Yokohama Yankee

by Leslie Helm

  I came to feel a strong bond with Atsushi that went beyond kinship. Not only did we share the same German great-grandfather, but both our families had been ashamed of their heritage and had sought to hide it. We even shared grandfathers who had dealt with gangsters. I felt as if we had become soul mates. His quest was the mirror image of my own.

  AS MARIKO AND ERIC GREW older, their ties to Japan weakened. They stopped watching Japanese videos and reading Japanese comic books. Every year it became more of a challenge to keep them interested in Japan. Still Marie and I did our best. They enjoyed Japanese food and we frequently had Japanese visitors. Marie was chair of Japanese Studies at the University of Washington and editor of The Journal of Japanese Studies. Periodically, we took trips to Japan. When I had the time, I continued my family research, connecting with a vast network of relatives in Japan, Germany, New Zealand and across the United States.

  By 1999, our nanny, Teiko, had been gone for two years, and Mariko, now ten, and Eric, seven, were rapidly forgetting their Japanese. Marie and I decided it was time to return to Japan to renew those ties. I would also have time to conduct research on my family. We each received an Abe Fellowship, which supports US and Japan-based researchers focusing on contemporary issues. We settled into an apartment for foreign scholars just outside the campus of Hitotsubashi University, on the outskirts of Tokyo, where Marie would be based. I commuted into Tokyo to The Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), a think tank where I would study the evolution of the Internet in Japan.

  Although the Hitotsubashi campus looked run down in places with its abandoned hulks of rusting bicycles and its untended shrubbery, we knew the kids would be safe in this small town, and so we allowed them a great deal of freedom. They loved to bicycle to the hundred-yen store on the other side of the campus where they could buy everything from toys to school supplies for less than a dollar each.

  Japan had changed since we had left six years earlier. Name-brand clothes and handbags that sold for hundreds of dollars apiece were less in evidence. Popping up instead were funky stores that sold secondhand clothes and cheap imports from China and India.

  To get Mariko and Eric speaking Japanese again, we placed them in a Japanese public school. Initially, everything went smoothly. We were impressed when the city government paid for interpreters to stay with each of our children every day for the first week in school. It concerned us that school regulations would not allow us to walk our children to school. Strangely, they were also forbidden from riding their bicycles. But we were thrilled when we discovered that the classroom teachers had appointed “friends” to walk with Eric and Mariko to school.

  Every morning, Yumi would call up from the road to our second-floor apartment, and Mariko would run down to join her friends as they walked to school. Mariko quickly became close friends with Yumi. Mariko loved finding herself in a class full of Japanese. In Seattle, she had been disturbed and angry when her class talked about the US bombing of Hiroshima. The only other Japanese-American in her class was a boy, and she didn’t feel like she could share her feelings with him. In this class, everyone was Japanese; everyone knew how to pronounce her name. For the first time, she said, she felt like she really belonged.

  Eric was also initially enthralled by Japan. He loved to visit temples. I would light the incense and he would stand quietly staring at the gilded Buddha that glowed from within the dark recesses of the temple hall. He had always been fascinated by religion and, at age five, while attending pre-school, once asked me about the crucifixion. When I explained to him about what the Romans had done, he was disturbed. “They should have used their words.”

  Eric’s teacher, an energetic woman with hair dyed red and a mouth full of glittering silver crowns, did a good job of including Eric in the class. Just a few days after school started, she assigned Eric to work as a server at lunch. Stainless-steel carts loaded with rice, stew and miso

  soup were rolled into the classroom. Eric beamed as he stood behind one cart, wearing a white apron and white paper hat and using a ladle to fill the kids’ soup bowls as they came through the lunch line.

  The teacher also assigned Eric a role as tadpole number ninety-nine in the class play. The play was about a mother frog who ventured out in search of a lost tadpole, only to be captured by an evil crayfish. The tadpoles gathered around and discussed what to do.

  “We must save our mother!” Eric bellowed, his only line in the play. The only dramatic instruction the children received was to shout out their lines as loud as they could. The tadpoles then broke into song as they marched off to rescue their mother. When Eric returned from school, he would march around the living room singing that martial tune.

  One morning, Eric’s classmate, Yuuta, knocked on our door while Eric was finishing his breakfast.

  “Hey, Eric! Are you still eating?” said Yuuta in Japanese. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Eric grabbed the boxy black leather backpack that has been the standard issue school backpack in Japan since World War II and headed out with Yuuta. Less than ten minutes had passed when Eric came home in tears.

  “I’m never going back to that school again,” Eric thundered as he strode into our little apartment and slammed the heavy metal door behind him. “It’s stupid!”

  Then Eric’s eyes brimmed with tears as he burst into a staccato of mournful cries. An older Japanese boy had made fun of Eric’s name. Then he had taken his backpack and swung it, hitting Eric in the face.

  I looked at Marie, wondering if we had made a tragic mistake in bringing our children back to Japan. I gave my son a hug and held him tight. I felt his shaking stop and his body relax. Only then did I begin to feel the tightness in my own chest ease.

  I could have done one of many things that morning. I could have signed Eric up for a martial-arts class. That’s what Grandfather Julie had done when Dad was teased by Japanese kids as a child in Yokohama. I could have sent Eric back out there and told him to be tough. That’s what Dad often said to me. But I had read enough about bullying in Japanese schools to know that minor incidents could become major problems. This issue had to be resolved immediately. I took Eric’s hand and walked him to school.

  “Did you know the boy who teased you?” I asked Eric as we walked.

  “No. He was from another class.” Eric’s voice was shaking.

  “Where did your friends go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I noticed then that his tears had left dirty streaks on his cheeks. I knelt down in the street to wipe his cheek with a paper tissue. I could imagine how it felt to have this new world he had been so taken with, suddenly turn on him.

  The elementary school was a cream-colored, two-story concrete block of a building much like every other school I’d seen in Japan. Inside the entryway, we took off our shoes. Eric changed into the clean inside shoes he kept in his backpack. I put my shoes on a large shoe shelf and took a pair of green slippers I found in a basket. Holding Eric’s hand, I walked down the polished wood hallway and knocked on the door of his classroom. I explained to the teacher what had happened. She nodded. Eric let her take him by the hand and lead him to his desk.

  Then I went to the school office and asked for the principal. She was not there, but the vice-principal came to the door. He was a handsome, stern-looking man. His looks reminded me of the kind of men who always played the role of the wise sports coach in Japanese television shows. They were tough but fair, and they always had the answers to life’s most difficult questions.

  “My son, Eric, was bullied by one of the Japanese boys this morning,” I said.

  “Oh? What happened?”

  “He made fun of Eric’s name and hit him in the head with his backpack.”

  “Well, that’s unfortunate,” he said, sounding concerned.

  But when I looked him in the eyes, I saw that he was annoyed. I felt myself blushing as it suddenly became clear that he considered my problem too trivial to warrant attention.

  “Perha
ps it wasn’t a big deal,” I conceded. “But I think you should talk to the kids.”

  “Shouldn’t the kids work things out for themselves?” asked the vice-principal.

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to stay calm. “But if things get worse, it will be your responsibility.”

  The vice-principal’s eyes narrowed. He knew exactly where I was going with this. Bullying had become a major issue in the Japanese press. There had been a spate of suicides by children bullied by their peers, often with the complicity of teachers, an informal way to enforce conformity. Once a teacher presided over a mock funeral in class for a junior-high boy who was often bullied by classmates and so stayed at home complaining of stomachaches. The boy committed suicide soon afterward by hanging himself in his bedroom. It was Japan’s conformist schools that made Japan disciplined, but also intolerant of diversity, unable to produce the creative thinking that its post-industrial society demanded. In that moment, it seemed to me that all of Japan’s problems could be reduced to the attitude of this one vice-principal.

  Finally, the vice principal gave me a brief nod. “I will talk to the teachers.”

  A few days later, Eric’s teacher called me at home. “About this incident,” she said. “I talked to the boy involved. He was only trying to be Eric’s friend.”

  “Isn’t that an odd way of trying to make friends?” I asked.

  “Well, in any case,” she added, “I think everything will be okay.” And sure enough, Eric was never excluded again.

  THAT FALL, I LEARNED THAT the think tank where I was studying was hosting a conference in Kyushu, the island where Dad had spent much of his time in the Occupation interviewing Japanese soldiers. However, this conference was on the northeastern side of the island, the opposite side from where Dad was stationed, and not far from a mountainous region where Grandmother Betty’s Japanese mother, Koshiro Fuku, was born. Fuku was the woman Edmund married after separating from Atsushi’s great-grandmother. I decided to attend the conference and then take a trip to the mountains in search of Fuku’s origins.

  I knew little about Fuku, who died in 1901 at age twenty-four. When the city of Kobe moved the foreign cemetery into the hills above Kobe to open up space in the downtown area, they found Fuku’s skeleton buried together with the skeleton of a small baby. Fuku had borne four children in six years, and, it seemed, had died trying to give birth to a fifth.

  Relatives had told me that Fuku had come from a family of disgraced samurai whose feudal lords had lost their domains in war or who had somehow lost favor with their lords. My newly discovered cousin Atsushi did some research and discovered that in the mountainous area north of Oita, there was a village called Egomori that was thought to have been founded by disgraced samurai. After the conference ended, I rented a car and headed for the mountains.

  By the time I got on the road, it was already dusk. I passed a number of little towns including one called Usa. I wondered if that was the town we used to laugh about in my childhood. In the days when Japanese products were still of low quality, the town used to stamp on its manufactured goods “Made in USA.” A car dealer in the town had a large model of the Statue of Liberty in its car lot.

  For several hours, I wended my way through the mountains. It was nearly ten o’clock and dark when I realized I had lost my way and entered a little village to ask directions. When I got back on the highway, I stepped on the gas, eager to reach my destination. As I sliced through the dark paddy fields, I saw headlights in the distance. As they got larger and larger, I suddenly realized with horror that they were from a truck that was fast bearing down on me—on my side of the road.

  Is this guy nuts? The truck was now less than one hundred yards away, blasting its air horn. What am I supposed to do? To my right, the road had no shoulder. I suspected that on the other side of the flimsy railing was a cliff that dropped off sharply into a river gorge. Adrenalin rushed through my veins. I had nowhere to turn.

  Then it came to me in a flash. Oh, my God! I’m the one who’s crazy. I’m driving on the wrong side of the road! As the front grill of that giant truck loomed above me, I swerved over to the left lane. My car shook as the truck shot past me just a few feet away, its air horn still blaring. My heart was pounding violently, so I pulled over to the side of the road and put my head back against the headrest. It was time to find a place for the night.

  The white-haired innkeeper was a friendly woman who brought dinner to my room on a tray and then knelt on the floor by the door to talk while I ate hungrily.

  “Have you come to teach English at the high school?” the innkeeper asked.

  “No. I’m here to look for my great-grandmother’s hometown. She married my German great-grandfather in Kobe, but I think she may have come from Egomori. Do you know that town? I can’t seem to find it on my map.” I took my map out of my bag and gave it to her.

  The innkeeper put on her reading glasses and pored over my map. “I know of the place. It’s not far. I have a former classmate who grew up there.” She got me a map and circled the town with my pen. Egomori was written with rarely used kanji characters for “house” and “seclusion.”

  “If your great-grandmother was from Egomori, she must have had a tough life,” said the innkeeper. “My classmate said they had to walk twenty minutes down the hill from the village to fetch water. To get to school by eight thirty every morning, she had to leave her village at five, while it was still dark. She would carry a paper lantern to guide her on the steep mountain paths. When day broke, she would blow out the candle and leave the lantern by the side of the path to pick up on the way home.

  “Life was so hard in those villages. Trainloads of girls, most of them barely thirteen, went to work in the textile mills in the big cities. Maybe that’s how your great-grandmother ended up in Kobe.”

  The next morning, I headed into the mountains, following a small river before turning left into a narrow tunnel. When I came out the other side, there were tall maples whose leaves had turned a bright scarlet and white-barked birch trees with leaves so yellow they looked like patches of sunshine.

  After winding through rolling hills and valleys, I reached a broad plateau where there were hundreds of rows of little teepees made of pine logs drilled with holes from which sprouted shiitake mushrooms. About ten miles later, there was a small temple on my right and a mound of gravestones on my left, placed on either side of the road as if to protect the small cluster of homes just beyond.

  “I think my great-grandmother may have come from this village,” I said to an old woman who was hanging clothes on bamboo poles in her small yard next door. “Do you know of any families named Koshiro?”

  “Well, there used to be a Kono in town until not long ago, but they left,” said the old lady. “Only ten households live in the village now. There used to be thirty, but with the cheap mushrooms coming in from China, it’s hard to make a living.”

  The woman turned her back to me and continued to hang her clothes. I grabbed a box of bean cakes from the backseat of my car. Thanking her profusely, I pushed them into her hands. Then I walked about the small village taking pictures. A dog slept in a sunny spot in the middle of the dirt road. The houses were unremarkable, but most had well-tended vegetable gardens. Just outside the village was a bamboo forest that seemed to be pressing in, waiting for the opportunity to retake this almost deserted village.

  I wandered into an old mill filled with wooden gears and pulleys the size of bicycle wheels that seemed to date from the age of the steam engine. Inside, I spotted a small grinding stone about the diameter of a steering wheel. “Do you think anybody would mind if I took this grinding stone?” I called out to the old lady who was still hanging her clothes next door.

  She came beside me to take a look. She was ghostly thin and not much more than four feet tall. “Go ahead. We used to use those stones to grind rice and barley to make soba [noodles]. The people who owned that mill just left all that trash there and took off years ago. But be careful, t
he building could collapse.” I lifted the stone, feeling a little guilty as I put it in my car. Nobody would miss it, I assured myself. And it could have been here when Fuku lived in the village.

  “Is it true that Egomori was founded by fugitive samurai?” I asked.

  “Sure it is,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “We were Heike.”

  “Heike?”

  I thought back to my Japanese history. The Heike ruled Japan briefly in the twelfth century. As recounted in “The Tale of Heike,” a famous epic poem composed in the thirteenth century, a Heike warrior named Kiyomori, the bastard son of a former emperor, became Japan’s most powerful minister. He sought to cement his rule by marrying his daughter to the emperor and putting his grandson on the throne. This was hundreds of years before the Tokugawa Shogunate was established.

  So absolute was Heike’s power in those days that it was said: “If you are not [Heike], you are not a human being.” Brothers from the rival Genji family, which had been crushed by Kiyomori, gathered an army and rose up against the Heike, launching one of the bloodiest civil wars in Japanese history. After five years, the Heike forces were routed at the decisive battle of Dan-no-ura. Hundreds of warriors took their own lives. A few surviving members of the Heike clan, legend has it, clambered to shore, shed their samurai garb and ran for the hills. The Genji soldiers fanned out across the countryside, determined to hunt down and kill every last Heike. Even women and young children were slaughtered.

  “There’s a cave back there in the woods where I used to play as a child. We called it the Heike cave,” the old lady said. “My father told me that his ancestors hid in that cave and watched as the Genji soldiers came through these hills to hunt them down. We have a memorial for the thousand Heike soldiers killed in the great sea battle. It’s that mound on the side of the road by the temple.”

  “If you are interested in this, I have something to show you,” the lady said and disappeared into her house. As I waited, I thought about the famous Heike-Genji battle. Recently, I had read up on the history in connection with an inro, a palm-sized, lacquer case that my father had left me when he died. The design, made in bold relief with numerous layers of powdered gold, was of a warrior on a horse charging down a steep hill. It was a beautiful piece signed by a famous nineteenth-century artist. But with all its gold, it was gaudy, not the kind of design I would have chosen for myself. I had wondered at the time why Dad had chosen that particular piece for me.