I spoke at Harvard in October before a group of students and professors. There was a great discussion following my talk. Toward the end I suggested that Japan should change its narrative about itself from that of a homogeneous country with rigid customs and set values dating back thousands of years to a narrative that focuses more on the country’s proven ability to make radical changes when the need arose. I said that narrative would better enable Japan to adjust to a modern Japan that is increasingly at odds with Japan’s view of itself. A skeptical students said that listening to NPR one keeps hearing about narratives and that since I was a journalist it wasn’t surprising that I would talk about narratives that did I really believe that could change Japan. I pointed to Tokugawa, which determined from the top what kind of society Japan should be and proceeded to create just such a society made up of a strict caste system. then the Meiji government shifted the narrative to focus on the introduction of Western technology and institutions of government and proceeded to transform Japan from the top. Narrative, or story if you prefer to call it that, can indeed be very powerful.
Here is the whole talk:
My day job in Seattle doesn’t have much to do with Japan. So when I sent a message out last spring to my contacts about my new book, Yokohama Yankee, there was more than a little confusion. Several people assumed it was a book about Ichiro’s new team in New York.
When I went on a book tour in Japan this summer, many of my Japanese audiences were also confused. Turns out “Yankee” is now commonly used in Japan as a word to mean …… juvenile delinquent.
For me the title, Yokohama Yankee, is simply a way to represent the contrasting roles of east and west in the life of my family.
Yokohama, of course, plays a central role in my book. It’s the port city in Japan where my great grandfather first arrived nearly 150 years ago, and where I was born and raised.
It’s also the place where feudal Japan first came face to face with western civilization. Today Yokohama is Japan’s second largest city with four million people, yet it has managed to maintain some of its old world charm. Couples go there for romantic weekends. They like to wander through Chinatown and stroll among the old Victorian houses on the bluff where I grew up.
Yokohama was a beautiful place. This is a hill that my great grandfather bought in Honmoku at the turn of the century for his summer villa.
I have a cousin who still lives on that hill. When he orders sushi at his local place, they still say Herumu-yama desu ne. Shall we deliver to Helm Hill.
I grew up with one foot in the foreign community and the other in the real Japan. Among my Japanese friends and acquaintances, I tried not to stick out. I did my best to be polite, to avoid being a nuisance and to always be respectful of my elders.
I learned the values of perseverance and stoicism. I had a dentist in Yokohama who used blunt needles that were so painful that I insisted on having my teeth drilled without novacaine. WOW, that hurt. But I always felt good afterward because the dentist would praise me for being able to handle the pain.
When I was with my Western friends, I went out of my way to break rules. We would climb over a chain-linked fence where hundreds of coca cola trucks were parked to steal Coca Cola stickers. We would start fires in abandoned lots. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t because of foreign, gaijin kids like me that the word “Yankee” came to mean “juvenile delinquent.”
Japanese was my first language because I spent so much of my early years with Japanese nannies.
That’s a picture of me with my older brother and two ladies who worked for us. People would come up to me and touch my platinum blond hair. School boys who scream “You crazy boy.”
Although my spoken Japanese was pretty good, because I was educated in English, my Japanese vocabulary was pretty limited.
As a kid, when my mother took us home by taxi she would tell the driver to go to “gaijin bochi.”
So when Japanese asked me where I lived, I would say in “Gaijin bochi.” They would give me these weird looks.
It took me a while before I realized that gaijin bochi didn’t mean foreigner’s bluff, as I assumed. It meant “foreigners’ cemetery.”
My mother was telling the taxi driver to go there because the cemetery happened to be right across the street from my house.
I was telling everybody I lived inside the foreign cemetery.
In some ways, I suppose I did. Or rather, much of the cemetery’s history lived inside of me.
The Foreign cemetery was established in 1859 to bury the first foreigners cut down by xenophobic samurai. It is the resting place for more than a dozen of my relatives including my Japanese great grandmother Hiro.
In Japanese culture, taking care of the ancestral graves is an important duty.
But, while I used to cut through the cemetery as a shortcut to grab a bowl of ramen, we NEVER visited our family graves. It was as if my family just wanted to forget the past.
Of course, when we try to bury the past, it can come back to haunt us.
It wasn’t until I moved to the United States for college, at age 17, and was doing my best to act like an American, that I became aware, for the first time, that I was one-fourth Japanese. I have two Japanese great-grandmothers. This is great grandmother Hiro.
The idea that I was part Japanese didn’t square with who I thought I was. Growing up in Japan as a gaijin, I was defined by who I was NOT. I was NOT Japanese. Being part-Japanese just seemed to confuse things.
Although I had many Japanese-American friends, I was different from them as well. I didn’t look Asian. And I had grown up in Japan, not America. So, for the next 20 years I did my best to avoid the issue of identity altogether.
Now, there are two things in life that are among the most emotional things that can happen to anybody: One is the death of a parent. The other is having children.
Both things happened to me in quick succession in the early 1990s while I was working in Japan as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times
Those two things changed my world.
The first thing that happened was the death of my father. He and I had had a difficult relationship over the years, so I was surprised by the depth of my grief. But I was also afraid. Dad had never come to terms with being part Japanese. He never really found a home in either Japan or America. I was afraid I would end up the same way.
The second event that turned my world upside down was the decision my wife and I made to adopt Japanese children. It seemed a natural thing to do at the time. But when we received a picture of a two-year-old girl, I suddenly began to have doubts.
I couldn’t explain it at the time, but today, I suspect it had something to do with our family’s efforts over several generations to hide our Japanese heritage.
My grandfather, for example, was half Japanese and married a woman who was also half-Japanese. Yet, he sometimes hit my father when he spoke Japanese at home. My half-Japanese father hid his Japanese heritage for much of his life.
Maybe that’s why the first time I met my daughter at the orphanage in Tokyo, I felt my chest tighten up. She was very cute. Yet there was some powerful force inside telling me to walk away, that this just wasn’t going to work.
I don’t think I’m spoiling the ending when I say that Mariko won me over.
I want to read you the section in the book where I describe the first meeting with my daughter Mariko at the orphanage in Tokyo:
P114
Even after we adopted Mariko and, in an incredible stroke of luck, we were able to also adopt my son Eric two months later, I STILL remained ambivalent toward Japan. (I should point out that I was also reporting about Japanese business at a time when there was a great deal of animosity in the U.S. toward Japanese businesses.)
I wondered if I could be a good father with that attitude. THAT’s what set me on the road to explore my family’s long history in Japan.
My book is about that journey, about my effort to rediscover the past and to reconcile my Japanese self with my western self.
Since my family story is so intertwined with modern Japanese history, the book is also about Japan’s efforts, over the past century and a half, to reconcile its national identity with a world so dominated by the West.
The story of Yokohama begins with a classic case of U.S. gunboat diplomacy. In 1853, Commodore Perry and his fleet sailed to Japan, pointed their canons to the shore, and said in effect: “Trade with us or else.”
Japan had been cut off from the rest of the world for 250 years, so technologically and militarily it was far behind the West. It had little choice but to open its doors.
But to keep foreigners from infecting Japanese culture, the Japanese government selected the isolated village of Yokohama and kicked out the villagers.
It then built a foreign settlement on a two-square-mile plot of land that faced the bay on one side, and was cut off from the rest of Japan by rivers and canals on its three other sides.
It was in Yokohama that western technology like horse-drawn carriages, telegraph systems and trains were first introduced to Japan.
When my German great grandfather arrived in Yokohama in 1869, Japan was hiring foreign engineers and other experts in a mad rush to catch up with the west.
They called that imported talent “oyatoi gaikokujin,” which means “foreign hired hand.” I guess you could say it was one of the world’s first “guest worker” programs.
Japan believed that it needed to become militarily strong to avoid being carved up by the West as China had been.
My great grandfather, Julius, who had fought in the Austro-Prussian war, but had come to Japan to seek his fortune, was hired as a military adviser to work for Karl Koppen, who had pulled together a motley crew of men to help modernize Wakayama’s army. As you will recall, Wakayama had been one of the key pillars of the Tokugawa shogunate, but lost power with the Meiji Restoration and the rise of Satsuma and Choshu. Wakayama wanted to restore its influence over the country.
Julius and the other German advisers taught the Japanese soldiers to march, shoot and build pontoon bridges. They believed that if Japanese soldiers were to fight like German soldiers, they would also have to live like them. They required the Japanese soldiers to eat meat, sleep on beds, sits on chairs and wear leather boots.
Here’s a picture of Julius with Japanese soldiers. On the back of this photograph are the names of famous Japanese such as Saigo Takamori. I’m almost certain that most of those names are not accurate, although Katsu Kaishu, supposedly the man in the suit, does resemble pictures of Kaishu. I still don’t know who in the family wrote those names at the back of the photos. (one of the frustrating things about my search was it often felt like I was going backwards. When I first visited the Wakayama city museum, that picture was on display and it was believed that the men were Wakayama soldiers. The next time I visited, it was gone. The curator said he had done a careful check and none of the soldiers were from Wakayama.) So I really have no idea who the men are, though the medals seem to suggest they fought in the seinan senso against Saigo Takamori.
In any case, as soon as Japan no longer needed the skills of the foreign hired hands like Julius, they were sent home.
Julius decided to stay in Japan.
CHANGE SLIDE!!!!!! FAMILY PICTURE
He married Hiro and they had children.
He also lured four of his siblings to Yokohama
Photo of Siblings
He worked in a variety of businesses.
At one point he bought one of Japan’s first dairy farms and had a brother operate it.
CHANGE SLIDE!!!!!! DAIRY FARM
The milk and butter was all sold to westerners because Japanese didn’t like dairy products at the time. In fact, their term for foreigners was “batakusai” stink like butter. At one point the farm caused a bit of a diplomatic incident because it was situated outside the boundaries of the foreign settlement. The matter was resolved when Julius wrote a letter explaining that the milk was necessary for the health of the foreigners in the settlement. The letter writing thing was typical of Japan. I’ve sat in many a koban writing a letter of apology. The story also reminds me of my experience spending a year in India with my wife in the late 1970s. there were no Japanese restaurants and we were desperate for Japanese food. We tried making oyakodonburi, but they didn’t have decent soy sauce. My father sent us a can of Kikkoman. At the post office, they said I would have to pay a $200 custom fee to take the shoyu home. We were students with little money. The agreed to give me the soy sauce tax free after I wrote a letter saying that soy sauce was necessary to my mental health.)
CHANGE SLIDE!!!!!! STEVEDORES
Greatgrandfather Julius eventually started his own trucking and stevedoring company. At the time, most of the trucks were imported from America. They were so heavy that they had to be pulled by large American horses that were also imported at great cost. Consequently in the early 1870s there were only a half dozen horse-drawn trucks in Yokohama. Julius’s great innovation? A lighter truck that could be pulled by two smaller Japanese horses.
Japan, once afraid of being colonized, soon became a colonial power. First it went to war with China and took Taiwan, then it defeated Russia and took Korea. Our family business grew as Japan’s economy expanded.
CHANGE: Julius’s House
Julius took Helm Brothers Public in 1899 and used the money to buy up competitors. He also built himself a nice house.
CHANGE TO FAMILY PICTURE
The second generation of my family in Japan was very wealthy. They were educated in three continents and spoke four languages. But they struggled with their identities.
CHANGE TO THE THREE SISTERS
None of the three daughters ever married. Though they were beautiful, as children of mixed race, I suspect they were not considered good enough for whites or Japanese. And I suspect Julius thought his daughters were too good to marry other mixed-race kids.
Julius and Hiro’s four sons also faced a lot of challenges. They struggled with their identities, taking citizenship in three separate countries.
CHANGE SLIDE TO CHARLES
Karl, the eldest, took Japanese citizenship so he could register Helm Brothers ships in his name.
Change to Barges
The company used barges to deliver cargo from ships in Yokohama to Tokyo and other areas. But only Japanese citizens were allowed to own ships that operated in Japan’s internal waters. At first he sent his children to German schools. During World War I, when Germany was enemy to Japan, he moved his children to the French schools and started calling himself by the more Anglicized Charles as opposed to his more German name Karl.
Change slide to Jim
The second son was James. He kept his German citizenship and did his military service in Germany. He worked for a bank in St. Petersberg, then for a large firm in New York before taking over Helm Brothers’ Kobe operations.
CHANGE SLIDE: Jim’s three children
Jim discriminated against his own daughter who looked more Japanese. He wouldn’t attend her marriage to a Portuguese Macauan. And he gave that daughter half the inheritance he gave the other children.
CHANGE SLIDE: Julie and Betty
The third son, my grandfather, became American because he happened to be born in Brooklyn. He married Betty, who was also half-Japanese.
Change Slide: Edmund Stucken
Her father, Edmund Stucken, came to Japan during the Meiji period. Among other things, he represented the interests of Tsingtau beer in Japan.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! WILLIE AND PARTY
The youngest brother, Willie, liked to party. When World war I started, Japan was allied with Britain, so Germany was the enemy. Now see if you can keep this straight: Willie, who was born and raised in Japan and had a Japanese mother, volunteered to fight with German forces to protect Tsingtau, a German colony in China from the Japanese army.
Kind of complicated. The point is: Willie, fought against Japan, his mother’s country, just to prove he was more of a patriot than any man born in Germany of a German mother.
He was captured and spent 5 years in a Japanese POW camp in Kurume, Kyushu.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! PRISON CAMP
Most of the Germans were treated well. Japan wanted to show the west it was civilized so it abided by every detail of the Hague conventions on the treatment of war prisoners.
They had a printing press,
CHANGE SLIDE orchestra
an orchestra
CHANGE SLIDE conjugal visits
and were even allowed conjugal visits. This is a drawing by one of the prisoners.
But Willie had a tougher time. The camp commander Mazaki Jinzaburo, who would later play a role in the militarization of Japan, played a cat and mouse game with Willie, ordering the camp barber to help Willie escape just so he could send soldiers to recapture him and throw him into solitary confinement.
I suspect Willie was picked on because he was part Japanese. Newspaper articles at the time described Willie as “Konketsu helm” or Ainoko Helm. The terms mean mixed blood or in-between child, but there is the connotation of mongrel as in mongrel dog.
Change Slide: Ship CUT?
When Willie FINALLY returned to his family in Yokohama at the end of the war, in 1920, Japan’s economy was prosperous. Great grandfather Julius had lived the war years exiled in Japan with his daughter and other German son, Jim. But Helm Brothers continued to flourish under the management of the American son, my grandfather Julie, and his Japanese brother, Charles.
NEW SLIDE: EMPLOYEES
But those good times wouldn’t last.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! earthquake 1
In 1923, exactly 90 years ago, Yokohama and Tokyo suffered a devastating earthquake. It was more destructive than the recent one in Fukushima because of fires that killed more than 140,000 people.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! earthquake 2
Most foreigners left Yokohama because it looked like the city had no future. My family stayed. Yokohama was their home. Starting from scratch, they built new barges, wagons and warehouses. They bought property from departing foreigners.
By the 1930s, the company was thriving again as was the country. Japan was chosen to host the 1940 summer Olympics.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! Helm House
My grandfather Julie believed a new era of Japanese internationalism was coming. So in 1936 he began building a new headquarters and apartment complex called Helm House. It boasted the most modern western conveniences including central air conditioning, coffee pots and toasters imported from America, furniture and chinaware custom-made in Japan, and carpets from China.
At different times, Helm House was home to
Change Slide
the German navy
Change slide
The u.s. 8th army
and the Kanagawa policy department.
Does anyone remember hearing about the 1940 Tokyo Olympics? Of course not. They never happened.
Not long after Helm House was completed in 1938, Japan canceled the Olympics so it could spend its money on an expanding war with China.
The U.S. imposed tough sanctions on oil and steel exports to Japan and tensions rose.
In August, 1941, after the U.S. Embassy had warned Americans more than half a dozen times that it was unsafe to remain in Japan, my grandfather took his family and moved to California. Three months later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, an attack that triggered a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! ANTI-Japanese picture
My father, as a teenager in California, must have felt shame and fear about his Japanese heritage. The family hid their Japanese belongings and asked friends to safekeep their valuables.
When the U.S. government ordered all people of Japanese descent to report to local authorities so they could be sent to internment camps, Dad’s family pretended the order didn’t apply to them. Dad would never forget the day a local newspaper outed the family by declaring “Helms are Japs.”
Luckily, they never WERE sent to the camps.
CHANGE SLIDE
My father returned to Japan as an intelligence officer in the U.S. occupation. He arrived in a Yokohama that had once again been leveled—This time by U.S. firebombs.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! firebomb
Those bombs, essentially napalm, were dropped on 20 cities across Japan. Between 200,000 and half a million people died in the fires caused by those bombs, most of them civilians.
Changes slide to DIET
This is a picture Dad took of the area around the Diet building.
Change to Haruo Slid
So dad arrived in Japan as victor, but in a nation of starving people.
His job was to interview Japanese soldiers returning from Soviet labor camps. The U.S. wanted to learn more about its new enemy. The goal was also to locate spies, and where possible to recruit them as double agents. The experience must have made him feel even more distant from his Japanese heritage.
Change slides: marriage
Dad married my mother Barbara Schinzinger. She was also born in Japan. She is the daughter of Robert Schinzinger, who taught German language and philosophy in Japan for more than 60 years, mostly at Gakushuin and Tokyo University after the war. Mishima was one of his students. He published a popular German-Japanese dictionary.
Change slide to advertisement
Dad returned to Yokohama and rebuilt Helm Brothers. But there was constant fighting among the Helm relatives now scattered across four continents, a battle that tore apart my family and ultimately ended in a hostile takeover of Helm Brothers by a Hong Kong company in 1973, exactly 40 years ago. I suspect it might have been one of the first hostile takeover bids ever in Japan.
Understanding what happened to my family over that turbulent century helped me to understand Dad, accept Japan and be a better father.
CHANGE SLIDE TO FOUR IN OUR FAMILY
Yet, ironically, while adopting Japanese children and exploring my family heritage helped me embrace my Japanese past, in some ways it also distanced me from Japan.
With two adopted Japanese children, I was more of an outsider in Japan than I had ever been.
Once, when we were checking out of a hotel in the mountains in Japan, the manager of the hotel looked at our family and said:
“So, I assume you two are the teachers and the two kids are your students?”
The notion was absurd since Mariko and Eric were then barely school age at the time. But cross-racial adoption is so unusual in Japan that Japanese simply could not imagine that we could possibly be a family.
We were happy to return to Seattle.
CHANGE SLIDE !!!!!!! ERIC
THAT’S A PICTURE OF MY SON ERIC taken by my father-in-law on July 4th.
With so many mixed race families in Seattle, and adoptions so common, we easily blended into the community.
I did have one awkward encounter when Eric was about three. We were shopping at the supermarket when Eric started running down the aisle. I ran after him, picked him up and put him in the shopping care. This stern, but well-meaning woman, came up to me and said “PUT HIM DOWN”
What? I said. He’s my son.
“Prove it,” she said.
That really stumped me. How do you prove that a child is your son?
Finally, I just pointed to my son who was laughing in the shopping cart. “Does he look like he’s been kidnapped?” I said.
But for the most part, people in Seattle welcomed us and our family life was much like any other with all the love and tension that every family faces.
I want to read a paragraph that comes at the end of a chapter about a rather frightening rafting trip my son and I took in Oregon on his sixteenth birthday. I almost drowned. It was Eric who pulled me out of the water.
Read
In recent years, I have returned to Japan again and again.
CHANGE: Komiyas
I connected with one Japanese relative who was a Shinto priest.
Tsunemochi
I discovered another relative who was doing his own search. Turned out his family had tried to hide their German heritage, just as mine had tried to hide our Japanese heritage.
CHANGE: Opa’s students
Another time I was invited to an alumni association gathering where men I their eighties sang old German folk songs. “They called themselves the association who sing the songs taught by Professor Schinzinger.” Decades after my grandfather died, they were still gathering regularly to sing the songs he taught them.
I have rediscovered my love for Japan. I have come to terms with the country.
But I’m not sure that Japan has come to terms with outsiders like myself.
Japan faces a serious crisis. It’s economy is being dragged down by declining birth rates and an aging population. It must encourage immigration, yet it seems incapable of assimilating outsiders.
There were forty or so member of my family in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s, and at least a couple dozen after World War II. Our family had many assets in Japan until 1973. Yet today, only two cousins still lives in Japan. In one case, the children are now living in London and Washington D.C. In the other case, the children look likely to live in Germany.
In the old days it was partly about visas. And at one time operating as a foreign company in Japan was a lot of trouble. Helm Brothers had to get permission from the Ministry of Finance every time it paid dividends.
But another key reason many of us left Japan was education: Our parents did not want us to go to Japanese schools because of bullying and the examination hell. And they didn’t feel we would get a good education in a Japanese university.
Now it’s true there are some changes afoot. You see a lot of more colleges teaching in English. There are a lot more Japanese choosing to have their kids educated overseas. They are the kikokushijo, the returnees, the mixed-race kids like me. The artists and drifters. There are also more and more foreigners working in Japan from all over the world. So you have a growing proportion of society that is in some way separated from what we would call traditional Japan. They all view themselves as outsiders. I’ve received emails from many people like that who connected with the outsider theme of my book.
Japan’s narrative of itself as a homogeneous society with a culture that goes back thousands of years with these rigid norms and cultural traditions is increasingly divorced from the reality of modern Japan.
When it comes to immigration policy, Japan if flailing. It brings in Brazilian-Japanese workers when there is a worker shortage. Then it sends them home when their presence becomes uncomfortable. The country brings in nurses from the Philippines to fill the need for health care workers but then sends them back as soon as they are trained and learn Japanese because they don’t want them to stay too long
Japanese still won’t adopt children from outside the family for fear their extended family won’t accept the children.
At one time, these attitudes may have represented a form of self-preservation: a need to protect Japanese culture and traditions. But today such practices are self-destructive.
As we all know, Japan’s history contains many periods when they face identity crises and underwent rapid change. Most prominently when Buddhism was introduced to Japan, in the Meiji period when Japan embraced western technology, and after the war.
One wonders if Japan is capable of changing its narrative of itself to focus less on the continuity of the culture and more on its ability at key points in its history to import the best of foreign cultures and adapt it for their own. Such a narrative would better help Japan transition into a period when it must embrace the richness of its new immigrants, in multiracial population and the changing face of the young.
Such a narrative might help to lay the foundation for new policies that could help tackle Japan’s coming challenges in everything from its need to spur innovation to its need to stop the decline in its population.
THANK YOU