blond baby was my baby and that this was the reason the professor and I were marrying.”
The wedding was reported on the evening news. Nomura Koichi, the chamberlain to the crown prince (now Emperor Akihito), gave a toast in Opa’s honor. (Earlier that year, when Opa received the Distinguished Service Cross of the West German government, the crown prince’s younger brother had sent him a box of cigars imprinted with the Imperial Crest.) The master of ceremonies read a congratulatory telegram from Tanaka Kotaro, the chief justice of Japan’s Supreme Court.
As my dad watched the ceremony, he was envious of the respect accorded Opa. He thought of his own job. He was happy at Helm Brothers, but it wasn’t the life of culture and intellectual stimulation he had imagined for himself.
In February 1956, Dad received the letter that would change the trajectory of his life. Julie was dying of kidney cancer, Betty wrote. Within a week, Dad was on a freighter with his family headed for San Francisco. Dad found his sixty-nine-year-old father at their Piedmont home looking frail. He took over from his exhausted mother the job of emptying the bedpan his father used and giving him morphine shots to ease his pain. I imagine father and son greeted each other stoically, with a handshake. They did not talk of death. They did not hug each other.
While he cared for his father, Dad wrote long letters to his Helm Brothers employees giving them detailed instructions on how to carry on the business. When he took a brief break from nursing his father on March 29, 1956, to visit friends, he returned to find his father dead. Just a few weeks later, even as he grieved for his father, Dad received a letter that shook him to his foundation. His cousin wrote that he and another cousin had held a meeting of the Helm Brothers board of directors and decided to appoint their seventy-year-old Uncle Jim as the company’s managing director. Dad would be fired and replaced by his Uncle Jim, the very man who, at Dad’s baptism had signed a pledge to his godson “to care for, and protect him, in event of anything happening to his parents.”
Reading that letter many years later, I could understand the bitterness Dad felt toward his relatives. Dad quickly dashed off a letter to the Helm Brothers accountant telling him he intended to fight the family decision. Then he booked passage for himself and his family on a ship headed back to Yokohama.
Dad stood on the sheltered bridge of the ship one April day in 1956 at the Japanese captain’s side, capturing a stormy scene on his home movie camera. “I’ve sailed for twenty years, but I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the captain. Dad had left Mom and his two sons in the family’s small cabin and had joined the captain on the bridge to film the Pacific in all the splendid fury that reflected so well the rage my father must have felt as he pondered the coming battle with his family. How would he make the rest of the family understand what a terrible mistake it would be to put his aging Uncle Jim in charge of the company? How would he win the support of his Aunt Louisa, who now controlled almost a third of the shares in Helm Brothers and would be crucial in his coming battle?
In the next shot on the home movie, the ship was anchored in the calm waters of Yokohama harbor. Mom held a leash, at the other end of which was my brother Chris in a leather harness. The camera focused on me. At six months, I was bundled up and lying on my back, laughing at the sky. Then there’s a shot of a tugboat flying the HB logo of Helm Brothers. There were a dozen people on board who began walking up the gangplank. Opa was the first to reach the deck. He held a bouquet of flowers rolled in a paper cone for my mother. Then came Dad’s cousin Walter and Uncle Willie. Last up the gangplank was Aunt Louisa. When she pressed her lips together and straightened her back, Dad must have known with chilling certainty that he had already lost the battle.
As the launch pulled away from the freighter, Mom put her arm through her father’s arm and laughed. From the home movie, it was clear that she was oblivious to Dad’s despair. When she later discovered the source of his humiliation, she tried to get Dad to understand the situation from the extended family’s point of view, which Dad found disloyal and made him furious.
Dad’s sorrow over his father’s death turned into bitter resentment toward his relatives. In letters to his mother in California, Dad described how he pretended to make his peace with the relatives while he waited for the right time to strike back. He agreed to help Uncle Jim, taking a job with Helm Brothers that paid only half his previous salary.
Seven months after Dad had been demoted, he finally resigned. He taught English for a while, exported Japanese tansu (chests) and looked for a new line of business. That’s when Dad received a call from a mysterious man in the US Central Intelligence Agency with an offer: If Dad would allow his office to be used as a drop-off point for the CIA, the government would give him some money to help launch his own real-estate company. As part of the deal, Dad would be asked to return briefly to the United States to study Russian. Japan had become a major front in the Cold War. Dad rented a small office, while keeping his plans secret from his relatives.
Betty was worried about her son’s hostility. “Above all, please remember your father’s name comes first. What would he do if he were alive?” she wrote to Dad. “Don’t hurt people deliberately to accomplish this—we do not need revenge, we want fair play.”
Dad was in no mood for fair play. He intended to compete with Helm Brothers head on. But just as he was about to launch the business, about a year after his father’s death, his mother, Betty, fell ill. Once again Dad found himself back on a freighter headed for California. This time he asked Mom to stay in Yokohama with us kids and help supervise the opening of his new business. Dad would take care of his mother, and while in California, take a course in Russian. Mom would join him in America with the kids once she had launched the business.
Don Helm Realtors office in Yokohama, ca. 1962.
If Mom and Dad’s first separation right after their wedding strengthened their relationship, this period pulled them apart. Since his father’s death, Dad had begun to drink more. He played less tennis and more golf.
He began having the occasional affair.
Mom confronted him about his affairs. She wrote, “I would not condemn you if you should sleep with another woman—you really can do as you please—but I can’t help my emotional reactions, and the knowledge or even the thought of your sleeping with another woman repels me.”
With Dad away, Mom discovered she enjoyed her newfound independence and happily wrote to her husband, “My days are so full and busy that I have little time to miss you. In making yourself independent of me, you made me independent of you, and I guess I should be thankful for that.”
Dad was apologetic for straying but then rationalized his behavior as “a question of appetite.” He said he was happy his wife had grown more independent, but then sent letters with long lists of what she had to do: “Rent the next door house furnished for $175; bring my real-estate books, summer, autumn, spring clothes and our important papers in the safe; give up your English teaching, there is too much else to do; sell our Studebaker.”
His Uncle Jim soon found out that Dad was going into competition with Helm Brothers. “It seems that Uncle Jim’s voice was shaking when he talked about this situation,” wrote Mom. “I can just see how he, in his sentimental way, is terribly upset about this ‘treachery’ on your part.”
But there was also good news: “Our ad in the paper about the new business has drawn many exclamations of surprise and many have already noticed your new sign. We’ve got a lot of friends, and I think they’ll help get business for us.”
Mom joined Dad in California with the kids for two months and then brought the whole family back to Yokohama. Dad’s new business was a success. “Pad? Hut? Chalet? Don Helm Realtors,” declared an advertisement Dad placed in newspapers, school programs and club bulletins around Yokohama. The Helm family, concluding that Dad was now working in open competition with Helm Brothers, threw him off the board. But Dad and Mom’s relationship improved. My mother loved to be pregnant, to have children, and so she was happy when my sister Julie was born in 1958, followed by my other sister, Andrea, in 1962.