Yokohama Yankee

by Leslie Helm

  “Shut it now!” the guide said suddenly. I fumbled, then focused and finally screwed it tight. Without warning, the front of the boat caught a current and the raft was pulled down a chute. I held on to the boat as air suddenly moved to my side of the boat, barely keeping us afloat as we sped down the river.

  “Wow, how did that work?” asked Eric.

  “Someone told me about that maneuver a long time ago. I always wondered if it would work,” said the guide.

  I was shaken, but I felt a peace growing inside me. Growing up, my father had always warned me against expecting too much. He once warned me that I would fail in my career if I ever returned to the United States because I wouldn’t have the advantage of speaking Japanese. Now I know that Dad just wanted to protect me from the inevitable disappointments, but in doing so he had cut away at my confidence. When I looked at Eric, I could see that he had no such issues. He had a confidence that I never had as a young man. I had helped him become who he was and those choices, in turn, had shaped me. I had done something right. That thought filled me with pride. As I thought of that, I realized that Dad, too, must have felt pride in his children during the final years of his life. He had done something right.

  The river calmed as the land flattened out. It was clear we would make it. As we drifted across the California border, we spotted a six-point elk sipping water. River otters raised their heads. We didn’t speak much on the bus ride home, but I could feel something between us that hadn’t been there before. At age fifty-two, I had experienced for the first time in my life, a total loss of control. And Eric had been there for me.

  “I’m really proud of you,” I said to Eric as we climbed out of the van and headed for our hotel. “But let’s not tell Mom too many of the details. She’ll only worry.”

  Eric nodded gravely. We had a pact.

  In the months that followed, Eric, in his growing independence, was often impatient with me. I, in my frustration, sometimes lost my temper. Occasionally, there were sharp words. But somehow, since that day, I have known that life would never pull us apart as it had my Dad and me. Eric and I were not connected genetically, but on that summer day, those rapids, wild and uncontrollable, had thrown us together to reveal a bond stronger than any biological code. I knew then that my son and I would always know how much we cared for each other. If, from time to time, we started to slip apart, the memory of white water on that summer day would be there to pull us back together.

  AT HOME IN SEATTLE, IT sometimes feels that I have the best of both worlds. I live on a bluff with a view of the Puget Sound that a visiting relative said reminded him of the view from Helm Hill in Honmoku before the sea was filled in. As I get older, I find the Japanese in me beginning to reassert itself. More often, now, I prefer the subtle bitterness of green tea to the instant buzz of strong coffee. I find relaxation pruning my pines, red maples and wisteria to give them the distinctive shapes I remember from Japan. I take the salmon, halibut and clams natural to the Northwest and cook them in the Japanese way with sweet sake, soy sauce, ginger, rice vinegar and green onions. And in the four decades since I first left Japan, Japanese culture has so permeated America that there is little from Japan that I cannot find here.

  All around my home are the touchstones of my journey into the past: a red lantern used on one of my great-grandfather’s barges; the copper handle of a paper door I found on the island paradise my father visited during the Occupation; and the grinding stone in my backyard that I took from the village of the disgraced samurai. Each taps a memory that leads me back into the past. I can feel the shiver of excitement my great-grandfather felt on that bright autumn day in 1869 when he first set foot in Yokohama, a town decked out in bright paper lanterns and colored banners in preparation for the horse races. From that day, my family’s fate has been linked inextricably with Japan’s like two parallel strands in a chain of DNA.

  A few decades after Julius trained Wakayama peasants in the ways of the Prussian Army, Japan emerged as a military and economic power. Yokohama’s development as a prosperous port created the conditions for Helm Brothers’ success as a stevedoring and forwarding company. And just as the advanced powers of the West snubbed newly modern Japan, my Grandfather Julie, as a man of mixed blood, also felt the sting of prejudice. The same earthquakes and wars that wounded Japan pulled at the fabric of my family. Dad was drawn back to a defeated Japan as an Occupation soldier; I was drawn back to report on the dark side of the Japanese miracle.

  I am still trying to find out who the military men are in the photo of my great-grandfather. His true legacy, however, was his pioneering spirit, the drive that took him away from the comfort of his family and community to build a new life in a new world. Without his decision to venture out, I would lack a dimension of my being that I’ve come to value. As a father of two children who must find their own way, I am reminded by Julius that there are drawbacks to being part of a close-knit community, just as there are challenges to being an outsider. Life is a little more predictable, but it can also be narrower. As someone who comes from three generations of “in-between” people who faced continuous upheaval, I’ve learned that we build our communities wherever we are, with whomever we choose. Julius arrived alone in Japan, but he lured five of his siblings from faraway Europe to join him, then married Hiro and created his own tribe. We survive to pass on our own values and establish our own truths. If we are lucky, with each generation these truths become more universal, less insular, a foundation for greater understanding across cultures.

  In Seattle, I have found such a community among friends, relatives and colleagues at work.

  I continue to visit Japan every couple of years to spend time with my Japanese relatives. On my last visit to Japan, I took Komiya Katsuaki and his wife Yoko to see the grave of my great-grandmother, Hiro Komiya, in the Foreigners’ Cemetery overlooking Yokohama harbor. I also showed them the small gravestone of Julius and Hiro’s first daughter, Lina, the one who died at birth. When Katsuaki knelt down to look more closely at the grave, he suddenly pointed to a tiny mark on the top left of the grave.

  “That’s our family crest,” he said with excitement. “See the three wisteria blooms?”

  I had always wondered whether the baby had been buried in this dark corner of the cemetery out of shame. Now it pleased me that Hiro had honored the baby with her family crest. It remains unclear why the Komiya family’s crest was different from the crest with two eagle feathers that had been passed down through our family. Perhaps they represented two branches of the Komiya family. Perhaps Hiro had adopted the crest of the other Komiya family after her brother-in-law had remarried and rejected her. But the gravestone was another connection to the Komiyas.

  Afterward, Katsuaki told me that the word in Japan for destiny, unmei, originated from the ancient Japanese belief that people at birth were given a certain bounty from God. If you were born with three thousand days’ worth of food, that was how long you would live. That was your fate. Lina, evidently, was born with no rice to her name.

  When I expressed some skepticism about the notion that so much of life was predetermined, Katsuaki looked at me strangely. “Don’t you remember how we met?” he asked. “We don’t usually read the back sections of the Yomiuri newspaper. What was the chance that Yoko would come across that article about you?”

  What, for that matter, was the chance that Marie and I would have ended up with Mariko and Eric? Was that fate too? I wondered. And what about my cousin Atsushi? He spoke of an invisible thread that binds us all, but that you don’t see it unless you are searching for it.

  No. It was not just fate that Marie and I ended up with Eric and Mariko. It was Mariko who won me over with her song about ants and helped overcome my fear and doubts about having Japanese children. It was Marie who snatched the note from the boathouse bulletin board and immediately called the pastor in northern Japan and arranged for us to adopt Eric. And I, I chose to write this book, looking into my family’s troubled past and rea
ching out to distant relatives to better understand myself, to heal old wounds and to seek to be a better father.

  Before we left Japan, I took Marie, Mariko and Eric again to see Dad’s grave at the Foreigners’ Cemetery. While Eric scrubbed the gravestone, Mariko helped me trim the azalea bushes. Marie cleaned out the vase and put fresh flowers in it.

  When we were finished, we stood at the foot of the grave and bowed our heads.

  Look at how big Mariko and Eric have grown, I told Dad. You would be impressed by Eric. He is sharp as a tack. And Mariko? Mariko would have found a way to reach you as I never could.

  Now as I think of my two children, I whisper my thanks to the gods and to my mother and my father. I see beyond their battles to remember the evenings when, after my mother had tucked us into bed, my father would come into the room with his ukulele and sing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” or “Red River Valley.” I understand now how Mother fell in love with Dad when she heard him sing in harmony with his two brothers as they were washing the dishes. I imagine Dad looking down at me with that charming smile he once gave me in the sushi bar when he told me the story about Hiro and the samurai. And I chuckle at the thought of my father finding his place among the German and Japanese ancestors he had once spurned, but who are now the collective gods of my family.

  GOING THROUGH OLD PHOTOGRAPHS OF my family with Josh Powell, the designer of this book, I came across a picture of dad leaning against a tree looking out over a body of water that seemed oddly familiar. The caption read, “Fort Lawton,” a name that had recently been in the news because the fort was shutting down after serving the nation for more than a century. In the photograph, Dad was in full uniform. He had just completed his studies at the Army Language School in Michigan and was on his way to Japan to serve in the Occupation. The army base where he stayed as he prepared for this strange new venture in Japan, I had discovered for the first time, was in Magnolia, the neighborhood I chose to make my home. How is it that these odd coincidences continue to strike? Or perhaps, as Atsushi once told me, they are not coincidences. Perhaps as we look back at our families, we become just a little more aware of the threads that, woven together, form the narratives of our life.

  It is an odd truth that in our branch of the Helm family, the male genetic line has come to an end. Grandfather Julie was much envied when he had three sons. Those three sons, in turn, begat five sons. But none of us five have had biological male children. My three male cousins have no plans to have children. My brother and I both have sons we adopted from Japan.

  To my great-grandfather, my grandfather and even my father, not having biological children to carry on the bloodline, to pass on our particular genetic fingerprint, might have been regarded as a curse. For me, it has proved a special gift because it is for this reason my wife and I are blessed with Mariko and Eric.

  And although growing up as adopted children in a mixed-race family has sometimes been difficult for them, they have both adapted well. Mariko feels a special mission in life. “When I was young, I would think that it was my fault that people were staring at me; that somehow I had done something wrong. I did not blend in with my family, and those implacable eyes were my punishment,” Mariko, at sixteen, wrote to me. “But now I realize that it is us, our family, who have to teach people that it’s okay to look different.”

  Eric looks at his adoption in coldly logical terms. Culture, he says, is not about ethnicity, but about upbringing. Although he is Asian in terms of the way he looks, he understands that many of his cultural values are more Western. He is studying Chinese because his high school does not offer Japanese language classes. I hope that his knowledge of kanji, which are quite similar to Chinese characters, will one day ease the way for him as he rediscovers his Japanese heritage.

  As for me, my journey into that past has taught me that my family contains few heroes. Still, I have embraced my family as I have embraced Japan, a culture whose complex tapestry, I now understand, has enriched my life in more ways than I will ever fully grasp. I know that our fates will continue to be inextricably linked, mine and Japan’s, for I have taken Japan’s children for my own.

  I hope my children will adopt this story for their own, but I know now that this will only be a small part of their story. They have their own journeys to take, their own stories to write.

  IN WRITING THIS FAMILY MEMOIR, I depended heavily on countless friends, relatives, scholars and strangers. I drew liberally from unpublished reminiscences by Great-grandfather Julius Helm; my Opa, Grandfather Robert Schinzinger; Opa’s second wife, Shizuka; my mother, Barbara Helm; and my distant cousin, Tsunemochi Atsushi. I also benefited from the genealogy work by my late aunt Jane Schinzinger and my dad’s late cousin, Trudy Webster.

  I conducted more than a hundred interviews over the course of my research. Karl Helm’s late daughters Trudy, Lillian and Margaret were invaluable. Dad, his two wives Toshiko and Barbara, his two brothers, Ray and Larry, and his cousins Richard Helm and Leo Ellis and their friends, Eileen Charlseworth and Lucille and Michael Apcar, were also a great help. Uncle Ray shared his knowledge and gave me binders full of family photos and letters he had assiduously saved. Dozens of old-timers in Yokohama shared their experiences, and I thank my childhood friend, Mary Corbett, for helping to arrange many of those interviews.

  Many Japanese scholars helped me, but I want to give particular thanks to Saito Takio and Nakatake Kanami of the Yokohama Archives of History, Takeuchi Yoshinobu of the Wakayama City Museum, Tsutsumi Yukichi of the city of Kurume and Umetani Noboru, formerly of Osaka University. Former Helm Brothers employees who provided information included Mori Taro, Teshirogi Takao, Joseph Splingaerd and Ozawa Matsuko.

  For historical background, I drew from dozens of published sources including: The Making of Modern Japan, by Ken Pyle; The Making of Modern Japan, by Marius B. Jansen; Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, by Susan B. Hanley; Awakening Japan: The Diary of a German Doctor: Erwin Baelz, edited by Toku Baelz; Oyatoi Gaikokujin, by Shigehisa Tokutaro; The German Prisoners-Of-War in Japan, 1914-1920, by Charles Burdick and Ursula Moessner; Embracing Defeat, by John W. Dower; The Western World and Japan, by G.B. Sansom; Yokohama in 1872, by Paul C. Blum; The Austro-Prussian War, by Geoffrey Wawro and A Historical Guide to Yokohama, by Burritt Sabin. I also drew from extensive files SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) put together on the Helms and their businesses as it tried to sort out whether the family should be classified as friends or enemy. (See Lesliehelm.com for an annotated bibliography.)

  Thanks to the Webster family for sharing their wonderful collection of Helm family photos. Most of the photos from the Occupation were taken by Dad. The woodblock prints of the Customhouse and the “Map of Early Yokohama” are from the collection of the Yokohama Archives of History.

  Special thanks to author and aunt, Ella Ellis, who gave me the confidence to embark on this journey; Brenda Peterson, who taught me to bring emotion to my writing, and Chalmers Johnson, who shaped my thinking on Japan. Among the many who read my manuscript and helped me shape it are Dori Jones Yang, John Runyan, Maureen Michelson, Sheldon Garon, Fred Notehelfer, Sheila Johnson, Neil Gross, Colter Mott, Burritt Sabin and, most important of all, my wife, Marie Anchordoguy.

  Thanks to Bruce Rutledge, publisher of Chin Music Press, who took a chance on this book. I was blessed to have as my editor, David Jacobson, a man who knows Japan well, is a great wordsmith and showed great patience and understanding as he helped me wrestle down this book and prepare it for publication. A special bouquet to the book designer, Josh Powell, who created a beautiful work of art from an impossible stack of family albums, postcards, stamps, stock certificates and random documents.

  My mother, Barbara, and my siblings, Chris, Julie and Andrea, have been a great comfort to me all my life, and I can’t thank them enough for always being by my side. As for Dad? I really believe he would have been proud of this book. One thing Dad taught me was that it’s important, above all, to tell the truth as you s
ee it, even if it might make a lot of people uncomfortable.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Marie, and our children Mariko and Eric, who have supported and encouraged me along my journey and have filled my life with joy and meaning.

  LESLIE HELM IS A VETERAN FOREIGN correspondent. He served eight years in Tokyo for Business Week and The Los Angeles Times, was bureau chief for Business Week in Boston, and has reported from South Korea and India. He is currently executive editor of Seattle Business, an award-winning monthly magazine. Helm earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism and in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, where his family has lived since 1869. Helm now lives in Seattle with his wife, Marie Anchordoguy, and his children, Mariko and Eric. He enjoys hiking and gardening in the summer and snowshoeing and playing squash in the winter.

  PHOTO: Gregory Schaffer

  Copyright ©2013 by Leslie Helm | PUBLISHER: Chin Music Press 2621 24th Ave. W. Seattle, WA 98199-3407 USA | www.chinmusicpress.com | First [1] edition | BOOK DESIGN: Josh Powell/Palindrome | Photography on pages 306, 308, 338 and 340 by Gregory Schaffer | COVER IMAGES: Photo is of Julius and Hiro Helm and their family. Postcard is of the bridge across the canal to Motomachi at the foot of The Bluff. | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED | Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data is available | ISBN: 9780984457694