by Leslie Helm
“Thank you so much for your hospitality,” I said to the carpenter and his wife after dinner. “We feel so lucky to have met you. I don’t know what we would have done if your son and his friend hadn’t picked us up.”
“It wasn’t luck,” said the carpenter. “Somebody would have helped you. Noto is famous for its hospitality. There is a well-known story about a thief who ran away from Tokyo to hide in this region. People gave him a place to sleep. They fed him every day. Everybody was so kind to him that he began to feel ashamed of his life. He left a note thanking the people of Noto and then committed suicide.”
The story silenced us. Confronted with the goodness of these people, we felt ashamed. What right did we have to make fun of the hard-working Japanese men while we sat on the platform in a crowded train station drinking sherry?
The next afternoon we headed home. We paid full fare for our train tickets and sat quietly in our seats. I had a new respect for Japan, for the beauty of its rural towns and the generosity of its people. I am reminded today, as I think back on that experience, that for every time I have been made to feel like as an outsider, there have been a dozen times I have been treated as honored guest. They are two sides of the same coin.
DAD, BY CONTRAST, WANTED NOTHING more to do with Japan. The summer after my senior year, he and Toshiko set off on a year-long honeymoon trip around the world. The goal was to take walks on the beach, have drinks at sunset, scuba dive, dine at the world’s best restaurants and find a beautiful place in which to spend the rest of their lives.
But from the very outset, he was uneasy. Years later, I would find a box full of old notebooks. One gray notebook revealed just how troubled Dad had become. On one page he had made a list of the things he feared most: “Parental type commands; loud voices; physical punishment; making and keeping new friends; parties and social functions; public speaking; effects of divorce on children and Barbara; friends’ response to divorce and Toshiko.”
On another page was a list of “Dos” and “Don’ts.” Under “Do” was: “Stay relaxed, wake up and live.” Under “Don’t” he listed: “Dwell on failures; be preoccupied with self.”
Here was Dad, at the turning point of his life, at a time when he had plenty of money and had just remarried, listing his hopes and fears like the numbers in an accounting ledger. On a page written shortly before he left Japan on his trip was his “To Do” list: “Pay Harry for stereo; dentist; traveler’s checks; review will; get married; sell typewriter.” Number twenty-two of the thirty-four items on the list, and the only one not crossed out, was the item that read: “What can I do for the children?” That one had stumped him.
In the first few entries on his round-the-world trip, things seemed promising. “Enjoyed Toshiko. Missed my family,” he wrote. He bought Toshiko a long green dress in a colorful market and ate fabulous oysters. In Singapore, the two feasted on spicy fish and satay with peanut sauce. In Thailand, they saw elephants lifting logs, snake handlers playing with cobras, and exotic Thai dancers.
Dad had hardly been away from Japan for three weeks when things started turning sour. “Bad dreams. Up in the night and wake up early,” he reported. At a houseboat in Kashmir, he smoked hashish and asked for career advice from a Pakistani saleswoman also staying on the houseboat who advised him to remain in real estate. He missed Mom so much that in Paris, he went to the post office and spent two hundred dollars to telephone her. In Paris, he jotted in his diary: “The constant shopping is driving me mad ... Death to shoppers!”
He and Toshiko rented a car and drove over the Pyrenees toward Spain. “How I miss my family,” he wrote in Torremolinos.
Dad enjoyed paella in Spain; the rugged cliffs in Malaga reminded him of the Japanese shoreline. While in Gibraltar, he learned that our family home, 236 Yamate, had sold for 120 million yen, about twenty-five times the price he paid for it ten years before. Although most of the money would go to pay Japanese taxes, it would be enough for the divorce settlement. He was happy about the sale, but he already missed his old life in Yokohama.
Don Helm and Toshiko (Hondo) Helm.
While Dad traveled around the world that summer, I was going through the house with my mother getting rid of stuff. It didn’t concern me that Helm Brothers had been sold after almost a century in the family, Dad had lost his job, my parents were divorced and my childhood home would soon be knocked down. I should have cared, but I didn’t. I just wanted to move on.
WHEN I LEFT JAPAN FOR college in 1973, I was unaware of the country’s powerful hold on my life. I assumed I would never return. However, when I left Japan in 1993 after the adoption of my two children, I knew I had lots of unfinished business and would often return. Even so, it was a surprise to me how quickly I would be pulled back to the country and the unexpected window I would soon get into my family’s past.
On January 17, 1995, when a great earthquake leveled Kobe, my editor asked me to fly to the city to cover the disaster. I contacted the reporters who were already covering the story. One was sleeping on the floor of the city hall. Others were staying at hotels in Osaka and taking taxis in, a two-hour ride because the trains weren’t running while the elevated expressways had collapsed. I scanned my mind for people I might know in Kobe with whom I could stay and remembered a visit my father had received in 1983 from Tsunemochi Atsushi, a retired furniture distributor from Kobe who claimed to be a relative. Dad told me at the time that Atsushi’s great-grandmother might have been the mistress of his Grandfather Edmund, his mother Betty’s father. I had met Atsushi briefly at a train station coffee shop many years before, but had never understood our relationship. I tracked his phone number down and telephoned him in Kobe, asking if his family was safe.
“We don’t have water,” said Atsushi. “But we are safe.” Then I told him my assignment and asked if I could stay with him. “My father-in-law lost his home and is living in the basement, but of course. I can make a bed for you in the office,” he said. I knew it would be an imposition, and I felt bad, but I had no alternatives.
I flew into the new Kansai airport built on a man-made island in Osaka Bay and took a hydrofoil to the ferry terminal on the city’s waterfront. It was past eight o’clock at night when I stepped off the boat onto the concrete pier, walking along wooden planks that had been placed to bridge large cracks in the concrete. The streets nearby were deserted, and an eerie silence blanketed the city, periodically shattered by the wail of an ambulance siren.
I walked through the dark streets, dragging my wheeled carry-on bag behind me as I searched for a taxi. The first scene that gave me a hint of the devastation was a fifteen-story concrete building that had been ripped cleanly from its foundation and was lying on its side, otherwise looking completely intact.
I knew this Kobe earthquake had been a mighty one. The temblor, which struck at 5:46 AM two days before, had measured 7.3 on the Richter scale. At the time, it was the worst to hit Japan since the Great Kanto Earthquake that had leveled Yokohama in 1923. The earth moved as much as a yard upwards and as much as twenty inches sideways. In twenty seconds, 67,000 buildings had completely collapsed, 3,900 people died and more than 200,000 were left homeless. Total damage was estimated at $200 billion.
As a child, I had experienced dozens of earthquakes. At school, we were taught to hide under our desks when the earth started to shake. At home, we would stand under door frames as the house shook. Sometimes we ran out to the bamboo grove in our garden. Bamboo, we were told, had roots that would hold the ground together and keep it from splitting open.
Growing up, I had heard many of the Helms’ stories about the 1923 earthquake and the firestorm that followed. I had read Dad’s description of how he had dragged bodies from the rubble after the Fukui earthquake in 1948. But it wasn’t until I saw that building in Kobe lying on its side that I really understood the destructive power of an earthquake.
As I walked on, I saw concrete telephone poles strewn across the sidewalks, their cables wrapped around trees and b
uildings. Cars had been flattened in their collapsed concrete garages. One big office tower had collapsed floor by floor like a giant accordion.
As I reached the center of town, I finally flagged a stray cab that took me as far as Rokko, a train station about a mile from Atsushi’s home. At the deserted train station, I found a telephone and called Atsushi. He said he couldn’t drive, but would send his wife, Yoshiko, to pick me up.
Yoshiko was an attractive woman in her sixties. She waved for me to get in the car. As she drove, taking a roundabout way home to avoid collapsed retaining walls, she gave me a quick rundown on the situation. Most of the earthquake damage had been in the flatlands that consisted of landfill. Her father, who lived in that area, had lost his home and was staying with them at the house, so things would be a little crowded.
“I’m so sorry to be bothering you at a time like this,” I said, acutely conscious of the huge imposition.
“No, we are happy you thought of us.”
A few minutes later, she pointed to a large modern complex on her left that took up an entire city block. “That’s the headquarters of the Yamaguchi gumi, a large yakuza organization,” she said. “During the day, when they distribute food and water to the residents, there is a line that extends all around the block.”
I smiled to myself. I knew the Yamaguchi gumi. The yakuza boss I had interviewed with the gold-plated, Kennedy-coin belt buckle had been from that organization.
At the house, Atsushi, now an elderly man with graying hair and gentle eyes, led me to his small office, where a futon had been laid out on the floor. “Feel free to use the telephone,” he said. “Then get some sleep.”
As soon as I was alone, I sent my editor an e-mail telling him I would file a story the next day on the yakuza relief efforts. The Japanese government was being criticized for its slow response to providing food and shelter for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by the disaster. This was a unique angle on that story. Atsushi had given me shelter. Yoshiko had found me my first story. I felt very lucky.
In the morning, Yoshiko made me toast and coffee. While I ate, she told me she had made some telephone calls; she had found a neighbor willing to lend me a bicycle, so I could get around the ravaged city. She had also found me a city map.
With map in hand, I took my borrowed bicycle and headed for the yakuza headquarters. There, sure enough, residents were already waiting in line. Some were walking away with large bags of diapers and toilet paper. I talked to a guard at the gate but was told the boss would not see me, but residents in the line told me the story. Only hours after the earthquake struck, trucks sent by affiliated gangs across the country began arriving with relief supplies, quickly filling the large compound. The boss had so many supplies that he began giving stuff away to neighbors. The relief effort was so well received in the neighborhood, the boss sent word to his associates around the country to send more supplies.
As I was walking away, I saw half a dozen posters plastered on the concrete walls. “Let’s chase the gangsters out of our neighborhood,” they said.
For the rest of the day, I bicycled all over the city. I visited tent cities where refugees sat stony-eyed, warming their hands over small fires. I talked to an old man who collected rags and then sold them as scrap. His tiny shop had suffered minor damage and he was making repairs. He remembered how the firebombs had destroyed his shop during World War II. “There will always be some disaster,” the old man said, shrugging his shoulders.
When I returned home, I helped Yoshiko collect water from the well at a shrine nearby. Much later, I would learn that the shrine was the same shrine Opa and Grandmother Annelise had evacuated to after the flood of 1938. Atsushi’s house, it turned out, was just blocks from where Opa’s gartenhaus had been. Yoshiko was concerned about her dog that hadn’t stopped barking since the earthquake. Every tiny aftershock made the dog shake and yelp with fear. That evening, she prepared a delicious feast from the various canned goods she had around the house. After dinner, I insisted on helping with the dishes. Most Japanese women don’t like having other people in their small kitchens. Yoshiko, after some reluctance, allowed me to do the dishes. I felt as if I had become a part of the family.
Afterward, we moved to the living room, and Atsushi pulled out his scrapbook. It was time to talk family. At his mother’s death bed, Atsushi told me, he learned from his uncle for the first time that he was part German. Curious, he looked through his family registry. There it was: His grandmother’s father was listed as Edmund Stucken. He went to a German priest, who took him to the Kobe foreign cemetery.
“It was a grey day in 1975,” Atsushi recalled. “The caretaker showed us where the grave was on a map. As we reached the area, the clouds parted, and a shaft of sunlight fell on a gravestone shaped like a large natural rock.” When Atsushi approached the rock, he saw the name on the gravestone: EDMUND STUCKEN—my great-grandfather, Betty’s father. Although Atsushi was far older than me, we shared the same great-grandfather.
Perhaps I gave a skeptical smile at that moment because Atsushi pulled a picture from his album and showed it to me. There it was, a spot of sunlight on the gravestone, as if the photo had been overexposed on that spot.
Atsushi became obsessed with his German heritage. All his vacations were spent in Germany. With little English and no German, he tracked down relations around the world. He was invited to a reunion in Germany that included 110 relatives from twenty-one countries. His family’s photo was included in a beautifully bound volume of genealogy distributed to everyone who attended. He left the Catholic Church into which he had been baptized and became a Protestant so he could attend the Kobe Union Church that his Great-Grandfather Edmund had attended.
Atsushi learned, much to his delight, that our common great-grandfather came from an illustrious family. When Edmund’s sister married the Baron of Mansberg, her father gave the couple as a dowry the castle Pichl. Atsushi discovered that his German ancestors had been international wool traders who had settled all over the world. Edmund’s mother was born in Cuba to diplomat parents. One of Edmund’s uncles was Adolf Bastian, one of the founders of modern ethnography, a man credited with having inspired both anthropologist Joseph Campbell as well as the creators of the movie Star Wars. Atsushi visited the massive Chateau Stucken outside Paris where the wealthy Russian branch of our family had lived in exile after the Russian revolution of 1917. He even visited a distant relative who was the head of a large multinational in South Africa called Stucken and Co. I was envious of Atsushi’s adventures, maybe even a little jealous, but I was excited by all he had learned. These people around the world were his relatives—but they were mine too.
Atsushi began to visit Edmund’s grave regularly. One day when he went to ask for Edmund’s blessings before departing for the big family reunion in Germany, he was shocked to find a gravestone on Edmund’s plot, disturbing the harmony and beauty of his ancestor’s grave.
He had assumed he was the only living relative to Edmund in Japan and had adopted the grave as his own family grave. He could not ignore that new gravestone that lay so impertinently in his great-grandfather’s plot. Finally, he went to the caretaker and asked him who had the authority to put the grave there. The caretaker went through his notes.
Leslie Helm with Japanese cousin Atsushi Tsunemochi by the grave of Great-Grandfather Edmund Stucken.
“It was a man named Donald Helm from Yokohama,” the caretaker said. Atsushi asked for Dad’s address, and one rainy evening in 1983, he visited Dad at his home on The Bluff. Dad received him hospitably, but Atsushi could tell he did not share his enthusiasm for family history. Dad told Atsushi that he had put his Aunt Gretchen’s ashes in her father’s grave.
Edmund was Gretchen’s father? This could only mean that Edmund had married twice: Atsushi was the descendant of Edmund’s first wife. Gretchen and Betty, Dad’s mother, were children of Edmund’s second marriage.
“After all my travels in Europe,” Atsushi said to me as I
sat there on his couch, “I learned that my closest relatives were not Germans after all, but Yankees who lived in Yokohama.”
It felt odd, just days after Kobe’s devastating earthquake, when so many people were homeless and living in misery, to be talking family history. Yet there was something about seeing how our past was woven together, how our meeting revealed so many new connections to the world, which was comforting in the midst of such destruction.
Later, when we were closer, Atsushi would tell me details he left out of the story that day. For example, one of his mother’s childhood friends recalled that when Atsushi’s mother acted uppity, they would say: Who are you to talk like that? You are just the daughter of a half-breed, and that would make her quiet.”
When Reggie Life, an American producer, approached Atsushi about being interviewed for a documentary that suggested people of mixed blood should not be called “half” American and half Japanese, but instead be called “doubles,” Atsushi was hesitant to participate in a project that would announce to the world his own mixed-blood status. He ultimately agreed, he said, hoping others would feel better about revealing their secrets. As Atsushi and I grew closer in successive trips, Atsushi even shared the story about how his Japanese grandfather, as a medical student, had cured the daughter of a powerful yakuza boss and had been rewarded with the most beautiful woman from among his brothels, a woman his grandfather made his receptionist when he started his clinic.