Leslie Helm - Yokohama Yankee: My Familys Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

I N THE SUMMER OF 1910 , Julius celebrated his seventieth birthday with a grand party at his summer villa. Paper lanterns hung across the large garden and down at the beach below. The servants had spent days preparing the feast that included roast beef, several large hams and lots of potatoes. Juliuss brother Paul was there with his wife. His sister Anna was there with her husband, two children and a grandchild. His three daughtersMarie, Elsie and Louisewere there, although Julius was disappointed that none had married. His two eldest sons Karl and Jim were there with their German-American wives. Karl and his wife had already given Julius two grandchildren. Juliuss youngest son, Willie, now eighteen, was also there. He was popular among the women with his charming smile. The only child missing was Julie, my grandfather, who was in New York studying accounting.

Julius sat on a chair in his garden surveying the scene. Periodically, a Helm Brothers employee would come by to pay his respects. Julius now employed hundreds of Japanese, and he had invited all of the managers to the party. He was immensely proud of his success.

Standing at the edge of the garden clutching something in her hand was his granddaughter Margaret, Karls dark-haired six-year-old. Eighty-five years later, the moment was still vivid in Margarets memory as she described her conversation with Julius: Grandpa picked me up and put me on his lap. He asked me what I had in my hand. When I opened my hand to show him my coins, he asked me if I had saved that money. When I said, Yes, he took another coin from his pocket and put it in my hand. Then he asked me, So what is it you want more than anything else in the world? I told him: I want a cousin with golden hair like Goldilocks.

I wonder if Julius didnt then reflect again on the challenges his half-Japanese descendants faced. He had tried his best to help them overcome the stigma of their mixed-race heritage. He had sent his children overseas to be educated. When Hiro died, Julius married Alma, a distant cousin from Germany, so that his youngest children would have the benefit of being raised by a German mother.

He was proud of his children, and he had provided well for them. If the foreign community sometimes looked down on them as half-caste, his family was large enough and wealthy enough to have created a community of its own with large family dinners on Sundays and lavish costume parties. What Julius hadnt foreseen were the two forces that would pull the family apart: One force, as old as history, was Alma, the new stepmother. The other was something completely new to mankind: a world war.

Julius thought he was doing his children a favor when he brought Alma to Yokohama from Germany to manage the household as his new wife. Alma, who had been active promoting voting rights for women in Germany, brought her girlfriend with her to keep her company. She was everything Hiro was not. She was tall, heavy and wore round, steel-rimmed spectacles over her icy blue eyes. She was a stern disciplinarian who held the Japanese in contempt and made her stepchildren ashamed of their Japanese heritage.

Juliuss eldest daughter, Marie, showed her loyalty to her dead mother Hiro by moving out. Later, Marie would abandon her Christian Science faith in favor of Buddhism and purchase a large piece of property by the sea in Zushi, not far from Yokohama, with plans to open a sanatorium for victims of tuberculosis.

Maries two younger sisters, Elsie and Louisa, had no such escape. Alma was intent on training them to be upper-class Germans, so she pressured them to study piano and art. When other mixed-race suitors came to call, Alma would turn them away, insisting the girls deserved better. My Aunt Louisa once warned me seventy years later never to go out with a Japanese girl because she would only be after your money. None of Juliuss three daughters would ever marry. Louisa would be the only one of her generation I would come to know, and what I remember best about her was the extremes to which she took thrift. Although Louisa was wealthy in her later years, she would hand the bus driver a ten-thousand-yen note, knowing he had no change and would have to let the old woman on for free. She once took my mother out to lunch for her birthday at the German Bakery in Motomachi. When it came time for Louisa to order, she pulled a slice of bread from her purse and asked the waitress to toast it. My stomach is not feeling well, she explained.

Julius at 70th birthday party with son Karl and granddaughter.

Almas greatest impact would be on Willie, Juliuss youngest son, with tragic consequences. Willie was a handsome boy with the same intense eyes and restless soul as his father, but with the delicate mouth and rounded chin of his mother, Hiro. At age seven, he had been sent to LEcole de LEtoile du Matin, a French Catholic boarding school in Tokyo. At nine, he lived in San Francisco with his three sisters while attending the Moulder School for Boys. At eleven, Willie returned to Yokohama to attend a boys Catholic school. Then Alma insisted Willie travel to Germany to attend prep school, business school and to do his military service.

When Willie returned to Japan from Germany, he hopped from job to job, never quite satisfied with his work. In 1914, when Willie was twenty-two, he worked for a British trading company. Perhaps because of his good looks, his money and his cosmopolitan ways, Willie developed a reputation as a playboy. It was bad luck that he came of age when, for the only time in its history, Germany would become Japans enemy.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan was intent on reversing the injustices it suffered following its victory over China. It created an alliance in 1902 with Britain, the worlds greatest naval power, and quadrupled the size of its standing army. In the summer of 1904, when Russia tried to expand its presence in Korea, Japan attacked. In a series of bloody battles that cost it more than eighty thousand lives, Japan defeated Russia and retook Port Arthur, becoming the first Asian country to defeat a modern European power. Japan now controlled Korea and had established its long-desired presence in Manchuria, a new frontier rich in all the raw materials Japan lacked. When World War I broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, Japan invaded Tsingtao, China, considered Germanys Pearl of the East.

Willie Helm is the center of the party, ca. 1928.

Germany called on all its citizens in Asia to come to the defense of Tsingtao. Most Germans in Japan at the time did not respond to what seemed to them a hopeless cause. Willie, whose mother had been Japanese, seemed compelled to prove he was a German patriot, and volunteered.

Willie was assigned as sergeant in the artillery division and sent to Tsingtao, but the small German force defending the German colony never had a chance. By November 1914, a few months after Willie reached Tsingtao, German forces surrendered, and the captured soldiers were sent to Japan as prisoners of war.