by Leslie Helm
“That’s my job,” said Katsuaki. “I studied history in college. Now I’m a Shinto priest at the Hachimangu Shrine.”
My jaw dropped. A Shinto priest? The only Shinto priests I had ever seen wore long white robes and tall black hats, and chanted with voices and faces devoid of emotion. It seemed impossible to me that Katsuaki, so young and engaged, could be such a priest. And not just any priest, but a priest at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, one of Japan’s largest and most famous shrines. It was located in the old capital of Kamakura, about eleven miles outside Yokohama.
Later, I learned that Yoko’s father was also a priest. Her family owned three shrines that had been passed down through the family for generations. Since Yoko had no brother, it was always understood that Yoko would marry a priest. He would be adopted into the family and take her family name as well as her father’s priestly duties at the family shrines.
Japanese are typically tight-lipped about their private lives. Yet Yoko and Katsuaki, from the beginning, were unusually open. At one point, I asked Katsuaki how long it would have taken my Great-Grandmother Hiro to walk from Hiratsuka to Yokohama.
“About seven and a half hours,” he said. “I know, because once I walked the whole way.”
“You walked from Yokohama to Hiratsuka?” I said in disbelief.
Katsuaki looked back at Yoko, and I saw her nod.
“Yoko and I got into a fight, so I left the house, but since I didn’t have the keys to the car I had to walk all the way to my father’s house.”
Yoko chuckled softly. “I told him that next time he stomps out, he should remember the keys.”
At Katsuaki’s parents’ house, a typical two-story Japanese residence with brown stucco walls and a tiled roof, Katsuaki’s mother served me cold barley tea. The house was warm and humid, and the cold tea was refreshing. Katsuaki disappeared and returned holding the elbow of his frail grandmother.
I greeted the grandmother and then showed her my photo of Hiro and Julius with their seven children.
“My, what a fine family Hiro had,” the grandmother said, stopping to clear her throat. “My husband gave me a foreign leather purse that he said came from Hiro. I used to keep all my valuables in it. I always hid it in the futon closet. I lost it when my house burned down.”
My anticipation rose but then fell when the grandmother said she had never heard anything about Hiro marrying a foreigner.
Soon Katsuaki’s father, a carpenter who had been working on a house nearby, arrived home on his bicycle. We needed him, Katsuaki explained, to give us a proper introduction to the patriarch of the honke, the main branch of the family. In traditional Japanese families, the eldest son, as head of the main branch of the family, inherits the family’s land and takes care of the ancestral graves.
Just as we were about to enter the honke patriarch’s house, Yoko handed me the bottle of Chivas I had given to them earlier. “Why don’t you give this to the patriarch?” she suggested. I felt awkward taking back the gift, but I was depending on her and Katsuaki to help me navigate the complexities of village life.
The patriarch was an old man with a grizzled beard. When I handed him the Chivas, he gave me a wide smile that showed missing teeth. He welcomed me into his house, which had walls of exposed mud and straw. Massive, crooked beams supported the roof. The house looked as if it could have been three hundred years old, but the old man told me it had been built right after the Great Earthquake of 1923.
As soon as I was seated, the old man went to the small family shrine at the back of the room, and came back with a handful of wooden ancestral tablets and shuffled through them. The tablets were long and narrow, and had kanji painted on them in black brush strokes.
These tablets were representations of the family ancestors, the ancestral gods that would guide and protect the family. The only time I had ever seen such tablets was when I was writing about a Japanese television show that depicted “true stories” of the supernatural. In the show, just as something tragic was about to happen—an old woman possessed by the devil and trying to kill a child, for example—one of these ancestral tablets would fly through the air like some supernatural being and land on the person with the distinct clacking sound of wood on wood just in time to dispel the evil.
The patriarch could not find a tablet with the name of my Great-Great-Grandfather Shichizaemon. I was sure he had already looked before and was only shuffling through the tablets again for my benefit. Then he brought out a neatly folded piece of rice paper. “This is what made us think we might be related to you,” he said.
The paper was an “IOU” for a large amount of money that the patriarch’s grandfather had borrowed from a man named Komiya Shichizaemon and received back after repaying the loan. “The only reason I can imagine that Shichizaemon would have loaned us so much money is that we were somehow related.”
“This IOU shows which pieces of land Shichizaemon held as collateral against the loan,” explained Katsuaki’s father. “Apparently Shichizaemon also had substantial gambling debts of his own.”
If this was Hiro’s father, perhaps the debts explained why Shichizaemon had been willing to allow his daughter, Hiro, to work in Yokohama as a maid and had permitted her to marry a foreigner.
The patriarch had another document showing Hiro had contributed an enormous sum at his grandfather’s funeral, suggesting she must have been a close relative.
“Come,” said the patriarch, “let me show you the grave.”
The old man led us down a narrow dirt path past a large farmhouse. Behind the house was a cemetery about the size of a large backyard. It was a stone’s throw from the elevated tracks of the bullet train, and periodically we could see the bull-nosed train zip past. Along one side of the cemetery, separating it from the large farmhouse, was a three-foot-high wall made of piled-up gravestones.
“After a few generations, individual graves are not important to the family anymore because those ancestors become gods,” Katsuaki said with a laugh. “Maybe your great-great-grandfather’s grave is somewhere in that wall.”
My eyes opened wide. I was a little shocked at the thought.
The old man led us to a large, relatively new looking gravestone of polished black granite. The first thing I noticed was the prominent design carved into the headstone: two eagle feathers crossed. Hiro’s family crest! This could be it, I thought. I couldn’t stop beaming. Katsuaki had noticed the crest too and smiled at me.
Behind the big headstone was a smaller, much older looking stone the size of a shoebox. “Look here,” said the patriarch. He rubbed some of the moss off the stone and began to read. “This stone was laid by Shichizaemon.”
We looked more closely at the newer black headstone. Above the two crossed eagle feathers was a series of names showing all the family members whose ashes had been buried there. The oldest family member was Komiya Tojiro. Tojiro, I thought to myself. The name sounded familiar. I pulled out my genealogy of Hiro’s family. I showed it to Katsuaki. A man named Tojiro had married Hiro’s older sister, been adopted into the family, and taken the Komiya name because Hiro had no brothers. He would represent the main branch of the family, the one responsible for maintaining the grave and carrying on the family name.
“Where do Tojiro’s descendants live?” I asked Katsuaki.
“They live right there,” said Katsuaki, pointing to the big farmhouse beside the cemetery. “They are from one of the oldest families in Yokouchi. There was a Hiro in that family, but they insist that she had no children.”
I could feel the tension in the air. Clearly, the two families did not get along. And yet it was probably Tojiro’s family to which I was most closely related. As we left the cemetery and walked past the old house, I asked if I could take a few pictures. Katsuaki looked alarmed.
“Go ahead,” said the patriarch.
As I was taking pictures, the patriarch went up to the front door of the farmhouse and knocked. A man with jet-black hair that had been greased back and who lo
oked to be in his early forties came to the door. I later calculated he must have been Tojiro’s great-grandson. He had evidently just awoken from an afternoon nap and looked annoyed as he rubbed his eyes. I moved closer to hear what they were saying.
“He came all the way from America,” the patriarch said, pointing toward me. “He has pictures and everything. You should see them.”
The patriarch pulled from his pocket a clipping of Mukuyoshi’s newspaper article. “They wrote all about him in the Yomiuri Shimbun,” he said, waving the article in the air. “How is it going to look if you refuse to see him now?”
The man took the article from the old man and barely glanced at it. “I know nothing about this article,” he said coldly, returning it to the patriarch. Then he looked my way, narrowing his eyes and staring at me for a few seconds before giving me a wary nod. “Well, okay. Come in.”
Like the patriarch’s house, the walls of this Komiya’s house were of mud and straw with large, rough-hewn timbers supporting the high roof. We sat on the tatami mats inside in an order which, I quickly realized, represented a distinct hierarchy. As the invited guest, I was placed to the left of my host in front of the alcove where a brush painting hung. On the right of our young host was the patriarch. Although older, he appeared to be of a somewhat lower status than the Komiya whose home we were in. On my left was Katsuaki’s father. Still standing out in the pounded-dirt entryway were the young priest Katsuaki and his wife. They were important people in their respective communities, but in this village, it seemed, they didn’t even have enough standing to be invited into the house.
“So what do you want from me?” the other Komiya asked sharply.
“I’m trying to find out about Hiro. She married my great-grandfather, Julius.”
“No. Hiro never had any children,” he replied firmly, as if he had already checked out the story. He nodded to an old lady who had been waiting in the dark recesses at the back of the room and now came forward to serve us green tea.
“Show him the pictures,” the patriarch said.
I pulled out my album and showed him my pictures of Hiro and Julius with their seven children.
“You’re talking about things that happened one hundred years ago,” said the man. “How should I know if these pictures are real?”
I was taken aback by the vehemence with which he rejected my story. I took out my genealogy of Hiro’s family and proceeded to name Hiro’s sisters and the men that they had married, including Tojiro, my host’s great-grandfather. The mention of Tojiro seemed to impress the man.
“What do you plan to do with this information?” he asked.
“I am writing a family history.”
The young man seemed to relax. Perhaps he thought I wanted a share of his inheritance. He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. Hiding it behind the palm of his hand, he smirked.
“Well, everything you say is completely wrong. It wasn’t Hiro that married a foreigner, it was her sister Fusa,” the man said triumphantly.
I didn’t know what the man was talking about, but I was excited. He had acknowledged that there was a foreign connection. I started to press him for more information, but Yoko gave me a nod from the doorway.
“We should leave now,” she said quietly.
Afterward, I told Katsuaki and Yoko I wanted to check our host’s family birth registry at city hall. Now that I had an address, I figured, the research should be easy. Yoko discouraged me, worried that we could get in trouble prying into the affairs of others. When I said I would go on my own, they reluctantly agreed to accompany me.
My request at city hall for the records set off a lot of head scratching. To check the records, I had to be a direct descendant, and the official didn’t believe a white man like me could possibly have Japanese ancestors. The supervisor, an efficient-looking woman, however, came by and asked me some questions. Katsuaki and Yoko explained the situation. The officials huddled. Finally, the woman agreed to investigate.
“I’m sorry, I can’t find anything,” the official said when he returned to the counter half an hour later. Then he looked at the chart again. “Wait a minute.” He went back to his boss for another consultation. Another hour passed. My train would be leaving soon, and I was now feeling bad about having dragged Yoko and Katsuaki into this fruitless search.
“Let’s forget about this,” I said. “I’ve already caused you so much trouble.”
“No, we should wait,” said Yoko. “Let’s pray.”
She put her hands together, closed her eyes and bowed her head. I closed my eyes and put my hands together.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Katsuaki. He looked calm. I thought of Hiro and then I suddenly felt confused. To whom am I praying? The Shinto gods? Katsuaki had said Shinto was more an embodiment of Japanese history and culture than a religion. But how much a part of Japanese history and culture was I?
“If only they would find something,” Yoko said, as she put down her hands. There was a new intimacy in her voice that touched me.
When the official came back with a sheaf of papers, he was shaking his head. “This is the koseki [birth record] starting with Shichizaemon, but I don’t see Hiro’s name and I don’t see Julius’s name. Do you want an official copy anyway? That would be 2,500 yen each.”
Katsuaki looked at me. “Might as well,” I said.
“We’ll get a copy, too,” said Yoko. “I’ve always been curious about this family.”
We must have been at the city office for nearly three hours when we finally got the records, returned to the car and headed for the train station. My train was scheduled to leave in ten minutes, so we had to rush. As we drove, Yoko sat in the back quietly going through the papers.
“I found it!” Yoko suddenly shrieked. “It says here Karu Helm.”
I could hear the excitement in her voice and it thrilled me that this woman who I had only met that morning was so caught up in my search. I looked at the document she held. Glued to one page was a tiny strip of paper no more than a quarter-inch wide and an inch long with the name Karu Helm written in Japanese. It had been attached to the registry on top of the name of Fusa, Hiro’s sister, and marked with a red seal.
At first I was confused. Who was Karu Helm? Then it hit me. Karu, of course, was the Japanese way of pronouncing Karl. That would be Julius and Hiro’s oldest son, the one who had taken Japanese citizenship for business reasons and changed his name to Charles to distance himself from his former German nationality. Under Japanese law, a person must be placed in a Japanese family’s birth registry before he or she can be recognized as a citizen. Since Hiro was dead by the time Karl discovered that he needed to become a Japanese citizen to register Helm Brothers’ many ships, Karl must have arranged to have his name included in the family registry of his mother Hiro’s divorced older sister Fusa.
In time I would learn that Hiro’s other older sister, the one who married Tojiro, died at a young age. Tojiro, who had by then been adopted into the Komiya family, remarried. Since neither he nor his wife had a biological connection to the Komiyas, he saw no reason to maintain relationships with his former wife’s family and no longer welcomed Hiro and her sisters at the house. Hiro stayed instead with her aunts and uncles, relatives of Katsuaki’s.
My journey to Egomori, the mountain village, in search of my other Japanese Great-Grandmother Fuku had made me feel connected to Japan. But this was a link that traced me back to my precise Japanese roots. Those birth records made it clear that my Great-Grandmother Hiro had been born and raised right there in the house next to the cemetery. While in the past, I would have avoided being entrapped in the web of mutual obligations that require such a commitment, the connection to Yoko and Katsuaki was one I longed to cultivate for me and for my children.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2004, I decided to take a trip to meet many of the people I had come across in the course of my family search. Then forty-eight, I was about the age Great-Grandfather Julius was in 1885, when he s
old his first company in Yokohama and bought his dream plantation in Virginia. I was about the age my father was in 1973 when he sold Helm Brothers and shed us, his family, as if we were burdensome winter clothes, before embarking on a world tour with his new wife. Great-Grandfather Julius and Dad had jettisoned their pasts in their search for a new life—and had been disappointed. I was choosing a different path, one that was taking me back into the past.
That summer, the plan was for me to travel to Japan for a couple of weeks. Marie and the kids would join me later. First, I visited my cousin Tsunemochi Atsushi in Kobe. Atsushi had grown more philosophical over the years. While there is an invisible thread that binds us all, he said, we don’t see it until we are ready. He reminded me of the stormy day in 1983 when he had gone to visit my father in Yokohama. Dad had politely listened to the story, but was uninterested in learning more. Atsushi and I, by contrast, had followed every lead in search of our roots.
On one of his recent overseas trips, Atsushi had come across the remains of St. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit who was one of the first Westerners to come to Japan when he arrived in 1549. For Atsushi, a religious man, Xavier’s role in bringing the Christian religion to Japan had a powerful meaning. Xavier, I later discovered, was Basque as is my wife Marie. Eric used to find it strange that he, with his Japanese blood, should be celebrating Basque traditions just because Marie’s family was Basque. We told him that he was inheriting the culture of both his parents, as every child does. Yet, here was this odd link between the Basques and the Japanese.
I bid the Tsunemochis goodbye and visited the wooded grounds of the elegant Wakayama castle, not far by train, where Julius had trained his peasant soldiers in 1871. The original castle, built in the sixteenth century, had been destroyed by American firebombs during World War II and been rebuilt in the 1960s.
I visited the Wakayama city museum nearby and met the new curator. He took me to the sites where Julius had taught his soldiers to march. We walked under massive old camphor trees that must have been there when Julius lived in Wakayama in 1871 and along the moat where he had taught his men to build pontoon bridges. I thought about how shocked the soldiers had been to discover that the bridge they had built in a few short hours did not collapse when they marched across it. The pontoon bridge, it seems to me now, is symbolic of what the West had brought to Japan: a focus on speed, function and efficiency, often at the cost of aesthetics and tradition.