by Leslie Helm
The inro depicted the famous Ichinotani battle scene in which the legendary warrior, Yoshitsune, the most famous and revered of the Genji brothers, led a surprise attack on the Heike. Yoshitsune was later given credit for defeating the Heike forces in the final sea battle. How odd that the memento from Dad depicted a battle in which the hero was vanquishing Heike, the samurai family from which Fuku, Dad’s grandmother, may have descended.
When the old lady came back, she had a crumpled, stained paper that had printed on it the words of a song, written during World War II by a school principal who had helped the village through a period when many villagers nearly starved to death. It was clear the principal had written the song—in the style of a traditional Japanese dance—to help the villagers find pride in their Heike heritage.
“Would you sing me the song?” I asked.
She smiled and sang in a voice that was so weak, it sounded like a faint whistle. When the morning fog clears, the sun shines through this plain of dreams. There is the Heike cave and the memorial for the thousand fallen in the Heike-Genji battle.
The old lady’s eyes started tearing. Suddenly, she stopped herself. “I don’t need this anymore,” she said, folding the piece of paper on which the song was written and putting it in my hand. “You take it.”
I was never able to determine if Great-Grandmother Fuku really did come from Egomori. There were other small villages in the area that claimed to have been established by Heike survivors and were still known as villages of disgraced samurai. I’ve since learned that there is little historical evidence to support the notion that any of these villages were really founded by Heike soldiers, but it didn’t matter to me. There was something about the image of the Heike soldiers running from battle and seeking shelter in these mountains that touched me. Like my family, they were not heroes. They were survivors. These villagers, whose clan might have once ruled Japan, chose to live in disgrace rather than to die with honor. My family, too, did not always choose the honorable path. We took different nationalities to protect our assets through two world wars. But if we had been outsiders in Yokohama for over a century, what was that compared to the inhabitants of this village who had been treated as descendants of disgraced samurai for 815 years? Even then, these villages had transformed that shame to pride.
BACK IN TOKYO, ERIC OFTEN played with his friends. Mariko enjoyed spending time with Yumi, whose parents ran a Japanese restaurant. They would run around the large restaurant, sometimes watching the elaborate meal preparations. Within a couple of months, Mariko and Eric were both once again chattering away in fluent Japanese.
Perhaps it was the college town we lived in, or the trip to Egomori, or perhaps it was the fact that I was looking at Japan as a researcher rather than a cynical journalist, but I, too, found myself enjoying Japan more than I had since childhood. I wasn’t looking for the dark side of Japan, but rather trying to re-establish a connection. When friends invited us to traditional dances or music performances, I didn’t complain of boredom, as I once did, but sought instead to savor Japan’s unique charms the way Great-Grandfathers Julius and Edmund, and Opa might have when they first experienced them.
Those final winter days of 1999, before we left Japan, were glorious. I had almost forgotten how bright and clear the sky could be in December. Marie and I took long bike rides with Mariko and Eric along the nearby Tama River. On New Year’s Eve, the night before the last year of the second millennium, while some of my colleagues at the think tank had retreated to their country homes in fear of the millennium bug’s impact on computers, we went to Jindaiji, an old temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. We painted little clay figurines of dragons to celebrate the year 2000, the year of the dragon. We stood in line before the temple bell for our turn to ring in the New Year. Mariko and Marie went first. Then Eric and I stood right below that thirteen-hundred-year-old bell, the size of a Volkswagen Bug. We grabbed the hemp rope that was attached to a large log, pulled that bell ringer as far as we could and then swung it forward so it hit the bell hard.
At first, the sound was deep and faint, as if it had come from far away. I imagined the sound beginning in the distant past and then gaining power as it reached the present, ringing so powerfully that my whole body vibrated. And as it did so, I somehow knew that the chasm I had once felt was no longer there. In its place was something new, something real that I could not quite define but had something to do with who I was and how I was connected to my past and to my children and to my future. Then the sound faded, as though it were sinking again into the past. I put my arm around Eric’s shoulder and we followed Marie and Mariko into the New Year’s crowd.
In the lazy days of the New Year, when most businesses in Japan shut down, we made a final round of visits to our friends. I felt a noticeable change in their attitude—or perhaps I was just more receptive. One Japanese couple gave our kids the traditional pocket money given to children by relatives at New Year’s. They asked the kids to call them aunt and uncle. “I can see your hearts have connected to your children,” said the mother at the end of our stay.
When we told the school we were leaving, Mariko’s and Eric’s classes gave them a warm send-off. They each came home with scrapbooks filled with pictures and farewell messages. Yumi wrote Mariko that she was her best friend and that she would never forget her. Eric’s classmates gave him a scrapbook filled with drawings by each child. Eric and Mariko had come to love Japan and their new friends, but they were happy to return to Seattle. I was also happy to be going home, but for the first time I also felt sad to leave Japan. Back in Seattle, I placed the grinding stone by our back door under a Japanese camellia bush.
WE HAD ONLY BEEN IN Japan for four months, but it had a big impact on our family. Eric and Mariko both came home speaking Japanese fluently. They missed their friends in Japan. Soon immersed in their American schools and sports, they gradually drifted again from Japan, but Eric had developed a strong sense of his Japanese heritage. He was twelve when he came home one day mystified that some of his friends didn’t believe that I was Japanese. It had never occurred to him that I didn’t look like him. For Mariko, by contrast, being adopted remained a sore point all through high school.
“How did it go?” I asked Mariko hesitantly when she returned from school one day.
“What do you think? I can’t believe you made me do this! I felt like I was walking around all day with a sign on my head that says ‘I’m adopted.’”
It had been grandparents’ day at Mariko’s school, when students were asked to take their grandparents on a tour of their high school. When my mother had received the invitation from The Northwest School and expressed an interest in going, I had told her Mariko would be happy to take her around. I had been wrong, but I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother that her granddaughter didn’t want to be seen with her and I had insisted Mariko agree to guide her Babachan, as our children called their grandmother, around the school.
OPPOSITE: Record of Hiro’s large gift to Komiya relative at funeral.
“I’m sorry sweetie, but I didn’t want to hurt Babachan’s feelings.” I told her.
“What about my feelings?” she wailed.
“Everybody has some cross to bear.”
Mariko refused to talk to me for a week. I should have known better than to force the issue. Although Mariko’s closest friends knew her parents were white, she hated having to explain to everyone else that she was adopted.
I continued to plod along with my family research. I learned much about myself and the Helms. Yet deep down I still longed for some public recognition of my family’s long presence in Japan. So when I received a copy of a book about Yokohama landmarks in the spring of 2001 and saw featured on its jacket cover a picture of Helm House, the five-story building Grandfather Julie had built in 1938, I was thrilled.
The slim volume contained a chapter on Helm House written by Mukuyoshi Saburo, a young reporter for The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest daily newspaper. Mukuyoshi
quoted experts who admired the building as an early example in Japan of “modern” architecture and called it a harbinger of the “Western lifestyle.” So when I traveled to Japan with my family later that summer, I visited Mukuyoshi at his Yokohama office. Our meeting that morning would launch me on one of the most unexpected and rewarding parts of my family journey.
“Have you seen the Helm House site yet?” Mukuyoshi asked after we had finished our tea. “Let me take you in my car.”
I was not prepared for what I saw when I got out of the car. The massive concrete building that my grandfather built in 1938—and which had anchored my family to Yokohama for three generations—was gone. In its place was a large dome of stretched white plastic, the kind of temporary structure so common at trade fairs.
I felt sick. Growing up in Yokohama, I had never thought much of the building. But after years of research I had become attached to it. I thought of the German navy officers who stayed there during World War II and the US Eighth Army brass that replaced them afterward, during the Occupation. Then I thought of the time capsule Grandfather Julie buried under the building. Now we would never know what it contained.
“A lot of people wanted to preserve the building,” said Mukuyoshi. “They gave several tours of the building, and hundreds of people came to see it.”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the plastic dome.
“It’s a Kabuki theatre. An official of the prefecture was a big fan of Bando Tamasaburo [a Kabuki actor famous as a female impersonator] and built this new stage so he would perform in Yokohama.” After his first performance, Tamasaburo declared that the street noise made it a terrible location.
“Now the theater is unused,” said Mukuyoshi. “But there’s something else I want to show you.” He led me to the far corner of the block where there was a small stucco building the size of a neighborhood post office.
“When they started to knock down this little storage building, they were surprised to hit brick,” said Mukuyoshi. “People thought all of the city’s brick buildings had collapsed during the 1923 earthquake. An architectural historian determined that this is probably the oldest building in Yokohama.”
The building’s address, #48, appeared above the door in stone. I knew my family had owned this property for half a century. Perhaps Great-Grandfather Julius himself had built it? I wondered. Mukuyoshi revealed, however, that a local architect had identified the structure as the surviving wing of what had once been the headquarters of Mollison, a British trading company.
Back at the Yomiuri office, Mukuyoshi could tell I felt dejected. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I want to track down my Japanese Great-Grandmother Hiro who was married to my Great-Grandfather Julius,” I said.
“Oh? What do you know about her?”
Some years before, I had found a genealogical chart that my Great-Uncle Willie had filled out, perhaps as part of an effort to join a Nazi-affiliated association. It included the names of Hiro’s parents, her grandparents, her siblings and even their spouses. I had also heard that Hiro’s father had been mayor of Hiratsuka, a city of a quarter million west of Yokohama. I went to the Hiratsuka City office to look at birth records, but was told my search would be impossible since birth records were filed not by name but by address. I was directed to a scholar who worked in the library next door.
The scholar offered little encouragement. “Your great-great-grandfather couldn’t have been the mayor of Hiratsuka,” he said. “This city didn’t even exist until the early 1900s. This area was just a handful of small villages.”
The scholar led me to the reference section and pulled out a book. “Read this. It contains the names of villagers who served in official posts over the past century.”
I sat at a nearby desk and flipped through the book. I was crestfallen. The book had no index. It was packed with thousands of names, most of which I could not read. I knew that Hiro’s last name, Komiya, was written with the kanji for “small” and “shrine.” But I had no idea how her father’s name, Shichizaemon, would be written. My eyes glazed over as I scanned page after page packed with kanji characters I could not recognize.
I was ready to give up when my thumb stopped on a page with several Komiyas. I could not read the first names of the first two Komiyas, but the kanji in the third name were quite simple. The first character was , which means “seven” and is read as shichi. The second character was . It meant “left” and is read as “sa” or “za.” The third character was . It meant “protect” and read as “e.” The final character was . It meant “gate” and was pronounced “mon.” Shichi sa e mon. Shichizaemon. This could be my Japanese great-great-grandfather!
I had finally tracked him down, or so I thought. The name, I learned later, means “guard at the seventh gate,” suggesting it was the name of a low-ranking samurai. Shichizaemon was identified in the book as a “neighborhood leader” in the village of Yokouchi.
I returned to the scholar’s office filled with excitement, but the scholar shook his head. Pulling out a local phone book, he showed me there were hundreds of Komiyas living in Yokouchi, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Hiratsuka. “You’ll need to check the Buddhist temples,” he advised. “There are only two in the Yokouchi area. They might have a record.”
In Japan, people tend to have their weddings at Shinto shrines and their funerals at Buddhist temples. Shrines avoid funerals because the native religion associates death with pollution. Buddhism, on the other hand, with its belief in rebirth, puts a great emphasis on rituals related to death.
At the first temple I visited, a priest kindly waded through a large stack of scrolled rice-paper records with names listed in bold black brush strokes. He found many Komiyas recorded, but none with the first name Shichizaemon. At the other temple, which had recently been rebuilt, the priest’s wife looked at me scornfully. “We threw away all those old records,” she said. “We have nothing.”
I told Mukuyoshi, on finishing the story, that my next step was to start telephoning all the Komiyas who lived in Yokouchi. “Maybe someone will know something about Hiro’s marriage to a foreigner.”
Mukuyoshi was skeptical. I wanted to explain to him how Hiro was this remarkable woman who had stopped a sword with her bare hand, how she had single-handedly led her young children across the Pacific Ocean and the continental United States to join her husband in Virginia in 1886, at a time when few Japanese had set foot on American soil. But I said nothing.
“Do you mind if I write a story about your family search?” Mukuyoshi asked, as if he had been reading my mind. The article, which was prominently displayed in the Yomiuri the next morning, included a picture of Hiro and a second picture of me under the large headline: “Great-Grandmother Komiya Hiro. Do you know her?”
The next day, Mukuyoshi called me at my hotel room with excitement. He had received a phone call from a woman who thought she might be related.
I met Yoko and her husband Katsuaki in the lobby of a hotel near Yokohama Station two days later. In her mid-30s, Yoko had the poise, the perfectly coiffed hair and the formal speech of an upper-class lady. Katsuaki was dressed more informally and had kind eyes that were big, dark and shiny like the eyes of a deer. He seemed uncomfortable when I handed him a bottle of Chivas as a gift.
We sat on a stone bench in the hotel lobby, while I showed them the family scrapbook I had put together. Katsuaki’s face fell when he saw my photocopy of Hiro’s family crest—two eagle feathers crossed.
“Are you sure that is accurate? This is not our family crest,” Katsuaki said. “Our family crest shows three wisteria blossoms.” We were all disappointed, but Katsuaki had already arranged to have me meet his parents.
As we moved slowly through heavy traffic headed for Hiratsuka, about nineteen miles west of Yokohama, Katsuaki filled me in on his family history. “The Komiyas were one of several families that descended from a powerful lord who ruled the Yokohama and Tokyo area in about 500 AD. There was
a Komiya who was a senior retainer in 1192 of the Shogun Minamoto Yoritomo [the Genji leader who triumphed over the Heike]. In the 1400s, there had even been a Komiya castle, although it burned down when the Komiyas were defeated in battle.”
Then Katsuaki bowed down as if in apology. “You know, we are not samurai. In the old days, many families, including the Komiyas, were both farmers and samurai. They worked their fields from spring to fall, then went out to fight as samurai in the winter. When Toyotomi Hideyoshi established the caste system in the late 1500s, everybody had to make a decision. Some of the Komiyas became full-time samurai, but our family decided they could have better lives as farmers.”
When I told the Komiyas about the dead-end I had reached trying to track down my Great-Great-Grandfather Shichizaemon at the temples, Katsuaki said he was not surprised.
“The local temples would not have had records of Shichizaemon,” Katsuaki explained. “The practice of having funerals at Buddhist temples is a relatively recent phenomenon of the past few hundred years. The ancient Japanese believed that ancestors became gods who protected their family. Older families like Shichizaemon’s therefore kept their family cemeteries close to their homes.”
I was mystified by the depth and breadth of Katsuaki’s knowledge. “I’ve never met anyone able to explain Japan’s history and customs as well as you do,” I told him.