by Leslie Helm
MOM DID HER BEST TO raise us as good Americans. Every Sunday morning she left Julie, still a toddler, with the maids, and drove my brother Chris and me to the American Consulate in Yokohama on the Bund for lessons on American citizenship. Chris and I walked into the imposing stone structure with its tall Greek columns and walked up the broad white marble staircase in the middle of a large atrium that led to the American Cultural Center on the second floor. It was a grand, almost church-like structure that always made me think America must be a cold but powerful place.
Leslie Helm, center, with brother Chris and sisters Andrea and Julie.
The American Cultural Center was taken up, in large part, by a library intended to help educate Japan on American democracy. It was in this library that I learned to draw pictures of bronze-skinned American Indians shaking hands with pilgrims in strange black outfits. All of this made me wonder what kind of country I belonged to. I learned that my heart was on the left side of my chest and that I should put my right hand over it as I recited the Pledge of Allegiance, wondering each time why it was “one nation, under God, invisible with liberty and justice for all.” I learned to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and the “Star Spangled Banner.” But it was really at home, watching American television programs like “Father Knows Best” and “Gunsmoke,” dubbed into Japanese, where I drew my notion of America as a society of close-knit families, wise fathers and justice-enforcing gunmen. I got a different view of America from Japanese television programs I watched, including a cartoon about a Zero pilot who outfoxed American fighters, a tall Japanese pro-wrestler who pummeled short and fat American wrestlers and a nuclear-powered boy robot named Atom (known outside of Japan as Astroboy), who was kidnapped by unscrupulous Americans and forced to work in a circus. My favorite Japanese programs were about swim teams and kendo clubs in which even the toughest obstacle could be resolved through perseverance, self-sacrifice and a few kind but strict words from the coach.
During the school year, I had Japanese lessons once a week and took judo, archery and karate. These disciplines taught me the importance of patience, persistence and self-control. But my most memorable times were the weekends spent at the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club (YC&AC), a country club for foreigners in Yokohama on a hill overlooking the sea that was a world apart from the crowded city. When Yokohama was hot and humid, there was almost always a breeze and cold lemon squash to cool me, and friends to keep me company. The swimming pool was deep blue and the lawn bowling greens perfectly trimmed. The bowlers in white shorts and polo shirts chatted as they waited their turns sipping from tall glasses of cold beer. Inside, nicely air conditioned at a time when that was still rare in Japan, was a four-lane bowling alley.
After a swim, my friends and I would order cheeseburgers with French fries that we paid for by signing little pink chits. On Sunday evenings there was always an American movie like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Swiss Family Robinson. Looking back now, I realize that at the time I was happy to live the insular but comfortable life of a gaijin.
The YC&AC was also an escape from what had become a nightmare at home. In bed at night I could hear my parents arguing loudly. One evening, when I was nine or ten, I woke up to a commotion and walked downstairs to our dining room.
“You stupid goddamned German,” Dad was yelling at Mom, spittle flying out of his mouth. Dad’s tie had been pulled loose. His white dress shirt, unbuttoned at the top, set off a neck blushed red from drink. He gripped Mom’s arm tightly and pushed her from the dining room into the kitchen. Mom, dressed in a nightgown, looked frightened.
“Don, you’re hurting me! Stop it!” she cried. I stood by the dining-room table, frozen.
“Just get out of my life,” he said, teeth clenched, eyes dark and cold. “I don’t need you.”
He pushed Mom toward the back door. She stumbled at the genkan, the sunken entryway, and, when she caught herself, she saw me.
“Don, the children!” Mom said, nodding to me.
Dad barely gave me a glance. “Get out!” he commanded, holding the door open.
Mom walked out, and as I ran after her, I heard the kitchen door slam shut behind me. I was cold in my bare feet and pajamas. It was dark, and Mom held my hand as we walked along the deserted road that ran through The Bluff, our foreign enclave. We sat on a low brick wall across the street from the Foreigners’ Cemetery.
Mom cried quietly, her head bowed down. I sat beside her, helpless, still trembling from what had happened. I had frequently lain in bed listening to my parents argue. Occasionally, Dad would take off his belt and hit me or my brother with it, caught up in his rage. But I had never before seen him so rough with my mother.
“What are we going to do, Mommy?” I finally asked.
My mother shook her head. The street in front of us was dark and empty, like a stage set long after the play was over and everyone had gone home. After what seemed to me like hours, Mom stood up and took my hand. “Let’s go home.” Dad wasn’t there when we entered the house. Mom quietly tucked me into bed.
Decades later, my mother told me it had happened to her many times before. People would ask her about a bruise and she would tell them she had taken a fall. But for me, that night was the turning point. I could no longer trust Dad. I feared and hated him. I stopped looking to him for approval. For years afterward, whenever Dad turned his gaze toward me, I averted my eyes. Not until I began to write this book did I begin to understand what had made him such a difficult man.
HELM BROTHERS FOUNDERED UNDER ONE manager after another until the family finally asked Dad to take over the company again in 1967, nearly a decade later. Helm Brothers agreed to purchase Dad’s business. Now he was happier, and for a while, peace returned to the household. Dad took us on a long trip through Europe, bought a new car and hired a contractor to put an addition on the house. He treated Mom better and their relationship seemed to improve.
Energized by the new challenge, he immediately began planning Helm Yamate Residences, a ten-story apartment building for foreign residents on a large piece of company-owned property on The Bluff. He came home with stories of carpenters who were unaccustomed to building Western-style houses and put the doors on the bathrooms so they opened inward, bumping into the toilet bowl. But he was enjoying the work.
He tried to bring modern management to Helm Brothers, hiring an accounting firm to go through the books so he could release a report to shareholders that, for the first time, revealed the true value of the company. “Don was too honest,” an accountant who worked for Helm Brothers told me decades later. Although Helm Brothers was worth many times what shareholders had previously believed, none of the shareholders had the money to buy out other shareholders at those high valuations. And since Japan’s strict regulations on the flow of capital out of the country made it difficult for the company to increase dividends, many shareholders wanted to unload their shares. It was only a question of time before some disgruntled shareholder would seek an outside buyer.
I remember sitting at the dinner table in 1972 when Dad came home and threw the prospectus on the table. A Hong Kong company was offering to buy Helm Brothers at exactly the price Dad had said the company was worth in his report several years earlier. Several relatives in the United States had already agreed to sell their shares without consulting Dad, and he felt betrayed for a second time. He knew the company’s value had skyrocketed since his last report, and a better price could have been negotiated if the relatives had contacted him first. For a second time, he decided to fight. He called all the relatives in Germany, New Zealand and the United States and asked them to hold off. He would get a better deal. It was a stressful time. Dad began drinking again. He often stayed out overnight. I would come home to find my mother crying. “Why is he doing this to me?”
Ultimately, the Hong Kong company doubled its offer and there was little alternative but to sell.
“The family has grown too large and diverse and more distant from Japan for it to remain as a c
ohesive unit. Now done is done,” one cousin told Dad. He had retired early on his Helm inheritance and advised Dad to do the same: “It gets easier when you pass fifty,” he said.
Dad was only forty-seven, but he saw no way out. On May 2, 1973, he convened the last board of directors meeting of Helm Brothers, bringing to an end family involvement in a company that Great-Grandfather Julius had started in 1891. The board agreed to sell the 210,000 shares outstanding of Helm Brothers for 2.1 billion yen, about forty million dollars today adjusted for inflation. Split among dozens of shareholders and after paying heavy Japanese taxes, it was no fortune. Over the next ten years, both the yen and land prices would soar, pushing the company’s value up almost tenfold.
Dad turned down the Hong Kong company’s offer to keep him on as manager, a decision his employees blamed for the company’s later collapse and the loss of so many of their jobs. Dad had decided it was time to start a new life. That meant making a clean break with the company; it meant divorcing Mom and marrying Toshiko, who had worked in his office for many years.
AS MY PARENTS DRIFTED APART, I knew my mother was suffering, but it was something I could not face. Years later, I read a fable that Opa, my grandfather, wrote. It helped me understand her pain. It was about a “Golden Bird” who loved to soar through the sky and to sing out her happiness but decided one day that she wanted to be human.
“You don’t know what you ask for; you don’t know what sorrows really are,” the old architect of the universe told Bird in Opa’s fable. But he granted Bird her wish and she became a beautiful maiden.
Many young men saw the beautiful maiden and heard her joyful singing. Every one of them wanted to marry her so he could keep her in his house, where she would sing when he wanted her to sing and would be silent when he wanted her to be silent.
Bird found her world narrow and so she went out across the great ocean, where she fell in love with a man who was handsome, smart and joyful and came from the same land as she. Bird faced many sorrows, including her mother’s early death. Each time she cried all night and in the morning her old father told her, “Human beings must have the courage to live and say good-bye.”
After the birth of her fourth child, Dr. Death came to Bird’s door. (This part was about my mother’s battle with breast cancer.) Bird looked into Dr. Death’s cruel eyes and drove a hard bargain. “I have four children to take care of; and my husband, though he doesn’t show it, needs me too.” Bird offered Death a part of her body, promising him the rest when her children were grown. The architect of the universe, seeing her sorrow, shed tears that fell upon Bird’s forehead and, shining like diamonds, blinded Dr. Death, who finally agreed to Bird’s offer. But Bird extended her life only to be confronted with a husband whose misery had turned love to pain. When her children were grown, Dr. Death returned for her. Bird was ready. She left her body, returned to her original form and flew away.
Although mother would continue to live for decades more, Opa’s fable wove the raw pain that I couldn’t bear to see in my mother into a sad but soothing fairy tale in which joy and sorrow are just part of the endless cycle of human life. I wish I could have had that perspective when Mom turned to me for comfort.
Instead, when Dad stopped coming home one day and chose to be with Toshiko, I was relieved. At least the fighting would cease. And with my parents preoccupied, I was free. It was my senior year, one of the happiest years of my life. Looking back, it seems odd that this should have been so, given that my family was coming apart. But the planets of my universe had aligned for me in a way they would not again for many years. At the Yokohama International School, where I had been enrolled since nursery school, I was involved in theater and karate and soccer. After school, I walked down the hill to a neighborhood I now know is close to where my Great-Grandfather Julius first lived, to take karate. After being a terrible student most of my life, I suddenly found I enjoyed reading and writing. Most of all, I found a perverse pleasure in embracing my gaijin identity and rejecting the straightjacket of Japanese society.
One weekend, two good friends and I decided to take a trip north across the main island of Honshu to the Japan Sea—a trip that would change my relationship to Japan. Marco was a Dutch national who had been my best friend since fifth grade, with a Chinese-Indonesian father and Belgian mother. My other close friend was Joji, a black belt in karate who had been raised by his Japanese mother after his Irish-American father abandoned the family.
As we waited for the train, Marco and I sat cross-legged on the concrete platform. I pulled a bottle of sherry out of the pocket of my large army surplus coat. I had won it at a school fair booth a few days before and had been carrying it around with me ever since, waiting for the appropriate occasion. Joji stuck his hand in his pocket and, with a flourish, produced two small wine glasses. I poured the sherry.
We sat and drank our sherry as a train whooshed into the station a few feet away. We didn’t budge as it screeched to a halt, the doors sliding open and thousands of commuters pouring out. When one man bumped into Marco and mumbled something in disgust, we laughed. What a joy it was not to be “them,” to be free spirits in a world of conformity. When our train finally arrived, we jumped on. When the ticket conductor came around, the three of us crammed into one of the tiny bathrooms on the train to avoid paying the fare.
It was dusk when we got off the train eight hours later with a vague notion of finding a hot spring where we could take a bath. We walked down a narrow street that cut through rice paddies toward the resort town, holding our thumbs out hoping to hitch a ride. It was our private joke; we didn’t expect anyone to stop. People didn’t pick up hitchhikers in Japan—particularly not foreigners. We had barely walked a hundred yards from the train station when a car pulled over in front of us followed by a second car. The two drivers happened to be friends, and we piled into the two cars.
“Where are you going?” the first driver asked.
“We want to take a bath,” said Joji, laughing as if it were a good joke. When the driver pulled up in front of a large, expensive-looking inn, we got nervous. We had brought little money.
“Don’t worry,” the driver said. “My mother works here as a maid. She can get you in for free.” The mother, a middle-aged woman wearing a white apron, came out and led us into a waiting room where she poured us some green tea.
“You can go in the bath when the guests are finished,” she said kindly.
It was nine o’clock when she handed us a stack of crisply starched and ironed yukata and a few small hand towels and led us to the baths on the top floor. We stripped down, dumped our clothes and yukata into a wicker basket and walked into the large, steamy bathing area.
We washed, rinsed off and then lowered ourselves gently into the hot, milky water that had the pungent sulfur smell I had come to love. The tile bath was the size of a small pool, and I couldn’t resist swimming the butterfly stroke across its full length before relaxing at the other side next to an artfully arranged rock waterfall, where the water poured into the bath.
Afterward, we donned our fresh yukata and walked out onto the hotel roof. The evening breeze felt cool against our steaming bodies. We leaned against the low concrete wall and looked out over the black tile roofs. It was a quiet night with no cars on the roads. There were few lights, and in the sky above was an ocean of stars. That’s when we heard it. Ka-kop, ka-kop. It was a woody, hollow sound.
“What is that? It sounds like a horse,” said Marco. But no, there was a different rhythm to it. As we listened, the sound seemed to multiply until the whole village was echoing with the sound: Ka-kop, ka-kop, ka-kop.
Suddenly it was clear to me. “Everyone’s wearing wooden geta (clogs).”
As we looked down into the narrow alleys between the rooftops, we could see that the streets had filled with men and women in their yukata returning from their baths.
The geta had a certain leisurely sound accompanied by shuffles and strange street echoes that seemed to harken
from a pre-industrial era. Later it would occur to me that this was a sound Great-Grandfather Julius must have heard when he first arrived in Wakayama.
When we changed back into our clothes and left the inn, our friends drove us to our next stop, an ochazuke restaurant owned by one of their fathers. It was arranged like a sushi bar, with one row of six bar stools. Townspeople liked to stop by for a bowl of rice and a piece of salted salmon that you sprinkled with seaweed and covered with green tea.
We slurped down the meal and bowed our thanks. The father brushed off our efforts to pay. Our last stop was the home of another one of the young men whose father, a carpenter, was building an addition. “You can sleep here,” the carpenter said, leading us to a room only partially completed.
As we lay down, it struck us that we had not drunk a drop of alcohol or smoked a single joint, and yet we were on this incredible high. We had thrown ourselves at the mercy of the road and something wondrous had happened.
The next morning, the carpenter took the day off and guided us around Noto Island, a short ferry ride away. He led us on narrow paths through tall bamboo forests that reminded him of his experiences as a soldier fighting in China when every day they had to scrounge for food, often stealing it from Chinese villagers. He now felt guilty about what he had done and seemed to feel better after sharing the experience with us. It was the first time a Japanese man had ever spoken to me about the war, and I felt as if I had glimpsed a deep wound that had never healed.
As we walked through the bamboo forest, we noticed rustling sounds behind us. “Could be a wild boar,” the carpenter said. “You can still find wild boar in these parts.” But when we came to a clearing, we could see a gaggle of boys following behind us. One brave boy came out from behind the foliage. He pointed at us, shocked by our non-Japanese appearance, then screamed and ran for cover. We pretended to be scared. The boys laughed and followed at a distance. As we made our way back to the ferry boat to leave, the boys finally came out from their hiding places and waved to us. “Come again,” they yelled. That night we ate curry and rice cooked by the carpenter’s wife.