Although Iitate village had three good elementary schools, one junior high school, all of the schools were closed. And although there were very few children living in the region, the government spent $40 million on a combined elementary and middle school. It now must bring children from distant villages to try to fill the classrooms, says Tao. Other pointless projects include a new town hall that holds 300 people. Japan tends to support large construction projects for the immediate jobs they create and because construction companies contribute campaign funds to politicians.

Similarly, the Japanese government has provided funds for a massive facility called the for testing robots, including drones with the hope that more robotics experts would move to the area allowing it to become a robotics center.

While the center hosted a robotics conference recently,  and the facility has been used to test drones and other devices, but there is no evidence that robotics experts have any interest in doing robotics research and development in the area.

The Japanese government has also moved forward on some projects without consulting locals. They used heavy equipment to scrape radioactive soil from the fields, for example, crushing the network of clay pipes that are so critical to draining water from the fields.  “You shouldn’t call them the Environmental Protection Agency; they are the environmental destruction agency,” says Tao. The scraped radioactive soil from affected areas of Fukushima have been placed in one square meter black bags that each hold about 35 square feet (about the area of a queen-sized bed) of soil. There are an estimated 14 million of those bags scattered across the prefecture. The Japanese parliament passed a measure some time ago in which it agreed that the burden of storing those bags would be shared by the entire country with every prefecture taking their share. Understandably, the prefectures have refused to accept the bags, so Fukushima has no choice but to store them temporarily in trenches.

Where there has been limited success, it has been in some more distributed approaches that he supports. Under one program, for example, the government has offered $100,000 grants to young people with ideas for businesses. His daughter received one such grant. He takes me to a warehouse-like space in a former big-box store that his daughter is turning into a facility to encourage invention. “It’s like an inventor’s garage,” says Tao. There are various projects in the works, including one for a system to grow wasabi and another an approach to reusing waste products as insulation.

Odaka, a town closer to the nuclear disaster area, has developed an approach that has been successful in launching new businesses. Several young entrepreneurs participating in the “Next Commons Lab,” a venture capital group of sorts subsidized by the federal government.

 It has launched startups including haccoba, which is successfully selling sake with unusual flavors. The company says it benefits from a law the requires sake brewers to stick to simple ingredients when making sake. By calling itself a “Craft sake brewery,” the company has the freedom to add other ingredients including hops, fig leaves and grape skins. The sake has proved so popular that several restaurants in Tokyo have become customers and the rest of the several hundred bottles per batch quickly sell out online. The company now plans to triple production.

One reason for the success of Odaka is its active local community. One center for that community is the  Futabaya, an inn that suffered flooding from the 2011 Tsunami. Inn owner Tomoko Kobayashi and her husband had to leave the area following the nuclear meltdown, but returned in 2013, using government compensation to rebuild the inn, which reopened in 2016 when it quickly became a favorite hangout for researchers and activists.

As tragic and difficult as that period was, Kobayashi remembers it as an exciting time. “I felt so free,” she says. Every week she would have BBQs or dinners and everyone from aid workers to scientists would gather and talk about all the work that needed to be done.” When trains finally started to pass through the area again, it was Kobayashi who planted flowers in front of the train station to brighten up what had become a bleak landscape. Kobayashi has become a networker. She helped launch a museum in a home offered up by a friend where local artists could display their work.

Kobayashi felt a kinship to Ukraine, which had suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. She visited Ukraine five times and came to develop many friends in the area. Now, despite the challenges that continue in her own hometown, she has worked with young people in the area to raise money to contribute to Ukraine’s war effort. A young man who would like to see the region’s watch-making expertise be better utilized, has started manufacturing a special watch. Earnings for the sale of the watch are donated to nonprofit groups operating in Ukraine. Meanwhile, her husband, Takenori, volunteers at a local fire station where equipment was installed to allow people to check food for radiation.

Others have also pitched in to bring life back to Odaka. Down the street from the Inn, Miri Yu, a Korean novelist and playwright born in Japan. She moved to Odaka in 2015 and launched a radio show to focus attention on the concerns of residents in the community. In 2018, she remodeled her home to create a small bookstore and coffee shop called Full House that remains one of the few commercial establishments open in the neighborhood.

Although Odaka has benefited from government compensation schemes, the subsidies have also had the perverse effect of discouraging people from returning and investing in their communities. Many prefer to continue to receive the government compensation rather than try to rebuild their businesses. Odaka’s population is now 3,000, down from 13,000 before the nuclear accident. In nearby Namie, the town has seen its population drop 90% to 2,000. Former residents who rebuilt their lives elsewhere don’t want to be uprooted again. Although Futaba, in a different area from the Futaba Inn, opened to returnees in the summer of 2022, for example, it still has only 50 residents, down from 9,000 before the accident. Many homes in the neighborhood have caved in roofs caused by the original 2011 earthquake. Even those returning to work at Futaba’s city hall are commuting from outside the area. Although the farmland along the ocean has been scraped of topsoil and can now be safely farmed, many landowners are choosing instead to lease their land to utilities who are using the land for solar farms. Fukushima has decided to depend on renewable sources for 100 percent of its energy including solar power and hydrogen. But the rest of Japan, which had temporarily shut down its nuclear plants, is restarting them and is even planning to build two new nuclear facilities to the north in an area also famous for its earthquakes. One farmer has chosen to return to his land near Futaba, and is now growing flowers and vegetables. Although he might have made more money leasing the land for a solar farm, he says, “I want to work the land. I don’t want to sit around at home.” But few other farmers in the area seem inclined to follow. Another problem with the way the government responded to the disaster was the decision to pay compensation for damages to the man in each family, not the women who typically handle a family’s finances in Japan. Many of these men squandered the money at pachinko parlors that were quickly established to suck up the large sums these men suddenly found themselves with, says Karin Taira, who works for “Real Fukushima” leading tours of the areas affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

The day of the nuclear accident, it had snowed and radioactive particles fell to the ground entering the the region’s rivers and lakes. Tao says the space telescope hasn’t been used but a guitarist did once hold a small concert inside. But Tao gets angry at those who say the entire region should be abandoned. Although mushrooms foraged in the surrounding forests still contain unhealthy amounts of radioactivity, vegetables, meat and other food products from the region are tested regularly and are now being eaten. “The radiation released by the nuclear plants was swept by the wind up here against the mountains,” says Tao. The snow then carried the poison cesium into the soil, the region’s rivers, and its lakes. “The government had supercomputers measuring the weather; they knew which direction the radiation was going,” says Tao. “They should have been warning people to avoid the Iitate area.” While the government has poured tens of billions of dollars to help revive the region, as with so many of the Japanese government’s responses to crisis, much of Japan’s effort has focused on construction projects. These included spending more than $12 billion on a massive new seawall that residents complain cuts them off from the sea on which they depend for fishing. Although Iitate village had three good elementary schools, one junior high school, all of the schools were closed. And although there were very few children living in the region, the government spent $40 million on a combined elementary and middle school. It now must bring children from distant villages to try to fill the classrooms, says Tao. Other pointless projects include a new town hall that holds 300 people. Japan tends to support large construction projects for the immediate jobs they create and because construction companies contribute campaign funds to politicians. Similarly, the Japanese government has provided funds for a massive facility called the for testing robots, including drones with the hope that more robotics experts would move to the area allowing it to become a robotics center. While the center hosted a robotics conference recently,  and the facility has been used to test drones and other devices, but there is no evidence that robotics experts have any interest in doing robotics research and development in the area. The Japanese government has also moved forward on some projects without consulting locals. They used heavy equipment to scrape radioactive soil from the fields, for example, crushing the network of clay pipes that are so critical to draining water from the fields.  “You shouldn’t call them the Environmental Protection Agency; they are the environmental destruction agency,” says Tao. The scraped radioactive soil from affected areas of Fukushima have been placed in one square meter black bags that each hold about 35 square feet (about the area of a queen-sized bed) of soil. There are an estimated 14 million of those bags scattered across the prefecture. The Japanese parliament passed a measure some time ago in which it agreed that the burden of storing those bags would be shared by the entire country with every prefecture taking their share. Understandably, the prefectures have refused to accept the bags, so Fukushima has no choice but to store them temporarily in trenches. Where there has been limited success, it has been in some more distributed approaches that he supports. Under one program, for example, the government has offered $100,000 grants to young people with ideas for businesses. His daughter received one such grant. He takes me to a warehouse-like space in a former big-box store that his daughter is turning into a facility to encourage invention. “It’s like an inventor’s garage,” says Tao. There are various projects in the works, including one for a system to grow wasabi and another an approach to reusing waste products as insulation. Odaka, a town closer to the nuclear disaster area, has developed an approach that has been successful in launching new businesses. Several young entrepreneurs participating in the “Next Commons Lab,” a venture capital group of sorts subsidized by the federal government.  It has launched startups including haccoba, which is successfully selling sake with unusual flavors. The company says it benefits from a law the requires sake brewers to stick to simple ingredients when making sake. By calling itself a “Craft sake brewery,” the company has the freedom to add other ingredients including hops, fig leaves and grape skins. The sake has proved so popular that several restaurants in Tokyo have become customers and the rest of the several hundred bottles per batch quickly sell out online. The company now plans to triple production. One reason for the success of Odaka is its active local community. One center for that community is the  Futabaya, an inn that suffered flooding from the 2011 Tsunami. Inn owner Tomoko Kobayashi and her husband had to leave the area following the nuclear meltdown, but returned in 2013, using government compensation to rebuild the inn, which reopened in 2016 when it quickly became a favorite hangout for researchers and activists. As tragic and difficult as that period was, Kobayashi remembers it as an exciting time. “I felt so free,” she says. Every week she would have BBQs or dinners and everyone from aid workers to scientists would gather and talk about all the work that needed to be done.” When trains finally started to pass through the area again, it was Kobayashi who planted flowers in front of the train station to brighten up what had become a bleak landscape. Kobayashi has become a networker. She helped launch a museum in a home offered up by a friend where local artists could display their work. Kobayashi felt a kinship to Ukraine, which had suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. She visited Ukraine five times and came to develop many friends in the area. Now, despite the challenges that continue in her own hometown, she has worked with young people in the area to raise money to contribute to Ukraine’s war effort. A young man who would like to see the region’s watch-making expertise be better utilized, has started manufacturing a special watch. Earnings for the sale of the watch are donated to nonprofit groups operating in Ukraine. Meanwhile, her husband, Takenori, volunteers at a local fire station where equipment was installed to allow people to check food for radiation.

I had long heard stories about a shipbuilding site in Yokohama where Helm Brothers, my family’s stevedoring company, used to build its barges and tugboats. A former company employee once told me how my grandfather, Julius Helm, would go with the company carpenter to the nearby woods on their horse cart to pick out trees for the lumber they needed to build the boats. 

Then some years ago, Toshiko, my father’s second wife, who lives near Negishi station in Yokohama, sent me a clipping about a sign that had been posted on a bridge to  mark the location of Helm Dock, the  Helm Brothers’ shipbuilding operation. The story didn’t say where the bridge was so I never bothered to follow up.

One day, as I was going through some pictures my Uncle Ray had taken in the early 1950s when he had been stationed with the U.S. Army in South Korea and had visited my parents in Yokohama. There was a picture of my mother standing on a barge. I had long assumed my mother must have visited a shipyard somewhere.

But then I came across another picture. This one showed my grandfather watching on as a barge was under construction. This must have been Helm Dock!

Grandfather Julius (aka Julie) at Helm Dock

Then something else slipped into place. When the Japanese version of my book came out, Joji Tsunoda reached out to me and showed me an amazing collection of five or six large photo albums packed with photographs by his father, Ranso Wolff, who had worked for Helm Brothers for two decades. Those pictures included many of Helm Brothers operations, and had been taken over a thirty-year period between 1910 and 1945. I have written about his remarkable story on this blog before. Joji told me of a story he heard from his uncle, Ranso’s brother-in-law. Shortly before Ranso married, Joji’s uncle, Ranso’s future brother-in-law, was walking past the dock when he heard a large Danish gentleman shouting orders at his workers.

The former Danish captain, Charles Wolff (1848-1920,) was Ranso’s father, who also worked for Helm Brothers. Joji’s uncle went home and told his sister, who was engaged to be married to Ranso that she was about to marry the son of a devil. At the time, seeing the picture above, which appears to be taken at Yokohama’s South Pier, I had assumed that Wolf was managing Helm Brothers’ stevedoring operations at Yokohama harbor, but Joji later told me that his grandfather had been manager of Helm Dock, and that the family had once lived in housing built for workers at the Docks. And as I was going through Joji’s father’s treasure trove of Yokohama pictures, I came across one taken about 1919 that I thought could be a picture of the Helm Dock operations.

Now I was truly curious. I went through records of properties in Yokohama that the Helms had once owned. On the list was a very large property at 200 Takegashira, Negishi. That must be it, I thought. On this day, Japan was playing the United States in the World Baseball Classic. Everyone’s eyes would be glued to their television sets. It would be a good day to explore. I took the train to Negishi Station and asked a policeman for directions. “Go to the river then turn right before crossing the bridge,” he said. He warned me that Takegashira was on the other side of the river, but that there was no sidewalk on either side of the road along the canal where traffic was heavy.

Carrying my large boxes of sembe I walked along that wide, heavily trafficked road until I finally reached the river and turned right just before the river as the policeman had recommended. I walked along the river, checking each bridge for signs that might say Helm Dock. I passed five bridges and had no luck. As I approached the sixth bridge, I looked across what the policeman had described as a river, but I now realized, was more like a canal. This is what I saw.

There was a tiny bridge, crossing an empty space from which descended a stone ramp–what could well be the ramp the shipbuilding operation at Helm Dock had used to launch new ships. I crossed the canal, and walked along the anal-side of the bridge looking for a Helm Dock sign. There was none. Meanwhile, big trucks were speeding past -one came so close the wind buffeted me against the railing. I gave up on my search for the plaque. Why would they put a plaque such a dangerous place anyway! I crossed to the other side of the road and found a side entrance to the six-story building that sat behind the bridge. When I saw a lady with a bag of groceries headed for the apartment building, I excused myself profusely and asked her if she knew anything about where Helm Dock was. “That’s it right there,” she said, pointing to the narrow space between the apartment building and the tiny bridge. The apartment building had been built right on top of the ship-building site, and the builders hadn’t bothered to remove the stone ramp. When I tried to ask more questions, the lady shook her head and rushed towards the apartment: “The final game of the World Baseball Classic is about to start.” I nodded my head. I understood. That tournament was all anybody had been talking about since I had arrived in Japan several weeks before.

The streets were empty and I had nobody else to ask. I didn’t know how to get to the hilltop park the sembe lady had recommended so instead I took a bus to Sankeien, a beautiful garden park in the neighborhood that is also famous for its cherry blossoms. My family had once summered on a hill nearby overlooking the ocean. I still have a cousin who lives nearby on what locals sometimes still call Helm Hill, although the nearby ocean has long since been filled in for miles around. I was hungry so I went into a nearby soba shop to order a bowl of noodles. I ate as I watched the baseball game on television. Suddenly the shop exploded into cheers. The patrons were celebrating Japan’s victory over the United States. Batting and pitching star Ohtani had come in as a relief pitcher in the final inning to strike out his Angels teammate. A dramatic end to the tournament. The old men in the soba shop chattered as the broadcast station began replaying the highlights of the game. “Japan is not doing so well these days but at least we are at the top of the world in baseball,” said one old man. You know, it’s not well known, but Ohtani’s father worked at a Mitsubishi Heavy factory around here. Spread the word. He’s really one of ours.”

I was happy for these men were adopting Ohtani as a local boy. Three decades of deflation had left Japan’s economy weak; salaries had hardly budged for thirty years, and after spending billions of dollars on the Tokyo Olympics, COVID had made it impossible for spectators to visit the Olympics. Now, finally, Japan had something to celebrate. Meanwhile, I was pleased by my own little discovery. In spite of the Helm family’s more than 100 years in Japan, almost nothing remains today of the Helm Brothers company that once had offices all across Japan. Now, here was a little ramp in stone that had lasted for more than a century and would remain for many years to come. As I looked at another photo Ranso had taken, I realized the stunning picture, complete with a streetcar crossing the bridge, had been taken from inside the Helm Docks, the Helm Brothers shipyard that Ranso’s father had managed.

1. 1. “What a beautiful death.” A Marianist Brother’s Outlook: The first letter is by Xavier Bertrand, a teacher at the Marianist school, St. Joseph College, whose student body drew largely from the expatriate community as well as from among mixed-race families. St. Joseph and its faculty of Brothers avoided the worst of the war by moving the school into the mountains, although many other Marianist schools in Japan suffered much worse fates.

1. 1. A Teenage Survivor: The second letter is from John Schultz who had been a classmate of my Uncle Ray at St. Joseph until the war began and ended the flow of money from his father in the United States. He was 15-years old the time, and lived with his single mother and sister. It is hard not to be moved by his story.

1. 1. One German businessman’s perspective: The third letter is from Willie Helm, my grandfather Julie’s youngest brother. He was always one to take risks and somehow always ended up okay. He took his inheritance early and invested it in failed ventures in the Japanese colony of Manchukuo, yet when he returned, his oldest sister took pity on him and left him with her fortune. Although his mother was Japanese, during World War I he went to war to protect German’s Chinese colony from the Japanese army. He suffered a head wound but survived and was sent to a prisoner of war camp. When World War II began, my American grandfather had to leave Japan for California, so Willie, a German, was put in charge of the family company, Helm Brothers. Willie made a great deal of money working with the German navy, which was based in Helm House. It is said he operated a lucrative black market out of the apartment building’s basement. But when U.S. forces arrived after the Japanese surrender, Willie’s luck had run out. His assets were frozen by U.S. occupation forces, and not long after he wrote the letter, he was deported to Germany. Before the trip, Willie put all his family jewelry and other valuables in the safekeeping of a German diplomat. The valuables were never returned.

1. 1. A Marianist Brother’s Perspective: This letter was written by Brother Francis Xavier Bertrand of Japanese vice province of the Society of Mary, and a French teacher at St. Joseph College, a Marianist school established on the Bluff in Yokohama in 1901 and closed in 2000. The letter, delivered “through the kindness of Archbishop Spellman” of News York, was translated from the French and distributed to friends and former students of St. Joseph in the United States. My grandparents, Julius and Betty Helm, whose children, Larry, Ray and Don attended St. Joseph, and had moved to Piedmont, California shortly before the war, copied the letter and and passed it on to friends and relatives on October 9, 1945

Park Hotel, Gora, Hakone Japan Sept 15, 1945

Dear Brother John Kessler,

Finally the World War has ended, and we are all still alive. Who would have believed it? We are profiting by the kindness of Archbishop Spellman, Archbishop of New York, who honored us today with one of his pleasant visits, and who took it upon himself to carry our correspondence to America. Mail in Japan is not functioning as yet for foreigners. (Mssr. Spellman gave us a gift of $250 and instructed Captain Cyril Curtis, an Australian, to buy us supplies. It was this Captain who flew the Archbishop here. Incidentally, he is one of our old boys. And now I am going to begin to relate a few of the vicissitudes of war we underwent.

In the month of September,1943, the 29^th, I believe, the police came to tell us that all the foreigners on the Bluff in Yokohama must evacuate. We immediately searched for a desirable and convenient place. We discussed for quite some time whether should move to the seashore or take up new quarters somewhere on the Tokyo plain. Finally we decided, after the New Year 1944, to live in the mountains. We were able to rent St. Joseph’s College for 12,000 yen a month. This allowed us to move into the hotel in the Hakone mountains at the bottom of “Big Hell” [a hot spring.] We used thirty and a half trucks to transport the most necessary and important things to Gora. These trucks went irregularly from the 20th of February 1944 to the end of March. The first time I went along in a truck. I almost had an accident. The roads here, as you know, are very steep and our truck didn’t use gas. It was one of those charcoal burners you no doubt remember. Well, the one I was on stopped and almost rolled into a ravine.

 Finally, one after another, we all arrived for good on the 17th of March. Living here was very trying because in the month of March it was very cold, with much snow, and there was no furnace installed. As the hotel had been neglected during the war, the windows and doors didn’t close very well. By the followings winter we were able to install a stove in the study room and it was O.K. One of the best things about the hotel was the fact that there were warm baths of mineral water coming from one side of Big Hell (which you know.) Unfortunately, it is only from time to time that we have this warm mineral water.

Toward the end of April 1944, we started school with seven pupils. Now we have forty boys and girls. At the present, I have 14 pupils taking music lessons, most of whom are girls. They are using three of our five pianos. I left one piano in Yokohama, taking a chance on it; the fifth was taken to Tokyo and fortunately was not burned. The little organ we had in the second parlor at Yokohama was sent to the Gyosei (Morning Star School) and burned there.

In Tokyo, the building at the Morning Star School was not bombed, but four buildings caught fire and burned. Fire from our neighbors spread to the large school constructed of reinforced concrete, then to the Brothers’ house then to the science building, and finally to the tailor shop, kitchen and refectory. We especially regret the loss of our rich and valuable library and the wonderful museum, which took go many years to develop.

At Kobe our school building was bombed and burned, but our Brothers had already moved to the country. Father Fage(Benefactor and Affiliated Member of the Society) was caught in his burning church and trapped by falling debris. He was burned to death while trying to save the Blessed Sacrament. What a beautiful death for a missionary after having been at the post in Kobe for fifty years.

At Osaka the Meisei (Bright Star School) suffered great damage due to incendiary bombs. All was burned except the building constructed of reinforced concrete.

At Nagasaki, the Kaisei (Star of the Sea School) suffered damages due to the atomic bomb, the new weapon which Hitler hoped to use to crush the allies.

Star School at Sapporo was spared as also our school at Yokohama. But our neighbor, the sisters [St. Maur’s], were burned out at Yokohama, Tokyo and Shizuoka. The third story of the main school building at Yokohama caught fire by accident, and that on Christmas Eve 1944. We still own our school in Yokohama and will come back if there are pupils. We will return there, soon, perhaps. In the meantime thieves have not scrupled to steal many things, among them curtains from the windows and the large drop on the stage in the auditorium. Today, two of our brothers , Bros. Crambach and Gessler, received an obedience to return to Yokohama to watch over St. Joseph College.

You did well to leave for America because the internees of your [American]concentration camp were moved to our old country house near Yamakita [in the mountains outside Yokohama.] They were not well treated especially towards the end. One man (Emery Jones) died of hunger. American fliers let fall 40 sacks of supplies for them. One sack went through the window of the old confession room.

Now you see, I am writing my old pupil and walking companion to return old favors and to acquaint you again with the French language. When are we going to take our next walk together. Here in the country near the Grand Fujiya Hotel it is very beautiful. The big shot of the American military authorities have taken over the Fujiya Hotel as their quarters. On the 6^th of Sept we received our first visit from American soldiers and drank to their health. The next day they took many photographs and some movies of our Brothers and pupils for American papers. If you watch carefully you many see them. They also promised to send some to Dayton University. We are now 24 brothers. Bro. Gerome left here last spring to die in Tokyo of an ordinary sickness.

Bro. Bertrand.

2) Tales of a Mixed Race Teenage Survivor

Letter from John Schultz — Jan 8, 1946

Dear Ray,

I thank you very much for your nice letter which I received it yesterday. I reached San Francisco on 18th of December last year. It was lucky for me that I have found two American Red Cross men on the ship. When the ship reached San Francisco, these two men brought me to the American Red Cross in the  city. The lady in there was very kind to me. On the first day, I slept in the Y.M.C.A. But it is the first time for me in United States since 18 years that I don’t know where to go. I even don’t know how to go to the restaurant. So I did not eat anything on that day. The lady in the Red Cross worried about me and put me in the Buddhist Church in S.F. because there are lots of Japanese people, and I am used to it with Japanese character.

On the second day, I went to see Bro. Tribull. He was very glad when he saw me and at the same time he was laughing because she put the Catholic boy in the Buddhist Church.

At his place, I was told about your telephone number. So when I went back to Church, I have phoned you, but you were not there. I heard that you went to Jujitsu lessons. On the third day, I went to see him again and he introduced me to other brothers. I will tell you an interesting thing that those Japanese people in the Church don’t believe that Japan was really defeated. On the same day, at half past six, I took a train from Oakland and went to Corvallis, Oregon. It took me 21 hours. I met my father at Albany. He was very glad when he saw me. I went to my uncle’s house. I spent my Christmas at his house. After three days of staying in Corvallis,1 took a bus and came to Olympia. 0lympia is a small town, but it is very beautiful. Perhaps I can say that it is one of the most beautiful town I have ever seen since I came to United States. I used to live near the Capitol Bldg, but it was raining all day that I had no chance to go and see it. After three days I took a bus and came to Renton. First 1 got off at Seattle (my home town) and took another bus to

Renton. I am in my aunty,s house now. She is very kind to me. I am in here for ten days already. That means I have traveled three states in ten days. Even the circus cannot travel three states in ten days.

I am very glad to hear that you are attending to school. I have wasted three and half years of school, because when the war broke out, our source of money from America was cut off. Afterwards, Mr. Haegeli told me to come to school, so went, but two months after, school was closed because Bluff was in the fortified zone. After the school was closed, all the teachers went to Hakone and opened the school there, but the police did not permit me to go there.

When Japan declared war against America on 8th of December (7th in U.S.) I was only 15 years old, so the police did not say anything to me. But on the first and second day, I did not go out anywhere, because I was afraid of the police. 1 have gone to the school for a month after the war was started. After that, I went out to work in the typewriter company in Tokyo. They paid me only 15 yen ($1) per month. With that much money, I helped my mother.She was her very glad much when I sent so much with the money, but I helped her quite much with other thing, because I lived in Tokyo and ate the meals at the company.

The government and the people were very kind to me at the beginning of the war, because they were winning all the time. But when they were defeated at the Island of Guadal Canar (crossed 1) and lost the way to go to Australia, the  government began to talk bad thing about America to the people, and they forbade to use the enemy people in the company. So ten months after, I was out of job and I came back home again. After that, my uncle used to give us little money, and we made the farm on the back of our house to raise the vegetables. The government even tell the people to give out all the Jazz records. Persons who did not give out these records were be punished. They said that they cannot fight against America when they are listening to the American music. After I was back from Tokyo, I was at home for about ten months. Afterward, Mr. Haegeli told me to come to school, so I went into 1st High School class from Sept 16, 1943. It was too difficult for me and Mr. Grosser taught the Algebra, which we have to learn in one year, he taught in two months, so I don’t even know the addition of the algebra. The school was closed on the 22nd of Dec 43, and all the foreigners have to move out from the Bluff. Honmoku was also the fortified zone. It was lucky for us that we were out of the zone. After the school was closed, the government made more strict law against the American people who was not interned. I was not permitted to go out from my house unless if it is not necessary. Even they don’t permit me to go out to the town to buy something. I was only allowed to go around my house and I could go as far as Sagiyama. I was not permitted to pass the tunnel and go to the other side of the town. Once, I went to the shore, secret,and on the way back home, I was caught by the police. He took me to the police station, and did not let me go out for half a day (I was not in the jail) That day, I don’t know how many slaps and kicks I got. After I came back home in the evening, I got sick, and I went into the bed for eight days. Then I came back home and sat down,that was the end for me. I could not even stand up on account of the kicks I got. It was 15th of February 1944. I will never forget this day. This is secret to everybody except you. Even Donker doesn’t know about this. After that, I was strictly guarded by the police, I have to write the diary and bring to the police station every week. I have done this till the date of the air raid. After that, what I can do was just stay home and help my mother. When the B29 begin to appear on the sky of Tokyo, most of the rich Japanese and all the foreigners except the enemy people had gone to the country. We could not go because we are enemies of Japan. That is why, on 29th of May 1945, we were burnt out. Donker Curtius , Mr. Mayes, Eddie Duer, Bryden, Gomes, and rest of other enemy people were also burnt out. The air laid began at nine o ^t clock in the morning, and finished at eleven o’clock. Two hours after, there is no more fire. At the same time, there is no more Yokohama left.  used to say “Gone with the fire” for Yokohama, Americans dropped average of two bombs to every people of Yokohama (including small and big bombs) Believe it or not, but it was written in the Japanese newspaper. For me I got one extra bomb than other people, we got three of hundred pounds incendiary bombs into our house, I think you know how small my house was. The air-raid siren alarmed, when I was still in bed. That time, the planes are over our house already. Whenever they bomb Tokyo, they use to fly over our house. That is why,  thought they are going to bomb Tokyo again. I was counting the planes in the bed. First line was with ten planes, but they did not drop any bombs. Second line was twenty planes. Third was thirty three, fourth was fifty two. And with the fifth line of hundred one planes they dropped the bombs around your house and Honmoku. I will not forget that noise, when the bombs are coming down from the sky, I cannot remember anything but, when the bombs came into my house, it made a big noise, and at the same time, what I can see was only the black smoke and the red flames of the fire. At this time, I got a burn on my hand and on my leg. It was the hottest and the coldest day I ever had in Yokohama. During the fire it was very hot  and in the evening it was very cold, because I have no more house and clothing, I came out with on gray short pants and one pink sweater. I came out with no underwear, no underpants, no shoes and no socks. I was wondering what shall I do this winter when the war does not finish: but luckily the war is over and we won the war, so the army supplied me with the clothing. After the air-raid, I walked around my house, but I could not find my mother and sister. On the next day, I found my mother and sister’s body in the canal. Both suffocated to death by smoke. That day, I can’t even understand what the people are talking about, because I lost my mother and sister at once, word that I cannot forget was: the neighbor told me that mother and sister must be glad because they were killed by the American bombs. Two days after, I made a small shack with burnt tin and burnt wire. During the war time, we could not get any wires and nails; but after the airlaid you could find the tins, wires, and nails in everywhere, but they are all burnt ones; I used to live in this small shack for two and half months. On 15th of August, Japan surrendered and there was a negotiation that the US Army is going to come into Japan on the 26th of August. But they postponed till 28th because there was a typhoon, my shack was blown away. After that I used to live in the air laid shelter, because even I rebuild my shack, it was in the typhoon season. Three days after, I met one captain and I begin to work for him as an interpreter. I worked for him for three weeks. After that I was sent to Manila as a recovered personnel. I got on C54 from Atsugi and went to Manila via Okinawa. It took only ten hours. I was in 29^th Replacement Depot (25 miles south of Manila) for four weeks I used to get better food and better treatment than the ordinary soldiers, because I was a recovered person, I was in there from October 2nd to October 30^th. Afterwards, they sent me back to Japan, because I was civilian. They told me to go to Tokyo and go through the American Consulate in Yokohama. It was not my fault. It was the army who made the mistake. I have landed on Atsugi Airfield on 1st of November. I was in Tokyo for one month. During that time I went through the American Consulate, and the army put me on the ship called LT. S.S. Leonard Wood. They know that I am going to Seattle, and they put me on the ship that goes to San Francisco. But it was lucky for me, because the ship that goes to Seattle left Yokohama game time with us, and this ship went into the storm and lost all the lifeboats and one man.

I left Yokohama on the 4th of Dec. and reached San Francisco on 18^th. Donker Curtius was interned three days after the war started. When I went to his house to see Bouldwin and Henry on the 8th of Dec., he was very intoxicated, because he was so discouraged by the outbreak of war. But he came back from the camp in the end of 1944, because he got sick. After he came back, they have moved to the back side of the Honmoku middle school. During the war time, I did not visit him so many times, because we were both enemies of Japan. Maybe I didn’t even visit him ten times, after the war was started.

I myself was told by the police not to visit the enemy people of Japan. On 29th of May, he was also burnt out. His house was burnt and his neighbors were not burnt. Afterwards they have rent the room from the neighbor and they are still there. Since Jimmy and Joyce were Japanese citizen, they could go any place they want to go. His grandfather was interned when the war was started, but he came back home three weeks after, because he was too old. He died in 1942. After the school was closed, Jimmy was just playing around the house, but Joyce was attending to Koran Gakko till the date of air raid, Jimmy is still small but Joyce is very big now. She is only little bit smaller than I. On 29 of May, his house was also burnt down, and they are living in the air-raid shelter now. I saw both of them once after I came back from Manila. His father is working as an interpreter now. When 11th Airborne Division occupied Sendai, he also went to Sendai. He is still there now.

Japan had a short of food during the war time. I think you know that. The time when you left Japan, the sugar and the rice was already rationed. After the outbreak of war, the food condition became worse and worse. In 1942, even the fish and the vegetables became rationed. In the same year, the fuel like charcoal and wood became rationed. In 1943, they used to give us half of the food what we need. In 1945, we could not get anything. The fishermen does not go out to fish, because they were afraid of the submarine and the sea planes. After the air raid, the food what they gave me for 20 days was just enough for me for only four days. They used to give a little bit of rice and hard soy beans and some shoyu. They gave me only 2 sen worth of salt per month. Vegetables once in about three weeks; frozen fish, once in about three months. I did not see the meat for three years.After Saipan was taken by the Americans, we could not get any sugar. In 1945, eight pounds of sugar cost 5000 yen in the black market. So I got sick after U.S. soldiers came into Japan, because I took too much sweet at once. When the army came into Japan, I was weight only 85 lbs., (only three times as heavier as a turkey) and I am 135 lbs now. The day when I went to Manila, I weighed 110 lbs. That means I have gained 50 lbs in 4 months.

In Washington, we have “liquid sunshine” every day. These few days, we have frost in the morning, but usually it is very warm. (Much warmer than Yokohama) If it is fair weather, we could see Mt  Rainier from our house.

I’ll close here, otherwise there will be no limit. Please give  my best regards to your parents and Larry. Shultz

3)

Oct 24, 1945

Letter from Willie Helm, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Julius Helm and Ray and Larry

533 Boulevard Way, Piedmont, Calif.

Authorities ordered all foreigners to clear out of Honmoku and Bluff. Most went to Hakone and Karuizawa orders came March 1944.

Willie’s family went to Karuizawa after having taken most of the clothing and some old furniture to Karuizawa. The good furniture as well as baby grand, phonograph, Frigidaire, washing machine, sun lamp, were placed in go-downs [warehouses]  in the settlement no. 90. Which was burned down.

Agnes, Veronica and Richard were in Karuizawa and still there.

Willie lived half time in Karuizawa and half time with Bud.

Bud purchased 804 [Julius’s house?] with all contents. We thought it a good idea instead of any Nip getting it. But now it’s no use as all burnt out together with contents.

In the excitement, Bud only rescued his tuxedo, swallow tail suit, hard form shirts, still with New York laundry labels and 85 cents alarm clock. All the rest of his stuff is gone.

Butter is now 100 to 150 yen a pound but impossible to get. Potatoes 20- 30 yen a kwan. Rice 60- 80 yen a sho. Agnes still has kidney trouble.

After the fire, Willie moved to a room in helm house. On the morning of the 29^th of May practically all of Daijinguyama went up in smoke up to former mis ross’s house.  Same day all of Motomachi, Isezakicho, Honomku were gone.

What is left of Honmoku near our place, just a couple of Japanese houses, all our houses—Willie’s Gomei, Bernard-Bells houses broken up through bombs.

Although [Japanese]soldiers are back it’s impossible to get carpenters.

The Nips seem to be dazed that they lost the war—how long they will be like that we do not know—they ought to work since they have no food to eat but even if they had money what could they buy.

When 804 burned on the 29^th, Bud shared Willie’s room in the Helm House. Everybody being very nervous before they left Willie’s place. Agnes and they were no more on speaking terms—Willie also got somewhat fed up—outside of these there were another two burnt out people put into the house. Four guests at one time for such a long period was too much. (E+L

[sisters Eloise and Louisa] were staying there during that time)

On the 24^th of August Nip authorities gave orders for all people living in Helm House to clear out within 24 hours as the place had to be made for sleeping quarters for U.S. officers. Nips would not even allow Bud and Willie to stay there so had to find quarters.

Katchan lost all her stuff, went to the country and now came back two weeks ago and working for Walter—she has only one dress what she has on. Walters leg at last better, had been bad for over two years.

Bernards living in servants rooms of Barney’s place, old man now 92 years old they were interned up to the end of war. Total eyesight, 98 percent hearing gone but brains working normal and good appetite.

Would appreciate very much if you could do something if any way possible—victuals as well as money—Willie will repay when he can—nothing can be done from here. Would be nice if they could be brought to your town.

I’ve never been much of a fan for art exhibits in Japan. Too often they throw together a bunch of stuff without any rhyme or reason. But this exhibit at the Tokyo Station Gallery uses woodblock prints, oil paintings, photographs, textiles and even an image of a bathtub installation to offer deep insights into the myriad of ways in which railroads have had a deep and enduring impact on Japanese culture, labor practices, social behavior and urban developments. Here are just a few examples.

This image doesn’t contain any images of trains, but it established the context for the train’s introduction, by illustrating the many areas in which the arrival of westerners posed a challenge to Japanese tradition. The people in western dress are shown beating up on people in traditional dress. The heads represent the challenges. On the bottom right is brick, and to the left is a lamp. Further to the left is a rabbit, which is beating on a wild boar.

This is one of many classic woodblock prints that show “black ships,” which brought the westerners to Japan, and the trains hey introduced.

This woodblock print by Kobayashi Kiyochika is from 1879. It’s only been seven years since the first train traveled from Yokohama to Shimbashi, but already the train, while fierce with flames coming from its locomative already seems somehow romantic and very much a part of the Japanese landscape.

Rail lines are being laid at a furious pace along the Tokaido, long a traditional route to walk between Kyoto and Tokyo. In this traditional board game image created in 1889, each box represents a train station on the Tokaido Railway.

You know trains have become a part of every day life when an image comes out illustrating a murder that took place on a trains, as was this 1994 image by Utagawa Kunisada III.

By 1940, the railroads are deeply imbedded in Japanese society and Japan is making its own contribution to train travel: bento boxes that include regional specialties. This is the light hearted side of the Japan experience, but there are many more dark images representing labor strife during the early 1930s. Their are designs for the special train cars built for occupation authorities after the war[

To many westerners, the image we have of Japan today are the faceless crowds best represented by images of people pouring into train stations. It sometimes feels as if that image of blank, inscrutable faces says something about the culture. But it’s easy to forget that this image, is to a great extent, a product of Japanese railways, not something that was part of traditional Japan. When you are crushed in a train, you need to put on that mask to hide yourself.

Of course there are flights of fancy and other paintings that are Daliesque

In 2016, I gathered in Kreuzlingen with some 120 relatives from Britain, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Canada. We were there to hear about the history of the Swiss Binswangers, a family that for four generations operated the Bellevue Sanatorium, which treated members of royal and wealthy families from around the world.

Next week I will visit Augsburg, where we will travel further down our larger family tree to meet the descendants of Moses Binswanger, my great, great, great, great grandfather. Here he is:

In taking a look at the Moses family, I will draw heavily from a short history of the Swiss Binswangers by Richard Binswanger. I will also draw from extensive research put together by family historians Andreas Binswanger and Walter Ertz and family genealogist Jane Schinzinger.

Moses Binswanger, a Jewish peddler, who was born in 1783 in Huerben, not far from Munich. His grandparents lived in Binswangen, 33 miles away, and they mostly likely took the name of that village as their last name when they moved first to Osterberg and then Huerben. Jews had lived in Huerben since 1518 when they had been driven out of Donauwoerth, where they had controlled much of the trade in salt.

In 1670, Count Maximilian of Liechtenstein asked the Emperor for permission to expels the Jews from Huerben but the request was denied, and five years later the count allowed the construction of a synagogue and a house for the rabbi. Ritual slaughter of animals was allowed, and for each cow or large animal slaughtered, the animal’s tongue had to be delivered to the manor–although in 1717, a new rule allowed a fee of 15 Kreutzer to be substituted for the tongue. For small animals, a fee of five Kreutzer was charged.

Moses married Bluemle Goetz, who was from the village of Fischach, about 14 miles away where Jews had lived since about 1570. The Jews of Fisbach were moneylenders, and also traded horses and cattle. Even today, farmers in the region tell stories of how the Jews had long been considered so honest in business dealings.

During the 30-years-war, which lasted until 1648, the Jews fled to Augsburg. Although they were allowed to return to Fisbach after the war, they were told they could only live in five houses. They moved in, and expanded each house until, by 1743, there were 113 people living in those five houses. Neighbors complain constantly and finally, in 1802, they were allowed to build more housing. A Jewish synagogue was built in Augsburg in 1739, and a cemetery in 1774. Today, one memorial carries the inscription: “Dedicated to the victims of the racial persecution 1933-1945. In Memory of the Dead: An Admonishment for the Living.”

The earliest city records of Binswangers in the region go back to 1799, when Salomon Binswanger, apparently facing difficult times, sells his pews–men’s seat No. 4 and women’s seat No. 20 in the upper Synagogue to Simon Laundauer, a protected Jew of Huerben for 35 florin. A month later, three Jews, including Seligman Binswanger, seem to be doing better because they contract with three master carpenters to build three new houses, paying 600 florins in upfront cash. (In 1818, Seligman Binswanger, now a widower in Huerben, transfers his house No. 123 to his son Marx. The house has a living room, an adjoining bedroom, a kitchen, a bedroom under the roof, wood storage and furnishings.) Seligman is also the father of Moses Binswanger.

The first records of Moses Binswanger date to 1809 when he makes a request of the Royal Bavarian Administration to be granted residency in Osterberg. The document references an attached statement noting his intention to marry Bluemle Goetz from Fischach. Including a dowry from his father of 100 florins, a dowry from Bluemle’s family of 625 florins, Moses’s personal savings of 300 florins, the couple ill start life flush with 1025 Florins. Moses is pronounced “financially responsible,” and is granted his request to be excused from military service. Moses is 26 years old at the time. As a subject of the Osterberg manor, he was assigned a lot for the construction of a residence.

The marriage contract of Moses and Bluemle Goetz is registered in the Manor Osterberg files in 1811. This time, Moses’ name is given as Moises Loew-Binswanger. The contract includes a prenuptual agreement of sorts. If the husband dies in the first year of marriage without a child having born, the wife will receive everything she has brought to the marriage. If he dies in the second year, she only receives half of her contribution to the marriage, but retains the right to occupy the couple’s residence. If the wife dies in the first year, the husband will return everything received her to her relatives. By the third year, the husband becomes the sole heir of the money. Many of the documents are written in Hebrew and written alternatively as Moses, Moises or Moyses.

The is Bluemle Goetz:

After Moses and Blumle married, they moved to Osterberg where Moses worked as a peddler selling textiles and glass door-to-door. He traveled to villages as much as 45 miles away, most likely on foot.

Moses had nine sons of whom four went to the United States. One of those sons founded Binswanger Glass, which would develop into one of the country’s largest window makers. Another son would stay in Germany and develop a large vinegar and beer brewing company. Yet a third son, Ludwig born in 1820, was trained in Germany as a doctor and moved to Kreutzlingen to take a job in a psychiatric hospital.

Seven years later, Ludwig married Jeannette Landauer, a very wealthy woman, and with her money opened a private psychiatric clinic, the Bellevue Asylum, in Kreutzlingen, Switzerland, right on Lake Constance on the border with Germany. 

As Richard Binswanger writes in his short history of the family: The asylum was founded in what was originally a convent and later became the publishing house “Belle-Vue”, which had become very well known for publishing liberal literature and promoting progressive ideas, written by German political refugees. The publishing house was not regarded favorably in Germany, and with the conservative backlash in Europe after [the revolution of]1848, the publishing house lost its economic foundation and was sold to the Binswangers.

When the Sanatorium opened, it ran the following advertisement showing the view that Belle-Vue had of Lake Constance.

Ludwig and Jeannette’s idea was to allow patients to move freely on a campus shared with the staff and the doctors. Once a week the patients dined with Ludwig’s family. This approach came out of the reform movement in psychiatry in the mid-19^th century, which believed that the patient’s needs should always come first. That approach was followed at Bellevue right until the sanatorium closed in 1980.

The Sanatorium was successful, and gradually added elegant homes to house the wealthy patients.

Ludwig had never been a very religious Jew. In 1848 he did make “a blazing speech for the emancipation of the Jews in Munich.” Liberal activists involved in the 1848 revolution experienced a crackdown by monarchists, and, by some accounts, Ludwig moved to Switzerland to escape the crackdown.

Although Ludwig had observed kashrut in Munich, when he moved to Konstanz, a German city on the border with Switzerland, that became difficult. Konstanz had expelled Jews from the city 400 years before and there was little or no Jewish community. Since Ludwig wanted to participate in political life and in the community, he converted to Christianity and joined the church at Kreuzlingen, a Swiss town nearby. His Jewish family was unhappy with that decision and there are reports that when his mother was on her deathbed, members of Ludwig’s family were not permitted to see her. When Ludwig’s siblings created the Moses and Blumle Binswanger Foundation in the 1900s to provide scholarships for members of the family, Ludwig was not a part of that effort.

Ludwig and Jeanette’s Sanatorium was successful, and the couple bought a rural estate, Brunneg Castle in 1874. That castle, which was originally built in 1680, became the family’s home for more than a century. It is now the Schloss Brunnegg Hotel. Andreas and Christophe Binswanger recall how there were two living rooms in the castle. In the summer, all the living room furniture would be moved to the living room on the north side of the house, which was cooler. In the “winter house” the living room was in the south and all the furniture had to be moved to that living room. Christophe Binswanger, later a World Bank economist, remembers the attic being full of cushions and large suitcases with drawers where the kids enjoyed playing. It would be the home first of Ludwig 1 then Ludwig II, then Robert I (my great, great grandfather) and then Otto ll. Since the Binswanger philosophy was that patient needs always came first, there were few boundaries between the patients and the family. Patients often ate with the family and the kids often spent time in the Asylum. Some of the kids were fine with it and loved running around the asylum. One Binswanger, however, was less enamored of the experience and wrote a book based on his memories growing up on the Sanatorium.

Ludwig I and his son Robert I bought the surrounding land, establishing a modern farm that provided the market in Constance with dairy products among other farm products. The family had 100 cows, and family members recall drinking milk directly from the teets of the cows. Later, when there was a tuberculosis epidemic among deer that was infecting cows in the Swiss Alps, Otto became concerned and sold all his cows. Visiting the farm in 2016, I thought it looked more like an elegant estate than a farm with its handsome barns and stables. The hay was stored in the barn below. There were also silos to store the grass. It was mixed with salt to feed cows in winter. The pigsty was built of brick. When the government planned to build a tunnel under the farm for a highway, the family objected on the grounds that the noise would disturb the pigs.

Robert Binswanger, my great great-grandfather, took over as head of the sanatorium in 1880. He married Bertha Hasenclever, who came from a wealthy Dutch family and whose riches help to finance an even more rapid expansion at Bellevue.

Robert and Bertha had five children including Ludwig 1881-1966, who would become the next head of Bellevue and a famous psychiatrist, Otto ll 1882-1968, Robert II, 1892-1963 and my great-grandmother Anna, 1877-1941.

Writes Richard Binswanger:

During Robert’s lifetime, Bellevue expanded and flourished. He created a magnificent park of around ten hectares with 15 houses for only 60 patients, where they lived, sometimes only one individual in a house together his staff. In one of these villas. I spent the first happy twelve years of my life. This “Bauwut” – building obsession – of Robert was one of the causes of the later decline of Bellevue, as the preservation and upkeep of the architectural substance far exceeded the financial capacities of the sanatorium. But until that point, almost sixty years would pass. Under the leadership of Robert I, Bellevue had the greatest economic success in its whole history.

There was an engine building that housed what looks like two generators to power the electricity on the campus.

The asylum was now a massive facility. The administration and kitchen facilities alone required a large building.

A large, high-ceilinged central kitchen produced food that was prepared in iron cookware that was then taken by car to each patient’s house. Richard remembers his father would alternate his fare between food cooked for the employees and that prepared for the patients so that he knew what everyone was eating. Once a week his parents had meals with the patients. That included the countess of Bern, a Miss Kernix who was bipolar.

 There was a butchery in an annex of the kitchen. “We all loved the kitchen,” Richard recalls. The parents would complain, but the cooks would always give us something to eat. There was a Mr. Raas? who trained the cooks. He had an unlimited supply of ice at a time when that was rare.

More modest was the “Middle Building” where the Physical therapist and housekeeper lived. The ironing was also done here and there was a big stove on which the flat irons were heated.

While most patients were given a lot of freedom, there was also Parkhaus, a special facility for patients with more severe problems.

Many patients were housed in elegant homes.

In addition to the houses pictured above there was the villas Bodan, Tannegg, Seehof and the Orangerie. The Orangerie had a bowling alley. There was also a building for the gardeners.

The villas were built to house the many wealthy patients Bellevue catered to. Among the patients was Hellene Muller who came from one of the wealthiest families in the Netherlands. Her family owned Muller and Co. Helene, studied art under H.P. Bremmer and began collecting art. She was one of the first European women to put together a major art collection and among the first collectors to recognize the artistic genius of Vincent vanGogh. She ultimately collected 97 paintings and 185 drawings by van Gogh. She and her husband donated their entire collection to the state along with their 75-acre forested estate, which is the site of the Kroller-Muller Art Museum.

Robert’s brother, Otto, also made his mark. He married Henriette Baedeker 1859-1941. According to Richard’s history, Otto “was professor at the medical faculty of the University of Jena GE and Chief of its Psychiatric University Clinic for several decades, which under his leadership became one of the most famous in Europe.

He treated many famous figures of his time, among others Friedrich Nietzsche. He was one of the first psychiatrists of his era to recognize the importance of Sigmund Freud and was considered a scientist and clinician of the same significance as Alois Alzheimer. He was the first to describe hypertensive vascular encephalopathy, a form of dementia, named “Binswanger’s disease” by Alzheimer himself. His children were Reinhard 1884-1939, Margaretha 1885-1931, Amelie 1887-1977, and Lilly, known as Hertha 1892-1966.

The sanatorium’s solarium that was a popular gathering place.

The solarium was a glass hallway that extended out from the main building and wrapped around the entry to the sanatorium. The sunlit glass hall, glassgung as it was called, was art nouveau, perhaps designed by the architect Heinrich Jurgensen, a German architect who spent much of his career in Denmark. It was often used for entertaining.

The glassgung was used for the filming of Martha, a critically acclaimed drama by Reiner Werner Fassbinder made for German television that came out in 1973.

Robert’s second wife was Marie-Louise Meyer, called Mietzie, 1871-1941. The couple had two sons: Paul Eduard, called Edu, 1898-1959 and Herbert, called Hebi, 1900-1975.

Marie-Louise was a beautiful and charming woman, and when her husband died, she left their home at Schloss Brunnegg and moved into her house in Uttwil on the Swiss side of the Lake of Constance. There she gathered many artists and writers.

Ludwig Binswanger ll followed his father Robert as chief medical director of Bellevue in 1911. He lived on the Bellevue campus in the Gartenhaus pictured below.

In retrospect, those were good years. Bellevue became one of the most famous private psychiatric clinics in the world, receiving patients from all continents. Patients included princes, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II and captains of industry. Many famous artists also spent time at Bellevue, including the painter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the dancer, Vaslav Nijnsky, the actor Gustav Gründgens and the art historian Aby Warburg.

But those good times would not last. First there was World War I. During the war, the sanatorium faced economic difficulties because foreigners, who accounted for 90 percent of its patients, had to leave Bellevue amid the rise in nationalism. “We never recovered from the crisis,“ says Richard, the historian.

Even so, the Sanatorium remained a center of social and intellectual activity. Ludwig Binswanger studied under Jung. Jung had introduced Binswanger to Freud in 1907, and the two had become good friends. A collection of their correspondences was collected in a book some years ago that has been translated into English. When Freud became ill, he left Vienna to visit Binswanger. Freud also referred many of his patients to the Sanatorium.

The two remained friends even though they differed in many of their views. Binswanger, for example believed in existential therapy. Binswanger uses a German term “Dasein,” which means literally “being there.” Some translate it as human existence, or a sense of moving beyond oneself. Heidegger translated Dasein as an openness, as a meadow is an openness in a forest.  Sartre calls it “nothingness.” There is also this concept that you can extend yourself into the world as with a telephone or telescope and the world can come into you, as in an artificial hip, or the society and cultural order into which we are born.

When we are enslaved by social norms there is a condition called “falleness.” Following Martin Buber, Binswanger adds the more positive notion of “we-ness” for love and an openness to each other. Binswanger sees this as “being-beyond-the-world.” Existentialists recognize that life is hard. You never have enough information to make a decision. And you will die. We can’t choose not to choose. We feel anxiety or dread toward the future.  Anxiety is a condition of being human. We are not like a table, eternal. We are always about to slip off into nothingness. If we do not do what we know we should, we feel guilt. We feel regret over past decisions that hurt us. We feel regret when we choose the easy way out. When we lose our nerve, there is a focus on being authentic, which is to be aware of yourself and your circumstances, your social world, the inevitability of anxiety of guild and death. It means involvement, compassion and commitment. The ideal of mental health is not happiness. The goal is to do your best. If you trade possibility for actuality, you are inauthentic. You have given up. Each person is unique, so each person has a different way to be authentic. If you are too busy to notice the moral decisions you must make, you are living in what Sartre calls bad faith. The neurotic person is aware of the choices that have to be faced and is overwhelmed by them and so freeze or panics. Or they find something small, a phobic object or compulsion, a target of anger or a pretense of disease. Although you can address the symptoms of all this, an existential psychologist says you need to face the reality of Dasein. The existential psychologist tries to discover the client’s world view. Their everyday lived world. Your physical world, your social relations, your culture. What is it that is most central to your sense of who you are? Binswanger wants to know your view of your past, present and future. Are you forever trying to recapture golden days? Do you live in the future always hoping for a better life? Is life a complex adventure or here today and gone tomorrow. How do you treat space? Open or closed? Cozy or vast? Warm or cold? Is life a journey or is there an immovable center? The existential psychologist allows the patient to express the full richness of their lives in their own words and in their own time. If there are dreams, the EP wants to know what you think they mean? Therapy involves an encounter, an opening up. It’s a dialogue between psychologist and patient. The goal is the autonomy of the client. Like teachiing a child to ride a bicycle, you can only help people become more fully human if you are prepared to release them.  This approach is considered unscientific by most psychologists today. Proponents say it offers a better, more refined way toward understanding human life.

There is a famous case of Ellen West who as a teenager would say “either Ceasar or nothing.”  At 17 she writes a poem asking the Sea-King to kiss her to death. When a friend comments on her weight, she begins to obsess about being fat. When parents interfere with an engagement, she becomes despondent. She marries her cousin in hopes of changing the trajectory of her life. But over time she becomes anorexic and twice attempts suicide. She is finally sent to Kreuzlingen where she lives comfortably with her husband. She is put under the care of Ludwig Binswanger. She writes a poem about her condition:

I’d like to die just as the birdling does That splits his throat in highest jubilation; And not to live as the worm on earth lives on, Becoming old and ugly, dull and dumb! No, feel for once how forces in me kindle, And wildly be consumed in my own fire.

She had divided life into the ethereal, pure world of the soul, writes Dr. C. George Boeree, and the “tomb world” tied to a bourgeois, corrupt society and a body with its base needs. Her anorexia, which reduced her body to a skeleton moved in that direction. The case is famous because Ludwig Binswanger chose to listen to her and let her express her perspective.

Because she continued to attempt suicide, she was given a choice: She must be committed to a special ward for serious patients where she would probably continue to deteriorate, or she should be released, in which case there was a high likelihood she would commit suicide.

Back in the real world she does better. She eats chocolates and writes letters. But then she takes a lethal dose of poison.

Under the final medical director, Wolfgang Binswanger, the philosophy of the sanatorium moved more toward the self-actualization philosophy of Carl Rogers. Wolfgang even experimented with drugs according to his wife.

The sanatorium gradually fell into decline following the retirement of Ludwig ll. The family faced many sorrows that also weakened the institution.

Robert III, the son of Ludwig II committed suicide as did Beat, son of Eduard. There seems to have been a tendency toward depression. My great-grandmother, born Anna Binswanger, attempted suicide in 1929. But there were other tragedies as well including the death of Peter, son of Kurt in a military aircraft crash as well as the early death of Werne, who the family had hoped would restore and revitalize Bellevue after the Second World War. There were also severe economic crises after both World War I and II, followed by the decline in the wealth of the aristocracy and the broader economic decline that gradually wore away at Bellevue.

The farm survived for a while. Andreas Binswanger, the historian, took over the farm from his father in 1968 and introduced computer systems to optimize the production of grain, apples and other products. He figured out that the cows were losing money and persuaded his father to sell the cows. Richard, who lived in the main house with his father, Otto, remembers waking up to a big fire at the barn. When Andreas retired, there was nobody to take over the farm and so it was sold to become a school for adolescents with learning disabilities.

I was 12 when I visited the sanatorium with my family. We had dinner with Wolfgang Binswanger and his wife and children. We received a tour of the sanatorium and I remember the patients painting in what must have been the glassed-in halls of the solarium. The campus was pretty and park- like. It may have had as many patients as it did earlier in the century, but they were probably less wealthy and that must have made it harder to charge high fees. The aristocracy that wase so important to Bellevue’s prosperity, was much in decline after World War I and all but gone by the end of World War II. The property was sold to a developer in 1980.

I look forward to learning more about this amazing family next week when I leave for Europe.

We are a childless couple. I’ve never felt particularly compelled to be a father, but accepted that I must, because it was what my wife wanted, and because I wanted someone to be there for us as we grew old. For medical reasons, mostly mine, we never conceived. We spent a year in our attempt. Every month we went to our fertility clinic for another round of sperm collection, washing, and artificial insemination. When we finally had to admit we would remain childless, my wife Hitomi was heartbroken and sobbing. “We could adopt,” I suggested. She answered in one word, “No.” We never spoke of it again. Now I understand.

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Usually attributed to sports writer Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, but according to my quick search, that may or may not be true. I kept thinking about it as I read your book. I appreciate that you shared not only your family’s victories and achievements, but also their losses, pain, anxieties, and vulnerabilities. Thank you for sharing those things not only about your family, but about you personally. Thank you for bleeding onto paper for us.

I mentioned my friend Andy Kimura. Andy and I bonded over my love of Japan and his interest in learning his cultural history. His father Taky Kimura was Bruce Lee’s most senior student and best friend. Andy carries on that martial arts legacy. His father’s story is a fascinating one, but it’s not my place to tell it. As soon as Andy received his copy of “Yokohama Yankee,” he wrote to tell me how much he was enjoying it. I can never really convey how thankful I am for your hard work, and for having stumbled across it in the downtown Seattle Kinokuniya bookstore. Blessings to you and your family.

(Note: This story was written by my mother about 1965 not long after the event. I was about 10 at the time, and I remember clearly the night our landlord came by our remote summer place and told us this story. Leslie Helm)

By Barbara Schinzinger Helm

Sit with me by the window — lean your elbows on the sill

and breathe the cold fresh morning air. The lake is still–smooth like a mirror. In the distance mountains peak like gold. That long tongue of land that made our bay lies dark andslumbering across from us. The rest is shadow, promises of color.

I hear the squeaking of an oar — a man stands upright in his fishing boat, gently rocking with the rowing; fishing line is trailing. Ripples form a V behind the boat — the mirror and the silence broken. Elegant Mt. Nantai looms at right, somewhere beyond the dark expanse of Lake Chuzenji, a tiny village at its foot.

Look to the left: the gentle curve of bay, a narrow, shallow sickle of a beach, the fisherman’s boat riding si1ently at anchor. Trees leaning over water, rocks reflected in its cold.

This is our side of the lake: rocks, a stoneretaining wall, a level piece of ground, a tiny house, the dirt road and the mountains in the back.

Hold your breath – when sunlight touches leaves across the bay, the colors will explode. Glowing, flaming reds; yellows soft, so gentle; oranges and browns; greens too, so light, so airy, thick, dark, saturated. Spots and splotches, dabs and swirls of color. You have never seen the like. I haven’t either. Only here!

“Yeah, that was a good one,” sighed Julie. The children had spent the afternoon with my Japanese stepmother while I had taken a long walk with my father where he lived far away at the other end of the lake. My stepmother had read them a ghost story about a woman who turns into a snake in the middle of the night, steals raw eggs from the fridge and then searches for children to eat. The story had affected them strongly, and it had taken quite a while to reassure the children when we returned. We had looked out at the tranquil lake, and I had pointed out to them how calm, how beautiful and lacking in malevolence nature was. I had told the children that there was no such thing as a ghost. The only threat to us, I said, would be a burglar, and no burglar would venture out to our little house, the only house for miles around, aside from the old house next door where a very old fisherman and her wife lived. (note: Though we never saw the old fisherman in those early years, there was a huge large trident leaning against his house, and we assumed he must be fierce.) Looking from our beds at the clear light of the stars, we had fallen asleep.

Tonight, an autumn storm was blowing in bringing more anxiety. Earlier in the afternoon, I had asked the boys to pull the boat up higher on the sand so it wouldn’t drift away. They had also put away folding chairs and any other light items that might be picked up by the wind and blown into the windows of the house.

Now the oil lamp swung gently, and our shadows on the wall shifted as the draft played with the flame. Chris had a blanket draped over his shoulders against the chill, and as another gust of wind blew through the room and made the shadows jump, he drew it more tightly around himself. Leslie gave a start and quickly looked over his shoulder at the window, making sure that nobody noticed his uneasiness. The curtain billowed and sank back.

Suddenly the dogs, who had been lying quietly in the hall gave a low, menacing growl. Julie pulled her head under her covers. Her voice came, soft and frightened: “Mother, do you think there is such a thing a hebi-onna (snake woman.)

I laughed with a heartiness I did not quite feel, “Of course not, Julie.”

The dog growled again, a long, low rumble. Chris, his arm clasped around his legs, his chin on his knees, gave me a quick glance. Then we heard the footsteps, and a knock on the glass door.

A movement like an electric current went through the group. The glass door rattled again. Someone was trying to open it.

I looked at Chris: “Please go and see who is there.” He seemed reluctant to get; up and go into the dark hall, go I called out:

“Who is there?”

“Hiraishi” came the faint reply through the doors. I took the flashlight from the wall and went out into the dark. When I opened the sliding door, the wind blew rain into the house.

At the door stood young Hiraishi. His short, stocky figure looked even smaller as he stood bent against the wind and rain. Water dripped from his cap, and his black slicker and black rubber boots glistened wet in the beam of my flashlight. His round, usually so cheerful face was pale and his dark eyes were frightened. His mouth worked as if he were trying to say something. Wet hair streaked his forehead.

“Please come in,” I said, hoping he would close the door quickly. He stepped into the hall, bending to pat the dog, who was sniffling his boots. The dog, who was usually so friend1y, wag growling softly, and the hair on his back was bristling. Hiraishi-san turned and closed the door, muting the wine of the wind and rain. “Come in and warm yourself,” I said. He had to steady himself as he slipped out of his boots and onto the boards of the hallway. His face was drawn, and his hands shook as he took off his wet raincoat. “I’ll get you some beer,” I said as I opened the sliding door to the living room.

Finally I had Hiraishi—san settled. He was sitting tailor—fashion at the low table, a blanket covering his knees. He was sipping his beer, and his hands were steadier. He even attempted a smile at the children whose eyes were fixed on him expectantly, and with curiosity.

After the obligatory small talk I finally felt free to ask: “What happened?” I immediately noticed a general tensing, a rearranging of positions, and an anticipatory intake of breath from the children. Hiroshi’s face changed again; the fear was back.

He lowered his eyes and looked down at his tight1y clasped hands. “I saw them!” he said finally.

 “Whom?” I asked, thinking back to the many stories he had told us on summer evenings in this room, at this table.

He stammered “The…the…the couple who committed suicide last summer!”

“That’s impossible!” It was almost a cry that came from Chris. Leslie looked pale as he said, frowning, “That can’t be. They’d be dead if they committed suicide.

I felt Julie shiver as she said in a quavering voice “You mean you saw dead people?”

“Or their ghosts,” added Leslie, as if explaining that dead people don’t walk about.

Hiraishi read the disbelief in our faces, and nodded emphatically. “Yes, I really saw them. Do you remember the story?”

I remembered the story. A young man, a college student, had fallen in love with the young wife of “one of his professors. They had started seeing each other, arranging to meet at one or another of the innumerable small coffee houses which can be found all over Tokyo. The young woman goon found that she had fallen in love with the young man. She knew it was impossible for her to leave her husband and bring disgrace on both their families. Preferring to die together rather than to live without each other, the young couple had decided to commit double suicide. On a beautiful, clear fall day last October, they took the train and bus to the lake. They walked to our bay, which is particularly beautiful in autumn. At the shallow beach on the far end of the bay they walked into the water together. The lake had claimed their bodies, and they had never been found. They had left a note on the sand, and that was all. Their pictures had been in all the papers. But how could Hiraishi—san possibly have seen them now? Today?

The children,too, remembered the story.

“How could you have seen them?” asked Chris. “They have been dead a long time.”

“Maybe he saw two shadows on the water,” suggested Leslie hopefully.

“Maybe he saw the hebi-onna,” mumbled Julie from the depths of her shelter.

Leslie turned toward her, “Don’t be silly. You know there is no such thing as a hebi-onna.”

     “But Fusaesan’s grandmother saw one.”

“That was just her imagination,” said Chris firmly. Then he turned to Hiraishi—san again who was staring ahead without paying attention to us. When Chris persisted, “What do yod mean, you saw them?” he rubbed his hand across his forehead and sat quietly for another few moments. Then he turned to Chris, turned to me, and said, “I had decided to drive here to see whether you were alright in this storm, and to check on the boats

I thought how typical it was of him to show so much concern for us. The drive along the narrow, winding road is not easy under the best of circumstances, but under today’s conditions it must have been a tremendous strain. On one side, the road ends abruptly with a steep drop to the lake. On the other side the mountains come right down to the edge of the road. When two cars meet head on, one has to back up to the last turnout. I imagined his car creeping along the road, the headlights dimmed by the rain, lighting up low—hanging branches and dripping undergrowth. The road is full of potholes and rocks. The lights would be wavering, as the car bumped along.

Hiraishi-san continued, “Because of the    rain, I was driving very slowly. Suddenly I saw two figures in the middle of the road. ‘Some foolish hikers caught in the rain,’I thought. When I got closer, I noticed that it was a young couple in city clothes.

They looked as if they might have set off from one of the many hotels, before the rain for an evening stroll and had gotten lost.

They had no coats or umbrellas, and their hair and clothes were streaming wet. I stopped the car and spoke to them, ‘Can I give you a lift?’ ‘Yes, please,” answered the young man in a curiously hollow voice. ‘We are going in the direction of the campground.” It never occurred to me at the time to wonder what they might want at the campground at night, in these clothes, without any equipment. I was just so concerned with their condition that I said, ‘jump in’ and opened the door for them. As they got in, I noticed how pale they were. The young woman’s black hair hung wet and heavy on her shoulders. Around her neck she had a long, bright red scarf that set off her pale skin. Somehow I had the feeling that I had seen them before. But as I drove on, I figured that they looked like so many other young couples who come to the lake in such great numbers.”

Hiraishi—san shook his head as if amazed at his own stupidity. Suddenly he turned to me, “Do you know that a part of the road, just before you get to the house, is under water and impassable? That spot is usually like a creek when it rains, but today it is like a raging river. When I got there, I realized I wouldn’t be able to drive on. I decided to leave the car and to try scrambling over the rocks to get the few yards to your house. I was sure you would be willing to give shelter to the young couple, at least until they were somewhat dry. They had been quiet since they had got into the car. I thought, they must be dead tired….” He shuddered as he said that and hunched his back as if to protect himself. I felt sorry for him. He was so obviously upset and disturbed. What had happened? Where was the young couple now? Why hadn’t they come with him? Were they hurt? Were they waiting in the car?

“Go on,” said Chris. “Tell us! What happened? Where are they now? Why didn’t you bring them with you?”

“Well…” Hiraishi-san turned his head and looked at us pleadingly, I don’t know!” His pale face twitched; his dark eyes swept the room; he looked at the window behind Chris, turned to look at the window behind his own back, and shuddered again. With shaking hands he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lit a match, and as he bent toward the light, a gust of wind swept through a crack in the wall and blew it out, Hiraishi—san shot up and looked around him wildly. When he saw that everything was all right he sat back again. Chris involuntarily moved away from the window and sat leaning against the door to the bedroom. Leslie followed Julie’s example and pulled his blanket over his head. “Best protection against ghosts,” he said with a crooked grin, and an unsuccessful attempt at nonchalance.

The wind blew a sheet of rain against the window. I heard the crunch of the boats on the gravelly beach as the wind rocked them on their keels. Did I hear footsteps? Was that the sound of voices? Nothing. The spring gurgled on. The waves kept on crashing against the rocks. The wind was whining.

Hiraishi-san was making a big thing of this incident I thought. And yet, his fear was genuine. I poured him another beer and he gulped it down. He pulled a big, white handkerchief out of his pocket and folded it carefully. Then slowly wiped his ace with it. He folded it again and put it but in his pocket. Then he picked up his cigarette, took one deep drag from it, and crushed it out in the ashtray. He pulled himself up straight and said determined to get it over with, “When I stopped the car and turned back to the couple they were gone. They weren’t in the car. All there was, were two puddles of water on the seats.”

A heavy silence fell over the room, The dog stirred, gave a soft yelp and settled down again. Even the wind had died down, and the rain had stopped. l heard the plunk, plunk of the water dripping from the roof into the puddles below. Suddenly I heard a soft moaning; then quiet again. I strained to hear, but everything was silent.

Finally Chris couldn’t stand the suspense any longer: you mean the couple just disappeared?”

Hiraishi nodded. “Yes, suddenly, without a sound.”

“Couldn’t they have opened the door and jumped out while you were concentrating on the road?” Chris kept trying to be realistic; and I must admit that I too was trying hard to think of a plausible explanation.

“But they couldn’t have! Not without my noticing it,” Hiraishi persisted, “1 have a two-door car. They couldn’t have gotten out without my knowing it.”

Again the dog yelped. Again we heard a soft, prolonged moaning. I felt cold and uncomfortable. The children were drawing closer together. We were no closer to solving the mystery of the vanished couple, and I decided to break the spell cast over us by Hiraishi-san’s story by announcing firmly, “Time to go to bed.”

“Awww, not now.”

“Not until we have figured out what happened. “

The children were excited and disappointed. Julie. sounding very tired, said, “Oh, Mother, I won’t be able to sleep a wink. It’s too spooky!”

“We’ll all sleep together in this room,” I announced, as I went into the next room to get another oil—lamp. Then I went into the hall to light the lamp there. The dog was shivering, and he came up to me to lick my hands.

Back in the living room I turned to Hiraishi, asking whether he felt all right about driving home tonight. He hesitated briefly, and then said courageously, his honest face serious and intent, “Yes, thank you. But are you sure that you will be all right by yourselves?” When I assured him that we could look after ourselves, he picked up his cap and got up slowly. “Well,” he said a bit reluctantly, “I’m warm again, and now that the rain has stopped the drive home will be much easier.”

In the hall, he slipped into his boots and pulled on his slicker. The moon had appeared from behind the clouds, and a soft light showed shimmering puddles on the road. Hiraishi turned in the door, “Thanks again. I feel much better now. He lingered in the doorway for a few moments and then stepped into the night. Pretty soon we heard the roar of his engine, his headlights briefly outlined the tall trees and he disappeared around the curve.

While Chris and Leslie laid out the bedding on the tatami mats in the living room, I heated some milk. We all had a cup of hot chocolate, sitting on, and in the case of Julie in, our beds.

“Ha! There are no ghosts,” said Leslie firmly, as he put his cup on the table and crawled into bed.

Chris was still very thoughtful. “I wonder what he did see though.” Then he, too, slid under the covers.

Julie hadn’t moved from her spot all night. I decided to let her sleep where she was. When I got up to put out the light, she raised her head and said pleadingly, “Can’t we leave the light on tonight?”

“Sure!” I knelt down beside her and put my arms around her.

“Sleep tight, sweetheart.” She gave me little smile, and as she cuddled up under the comforter, “I’m sooo tired.”

Thank God for that, ‘I thought,’ as I pulled up my covers and stretched out on my hard bedding.

After a brief goodnight, we all fell silent. We were too occupied with our own thoughts and too exhausted to talk.

All night I heard the children stirring restlessly in their sleep. Julie sat up once and cried out loudly in Japanese, “Go away! Go away! ” Finally, toward dawn, they fell into a deep sleep.

When we awoke the next morning, the tips of the mountains yere bathed in gold. Their outlines were reflected in the lake which was as smooth and clear as a mirror. The trees and bushes looked as if they had been washed clean, and their lush, green leaves shone. The sky was a deep, brilliant blue, and a few small white clouds hung around the top of Mt. Nantai.

I was sitting at the open window, breathing in the fresh air. Breakfast had been tense and quiet. The children spoke little. Julie looked pale and tired. The boys were deep in thought. And yet the events of the night before seemed unreal, almost as if they had never happened; almost as if it had just been bad  dream. I decided to take the children to town today. A boat ride on this beautiful day, and a tasty Japanese lunch of fresh lake trout would dispel any lingering fears

   As I looked down at the beach to see if our boat was still there, I saw something red amongst the pieces of wood and broken branches which the storm had washed onto the sand. It looked like  a long strip of cloth, wound around a branch.

Suddenly I heard the sputtering of an engine, and a boat rounded the promontory and entered our bay. It was the water police boat; the police were obviously checking on the effects of the storm. I waved at the two men in the boat, and they waved back. The boat chugged along, past our house, past the sandy beach, and stopped. The men bent over the edge of the boat. I saw them straighten up, talk excitedly, and look into the water again. Then they circled the area a few times, headed the boat toward town, and took off at full speed I wondered what had happened, but I knew that I would find out as soon as I got into town.

A few minutes later we were on our way. As we got into the boat, I noticed the red cloth again. I bent down to look at it and found that it was a long, red scarf that had become entangled in a branch. It was worn and torn. Where had I recently seen or heard of a red scarf? The question didn’t bother me particularly, and soon we were tying up our boat at a pier in town.

As we stepped onto the sidewalk, we heard sirens screaming, and soon an ambulance speeded past us followed by two police cars. We watched them until they disappeared around a corner. People were stepping out of stores to look up and down the street. Not much happens here in Chuzenji, and every little happening causes great excitement.

Since we were near the ferry landing, we decided to look in on Hiraishi—san. Maybe he would know what had happened; and anyway, we wanted to hear how he had got home last night. But Hiraishi-san was not there, his boat had just left the pier a few minutes earlier.

Since it was such a gorgeous day, we decided to visit my father and join him and his family on their daily walk. They had gotten through the storm alright except for a few leaks in the roof, and we found my father emptying a bucket of rainwater which had been sitting in the middle of the bedroom.

We took a long, leisurely walk along the lake. The path was washed out in spots, and we had to climb over rocks and a few uprooted trees. The air smelled of fir trees, moss and damp wood, of wet ferns and bamboo grass.

   Tired but exhilarated we returned to the waterfall where my father stays every summer. We were looking forward to a hot bowl of noodles at the souvenir shop by the falls. When we walked the few steps up to the waterfall viewing pavilion, we saw groups of people talking excitedly. We went up to Murone—san, my father’s landlord, and the owner of the souvenir shop. He saw us coming and walked toward us. “They have found them,” he said importantly. “The couple who committed suicide last summer. You remember the story, don’t you?” Our mouths must have dropped open, or we must have shown our shock and excitement in some way for my father looked at us in surprise. We were speechless so my father turned to Murone-san and said, “Yes, I do remember what happened. The young people were never found were they?”

Chris added hastily; “You mean they were found alive?” Alive, it shot through my mind, alive That would explain everything. I gave a sigh of relief; no ghosts after all.

But Murone-san was continuing excitedly, impatient with our stupidity: “Of course not alive. They committed suicide. There was no question about that. No, no! Their bodies were found this morning by the police in a patrol boat. They were over there in your bay near the sandy beach. Their bodies were clearly visible in the clear water. They looked as if they had just died—the cold of the deep water must have preserved them. They still had their arms about each other, and her long hair was entangled in the branches of a submerged tree. The storm must have broken loose the tree and brought the bodies to the surface. Yes. That must have happened last night in the storm.”  

They took old clothes stored in the bomb shelter with the intention of donating them to an orphanage. They soaked the clothes in water then ran outside to a clearing at the top of the hill created by bombs dropped some days earlier. Then her parents lay her and her two brothers in the shell of a downed water tank where they lay as they watched the bombers continue to fly by dropping the bombs that floated down before releasing dozens of milk-jug sized fire bombs onto the city.

Saal, who is doing research for her memoir, looked up Yokohama on the web to learn more about the city that had been her home for six years. She read Yokohama Yankee and contacted me. I called Louise at her New Hampshire retirement home. Shut in by a heavy snow, she spent several hours talking about the strange circumstances that led her to Yokohama.

In an amazing coincidence, it turns out that Louis lived for much of her time in Yokohama at 78 Nishinoya-cho in the house that my grandfather Julius Helm had built and that my father and his two brothers grew up in.

My father and his family vacated the Nishinomiya-cho house when they left Japan in August 1941 after numerous warnings from the American embassy that the family should leave to avoid a coming war. Right about the same time, Louise’s family was moving in the opposite direction.

Louise’s father, Alois Stockinger, left his home in Bavaria in 1923 at age 19 to immigrate to Chicago.  At the time, German was in a recession, and the only jobs available to him were in the coal mine in Penzberg, the town where he lived. Alois was particularly sad to leave behind a twin sister, Therese, with whom he was very close.

In Chicago, Alois worked hard and built a good life as a machinist for Nabisco. He married Maria Brokamp, also from Germany, and had two children. Rudi was born in 1935 and Louise, the following year, in 1936. While he was happy with his life in Chicago, Alois desperately missed his twin sister Therese. He had repeatedly written to her asking her to join him in Chicago, but his mother, whose two sons had already immigrated to America, refused to allow her to leave. Consequently, in 1941, even as war was raging in Europe, Alois decided to return to Germany to visit his twin.

Crossing the Atlantic to Europe was too dangerous at the time, so in the summer of 1941, Alois decided to take the long route home to German. He set out by train to San Francisco, then across the Pacific to Yokohama, Japan with the intention of taking the Tran-Siberian Railroad across Russia to reach Germany.  Alois took with him his wife Maria, his five-year-old son Rudi and his daughter Louise, who was then four.

When they arrived in Yokohama, they decided to do a little touring before taking the train and ferry to Russia to take the train. They traveled to Karuizawa then Kamakura where the family stayed at the Kaihin-in, an elegant old hotel on the beach.  “My father was a great swimmer and he would take these long swims far out into the ocean,” recalls Louise. “He would be gone so long I was afraid he would never come back.”

A few days after their arrival in Kamakura, Louise recalls her parents becoming quite upset. Only later did she learn that Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor and was now at war with the United States.

Her parents were advised that it would now be too dangerous to travel to Russia to catch the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Meanwhile, returning to the United States was now impossible. The family decided to move to Yokohama where there was a large German community. The German consul in Yokohama introduced Alois to the Helms, and the family then moved into my grandfather’s home at 78 Nishinoya- cho. “It was a nice house with a large, nicely landscaped garden, a large pond with big coy fish and a swing. There was a big iron fence that was more than eight-feet-tall that was later taken down to use for the metal for war production, though the metal was never collected.” Next door, she says, was another Helm home. It was occupied by a tall man who was a Helm but was Japanese.  Up the hill, on the right side, at 66 Nishinoyacho lived the Horios. Louse remembers Mrs. Horio as being named Martha. She had German and Japanese blood and spoke both languages. She later used the name Masako, perhaps because foreigners were less welcome as the war dragged on. “My best friend was Trudy Paul,” Louise recalls.

As it became clear the family would be in Yokohama for a while, the children were sent to local schools. “We went to the German school in Yokohama. I loved the singing and the arts and crafts. It just opened the world to me to be with other children,” Louisa recalls. “Once I went with my mother to visit someone at Helm House. It seemed very modern.”

When the Doolittle raid came in April 1942, an American effort to shake up the Japanese, the planes flew low and machine gunned the area. “In the house behind us, a bullet went through the roof and stuck in the wall,” says Louise. “They were shooting the Japanese to try to scare them.”

In February 1943, Louisa’s brother Siegfried was born at the Bluff Hospital, which was then operated by nuns. He was a handful. Once, when he as two and a half, he climbed onto a toy truck and escaped his playpen and walked all the way to the Horio’s to visit Mrs. Horio and her son.

In September 1943 there was a big explosion in the harbor. Nobody was sure, but there were many German ships in the harbor at the time and some people thought it might be sabotage. Louisa recalls being in the dining room at the time. Her Dad thought Rudi had slammed the door, and told Rudi to go out again and come back, this time closing the door quietly.

After the bombing, without their ship, a large contingent of German soldiers were stuck in Yokohama. “We took in three German soldiers,” recalls Louise. “Thanks to them we had a very special Christmas. At the time there were no Christmas trees available. The soldiers took pine branches, made holes in the trunk of tree and created a nice tree. One of the soldiers carried my brother around.

In March 1945 the American bombers appeared. “We would watch them. When a plane was hit, they would head in our direction as they tried to reach the ocean. They would often drop their remaining ammunition on the hill above us before heading to the ocean so we would see them. Once, five houses on top of our hill were hit. We watched the bombs hit and explode. Everything on top of the hill was reduced to rubble.

One morning, the warnings came again, and, as usual, the parents rushed the family into the small bomb shelter behind the house. “When the trees above us started burning, we knew it wasn’t safe to stay in the shelter,” says Louise. “There were some old clothes that my mother had stored in the shelter planning to give them away. My parents wet the clothes and wrapped them around us and we rushed [through the fire] to the clearing [by the earlier bombing at the top of the hill.] There was a big metal tank that was empty. We lay down in the tank and the airplanes dropping their bombs.

“The next morning we went to our house. One bomb had landed in the kitchen and the motor from the refrigerator was at the other end of the house. Everything had burned except one chicken. Our father caught the chicken and put it in the garage, which had survived the fire.

“Two days later, the trucks came to evacuate us. My older brother went to that garage and got the chicken. He carried it in a helmet he had found as we got on the truck. As we drove away we saw burned bodies lined up along the street. At one house, the family had stayed in the air raid shelter and they had all died. We were thankful that we had parents who knew how to do the right thing. We were thankful that we survived.”

“The trucks took us to Hakone. At first we stayed at a house near a golf course. They brought injured military horses to the golf course to recuperate. My brother went there a lot, and the workers gave him a horse to take care of. Later we stayed in a village that [they said] had been built for the  Olympics (originally planned for October 1940 but then cancelled.) The Rilings who had lived in Indonesia, the husband was a German businessman, lived there. The husband was later sent back to Germany to fight in the war.”

In April 1945 when Roosevelt died “we thought it would be the end of the war,” recalls Louise. “What did we know.”

In Hakone, there was a one-room German school in a hotel for 12 kids. Sometimes, we got salmon, canned tuna and lard that was distributed to the German community. “Towards the end of the war we ran out of food and my father and brother set traps to catch rabbits,” says Louise.

“When the war ended a U.S. Army captain and a soldier came in on a Jeep. My brother spoke English and Japanese so he went with the soldiers to help them with translation. They saw we didn’t have food, so they brought us flour and Crisco. Mother made crullers–like donuts. They all loved her food so they often visited. The pilots admitted they had bombed Yokohama.  But they didn’t hate us and we didn’t hate them. One pilot wanted to adopt my 3-year-old brother, Siegfried. He said, ‘my wife and I can give him a great life.’ Mother said ‘no I won’t give him up.’ The American soldiers came on day trips for recreation. White and black soldiers always travelled separately.

In 1947, when Louise was eleven, the family was sent back to Germany on a U.S. troop transport ship along with many others in the German community. “We went through the Suez Canal, around Gibraltar, and then when we got to the North Sea, we had to follow an ice breaker [to the German port.]  We spent 35 days on that troop transporter in very bad weather. Once they held a concert on deck, and everybody fell over with their instruments and all.”

“The family was placed in a large camp at Ludwigshaven. Everybody was required to stay in the camp. My brother bribed someone to send a telegram to my uncle. My uncle was in the Bavarian police force, and arrived with my grandfather in a police car. As we were preparing to leave, my uncle put his foot on the running board of the car while he rolled a cigarette. My mother said to me ‘go get a pack of cigarettes.’ Mother had bought several cartons of camel cigarettes on the ship. When my uncle saw that pack of cigarettes, he really lit up. He would say, ‘Maria, do you have another pack.’ She would say no, but then whenever uncle would do us a favor, she would give him more cigarettes.

“There was a housing shortage in Germany at the time, so we lived with my grandfather for five years until 1952. The apartment was on [one floor of]a three-story building built for employees of the local coal mine. The apartment had two bedrooms and a kitchen and that is where our family stayed. It was pretty tight.

“We spoke high German, but in Bavaria they spoke differently so sometimes they would make fun of us and throw rocks at us. One boy called me “American whore.” My big brother beat him up and then there was peace. In school, I found most students and teachers supportive. We didn’t have much, but we didn’t have television, so we didn’t know what the rich people had, and we were happy. We had parents who loved us, and that was the most important thing. I had a wonderful teenage time.

“In 1952, when my parents said we would return to the United States, I didn’t want to go. I was in a commercial school and I was happy. But we moved back to the United States and went to live in Union City, in New Jersey. We were near New York City, and I spent a lot of time there. We skated in Central Park and went to Radio City. After my sophomore year in high school, I felt very accepted. I spent more time looking up words in my dictionary than doing my homework.  After high school, I took a job at Chase Manhattan bank in Wall Street. At night I studied accounting at NYU. When I got married I quit, but I finished my degree [when the kids were in high school] and graduated [college] at the same time as my younger son.

“In the United States, I was always more comfortable with people of German descent. In [Manhattan] around 86^th street was Yorkville. It was a very German section where there were establishments that had German music. My boyfriend and I went dancing there. Union city also had some German Clubs. We had a sense we were different from others. We [German-Americans] had different rules. The culture was a little different. I married another German in 1957. We took a trip to Germany and I got the approval from his mother. When I was raising my children we felt different. We [German-Americans] were stricter. We had two sons and a daughter. We moved to Cramford, New Jersey where I raised my children. After that, we didn’t see many other Germans and we stopped speaking German.”

“The children always asked me to talk about the war days.  But my biggest tragedy was what happened to my daughter. While she was away in college, a friend called asking to buy the extra car my daughter had used [before she left for college.] I thought my daughter didn’t need it so I sold it.  When my daughter came home from college [one weekend,] she was invited to a party. She didn’t have a car so a friend took her to the party. Afterward, a young man offered her a ride home. After the party, the two parked in front of the house and talked. When we woke up in the morning, the two were dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. The boy had a new muffler in the trunk. He knew about the leak in the muffler and was planning to fix it. If I hadn’t sold the extra car, my daughter wouldn’t have died.”

“When my husband died two years ago, I sold the house and moved to this retirement home [in New Hampshire.]  My son is in Birmingham, north of London. He is an economics professor. I was on the computer and reading about Yokohama and came across your book [Yokohama Yankee.] I mentioned it to David, and he bought it on Amazon and sent it to me. It reminded me of my good times in Japan.

“Your stories about the Helm stevedoring business reminded me of my husband. He worked as an electrician for an overhead handling company that built cranes for moving heavy things in warehouses. Later he designed and built lifting systems for moving moving boats and large crates in factories and warehouses. He met Malcom McLean, an American truck driver who would drive cargo to the waterfront where it would take two days to move the cargo from the truck to the ship. Then unions would strike and the work would be put on hold.” McLean came up with the idea of packing cargo in uniform containers so that cargo could be quickly loaded and unloaded from ships. Later he started SeaLand, which would develop into a the giant stevedoring and shipping company.

“I’ve had a very good life,” says Louise.

Mother’s Memorial August 20, 2017

With the death of my mother, Barbara Helm, there is a hole in my heart I fear will never heal. But I always feel better when I go through her old photos and reminiscences and reflect on just how full her life was.

Let’s start at the beginning.  She was born on August 28, 1924 during the season of O’Bon, a time when the ancestral spirits come back to earth, and families gather to honor them. It was in a tiny hospital in Karuizawa, a vacation community high in the mountains of Nagano, that Barbara found her way into the world.  She would have been   93-years-old next week.

Picture a high wooden platform draped in red and white banners. An old man wearing  a hachimaki, a cloth headband, has the sleeves of his yukata rolled up, and is pounding on two giant taiko drums. A flute player purses her lips as she carries the tune while a singer belts out a local rendition of tanko-bushi, a traditional favorite.

tsukiga-deta deta-tsukiga-deta a yoi yoi 
Uchi no oyama no-ueni-deta 
Anmari entotsuga-takai-node (a yoisha yoisha) 
sa-zoya otsukisan- kemuta-karo sano yoi yoi

In concentric circles around the platform the locals are dancing occasionally joining in with a boisterous “a yoisha yoisha…”

Writing in her remembrances, Mom wonders if all the pounding of the drums and loud singing ”was the reason I’ve never been bothered by sound and activity.”

As a mother and as a hostess, Mother was an explosion of energy, bubbles of joy, a picture of elegance. She was never happier than when she was at the eye of a storm preparing for a big party or function. Watching Chris and my two sister’s organize today’s event, I think they inherited that gene.

She was always directing some major function whether it was organizing a wood-block print sale to raise money for charity or organizing volunteers and donations for a massive school fair. She once persuaded an insurance company to donate several crates of partially damaged dishes so we could set up a booth at a school fair where, for fifty yen, you could enjoy the extreme satisfaction of throwing a pair of baseballs at the dishes and smashing them to smithereens.

When times were tough, she made the best of what she had. As a child growing up in Japan, Mom was home-schooled with her brother Roland, and often felt the absence of other children. She insisted her nanny add a phantom student to their lessons. When her tutor would ask Mom a question, she would say to her tutor: “Ask her a question too,” she said, pointing at the empty chair.

At age 12 she cried after a major flood swept her house away, not because of the loss of all her belongings, but because her dog died in the disaster. A second home burned down when firebombs rained on Tokyo, and she lost her cat. She suffered her greatest sorrow at 21 when her mother, Annelise, died just after the end of World War II weakened by malnutrition. Her mother had been giving her share of the food to her two children and her husband.

Mother learned to be resilient. She reached out and made friends. She taught English, translated at the Tokyo war crimes trials and played her own little role in international relations, co-founding the “Inubashi” a group of Germans, Americans and Japanese who, in the aftermath of World War II, traveled around Japan and developed close friendships.

At age 49, after my father divorced her, my mother was devastated, but pulled herself together, packed us up and moved us to the bay area to start a new life. She never tried to turn us against our father, often inviting him and his new wife to her new home in Oakland.

In Oakland, too, she became the heartbeat of a community of friends and relatives. She hosted five weddings at her house; that of Sayuri and Archie, Marie and me, Patrick and Zoe, Chris and Vickie and finally, her wedding to Torsten, her life’s love and partner. At her memorial, Sayuri share how my mother was the first person she called when her husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack while still in his 40s. Sayuri said her whole body had gone numb. My mother said to Sayuri. “I’m so sorry. But you are going to be OK.” Sayuri said that for the first time she cried. She saw a way forward.

Mother loved to help others. She enjoyed her work co-managing English in Action, an organization that connected foreign students and scholars with local residents for English conversation. She was a hostess of the Servas organization, accepting travelers from all over the world into her home. They often called at the last minutes asking for a place to stay. Staying with my mother was like living in a salon where interesting new people were always coming and going.

Even in the last 15 years as she slowly lost her mind to dementia, she managed to hold it together. I can still remember the day she swept into my kitchen for a party and announced to everybody present “I just crossed the border into Alzheimers” as if she had just come home from a trip.

Mom never got angry or bitter, maintaining her grace in what must have been a world of chaos. I picked her up at the hospital one day after she had had a bout of pneumonia. She told me she had had the most wonderful evening at the hospital. She had woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of voices and clinking glasses. She got out of her hospital bed and walked up the stairs. There she found a huge ballroom filled with people. Someone handed her a glass of champagne and she had a wonderful time. Even her hallucinations were mostly happy.

Today we honor Mother amid this season of O’bon, a time of family gatherings—a time to honor our ancestors.

The song I mentioned earlier is about the rising moon. It is a song almost everybody whose spent a lot of time in Japan eventually comes across. But many of us never learn what it’s about. A couple of days ago I checked on google. Turns out the song is about the moon rising over a mining town. The final line of the song says: “The chimney rises so high that the moon will get choked with smoke.”

But the song is not about pollution. It’s about a prosperity that was keeping hunger at bay. It’s a prosperity whose consequences we must now deal with. But we cannot allow the weight of those troubles to overwhelm us. We must find strength in each other, as Mom always did by reaching out to others.

So let us also honor not just Barbara, but all of the loved ones we have lost. Let us give a nod to the ancestors who brought us to where we are today. And Let’s shower hope and best wishes on the young people among us who carry the heavy burden of creating a brighter world for us and all our descendants.

Obon is about reconnecting with friends and family. I know the spirit of my mom is among us today and she is enjoying this scene, for once again she has brought us together for a great party.

The  Story  Of  My  Life

For my grand-children, with all my love. Babachan

I would like to tell you  about my childhood and life in Japan, and I will try to get as far with this as I can.

Part One

My parents left Germany in 1923, not long after the first World War. My father had graduated with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Berlin, where Einstein had been one of his professors. It was the time of the great inflation, and my father could not find a job. He wanted to become a professor of philosophy, but in those days you had to start by getting paid by the students who were attending your lectures, and that was not enough to live on. However, once, when he was giving private lessons in Greek and Latin to two Japanese junior college teachers, he found he could get a teaching job in Japan. Now my parents could get married.

My grandmother, Mother’s mother, Anne Hebting, nee Binswanger, was very worried about her daughter Annelise. She was afraid that she would have an unhappy life with a husband who had no money and was nearly blind (my father had a severe infection in his eyes when he was quite young – he said he remembered lying in bed with compresses on his eyes). He had macular degeneration all his life after that, and he has always had to read with glasses and a magnifying glass. (One of my vivid childhood memories is of my parents sitting at the breakfast table and my mother reading the newspaper headlines to my father – when there was something in which he was interested he would interrupt her and she would read that article to him.) So my grandmother went to her brother Ludwig Binswanger, a psychiatrist who owned and ran the Sanatorium Bellevue in Switzerland, for help. But Onkel Joy (Dr. Binswanger) assured her that my mother would be made much unhappier by not being allowed to marry Robert, than what she might experience in far-away Japan with him. So my parents left Germany in 1923 for Opa to teach German at a Japanese junior college, the Osaka Kotogakko. The school paid for my parents’ fare on a steamer going from Amsterdam to Japan.  My parents arrived in Kobe harbor the day after the big, destructive earthquake in Yokohama, and Kobe was full of people who had fled from Yokohama and Tokyo.

The principal of the School met my parents at the ship and brought them to a small house outside of Osaka. (The houses meant for the American and the German Professor were not yet finished.) This small house stood among rice-fields, and   their neighbor was introduced to them; he said he lived nearby, and since his house was connected to their house by a bell, they could always call him for help. One day, when my parents came home from work, they found the man’s house surrounded by police. At night he had been going out, robbing the neighborhood. Later we moved to  the house which had been built for us in Osaka. I have many vivid memories of that house where we lived for so many years.

I was born on August  28, 1924. I have tried to visualize what happened at the time of my birth. I was born in Karuizawa, ( a summer resort in the mountains  popular with many foreigners) in a nursing home, or small hospital, run by Dr. Munroe, the Ainu expert, and his Japanese wife. I am told it was at the time of Obon, the Buddhist summer festival. I can imagine my mother lying in her hospital bed, enduring the birth pains, while nearby the big drums were beaten all day long, and the music for the Bonodori dances was blaring from loudspeakers; maybe that’s why I am not bothered by noise and excitement. My parents’  trip from Osaka to Karuizawa, an overnight trip, can’t have been very comfortable for my poor mother. She must have been in her last months of pregnancy.  Mrs. Baerwald, Hans’s mother, told me many years later that I was born prematurely, and that she, having been a nurse, helped my mother in the hospital and managed to get some diapers and baby clothes for me. I wish I had asked Mrs. Baerwald more about details, since I had no idea I had been born prematurely.

That first trip on the train from Kobe to Karuizawa must have been uncomfortable for my mother. But the future trips, which I can remember well, were always an adventure. They  were always overnight trips and we slept in two small compartments with two bunkbeds each, one above and one below, facing each other. Very vivid is the memory of my mother taking out a thermos and pouring cups of freshly squeezed lemonade for us. A rare and special treat. The next day, when the train stopped in Takasaki to add another engine for the steep uphill ride to Karuizawa, we bought unagi domburi (grilled eel on rice) at the station. Takasaki was famous for its unagi domburi, and I have loved it ever since.  The trip into the mountains and to Karuizawa, was steep and slow, and I remember sticking my head out of the window and getting all sooty (they still had steam engines in those days.) The train labored slowly uphill, and I remember once actually sitting on the steps to the carriage and having an unobstructed view from there of the mountainsides through which the train was taking us. Many years later, during our prolonged stay in Karuizawa because of the war, a group of us rode our bikes down that winding road – which constantly crisscrossed the tracks – to Takasaki. It was fun flying around the curves on our bikes. Where the train went straight up, the road curved gently.

There are only a few photos of my first days in Karuizawa, but there are, if I can find them, photos of the house where I lived with my parents until  we moved to Osaka. I don’t know why we lived in that small Japanese house in Funao, since my father was teaching in Osaka, but I gather it was not very far from the school, and I think the two Western-style houses which the school was building for us and the teacher for English, Mr. Parker and his family, were not yet finished. This house in Funao stood among rice fields and had only one neighbor. When my parents rented the house they were told that they would be very safe since their house was connected to the neighbor’s house by a bell which they could ring in case of danger. One day, when they returned from teaching, they saw the neighbor’s house surrounded by police: it turned out that he had spent his nights robbing people in the area!

My brother Roland, who was two years younger than I, was born in the house where we lived at that time. It was a Western style house, which the school had built for us; it was in a suburb of Osaka called Sumiyoshi-ku. Osaka, even then, was a big, bustling city. There was constant building, rebuilding, and road repairs going on so that one day I asked “Is Osaka ever going to be finished?”

Japanese houses have straw mats, called “Tatami”, in their rooms. Our house had only one tatami room; our Japanese maid lived there. The other rooms had wooden floors. The maid was called by name if she was young, and obasan when she was old. Obasan (Grandma or Auntie, depending on the pronunciation), looked after me and my brother, and we learned how to speak Japanese from her. Later, still in Osaka, we had a young maid called Rinko-san, and I remember her. (I remember her particularly well, because during WWII, when Roland I were bicycling in Karuizawa to visit farmers to ask if we could trade clothes for food, we happened to meet by chance and recognized each other immediately.

My father had his study upstairs. There were two big bookcases filled with books in that room. I spent a great deal of time reading there. Next to that room was the room my brother and I shared; in front of that room there was a balcony from which my brother and I could climb onto the roof. We loved to look down onto the street and we saw the people looking up at us as if we were crazy! My parents’ bedroom was a small room just above the stairway that went upstairs. My mother’s ‘study’ was downstairs in a narrow verandah in front of the living room, facing the garden. She had a desk there, and I remember her sitting there often to write letters to her family in Germany.(Years later my father told me how homesick my mother had been for her family in Germany.) My brother and I were allowed to play in the verandah. From there we could also go into the garden.     When I was young, I was often sick, and if I had a fever, the doctor came to the house. He always came in a “Rickshaw” (short for Jinricksha), a small carriage with two big wheels, which is pulled by a man who runs through the streets with it. While the doctor was in the house, the rickshaw-man sat waiting in the entrance way and Rinko-san would bring him a cup of hot Japanese tea. When I did not have a high fever, we would go to the Red Cross hospital in town, which was a very crowded, big building. I saw young people, old people, mothers with their babies on their backs (you could only see the babies’ tiny heads, because the mothers wore padded, wide kimonos over the babies and themselves to keep the baby warm), old and young people. Everybody sat on crowded benches, waiting for the doctor to see them.

When I was young, I went to a Japanese kindergarten. I remember that Obasan had to go with me to the kindergarten, because it was far away, and we had to ride a small train to get there. My parents told me that I had to pass an entrance “examination ” to get into the kindergarten. (Did I have to draw something?) When I was old enough to go to school, my parents taught me at home. Later we had a German governess, Angela, who taught my brother and me, also at home. Angela was wonderful. She pretended that there were other children in my class and she would call them by name. She taught us many things. We made things from wood, or paper, or cloth. We made a big mural by cutting up colored paper to paste on the mural to make a castle, animals, and trees and flowers. She also made up a story about a girl called Annemarie, and that story went on for many years. She could make dolls and even picture books. She made a dollhouse for me from an orange crate and put in it furniture made of match boxes. I loved it. She also took an old folding screen with two panels, cut windows in it, and covered it with wallpaper. If you stood the screen facing a corner, you had a big playhouse with two windows. Then she met a young Englishman who lived in the neighborhood. I think he was the Harold Evans who later married Angela.

Our neighbor was an American who taught English at the school where my father taught German. He and his family lived in a house just like ours. But where we had a flower garden, they had a big lawn with a swing on it that could seat four children. We often played there. He had a daughter called June. June was just ten months younger, and we called each other sisters. It was wonderful to have a sister, but June was also my best friend. My other playmates were all Japanese. I learned many songs and games from them. With June I spoke English, with my playmates and Rinkosan I spoke Japanese, and with my parents, Angela and my brother I spoke German. Actually my English lessons started when Angela met Harold Evans, who came to the house to see her, and would take me on his lap and read “Peter Rabbit” and other Stories to me. Several years later they got married and finally ended up in Australia.

It was a wonderful life, I had nothing to worry about and I had a loving family and happy friends, I lived in a nice house with a lovely garden. We had a swing, metal bars and a slide in the garden. Our house was near open fields, where we could play, and we could ride our bicycles through-out the neighborhood. We also had a sandbox where we often played. On weekends or holidays our parents would take us on outings. We would go to a temple near our house, where we visited the white temple horse which stood in a small enclosed area, and we tried to cross a steep, rounded bridge. Or we would go to a small lake where we rented a rowboat, and our parents taught us how to row. Sometimes we would take a train to the mountains and go hiking. We had a picnic lunch and stopped at a Japanese teahouse where we sat on wooden benches (some of them covered with a bright red cloth) and drank lemonade from a bottle with a marble stopper inside. To drink from the bottle, you had to push the marble into the bottle. In the evenings we often played games with our parents, or our mother would play the piano, and we would all sing together. My brother didn’t like the singing so much, and I often saw him yawning. Maybe he was just tired from playing outside all day. I do remember that, playing cards with our parents, I could see what cards my father had, because he was holding his cards close to his weak eyes and I could see the cards reflected in his glasses.

In the early years June and I played together every day, and most of the time Roland played with us. But when June was old enough to go to school, her father rented a house in Kobe, where June and her mother lived while June went to school. She often came home for the weekends, but I was never sure if she would come, so I made myself a small altar where I would pray that June would come – sometimes God would hear my prayers! Once I was invited to spend a few days at the Parkers’ house in Kobe, and I was allowed to go to school with June. Being in a classroom with many English-speaking children was a new and exciting experience for me. Luckily I had no trouble understanding and speaking English.

Christmas was always very special. For a few days before Christmas one room would be locked. We knew that the Christ child and the angels were getting the room ready for Christmas. Once I looked through the keyhole and saw an angel fly through the room with a present in its hand!  (Another time my mother wanted to sit on my bed to say good night, but I said she couldn’t sit there, because an angel was already sitting there!)

On Christmas Eve, my brother and I would sit with our father in the darkened living room and wait; often June would be there, too, because in her family, they celebrated Christmas Day. Suddenly a little bell would ring, and the doors to the dining room would open. In the dark room stood the Christmas tree,  glowing with white, burning candles. Heavy tinsel decorated the branches and shimmered in the candle light. Golden balls, red apples, cookies and chocolate pine cones hung from the branches. We were not allowed to go near until we had sung several Christmas carols. Roland and I would be looking around to see our presents. Everyone had his own spot on which the presents were laid out, unwrapped. There also was a plate of special Christmas cookies for each of us. (These cookies were made a few weeks before Christmas, and I was allowed to help my mother make them.) When we were through singing, Roland and I would rush up to our presents to see what the Christkind (Christ child) had brought us. After playing for a while with our new toys, we all had Christmas dinner together.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         KARUIZAWA

When I was young, we used to spend the summers in a place called Karuizawa, where many foreigners went to get away from the hot cities. Karuizawa, where I was born the summer of l924,  had many beautiful, tall fir trees and big houses that stood in the shade of these trees. It rained often, and it was green everywhere. The stones were covered with moss, and there were many ferns. Karuizawa is on a high plateau, and there were hills and mountains all around it. There were hot springs and beautiful waterfalls in the area. There was a place called “Sunset Point”, which you could reach by walking up a mountain for about one or two hours. From there you could watch the sun set over Karuizawa and the surrounding hills and mountains. There was also a volcano which erupted sometimes and ashes would fall around us. Once, as a child, when I was lying on the grass by the house, I felt the earth shake lightly and within seconds the mountain erupted, and ashes fell around me. When I was older, I climbed this Mt. Asama. It was a bit scary, because I was afraid it might blow up, but we were told that the scientists could tell when it would erupt, and then the mountain was closed to climbers. We went on many hikes, played with our friends, went swimming in a cold pool. When the weather was nice, we would have tea in an open area in front of the house; a table and chairs were brought out, and the table was set beautifully. Often our parents’ friends came to tea. On my birthday our father and Angela would put on a “Kasperle Theater” (Punch and Judy show) with puppets made by Angela. The puppets had heads carved out of potatoes. I will never forget these birthdays. I also remember when my brother and I were little and how we used to love to squat under one of the big Japanese paper umbrellas, that smelled so wonderfully of waxed paper; we would squat there and listen to the patter of the rain on the paper and smell the fresh smell of the wet earth and the trees; we must have been very little to have fit under one umbrella! Except for two summers which we spent at Lake Nojiri, two summers spent in Takayama near Matsushima and Sendai, where father taught at the University for one year, and the two summers we spent in Germany, we spent every summer in Karuizawa until the end of the war. June and her family spent their summers in Nojiri, so we were only able to spend two summers together.

Germany

When I was five, when my parents had been in Japan for six years, in 1929, we went back to Germany to visit our grandparents, uncles and aunts, and  our cousins, all of whom we had never met. We took a train to the big port city Shimonoseki from where we took a ship to Vladivostok in Russia. Our friend Kazuko Araki was going to Germany to study piano under Arthur Schnabel. Her father wanted her to have a comfortable trip so he paid for all of us to travel first class on the train to Shimonoseki, and I have a vague memory of the comforts of first class travel. In Vladivostok we got on the trans-Siberian railroad, which took two weeks to travel through Siberia to Moscow. All I remember of that trip are big planes, covered with meadows and many trees and a few houses. In the station restaurant in Moscow I saw man eating peas with a knife. He somehow managed to get a row of peas on his knife and then slid them into his mouth without cutting himself! From Moscow we took the train to Berlin, which was the capital of Germany. My father told me later that I asked him: “Where is the gate to Germany?”

It was wonderful to spend a holiday with our relatives. Since I was only five, I don’t remember so much about the trip. I do remember spending some time by a beautiful lake in Switzerland, and playing with a little girl called Peterle, with whom I had played in Japan. ( When I learned the Christmas carol “Ihr Kinderlein kommet…” I thought that the part  “Zur Krippe her kommet in Bethlehems Stall” went “Come to the crib in Peterle’s Stall (stable)”! ) My mother’s parents were there, too, and I loved my Grosspapa for allowing me to have sugar on my salad, because I hated salad. I also remember going to a kindergarten somewhere, maybe in Heidelberg where Grossmama and Grosspapa lived. We had little lunch boxes in which we took fruit to school, and I learned to love pears, which we could not get in Japan in those days. I also remember visiting somebody’s house, and the little boy there spitting at me. I was very upset, and couldn’t understand why he would do that. One day we took a walk with an old, white haired aunt, and I am told that I looked at her and said “You’re going to be an angel soon, aren’t you?” and I wonder whether I upset her.

It was at that time that my parents met Angela Lepsius and decided to ask her to be our governess. I often thought, later, how hard it must have been for her, and how courageous she must have been to leave her family, her country and, at 21, to go with strange people to a far away, strange country. She went back to Japan with us, again by train through Siberia. We brought much food along and usually ate in our compartment on the train. I remember one man on this trip, who had such a big belly, that I thought he should have some support on wheels for it. I am told that Roland and I learned some Russian, but I certainly don’t remember that. After we got back from Germany, and were back in Osaka, June and I continued our friendship. Angela met a young Englishman who used to come and visit, and my parents asked him to teach me English. He used to take me on his lap and read “The Tales of Peter Rabbit” with me. June and I spoke a mixture of English, German and Japanese, and it wasn’t till June came back from a year in America in 1932 that we spoke only English together; but by then she was in second grade and I must have been in third grade, but being taught at home. June’s parents rented a house in Kobe so that June could go to the “Canadian Academy” there. Her father kept the house in Osaka, because he was teaching there, and June and her mother would often come home on weekends. I set up a small altar at which I always prayed to make sure that she would come home! One day a friend of mine said: “you can’t always ask God for things. You also have to thank him!” That I did religiously after that! Once, I spent a few days with her in Kobe, and I remember going to school with her. It was a very exciting experience.

Roland and I were taught by Angela. She was a great teacher, and did many art projects with us. During class she would pretend that there were other pupils, too, even giving them names. From the time that Angela came to us, till we moved to Kobe, she would tell me a continuous story about a girl called Annemarie. Even after she moved into her little house in Ashiya – and  I stayed with her  during our move from Osaka to Kobe – she continued the story.

Kobe

When I was nine, my parents decided that Roland and I should go to the German school in Kobe, a city near Osaka. So we moved to a nice house in Kobe, and my father had to take the train to Osaka every day, and Roland and I had to take a bus to get to school. After my mother had taken us there once, she asked us if we thought we could find the way there alone. I was sure I could, and my mother sent us off. Unfortunately I made Roland get off with me at the wrong bus-stop. We got terribly lost, but luckily we found our way home again, but without having found the school. The next time Mother went with us once more, and from then on we found our way.

The new house was a Japanese house with tatami in every room, except for one room which had a wooden floor. That became my room, and in it stood the piano. My mother started giving me piano lessons, and I enjoyed them and tried playing songs. But I never practiced enough to learn much more and now I am sorry that I didn’t. The house was built on a hill, on three levels. It was entered on the street level. In the bottom was a big empty room with a big platform . Roland and I used that platform to play theater. At the bottom of the hill there was a brook running over some rocks, where we played “Swiss Mountain Guide” or “Germanic Cave Dwellers”. In Roland’s room, which had Tatami, we played “Japanese Family”. And on the balcony, with its railing, we played “Sailors”.

Angela had moved into a small house in Ashiya, a few stations by train away from us, not far from the ocean. She was doing hand weaving and selling the beautiful things she made. Once, while I visited her, during our move to Kobe, there was a “typhoon”, a big storm, in the middle of the night. Because her house was so little, the bigger houses around her protected us from the wind. But the next day we found out that the fishing boats were in the middle of the streets, and in our house in Osaka some tiles had been blown off the roof and through a window into our parents’ bedroom. Later, Angela got married to Harold Wakefield, an Englishman whom she had met in Karuizawa. The wedding was in our new house, and we had a Russian woman come to the house to cook a Russian Easter dinner for the wedding. I loved watching her make the Easter cake, which became the wedding cake; it was a big, white, dome-shaped cake made of cottage cheese, raisins, eggs, and many more delicious things.

In those days my father was also teaching at Kyoto University and he was very happy there. But Kyoto was even further away than Osaka. Still, father found time to spend with us. One thing I remember well about my parents are the breakfasts, when my mother would read the newspaper headlines to my father who had such poor eye-sight, and then read the articles he wanted to hear.

Roland and I enjoyed going to the German school. For the first time we had German friends. I was especially happy in Kobe, because June and her family had moved   to Kobe a few years earlier, and they were living close to us. But June went to a school where English was spoken, the Canadian Academy, and we only saw each other after school or on weekends.

There was a cemetery near our house, and Roland and I would go for walks there with our dog. The Japanese put rice cakes in front of the gravestones as a gift to their gods. In Japan the people who have died are looked upon as gods. Unfortunately our dog used to like to eat the rice cakes. But Roland and I figured that maybe the people would think that the gods had eaten the cakes and would be happy. Once we even watched a coffin being put into the crematorium.

2nd Trip to Germany

In l936, when I was eleven, two years after we had moved to Kobe, another six years were up, and we gave up our house, packed and stored our things, and went back to Germany. I think it was then that my parents sold the piano. I am afraid that my mother must have missed it very much when we came back and didn’t replace it. After a few months in Germany, my parents did not like what was happening under Hitler, and decided to return to Japan. But first we had our holiday there.

The trip to Germany was one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. In Kobe we went on board a modern German ship that carried about 100 passengers. Of course I, who always got sick, got sick on the ship while it was still in the harbor; I had a high fever, and our Japanese doctor came to the ship to see me and prescribe some medicine. Later, when everybody else was on deck, a baby in the next cabin started to cry and wouldn’t stop. I went to the cabin and comforted the baby the way I had seen my mother comfort Roland, by stroking the forehead gently. The baby fell asleep, but I don’t know if I gave the baby my germs. I did not yet know about passing illnesses along.

Besides people, the ship carried goods for other countries, which meant that we stopped at many ports and the trip took 24 days. We stopped in Shanghai, where we visited friends of my parents’; Hong Kong; Manila, where we took a ride in a horse-drawn carriage and were surprised by a tropical rain. (The rain suddenly came down in buckets and then stopped again, just as suddenly); Singapore, where we visited the botanical gardens and saw many monkeys eating bananas; Penang; Ceylon, where little boys dove off of boats to catch coins which people on our ship were throwing into the water; Port Said, from where we went through the Suez canal. Going through the Suez Canal was like being between high sand dunes on which we saw people walking along with camels. In the Mediterranean Sea we passed Mt. Stromboli, a volcano near Sicily, Italy; we passed it in the dark, and we saw the red glowing lava come down the side of the mountain. We got off the ship in Marseilles and took a train to Paris, where my Grandmother Schinzinger and Aunt Eva met us at the station. In those days women, who had lost their husbands, wore black widows’ dresses and a veil. Since my grandfather had just died, my grandmother was wearing widow’s garb, and when she came to put her arms around me, I wondered “Why is this nun kissing me?”

We spent several days in Paris with friends of our parents, the Huldschiners (they later became my guarantors in the U.S.A.). I am told that I looked around the small kitchen of their apartment and said: “Here one has to do one’s own cooking.” (Hier kocht man selber). We visited Malmaison and Versailles. I loved the big lawns at Versailles and did cart wheels on the grass. But otherwise I was disappointed by the palace of Versailles, because there were just rows of big rooms with paintings on the walls, and no throne. However I loved Malmaison, which had belonged to Napoleon’s wife Josephine, because it was furnished and looked just the way it did when she lived there. Among the things we saw there was Napoleon’s rather small bathtub, and I suddenly realized that people were smaller in those days. After Paris we went to Switzerland to visit my mother’s Uncle Joy, Dr. Ludwig Binswanger, psychiatrist, head of the sanitarium Bellevue which my great-great-grandfather Ludwig Binswanger had founded.

When my Grossmama Hebting heard that my mother wanted to marry my father, she had been very worried about her daughter going so far away, to strange Japan, with a man who was nearly blind. She went to her brother, this Dr. Ludwig Binswanger. She told him about her worries, but he said he believed my mother would be much unhappier not marrying Robert, than she would be no matter what problems she might face in Japan. Ever since then Onkel Joy took an interest in Roland’s and my lives. He was fond of my mother, and he had many interests in common with my father the philosopher. So, from Paris we went to Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, to visit Onkel Joy and family. We stayed there for several weeks, and I had a ball. I fell promptly in love with my second cousin Dieter Binswanger. He was 14 and I, 12, had a crush on him for years. I also remember meeting my older cousin Hilde Binswanger, who was a student at that time, and with whom I stayed in touch over the years. There was another brother, also called Ludwig – he was the oldest, a very kind and gentle man – whom we also met and with whom, in later years, I was also in touch until he died of cancer. We then visited my mother’s favorite cousin Onkel Roelli Binswanger, Grossmama’s youngest brother. Uncle Roelli was a poet, and his wife was a painter. Uncle Roellie’s daughter Rotraut, and son Christopher and his family have become good friends of mine over the years.

We also stayed with a family who had a big music box, which I loved. On this box you could play various disks which were made of metal and had small prongs that hit the machinery to produce the sound. I don’t remember the name of the family. I think the place where they lived was called Sulzbach, and I don’t know where that is.

At that time I made a great discovery. I decided not to look forward so much to every new visit, because then I would never be disappointed.

In Germany, Roland stayed with Grossmama, our mother’s mother in Freiburg, the city where our father grew up. My parents left him with her, because he was a good boy and would not need much discipline; Grossmama was a kind, easy-going grandmother. I went to Karlsruhe to stay with my father’s mother, Grossmutter, who was very loving, but she was also very strict, and I could be difficult. Both our grandfathers had died while we were in Japan, Grosspapa (Hebting) in l932 and Grossvater (Schinzinger) just about a month before we left for Germany; that was very hard on our parents, who had seen their fathers only once in 12 years.

Roland and I went to school, Roland in Freiburg and I in Karlsruhe, and that was also a new experience, because the German school in Japan was so much smaller. My Tante Eva, who lived with my grandmother since my grandfather had died, was a piano teacher and taught me piano. She gave music and piano lessons to children who came to the apartment and I was allowed to join them. But here, too, I did not practice enough and she got quite discouraged.

At one point I got sick again with bronchitis, and my mother took me to the children’s department of the University Hospital in Freiburg, my father’s home town. The doctor said I should go to a rest home for children, and suggested a place in the Black Forest for the good air. My mother took me there and returned to her family. I had a wonderful time for the 2 months I was there. My parents thought it would be good for Roland to be there, too, so he joined me there for the last month. My mother, Aunt Eva and Grossmutter came once to visit, and I have a photo of us in front of the Kinderheim. I was there for the two months, and I, who was always so skinny that my mother worried about me, put on l0 pounds. I guess that I, who hated most foods, learned to enjoy eating because I was always eating with many other children. We spent much of our time lying on deckchairs on the terrace, wrapped in blankets because it was winter and quite cold. This was supposed to be good for our lungs. For a while I slept on a covered verandah in a bed with a big down comforter. Sometimes the snow would blow into my face and I loved that. Because arithmetic was my weakest subject, I had to take lessons in that, and also in English, so that I would not forget it. But otherwise I could read whatever and as much as I wanted to. Of course we had to write letters to our parents. We went on walks, or we would go skiing. This is where I first learned to ski by sliding down little hills leaving the ski poles behind. I was also given a pair of skates which could be clamped onto my boots, and we went skating on a pond. My friends and I put on little plays, and we also played at being gypsies, and the boys were Indians – costumes were available. On Advent Sundays, in December, we all sang Christmas Carols under the thick wreath which hung from the ceiling of the big hall. On Christmas Eve we went into the forest at dark and lit sparklers which we hung on a Christmas tree. Can you imagine a Christmas tree covered with snow, in the dark, lit by dozens of bright sparklers?  It was beautiful!  We stood, warm in our winter clothes, quietly looking on. Did we sing some carols? I can’t remember, but we must have done so.

Sometime around Christmas my mother, Grossmutter and Tante Eva came to visit us, and stayed in the town of Koenigsfeld, where the sanitarium was. We loved seeing them, but I, at least, had such a good time with all my friends, that I didn’t even miss my family. My father had already left for Japan to start teaching again; from there he often sent me nori (Japanese dried seaweed) which I loved and shared only with my best friend Christa. Later, Christa and I wrote to each other till there was no more   mail coming through from Germany to Japan. But somehow, in spite of our having moved to Tokyo, she managed to get in touch with me after the war! It is here, in Koenigsfeld, that I had my first boyfriend. He was fourteen to my twelve, a quiet, thoughtful boy. We spent much time together, and we sometimes held hands! After I returned to Japan we stayed in touch by mail until the war put an end to our correspondence.

My mother was happy to now have a chance to spend time with her family, and of course I also had my brother near me, so I was never homesick.

Back In Japan

In April we returned to Japan. Since my father was already there, teaching, we were three on the ship, in a cabin for three. Coming from Japan, we had landed in Marseilles; returning to Japan we left from Genoa. On the last day on the train to Genoa, I caught my thumb in a door, and had a sore finger for weeks. Maybe that is why I don’t remember this trip as well as I did the first, exciting, one.  But I know I had a great time. We played games, got dressed up for a fancy dress ball, I as a gypsy, swam in the pool, and I read all of Jack London’s books, in German translation, that were in the ship’s library – and there were many of them. On the first trip I had discovered Karl May, a German writer popular with teen agers and young adults for his books on the Wild West. They were works of fiction, but it is said that the background was quite authentic. However, I preferred Jack London.

Also on the ship was a group of Australian acrobats. One of the young girls in the group had very curly hair and was called the “Shirley Temple of Australia”. I always loved acrobatics, and watching them filled me with envy, but I learned a few things from them.

In the meantime, in Japan, father had found a lovely little Japanese house for us, right on a stream that came from the hills behind us, ran just past the house and then directly underground all the way to the sea. Behind the house was an apartment house, and behind that a small Shinto shrine. Shinto is the Japanese religion in which people worship nature and their ancestors. A shrine is like a temple, and my brother and I thought the grounds would make a great pet cemetery and we buried there all dead birds and animals we found. (This reminds me of a story about Roland when he was maybe six years old, in Osaka. We had found a dead bird and we decided we needed to bury it. So Roland dug a hole and put the bird in it. When the burial was over, I said “and now the bird will go to heaven,” but Roland answered “no it won’t.”  So the next day Roland dug open the grave and showed me the bird and said “See, it didn’t go to heaven.”  (A scientist from the beginning!!)  Behind the shrine came the forest and then Mt. Rokko. Many German children in our school had fathers who worked for big companies, and the families lived in big, western style houses in the hills of Kobe. We always lived out of town, in Japanese houses, because the   rent was lower. But nothing could beat our romantic little house by the stream. Another plus was the fact that I could walk to June’s house in about 15 minutes. My friend Gretchen lived further away, closer to the city, but also in a Japanese house, maybe because she had a Japanese mother. I used to have to take the tram and then walk to get to her house. Every time I visited Gretchen, and after we finished our homework, her mother would give us thick slices of toasted white bread spread with butter and strawberry jam. That was always a special treat, because we never had toast at home (we got bread from the German Bakery in Kobe). We, our family, didn’t go out to eat often, but when we did I always ordered  toast and tea.

Although I had missed almost one year of school while in Germany, I was accepted into the next grade. Roland and I had to get up every day at six in the morning to get to school by 8 o’clock. We had to get dressed, have breakfast, walk k 20 minutes downhill to Rokko Tosanguchi station, ride the train for 15 minutes to Sannomiya station, and then walk through Kobe, up the hill to our school at the foot of Mt. Futatabi – another 20 minutes. But the walk through town was fun. There were many Japanese schoolchildren on their way to school with their light-blue smocks and matching hats if they were in kindergarten, or in the navy-blue uniforms  of the middle school and high school children. We walked past shops that were already getting ready for business, pharmacies, a pet shop, candy stores, clothing stores, a barber shop. Once I saw a man watering his canary, giving it a shower in its cage on the street. Sometimes, especially on the way home, when we had more time, we walked through the Ikuta Shrine area. We walked past a shop that had a sign saying ”Please try our flesh milk.”

We had school from 8 to 1, and then went home for lunch. Sometimes, on very hot days, we would tease each other on the tiring way home by describing the tall, frosted glasses of cool, fresh juice we used to get on the ship. That would make our mouths water, but also made us thirstier. Once a week we had sports in the afternoon, and we had lunch in a small noodle shop behind the school. For a while I had lunch on sports days with a friend of mine, Eva Vogelsang, who was in my brother’s class, and with her family. I remember especially the potatoes boiled in their skin (Pellkartoffeln)  which we peeled at the table and then ate with a gravy of small bits of crisp bacon. One term I had Wednesday lunches in the home of the German Consul General. Frau Balser was always very kind to me.

At home I spent a great deal of time reading. I always got books from Germany for birthdays and Christmas. One of my father’s colleagues, who lived and taught in a small town in Kyushu, had two daughters about my age. Our parents used to exchange books by mail. I think that it was our mothers who wrapped and mailed the books, and I am grateful to my mother for making all these books available to me. I started carefully wrapping each of my own books in brown wrapping paper to protect the covers and  wrote the titles of the books on the back. I wanted them to look like a library. Unfortunately, this was one of the many projects I started and never finished. Much later I studied to be a librarian, but I never worked as one.

The  Flood

We were all very happy in the house by the river, but our happiness came to a sudden and sad end after about one year. It was du   ring the rainy season, end of May or early June, and it had rained without stopping for many days. My brother and I went to school that day. It was the day when our father always came, a few hours later, to teach Latin. Around noon water started running down the hill, past our school. In the street behind the school, where our noodle-shop was, the Japanese wooden garbage boxes started sailing away, like boats. A rope was strung along the road, so people walking along could hang onto it, to keep from being swept away by the water. Pretty soon we saw one and then more houses on the hill above the school collapse as if they were made of building blocks that a child has pushed over. After that, the pieces of the houses, furniture, and even people were washed down the road, past our school. The teachers and the big boys stood in the gate of the reinforced-concrete wall that surrounded our school, and started pulling people out of the water and into the school. We all gave our school track suits to these people. One man was already dead when they pulled him in, and that is the first time I saw a corpse. Roland and I were very worried about our father being caught in the flood, but hoped that he had stayed at home (which he had) because of all the rain. After it was all over, actually very quickly, Roland and I walked down the hill to the train station. On the main road to the station we saw streetcars and automobiles buried in sand and dirt up to the top. Houses and buildings were collapsed or damaged. Of course the  trains were not running, so Roland and I walked on the elevated train tracks toward home. On the way we met an American friend of ours, Mr. Shaw, and when we asked him about our parents, he told us that they were OK, but that our house had been swept away by the flood. He did not know where my parents were, so we walked to June’s house, which was still standing, and she told us that my parents had gone to the home of a friend, Fraeulein Victorius, June’s piano teacher, who lived in the neighborhood. It was wonderful to see our parents alive, but we were very sad to hear that our dog had been left in the house, because he didn’t want to go out into the rain, and my parents didn’t think the whole house would disappear; my mother and father rolled up the new carpet we had bought in Hong Kong on the way home from Germany and put it in the room farthest from the stream, and left the dog there, too, thinking he would be safe. The neighbors in the apartment house behind us had come to tell my parents that they could see that the water from the river had started undermining the foundation of our house. The logs and boulders that had been swept down from the hills behind our house had blocked the entrance to the underground tunnel, and the force of the current was tearing at the sides of the riverbed. So our parents and our maid Tsunesan grabbed a few valuables: Tsunesan dumped our silverware into a tablecloth, Mother took her jewelry, my father some important documents like pass ports, and they put our new Chinese carpet and the dog, who refused to leave the house in the rain, into a room on the far side of the house thinking that would be safe, and left. I don’t know when they went back to check on the house, but when they did, they found that it was completely gone – only the gas meter was left among a pile of rocks. Where our house had been, and all the way down to the ocean, there was just one wide riverbed. Further down from our house, on the left hand side of the road – now  the riverbed – stood  one half of a two story house, with a clock hanging on the wall of an upstairs room, with the rest of that room and the room below torn away. The apartment house behind us was damaged, and later burned down (by its owners?) and only the ruins still stood. Roland and I had given away our sweat suits in the school to the people who had been rescued from the water, so we really had only the clothes we were wearing. The next day my parents bought us all some new clothes, and a friend returned a book I had lent her. I will never forget the feeling of proud ownership I felt as I looked into the closet in June’s room and saw my new dress hanging there, and below it, in a box, my book.

We were the only Germans who had lost their house, so the community started collecting things for us. They were very generous. For years we lived with the furniture and clothing given us at that time. My father got a pair of shoes he called the “trumpeter shoes” (die Trompeter Schuhe), because they made a strange squeaking sound when he walked. He also got another pair of shoes which looked just like the trumpeter shoes and were called the “brothers of the  trumpeter shoes.”  My mother got a very elegant grey suit which she wore till she died, some seven years later. I, then, got the suit and wore it to my wedding in 1950. Then I wore it till we went back to Japan in l953. There I wore it for several years until, one day, our dog tore it from the line on which it was hanging to be aired! That was the end of it. It had lasted for twenty years!

We all stayed with different friends until we went to Karuizawa,  where we were split up, again staying with different friends for the summer. I stayed with the Parkers’ in Kobe until June and her family left for Lake Nojiri, and then I was invited to stay at the Refardts’. Roland stayed with a friend’s family. I don’t remember who it was, probably the Pfluegers. This is one of the many times I suddenly realize with a stab of pain that Roland is no longer there for me to talk to, and with whom to exchange memories.

I don’t remember where my parents stayed. (I think they stayed with Miss Victorius, my parents’ friend and June’s piano teacher).

Our New Home

The houses in Karuizawa were all completely furnished so we were able to spend a comfortable summer. When we returned to Kobe, we rented another house, closer to June’s (much to my joy), and my parents started all over again in Japan. This is the house that has the exact same address (except for one different digit in the house number as the house in which the Tsunemochi’s (distant relatives, recently discovered), live. This time my parents did not have the things they brought with them from Germany; the wedding presents, and many things from their parents’ homes, and the few things they had bought since, were all a great loss. The emperor gave a small amount of money to each family affected by the flood. Much to my father’s anger, the gas company came to read the gas meter which stood all alone on a post among the ruins, and he had to pay. The members of the German community got together to help us get resettled. They donated used furniture and clothing. Two different people happened to give my father identical pairs of shoes. One pair of these shoes squeaked when walked in and my parents called them “The Trumpeter Shoes”. The other pair was called “the brothers of the trumpeter shoes”! My mother got a lovely grey wool suit which she wore till she died, and which I wore, too, for years in Japan, in the States, then back in Japan where, one day, hanging on the line to be aired, the dog tore it off the line and ruined it!

It was a very hard time for our parents,  much harder than Roland and I realized at the time. Roland and I were happy with what we had, and we even had a new dog; but we always remembered good old Menko, who had been with us since our days in Osaka.

It was wonderful to live so close to June, and we spent much time together. I often spent the night at her house after having supper there. I loved Mrs. Parker’s cooking because it was quite different from what we had at home.  They often had different kinds of Japanese food, while at home, when we had Japanese food, we usually had Sukiyaki.

I liked to get up early and take our dog for a walk in the woods behind our house while June liked to sleep late, so that I often went alone or with Roland. We would bring home salamanders which we caught in small ponds. Once I went alone, trying new trails, when I came to a steep slope which I had to cross; at the bottom was the rivulet which also flowed  past our old house and went underground there, causing the house to be washed away! Half way across the slope I slipped and slid on my side down the hill, ending up with my skirt torn and my thigh bloody. Looking like that I had to cross the stream, climb up a small embankment to the highway and walk home along the frequently travelled road; nobody stopped to offer help!

June and I loved to play in our “Secret Garden” which was an empty lot with a wall around it which we had discovered in the neighborhood. One of our favorite games was “Meeting in America after many years” in which we acted out many versions of an unexpected meeting in the States after we were grown up. June’s father had been talking about going back to the States, and we were dreading the separation.

Our new home offered good opportunities for climbing; I could climb up to our roof and from there onto the roof s of the neighboring houses. I often wondered why my parents didn’t object, but I finally figured, after I got older, that my parents probably thought it was safer to have me not afraid than having me fall from feeling insecure. I’ll never forget when I stopped climbing. It was in Karuizawa, on my 18th birthday. I decided it was about time I acted grown-up, and so I climbed one of the tall Karuizawa pines – which stood near our house – as a farewell gesture. That was it!

When I turned 14, the German school had no more grades for me, so I entered the Canadian Academy. I entered the first form, which must have been the first year of high school. It was a much bigger school than the German School, and I think there were 22 in my class. It was pretty easy for me, because the German school was one year ahead in Math, Geometry and Latin – subjects in which I was not very good, but which were now much easier for me. They had hockey and I wanted to learn to play.  I remember standing on the hockey field with the hockey stick in my hand, not knowing what to do. Obviously no one came to my rescue, because I gave up after this first experience. But I was good in track and field, setting a new record at CA in the 100 meter dash.

It was during my year at CA that a Japanese newspaper organized a Junior Olympics for all the foreign schools and Japanese schools in the Kobe area. I think it was on a week day and I seem to remember going with my CA schoolmates on a bus to the meet. The kids in the bus were teasing me and calling out Heil Hitler, but I cannot remember any further teasing – it must have been an isolated incidence. I won several prizes at this meet, among them the first prize in the 100 meter dash. A few weeks later, much to our family’ surprise, we got a letter from my Grossmama in Germany with a clipping from the Berliner Illustrierte, (somewhat like Life magazine) with a picture of me receiving my prize for the first place in this race. On the same page was a picture of Princess Elizabeth getting a prize for first place in a swimming event. Grossmama wrote how happy she was for me, but my Grossmutter warned me not to become conceited with my having appeared in the magazine. I thought it was so typical of my two grandmothers.

The British community in Kobe always celebrated Empire Day in the summer with a big sporting event in which I also got prizes for running. I just loved to run!

The year at the CA was a wonderful year for me. The classes were big. We were 22 in First Form!). I found new friends, but June remained my closest friend although she was a class below me, being ten months younger. There were dances to which my parents let me go. But at one point my mother felt I had been to enough dances and would not allow me to go to one which I longed to attend. I remember begging and crying, but mother was immovable! I was heart-broken, but that passed, too.

We got a new dog, a shaggy part shepherd, sweet and gentle, whom   we called Wolf.  [He came with us to Tokyo, but disappeared one day when rationing had started and food became scarce. We feared he had been caught and eaten, for we never found him again.] –  We also got a new cat, longhaired and black, called Mohrle.  Mohrle liked to lie near the shichirin (charcoal burner). First she singed the hair on one side of her body, and then the other side by lying too close to that shichirin.  She ended up as part of the crew of a German freighter going back to Germany!

Life at school and at home was great. When we were smaller, Roland and I fought a great deal, partly in fun, and as a result of our tussles the Japanese sliding doors got damaged often and we had to pay to have them repapered with our allowances. June used to get a big kick out of watching Roland and me fight. Being an only child she found these fights entertaining. I don’t remember why we fought, but I think it was often because I used to tease Roland mercilessly. But maybe we also fought just for the fun of it.

Beginning of the War

When Germany started the war by marching into Poland, the German consul demanded that the German families take their children out of the enemy school  so. My parents would have liked to keep me at CA, but they felt it wise to go along with the consul’s wishes.

Now the German school was forced to hire new staff, which was difficult because it would take long to bring in someone from Germany. My father continued to teach Latin, we got a young teacher from a Japanese Catholic boys’ school to teach math, and our class went to the chemistry lab of a German company (I think it was IG Farben) for our chemistry lessons. I think they put the ninth and eighth grades together, because I remember some of the younger ones being in the same class with us ninth graders. We had a happy year far from the war in Europe.

Get info on Gripsholm and the leaving of Americans and British

We had a new teacher, Herr Geyer, who had recently come from Germany and had brought with him strange new ideas – of returning to old Germanic ways, such as jumping over an open fire to celebrate the summer solstice, and other customs that were new to us. He gave his first  child a Germanic name. One thing which he introduced, however, was very popular. He made each one of us start a “yearbook” in which we were to  write  things that happened throughout the year, such as Japanese holidays and how they were celebrated, important happenings at home, at school, or in the world. We were to illustrate them with our own drawings, photos, or newspaper clippings. We all enjoyed very much working on these yearbooks, and I am very sorry that mine did not survive the air-raids. Another new teacher was Mr. Schoenborn who was young, lively, a good teacher and very popular. I cannot remember what he taught. He later volunteered to return to Germany to join the army there – at least that is what I remember – and he died when the auxiliary cruiser on which he was travelling, was torpedoed.  (He was not the only one from the German community to meet such a fate.) Besides our studies we had outings, games in the woods above our school  and trips to Japanese-German functions. Once we were invited to a radio station where we sang German songs. One popular school project was providing speech, music and sound effects to silent children’s movies, which had come from Germany. We sang in our music classes, and I still remember the lovely folksongs we learned. The Hitler Youth songs which we learned at the meetings of the German Youth  of Japan were partly old folk songs and partly new ones, and partly old and new marching songs. We learned crafts, such as book-binding, cutting forms out with jigsaws and painting them etc. I was briefly in charge of a small group of girls, and we had meetings at which we talked about the war, about programs we could organize, and we sang. Singing is an old German pastime. There is an abundance of lovely folksongs, and the Nazis took vantage of this by  producing many new songs about hiking in the woods, the beauty of the fatherland, of youth and the future – with nice melodies similar to the old  songs. My parents were very concerned that we might swallow the Nazi propaganda wholesale, and tried to keep our minds open for other ideas without feeling alienated from our group. They stayed in touch with their Jewish friends and made sure that we were always polite to everyone. My first art teacher was a lovely Jewish lady, a Frau Mendelsohn (spelling?) who taught me charcoal drawing. To me she seemed quite old, and her hands shook when she approached the paper, until the charcoal  she was holding touched the paper and she drew firmly and beautifully. What made these lessons even more enjoyable was that June was sharing them with me. Shortly after the move into our new home I started violin lessons. Angela’s sister, Gitta Lepsius, had come to Japan at some point – I don’t know when – and was living near us. She became a good friend of ours until she returned to Germany ten or fifteen years after the end of the war. (At that time she lived in Yokohama, and one Christmas she offered to teach me how to make dolls for the crèche under the Christmas tree – one of you still has these figures. When she left we bought her wicker armchairs and table for our house on the beach in Akiya). Gitta played the violin and was my first teacher. Later I had a Spaniard, who lived not far away, as teacher. I can’t remember his name, but I remember that the people in his neighborhood thought he was called  Mr.”Keep Smiling” because he had a sign saying that above his door! I was making pretty good progress when we left for Tokyo. I remember taking my violin to Sachiko’s house – I had to go by train – and Sachiko accompanying me on her piano. It was fun, but I don’t think this happened often. When we moved to Tokyo my parents couldn’t find a violin teacher and so I practiced on my own for a while, but made hardly any progress. I am very sorry my parents never got another piano, for it would have been wonderful if my mother could have accompanied me when I played the violin.

What happened in those few short years we were in the house at Shinohara Kitamachi? Not much – the most significant probably was the time Roland had a few itchy spots which we thought came from mosquitoes, or were fleabites. But then I got a high fever and a bad red rash, and the doctor diagnosed Scarlet Fever. So Roland and I were sequestered in the big upstairs room (actually two rooms without the paper doors in between) which was our parents’ bedroom and my father’s study. Then my poor mother also got scarlet fever, and, being an adult, she suffered much more than Roland or I did. We had a very nice Hungarian doctor, Dr. Scutor, who looked after us. When my father asked him  what he could do to help his poor suffering wife, the doctor answered: “Wipe tears!”  So now the three of us were quarantined upstairs. My father was the only one allowed to see us. He had to wear a white coat when he was in the room and had to constantly wash his hands with an antiseptic solution. Father hired a nurse to help, since Tsunesan was busy with the household.

After we felt well enough to read and do other things I started sketching my family, and I still have a number of sketches of our mother and Roland (dated Jan.’40) mostly reading. When we were better, we had to bathe often to remove all the dead skin from our bodies. I loved that; we went downstairs where the  big Japanese tub was and the nurse scrubbed us.

Unfortunately my fever had been so high that, for the rest of my life, I have had palpitations, and in my seventies I was found to have atrial fibrillation. Ever since the scarlet fever my heart did all sorts of bothersome things. But I am sure our mother suffered much more than Roland and I ever realized.

This must have been the year after I went to CA. CA had been a great deal of fun, and a very new experience. But now I was back in the German School, and June soon left for The United States.

We  often had overnight visitors, other Kotogakko teachers and their wives, who were happy to get away from the country-side and to visit the big City. I called our house the “Hostel to the Travelling Kotogakko teacher.” For my parents it was good to see different faces and have different, and stimulating conversations.

As I look over my old diaries, I find that I started the first notebook in January of 1940. I called it my “Allerleiheft” (Book of all sorts of things). First I entered a half page of things I had recently learned in school. Then came a new word I had learned: bigott (bigoted) and its synonym.

Then I wrote my first poem on the 6th of Feb.:

Ich blick hinauf ins dunkle Sternenzelt,

Wie klein und unscheinbar erscheint mir diese Welt,

Hineingestellt in jene ewig fremden Sternenwelten.

Ihr Leuchten gibt uns einen frohen Schein,

Was wird wohl unser Strahl in ihrer Ferne sein?

I look up into the starlit sky

How small and insignificant appears our world

Among those ever distant worlds of stars;

Their shine gives us a happy glow;

What might our glow be in their so  distant sphere?

My parents gave me the humorous poems of Christian Morgenstern to read. I enjoyed them and wrote one of my own in his style, Feb. ‘41

Palmstroem hat, von allen Sorgen

wohl beschuetzt und wohl geborgen,

in seinem Waldheim Urlaub.

Um das Waldheim ist gespannt

ein Netz gewebt von Palmstroem’s Hand.

Keine Sorge, gross noch klein

kann in Palmstroem’s Heim hinein.

So ist Palmstroem vor den Sorgen

unsres Alltags wohl geborgen.

__________

Palmstroem has, far from all sorrows,

Well protected in his borrows,

A Holiday.

Around this home there is a net

He’d made, so he could best protect

Himself.

No worries, neither great nor small,

can enter through this fortress wall.

Thus Palmstroem is so well protected

From the life he has rejected.

Then  I entered things I had to buy. On the same page is a photo of my very close friend Gisela Gernoth. Her father, who had worked in Hankow, China, had died very suddenly while Gisela and her mother were on their way back from Germany where they had visited Gisela’s brother, who was in a boarding school there. They had packed up the things in their Hankow home and had stopped in Japan – possibly to see which was the best way to get back to Germany. They may have been in Japan for about a year. Gisela and I became close friends. This friendship also included my friend Gretchen Krebs. We were a happy threesome. After the war Gisela and I made contact again and we have kept up this friendship across the oceans. I got in touch with Gisa (that’s what she calls herself now) on my first visit to Germany after the war. By then she had married a script-writer working for Bavaria Film  kunst. At one point she entered a competition for amateur painters and won the first prize. Ever since then she had success with her paintings. But one day her husband suggested that she, too, write a movie script. She did, and the movie was a success. Later it came out as a novel. She has written several novels since then, and when I visited her in 2004, she was writing another book. Since she had had a stroke, this is quite an undertaking. She showed my friend Inge and me how she does this with two fingers of her crippled hand, typing on the computer.

I write in Feb 41:  “I am glad that I won’t be there when Gisela leaves. We will definitely make the bicycle tour of Germany we have planned. I can hardly believe that she is leaving. …. Now I don’t have anyone anymore.  June is gone, and I will see Gisela for the last time today. Nobody with whom I can  roughhouse, or with whom I can have a really good conversation. All of them are younger than I, even   the boys.”

The only attempt at making it a diary ends there. I was learning about the French Revolution and I pasted in pictures of important people of that period. I had enough space to write about their lives, but never took the trouble.

After that I used the book to write down my thoughts and experiences, always dated, so I guess it was a kind of diary. I also wrote in it an occasional poem. I wonder what made me think of death, but I wrote a poem about a cemetery on 31.8.1941 (We must have been in Karuizawa) It is all about a cemetery and a fresh grave in which a child has been buried. I just  cannot figure out what made me write it; could it be a premonition that my mother would die in a few years? Maybe the surroundings made me melancholy. My mother is buried in a small cemetery which is located in the corner of the big cemetery in Karuizawa. The mother of a friend of mine had died not long before, and part of the

rock that marked her grave became the headstone of my mother’s grave.

Karuizawa

Karuizawa is beautiful in a dark, somber way. Paths wind through forests thick with tall, dark firs, the rocks along the side of the paths are covered with moss, the air is pure and full of the smell of the pine needles. It rains often, and that is good for the pines and the moss. Most of the houses there  were built by missionaries (mostly Americans, some British). The houses are  built of wood and are usually quite roomy. The first house we lived in was a little ways from a small settlement where many Germans spent their summers. This area was called the “Hunnenwaeldchen.” (Forest of the Huns.) We were at the edge of it, up a small incline, and right next to us were the tracks of the little train that took visitors to Kusatsu, the hot springs where many lepers went. Roland and I often played on the tracks, but my parents didn’t worry, because the sound of the train on the tracks reached us long before the train did – and it did not run very often, nor very fast. I was old enough when we moved from there so that I have quite vivid memories of the place (helped, of course, by photos.) We often brought a table out and had lunch or afternoon tea under the tall firs. Ever since then I love eating outdoors.

It rained a great deal in Karuizawa, and Roland and I loved to  sit under one of the big Japanese umbrellas which are covered by a thick layer of wax-coated paper. We loved the smell of the umbrella and the sound of the rain on the taut paper. There was a magical quality about the place. Almost a fairyland.

There was a shed next to the house. Roland and I often played in it. One day we saw something -a ghost? a spirit? – something that flashed through the shed. Both of us saw it! We often spoke of it in later years and wondered what it could have been.

To get our drinking water we had to take a narrow path for a few meters down the hill to a small spring and carry it in pitchers up to the house.

There was only one house above ours, on a hill on the other side of the tracks, and a German scholar, a teacher like our father – but older – lived there. I still  remember my parents’ embarrassment when the elderly gentleman came to tea one day. I had heard my parents talk about people who were Nazis, and people  who were not Nazis. So I thought I’d join the conversation and asked  Herr Winkler, “Are you a Nazi?” to which he kindly said, “no, I am not.” I nodded understandingly and said “You are too old, aren’t you.” My poor parents must have felt very embarrassed, especially since he was Jewish, but they said nothing to me, and he smiled.

Karuizawa still has a very special place in my heart. I was born there, we went through the hardships of the last year of the war there, and my mother died there and is buried there. My father lived to be 90, and when he was ill and in a hospital in Yokohama, I came to Japan and was there when he died. He had chosen a spot in a cemetery near Yokohama – where he said he could look at the mountains, and that is where he was buried. Later, I returned from the States, took part of his ashes (which I had kept) to Karuizawa to bury them under our mother’s gravestone, and attach to the stone a bronze plaque with both my parents’ names and the dates of their births and deaths.  (Roland designed and had the plaque made in California.)  I had never seen anybody in that corner of the Karuizawa cemetery and wondered how I could get the ashes into the grave and attach the plaque to the stone and plant a flower. But, like a miracle, someone was working on a German grave there, and I asked whether he could bury the ashes under the stone, attach the plaque to the stone, and plant the flower. He said he would do it, I paid him and left. When I came back the next day, it was just like always before: there was not a soul around –  but the plaque was nicely attached, the flower was planted and everything was in order.

I hope that one of these days I can visit the cemetery again!

Now back to my diary: I have a few undated pages in my diary where I puzzle about the meaning of life. I start again in 1942 and write about books I have read, music I am listening to, my thoughts about life.

On June 14th I write:

Wohin?

All mein Denken, all mein Sehnen

Geht dem Unbekannen zu:

Einem Land, das ich nicht kenne

Einem Mensch den ich nicht nenne,

Denn ich weiss nicht wer es ist.

Was es ist kann ich nicht sagen,

Kann nur jubeln, kann nur klagen,

Denn die Ungewissheit drueckt.

Ja sie drueckt, doch kann sie heben

Meine Seele hoch hinaus,

Und ich mein’ ich koennt nicht leben

mehr in diesem engen Haus.

Weit hinaus, hinaus ins Ferne

Treibt mich meine Sehnsucht fort,

doch ich wuesste ja so gerne

Wohin treibt sie mich nun fort?

Where?

All my thinking, all my longing

Turn around all the unknown:

A land I do not know,

Someone I cannot name,

Because I don’t know  who it is.

What it is I cannot say,

I can but feel such joy, such sorrow

Because of the uncertainty.

And yet my soul is lifted high

And makes me feel I could no longer

Live in this confining house.

Far away into the distance

My longing drives me on.

But what I’d like to know so much:

Where is it driving me?

(This poem was too hard to translate well)

On 31 Aug ‘41 I wrote another poem about a cemetery. I think the somber beauty of the surroundings brought these feelings on. Then I add: I wish I could spend a few more days in Karuizawa.

The next page I’m back to what I am learning: Pictures of Greek columns with Doric, Jonic and Corinthian design. Then I start wondering about the meaning of life, listen to Brahma’s second symphony, write a poem about how beautiful life is and list the books I have been reading, making a few comments. At one point I write: “It’s strange, there are such sad things in this life. Luckily for me there have been no terribly sad things, but still there are little things in my daily life that make me sad, unhappy, angry. And then there are hours in which I get over these feelings and think how absolutely WONDERFUL life is!!!”

I give the names of four German books I have read and then “They Brought Their Women” by Edna Ferber (in English).

At one point I write: “I must have time, much time.” and “I wonder whether I’ll be an old maid like Frau  von H?”

June 14th 1942, another poem “Where?” Wondering where my longings will take me. A few days later at the Yokohama Pool, I jumped feet first from the 10 meter board and hit the water with my face and got a concussion. My friends accused me of trying to show off, and I had to admit I probably did.

During the summer holidays that year I did  much reading again, and I describe the books. (The books written in English I read in the original.) Among them O’Henry,  “Best Short Stories.” Then I describe a trip to Asakusa with my class.

Read ”Darby and Joan.”

That summer ‘42 in July I went to the camp of which I have this little book I have shown you. I have notes in my diary of the first aid course we had there. Back in Karuizawa I heard that the first love of my life has returned to Germany, probably to go into the army, (a one-sided love, I may add!). I think our parents couldn’t afford to rent a house in Karuizawa that year, so Roland and I stayed with different people that summer. I spent some time in the house of German Ambassador Ott. I wrote a little poem about Karuizawa. Entries about books read, observations about my friends. I am sharing a room with the Ott’s daughter Ulla, whom I have known since we were much younger, and she and I always got along very well, but I discover to my embarrassment that she has been reading my diary.

Sep. 20 ‘42 “Everything has an advantage, and even if it shouldn’t have one, pretend it has one. When one thing isn’t right, maybe something else is.”

In one book   I am reading, I am amused by a remark a brother makes about his sister: “From  11 to 12 she lies in the hammock and is sad!”

25th Sep. I listen to Brahms’s second symphony and describe a little insect that sits on my page and cleans itself.

One day later only one comment: “I’m homesick for Kobe.”                                                                                                                       Now I am 18 years old, and where there were never many young boys or men, there are now young Ge German sailors who are on two auxiliary cruisers in Yokohama harbor. Knowing young men is a new experience, and I am having a difficult time concentrating on my studies. Then there is a terrible explosion in Yokohama, the two German auxiliary cruisers are blown up. It was never discovered how this could have happened. I think most of the crew are rescued and find homes in the German Community. We take in a young sailor about 21 years old. His name is Guenter. He is polite, intelligent, and he and I become good friends. He considers me his little sister. Everybody in the house, including Tsunesan, our old maid from Kobe days, likes him. Tsunesan is usually very critical of our friends. (When a guest stayed too long, she would put a broom upside-down in the broom closet; that was meant to sweep the guest out of the house, I guess.)

I have to study hard for my final exams, and Guenter helps me with things like math and science.

Those were happy days, my only concern was passing my final exams, but I didn’t study as hard as I should have. Sometimes I got together with my friend and classmate Jutta Wenneker. We did not do much studying together, but we’d take walks together to relax.

Another friend, Ingrid Buhre, not living too far away, was a class below me, and I was able to help her with some of her homework; it was especially good to help her with math since that made it a kind of review for me. My closest friend at that time was Ursel Loch, who was my age, but one class below me because she had been interned in Indonesia by the Dutch at the onset of the war, and had lost a year that way. We had very much in common. Unfortunately she lived in Yokohama, a bit too far for us to see each other often. But sometimes she came to spend the night and we would talk into the wee hours of the morning. I still remember my bedroom with its view into the garden which sloped gently downhill, and I could see the moon and the stars at night. It was a pretty garden, well established and not too much work. Once I heard an “Uguisu no Taniwatari”, a kind of nightingale. It sang beautifully. (That reminds me that a nightingale sang in front of my window at the Bluff Hospital in Yokohama when Julie was born).

It is a difficult period for me. The pressure of the exams. No close friend living  nearby. I miss June. On March 15 ‘43 my exams begin.  I know that I did poorly in my German composition, a subject in which I am usually quite good. I am embarrassed and angry. I got poor marks in the sciences, but I had expected that. As usual I did well in physical education and in English.

After our graduation we were invited by friends of one of my classmates, Walter Kuhweide (who died quite young, later, in Germany). His parents had a nice dinner for our class at their home. That time I learned not to be greedy. When the food was being served I took a big portion because it looked so good, but when the waitress came around with it for seconds, I still had some on my plate and she passed me by!

One graduation party was held at the Wennekers with a nice mixture of us ex-students and adults. Jutta and I put on a little skit, I read a poem my father had written for me about graduating, and Inge and Helga Trapp gave a great dance performance.

There were several earthquakes during that period, and I find that I am getting used to them. When the exams were over I graduated with a “satisfactory” and was satisfied. Nothing great, but I passed. Now came a period of parties, a few balls. I had a great time.

Six Months in Kobe

Then I had to start thinking of my “Pflichtjahr”: every German girl had to work (one year if she didn’t get her Abitur, or half a year if she got the final exam) in a family with many children. I had to find a family I liked and who wanted me. In the end it was decided that I should go to Kobe to be with a very nice family we knew.  They had three children and were expecting their fourth. Mrs. Dieterich was very kind and patient with me. I helped with the housework and with the children, two girls and a little boy. When the new baby, another little girl, arrived, I learned to bathe and to change her. I wrote a short poem about the beautiful eyes of the little boy and how they made me feel a bond with him.

Very few of my former friends were there. Those of my age were mostly still in Tokyo and my younger friends were still at school in Tokyo; only my good friend Eva was still around.

Kobe harbor also had a few German auxiliary cruisers, and I met some very nice young men. One gave me a pretty little Japanese dish which I still have. Again, I am amazed – in retrospect – how well these young men, far from their homes, behaved. I had Sundays off, and had a pretty active social life. I kept in touch with my friend Guenter in the Tokyo area, until he, too, disappeared on a ship  bound for Germany. Many years later I heard from him again. His ship had been captured, and he ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Canada. From there he went to New Guinea, after the war, and finally ended up in Australia. I will have to listen again to the tape he sent me from there. For years, after I left for the States, he sent my father Christmas cards!

In the summer the Dieterichs went to a small summer cottage on Mt. Rokko. They did not bring their maid with them, because the maid had to cook for Mr. Dieterich who only came up on weekends. I had to clean and had to help with the cooking. I had fun cooking and even learned how to make noodles from scratch. My friend Eva was there, too, with her parents. There was a pond in the neighborhood where we could swim. I also had fun with the Dieterich kids. It was a nice summer even though I had to work hard. On Sundays I often went down to Kobe. After my half year with the Dieterichs was up, I returned to Tokyo.

Back In Tokyo

There are difficult times that await me in Tokyo. The future is a blank. I am stuck in wartime Tokyo, no more school; I have to find ways of passing my time. There are parties and balls where I meet young men – all older than I, and working. I have my few friends in Tokyo, two good friends in Yokohama. I’m trying to find a meaning to my life and read a great deal. It is February and cold. I write in my diary on Feb 2, ‘44: “It happened now, again: What I had just been thinking and wanting to write down has escaped me. But there is one thing I realized yesterday, and father helped me to come to this realization: Don’t expect anything from life, give to life from that which you carry within yourself; don’t reach for something in life, search for something within yourself. There is not much sense in sitting down and saying ‘I am curious what life will bring me.’ You’ll soon be disappointed and say ‘Life is boring.’ Look within yourself to find that with which you can shape your life; and should you have not enough within yourself, utilize that which comes to you from outside: thoughts and ideas of other people, the beauty of nature and the secrets of life. But I just said don’t expect anything from life; yes, don’t expect the secrets to expose themselves to you and confront you. No, search for these secrets and you will find much that cannot be revealed to someone else who is not searching for it and is not trying to find it, change it and absorb it and give it shape with your own thoughts, until from a small idea, a sentence, comes a revelation. “

“ Geheimnisvoll weben

Stets durch dein Leben

Menschenschicksale hin. “

“Human destinies

Constantly weave

Mysteriously through your life.”

At one point I realize that only  work is truly satisfying!

I longed to hear good music, wich was not often available except on records, and I continued to  read a great deal.

Parties, but no boyfriend. I helped in the house with laundry and other tasks, but also tried to keep up my Japanese language. At one point I got a scholarship to study Japanese. It was a scholarship originally intended for South Asian students, but since they could not come to Japan because of the war, I got that scholarship. A young woman was my teacher. The few polite phrases I know in Japanese I learned from her. She taught me a song about Mt. Fuji which she sang in a funny, quavering voice. But I liked her.

Wartime  Karuizawa

July 1944.

We are back in Karuizawa, and I help in the household, learn Japanese, and read. My friends Ursel and Jutta are here. Jutta is engaged to Fritz, the son of the Schneewinds. Inge Schneewind, his sister, was in my graduating class. Their family was one of those who came from Indonesia. Handsome Fritz is a U- Boat captain. He has to go back to sea and his U-boat is hit by a torpedo shortly afterwards. It is a terrible blow for the Schneewinds and for Jutta.

Sachiko comes to visit us for a week. She is married now and living in Sendai. Being a good Japanese daughter she had to marry. She didn’t know any young men, they are probably all in the war, but she remembered that there was a Japanese gentleman on the ship on which she and her family had returned from Germany, and he spoke German. He had gone to Germany to study beer brewing. When the war broke out he had to join the Japanese Army and go to Manchuria. So Sachiko and her mother had gone there to speak to him. When he returned to Japan, Sachiko got married.

I am so happy to see my old friend again.

My parents commuted between Tokyo and Karuizawa. My mother was representing Mr. Karl Mehnert’s magazine “The Twentieth Century” in Japan. Mr. Mehnert and his wife were stuck in Shanghai. At one point that job ended because of the lack of communication caused by the war. But before that, my mother had been to Shanghai once, to speak to Mr. Mehnert and to make the arrangements for her representing his magazine in Japan. In Shanghai she bought an overcoat for herself and a lovely dress and a bathing suit for me.

Our maid, faithful Tsunesan, remained in Tokyo to take care of the house and my parents when they were there. A German exchange scholar who had arrived from Germany was also staying in our house.

Our life in Karuizawa was simple, but we were happy.

On 9.8.’44 I wrote in my diary:

“I don’t seem to get around to studying Japanese. It’s just that there is so much to do in a household. Today I did the big wash (sheets etc) -( no washing machine in those days!) In the afternoon I went briefly to the Machi (our main shopping street) with Ursel. Then we wanted to do some studying, but now it was time to prepare dinner.”

Friday 11.8.

“The other day I read ‘Der Weizenstrauss’ by Heinrich Zillich. Quite nice. Maybe a little too sentimental. Siebenbuergen (Transylvania) is described with such love that it brings the country close to you. This war-generation, which is still living in the happenings of the last world war appears too sentimental to me; is it really true that these happenings, no matter how deep they went, could reverberate for so long and change people so much? The “Anna Karenina”, the 2nd volume of which I am working on now, is so human, all people are presented with such realism that one experieces with them and feels with them. But maybe that is why I am finding it so difficult to continue reading. Anna, as a human being, gives me so much to think about, that I regard her like a living person. But the way she is so little concerned about her life, what I mean is that she seems to let herself be driven by her feelings too much, that is what makes me angry.”

(There is more about a book by Hans Carossa, and about “Anilin” by Schenzinger).

“Guenterle is alive; he is a prisoner in Canada.”

Sunday, 20.8.44

“ I am so tired, and yet I am sitting in the kitchen keeping watch. Roland and Sachiko are sleeping. At 11 I will wake Sachiko and Roland. Roland will see Sachiko off. They will bicycle to the station and I can go to bed. It’s been a long time since I have had such a dismal day as today. I didn’t feel like doing anything, least of all reading. I haven’t read a truly good book for a long time {etc. etc.}”

Friday, 7.9.’44

“Today Mother came back from a short stay in Tokyo, where she packed for our move. I haven’t quite decided whether to be happy that we will be living in Karuizawa for good. On one hand one is safer here; it is rustic and lovely here; but isn’t it going to be terribly monotonous and  boring? It is true that I have a lot to do with the household and my Japanese lessons; and I also have to read more; and I have also decided to continue with French, violin playing, English, etc. That should fill my days, the way it was last summer;  but I just want some diversion. When Mother talks about Tokyo I get quite fidgety from a fear that I might miss something. Then, oh, how I wish I could be down there. There are days when I don’t want to see anyone; and then again there are times I can’t be enough among people.

I am happy that Ursel is up here. Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do with all my thoughts, I turn to her. Then we talk about trivialities as if they were great world-shaking events.”

I don’t remember at what point we brought our things up to Karuizawa, and I don’t know what all was brought up. But there were the two big German iron bed-steads which we got after the flood. At any rate that is what I think, because those beds came with us to Tokyo after the war. And I know we brought my violin, because I mention practicing with it. But what happened to it later, I do not know.

The house we were renting at the time was quite big and had belonged to American Missionaries. Some of their things were stored in a room upstairs. I got some books out of the room so I would have something to read ( and returned them to the room, of course.)

The German community distributed canned goods that had been purchased in Japan and were to have been shipped to Germany via Siberia, but then the war with Russia broke out and nothing could be sent or received. These canned goods were distributed to us. We got smoked salmon, sardines and mackerel. Somehow we had found one bicycle for rent, but needed a second one and we traded several (about six or seven) cans of sardines for it.

Our neighbor had acquired a goat for goat milk, and it was tied up outside their house so it could graze there. They had a baby and milk was not plentiful.

We spent the first winter in Karuizawa. I remember we had a root cellar in which we kept apples and potatoes – the mainstay of our diet. My mother called them “heaven and earth”. Once I ate a frozen apple and it tasted like a melon. A few things which I can remember will give a picture of the winter: we had a Japanese bath tub. To conserve wood we had baths about once or twice a week. Because the water pipes were not wrapped against freezing, we had to keep the taps open: the one in the kitchen and the one in the bathroom. Since we only bathed twice a week, ice would form below the dripping faucet, and soon we had a small iceberg in the bathroom. So when bath-time came around, each person in turn had to sit in the bathtub and pour hot water over the iceberg till it was completely melted and could build up again until the next bath. The bathwater then was used the next day to do the laundry. I will never forget the sheets on the line turning to sheets of ice. It took a long time to get them dry.

Mother and I wore gloves when we cleaned house, and we went every so often to the stove to warm up. The stoves were basically a metal drum, with an opening in the front to let in air, and a big opening in the top to put in the wood. I think we had one stove downstairs, and   one  upstairs. I remember the stove upstairs clearly; it seems to me that we spent most of our spare time around that stove. When it threatened to go out, my father would take very small slivers of wood and place them over some paper and light a match to them. That would make enough of a fire to restart the wood that had stopped burning. My father would call that the “little sympathy fire” (ein Sympathie Feuerchen).

The German community had bought a piece of forest, and men, women and children hiked up into the mountains. The men cut down the trees, the women cut up the branches, and the children helped gather the cut up pieces. Everybody brought makings for a soup, a big pot was put over a fire, and we cooked our lunch, an “Eintopf” (a one pot dish). When we were all tired, we took as much wood as we could carry on our backs home with us. The rest was brought down by some workmen.

My father started a “seminar” on “The History of Philosophy”.   I think the attendees were Ingrid, Ursel, Morido and I. I cannot remember how long this continued. Morido and I or Ursel and I spent a great deal of time together. Particularly Morido and I until the Japanese authorities forbade Japanese citizens to associate with foreigners, and Morido had Japanese citizenship.

My friends Jutta Wenneker, Inge Trapp, and Hella Janson were taking a course from Susanne Klein-Vogelbach, who had been our teacher for gymnastics at the German School in Omori. So I joined them for some of their classes, and we also spent many evenings together in Susanne’s room. She became a good friend and advisor. We were working on a routine, expressing music (Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”) with dance movements. We were ready to perform when the war ended, and our performance was attended by the first American GIs to come to Karuizawa for “Rest and Recuperation”. After the performance a young GI asked if we could take a walk together. So we walked and talked. At one point he asked me if he could have a “pitcher” of me. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted till I found out he wanted a photo of me, but I didn’t have one with me, and I don’t know if I even had one at home.

After we had brought up some furniture, books, etc., Mrs. Harich-Schneider, a pianist, but primarily a harpsichord, cembalo and clavichord player, asked whether she could bring her grand piano to our house. [The last Christmas in Tokyo we had invited her to our home and she had her clavichord brought to our house on a “reea-caa” ( a bicycle with a cart behind it)] My parents agreed, and she had her grand piano shipped to Karuizawa. It was wonderful to have her give concerts in our house, attended by members of the community.

I think I have already mentioned that we received rations of canned sea foods, and had traded several cans of sardines for another bicycle so that Roland and I could both get around better. One important task of ours was to bicycle into the country-side to visit farmers, and trade items of clothing for food. We had a great time doing this, and since we couldn’t very well go to the same farmers all the time, we travelled far afield. The farmers were always friendly and would ask us in to sit by the fire. They’d say “dozo o-agannatte.”  “Please come up and sit” on the tatami of course. Once we got to eat new potatoes that were cooking in a pot hanging over a fire, and ate them, dipping them into miso. One farmer told us horror stories he had heard about the things Americans did to the Japanese prisoners of war. But that happened only once. We tried to tell them that these stories probably weren’t true, but they believed what they read in the papers or heard on the radio.

One day we came to a small village we had not been to before. We were bicycling down the main street when we ran into a young woman who looked very familiar. The three of us stopped, looked at each other, and practically fell into each other’s arms: the young woman was Rinko-san, who had worked for us many decades ago, when we were still very small and living in Osaka. It is absolutely amazing how quickly we recognized each other. I never got to go back to that village, because the war ended soon after the meeting and I went to work in Tokyo, but Roland went back there repeatedly.

One time Roland  decided to go further afield by train. He got off at some unknown station and asked where he could find someone who sold apples. He was told to go straight down the street from the station until he came to a big farm. He went, and when he got to the right place he was shown to the “bekkan” ( a separate little house – in this case for the grandmother) where the owner’s mother lived. He was received very cordially and asked to sit at the “kotatsu” with the old lady. I also got to experience this later, when Roland and I went there for New Year’s. At that time we were offered toasted mochi to eat with wonderful apricot jam. I don’t know what happened on that first visit, except that Roland was so very graciously received. He was told that this big farm produced and canned a variety of fruit for the Japanese Army. Roland was given several jars of canned fruit to take home. (I don’t know whether he traded them, bought them or received them as gifts – I think the last is true.)  This was   a big surprise and a wonderful addition to our meager diet. Talking about diet: That first autumn, when we realized that we would be staying in Karuizawa, I helped mother make Sauerkraut. She bought many heads of cabbage, chopped them up and placed them in a barrel with lots of salt, pounding the cabbage while adding salt and more cabbage. I don’t remember how long we let it sit. Probably into the winter;  it was good!

At one point, when the German Navy had captured a British or Australian supply ship, our community got raw coffee beans, lard and coco butter. The coffee beans were very valuable and were used for trading goods or services. The lard was rendered with onions and eaten on bread or used for roasting potatoes etc. I can’t remember what we did with the coco butter. Somewhere mother got or still had some wool which was knit into a sweater for me by a German lady who was paid in coffee beans. We got milk which we had to pick up at a local dairy, but it was rather watered down, and some days the supply had run out by the time we got to the shop. One day, when Morido and I went looking for food, we found that in a little town (Kusatsu) near us we could buy watermelon juice. It was very unusual, but refreshing and tasty! Miso was available and we put edible weeds from the garden into the miso soup. Once, somewhere, I got a piece of meat which was not very fresh at all. I boiled it and boiled it until I was sure I had boiled all the germs away. It was rather tasteless, but it was meat. I am afraid that my mother skimped on the food she ate so that our father, Roland and I had enough. I don’t remember feeling really hungry, and I think we got used to our new diet. (Many decades later I asked a friend who had been in Karuizawa at that time whether he had been hungry, and he said he had been hungry many times.) It wasn’t till after the end of the war that I really realized how poorly we had eaten. And I am sure that my mother wanted my father, Roland and me to eat as well as possible, and that the lack of proper nutrition caused my mother to lack the resistance she needed when she got the Meningitis that killed her.

We walked a great deal: up Hanareyama, walks within Karuizawa itself, a hike up to “Sunset Point” (which Morido and I made one night by moonlight, and where we saw what we thought were bear tracks!), to the lava beds around Mt. Asama, and more; walking on the lava beds was interesting because air had been trapped in the hardening lava and made the ground sound hollow. We also had to walk when we visited people on Atagoyama, where there were many houses and one couldn’t bicycle. I think the Paasches (I took Kanji lessons from Mr. Paasche) lived a short way up the hill on Atagoyama.

When it snowed, the countryside was beautiful, but then Asamayama would erupt and the snow would be covered with its grey ash. I remember one summer day when I was about 12 years old lying in the grass. I remember the  silence that suddenly fell over nature, not even a sound from insects, as I lay there. Then, within minutes Asama erupted with a big bang spewing big grey clouds that gradually dissipated in the wind. I don’t remember any ashes falling at that time.

On the 29th of November ‘44 I write: “I am alone. For the first time in my life all alone for 10 days.” My parents had gone to Tokyo, and Roland was at school in Gora, near Hakone, in a hotel to which the German School had been evacuated. I felt lonely, almost sad. A telegram came, from Akasaka, and I was worried that something had happened to my parents, but it said: “Ration card in the dresser, buy shoes”.  I can’t remember if, or where, I did buy shoes!

On the 30th it snowed for the first time. I continued my Japanese lessons and enjoyed them. Mr. Paasche, to whose house I walked about twice a week, was teaching me Kanji. At one point he suggested that I learn the Chinese reading for the Kanji, too, but I decided the Japanese reading was enough for me!

It was cold at night, and when I read in bed, my fingers got stiff from the cold. I read German, English and American literature, and later also French. It seems that my scholarship was still paying for the Japanese lessons with Mr. Hashimoto (of whom I remember only that he was a kindly, elderly gentleman) and Mr. Paasche. At one point I wrote in my diary: “Today I am really looking forward to my Japanese lesson. Work is still the best medicine, after all”.

An exciting interlude was a ski-trip with friends to Shiga.  It was not only downhill skiing (no ski-lifts, and we had to walk up any slope we wanted to ski down), and we often put seal-skins on our skis and went cross-country or further up into the mountains through the snow. One hike was through the “Maerchenwald” (Fairytale Forest). Another was to a hut at the top of a mountain where we got a delicious hot drink and some sweet mochi (abekawa). Then we all skied together back down to the hotel. That was always a thrilling run. Another was further afield, then down into a gorge and up the other side to Hoppo, a small hotspring resort where we would get lunch or occasionally take a hot bath. One of the young men at the hotel, I think he was Austrian, gave some of us women ski lessons, which we appreciated very much. After the war the US Army took over the hotel and built a ski-lift and a rope tow near the hotel. They met the hotel guests in Yugawara at the train station and brought them to the hotel by weasel. Once, when I went there with my American friends and had breakfast at the hotel and used the ski lift, the manager of the hotel ordered a Japanese policeman to fetch me at the little Japanese hut where we were staying near the hotel.  He said to me that he knew I had taken the weasel (a kind of motorized sled) to the hotel, had eaten there, and had used the ski lift. He ordered me to leave the area at once, or he would get the police to remove me. I got my back pack, put the skins on my skis and took off to a much higher little Japanese hut, the “Shiga Huette”. The one where we had been staying was the “Maruike Huette”. The friends who had come with me were  Americans, so they  had no trouble. After climbing for a while I looked down over the hotel, the ski-lift and the slopes and felt, in a rather exciting way, like an “outlaw”.  (Here, enter Roland’s description of Shiga)

The stay in the hotel was fun. I don’t recall many Japanese people being there, but maybe they did not have as much spare time as we foreigners seemed to have. For my first ski trip to Shiga I had earned the money by tutoring some younger students from the German School. When I got my first pay, the money was stolen out of my day-pack while on the train going home. I was heart-broken, but my parents took pity on me and paid for the trip.

On the 22nd of January I put 1 9 4 5  on top of the page in my diary in big letters and two big exclamation marks. Rather prophetic, because this turned out to be an eventful, and also very sad year. I wrote :

“ I am lying in bed with a cold and am enjoying the inactivity. It is very cold, and my fingers are almost too stiff to write. This year I did not celebrate New Year’s Eve, but slept into the new year. At least a healthful beginning.

A winter in Karuizawa is cold! Housework in the mornings is almost unbearable.”

I still had part of the scholarship I had received in Tokyo, and I continued my Japanese lessons with kindly Mr. Hashimoto, who came to our house to teach me, and also with Mr. Paasche at the Paasches on Atagoyama. At one point, when I was very dispirited, I threw myself into my studies. For the first time I realized that studying, too, can be medicine.

I don’t remember at what point my parents stopped going down to Tokyo. I am sure mother’s work was finished, and my father had his winter holidays.

0n Thursday, 24 May 1945, I wrote:

“Today  is a heavenly day. So full of sunshine and spring air. So peaceful and quiet. But how much unrest is under this peaceful surface that wants to lull us into thinking that we are living in paradise. The de la Trobe family sat in their garden, in the warm sun, at a nicely set table. Can you imagine anything more peaceful? But where is Mr. de la Trobe? He died recently. Where is Henner? What is Henner doing, the soldier on the Eastern Front? And on top of everything Mrs. de la Trobe has a weak heart. (Mrs. de la Trobe died not long after this entry and she was buried in the same cemetery where mother was buried a few months later, and they both share a big rock which was split in two for the two headstones.) Oh and Jutta! our clown is quiet and pale. No more hope that Fritz will come back. Where has Jutta’s future gone?”

Two  poems, one of which I can translate, follow:

An meinen Freund, den Mond

26 August 1945

Your glow will go with me.

No matter where you go

Not lonely will I be.

I write about literature and poetry. I feel sorry for Morido who can no longer see his German friends because the Japanese are not allowed to associate with any foreigners – even allies. I read much.

The War is Over. Peace again!

Tuesday 8.28.45 I write in my diary:

“My birthday! 21 years old! A truly nice, harmonious day. Sad only mother’s tears this morning and father’s illness tonight. American occupation planes over Karuizawa as a morning greeting. First birthday in this peace-time. Just as with my parents whose 21st birthdays also fell into the first year of peace after WWI. Roland prepared breakfast and the birthday table. Lovely book and a dear letter from Morido. How that letter has comforted me. Afternoon and evening with the Gymnastics class, including Hella and Ingrid.”

I will never forget my mother’s tears that day. It seems she had had a lump in her breast, and although the doctor had declared it benign, she was still haunted by thoughts of death. I think the war, her worries about her family in Germany, and about us, here in Japan, an infection from an insect bite had all affected her health, and I am afraid she really believed she was going to die soon.

9.22.45

“It is hardly noticeable that there is peace. But sometimes small, insignificant things show that the war is over. I am so happy about that. Why think about a difficult future; I am sure everything will go well, also in Germany – although I always have to remind myself that the situation there is very serious.”

At this point we were living in a different house. Why we moved, I don’t know. Was the rent less? Was it easier to take care of because it was smaller? I never questioned my parents about this, and obviously it did not surprise me. It could also have been because it was easier to heat  because it was smaller. The stove pipe from the stove in the living/dining room went through the ceiling into our  parents’ bedroom to help keep that a little  warmer. My room, across from my parents’, was  quite big as I remember. Roland’s’ must have been next to that of our parents. It is really strange how memory works. I remember my bed being sometimes against the narrow wall, sometimes against the wall that ran parallel to the walls of my parents’ and my brother’s room on the other side of the stairwell. His room was quite small, and that is where my mother’s body lay when she died. Strangely enough I have a completely different memory of the house that we were living in at that time, compared to my memory of how it was when we had Mothers’ memorial service there. It is almost as if I were remembering two different houses. Could that be because one was a happy time, and the other a sad one?

Our life in the new house continued in the same way as before. Roland had graduated from school – gotten the Abitur –  and was getting engineering lessons from a German engineer whose family had also been evacuated to Karuizawa. He had a completely different social life from mine. He had friends of his own age, and I did not see them often –  or did not notice, so occupied was I with my own life. It is really interesting how our memory of places is colored by what happens to us at any particular time.

So now I was almost 21 and attended lectures and talks given by members of the community – not that I remember much of what was said.

I wrote the following about the rain (it always rained much in Karuizawa and that was what kept it in such lush green): “Are there rains such as we have them in Karuizawa anywhere else? This rushing takes away your breath. It wants to tear you along, on and on, down and down. When it hits the roofs, it sprays up white. And when it stops, there is quiet, but also emptiness. I love it, this rushing of the rain.”

I am often asked what we heard about the atomic bomb being dropped on  Hiroshima. I only have a vague memory of someone saying that a terrible bomb had been dropped that had killed many people. I don’t remember hearing of a second atomic bomb. It all seemed so remote, almost as if in another world.

Oddly enough, I do not mention in my diary how we found out about the end of the war,  and yet the memory of that day is very clear in my mind. We had heard that the war was over and that the Emperor was going to speak on the radio. Since people not connected with the German Embassy were forbidden by the Japanese government to have short wave radios, I went to the home of my friend Jutta, who was the daughter of the Naval attaché at the German Embassy.  Of course we did not understand a word the emperor said, he spoke in very formal, stilted Japanese, but we didn’t need to understand, we knew the war was over. It was one of those moments one can never forget. After the speech I bicycled home. I will never forget that ride through the silent, deserted streets; not a soul around. It was an awesome feeling; I realized that I had witnessed a life-changing moment.

For now, however, life continued unchanged till, pretty soon, the first GIs came. The hotel where the women and children evacuated from Indonesia were staying, was occupied by the US army for R&R (rest and recuperation). The poor evacuees had to find new homes, and a sign was put above the entrance to the hotel: NO GERMANS AND DOGS ALLOWED. Susanne and our group gave our dance performance to Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” which was attended by members of the armed forces. One GI talked to Ingrid and me after the performance and we took a walk together. These were men who had been fighting in the war until so recently and were now happy to see young girls.  The young GI Ingrid and I talked with, asked me for my “pitcher”; it took a while for me to realize he wanted a photograph of me (I didn’t have one). I don’t remember seeing much more of the GIs who were in Karuizawa, and our life continued quite unchanged for a while. The Americans, of course, needed to get English speaking people to work for them, and many Japanese were hired who spoke some English. But we Germans were all suspected of being   Nazis and it took a long time before some of us were hired. In my case I got several jobs in the coming year, and each time I was fired after a while because of my membership in the “German Youth of Japan”. The Japanese were hired because they were needed, just as the Germans were hired in Germany because they were needed, even though they had been in the Hitler Youth.  In Karuizawa our life continued unchanged. Every once in a while we would hear of a German who had been hired by the Americans.

On the 18th of October I wrote in my diary, and what I wrote shows that life went on as usual; but then, on Dec. 12th, I wrote: “ Here I sit with cold feet and hands in snowy Karuizawa. Yesterday, after a week of sick leave…..” (I didn’t finish the sentence).  After some weeks or months working in Tokyo I got hepatitis. What had happened was the following: One day, when I was walking down the street near the Marunouchi Hotel, (I had not been feeling too well,) I walked past two working men who were sitting by the side of the road eating  rice out of their bento bakos (lunch boxes). I suddenly felt a great craving for plain white rice. Later a friend took me to a doctor, and it turned out that I had jaundice. So I got sick leave and went home to Karuizawa. But the fact that I took  sick “leave” means that I had gotten a job! Since October 31, 1945  my friend Hella and I were working at the PX in Tokyo. Hella knew Fosco Maraini, an Italian photographer-writer and his wife. They had spent the war years in Tokyo, and she was employed in the PX and got Hella and me a job there, too. I lived in Omori with Hella and her family, and the two of us commuted daily to Tokyo. We were stock clerks and had to figure a certain percentage of the original price of the merchandise to be sold, add that to the old price and write the new price tags. I enjoyed working, the conditions were good, and we soon became friends with our two bosses who ran the PX.  It was against the law for us to  buy anything in the PX, but they were not very strict about it. My Mother longed for cigarettes and I didn’t know anything about cigarettes, but I had heard about “Camel” cigarettes, and that is what I bought for her. (The power of advertising!) She also wanted lipstick and rouge – her health was poor and she looked pale. My parents were delighted with anything that I could get for them. Once, after having spent a weekend at home, I had my suitcase stolen on my return trip from Karuizawa, in the local train from Tokyo station. My bosses let me buy a pair of new shoes and some other necessary items in the PX.

Mr. Janson, Hella’s father, was not well, so as soon as I found a place to live I moved. Mr. and Mrs. Maraini were living in the Marunouchi hotel and told me of a nice, small room that was available. The hotel was near Tokyo Station and the PX, a very convenient location, on the edge of a group of buildings around the heart of Tokyo. These buildings were probably left unbombed on purpose so that they could be used by the US armed forces.  From my room I could look down onto the foundations of an adjoining building that had been bombed out. One sight I will never forget is that of a young GI on guard duty, with a gun over his shoulder, amusing himself by balancing along on the remnants of the foundation of that destroyed building. What he was “guarding” I couldn’t figure out.

Once, at a party at the Jansons’, our bosses had been invited and had brought along a friend of theirs. This man, who ran the US Army radio station WVTR, Bob le Monde, and  I started dating. He was quite a bit older than I, but we got along well and I fell in love with him, and when he returned to the States it was my first real heartbreak. Once he told me about this “new machine” in the US, the TV, and what it might lead to. When I came to the States in 1950 I saw him on the stage in Hollywood, where he was the announcer on a TV show the name of which I can’t remember.

Hella and I continued to work together and enjoyed ourselves. We liked our work, our bosses; we were dating and being invited out to dinners in the Officers’ messes in the area. Hella was very embarrassed by the greed with which I ate everything I could lay my hands on. I put on so much weight that my American friends called me “pleasantly plump”.

While I was dating Bob, I met, through a friend of mine, a young man named Bob Feary, who was interesting and attractive and was in the Foreign Service. We went out together a few times. One day, when the second Bob called and said “here is Bob”, I answered “Which Bob?” which was rude and lost me a good friend.

I tried to get up to Karuizawa as often as I could, but when I was in Tokyo my mother wrote me lovely letters which I have kept and which I cherish. When Bob (1) left, I wrote a poem about the loss I felt, and I sent it to her. She wrote how much she liked the poem, but said; “I don’t  want you to be so sad!!”

My mother’s last letter to me was written on the 16th of February 1946, and she died on the 22nd of February, after just a few days of a cold which turned into Meningitis. My Father had called me first to cancel a visit I was planning, wanting to bring some friends up for George Washington’s birthday. He said Mother had a cold. Then he called again and asked me to come home at once, because Mother’s illness had turned out to be Meningitis, and to bring penicillin. I spent that whole evening and night trying, with the help of my American friends, to get the penicillin. I finally got it the next morning, and, rushing to get to the train station, I saw Bob Feary in a car in front of the DaiIchi Hotel; I begged him to give me a ride to Tokyo Station. He took me there, I caught a train, and when my father met me on the platform in Karuizawa he had to tell me that my mother had died that night. I think, and I hope, that I will never again experience such a sad moment.  Even today I can’t think or talk of my mot her without crying. Fortunately she had recently received a letter from Uncle Ludwig Binswanger in Switzerland. In it he wrote that Mother’s sister and family were well, and that her brother Gero was in a Russian prisoner of war camp. She was not happy about that, but she was glad he was at least alive. I am glad that she never knew that Gero was not heard from again, and declared killed in action in the last fight for Berlin. She was very close to her younger brother. Her last letter to me was written on February 19th. We had a lovely memorial celebration for her in our little house in Karuizawa at which a friend read Mother’s favorite poem, a poem by Rielke “Alkestis”. We placed her in a wooden coffin which Roland put on a sled to pull over the snow to the cemetery. When spring came we planted flowers around her grave with the tombstone which was half of the de la Trobe tomb stone).

I had to get back to my work at the PX and had to leave Father and Roland alone in cold Karuizawa.

At one point I was transferred to the Yokohama PX, but my job there did not last long (from 25 January to end of March) because my former membership in the German Youth of Japan again made me ineligible to work for the Armed Forces. I picked up on my shorthand again, but was not really interested in it. I moved from the Marunouchi Hotel to a very nice room in the home of a member of the Kawasaki family.

I went, as often as I could on Sundays, to the Hibiya Concert Hall. The Hibiya Hall had been taken over by the army and on Sundays they gave free concerts there. Again, these were meant only for the occupation forces, but since no one was checked when entering, I often went there either alone or later, when Roland was in Tokyo, together with him. One Sunday I met a young lieutenant who happened to be sitting next to me at one of these concerts. He was a very nice young man and walked me back to the Marunouchi Hotel where I was living at that time.  We  said good-bye at the door to the hotel. I never expected to see him again. He was stationed in Taiwan, I think, and he was leaving the next day. Then, several months later, when I was at a Hibiya Hall concert again, there was the same young man. He had been posted to Tokyo, and we saw each other often and became good friends. When he went home to New York State, we corresponded for a while. Then came my move to the U.S. and my marriage to Don. The first time Don and I went together to a concert of the symphony in San Francisco, whom did we run into, but the same young man, Bill Rifesnyder. We talked and found that we had mutual friends, but we never saw each other again. Maybe we’ll meet again at a concert in Seattle?

Another time, when Roland and I went to a concert, a GI asked Roland during intermission where the rest-room was and Roli, not knowing what a rest room was, thought it meant a lounge and answered: “there is one over there in the Ernie Pyle Theater, with soft chairs and music. “!!

When spring and the start of a new semester came, my father resumed his teaching. He would come down from Karuizawa once a week for several days and stayed in Urawa with our friend Dr. Dietrich Seckel. Father’s old friend C.K.Parker, June’s father, was back in Japan as a civilian with the Army because of his knowledge of Japan and its people. He lived in Tokyo, and whenever father was in the area, we would have dinner together. Father enjoyed seeing CK again, and I was happy to get news about June. There was also another former resident of Japan, Percy Buchanan, whom I remembered from Nojiri days. He was billeted in the Dai Ichi Hotel and he took me there for dances on several occasions. (Something my mother had been happy to hear.)

I went out a great deal with many different people, one of them a very nice Hungarian art historian, Dr. Horvard. But I felt restless and uncertain about my future. Many weekends I spent in Karuizawa with Father and Roland, and had a wonderful, if often sad, time.

On  the 31st of March I wrote in my diary: “A terrible storm blows outside. It seems as if all the dust of Tokyo is in the air and now forms a yellowish haze. But it is finally warm. But for how long? “

My parents had sent me our old maid Tsunesan’s address and encouraged me to visit her. In my diary I write of the visit: “The visit with Tsunesan on Tuesday was so nice. This dear, beloved old soul. But it was sad. We spoke of Mother.”

The next time I visited Mother’s grave in Karuizawa, I wrote in my book in German:

An Mutters Grab

Hier liegst Du nun und ruhst in Frieden.

Wir aber stehn vor Deinem Grab

Und sprechen noch mit Dir

Als wenn Du lebtest.

You now lie here and rest in peace.

We, however, stand before your grave

And speak with you as if you were alive.

On the 15th of May my father wrote a beautiful poem which I am not going to attempt to translate

translate:

Noch hoer ich jenen herben

Und traurig leisen KLang:

Im Fruehling ist gut sterben

in Blueten und Vogelgesang.

Doch eh’ der Mai mit Glaenzen

in diese Waelder drang

musst ich Dein Grab bekraenzen;

von Frost die Scholle klang.

Heut’ aber kommt von Sueden

ein Wehn mit waremem Hauch

bringt zu der Todesmueden

die Fruehlingsbotschaft auch.

Der Vogel singt vom Rain,

im Fruehling ist gut sterben!

Mich trifft der Herbst allein.

On the 23rd of May I got a job in the Prosecution Section of the International War Tribunal.  Commander Denzel Carr, whom my father knew from early Japan days, was working at the International Tribunal in Tokyo, and got me a job there, translating German documents into English. I had a wonderful time there. The work was interesting, and working with me were Uli Straus, whom I knew from early Karuizawa days, my former schoolmate and friend Mechtild Karsch, and John Mills, a young lieutenant in   the British Navy. Besides working, Uli and I would entertain each other by writing limericks and drawing “Goons”. We had a great time together and became good friends. Also working there was another young British Naval officer. We all got along well and had our lunches and relaxed on the lawn in front of the building. Mechtild and John started dating and went out together until John left Japan. [He came back several years later with his charming French wife and became one of my father’s friends, and I saw them again when I came back to Japan from the States in 1953 with my new family, and again another time in Austria.] My work was, as I said, interesting and I enjoyed the challenge. Once I was given a VIP ticket for the Trials (where my friend Jack Greenberg was the court reporter, as I found out later after I met him) and saw Konoe being interrogated.

I had a pretty busy social life. I do not remember the sequence of events, or how I met the different people I now called friends,  but besides my friends in the office, there was Jutta Wenneker, my class-mate at the German School in Omori, and Harold Evans who was the assistant to the New Zealand Judge at the trials. Jutta and Harold, Bill Rifesnyder (after he came back the second time)  and I went out together frequently. Jutta at one point had to make a very difficult decision whether to be repatriated together with her family to Germany or to marry Harold and stay. In the end – she was already on board the ship for Germany – she decided to marry Harold and got off the ship in the last moment. She and Harold got married in a simple ceremony at the Imperial Hotel with the New Zealand Judge as best man, me as bridesmaid, and my father standing in for Jutta’s father.

This period was a very interesting time for me, both because I enjoyed  translating and because of the people I met at work. There were parties with people from many nations. I remember several good looking Russian officers who spoke excellent English, though  I never got to know them. One Frenchman at the trials took English lessons from me and had his chauffeur pick me up at my job and take me back again for every lesson.

When Commander Carr’s family came to Japan, I got to know his wife and daughter Jane, who was close to me in age.  My parents had known Mr. Carr when he was teaching in Japan, and my father was happy to see him again.  Jane and I became friends  and did  many things together.  She drove a convertible and I can remember how impressed I was when she drove this car, with the top down, in a relaxed fashion with an arm on the rolled-down window. I had never seen anything like that before. I went to Hawaii many years later to visit her there.

I was very sorry when I had to leave this job, too, because of the DJJ. I got a good reference from Commander Carr when I left. I continued to go to dances, had dates, and went on a few outings with a group which called itself the “Imperial Marching and Chowder Society”, which included an American of German descent (Willo von Moltke). He agreed to send a letter for me to my mother’s Onkel Joy in Switzerland to inform him of what had happened to us, how we had survived the war. One of the members of this group was Lt. Marcel Le Rocque. We dated for several months, fell in love, and wanted to get married. He had been in the Army Language School and spoke and wrote Japanese. I had found another Japanese teacher, a very nice old man, who taught me language and Kanji. Marcel LeRoque, called Rocky, joined me in my Japanese lessons. I was in LOVE. We took trips together and  he came to Karuizawa and met my father and Roland. We got along so well, had such wonderful times together, and were so in love that we got engaged on the 27th of Sept and celebrated our engagement with my father and Mr. Parker in the room of Rocky’s boss.

From the beginning Rocky had told me about his parents who, as French Canadians, were anti German, and who, as catholic, could not conceive of having a non-Catholic, German daughter-in-law.  But Rocky promised me he would go home, get his discharge from the army, get a job that would take him back to Japan, and we would get married. In the meantime we had wonderful times together. Just before his discharge he got measles, and I  had to say farewell to him in the door of his sickroom.

Rocky and I corresponded till, on the 14th of January 1947 I write in my diary that I had heard from Rocky that he was not coming back to Japan. I was heartbroken and on the 23rd I wrote the following in English:

Youth

I dreamed where the was no dream;

I saw beauty where there was none,

and I loved where there was no love.

I was blissful in the light of a young morning!

Till one day I awakened to see my dream break.

Still its memory kept following me,

calling me back into its caress.

But I saw new fields stretching –

saw a new day dawn.

And I left the fresh shadows

and soft lights of the morning

to walk into the bright,

Sometimes oh too bright light of the day.

(PS – many, many years later he got in touch with me again, wrote a letter and asked me to reply by sending my letter to the address of the school which he was running. But foolish me, I was embarrassed to send a letter to the school and sent it instead to the home address which he had on the back of the envelope. Of course I never heard from him again, and I can find neither the letter nor the envelope with the address.)

Through Denzel Carr I also met old friends of his, Yale and Helen Maxon. The Maxons had lived in Tokyo before the war and had been in a Madrigal Group at that time. This group had been started by a Japanese businessman who had studied at Oxford in England, had sung madrigals there, and then had started Japanese and a non-Japanese Madrigal group in Tokyo.  Helen invited me to join them in this second group, and I learned to love singing madrigals. We sang at different occasions such as a wedding, the re-dedication of Yokohama’s Christ Church after its restoration from war damage, and I sang with them until I left Japan in 1950.

Mechtild was looking for a place to live, and I offered to share my two rooms at the Kawasakis’s with her. I had moved to these two comfortable, large rooms in the home of a member of the Kawasaki family after leaving the Marunouchi Hotel, which, my mother had heard, had a bad reputation. I don’t know what could have caused the bad reputation. I never noticed anything. Besides me, a friend, Lulu Schuette (formerly Schmidt, sister of my class mate Werner) lived there, and also Fosco Maraini, an Italian journalist and photographer, and his  wife and two little girls. Fosco later wrote a book on Japan, “Meeting With Japan” which was published in English in 1959. I don’t remember anything objectionable going on at the hotel. I do remember one time, though, when an American officer, slightly inebriated, tried to force his way into my room.

But I just grabbed his hat and threw it into the hallway and when he ran after it I locked my door.

I was lucky to have found the two rooms at the Kawasakis. I think it happened because I was teaching English to another Mrs. Kawasaki whom I had met through a good friend of mine, a friend of Jack Greenberg’s, Leonard Rand. She knew that a sister-in-law (I think) wanted to rent out two rooms. The door to these rooms was to the left of the entrance to the Kawasaki home and set back, so we also had a private entrance from the garden. Since Mechtild, who shared the place with me, and I usually used that entrance we had little contact with the owners; but they were kind and we were allowed to use the ofuro (Japanese bath tub) on bath days. Mechtild and I got along well, but then, sometime later, she met an American Major, fell in love, got married and eventually moved to the States.

One thing I remember very vividly from those days: I was always very allergic to the Japanese lacquer plant (urushi) from which the lacquer for lacquerware is made, and which – I was to find out painfully – is also an ingredient in some paints. The toilet seats in the War Ministry Building, where the trials were being held, and where I was working, had been newly painted. Unfortunately that paint contained some lacquer and I, not knowing that, had sat on one of those seats and ended up with a terrible lacquer rash on my bottom; so bad that I had to sleep on my stomach for a long time. This is one of my memories from my nice rooms in my new home. One advantage, though, was that I got to teach English conversation to the Mrs. Kawasaki who had recommended me to her sister, where I was living. I did this for quite some time and had many good times there. One day I was even invited to share the ofuro (Japanese bath) with this Mrs. Kawasaki.

I continued to live in my room at the other Kawasakis’ until the Gakushuin (Peers’ School) offered my father a place to live in the building that had been the  boys’ dormitory. My father  had been living in Karuizawa till then,  coming down to Tokyo to stay with my parents’ good friend Dr. Seckel so he could go to teach at the University. When the Peers’ School started again my father, my brother and I moved into the former library of the school on the second floor of the building. The library was a large room which we divided with bookshelves into a living room, and a bedroom-dining room combination. Father and Roland slept in the bedroom quarter of the library, just wide enough for the two big metal German beds we were given after the flood, and a wardrobe, and I slept on the couch in the living room. Our “dining room-kitchen” was separated from the “bedroom”  by a curtain. There was a small room next to ours for Tsunesan. The dear soul had agreed to come back to us. The “dining room” opened onto a balcony that ran along Tsunesan’s room and some other unused rooms, and ended in a balcony that ran along two sides of the building. Above us was a flat roof that covered the building and was the scene of many a happy party of ours. From there, on clear days, (especially after typhoons), we could see Mt. Fuji above the roofs of the city. Roland put a roof over the narrow segment of balcony in front of Tsunesan’s room, and that is where we had  our  “shichirin”  (charcoal burner) for cooking. We couldn’t find good bread, so Roland built a “bread baker” by making a loaf-sized wooden box that had a metal plate along each long interior side of the “baker”. He connected each metal plate to electric wires, one +pole and one -pole, and when the wet dough was put in the baker, the electricity went through the dough until it was done, i.e. dry, and the electricity stopped flowing, and the bread was done! – and we didn’t get electrocuted!  –

The only disadvantage of our new residence was the lack of a proper bathroom. Since this had been a boys’ dormitory, the only facility on our floor was a rest room with pissoirs only, and I had to learn to use these, because the other, more inclusive bathroom, was in the basement. There, in the basement, was also the bathroom proper, a large community bath, to which people from the other buildings came on bath day.

Once we had moved, I continued teaching English. I had started teaching at the “Tokyo Conversation School” and at the Waseda University’s English Speaking Society. English speakers were very much in demand because most Japanese wanted to learn English. I can’t remember all the places where I taught. I think the job at Waseda continued even when I got the job at the Girls’ Middle School in Meijiro, where  we lived at that time. One of my Waseda students wrote me a letter one day, asking whether he could visit to “become intimate” with me. (One of the many funny uses of the English language I encountered during those days, when I was living with Father and Roland.) While I was at the Mejiro girls’ school, one of my students, Keiko Hiratsuka, invited me to her home to meet

her family. Her father, it turned out, was a well-known Japanese wood-block print artist. I was received very graciously by the family: Father, Mother, and three daughters.  After  dinner Mr. Hiratsuka showed me his prints, and gave me at least twenty of them, not numbered, but all signed by him. Many years later (in the ‘60s) the owner of a Japanese art shop told me that he thought I must have the largest private collection of Hiratsuka prints in Japan. We became good friends with Keiko and her family. By then Roland and I had found a wonderful group of American friends which Keiko eventually joined, and to which I will devote a chapter later.

My father was teaching at Gakushuin again, and he was told he could teach either in uniform or in formal attire (a cut-away or tails). He chose the uniform and when not teaching, he kept his jacket in the coat closet at the school.

The Japanese Government had been looking for an English teacher for the crown prince (the crown prince did not learn German) for some time. A very charming woman, a Quaker called Mrs. Vining, was chosen. When she moved into her new home which was near ours,  she invited us to her home for dinner. (Our living arrangements were so primitive that we never could return her invitation). At dinner, when Mrs. Vining mentioned Quakers, Roland asked whether the Quakers had anything to do with Quaker Oats. This she answered with a gentle, smiling “no”. Later she wrote a book about her experiences in Japan: “A Window for the Crown Prince”.

Fortunately for Father, the walk to Gakushuin was short. But he was also still teaching at Tokyo University, and for that he had to take the train and then walk a pretty long way to the University. Meijiro Station was not very far. As a matter of fact we often heard trains passing in the night, and one night I woke up thinking the train was coming through my room and tried to move a table out of the way. The table had been enlarged by placing a wooden board on it and it had some teacups on it that we had used the evening before. I picked up the board to get it out of the way of the train that I thought was coming through our room, and set it aside which meant that I dropped it!

One day, on the suburban train, in the section reserved for US military and civilian personnel (which Roland and I used to ride although it was forbidden) I met a very nice looking, tall young man. We got to talking, and he said he wanted to see me again. Thus began my friendship with Jack Greenberg (he was the court reporter at the trials, as I mentioned earlier).  He had many friends and often took me to parties to  which he had been invited. We got along very well, and I always felt very comfortable and protected, very much at ease in his company. We never became lovers, but it was a beautiful friendship. Jack often came to our place for dinner. One day Harold Evans told me that the New Zealand Judge had found a book on Japanese woodblock prints that was written in German and which he wanted translated. Harold suggested that I might be interested in translating it into English. So I did that, and Jack, having such a broad knowledge of the English language from his work as court reporter, helped me with it and we had a great time working together. The New Zealand judge was very happy with the translation and – although  I had not expected to be paid for my work – insisted on paying me something. Later, when I started babysitting for the Hammerles, I was able to use that money to buy myself a raincoat from their Montgomery Ward Catalog.

Father, Roland, and I had a happy life together except for the moments of deep sadness over the loss of our beloved wife and mother. This sadness never left us till the end of Father’s and Roland’s lives, and will stay with me till I die, too.

Quite by luck, one of those strange incidents that can change one’s life happened. That was the beginning of the Inubashi, a small group of young German, Japanese, and American people. But I will have to begin from the beginning for that story:

In one of the women’s billets where non-military female employees of the Armed Forces lived, I think it was called the Osaka Building, there was a room which housed five  young women called Carol Chambers (from California), Barbara Vestal (from California), Marjorie Murphy (from Minnesota), Kay Russell and Yoshi Nakandakari (from Okinawa).

It all started with Kay Russell, who worked in the Department of Information and Education with, among other people, a Japanese gentleman. This gentleman invited Kay to his home for dinner one day. After dinner photo albums were brought out to show Kay a little about the life of the family. Among many photos were some of two Caucasian children, a boy and a girl. This was interesting to Kay and she asked who these children might be.  They are the children of my former teacher was the answer. Kay was curious: Where do they live? When she was told that they were living in Tokyo, she asked whether she could meet them. These children were Roland and I, and Mr. M. (I wish I could remember his name) invited Kay, Roland and me to dinner, so that we could meet. Thus we got to know Kay, and later her roommates Carol and Barbara. At that time Carol and Barbara were teaching two young students of Tokyo  University English: Ken Ikebe and Toshi Muto (both later joined Japan’s foreign service, and Toshi was ambassador to Moscow and London among many other postings – but became the first one of our group to die. Ken was consul general in Seattle at one point, ambassador to New Zealand, and a member of Japan’s UN mission in Paris when Roland, Jane, Don and I visited there in l951.) One day, Kay, Barbara, Carol, Roland and I decided to go on a bicycle trip over  the Thanksgiving holiday. The American girls suggested that we include their two Japanese students, and Roland and I decided to ask Keiko Hiratsuka and our friend Horst Schneewind to join us.

Everything was quickly arranged – everybody had a bicycle, and the date was set. We decided to meet at Yurakucho station. We never inquired how to get our bicycles on the train: we just took them onto the platform and into the coach. Americans were still able to get away with many things other people couldn’t get away with. Nobody knew that Roland and I were not Americans, and the Japanese students were part of our group. We had decided to bicycle along the coast of the Izu Peninsula. We took the train to Mishima at the base of the peninsula, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. Our first stop was a small inn which we found by chance on the south-eastern coast of the peninsula. It was on a slope and we had to carry our bikes down an incline (were there steps?) and up again the next day. We had army K rations for dinner, augmented by some tangerines given to us by a Japanese gentleman who had the room next to ours. (We gave him some K rations in exchange.) Back on the road the next day we ran into a man who had just shot a pheasant. We offered to buy it from him and Roland carried it slung by a string over his shoulder. That day we made it to Shimoda, a harbor town at the tip of the peninsula. There we had the cook prepare our pheasant which we ate along with our Japanese meal for our Thanksgiving dinner. One of our two rooms at the hotel, I think it was the one for us girls, had the name “Inubashi” above the door. At the inn there was also a room with ping pong tables. Above the door to that room was a sign that read  “Ping Ponog Room.”  After dinner we decided to play ping pong, and held the “Inubashi International Ping Ponog Tournament.” At Christmas, one of the Japanese young men, Toshi Muto, sent us a card addressed “To the members of the Inubashi International Ping Ponog Tournament.”  Thus was born the future name of our group “the Inubashi.”  Father soon became the “Oya-Inubashi”  (Elder Inubashi), and joined us on many future trips, including a bicycle trip on which someone in our group always had our father on his bike (my father’s eyesight was too poor for him to be able to ride a bike). At one point one of our group, Hans Crome I think, stopped a truck and got a ride for father and his bike.

It was on this, our first trip, that we started singing. Barbara  Vestal (who was one of the girls who shared a room at the Osaka Hotel) was a music teacher and taught us many songs, and directed us. Toshi Muto taught us, of all things, a German round. From Shimoda we took a ferry back to the mainland, and everyone on this boat had to perform something (doing this is quite popular among Japanese). Most people sang something. So this was the first time we sang with an audience, and with that started a tradition. A friend of Carol’s from San Diego, who was working as a civilian for the army, was also very musical and was allowed to play the organ in the Tokyo Mitsukoshi Department Store after hours. The “Inubashi” went to hear him and he soon became a member. Wherever we went, we sang. We sang together, several times for our friends, and once on stage at some Japanese concert or competition. We practiced every week, and when I came back to Japan after marrying Don, they (the remnants of the Inubashi) were still singing together, and I often joined them.

I could write endlessly about this period, so much went on all the time, always new and old faces, always new experiences. I have just been reading in my diary again. I had forgotten a great deal; for instance that father had been teaching German to Kay Russell and Doty. Once a week they came to our place for their German lessons and stayed for several hours, having dinner with us. It was at that time that I was teaching both at the Waseda English Speaking Society and at Kawamura Girls’ Middle School.  Someone got me a VIP ticket to the trials (where I had worked) and I saw and heard Konoe being interrogated. I also describe a completely new experience for me: watching an American football game. I even went to the horse races for the first time in my life. Another new experience was watching a boxing match and seeing one of the fighters at the end of the match take out of his mouth what I thought were his teeth, but it was his tooth guard. I often spent the night with the girls in the Osaka Hotel when I had been out in downtown Tokyo.

When many of the Germans in Japan were sent back to Germany by the U.S government, because they had been in the Nazi party , I took over a  baby-sitting job from Mrs. Fellmer. She was the wife of a German conductor and musician who had worked and taught in Japan for a number of years. Mrs. Fellmer had babysat for Col. and Mrs. Hammerle’s two children for one year. When the Fellmers left for Germany I took over her job and babysat for about a year until the Hammerles returned to the United States. They lived in Washington Heights, and sometimes I took the children on walks in the grounds of the Meiji Shrine nearby. I liked the whole family and enjoyed very much looking after the children. I learned a great deal about small children.  Corky must have been about 3 or 4, and Holly was a toddler, still in diapers. After they left I stayed in touch with them for several years. I wonder where and how they all are now.  The parents were quite strict. Once, when I was having lunch alone with the children, Corky said “Let’s play house.”  I said OK , and Corky banged his fist on the table and said: “God damnit!” I had never thought that Col. Hammerle would use such language, and I had to laugh. I enjoyed my time there. I often had dinner with them and ate so much that I got into the habit of drinking my after-dinner coffee black. I got to take home the bacon drippings which came in very handy for our cooking.

As I mentioned, the American authorities decided to send back to Germany all Germans who had been Nazi Party members. Our family friend, Dr. Seckel, a teacher of German at the Kotogakko in Urawa, who had joined the party for practical reasons, was also repatriated. All the possessions of these unfortunate people were confiscated and they were allowed only 350lbs of baggage. Mr. Seckel was an art historian and had an extensive library of lovely art books. All the things confiscated by the Americans were then auctioned off. Mr. Seckel had a brother who was a professor at the University of Chicago who wired money to buy back these books. Mechtild, being married to an American major by then, was able to take part in the auction, so she got back Mr. Seckel’s books for him. Since he was sent back with very little baggage, I assume that my father sent his books to Germany for him.

Father wanted very much for Roland and me to go to college, but our Japanese was not good enough to study at a Japanese University, and it would be impossible for us to find a place to live and study in Germany. We discussed these problems with our Inubashi friends, and one of the original four members from the Osaka Hotel, Kay Russell, offered to sponsor Roland. We were happy and grateful to accept her generous offer. The money for the fare came from a Canadian life insurance policy that father had taken out years ago. The insurance company (Sunlife Insurance) had very thoughtfully continued to make the payments throughout the war from the money that would be due him. Kay Russel’s roommate, Carol Chambers, suggested Roland stay with her family in San Diego, when he first arrived. Roland’s trip and first months in the States are described by Roland elsewhere, I think. What impressed me greatly, however, and what made me certain that Roland could take care of himself, was the following occurrence: Roland’s ship was to go straight to San Francisco, but soon out of Japanese waters he was told that the ship was to stop in Tsingtao, and that he was to pay an additional fare. But Roland argued that he had boarded the ship expecting to go directly to San Francisco and that he had no intention of paying more, and the agency finally agreed not to charge him. I was so proud of Roland when I heard this; now I knew that my little brother could take care of himself. We all missed Roli, but we knew that it was good for him to be in the United States.

Now Father and I were alone with Tsunesan. I know my father missed Roland very much. But since he had become a member of the Inubashi, he was never lonely for long, and I was with him till I, too, left about one year later.

Since I remember very little of that period I will review what I wrote in my review of the Year 1949. It was a year full of a variety of happenings, interesting, I learned a great deal, and it also brought a lot of fun and many sociable times. A year of enjoyable activities with young people.  Group activities of the Inubashi included ski-trips in winter, weekends in Karuizawa at Mrs. Schneewind’s (mother of a schoolmate of ours), folk dancing, Inubashi parties, swimming, hiking, trips by car in the spring and summer, bicycle tours in the spring and summer, our singing and the creation of the “International Singers.” There were the monthly meetings in which we discussed politics, started by several of us who had taken part in the Quaker International Students’ Conference, and the American Students’ Conference. The latter included the young people who had come from the States as missionaries called the J-3s because of their commitment to stay in Japan for three years. Exciting for me was an invitation to speak in Hibiya Hall for a UNESCO meeting. I spoke briefly in three languages, German, Japanese and English. I went out with many different interesting and not so interesting people, fell madly in love with a young Dane just a few months before my departure from Japan and had to leave with a broken heart.

A friend of mine, a Scandinavian diplomat, got me a free ticket on a freighter of the Danish Maersk Line. The only other passenger was a youngish, rather stodgy man, but he was with the shipping agency and knew the charming, bearded old captain of the ship and introduced me to him. At lunch every day we had a wonderful smorgasbord. I read a great deal and put the photos of the past years into an album. It was a most pleasant trip. When we approached the California coast the radio brought American broadcasts. I heard my first American commercial: “Halo, Shampoo, Halo.” (They made it sound like “Hello, shampoo, hello”). As we approached S.F.  I saw the white houses on my right – a lovely sight after the small Japanese houses with their black roofs. When we passed below the Golden Gate Bridge before we landed, a customs official came on board, and looked at my immigration papers. As he looked at my chest X Ray, he said: “A typical X Ray from Japan.” (I had spots on my lungs from exposure to tuberculosis.)  Here I have to tell the story of a young Swiss woman journalist, friend of my parents’, who went to see her Japanese doctor. When he looked at her lungs through the fluoroscope he called all the nurses near him to come and look. The lady was horrified – she thought she must have some terrible disease – but what happened was that the doctor wanted the nurses to see a completely healthy lung! Japan had so many cases of tuberculosis that the nurses hardly ever got to see a healthy lung. My father lost many students to this disease, especially in the early years.

As we passed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, I was almost afraid that the tip of the mast would hit the bridge, but of course it didn’t. Roland and Dirk Bornhorst – who had a car – met me at the pier.  First we walked through the town – I was amazed at all the old newspapers messing up the streets. Then we crossed the SF-Oakland Bay bridge and ended up in Roland’s tiny, two room apartment. (“Here one has to polish one’s own shoes “ was the remark one young German friend from Japan made when he first saw Roland’s place.) Roland was already enrolled at UC Berkeley, and was working in a COOP dining room for pocket money. The Maxons had offered to put me up for a while, and I spent a few nice days with them. Then I took the train down to Los Angeles to visit Hella Janson,

(now Berg),  an old friend from Japan days, who was studying fashion design. She was staying at the Evangeline Residence where I spent a few nights with her. I called friends from Japan days and started looking for a job. I went with the brother of a friend in Japan to see “Finnian’s Rainbow “ – a delightful musical – at Hollywood  Bowl. Two young GIs whom I had met in Japan and I went sightseeing together. Then I found in the paper an ad that asked for people to sell magazine subscriptions. I answered the ad, got the job, and found it very uninteresting, but it was a job. We had to ring doorbells and try to sell the owners a cook book. We had to stick a cookbook in the owner’s face and ask “would you like a free cookbook?” and then try to sell them a magazine subscription. I don’t think I made any money – that was paid only when people had actually paid for a subscription. But on this job I was working with two young women who were also trying to do the same thing. We got to talking, and one of them, Nan, suggested I live with them and work for them in exchange for room and board. It turned out that the two – Nan and Shirley – lived together in a house that belonged to Nancy’s father.  Nan told me that her father played golf with Eisenhower, and her uncle was a wild-game hunter! One day the rich aunt called when the girls were out, and I answered the phone. I answered politely; it was Nan’s aunt, and the next day she asked Nan: “Who answered the phone? She’s better than Cy.” Cy was the aunt’s butler!

The house was located in a beautiful, wooded spot in Laurel Canyon in Hollywood. The two girls offered me the guest cabin and food, in exchange for my cooking for them. The guest cabin had two rooms and a bathroom with shower. One of the rooms was for Nan’s dogs, two beautiful Belgian Shepherds, the other one was for me. I had a reading light, an overhead light and a radio and I was very comfortable. The lot was hilly, and I had to sign a statement that I would not sue Nan if I fell and hurt myself.

We got along well. In the mornings we had breakfast together and took sandwiches with us for lunch. I was asked to cook in the evenings, set the table with fancy mirrored placemats and silver, and then serve the food with a napkin over my arm with which to brush the breadcrumbs from the table. Then I had my dinner in the kitchen and cleaned up.

For some reason the job selling the subscriptions ended at one point, and I truly can’t remember if I earned anything at all, but it was an interesting experience. One after-effect was that for a long time I could not look at a California ranch-style house without feeling slightly nauseous.

Then I tried selling water-softeners, briefly, with even less success.

Finally I returned to La Jolla and to the Chambers. I stayed with Carol and her family while I looked for a job. I found one as a cook housekeeper; but while I was a good cook and good at cleaning, I hadn’t learned to serve food when my employers had guests. I had a lovely room with a view over the bay. But this job didn’t last long, either. My employers were leaving on vacation and knew I would be leaving soon myself to go to college, so they took that opportunity to let me go.

Carol had decided to go to Sweden to study, and was planning to take a ship out of Seattle. So Carol and I, and two young male friends of Carol’s drove to Seattle, visiting Carol’s brother, who was a forester in Oregon, on the way. In Seattle I contacted Woodie Mcpheaters from Japan days (we had actually talked about marriage at one point), and he introduced me to a very nice young couple with a small child. They were willing to let me stay with them, and I had very good times with them. Two stand out in my memory. One: a trip to the Olympic peninsula where we drove as close as we could to Hurricane Ridge and walked to the top where we spent the night in sleeping bags under the stars. During the night an elk came and inspected us. Above Canada, to the north, we saw the northern lights. Again a completely new experience. Another time they took me into the mountains North-East of Seattle, where we stayed in a small cabin overnight. I also went with them to pick beans for spending money. One day Woody took me to the Olympic Peninsula again, to show me a piece of land he and a friend had bought. It was a small, old  farm in the middle of the forest: an old farmhouse, a large meadow in which elk appeared during the night –  or so I was told. I loved the place at first sight and almost decided to marry Woody after all, just so that I could live in this beautiful spot! (It is a good thing I didn’t marry him: he later joined the Scientologists!)  I am so grateful to the young couple who took me in without knowing me, but I can’t remember their name – I did remember it when I first came back to Seattle to live, but I could not find it in the telephone book.

After Seattle I returned to Berkeley and probably stayed with the Maxons again. I visited Roland in his tiny room and then went to the University and looked around. I found out that it was possible to earn one’s room and board by working 10 hours a week. And if the work included cooking one could earn $10.- a month extra. I went to the Bureau of Occupations to see what kind of positions were available. I loved children, but I figured that living in a home with children would probably involve extra work without pay, and anyway, I wanted to have enough time to study. So when I saw that there was a place open at the home of a retired professor and his wife, and heard that the previous student had been there for several years, I decided to get an interview with them. I am not sure, but I think my first interview was with professor Etcheverry in his office on campus. He turned out to be a charming man. I then met his wife and it was decided that I should move in. I got a large room upstairs, sharing the bathroom with professor Etcheverry. Mrs. Etcheverry had her bedroom on the first floor. She was a sweet lady, and I knew I would be comfortable there. It was not too long since their younger son had died quite tragically, and Mrs. Etcheverry had only recently gone through a period of severe depression. Prof. Etcheverry was a delightful person with a great sense of humor. One day, during the first week, he asked me who my favorite professor was. I answered: “Professor Scalapino”. The next day, at breakfast, he said “I’m sorry, Barbara, but Prof. Scalapino is already married.”!

They wanted me to  fix breakfast in the mornings and cook dinner in the evenings. I cooked and then ate my meals with them. When they had company I also cooked. They usually had a lamb roast and caramel custard pudding for desert. I ate with them even when they had company and they called me “our college girl.” They asked me to clean house once a week and they payed me extra for that. I think I was supposed to get $10.- a month for the extra work, but they gave me $20. Since that was not enough pocket money, I took other part-time jobs. One was cooking lunch for a very nice elderly couple – he was a retired Unitarian minister. I cooked lunch for them and ate it with them. I don’t remember if I got paid money besides getting the lunch. I also don’t remember how long I did that, but I think it was for one semester. I also did several house cleaning jobs and odd jobs of serving at dinners during that first year.

Shortly after the semester began, I joined the Treble Clef Society, an on campus choral group, because I had always been so fond of singing. We sang at several concerts and at one point, after I had married Don, we put on Gershwin’s   “Of Thee I Sing”. So I started my new life with a very full schedule. The rehearsals for the musical took much time, and one evening when I was walking home with a group of friends, a campus cop stopped us and asked whether one of us was Barbara Helm. Don had called because I was later than usual and he had gotten worried.

I had hoped to get into “Recreation”, because I knew I would be interested in working with children or youths in a variety of activities, but unfortunately to do that I had to have American citizenship, and as an immigrant it would take me 5 years to get my citizenship. In Recreation my experiences at the International Quaker Seminar and the American Students Conference would have been very useful, but now I had to give up that idea. In my last years in Japan I had gotten interested in what I considered politics so that I chose Political Science not realizing that what I would really have enjoyed was International Relations. But by the time I realized that, it was really too late to switch. Since I had gotten the German Abitur  – I guess you would call it the “final exams” – I was given two years’ college credit. At my age – I was now 25 – that was a great advantage.

Things went well. In one of my first courses “The Political Society of Japan” I met Hans Baerwald again. I remembered him vaguely from early Japan days, and my parents had been friends of the Baerwalds. Father had suggested that I visit Mrs. Baerwald. I did, and there I also met her daughter Anne, who lived nearby with her family, and was visiting her mother. On the street I had seen Hans with a young girl who was holding a rose in her hand, and Mrs. Baerwald and Anne were talking about Hans’ new girlfriend. It was Diane Aamoth who later got married to Hans. At that time she had graduated in Pol. Sci. and was working in the Poli Sci. department office. In this class were also Don Helm, Leo Rose and George Moore who all became close friends. (They were all graduate students at that time.)

I enjoyed the singing very much, but after we put on George Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” I quit. The production had been great fun but had taken so much of my time. I couldn’t do everything: do housework and cook, take classes and write papers, and sing! So, after a year – I think – I gave up the singing. George Moore, Don, and I became a threesome and spent time going to lectures, drinking coffee at the Students’ Union or eating Japanese food in local restaurants. A whole group of us went on picnics together and at one point inaugurated the “Society for The Preservation of Parlor Games.” The latter included the aforementioned, and Hans and Diane, Connie Freydig, John Hattori, and Larry Schraeder and Betty Nakagawa who later got married.

Two people who became particularly good friends of mine were Don’s friends Maryanne and Paul Takagi. I think they had just gotten married when I met them, and MaryAnn was working in the office of Prof Brown.

Roland was involved in his studies of engineering and quite busy, but he occasionally joined our group, especially on picnics and skiing (which we did at the Sierra Club Lodge at Norden in the Sierras). He was still doing odd jobs to cover his expenses and at one point got a scholarship for poor foreign students. I got that scholarship, too, but by then I was married to Don and was no longer so poor and therefore could not accept it.

One day Don and George took me on a trip to the mountains where a friend of theirs, Jane, who had graduated the year before, was teaching in an elementary school. I took an immediate liking to her. I had been looking out for a girlfriend for Roland, but since we were up in the mountains it just didn’t occur to me that Jane would be great for Roland. Later someone else introduced Jane to Roland and they got married in June of 1952. After this trip George got mononucleosis, and was absent for several weeks. One day Prof Scalapino invited the whole class for a show of slides he had taken in Japan. Don picked me up in his car and we drove there together. On the way there Don took my hand very shyly and gently and I was touched by his action. He took me out several times and we spent much time together. I found that we had many interests in common, art, music, our love for and knowledge of Japan (during the war he had been drafted into the army and had been sent to language school to learn Japanese. After the war he spent at least one year as an officer in Japan – I think he had something to do with interviewing former prisoners of war.) One evening I was invited to his home for dinner with his parents and two brothers. After dinner the boys went into the kitchen to do the dishes and worked while singing in harmony. All three had nice voices. I was charmed. Another time when I was there, Don took out some classical records and played them for me. (Once we got married and moved to Japan, he forgot all his old interests and instead got involved with a group of men who   got together after work to drink.) I fell in love, and in February of 1952 we got married. Mother and Father Helm payed for the wedding, and Mrs. Etcheverry arranged for us to be able to have the wedding reception at the College Women’s Club. My friend Barbara Vestal came from San Diego to be the maid of honor, and George Moor was the best man; Roland gave me away. After the ceremony I got out of my “wedding dress” (Which was a pretty evening dress, pale blue) to change into my “going away suit” (the suit mother had received after the flood). But I found that I had forgotten to bring a blouse, so dear Mrs. Etcheverry took off her blouse to lend it to me because we were leaving right away on our honeymoon. The Etcheverrys had recommended a hotel in Carmel (where they usually spent New Year’ Eve.)  Anne Lenway and her husband were in Carmel, too, and surprised us with a visit.

The Etcheverrys had suggested that Don move in with me and pay $60 a month for his food. With the money he got from the government for his studies, and with me continuing with my housework at the Etcheverries and other places, we managed. I graduated with a BA and Don got his MA in June of 1952.

Roland and Jane, Don and I were planning a trip to Europe together. The National Students’ Association advertised a cheap student flight on a chartered plane from New York to London and a cheap ocean voyage on an old troop ship from Le Havre back to New York. I had received my citizenship two years after immigrating and one year after having married Don. Roland and Jane got married shortly before we left. We decided to drive our car across the USA and leave it with friends on the East Coast. The first problem arose before our departure, when we went to the German consulate for visas. We found that because Roland was eligible for the draft and could be excused only if he were enrolled in school and that his visa therefore depended on his being enrolled.

I was so disappointed and couldn’t hold back my tears. The consul saw my tears, then said we could get the visa if we promised to be back in time for Roland to enroll at the University upon his return. Roland and Jane got married in the Brazilian Room in Tilden Park and we had an old-fashioned German “Bowle” (fresh fruit punch) to celebrate. The next day we left by car for New York. Not wanting to waste the precious German wedding punch, we took the leftover with us on the trip. When we stopped at June Goldman’s in Iowa for a night, we had Max and June try the wonderful punch the next morning. — Max took a mouthful and made a face and said: “How many miles do you get on this?” –  it had turned into alcohol!

The trip by car to the East Coast was wonderful. We took the northern route via Yellowstone National Park (where we saw Old Faithful), past Salt Lake and Salt Lake City. We had our sleeping bags with us and slept by the side of the road. Once, when we had gone to sleep in the dark, we found that we had slept on broken glass! Another time we had to stop driving to let two skunks slowly cross the road. We visited friends in Maryland and left our car with them. In New York we boarded our flight and flew into London. Once we arrived in London we wanted to eat and found some workmen sitting outside the airport and asked them where we could find something to eat. They answered that where they would eat wouldn’t be suitable for people in “your station of life”.

Luckily Don remembered that, when he had visited London as a student, he had stayed in a hostel for women of the Armed Forces, and we found it again. It was very clean, smelled of Lysol, and we had bread and marmalade and tea for a satisfying breakfast. We had a Chinese dinner the next day and then set out to find some bicycles. Don suggested we go somewhere – I don’t remember where and what it was, but it was a place where foreign travelers could find or leave messages etc. There we found an ad from people wanting to sell their two bikes. We got the other two bikes through some relatives of ours in Heidelberg. While still in London we visited the widow of our great-uncle Edmund Van der Straaten: – she is an old lady now and has trouble placing  Roland and me; suddenly she says: “Oh, you are the Japs!” She remembered us from a photo my parents had sent her of me as a toddler in a kimono. – She gives us tea to take to our grandmother, her sister-in-law in Germany. Later, in Germany, on the border, we have to pay duty on it! – Don showed us a little of London, and then it was off on the boat through the canal to Dunkerque and then to Paris. Don found us a place again, the little hotel where he had stayed that same trip about a year before, and we spent a few days looking around Paris.  While there, we visited Fontainebleau, where Roland’s and my Inubashi friends Kay Russel, Barbara Vestal and Carol Chambers were teaching in a school for children of American military personnel. Jack Heckelman was there, too, but I don’t remember where he was working. We spent a few wonderful days in Fontainebleau and Paris and then took the train to Marseilles, where we started our bicycle trip.

The weather was beautiful as we set off bicycling along the Mediterranean Sea. We had no specific goal, we just enjoyed the scenery, the setting, the fishermen singing as they hauled in their nets, taking occasional dips in the sea – that was like being in a bathtub, nothing like the invigorating freshness of the oceans on the coasts of Japan, but the beaches were beautiful. We bicycled through Monte Carlo, where we saw beautiful yachts anchored in the harbor, and then on to Rapallo. I remember little about where we stayed or camped. I do remember that we stayed in a youth hostel in Venice. The Italian fishermen reminded us of Japan. One of the things I enjoyed particularly was that everywhere we went in Italy people were singing.

The first time I went into a restroom in Italy, I couldn’t figure out which was for the women: signori or signore. From having learned Latin I was able to figure it out: not “signori” for me! I also remember that in some stations we were able to take baths – but I can’t remember where (it could have been Germany). In Florence and in Venice we stayed in youth hostels – when we didn’t camp out, we stayed in hostels. In one olive orchard where people were sleeping under the trees, I had my camera stolen from next to me as I slept in my sleeping bag. Once, in Germany, we camped next to a potato field where, we were told later, we were lucky not to have run into – was it raccoons, or foxes? Jane was happy she didn’t know about that till the day after. As we were told later, since the Germans were forbidden to own weapons, there was quite some wildlife to be found in the country-side.

We saw the leaning tower of Pisa, and then the beautiful doors to the dome and the gorgeous statue of David in Florence. When we reached Venice, we spent a few wonderful days, including a ride in gondolas and then took ourselves and our bikes by train across the Brenner Pass, and then bicycled down into Innsbruck in Germany; a spectacular, breathtaking ride and wonderful experience. On this trip we saw many of the crosses that often stand by the side of the road; this was catholic country. Unfortunately Don, Roland, and I tended to bicycle a little faster than Jane, and then would have to stop to let her catch up. We didn’t mind, but I’m sure poor Jane wasn’t all too happy about it, especially since we set off again pretty soon after she had caught up with us.

The same day we left Italy we arrived in Kreuzlingen on the Bodensee (Lake Constance.) There we showed up at the doorstep of our great-uncle Joy (Dr. Ludwig Binswanger). I don’t remember, but I hope that we had announced our coming. The evening of our arrival the Binswangers had a concert in their home: Edwin Fischer would be playing. My cousin Dieter, about two years older than I, was worried whether we would be appropriately dressed, since we arrived in our bicycling clothes, but when Jane and I in our navy blue nylon dresses and Roland and Don in clean shirts, jackets and pressed pants arrived, we were graciously received. Uncle Joy was very fond of his sister Anni, our grandmother, and had always taken an interest in our family. He was very fond of Mother, and shared an interest in philosophy with my father. Whenever we came to Europe we would spend a few days in Bellevue with his family. This time, too, he invited first Roland, and then me to a private talk with him in his study. He lay on his couch and we got to sit in an easy chair facing him; he asked us questions about our lives and let us talk.

I can’t remember where we slept – in the Gartenhaus (Onkel Joy’s Residence) or in the main building, the “Bellevue”. The next day Dieter took us to the  Brunneg to see Tante Dolly, Werner’s English wife (Onkel Joy’s sister-in-law). Werner had died not long ago of pneumonia. Then he showed us around Brunneg, an elegant old estate, and I told him how embarrassed I was that I had asked him to carry me down the big wide stairs there, when I was 11 and had a crush on him, and he confessed that he had had a crush on me, too. (Dieter later became a doctor specializing in stomach problems, but became quite obsessed with music and left his wife and 5 children to live with a young Chinese pianist. This relationship didn’t last either, I think, and I think he died rather a lonely death. His wife Esther later became a good friend of mine.)

From Kreuzlingen we went to Lake Lucerne and took a look at Mt. Pilatus. I think we took a suspension car up – how far we went I cannot remember. But the view was impressive. We also visited Wolfgang (Dieter’s brother) and Trudi Binswanger, and met little Markus, their first child. They were spending their holidays in a small hotel on a mountain lake at the foot of the Alps. Wolfgang is also a psychiatrist and is working in Zurich. (When I was in Europe a number of years ago I went with Trudi to hear Markus give a talk. Markus is also a psychiatrist and has established a village where people who need psychiatric help live with their families in separate small houses.)

After Switzerland we bicycled along the Rhine and later the Neckar to get to the home of our Tante Annemarie, mother’s younger sister, in Heidelberg. She is married to a lawyer, Adolf Schuele. Tante Annemarie is not well. She suffers terribly from migraines, and her daughter Franziska tells me that she has to find morphine for her. Tante Annemarie dies not long after our visit. Also living in the house is Ilse, the wife of our Uncle Gero who was killed in the war. She has a little boy also called Gero, who has never seen his father. Here we give away our bicycles, because from here on we will travel by train, bus, or hitchhiking. In Heidelberg we also visit our mother’s first home. The next stop is Karlsruhe, where we visit my father’s mother “Grossmutter” and Aunt Eva and deliver the tea from England. They live in the attic of an old house which was not bombed out. They have a cleaning woman, an elderly one who comes once a week, and Grossmutter helps her carry the bucket of water for the mop up the stairs!

From Karlsruhe we now take the train to Bad Homburg where Tante Jetta lives with two elderly aunts. One is Tante Jenny, the wife of Dr.Baumstark who had owned the Sanatorium Baumstark where Aunt Jetta had worked till his death. Living with them is another old lady, Tante Jenny’s sister, Tante Marianne. It is a lovely old house and they manage to find some rooms for us to use. Tante Jetta takes us up to a mountain where there is an old castle ruin. We also eat in a very nice old restaurant in the forest.

From Bad Homburg we bicycle along the Rhine till we come to Eltville, where our Onkel Wolfgang, father’s youngest brother, lives on an Island, the “Eltviller Aue” (Aue=meadow) which belongs to Onkel Alberts divorced wife Irma. Wolfgang is in charge of the farm which is on the island. On this island is a small “castle” which belongs to Irma, but at that time it was rented to an American family in Germany with the occupation. These kind people think we should stay in this house, since we belong to the family, and make two rooms available for us; it is an enormous place. Francesca is staying with her mother in a lovely small house – part of the island property. They all, including the American tenants, join us at a fire which we have in the evening by the river. Later Wolfgang takes us to the pigsty where the pig is which he had bought and which had just arrived that day. Francesca decides we have to christen the pig and we have a fun christening. Later Onkel Wolfgang decides we should all have a dip in the river and he goes in with his underpants on. Later he lies down in bed next to Lucia, and she is furious because he has kept on his wet underpants.

Now I will have to start looking at photos to help me remember what came next: I don’t remember from where to where we bicycled, but we covered a long stretch along the Rhine, visited castle ruins, saw the rock from where the Lorelei lured boats – and fishermen – to their deaths in the river with her bewitching songs. We enjoyed food in small inns and coffee shops. It seems we were very lucky with the weather. One more quick visit to Freiburg from where we went to Strasburg with its gorgeous cathedral from the top of which we looked over the roofs of the beautiful old houses.-  Then back to our grand-parents’ former home in Heidelberg – where we leave our bikes for their children. I believe from there we took the train to Paris where we had to get Roland’s papers, but they have not arrived yet. Frantic calls to Washington DC, and we hear again that Roland has to stay on to get an extension for his visa, and to get that he has to be enrolled in college, since he is not yet a citizen. We decide that Roland should stay in Paris, until he gets the necessary papers after Jane has enrolled him in college in Berkeley. Most complicated! Luckily our friend Kay Russell from Japan days is still in Paris and Roland can stay with her until the necessary papers arrive. We spend a few fun days in Paris, then the rest of us go by train to Le Havre, where we will board the old troop ship that has been chartered by the National Students Association for the trip which had started with our flight on the airplane, also chartered by this group.

The ship has hit an iceberg before reaching LeHavre, and the dent in the bow of the ship is covered by a big tarp. We sleep in bunks three or four  high.

The weather continues rough and one girl on the ship gets so seasick that she wants to jump overboard, and she is taken to the infirmary and has to be strapped to her bed there.

On board we meet a young couple who have found a cozy spot in the bow of the ship. We get along well and it turns out that we will run into them again and again, first in Boston, and also in California when they visit their daughter who lives on the way to the wine country.

After we reach New York Harbor and get off the ship we have to go through customs. The customs officer is not at all interested in what we have to declare, although Jane is expecting to show her piece of silk and pay duty. It turns out he doesn’t care what we have with us, but finally asks whether we have some wine. We show him our recently bought wine and explain that it is already open. That’s fine with him; all he wants is a good taste of it. He drinks, gives back the bottle and waves us on.

We don’t linger in New York. We have to get to California as soon as possible to enroll Roland in College. This time we take the southern route. I don’t remember much of this trip except that we drove through some lovely countryside. As usual we spread out our sleeping bags for the night. In Texas we stopped to visit Mary-Jane’s family. This is the first time Don and I have met them. We had a great time with them, but couldn’t stay but for a few days. Roland had to get back to make sure he was registered at UC.

As we were nearing home, we heard a radio message warning listeners that an escaped convict was thought to be on the highway where we were traveling. We continued as we had travelled before, though we were a bit worried. Pretty soon we felt safe again and concentrated on the road and the scenery. I don’t remember which route we took home, but we drove in a north-West direction.

I assume that Roland and Jane, before they left, had already moved into the small house in the student village that was to be their home. All I remember is that they had painted their interior walls and had chosen a yellow which turned out different once the paint had dried. Roland called it a “pee pee yellow.”

Upon our return, it did not take us long to settle back into our old routines. The three of us started our new courses; Jane kept on teaching and became a “Hausfrau”.  We saw each other off and on, on campus, sometimes had lunch together. Jane was teaching; but then she got pregnant and they had a baby boy whom they named Stefan; I should mention here that I had Christopher just a few months before Stefan was born. I had graduated from Library School, just before leaving on the trip to Europe, and upon our return we moved into an empty apartment in housing intended for veterans, Don having been in the US Army during the occupation. Our entrance led up some outside steps that led to the front door of our neighbors’ apartment and to our front door. Next to us, if I remember correctly, lived a black family with the cutest little boy, who soon became a friend of ours. From here I went to my classes at the Library School, while Don worked in a canning factory so we could have some spending money. The Dean of the Library School was not happy with my having a baby, because he wanted every graduate to start work immediately after graduation. I’m sorry I had to disappoint him, but I wanted to become a mother first, and then work as a librarian. Later, in Japan, when the International School in Yokohama wanted me as a librarian, Don did not want me to work – (except in the house, of course!)

Mary-Anna Takagi was also pregnant, and they had their first child, Tani, just a few months before I had Chris, and MA and I together attended special exercise classes for pregnant women. Diane Baerwald was also pregnant, and their child, Andrea, was the first to be born in our group.

Don found a job in a canning factory.

The new apartment was very small, and when Chris was born we had to put our beds one on top of the other to make room for the crib. Well, Chris’ arrival put a bit of a cramp into our lifestyle, but later, it was nice for us young mothers to be able to get together and chat while we were nursing our babies.

From here it gets difficult to remember; so much kept going on and we were kept so busy; but if we took our babies along, we could go on picnics in the forest or on the beach with the others and had a great time. Mr. Yatsushiro, my friend Sachiko’s father came from Japan on business and came to see us in our tiny home.

Don’s father had made a trip to Japan, to perk up the business a bit. The German Helm had not been a very effective manager, so Father Helm thought it best to send us to Japan so Don could manage the company. Of course Don was not prepared to run a business – all he had ever taken was an accounting course – but he needed a job and decided to accept the job of manager of Helm Brothers. It was a very difficult time for him. For me, life was quite easy. Don’s father had built a very nice house for us and we settled in with baby Chris. I was happy to be back in Japan, although I knew little of Yokohama, having lived in the Kansai Area (Osaka and Kobe) and then Tokyo. We soon renewed old friendships (Don had been away much longer than I had been) and made new friends.

Tsurusan, who had worked for the Helms during  their Japan days, had kept in touch with the family and was willing to come and work for us. She was a real blessing. She was capable, learned quickly, and having watched me cooking, she was able to surprise us with a cooked meal when we were late coming home one day. But we also needed a younger and sturdy young woman to help with Chris. We hired Nori-chan, the daughter of the carpenter at Helm Brothers. She learned quickly, and came to love Chris and the kids who followed. Unfortunately she also was a thief, which we found out later, when one day I missed something of mine and found she had taken it. Earlier, my father had mentioned that something had been taken from his overcoat pocket, and since we could not prove anything, we felt there must have been a misunderstanding. I also lost some small items of jewelry. So I decided to leave some money lying around and had marked one of the coins. When I asked her for some change, I found my marked coin. With that proof we found out about all she had taken. I think I got back most of the things she had taken. We hated  to let her go, but luckily she had met a young man whom she married, and after their wedding we saw them occasionally.

Now – it is July 30 2010 – I am finding that I am not remembering well anymore. Too bad!!!

But Leslie, our second boy, was born in Yokohama – he was always the one among our children who got hurt. He fell off the back of the couch into a window, broke it, and hurt himself. We had told our children to be careful with fireworks, but when some of his friends were playing on the street with firecrackers, he came to watch just as they had put some in a bottle and put fire to them. The bottle exploded and a piece of glass got into Leslie’s eye. I had to grab him and rush him to the doctor at the Bluff Hospital nearby. There I was told to take him to a Japanese hospital which had an excellent eye specialist. There he was well taken care of and I found this Japanese hospital very efficient, but not as modern as the Bluff Hospital. While I was waiting for Les to be treated, I watched a cat jump onto a table to eat the left-over food on the plates. Another time he played at the fire station nearby and climbed up a wall where the fire hoses were hung out to dry, and he fell again and hurt himself. When we were at Lake Chuzenji, where we always stayed in the summers, this time at the home of the caretaker of the waterfall food stand, he ran from the waterfall to the house and crashed into the glass door to the house. And once, when he was at the YCAC (Yokohama Country And Athletic Club) playing in the pool with a friend, this friend came swimming under water and surfaced just as Leslie’s head was above him and knocked out one of his incisors. I was called to the Club and had to rush him to the dentist.

Chris was, and always will be a solid, thinking being. He was a good, intelligent child, quick to learn, and interested in many things. He is a Lawyer. Leslie, our joker, our clown, in spite of all his bad luck, became a journalist, worked for Business Week in Japan and is now editing a news magazine in Seattle. Julie, who always loved animals, became a veterinarian and now lives in the mountains of Colorado with husband, 2 boys and many animals. Andrea went through college in Portland Oregon and lives there now with her husband, a son and a daughter, and is happy in her job at her children’s school.

Now I am living in Seattle Washington, and will try to continue the story of my Life.  How much longer?

by:

Robert Schinzinger

Once upon a time there was a little golden bird which just loved to fly through the blue sky, and to sing out of mere joy over the beauty of the world. Many people heard the joyful song of the golden bird, and because their hearts were full of sorrows and unhappy thoughts, they wanted to catch the bird and to keep it in a cage where it should sing when they wanted it to sing. To be silent when they wanted it to be silent. But the golden bird flew high over their heads, singing and enjoying the beauty of the world.

Sometimes however, the little golden bird wondered why so many people lived on the green crust of the earth. Working hard and having happy as well as unhappy thoughts. After a while the golden bird got tired of the empty blue sky and wanted very much to live a human life on the green surface of the earth. When the old architect of the universe heard the golden birds wish he shook his head and said “My dear little golden bird, you don’t know what you ask for. You don’t know what sorrows really are.”

But the little golden bird insisted on living a human life like all the others on the green earth. Since the little bird begged and begged, the lord finally said “well, I shall transform you in to a human being, but you cannot change back in to your present form of existence until your human life has ended.”

So the golden bird was born on earth as a little girl who just loved to walk through the green woods and fields, singing out of mere joy over this wonderful world. One day when she was no longer a little girl, but a beautiful young maiden, her mother died. Now she knew what sorrow was. All night long she cried over the body of her beloved mother. When the morning came and the sun threw its light on her mothers marble-like face, her father took her hand and led her out of the room. “My dear daughter”, he said, “we human being must have the courage to live and say good-bye.

Keep the image of your dear mother in your heart! Live, as if she were still with you, because her love will always be with you.

Little birdy, that was the girls name, started a new life. She worked hard and shared her earnings with her old father who also worked hard, because the times were not good. Many sorrows she learned, but they were all very little, compared with her first great sorrow.

Birdie knew that her mother’s love was with her. She felt that her mother lived in her heart, but also in the tender flowers and strong trees. And when she walked through the green woods and fields, she sang out of meer joy over this wonderful world.

The old architect of the universe smiled, while tears came to his eternal eyes.

Everybody liked birdy, and birdy liked everybody, because she did not know that the others were different and did not have the heart of a golden bird.

Many young men saw the beautiful maiden and heard her joyful singing. Everyone of them wanted to marry her, wanted to keep her in hs house, where she should sing, when he wanted her to sing, and would be silent, when he wanted her to be silent. Birdy didn’t love any of them so much that she would give up her freedom. She preferred the friendship of those gils and boys who liked wandering and singing as she did herself. She knew songs of many lands, and spoke many languages.

One day, Birdy met a young man whom she liked better than the others, because he was beautiful and could laugh a joyful laughter. She spent the whole day with him, walking through the green woods and fields, and singing out of mere joy over this wondeful world. When the evening came, they entered a little inn on the roadside and ordered a simple meal.

Birdy looked out of the window and saw the first star in the dark blue sky. “Look, the first star”, she said to the young man, who had reached for the newspaper. “I wished, we could fly right in to the world of stars!” He replied: “What a silly idea!” He opened the newspaper. Birdy continued: “Whenever I see the stars, I want to sing out of mere joy over the beauty of the world.” “Keep quiet!” he said. “I want to read the paper.”

Astonished, she asked: “Don’t you want to sing with me?” “No”, he replied. There is a time for singing, and there is a time for silence. Now I want you to be quiet, because I must read the sports news”. He looked in to his newspaper and did not see that her face turned away from him, and toward the evening star.

The young man was so interested in the last boxing events, that he did not notice it, when birdy silently stood up and left the room.

She stepped out of the house and walked through the darkness. Many silvery stars were shining over her head, and she cried bitterly for the second time in her life. The young man was still reading the paper, when the innkeeper brought the meal and asked “Where is the young lady?” The lad looked around and said: “Oh, she must have left the room for a moment. She will soon be back. I’ll start eating, for I am very hungry.” But birdy did not come back to him.

The next morning when birdy had breakfast with her father, she said “I want to travel into the wide world. Here, everything is so narrow, and people are very narrow too.”

The old man shook his head and said: “Dear birdy, the world can everywhere be wide or narrow. Your friend disappointed you. Can you be sure to find a better one far away?” “I don’t know”, said birdy. “But if I cannot find a better one, I shall come back to you.”

The old man opened the drawer of his desk, and gave Birdy a little box with golden coins, rings, and necklaces. “That’s what your mother left behind. Take it! Keep the rings and necklaces, and you will feel her near you. With the coins you can buy the passage on a ship which will bring you to the other side of the ocean. Over there, you must work hard in order to make an honest living. Are you ready for a hard life?” Birdy nodded “Yes, I shall be happy to work hard, as long as I can sing whenever I like to.”

Birdy told her friends about her decision to travel in to the far world, and they arranged for a vig party where they sang song in different languages, and gave birdy many farewell gifts. Finally the ship left the harbour, and birdy was standing on deck waving both hands. And after the ship had disappeared on the horizon Birdy’s friendssaid to her lonely father: “Now you must wander and sing with us.”

On the other side of the great ocean, Birdy left the ship and went to the castle of a rich couple of whom she worked as a house-keeper, cook, and maid. The little castle stood on a cliff, over looking the infinite ocean. The lady liked Birdy, because she sang like a bird and never complained over the work she had to do.

One afternoon the lady and birdy spoke about a poor neighbour who had just passed away. Birdy said to the lady: “Since all people are children of God, they should share the fruits of this earth equally. Don’t you think so?” The lady was shocked and said: “Are you a communist?” Birdy said: ” I do not know what communism actually means, but if it means the black and white men should be equal, and that the difference between rich and poor should finally disappear….”

The lady interrupted her. “You harbour very dangerous thoughts, Birdy! God has made the world as it is, when the poor want to take the property of the rich, – who can be sure of his proterty and life? With your ideas you better look for work in another home!”

Birdy left the beautiful small castle on the sea shore, and took a dirty little room in the big city. Going from house to house, she tried to sell a lady’s magazine. She saw very many unhappy and unfriendly people. Seldom she found the time for walking through the hills, and for singing full of joy over this wonderful world.

Therefore, she decided to go to school again and to learn more of this world of ours. She found a nice college, standing in a huge green park, where many young people, like herself wanted to learn and to talk and to sing and to laugh. She worked for an old professor and his wife, doing all the house work as a maid and a cook.

Everybody liked Birdy, and Birdy liked everybody. But she liked one young man more than all the others. He was good looking, intelligent, and happy, and had been born in the same far away country from which she herself had come.

Once, Birdy and Julius – That was the young mans name. Walked through green woods and fields, singing and laughing and exchanging sweet words of love. When evening came, they entered a little inn on the roadside and ordered a simple meal. Birdy looked out of the window and saw the first star in the dark blue sky. She said: “Look! The first star! Would it not be wonderful to fly right in to the world of the stars?”

Julius kissed her and said: “With you, I go anywhere you want.” When the inn-keeper brought in the meal, birdy was still there, holding her friends hand.

Birdy and julius married and lived together under the roof of the old professors house, where birdy still worked, while preparing for her final examinations.

After one year, Birdy and Julius travelled on a big white ship over the immense blue sea towards the land, where both of them had been born, and had a happy childhood.

After another year, a healthy little boy was born, whom the happy parents called Cress. Julius worked hard for his father’s firm, and birdy took care of the baby and the little household. One day when birdys father came and asked her whether she was still singing, she laughed and said: “I am singing from morning to night, and our little Cress will soon learn to sing too.”

Cress grew quickly, and his parents played gayly with him on the green lawn of their little house.

When Cress began to sing, a second son was born and called “Less.” And when Less began to sin, a little girl was born was born and called Kess. And when Kess began to sing, another baby was born, which died at once. Birdy experienced her third great sorrow.

Birdy was no longer a young maiden, but a mature woman. She cried over the little body of her baby, until her old father came in and said: “Dear Birdy, we human beings must have the courage to live and say goodbye. This baby was spared many heavy sorrows. For us, however many sorrows are waiting behind the next corner.”

Right he was. Julius lost his father, and after a while his mother too. His relatives who had shares in his father’s firm made life miserable for him. He could no longer laugh and sing with Birdy. He became impatient with her and even scolded her. In such moments she would take Cress, Less, and Kess and walk with them through the green fields, and showed them the beauty of the world.

Time flew, and another little girl was born and called Tess. Birdy gave her time and energy to the four children, Cress, Less, Kess and Tess. And when she was singing with them her husband got jealous and said: “Birdy, you are childish and silly. You don’t know the reality of life and the value of money. You would better share my sorrows, instead of singing all day long.” He was no longer a young man, but an efficient and respected businessman, well known in the town, and many girls were eager to draw his attention and to please him.

Many friends visited their home, which was no longer a little house, but a big house with a beautiful garden. Everybody enjoyed Birdy’s company, because one felt at ease with her. The guests forgot their sorrows when they spoke with her.Birdy was so kind and cheerful with their guests, as she was with her children. This made her husband impatient. He complained, that she did not ask, from where all the money came that they needed for the big household. That she did not share his sorrows “You are far behind me.” he said.

One evening, when birdy was alone at home, somebody knocked at the door. She opened, and there stood a stranger with a very ernest and unfriendly face. She asked him what he wanted and he said: “I am Dr. Death. I came to get your body, because your life has come to it’s end.” Birdy looked at the strangers hard eyes and said: “I shall be ready when my time really is over. I have four children to take care of, and my husband, though he doesn’t show it, needs me too.” There was a long silence. Birdy spoke again. “To show my sincerity, I will give you part of my body today, the rest you may take when my children no longer need me.” Birdy felt how alone she was at the moment. She thought of the songs she still wanted to teach her children, especially Tess, the youngest one. The architect of the universe saw Birdy’s fourth great sorrow, and tears fell from his old, old eyes upon Birdy’s forehead. The lord’s tears were shining like diamonds and Dr. Death held his hand over his eyes because the diamons on Birdy’s forehead blinded him. After a while, which seemed like an eternity to Birdy, the stranger said: “All right. I take a part of your body now. Don’t forget that I shall come back for the rest, when the time comes!” Birdy looked straight in to the eyes of Dr. Death, and her eyes blinded him like the diamonds. “All right”, she said, “I am ready now for the pawn, and I shall be ready when my time comes.”

Birdy spoke to nobody of her conversation with Dr. Death, not even to her husband. Everybody took her operation as a fact and congratulated her on the success of her operation. She quickly recovered and did all kinds of exercise in order to get back full control of her body. She walked with the four children through the green woods, singing and laughing, but something strange was in her voice. In summer they swam in th ecold mountain lake, and in winter they skied in the mountains, covered with silvery snow. In town, during school-time, she helped the children with their little problems, helped her husband with his greater problems, and showed their friends and guests the same cheerful hospitality as before.

The eldest son had to go to college. So Birdy flew with him in a big air plane over the Ocean, brought him to college, and spoke with the professors. And when she said goodbye to Cress, she had tears in her eyes. But thought of the word of her father: We human beings must have the courage to live and to say goodbye.

One child after the other she brought to College, and she was an old lady with white hair. Her father had long since passed away. One morning, her husband was away on a business trip. She felt very lonesome. She looked out of the window and saw a little bird flying through the blue sky over the green woods and fields. And when she heard the bird singing, she thought “How strange! I must have heard this song long, long ago, perhaps even before my birth.” She tried to sing the melody, and her heart became very light. At that moment she heard a knock at the door. At once she knew who it was. “Come in!” She said. “I am ready.” And when Dr. Death entered the room, he saw Birdy’s body lying on the floor, and a little golden bird flying out of the window.

I like to imagine her the way my grandfather once did in a fable as an immortal golden bird who enjoyed soaring through the sky enjoying the beauty of the universe but asked to be transformed into a human being to experience the  joys and sorrows of being human.

Mother, who lived to 92, had four children–Chris, Julie, Andrea and me–and 14 grandchildren and step-grandchildren. She married twice: first to my father, Donald Julius Helm, then later in life, to Torsten Blomberg, a sweet and generous Swede. Although she never had a career, she opened her house to relatives and strangers alike and developed hundreds of friendships over her life. She loved getting to know people, and once told me her favorite hobby was “collecting people.”

In every community in which she lived–and she lived in many throughout the world–Mom quickly became its beating heart. In Yokohama she organized massive fairs to help raise money for the Yokohama International School, and put on woodblock print exhibits to help Japanese artists get exposure to foreigners while at the same time educating foreigners in that rapidly evolving art form. In Oakland, she was in charge of “English in Action” a program that recruited armies of volunteers to help visiting students and scholars in Berkeley learn English in one-on-one conversations.

Mother was born in Karuizawa, Japan on August 28, 1924. Her father, Robert Schinzinger, had come to Japan the year before with her mother Annelise (born Hebting) to teach German language and literature. Robert had received a doctorate in philosophy but was unable to find a job teaching in the depressed economy that followed Germany’s defeat at the end of World War I. Mom recalls being home schooled in Japan with her brother Roland. The two siblings created a phantom classmate to make life more interesting. When her father hired Angela, a nanny, to help with the lessons, Mom would point to the empty seat beside her and tell Angela “Don’t forget to ask her questions too.”

Mom later attended the Canadian Academy in Kobe, and, when the family moved to Tokyo so Opa could teach at Tokyo University and Gakushuin, Mom attended the German school in Yokohama. Like most Germans in Japan, she grew up speaking four languages. Japanese to get along in daily life, English because it was the common language among foreigners, German because it was what she spoke at home and French because that was the foreign language she studied at school.

Mom adored her parent. But I sometimes get the sense there was a hard,  elitist  edge to her mother. In her diary, Mom talks about how, never having lived in Germany, she found herself enjoying a novel that described the life of a young girl in Germany. Her mother asked her why she was reading such “trash.” Then she praised mother for her German translation of a poem by Shelley.

Mom never got over the death of her mother at 49. Annelise had been weakened from malnutrition, and died soon after the end of World War II because she couldn’t get penicillin. She remembers being so discombobulated that when friends knocked on their front door to offer their condolences, instead of opening the door, Mom knocked back. In his fable, Opa describes Annelise’s death as Mom’s first great sorrow.

Mom had suffered many other sorrows. Her first home in Kobe had been swept away by a flood that also killed her first dog. Her house in Tokyo was destroyed by firebombs at a time when the family had evacuated to the resort town of Karuizawa. When Mom took a trip to look at the house, she saw her cat wandering amid the burnt timbers.

After the war, Mom worked for the U.S. Occupation translating German documents into English so they could be used to prosecute Japanese officials in the Tokyo war crimes trials. She also taught English and co-founded the “Inubashi” a group of Germans, Americans and Japanese who, in the aftermath of World War II, traveled around Japan and developed close friendships.

Mom’s first love, an American soldier named Rocky, promised to marry her but broke off the engagement when his parents objected to Mom being German. Mom traveled to California to attend the University of California, Berkeley. With no money, she worked selling magazine subscriptions, doing housework and any other work she could find while she studied political science and library science. It was in California that she met my father, who was also born in Japan. After school the two married and moved back to Japan.

Soon after Andrea, her fourth child, was born Mother got breast cancer.   In Opa’s fable, Dr. Death comes calling at Mother’s door and Mom says she is not yet ready to go because she has work to do raising her children. Instead, she offers Dr. Death a part of herself, her breasts. Opa is referring to Mom’s double mastectomy.

My parents’ marriage was a stormy one that ended in divorce. Opa’s fable speaks of how so many men loved to hear Mom sing and would try to cage her so she would sing only to them. Mom later married Torsten Blomberg, a wonderful Swede who became the love of her life and a constant travel companion.

Some of my life’s happiest memories are sitting on the floor and leaning back against my mother as she wrapped her arms around me and read to me every night from favorites such as Dr. Doolittle, The Wind in the Willow and Peter Rabbit.

Mom studied calligraphy and produced beautiful sumi paintings. She was also a great potter. I’m convinced she would have been a great artist if only she could have stuck to any one thing. She tended to be a wanderer, and in that respect I find myself like her, unable to focus on any one thing. Perhaps that is why journalism suits me. Every day is a new beginning.

When I finished Yokohama Yankee, and a photographer came to our house with the book designer, Josh Powell, Josh was so pleased to see my mother in the flesh after having spent so much time going through her photo albums. My mother loved the attention. When the photographer asked me to pose for my book photo, mother laughed at me. “So what, you’re a star now?” Josh found that funny. Mom always knew how to needle me.

With my Mom’s passing, there is a hole in my heart I fear will never heal. At an earlier difficult time, when my parents divorced, my grandfather wrote the fable about “The Golden Bird” who wanted to come down from the sky and become human even if it meant experiencing sorrow. At the time Opa’s fable helped me to endure the pain of watching my family torn apart by weaving Mom’s sad story into a soothing fairy tale in which sorrow is just a part of the endless cycle of human life. Now, once again, I find comfort in that tale. Here’s how it ends:

“One child after the other she brought to College, and then she was an old lady with white hair. Her father had long since passed away. One morning she felt very lonesome. She looked out of the window and saw a little bird flying through the blue sky over the green woods and fields. And when she heard the bird singing, she thought “How strange! I must have heard this song long, long ago, perhaps even before my birth.” She tried to sing the melody, and her heart became very light. At that moment she heard a knock at the door. At once she knew who it was. “Come in!” She said. “I am ready.” And when Dr. Death entered the room, he saw Birdy’s body lying on the floor, and a little golden bird flying out of the window.

This is probably a picture of the South Pier in Yokohama after the 1923 earthquake. The crane in the back may be the 2-ton floating crane that Helm Brothers operated and which was reportedly used to help in the reconstruction of Yokohama after the earthquake.

His father was a manager on the Helm docks and so from a young age he also worked for the Helms in their stevedoring operation. His son, Joji Tsunoda, who read the translation of Yokohama Yankee and contacted me, says there is a story in his family about how his father rose through the ranks at Helm Brothers. 

Charles Helm, by grandfather’s oldest brother and the president of Helm Brothers at the time, often saw Ranso working at the office on his way home from the chabuya, the brothel where men went for women and drinking. Charles figured if Ranso was always working so hard so late every night he could be trusted so he hired Ransu as his assistant, then later his top manager. Tsunoda-san says his father always said that “Charles-san wa inochi no onjin.”(Charles saved my life.) The picture to the right is a picture of Ranso taken in 1918 not far from where Helm Brothers had property. Motomachi is on the other side of the canal.

Once Ranso was promoted to be Charles’s assistant, he would often go drinking with Charles and return after 8 p.m.  Ranso met his wife at church (at Andre Kyokoai  at Sakuragicho.) Later they both joined the congregation at Christ Church (Seiko-kai.) When Ranso decided to marry Tsunoda-san’s mother, his uncle, (his mother’s brother) walked by the Yokohama docks and saw Ranso’s father, Charles Wolf, yelling at everybody. He warned his sister that Ranso’s father was the devil and that she would be marrying the devil’s son. 

Ranso was well paid by Helm Brothers and lived a good life. Charles told him to “build your house near us.” He built a two-story western house at 96 Nishinotani machi not far from Charles’ house. It was a 400 tsubo house, large for the time. He hired a cook who had worked at the Imperial Hotel to teach his wife to cook western food. Ranso’s wife played the piano and his daughters were sent to the Ueno Music school. (Ueno Ongaku Gakko.)

Ranso’s house survived the earthquake, but the rest of Yokohama was laid to waste. Here are pictures he took after the earthquake.

Ranso’s promotion helped the family.  In 1929, when the stock market crashed and the economy tumbled, there was a huge line at Sakuragicho station that went all around the block of people looking for work recalls Tsunoda-san. He remembers that in 1935, the recession was still so bad people were selling their daughters. People took their old people to the mountains to die.  The 1936 uprising against the government happened because of poverty, says Tsunoda-san. “But we were okay.” Not only did Ranso have work, the family also received dividends from Helm brothers because Ranso’s father Charles had purchased shares of the company when he worked for Helm Brothers.

Charles Helm lived nearby in a 2-story building. Ranso often hung out with Walter and Monchan. (Tsunoda-san doesn’t know who Monchan was but is trying to find out.) When Charles died in 1933, the house was unused and mixed race people used it for love trysts.

Tsunoda remembers other tidbits of his childhood in Yokohama. He remembers the large family house he lived in. He remembers there was a girl at the fruit store who liked Walter. “The girl asked my mother what she should do, and my mother said “If you like him, go and get him.”  The girl tried to get into Walter’s house, but was bit by a bulldog and fell down the stairs. Tsunoda-san also remembers receiving a big cherry tree from the Helms in 1936 that they planted in the garden.

In March 1941, they sent my father to take over the Kobe office which now combines the Kobe operations of Helm Brothers as well as that of its stevedoring subsidiary, Toyo Unso. My grandfather’s older brother  Jim, who had run the Kobe operations for many year, had decided to return to the United States because of the anti-foreign sentiment that had developed.

One big problem Ranso faced was what to do with his house in Yokohama. Because many felt that war was imminent in 1941, many foreigners were leaving and so real estate prices had plummeted. Ranso  took a big bottle of sake to the home of a prominent local and asked him to sell their house at 96 nishi no tanimachi. Ranso’s son Tsunoda says the family received almost nothing for the house.

Other things also began to change. Ranso Wolff took his mother’s name Tsunoda, and became Danza Tsunoda. His younger brother Jonnas became Yonezo, and his father Ranso, became Danza. Tsunoda switch from the foreign school to a Japanese schools and that they stop speaking English and German. His father told him to stop inviting friends. “We tried to hide our foreign blood.” Even so, the other children somehow knew he wasn’t Japanese and teased him mercilessly. “I was teased for being a foreigner, so we tried to hide it.”

Tsunoda-san remembers speaking English to his father. He would say good morning papa, good night papa. His sister, Emi, went to St. Maur’s about 1932.  But when the war started, they couldn’t listen to Jazz anymore. ” loved Jazz. And you couldn’t use words like “ball and “strike.”  I had to stop saying mama and papa. Good morning and good night.

In Kobe they rented a large house and lived well for a while as the head of the Kobe office. But very soon afterward in 1942, the government took over the companies and merged it with Japanese stevedoring companies.

His father was sent to a small shipbuilding company and the family became very poor. “There were times we had 20 pieces of corn for dinner. We would combine kasu and mugi and fry it to eat.

As the war progressed, Ranso Wolff, now Danza Tsunoda, became involved in neighborhood organizations to show his patriatism. Tsunoda remembers carrying clay on carts to make containers for water. They planned to use the containers if there were fires from the bombing. But how do you stop a fire with a bucket? That’s like fighting with a bamboo spear.”

In Showa 19 (1944) , we were losing. Soldiers had no shoes and no rifles. People were hungry and many committed suicide. There was nothing to eat. School was all labor. We wore navy uniform at elementary school

After the war, everything changed quickly. In war, if you said the truth you were sent to jail. Father was followed by people because they thought he was a spy.  Nobody was on the road unless you were going to a factory or going to a military base. After the war, suddenly everyone loved America. “Once someone at school put on a record of military songs on purpose. The principal was so embarrassed. Still, we had not money  so we sold our piano for 200,000 yen. We also sold our typewriters.

After the war, my father was asked to work at Helm Brothers again but had moved whole family to the Kobe area and we didn’t want to move back to a Yokohama that had been destroyed by fire.

Among Tsunoda-san’s many pictures was this picture taken at my father’s house when he was 6 years oldThis  This picture, which I had never seen before, was taken March 5, 1939 during the 40th anniversary part for Helm Brothers. At the center table is Willie Helm, my grandfather’s younger brother. The man two his rights is Ranso Wolff.

The picture to the right is Ranso (on the far left) during the construction of Helm House about 1938.

Ranso’s best pictures are of the 1923 Kanto earthquake and a will post them in another blog.

But after the Japanese translation of my book, my Japanese publisher at Akashi Shoten forwarded me a letter from Joji Tsunoda. Tsunoda-san had seen an advertisement for my book in the Asahi Shimbun and wondered if I came from the same Helm family that his father and grandfather had worked for. If so, he told me, he had pictures to share.

I arranged to meet with Tsunoda-san while I was in Kobe. Originally we planned to meet near a train station, but he suggested it might be more convenient if he drove to the home of the Tomimura family where I was staying.

I figured this would be like many other contacts I had received: people who had known some member of my family. But this was very different. He came with a box full of albums, and thumbing through them I realized quickly that they were the originals of pictures my family had been passing around for the past century.

Tsunoda-san’s grandfather, Charles Wolf, had come to Yokohama from Denmark as a freighter captain and taken a job worked as the manager of the dock for Helm Brothers at the turn of the century. His Japanese assistant at Helm Brothers was good at cooking so he married her. They had a son named Ranso Wolf who was born in 1894.  They tried unsuccessfully to get him Danish citizenship so he had to take Japanese citizenship. He went to Yokohama Shogakko (a Japanese elementary school) then to St. Josephs College, a catholic high school.  Ranso was smart and studied calligraphy. He taught himself to speak German and read and write Japanese. He also taught himself photography.

Tsunoda was his mother’s name. A quick Google search shows that Ranso Wolf worked as an assistant at Helm Brothers in 1912, according to the Directory and Chronicle for China, Japan Corea, Indo-china, Straits settlements, Malay states, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines.

Ranso was an amazing photographer and I will share his photos in another post.

On a recent trip to southern Germany, I did a little research into my great uncle, Albert Schinzinger. He had been an officer in the German army,  when he fell in love with a ballet dancer. Marrying a dancer was not considered proper for a German officer so Albert had to resign his commission. 

Through family contacts, however, (his mother, Maria Josephine F Storck, was from a family of wealthy industrialists) he obtained a job representing Krupp, the German arms maker. He sold weapons in Chile and other South American countries for a few years. (It has been said that Krupp would sell hardened metal to shield armies then sell even tougher artillery shells to pierce that extra-hard steel, so it could then sell even tougher steel and even stronger artillery.) Later, in about 1896,  Schinzinger moved to Japan to represent Krupp. Here’s a picture of Albert with Japanese soldiers, and of Albert as a young officer. 

In Japan, Albert lived very well. There was an article in Harpers Weekly about a drama among Albert’s servants that was titled “The Courteous Avenger,” in which a samurai who is working for Albert in a lowly servant post, gets impatient with the head houseboy who is of a lower class and cuts his head off with his sword.  I posted the article on this site earlier here. My grandfather told the story of how Albert used to entertain people of high society with these elaborate 10-course dinners. To make sure everything was just right, he would have a full-rehearsal for the dinner at which he would have the entire 10-course meal for 12 people cooked so he could test the meals. The leftovers would go to the servants. My grandfather Schinziner, who spent 60 years teaching literature and philosophy at Japanese universities such as Gakushuin and Tokyo University, says he first became enamored of Japan when he visited his Uncle Albert at his home called Villa Sakura, which means Cherry Blossom Castle. It was the mansion Albert built in Freiburg on his return from Japan. Albert had filled the villa with the Japanese antiques he collected while in Japan from 1898-1906 including ancient samurai armor and bronze canons. It was at that villa that my grandfather, Opa, as a child, saw these mysterious Japanese implements and became curious about the culture that had produce them. It was Albert who, as honorary consul general representing Japan, would later help my grandfather find his first teaching job at Osaka Koto Gakko, an elite high school in Japan.

I had learned years ago that this Villa Sakura was still standing and decided to visit. The mansion turned out to be an hour’s walk from where I was staying south of Frieburg. My journey took me  through vineyards and rolling hills into a wealthy neighborhood filled with giant homes. Here to the right is Villa Sakura as it looks today.

I entered the building and learned that the house had been converted into a school for teachers. I was quickly introduced to school master Lutz-Walter Muller-Till, a friendly gentleman who gave me a tour through the four-story building’s 35 or so rooms.

It was a beautiful house. It was disturbing to think the home was built with money earned from selling weapons, but it pleased me to see the school now used for teaching young students how to teach art and music.

At the end of the day, when I had access to the Internet over wifi, I looked up Villa Sakura to see if I could find any more information. That’s when I came across some postcards on Ebay that turned out to be photographs of the interior of Villa Sakura from Albert’s day.

Whether it was Albert or the person who bought the Villa from Albert who had the photographs taken, I don’t know. Albert, in an odd form of justice, lost all his money to a swindler who persuaded him there was oil to be found in the Black Forest. In any case, these postcards gave me a sense of what my grandfather must have seen when he visited this home as a child. The picture shows a full suit of army, a bronze canon and lots of Japanese and Chinese ceramics.

But then I found another postcard that was particularly exciting because it reminded me of a story my grandfather told.

Grandfather said that his Uncle Albert had brought home from Japan a huge statue of the Buddha. But because his Catholic visitors were so offended by the statue, Albert had a bamboo screen placed above the Buddha that he could roll down to hide the statue when he had visitors. Here was a postcard of that Buddha! A little strange that there is a huge sword leaning against the statue, but so wonderful to have photographic evidence to back up one of my grandfather’s stories.

May 21  Center Minami, Tsuzuki ku 2:30 p.m. “Yokohama yankii ni kiku” (“Listening to Yokohama Yankee”) Almond Community Network  Saturday, May 21  Tsuzuki ku 2 p.m. For more information see: https://www.facebook.com/yokohamanikiku/

Monday, May 23rd  2-3 p.m. International Christian University, Institute for Asian Cultural Studies,

Monday May 23rd  6-8 p.m. German-Japan Society 日独協会

申込み：下記メールアドレスの金谷宛にお願い致します For information send email to: jdg@jdg.o  For location: http://www.jdg.or.jp/access  場所は信濃町から徒歩6分、アクセスは以下を参照ください。

Wednesday, May 25  7 p.m.  Meiji University

Thursday, May 26th, 3 p.m. Kanto Gakuin University, Department of Economics

Friday, May 27th  6 p.m. Yokohama Nichibei Kyokai

Saturday, May 28th, Golden Cup, Honmoku

Yokohama Yankee was a fascinating book. I share your experience in being of mixed blood with a bi-cultural upbringing. The story of your family is much more epic and historical than mine, yet I can still relate to it on a few levels. Born in Indiana in 1958, the son of a US Navy captain and his Japanese wife, I was soon sailing for Yokohama with my family aboard the Hikawa Maru. My father was born in Los Angeles, mother in Yokohama, brother in Tokyo and my sister here in Seattle. My parents separated, leaving me with my mother in Yokohama. My father, brother and sister returned to live in the San Juan Islands.

My mother and I returned to Seattle in 1963 as my fathers health was failing, he had purchased a house in Wallingford at this time. My father passed away in 1965, leaving a young widow who spoke little English and her children who spoke little Japanese. During his time in Japan after the war, my father was C.O. of Opama Naval Air Base and worked with local businessman in some sort of capacity with the Occupation. He loved Japan and its people, we were his second set of children, the first being American. I have many old photographs of him at various swanky affairs surrounded by well-dressed business types and attractive young women, he always is the guest of honor. Funny thing is I really don’t know exactly what he did but he sure seemed to be enjoying himself.

In 1969 my mother announced that we were moving to Yokohama for an unspecified amount of time. It had been my fathers wish that we experience our Japanese side. We were not at all happy with this but my mom is headstrong, so we did not argue. This time we took passage on the Oronsay, a P&O liner and sailed back to Japan, disembarking at Osanbashi on a gloomy grey day in October, 1969. I attended Y.I.S. for the 6th grade. Mr Glass was the headmaster and my main teacher was an arrogant young Englishman named Mr French of all things. Ms Chatainville was our French language teacher, she was horrible. I played cricket at YCAC and was there for a private screening of “Yellow Submarine”. It was the genteel life of the well heeled diplomat-business core of which we were not a part of. We lived near Negishi Eki in

Isogo in a very Japanese neighborhood. The gaki would follow me around crying “Gaijin” or “Kureji Boy” (crazy boy) I got used to it. I transferred to St Josephs for 6th and 7th grade. My brother also went there and my sister was at St Maurs. My stomping grounds were mainly Honmoku, Kannai, Motomachi and of course, the Bluff. There were great little excursions with my mates to Zushi, Kamakura and into Tokyo where I had my first Big Mac at the original

McDonalds In Ginza, heaven! Although my dad was Navy, I did not hang out with the American military kids, they were rough and mean-spirited. Being American and having that fixed exchange rate made for a life of entitlement and adventure. We grew up fast and found that the freedoms were many. I would imagine that growing up Stateside would have been boring by comparison. We went to Expo 70 and even got to see Utaemon in the Grand Kabuki in Osaka.

You touch many times on the struggles and challenges of being of mixed blood. I know how it feels to have one foot firmly embedded in either culture, yet never both at once, that is impossible. Seattle is a great place to be for a person of mixed blood, yet that is not to say that racism does not exist here, and it certainly exists in Japan.

We returned to Seattle in 1972. My sister and I enrolled at Blanchet, my brother joined the Army. I transferred out in my junior year partly because of waspish attitudes and “good natured” racism. The friends that I had before leaving America in 1969 were like strangers to me now. I did not understand their attitudes or outlook on life. They seemed immature and unworldly, perhaps that was me being arrogant at a tender age?

My mother knew there would be problems for her kids in this respect. She told me to never be ashamed of my Japaneseness, to always be proud of of her and my father.

And so on through life it went that I was proud of my Japanese heritage, while being a proud American at the same time, never did I consider this a contradiction.

It has not always been so clear cut. I returned to Japan in 1986 to rediscover my Japaneseness with the thought of living and working there for a spell. I came back feeling certain that it was impossible to adapt to their lifestyle. Things had changed. I was critical of the lack of individualism, the hollow soulness, the rampant adoption of vapid and meaningless Western fads. What happened to yukata and geta in the summertime? The contrived pop culture and American fast food restaurants made me feel that Japan was losing its way, it was sad.

But my quest for Japaneseness continued here in Seattle. I enrolled at the University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies. I was, of course, in the East Asia program with special interest in post WWII Japanese Politics. I felt it important to study about that time, mainly because of my fathers involvement with it, maybe it would shed some light on exactly what he did, such a mystery to me. You mentioned Susan Hanley in your acknowledgements, she was my counselor and had a lot to do with my application process. I also had her twice as an instructor for history classes as she was the worlds authority on the Tokugawa Era, great person. Reading material that was recently declassified, I discovered that the Occupation was more one-sided than previously thought. I became more sympathetic to the Japanese side.

So now that I am on the verge of being “jiji”, as my Edo-ko friends like to call me, I find that making my bed becomes less important. What is important is to continue being a well entrenched Seattleite that makes trips to Japan periodically. I can’t answer all the questions within me about the dualistic nature of my being, do not know if it even matters. What matters now is to enjoy the passage back and forth because I still love Japan. I feel fortunate to have the love and appreciation for a country and people so complex, paradoxical, insecure yet so beautiful, symbolic and rich in tradition and history.

Thank you for putting your perspective on the Yokohama Yankee personage. There are many of us who have straddled the Pacific with their own stories to tell.

Your book puts a stamp of legitimacy on my experience and certainly that of others.

Sincerely,

Pat.

I am a chef. I graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York in 1997. While there I had the opportunity to live and work in New York City. It was

a fabulous experience. I returned to Seattle and worked for Lowell-Hunt Catering for 5 years then moved to Sonoma County, CA where I worked in wine sales and

catered  many events at wineries in both Napa and Sonoma Counties.

In 2003 I flew to Japan to visit my CIA buddies that had opened a restaurant in Azabu-Juban, near the Mori Tower.It was quite a rush cooking

in their busy little restaurant, then going out after work to drink and eat. Sushi at Tsukiji at 6:00a.m. with sake and beer, then off to work we went, what a blast! I returned

6 months later to do it again, very keen on picking up everything they were doing food-wise.

In 2004 I bought the Maple Leaf Grill, a neighborhood joint near Northgate. I operated as chef-owner for a little over 10 years. It was a great experience up until 2008,

when things began to unravel due to the economy. I stuck it out until the lease expired, then got the hell out of there. I have to mention my mother here, as much as

she can be outspoken about my shortcomings or errant ways, she was an absolute rock during the down years, an unfailing means of support and back-up. She, unlike a lot

of her race, is quite outspoken and says exactly what is on her mind. At 84, she continues in this way.

I took a position with Farestart, a vocational job training program for underpriviliged adults, as chef-instructor in September 2014. It was a job like no other. The interaction

with the students was most fulfilling and meaningful. I left Farestart after one year and traveled a bit, cruising the British Columbian San Juans with my brother and his wife

then off to Japan with my sister, her husband, their son and mom, three generations. We visited Sapporo for the first time, then to Yokohama and Ito City to relax onsen style.

Currently I am preparing for opening a cooking school in Bellevue. My job is to basically run the kitchen, teach classes and assist incoming chefs. I have been busy the

past couple of months writing menus, developing curriculum and testing recipes. I have to say that the “Izakaya” menu was a hit! The chawan-mushi impressed all.

Being back in Japan last Fall was a gastronomic reawakening of the senses. I returned with a new raison d’etre, to delve completely into Japanese cookery. To that end

I have immersed my self in reading cookbooks by Shizuo Tsuji, who is the “Escoffier” of Japanese cuisine. His writings on technique, history and “making it your own” are

invaluable to anyone in this pursuit. And so now I am at Uwajimaya 6-8 times a month, Japan continues to have that hold on me.

The name of the cooking school is Whisk. The website just went active and we are scheduling our first classes for Jan 31.

I came across some fun pictures of some of the games. This was a farewell party at the home of my friend Ian Harvey’s parents. in 1963. The man on the floor in the middle picture with a glass of Scotch on his forehead is my father Don Helm.

The picture of the three men doing the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” thing was at a New Years party at the Chuzenji Kanaya Hotel. Nikko, close to Chuzenji, is the site of the shrine that has the carving of the three wise monkeys. The “hear no evil” man is Mr. Murray, whose sons, Chris and Nicholas, were our friends. They always had great parties in Tokyo. I remember one New Years Eve when they organized a very elaborate scavenger hunt all over town. We teenagers had a lot to drink and enjoyed wandering about the city.

Then in November, a month and a half after the book was released and just when I had given up, I finally started getting some significant reviews. I got reviews of Yokohama Yankee in Nikkei Shimbun, Japan’s Wall Street Journal, and Kyodo News Service, Japan’s Associated Press. You can read the Nikkei Shimbun review here. I was pleased to see an economic newspaper touch  in the review not just history, but also issues such as identity that are so central to the book.

The Kyodo News Service piece was picked up by a number of newspapers including those in Okinawa, Kyoto and Sanyou. You can read the Sanyou Shimbun’s version here. The Kyodo News Service piece was written by Kazuo Ueyama, Director of the  Yokohama Archives of History, and was both detailed and effective in outlining the primary thrust of the book. Below is a photograph my editor in Kyoto sent me of the piece in the Kyoto paper.

My translator also updated her Japanese video about the book, here  but I suspect the link might not work because she may have used classical music in the video that was copyrighted.

Ernst Baerwald was an enterprising Jewish man who also took amazing photographs of old Japan including Yokohama and Tokyo. His son, Hans Baerwald, was a close friend of my father, Don Helm at UC Berkeley, and later at language school and in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. Hans, who later became a professor at UCLA focused on Japanese politics, and wrote a fascinating story of his life here.  Hans’s daughter, my friend Jan Baerwald, received her grandfather Pasha’s amazing collection of photographs of Japan in the early 1900s.

I asked Jan about her grandfather, who she called Pasha. This is what she wrote:

Pasha’s name was Ernst (or Ernest) Baerwald. He was brought as a POW from Tsingtao in 1914 where he lived at the Bando POW camp (in Naruto) until it closed in 1919, when he moved to Kobe – there’s an article my dad wrote which appears as a link on the Wikipedia entry about Bando  that will tell you a bit more. I think the family emigrated to the States in 1940 (except for my aunt, who was already attending Mills College in Oakland). The whole story of Bando is fascinating – seems more like a village, with small businesses, theater groups, an orchestra (Pasha played the violin), etc. They taught the locals how to make beer and bake bread. There’s a fair amount on the web about it.

So Pasha, like my great uncle Willie, spent many years in a Japanese POW camp. But unlike my father’s family, he moved in German high society in Tokyo. In his visitor’s book, there is the signature of Albert Einstein, who Pasha apparently hosted when Einstein visited Japan. The visitor’s book also contains the signatures of my maternal grandfather, Robert Schinzinger, and his wife Annelise.

In any case, Jan has shared with me many of the pictures she inherited from Pasha and I hope to post them on this blog from time to time. Here are a few more of them.

Presumably this is a sawyer delivering a nice-sized piece of lumber to raise someone’s roof beams.

But what’s this vendor making. Anybody care to guess? By the looks on the faces of the kids, I suspect it’s sweet.

レスリーヘルム様
あっという間に読み切ってしまいました。ただただ面白かった！！
近所の書店で、以前(20年程前)から日本の黎明期である明治初期に興味があり、お雇い外国人の話しなど特に興味 があったので、何気無く購入致しました。しかし、ただのフツーのおばさん？オバアチャンとしては読み尽くした感があったのでさほど期待もせず…(ごめんなさい)
歴史家が書いた歴史ではない誤魔化されてない歴史を知る事ができました。えーっ、えーっ、そうなのぉー！の興奮の連続でした。
本当に興味深い内容でした。
私は(1950生)神戸出身なので あのジェームズ邸との繋がりには驚かされました。
また、わたしの曽祖父は横浜で税関の仕事に携わり、高祖父も横浜で官舎に住み、通訳をしていたので、ユリウスさんと関わったこともあったのではと…。
その後、曽祖父は税関の仕事が官から民へになり神戸支社を任せられ、神戸に移りました。
私の先祖ともどこかしらリンクし、楽しく読ませて頂きました。私の実家の六甲、山口組の話しが出てきたりしたのも嬉しかったですね。
それにしても凄い取材力ですね。
知りたい！という気持ちだけではできないことです。
素晴らしい知能と実行力の賜物ですね。挫けそうな困難も多々あったことでしょう。…稀有な方だと尊敬致します。
ただの一読者としては
いろいろ知る事ができ、感謝です。
本当にいい本をありがとうございました。
感想というより、感動と感謝を伝えたくメール致しました。
マリコさん、エリックさんの
健やかなることを願い。

The Japanese translation of Yokohama Yankee is now available here. If you have read my book in English but also read and write Japanese, it would be wonderful if you would write a review of the book on the Japanese site. I’m afraid the site is rather bare bones. Would be wonderful if a couple people who have already read my book could recommend it to the Japanese audience.

Thanks for your consideration.

Best regards,

Leslie

I’m very excited to put the finishing touches to the Japanese translation of Yokohama Yankee. The Japanese edition comes out in late September.

The translation was in the very capable hands of Yumiko Murakami, who has translated many books. Even so, there have been times we have had to hammer out our differences.
One of these days I’d like to go into more depth on the areas in which we have differed in translating my particular perspective on Japanese culture and language.

In the next picture it looks like I have some money in hand to spend at the fair.

Thirty years later, soon after adopting Mariko and Eric, we dressed Mariko up in a yutaka and tucked Eric into the snuggly and went to the bon-odori, the fair to celebrate the return of the spirits.

Mariko wanted to fish in the water for a ball.

And I tried to learn the local dance, looking a little silly carrying Eric in the baby snuggly. 

My mother would often take us to a a U.S. military base (Yokohama had several American bases filled with homes, schools, movie theaters and teen clubs.) There would always be a marching band, usually from the navy, playing Sousa tunes. Sometimes an aircraft carrier would be moored nearby and open to visitors. There would be potato sack races, three-legged races and tug-of-wars with massive ropes. Best of all there were grilled hamburgers and, if we were lucky, American ice cream made  with real cream, not frozen milk like most of the Japanese ice cream.

One year, there were even motorboats for the kids to drive around a course. I was only eight at the time, and so wasn’t allowed to drive a boat and I always envied the other kids. Sasagawa Ryoichi, who had once been imprisoned as a war criminal and later became a billionaire operating boat-races used for gambling, had arranged for the kids to use the  boats for public relations.  Much later I nterviewed Sasagawa, who was then on a campaign to win the Nobel peace prize and was the single largest private donor to the United Nations. He bragged about how he had piloted his private plane to Europe to visit Hitler and Mussolini. (He said he met Il Duce, but missed Hitler who was on a trip.)

In evening, after the festivities, there would be fireworks at the base. But more often we would go home and Dad would take us up to the roof of Helm House where we got a great view of grander fireworks paid for, I assume, by the American Consulate, which was just a few blocks away.

It was pretty easy to buy fireworks in Japan at any time of year and so my friends and I often enjoyed playing with the dozens of varieties for sale. There were the little bead-like fireworks that you used a sling shot to hit against the wall to make them explode. The Chinese variety you would throw at someone’s feet and the machine-gun ratatat would make people jump. Then really explosive ones we used, cruelly, to blow up ant hills. I learned my lesson.

I was about 9. I was bicycling home when I came across my brother and his friends playing with them. They would put a firecracker in a bottle and cork it up. When the firecracker exploded, the cork would shoot into the sky. But then someone had the bright idea of screwing a cap on the bottle. This time all the older kids scattered. I stood there stupidly with my bike wondering what was going on.

I didn’t know what hit me. Kids were screaming and my mother ran out of the house. (I was always getting into accidents.) She picked me up and ran to the street where she flagged down a cab to take us the one block to the hospital. Blood was pouring from my face. The doctor took a look at my torn eyeball and said he would have to remove it. My mother asked him to him to wait. She called a friend who knew a leading Japanese eye surgeon who happened to be in Yokohama and was able to save my eye.

The picture on the right shows me as a cub scout helping raise the flag on July 4th at a U.S. military base in Yokohama. I’m the one at the end of the line with the huge patch over my eye. For Halloween that year, four month later, I was still wearing a patch, but my mother made me a pirates outfit and replaced the white patch with a much nicer black one. To this day I have a section of my iris missing, which prevents my pupil from adjusting to the glare

Today the only kind of fireworks I like are sprinklers. My favorites are the Japanese sprinklers that are little more than a string. You light them and a little blob gathers at the bottom of the string from which shoot tiny sparks.

Here is a picture of me lighting the larger sprinklers for Mariko during the summer of 1992, soon after we adopted her. I loved to watch Mariko’s eyes light up as she looked at the sparks fly.

I am particularly sensitive to the west’s tendency to make money off of war because of the role my own family played in militarizing Japan. My great-grandfather Julius, was among a small band of German soldiers who helped to introduce conscription to Japan.

The picture on the right shows my great-grandfather with members of the Japanese army in the late 1800s.

My cousin, Stefan Schinzinger, was doing some of his own research when he came across a German archive with pictures of another family arms merchant. Albert Schinzinger, my grandfather Robert Schinzinger’s uncle, represented Krupp in Japan. The pictures below appear to show Albert on a shooting range in Hokkaido demonstrating the power of the artillery that he was selling to Japan as it built up its army in preparation for war with Russian. The West would later complain about the militarization of Japan, but at the turn of the century, when Britain and the United States was fearful of Russian expansionism, they were happy to see Japan’s rising military strength. They not only supplied Japan with arms, but they wrote frequently about how well the Japanese soldiers were trained. During the Russo-Japanese war, much of the press glorified the exploits of the Japanese soldiers. Here are the pictures. The first picture is of Albert Schinzinger many years later when he was appointed honorary Japanese consult in Berlin. After World War I, when German was enemy to Japan, Albert would co-found a company that would play a key role in developing a closer relationship between the German and Japanese navies, the beginnings of what would later be the alliance of axis powers.

Being the editor of a local magazine has helped. In past jobs I would seldom talk to the same person more than once. Now, since I cover the local community, I frequently run into the same people again and again. People I have met in interviews or in business settings have become friends. And since my magazine is local I have more reason to follow local issues. That, too, has made me feel more a part of the community.
Yesterday, a young couple moved into their new house a couple doors down. When I welcomed to the neighborhood, I realized that after 25 years in this house I really am one of the old timers in the area. I told them about the people in the neighborhood, including our amazing neighbor who has been nurse, national champion cross country skier, master carpenter, pastry chef and now artist. I told him about someone down the street who could cause trouble. I told them about the block parties we do annually to reconnect.
Now I’m leading an effort to build a walk and bicycle trail that will link our Magnolia neighborhood more directly with downtown Seattle. It’s touchy because some neighbors in the area do not support the project. They worry they will lose their privacy if more people walk and bicycle past their houses. Today I walked the neighborhood going door-to-door to listen to their concerns. I now understand how they feel. But I still feel strongly that the trail through city-owned parkland will benefit the whole community and I’ve put a lot of effort into it. We hold regular meetings, we’ve put up a Facebook page (Magnolia Trail Community) and we received a $25,000 grant from the city of Seattle to hire a consultant to look at potential environmental and city permitting issues. There’s been great community support for the trail. A member of the city council recently called me and asked to walk with me along the site of the proposed trail. As we push forward with this effort I’m meeting many of the core people in the community who get things done. Turns out there are a couple dozen people who are involved in just about every improvement project. Now I am one becoming one of them. It feels good to be doing this. I’m beginning to feel like a real insider and I like it. Foreigners in Japan seldom have opportunities to get involved in projects like this. And it may be one reason it’s so hard to feel part of a community.

I first met him in 1977 when he visited my mother, who occasionally hosted visitors of the state department. I had just graduated from college and was considering a career in journalism. Chuma-san had already been a reporter at Asahi Shimbun for 17 years. “Come work in Japan,” he said. “I will make all the introductions you need.” He was true to his word. When my wife Marie and I went to India a year later, he introduced us to the Asahi Shimbun correspondent in New Delhi who promptly invited us to a charming sitar concert at his home.

When I arrived in Tokyo to work as a correspondent for Business Week, Chuma-san introduced me to then Finance Minister Noboru Takeshita and I spent a memorable week following Takeshita around on the campaign trail and had dinner with his family. Chuma-san was patient with me as I tried to understand the complexities of Japanese politics. He was quite upset when I wrote a story about a yakuza boss’s involvement in the relief effort in Kobe. Chuma-san thought the story reflected too positively on the gangster. I don’t think I ever measured up to his high standards, but he was always generous with his time and counsel. And he was a warm and open-hearted man.

Chuma-san, he wife, his son and his daughter all became close friends to Marie and me. Marie exchanged English and Japanese lessons with Chuma-san and Marie spoke at his daughter’s wedding. Chuma-san and his wife once stayed with us in Seattle. And although we took him all over the state, Chuma always said his fondest memory of his visit was of walking to the abandoned schoolyard behind our house and picking blackberries that grew wild on the chain-linked fence. “They are so sweet,” he said. “They are just so sweet–and right in your backyard.”

Chuma-san was well regarded in the journalism world and became chair of Asahi Shimbun’s editorial board in 1994 and executive editor in 1999. Even after he retired from the Asahi Shimbun, he continued to work in journalism, taking a job as chief editor of the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun in Nagano Prefecture. It meant being away from his wife and grandchildren, but he said he enjoyed helping the local reporters improve their work.

Can it be that 38 years have passed since I met that gentle man in Oakland at my mother’s house. The last time Marie and  I saw him, two summers ago, he took us to a very elegant Japanese restaurant where the sake and dishes kept coming for hours. I remember waving to him as Marie and I turned to catch our train. I felt a tug at my heart, and a strange premonition that I would not see him again. It was odd I had felt that way since it was his wife who had recently been sick not Chuma-san. Now he is gone and I feel a deep loss. It is a loss that feels greatly magnified because Chuma-san and his wife were such an important connection for me to Japan. But I am also reminded how few truly precious friends we have during our short lives and how important it is for us to treasure them while they are still with us.

I understand the sense of alienation expressed by many of the adopted children in the story. My children experienced many of those same feelings. Although I am one quarter Japanese, I look white. My wife is also white. So every time someone saw us as a family, there are always questions–people are always trying to figure out how we are related.

This was very difficult for the children when they were growing up. When we took our children back to Japan for four months and put them in Japanese schools, they loved the experience. Today, however, while the children feel close to Japan, they see themselves as American. They have been to Japan enough times to know that they are culturally very different from the Japanese even though they may be ethnically Japanese and have a pretty good understanding of Japanese language and culture.

What I find the most sad about the adoptees quoted in the article was the feeling among some of them that all international adoption is bad and that it should be shut down. Few people doubt that children should be adopted first in families from the same country. But if that is not an option, and that is the case in many countries, it seems unfortunate to cut off the option of international adoption. In the case of Japan, for example, there is still a stigma attached to adoption and so there are very few parents interested in adoption. There is a widespread feeling among many Japanese that adopted children are of a lower class and therefore not as smart. In many cases, children would be raised in an orphanage if outside families hadn’t chosen to adopt them. In the case of my daughter, she was 3 years old when we adopted her. She was very strong willed. While that is a characteristic we like in Japan, it was an attitude the adoption authorities in Japan believed would make it difficult for her to fit into a Japanese family.

My book, Yokohama Yankee, touches on many of these adoption issues. I talk about my own initial difficulty in embracing the idea of interracial adoption coming from a family that has long denied its mixed heritage. I write about  the challenges my children have had, but also their successes. Later this year, my book will be translated in Japanese. My hope is that Japanese couples who read about my experience will recognize what a joy it can be to adopt and choose to adopt themselves. It takes courage because families who adopt often find themselves shunned by relatives.

Of course the ideal thing is for children to be adopted by parents in their own culture. But until a society is ready to embrace those children, international adoption is the best chance that children in orphanages have to be raised with all the love that parents can give. As excellent as the orphanages in Japan are, there is only one adult for every 10-15 children so there is no way staff in an orphanage can provide the love and attention that parents can. If some children are put up for international adoption and some portion of them experience some sense of alienation, that is unfortunate. But it’s hard to argue that those children would be better off in orphanages.

Some of the adoptees say countries like South Korea should do more to make sure that children who are abandoned or placed in orphanages are raised by South Koreas.  I totally agree. And I am fully supportive of their efforts to tighten adoption laws so no child is “taken away” from a family. But until more people from a country choose to adopt children in orphanages, international adoption must be left open as an option. For many children, it’s the only chance they have to get the love that they deserve.

This is a passage from my mother’s reminiscences about a unique group to emerged in Japan’s postwar period:

Quite by luck, one of those strange incidents that can change ones life happened. That was the beginning of the Inubashi, a small group of young German, Japanese, and American people. But I will have to begin from the beginning for that story: In one of the women’s billets where non-military female employees of the Armed Forces lived, I think it was called the Osaka Building, there was a room which housed five young women called Carol Chambers (from California), Barbara Vestal (from California), Marjorie Murphy (from Minnesota), Kay Russell (from ?) and Yoshi Nakandakari (from Okinawa).

It all started with Kay Russell, who worked in the Department of Information and Education with, among other people, a Japanese gentleman. This gentleman invited Kay to his home for dinner one day. After dinner photo albums were brought out to show Kay a little about the life of the family. Among many photos were some of two Caucasian children, a boy and a girl. This was interesting to Kay and she asked who these children might be. They are the children of my former teacher was the answer. Kay was curious: Where do they live? When she was told that they were living in Tokyo, she asked whether she could meet them. These children were Roland and I, and Mr. M. (I wish I could remember his name) invited Kay, Roland and me to dinner, so that we could meet. Thus we got to know Kay, and later her roommates Carol and Barbara.

At that time Carol and Barbara were teaching two young students of Tokyo University English: Ken Ikebe and Toshi Muto (both later joined Japan’s foreign service, and Toshi was ambassador to Moscow and London among many other postings – but became the first one of our group to die. Ken was consul general in Seattle at one point, ambassador to New Zealand, and a member of Japan’s UN mission in Paris when Roland, Jane, Don and I visited there in l951.) One day, Kay, Barbara, Carol, Roland and I decided to go on a bicycle trip over the Thanksgiving holiday. The American girls suggested that we include their two Japanese students, and Roland and I decided to ask Keiko Hiratsuka and our friend Horst Schneewind to join us. Everything was quickly arranged – everybody had a bicycle, and the date was set. We decided to meet at Yurakucho station. We never inquired how to get our bicycles on the train: we just took them onto the platform and into the coach. Americans were still able to get away with many things other people couldn’t get away with. Nobody knew that Roland and I were not Americans, and the Japanese students were part of our group. We had decided to bicycle along the coast of the Izu Peninsula. We took the train to Mishima at the base of the peninsula, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. Our first stop was a small inn which we found by chance on the south-eastern coast of the peninsula. It was on a slope and we had to carry our bikes down an incline (were there steps?) and up again the next day. We had army K rations for dinner, augmented by some tangerines given to us by a Japanese gentleman who had the room next to ours. (We gave him some K rations in exchange.) Back on the road the next day we ran into a man who had just shot a pheasant. We offered to buy it from him and Roland carried it slung by a string over his shoulder. That day we made it to Shimoda, a harbor town at the tip of the peninsula. There we had the cook prepare our pheasant which we ate along with our Japanese meal for our Thanksgiving dinner. One of our two rooms at the hotel, I think it was the one for us girls, had the name “Inubashi” above the door. At the inn there was also a room with ping pong tables. Above the door to that room was a sign that read “Ping Ponog Room.” After dinner we decided to play ping pong, and held the “Inubashi International Ping Ponog Tournament.” At Christmas, one of the Japanese young men, Toshi Muto, sent us a card addressed “To the members of the Inubashi International Ping Ponog Tournament.” Thus was born the future name of our group “the Inubashi.” Father soon became the “Oya-Inubashi” (Elder Inubashi), and joined us on many future trips, including a bicycle trip on which someone in our group always had our father on his bike (my father’s eyesight was too poor for him to be able to ride a bike). At one point one of our group, Hans Crome I think, stopped a truck and got a ride for father and his bike.

It was on this, our first trip, that we started singing. Barbara Vestal (who was one of the girls who shared a room at the Osaka Hotel) was a music teacher and taught us many songs, and directed us. Toshi Muto taught us, of all things, a German round. From Shimoda we took a ferry back to the mainland, and everyone on this boat had to perform something (doing this is quite popular among Japanese).

Most people sang something. So this was the first time we sang with an audience, and with that started a tradition. A friend of Carol’s from San Diego, who was working as a civilian for the army, was also very musical and was allowed to play the organ in the Tokyo Mitsukoshi Department Store after hours. The “Inubashi” went to hear him and he soon became a member. Wherever we went, we sang. We sang together, several times for our friends, and once on stage at some Japanese concert or competition. We practiced every week, and when I came back to Japan after marrying Don, they (the remnants of the Inubashi) were still singing together, and I often joined them. I could write endlessly about this period, so much went on all the time, always new and old faces, always new experiences. I have just been reading in my diary again. I had forgotten a great deal; for instance that father had been teaching German to Kay Russell and Doty. Once a week they came to our place for their German lessons and stayed for several hours, having dinner with us.

It was at that time that I was teaching both at the Waseda English Speaking Society and at Kawamura Girls’ Middle School. Someone got me a VIP ticket to the trials (where I had worked) and I saw and heard Konoe being interrogated. I also describe a completely new experience for me: watching an American football game. I even went to the horse races for the first time in my life. Another new experience was watching a boxing match and seeing one of the fighters at the end of the match take out of his mouth what I thought were his teeth, but it was his toothguard. I often spent the night with the girls in the Osaka Hotel when I had been out in downtown Tokyo. When many of the Germans in Japan were sent back to Germany by the U.S government, because they had been in the Nazi party , I took over a baby-sitting job from Mrs. Fellmer. She was the wife of a German conductor and musician who had worked and taught in Japan for a number of years. Mrs. Fellmer had babysat for Col. and Mrs. Hammerle’s two children for one year. When the Fellmers left for Germany I took over her job and babysat for about a year until the Hammerles returned to the United States. They lived in Washington Heights, and sometimes I took the children on walks in the grounds of the Meiji Shrine nearby. I liked the whole family and enjoyed very much looking after the children. I learned a great deal about small children. Corky must have been about 3 or 4, and Holly was a toddler, still in diapers. After they left I stayed in touch with them for several years. I wonder where and how they all are now. The parents were quite strict. Once, when I was having lunch alone with the children, Corky said “Lets play house.” I said OK , and Corky banged his fist on the table and said: “God damnit!” I had never thought that Col. Hammerle would use such language, and I had to laugh. I enjoyed my time there. I often had dinner with them and ate so much that I got into the habit of drinking my after-dinner coffee black. I got to take home the bacon drippings which came in very handy for our cooking. As I mentioned, the American authorities decided to send back to Germany all Germans who had been Nazi Party members. Our family friend, Dr. Seckel, a teacher of German at the Kotogakko in Urawa, who had joined the party for practical reasons, was also repatriated. All the possessions of these unfortunate people were confiscated and they were allowed only 350lbs of baggage. Mr. Seckel was an art historian and had an extensive library of lovely art books. All the things confiscated by the Americans were then auctioned off. Mr. Seckel had a brother who was a professor at the University of Chicago who wired money to buy back these books. Mechtild, being married to an American major by then, was able to take part in the auction, so she got back Mr. Seckel’s books for him. Since he was sent back with very little baggage, I assume that my father sent his books to Germany for him. Father wanted very much for Roland and me to go to college, but our Japanese was not good enough to study at a Japanese University, and it would be impossible for us to find a place to live and study in Germany. We discussed these problems with our Inubashi friends, and one of the original four members from the Osaka Hotel, Kay Russell, offered to sponsor Roland. We were happy and grateful to accept her generous offer. The money for the fare came from a Canadian life insurance policy that father had taken out years ago. The insurance company (Sunlife Insurance?) had very thoughtfully continued to make the payments throughout the war from the money that would be due him. Kay Russel’s roommate, Carol Chambers, suggested Roland stay with her family in San Diego, when he first arrived. Roland’s trip and first months in the States are described by Roland elsehwere, I think. What impressed me greatly, however, and what made me certain that Roland could take care of himself, was the following occurrence: Roland’s ship was to go straight to San Francisco, but soon out of Japanese waters he was told that the ship was to stop in Tsingtao, and that he was to pay an additional fare. But Roland argued that he had boarded the ship expecting to go directly to San Francisco and that he had no intention of paying more, and the agency finally agreed not to charge him. I was so proud of Roland when I heard this; now I knew that my little brother could take care of himself. We all missed Roli, but we knew that it was good for him to be in the United States. Now Father and I were alone with Tsunesan. I know my father missed Roland very much. But since he had become a member of the Inubashi, he was never lonely for long, and I was with him till I, too, left about one year later. Since I remember very little of that period I will review what I wrote in my review of the Year 1949. It was a year full of a variety of happenings, interesting, I learned a great deal, and it also brought a lot of fun and many sociable times. A year of enjoyable activities with young people. Group activities of the Inubashi included ski-trips in winter, weekends in Karuizawa at Mrs. SchneewindÕs (mother of a schoolmate of ours), folkdancing, Inubashi parties, swimming, hiking, trips by car in the spring and summer, bicycle tours in the spring and summer, our singing and the creation of the “International Singers.” There were the monthly meetings in which we discussed politics, started by several of us who had taken part in the Quaker International Students’ Conference, and the American Students’ Conference. The latter included the young people who had come from the States as missionaries called the J-3s because of their commitment to stay in Japan for three years. Exciting for me was an invitation to speak in Hibiya Hall for a UNESCO meeting. I spoke briefly in three languages, German, Japanese and English. I went out with many different interesting and not so interesting people, fell madly in love with a young Dane just a few months before my departure from Japan and had to leave with a broken heart.

University Bookstore Hosts First “Seattle Indie Publisher Holiday Book Bazaar”
Seattle, Washington – University Bookstore will present the inaugural “Seattle Indie Publisher Book Bazaar” on Saturday, December 13th, 2014 from 1:00PM—4:00PM.
This festive showcase of locally published books by Wave Books, University of Washington Press, The Mountaineers Books, Fantagraphics Books, Copper Canyon Press and Chin Music Press will include discussions, live drawing demos and readings by a variety of Pacific Northwest authors, cartoonists, poets and artists, including (among others):
• Ed Skoog, Washington State Book Award Winner
• Frances McCue, poet, Mary Randlett Portraits
• Peter Bagge, comic creator, Hate and Neat Stuff
• Enfu, video game developer and artist, Cute Grit
• Leslie Helm, memoirist, Yokohama Yankee
Joining the book bazaar will be Seattle City of Literature, the nonprofit organization dedicated to securing Seattle’s bid to be designated a UNESCO City of Literature. Author and Executive Director Ryan Boudinot and Managing Director Rebecca Brinson will answer questions about Seattle’s involvement with the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and will share books by authors from Cities of Literature.
In addition, participating publishers will host a signed book raffle, in which one signed title (or more) from the presses will be raffled off each hour. The raffle is free to enter.
All presenters will be available for book signing after their performance. Free gift wrapping services will be provided for all purchases by University Bookstore staff. The book store cafe will also be serving hot beverages and snacks for visitors to enjoy.
This event is free and open to the public.
University Bookstore is located is located at University Avenue and 45th. Parking in the University Bookstore lot on 43rd and 15th will be validated with proof of purchase.

September 27 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Location: Garfield Book Company Community Room  208 S. Garfield Street

Leslie Helm tells the riveting story of five generations of his multinational, biracial merchant family living in Yokohama in war and peace. Leslie’s great grandfather immigrated from Germany to Japan. Helm’s family’s history sheds light on the political, economic, cultural, and racial interactions and tensions between Japan and the United States.

Born and raised in Yokohama Japan, journalist Leslie Helm ‘s decision to adopt Japanese children launched him on a journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great-grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870 and defied custom to marry a Japanese woman. The family’s experiences of love and war helped Helm embrace his Japanese and American heritage. Class is offered by Learning Is Forever.

In any case, Jaochim’s new position allowed him the luxury of educating his children. My great great grandfather, Johann Theodor J Helm, was sent to study the law. Turns out that reading the law gave him awful headaches so he gave it up, using his inheritance to buy a 500-acre farm in Rosow in about 1825.

At the time, Prussia was developing rapidly and many residents were moving eastward, often displacing the Polish residents who lived in the area. According to family legend, Johann was visiting the town of Stettin to pay rent on 100-acres of meadow land that he leased from the church when he saw a beautiful 10-year-old girl standing on the balcony of her home and promptly fell in love. So in love was he that he waited ten years until she came of age to propose marriage.

Their first son was Julius Helm, my great grandfather. Julius, who was trained as a farmer, fought in the Austro-Prussian war, worked as a military adviser in Wakayama and started Helm Brothers in Yokohama. His siblings were also scattered about Germany and Japan, and the Rosow farm was sold.

Many years ago I came across the website for Rosow. I contacted the webmaster who turned out to be the mayor of the town, which had shrunk to a population of 70, perhaps even smaller than it was in my great grandfather’s time. The mayor thought the barn from my great grandfather’s farm might be still standing.

Now I’m heading back to Eastern Europe and I hope to visit Rosow and find that barn. As I start my research, the only reference I can find to the town is a story about how the depopulated village was now finding new residents and wealthy Poles were coming across the border into Germany and buying up farms and homes in the village. What goes around comes around.

These pictures come to me courtesy of Chris Ritter. He and his sister own them. His grandfather, Paul Ritter, was the first Swiss Consul in Yokohama and was later promoted to Ambassador to Japan. His family was close to the CB Bernard family. Chris was born in Honmoku in 1935 and his father Max was born in Yokohama in 1902.

A few months ago, soon after I posted about CB Bernard here, and about his wonderful scenes of early Japan, I received the following email from Julian Bernard in Canada, a distant relative of my second cousin Bertie. Bertie had been my teacher in high school at Y.I.S. and had taught me an early love for history. I had always been fascinated by his British accent, and until I researched Yokohama Yankee, never really understood how we were related. (His maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather were brothers.) So I was thrilled when I received this message from his cousin giving me insight into the paternal, British side of his family.

“My heart skipped a beat, or even two, when I came across “A Grandfather’s Love”.  Charles Burton Bernard, was my grandfather.  I met him only once, in 1939, just before he set sail from Vancouver for Yokohama on the final stage of what must have been his last trip outside Japan.  To this day I cherish a number of his drawings and watercolours including four pen and ink drawings which he sent to me, four successive Christmas gifts, from 1936 to 1939…I have no wish to intrude on the Helm family or its Bernard links but I could not resist the urge to tell you how moved I was by your vignette of CBB.”

That email began my long correspondence with Julian who had spent 30 years with the Business Development Bank of Canada and married Ann, whose father had spent a year and a half in Japan working for Nipponophone, the Japanese subsidiary of EMI, a British recording company. (He wrote a delightful diary of his experiences in Japan that will be the subject of a separate post.) From Julian I learned so much about the Bernard family’s life in Yokohama and how much the family’s experience mirrored those of my own family. Julian found Yokohama Yankee “intensely interesting but also rewarding,”  he said because “It helped me realize that my father’s discomfort with his heritage was not just his but was shared with many others with the same or similar backgrounds.” Julian explained in more detail in a following email:

“George, my father, always told us that he was born in Kingsbridge, Devon and that his mother died when he was young. That was his story and he stuck to it.  Dad was in the Royal Navy in WW1 and in the Canadian Navy in WW2 during which he was commanding officer of the Toronto naval station and later of a base on the east coast; it seems safe to assume the navy had no idea he was half Japanese.  CBB didn’t let the cat out of the bag when he visited us in 1939.  I do remember CBB’s arrival from Montreal at Union Station in Toronto.  I was with my father on the platform, the train arrived, the doors opened, and down stepped a slight, dapper, white haired man with a white goatee wearing a grey three piece suit.  My father said “good afternoon, sir” and the thought flashed through my mind – he called his dad ‘sir’.  In retrospect, I believe it reflected both distance, and respect.  Another incident occurred around 1962/63.  Ann and I were at my parents for Sunday dinner.  The phone rang and Dad went off to answer it.  The conversation was brief and Dad returned to the table.  Someone asked who it was and he replied that it was his nephew, Bertie, who was at Queen’s University in Kingston (mid-way between Toronto and Montreal) for a term and that he would like to visit us.  Of course we all asked when Bertie was coming and Dad’s response was “I told him I didn’t want to see him”.  When we asked why not, Dad stormed upstairs and we didn’t see him again that day.  Obviously, we had hit a sore spot.  That incident got me thinking back to my teens when I wore thick, bottle bottom, glasses.  It happened no more than two or three times but, when I removed my glasses, I had been asked if I had any Asian blood in me.  There was something about my eyes.  Of course I denied it because that was what I had been told but, after the phone call incident, I really began to wonder.

“Only a few days after my father died in 1982, Mother came across Dad’s passport, opened it, and found his birthplace recorded as Yokohama.  They had been married for 54 years and he had never told her!  Within a few weeks Ann and I were in Erieville, NY where cousin Tony was then living and the whole story came tumbling forth; it was the start of my quest to meet as many as possible of my long hidden cousins and to try to understand why the truth had so long been denied.

CBB’s first marriage, to Ura Iida, ended in rancour and it seems inevitable that the collapse of the relationship affected the children.  The story goes that CBB’s partner in the tea business, a man named Down, swindled CBB while CBB was away on one of his frequent trips to England and/or the USA.  Down and Ura had Power of Attorney and, when CBB returned, the business was gone.”

It’s unclear whether CBB’s first wife, Ura, had anything to do with CBB being swindled, Julian later explained. In any case, CBB divorced his wife Ura. After the divorce, Ura’s brother threatened CBB. Apparently CBB felt the threat was a serious one because he began carrying a gun on his person, something that was very rare in Japan in the early 1900s.

CBB took over the care of the children, and, as was the custom among British expatriates, sent them to Britain for their education. Explains Julian: “Of CBB and Ura’s five children, [eldest son] Charles (CEBB) was sent off to England in 1904, when he was 12, to be cared for by CBB’s sisters, Blanche and Grace.  John and George were shipped off early in 1909 at the ages of 11 and 9 respectively while the two girls, Amy and Ciss (Cecile) followed later in 1909 at the ages of 13 and 9 respectively.  Despite the business setbacks, CBB was seemingly still quite well off at the time and governesses, nurses/amahs were employed; judging from a few surviving photos, most of them were English but there was at least one Eurasian…. CBB paid for the children’s first class passages back to England, their upkeep and their public (in the British sense of that word) education.”

The children must have faced a great deal of discrimination in England. Says Julian:  “All were unhappy there, probably because they were “different” and four left England when they could – two to Canada, one to Boston and one to Argentina.  Amy remained in England but then had the misfortune to marry a brute of an army man who never stopped berating her for her ancestry.  Amy’s sole surviving child, now an elderly widow in Scotland, cannot get her head around any of this and continues to refer to Bertie as “the mysterious Japanese cousin”. [Amy’s extensive collection of papers and photographs, Julian later wrote, were edited to remove photographs of Ura, her Japanese mother.]

The grandchildren of that side of the family showed little interest in their Japanese heritage. “Once CBB’s five children of his marriage to Ura Iida left Japan, none ever returned.  There were 9 grandchildren and I was the only one to visit the country,” says Julian.

But the fourth generation is now showing interest. Julian’s youngest son, Chris has visited Japan. Brigid, a great-granddaughter of CBB is apparently planning to study in Japan. Last night I had sushi with Amy Bernard, another grandaughter who represents the Boston side of the family. Her father and grandfather, like her great-grandfather CBB, were both artists. Amy works as a scientist at the Paul Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, just a few miles from where I live. She is one eighth Japanese, and with red hair and fair skin, shows little trace of her Japanese heritage. But she loves Japanese food and is interested in exploring her Japanese roots. She says she will find a way to go to Japan soon. She showed me a photo album she inherited with many charming pictures of CBB’s life in Yokohama.

Every new bit of information I learn about my family help me better understand what my family went through. The Bernard’s experience showed that my family’s experience of trying to hide our mixed race background was hardly unusual. And making those connections allow me to experience the joy of seeing how the fourth generation of the Bernard family is was once again embracing Japan. We owe so much to people like Julian, who spend a lifetime digging into their family histories to uncover a past that tells us more about who we are.

Below is a picture of Julian Bernard at left, with my cousin Bertie Bernard at center, Julian’s wife next to Bertie, Lillian, Bertie’s mother (who helped me so much with my book), and Kyoko, Bertie’s charming and brilliant wife. The Japanese gentleman between Julian and Bertie is Kyoko’s brother.

Lovingly pasted into now yellowing pages are the flimsy sheets of letter paper used back then when every ounce counted. In the scrap book are loving letters from his mother (my grandmother Betty) filled with admonitions to “wash your towels every three days,” and to make sure he washies his neck and underarms in the shower. In one letter on July 8, 1943 grandmother writes my uncle about the day my Dad (Don) wore his army uniform for the first time: “(Don) has a little side cap and I must say the whole outfit becomes him. He was strutting around so proudly like a hen that had just laid an egg and didn’t know what was going to happen next.” Or another time when my grandparents were invited to a party in Tokyo that included Princess Takamatsu and the American ambassador to Japan. While everyone else arrived in “dark Cadillacs with uniformed chauffeurs, my grandparents rattled to the entrance to the grand mansion in an old Ford. Grandfather Julie evidently hated the party, saying one such evening was “enough for a lifetime.” But my grandmother dreamed of a day when her son Don, my dad, would move in such circles exchanging small talk with important people. But, of course, like his father, Dad hated such parties. Then there is the letter my grandmother sent the day after I was born demanding my uncle send her $5. Apparently she had bet my uncle that I would be a boy. “I sang and whooped1” wrote my grandmother.

In doing research for Yokohama Yankee, I didn’t have access to this scrapbook. But I had access to many other letters and memoirs. And that got me thinking. What will my great grandchildren read if they want to know more about my generation. In this day of email and Facebook–where important messages are buried among so many trivial words–how can we preserve the memories that the next generation might find useful? It is something I will ponder about. For while I have written much about the past, I say little about the present even though we are going through more momentous changes now than just about any time in history. So what should we be doing to leave behind snapshots of our age, the way way think, the lessons we learn. Or does it even matter now that everything is being electronically recorded online and in computers. Then again, how much of that information is on old videotapes or computer discs that our grandkids won’t have access to?

What do you think? Are you making an effort to pass your thoughts on to your kids and grandkids?

MATSUDA YASUBE was running betto [groom] for Captain Schinzinger. The captain represented a foreign firm that sold high explosives to the Imperial government: therefore he was great. He lived in a fine house in the European quarter of Tokio – amid an army of servants–as every great man must. There was a squad of these boys, aged from fifteen to fifty, who swept the honorable and pebbly driveway with big brooms made of twigs, and could not do any other kind of work. Then there was the middle-aged boy who came to the front door whenever a caller pushed the electric button, swung the door open majestically, and stood in silence, a very dignified statue swathed in silk and cotton, holding forth a silver tray for the visitor’s honorable card. There were also the boys who attended the furnaces, boys who did the honorable housework, boys who waited on the honorable table of the captain, besides those who cooked the meals, the runners of errands, and various other minor boys whose slight labors no westerner may guess. Each of these attended strictly to his own duty, and could not be driven by Fate herself to do the work of any other. That is the unwritten law.

Over all ruled Takiguchi Tokutaro, whom we should call a major-domo, but whose native style and title is Number One Boy. Of middle age, his clean-shaven face a bronze mask of dignity, with a curl of the lip that recalled the swaggering old daimios [lords] who cut down any that dared stand too near when they travelled along the Tokaido, Takiguchi was a fine figure of a man. He was tall and of powerful build, too; and, although his habitual movement was slow and majestic, as became a person of his high position, he was still as agile as a youth and one to be dreaded in quarrel. It was his physical prowess as much as his lofty office that gave him a habit of truculence toward his inferiors, a habit which they all resented in secret yet dared not resist openly by so much as the angry flutter of an eyelid. No foreigner dreamed of these savage eddies beneath the placid surface of the domestic stream, and many a friend congratulated the captain upon the excellence of his smooth household machinery.
Matsuda Yasube was the only one of the domestic staff who failed to bow low and rub his knees with his palms and draw a long, hissing, deferential inhalation whenever Takiguchi honored him by giving an order. Matsuda was young and fippant, and came of a family that had been honorable for centuries. The ancient feudal idea that personal service is far nobler than any other employment still prevails in Japan. Matsuda was proud as any young lord, and the lofty airs of Takiguchi irritated him beyond endurance. Besides, his own position as running betto made him an important personage, too. He often indulged in a light glance of disrespect at Takiguchi. A betto is a groom. The running betto perches in state beside the coachman on the box of his master’s carriage. Horses and carriages are still so infrequent in Japan that even in Tokio the services of the running betto are necessary to warn people on foot to get out of the way. With arms folded across his deep chest, the running betto emits from his squeezed throat as often as necessary, perhaps oftener, a long-drawn note of warning, a curious vibrant menace, full of affectation of importance.
“Ee-ee-ee-ee!” he cries, and wayfarers scramble aside to let the carriage pass. Or if the roadway be in the least crowded the betto, still shrilling his cry, leaps down from the box, runs ahead, and thrusts and hauls the people out of the way. It is no wonder Matsuda grew prouder day by day. Witness the conduct of our own policemen and guards and platform men whose duty it is to hurl the defenseless citizens as far as they can throw him.
One evening Matsuda squatted in the kitchen, holding his blue wrists over the edge of the hibachi so that his whole body would thereby be warmed. He drew from his girdle a Japanese pipe——a long, thin reed with a tiny silver bowl at the end of it. Into this bowl he pushed a pinch of Japanese tobacco that looked like old brown corn-silk, lit it, and, after three or four pulls, knocked the glowing red dottel [half-smoked tobacco] out on his palm. He refilled the pipe, lit the fresh tobacco from the dottel, and pulled away in comfort. As a matter of fact, the fine, clinging tobacco ash was next to his palm, and the red coal of tobacco lay harmless upon it. But all this was not clear to Katrina, a maid newly come from- Berlin. Her big blue eyes stood out opened wide in amazement.
“Ach, wunderschiin!” she cried.
Matsuda grunted in disdain of admiration from a mere foreigner; above all, a mere woman. Yet he did not fail to repeat his trick several times.
Katrina, still wondering, found Takiguchi in the dining-room superintending the arrangement of the table for dinner and deferentially listening to Captain Schinzinger’s directions about the wines.
“Tell me, Number One Boy,” she said, “why is Matsuda Yasube able to hold a coal of red—hot tobacco in his bare hand and feel no pain?”
“Because he is coarse, brutal person,” replied Takiguchi, bowing politely, but with just enough respect for a foreign female. At that moment Matsuda came swaggering through the dining-room. He fixed himself at insolent ease in front of Takiguchi, his hands resting on his hips, and made a very small and mocking bow.
“Honorable Number One,” he inquired in Japanese, “are you paying the high compliment of talking about me?”
“Out of my way, beast!” Takiguchi growled contemptuously, adding to the insult by uttering it in English. The two stood eye to eye for the space of perhaps two seconds; then young Matsuda, knowing very little English and unaware of the exact meaning

of Number One Boy’s words, slowly swaggered from the room.
Late that night when off duty the runnin betto observed casually to his friend the betto: “Tell me a new word, 0 Norama. San, you who know all the thoughts and words of the outlandish English. What is the meaning of the word “beast?”
“‘Beast,’ young honored friend?” Norama replied, meditatively. “‘Beast”? Oh yes. It means an animal, low, brutal, besotted thing.”
“It has a curious sound like the hissing of a goose.” Matsuda indifferently commented. “I heard it to-day for the first time. It is a new word to me.”
But when he stretched himself on the mat that night sleep was far from him. The air of unconcern which had hidden his personal interest in the new word now gave way to an access of rage as he kept repeating it to himself over and over again. “Beast!” “Beast!” “Beast!” he whispered, and the sound hissed like a serpent in his cars. So the outrageous upstart Takiguchi, whose family dated back barely to the Gen-roku period, a mere two hundred years, had dared to apply a loathsome English epithet to him, a Matsuda, member of a most ancient family of the Satsuma clan, a people who were great long before the time of the first Shogun! The affront was [too much.]

Nevertheless. it was a serene and smiling Matsuda who went about his duties next day. He was a trifle pale, and his eyes were feverishly bright; but there was no trace upon his smooth countenance of revenge, anger, or any other passion. For what says the ancient proverb? “He is indeed a pomegranate who, when he opens his mouth, shows his heart.” So Matsuda. smiled more blandly than usual as he went about the house, and on the box of the carriage his weird, crooning “ Ee-ee-ee-ee!” of warning sounded as loud and clear as ever. Thinking it over afterward, members of the family remembered that for many days the running betto kept out of the way of the Number One Boy except when the master was present. On such occasions he was often seen edging toward Takiguchi, though he never remained near him very long. The conditions were not quite right. The precise details that should accompany a pretty and perfect taking of Japanese revenge are beyond the conception of the outlander. I shall not try to guess at their devious complications.
On the fifteenth evening after the insult Captain Schinzinger was going to dine out. The carriage was ordered for half past six o’clock, and punctually at the minute it swept up the pebbly drive and halted before the great door, Matsuda leaped nimbly down from his perch on the box and took his proper place at the horses’ heads. He was watchful, trim, and serene, without a trace of emotion. As usual, on such occasions, a dozen or so of the household boys arranged themselves in a semicircle around the portal to make proper low bows to the master and wish him good luck on his departure. Number One Boy, with all the dignity of a daimio conducting an honored guest, led the master to the carriage. Captain Schinzinger stepped into the Victoria and sat down. Takiguchi bent forward to tuck the lap robe around his master’s honorable ankles.
The running betto let go the bridle, and in two bounds was beside Takiguchi. His eyes were ablaze, and his cheeks were flushed dull red. With his left hand he plucked the Number One Boy into an upright position, while in his upraised right hand there flashed a keen, glittering knife with a blade almost as broad as a cleaver.
“Tss-ss-ss! Beast!” he hissed as he drove the blade to the hilt into the muscular neck of Takiguchi at the point where the jugular-vein descends into the body. As his victim fell, already dead, as it seemed, Matsuda started on a run, for none of his fellow servants tried to hold him. He ran all the way to the nearest police station, half a mile away. Upon entering, he made a profound bow to the captain sitting in command at the desk, and laid the red knife before him.
“Honorable captain,” he said, with a winning smile and carefully guarding glance and voice so that they should not betray unseemly exultation—“Honorable captain, I have been compelled to kill one who offered me insult. I give my weapon [to you and] give myself to be your prisoner.”
The captain bowed politely and directed the lieutenant to make careful notes of the name, age, and history of the prisoner, the place of the killing, and all other necessary details. Then a policeman, bowing very politely, requested the honorable prisoner to come to his honorable cell. There Matsuda Yasube stretched himself on the mat and slept without a care. He awoke at daylight, and, after a fine hot bath, squatted down to an excellent breakfast of boiled rice, pickled turnip, and tea. He permitted himself the luxury of an exultant smile whenever he felt quite sure no one could see him. But in the midst of one of these self-congratulations a most unpleasant thought jarred upon his satisfaction. He asked to be taken to the police captain at once.
“ Honorable commander,” he said when he had bowed before the desk, “a distressing thought is disturbing me. I have left something undone at the house of my honorable master. If it remains undone, I shall be in disgrace forever. Will you deign to send me to the house for a little time?”
“A matter of honor? You shall go by all means,” the captain graciously replied.
Therefore it was that at nine o‘clock in the morning Captain Shinzinger, upon arising from breakfast, was informed by the acting Number One Boy that Matsuda Yasube craved the honor of an interview with him. The captain went to the porch and found the running betto standing beside a policeman in uniform, who smiled and saluted.
“ Honorable master,” said Miatsuda, after bowing half-way to the floor three times, “I was very selfish last evening. I was so ill-bred, so rustic, in making my private revenge-business disturbing the good ordering of your honorable house. For this I seek most humbly gracious pardoning from you.”
Matsuda’s bowed face was a picture of distress until he heard the kindly tone of Captain Schinzinger’s voice reassuring him.
“You have my pardon, Maisuda,“ he said.
Whereupon Matsuda Yasube bowed deeper than before and cried. “Thank you, sir.” and. “Good-by, master! Sayonara!” and marched away to the police station. There he spent many happy days, indifferent to whether gallows or prison cell awaited him, for he had wiped the stain from his honor and shown true courtesy to the master. So he squatted on the mat and warmed his wrists at the hibachi, and spent most of his waking time in smoking pinches of silky brown tobacco in his little silver pipe and knocking the glowing dottels out on his bare left palm.

Hayao Miyazaki has always been one of my favorite Japanese artists. His skepticism towards the foibles of mankind is leavened by his humanism, and, ultimately, his optimism that the world, and we humans and the world we live it, will survive in spite of ourselves. I was reminded of this and of my favorite Miyazaki movie, Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa (Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind), when I heard an incredible radio report on NPR recently about a true miracle that occurred at a massive, water-filled copper pit in Butte, Montana.

In Miyazaki’s film, Nausica, you may recall, a nuclear holocaust destroys most of the planet. The film takes place a thousand years later, when a beautiful forest has grown up that produces terribly poisonous plants and insects. The few humans who remain on earth mistake the poisonous forest for the enemy and try to destroy it. Just in time, the young heroine learns that the poisonous forest is really nature’s way of filtering out toxic substances to create ground water that is pure enough to sustain life, including the people on the planet.

Well, in the radio show, which was produced by radio lab, we are introduced to a huge lake that has been cut into an old copper mine. When the mine closed many years ago, we learn, the mining company dynamited it rather than bother to clean it up. Rain mixed with the old remains of the mine creating a soup of sulfuric acid that kept eating into the mountain, sucking ever more toxic metals into the lake and making it ever larger. One day a flock of geese landed in the soup and were found dead the next day.

Much later, a team of chemists comes across a startling discovery: a living substance that seems to be doing what the poisonous forest was doing in Miyazaki’s film. If you’ve seen Miyazaki’s film, you must listen to this marvelously produced radio program. If you haven’t seen the film, you should watch it then listen to the radio program. You will be bowled over by Miyazaki’s imagination and this miracle in Butte, Montana. I don’t want to tell you what the chemists learned because it would ruin the ending of the radio show. What I can tell you is that it has to do with geese and with the self-healing powers of nature. You should listen to the program, It’s radio at its best.

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She was already close to 90 the first time I visited her at her small cottage in Venice, Los Angeles in 1996. The cottage had a charming garden that she carefully tended and which backed up onto one of Venice’s canals. The house was built at the turn of the century when Venice had been a resort area. Monte bought it in the 1950s when the area had hit hard times.

“I bought this house because it was cheap, but I love it.” She had previously lived in a nice house in Beverly Glenn that she bought when her father died in 1933 leaving her a good inheritance.

Then she married Leonard Stone, a handsome alcoholic who had three daughters from a previous marriage. The previous marriage had suffered, in part, because both Stone and his wife were alcoholics, according to Robert Patterson, Stone’s grandson.

Stone came from wealthy parents. His father had been a stockbroker in Australia working with a brother who was a partner in the same law firm as Herbert Hoover. The two were partners in several mining investments. Stone later move to California and became a mining engineer and the editor of a mining journal. He would short the stock of a mining company than write negative stories about the mine to drive its stock price down so he could buy the share back at a nice profit. Stone’s mother was also from a rich family. Her forebears had been the beneficiaries of a Spanish land grant. Her aunt had been one of the founders of Santa Monica. When Stone’s father ran away, perhaps after his unscrupulous activity was uncovered, Stone’s mother married a shipping magnate and inherited his money when he died a few years later.

So one images that Leonard Stone, the son, must have inherited a fair amount of money. Perhaps some of the money was lost in the 1929 crash. Perhaps he spent it all. In any case, he must have run out of money because in 1932 he was convicted for counterfeiting and spent 18 months in a penitentiary.

Monte probably knew nothing of that history. She remembered Leonard as an idealistic salesman with dreams and lots of ideas that never came to fruition. “He was ahead of his time,” she used to say pointing out that he was the first to come up with the idea of selling cut flowers in the supermarket. “He liked to bend the elbow,” she added, referring to his love for drink. Stone proceeded to spend all of Monte’s substantial inheritance on his various business ideas.

Fortunately, Monte still owned shares of Helm Brothers, which weren’t easy to sell. The couple lived on the $250 a month in dividends from Helm Brothers. But those dividends stopped flowing when World War II began.  Leonard drank more and his health declined. In 1945 the doctor suggested Monte and her husband go to the desert to improve Leonard’s health. A friend got them jobs in Furnace Creek Valley. For nine months, Monte cooked for farm workers while Leonard put in irrigation lines for the date palms.

When they returned to Los Angeles in 1946, there was no place to live. Everybody was coming back from the war and housing was in short supply. She paid some money under the table and got an apartment for $100 a month. Sometime later, perhaps when the war ended and dividends started flowing again from Helm Brothers, Monte and Leonard moved into the Venice house.

The Venice house had a galley kitchen, a tiny living room and two small bedrooms. The first time I met her, I told her she had been one of my Dad’s favorite cousins. She smiled, then said in a husky voice that must have been sexy when she was young: “I remember going to Japan for a Helm Brothers board meeting. People were unhappy because your Dad was competing with Helm Brothers. We threw him out on his ass,” she said. Dad had started a competing company after his uncle had fired him as head of the company. The family had retaliated by removing Dad from the Helm Brothers board. But I could tell that Monte loved my father.

Monte served me tea and cookies, and we sat on the couch and talked as we went through pictures. She had lived a privileged existence as a young girl. She grew up in the Victorian mansion in Yokohama that my great grandfather built in 1902. She attended a French convent in Tokyo. Among her classmates was the Siamese ambassador to Japan.

She remembers her Japanese grandmother’s sister had given all the children gold bracelets. Her house burned down in the great earthquake of 1923 and her father built a grand new house in Hachiojiyama (Helm Hill) near Honmoku.

When Monte first moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s, she lived with her aunt. Her aunt would call her “yellow” and make Monte stay in her room when guests came because she was embarrassed about having a Japanese relative. Her grandmother was Japanese.

Her father, Charles, had taken Japanese citizenship so that Helm Brothers ships could be registered in his name. It took years for Monte to get U.S. citizenship because of the 1924 Exclusion Act which prohibited those of Japanese heritage from getting citizenship. It was only because her mother was white and born American that she was able to get the papers. Monte’s parents were first cousins. Her mother’s father, Gustav, was the brother of her father’s father, Julius. When she finally got U.S. citizenship on June 13 1930, the Evening Herald wrote: “International girl becomes American.”

Not long afterward, Monte had trouble finding a job In the midst of the Great Depression, and she returned to Yokohama taking a second class berth on an NYK ship to save money. When the purser saw her name on the list he said; “Miss Helm, you mustn’t go second class. Your father will be very upset. I’ll put you in first class and your father will pay me back later.”

On the ship Margaret met Hayward Hunter of San Francisco, a young lumber salesman, and quickly fell for him. They spent time together in Yokohama and later Kobe. One evening, they were taking a taxi to Monte’s Uncle Jim and Aunt Elizabeth’s house in Maiko when the taxi stalled right on the train tracks.  The driver was trying to restart the car when Margaret saw the lights of the train coming around the bend. The train rammed into the car knocking it on its side and pushing it up onto the train platform. The top of the car was ripped off. Margaret fell unconscious. They were lucky to be alive.

When Monte had recuperated, she and Hayward took the boat to Yokohama. Monte got off the ship at Yokohama to visit her family. Hayward stayed on the ship to go to San Francisco. She gave him a package to give to her Aunt Betsy in Los Angeles and wrote to her Aunt to meet the ship. She dreamed of marriage to Hayward. Her Aunt Betsy later wrote Monte that when she delivered the package to Hayward, he was there with his wife, who had come to take him home.

Monte could have lived an easy life if she had stayed in Yokohama. But she said she hated the way the foreign wives would hang out at the club and play mahjong all day long. She wanted to be independent. That was why she traveled to Los Angeles and went to secretary school. She was one of the few Helms I knew of her generation who worked most of her life. She couldn’t afford to retire early as most of her cousins had done.

She never felt bitter about the money Leonard had spent. She never felt she ever wanted more than that house in Venice. It had never been remodeled and looked much like it must have looked when it was first built at the turn of the century. Toward the end, she could have sold the house and lived comfortably in a retirement home. Yet she continued to live there taking a bus to do her grocery shopping, and in the end, wearing an oxygen mask as she did the house cleaning.

In the years that followed, I often visited her in Venice. The last time I went with my children. She was so pleased to see them. Before we left, we went out back into the garden she loved so much and I took a picture of her with Eric and Mariko. It is a reminder of one of the many special moments I had connecting to special people in the course of researching my book.

The black and white image shows the family crest as depicted in family documents. The one in red is a version drawn by my cousin, Alan Webster.

When I was about fourteen, in a surge of family pride, relatives had a mold of the family crest made and many of us received jewelry with the crest. My sisters received gold pendants with the mark of the crest, while my brother and I received rings and cuff links. I gave the ring to my son Eric when he turned 18. We Helms were in disarray and seemed to be in search of something to show we were important in some way.

At the beginning of my family search, I made some effort to determine whether there was any significance to the crest. I was very excited to discover that Trudy (Helm) Weber has a seal with the crest. The kind uses to press into wax to seal an envelope. The handle of the sea was a ruby-colored precious stone.  I suspect that Trudy’s father, Karl, or perhaps my great grandfather, Julius Helm, had it made, although it’s possible that the seal may have been older. Perhaps one day someone will have it evaluated to determine its age. But whatever it’s age, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t go back hundreds of years. I have serious questions as to its authenticity.

Why? Well, for one thing, the helmet at the top is a barred helmet, which is reportedly used only for nobility.
Yet I have come across nothing to suggest we were ever remotely related to nobility. According to stories from my great-grandfather’s sister, Charlotte, the Helm family migrated from the Netherlands. An early story tells of an ancestor who was a pastor in Schleswig Holstein, on the border with Denmark. He apparently had a disagreement with his patron who was loyal to the Pope. Apparently, our pastor ancestor tore off his vestments, threw them on the ground and said angrily “There lies the Pope and here stands the church.” Presumably this story happened sometime around the Thirty Years’ War in the early 1600s, when Catholics and Protestants battled for control of the many principalities in Europe.

The first record we have of the Helm line is of great, great, great-grandfather, Joachim Adolph Friedrich Helm. He was born in Mecklenburg, Trollenhagen and made his way to Woldegk in the north of Germany. There he studied law and became a law court administrator and church economist. We think he might have gotten that post in 1785 when he married Charlotte Dorothea Fuchs, the widow of his predecessor. The father of this widow was a superintendent in the region, presumably somewhat prominent. But the Fuchs were hardly nobles. Over the internet, someone recently connected to my family tree, which gave me access to the family background of the Fuchs. The occupations of two of the earliest people on the family register, which went back five hundred years, were listed as “assistant executioner.”

Joachim’s youngest son, my great-great grandfather, Johann Theodor Julius Helm, was born in 1800 and studied law like his father but ended up going into farming, because he suffered from terrible headaches when he read texts. Instead, he bought a 400-acre farm in Rosow, north of Berlin, where my great-grandfather was born in 1840. So in the case of the Helm crest, there is no evidence of how the family got  the crest, and no sign of nobility.

When it comes to the Japanese side of the family, the family of my great grandmother Hiro Komiya,  there are two crests.

In Japan, with the exception of some very prominent families, crests are relatively informal symbols. Anybody can choose just about any crest. When I first started research into my family, people told me the Komiya crest was the one above with the crossed eagle feathers. But when I met distant relatives, they told me the Komiyas had once been samurai and even had a castle. But the castle had long since been destroyed, and hundreds of years ago our branch of the family had renounced our samurai past to settle down as farmers. Their family crest was the wisteria crest shown above with the drooping flowers making the sides of a circle. I assumed we represented two different branches of the same family. Yet, there was a mystery. On the gravestone of my great-grandfather’s first daughter, who died as a baby, was the wisteria symbol shown below.

Yet, when if finally found the grave of my Japanese great-great grandfather, the grave had the symbol of the two crossed feathers.

At the time I wrote my book, Yokohama Yankee, I couldn’t explain the two different crests for the same family. I have since learned that it is not unusual for a new branch of a family to adopt a new crest. I believe that the family’s original crest was the wisteria crest since that was on a gravestone placed in 1875, when Caroline Helm, the first daughter of Komiya Helm, died as a baby. The second crest, the two crossed feathers, by contrast, was on the grave of a much newer grave for my great great grandfather’s adopted son. The son was adopted when he married my great-great grandfather’s daughter. In an unusual situation, the the biological daughter died, and the adopted son remarried. Since there was now no longer any blood connection with his adopted father’s side of the family, the adopted son appears to have decided to take on the new crest, the crossed eagle feathers. He had the crest with the crossed feathers put on his grave. His father in law’s grave is used, somewhat disrespectfully as one of the stones that support the foundation of the adopted son’s grave.

Crest’s are really only important if they mean something to the family. Although I have mixed family’s about my Helm ancestors and doubt they ever had noble blood, I came to love them in the course of writing my book. And while I’m not crazy about the martial theme of the Helm crest, it is tied to the family’s history. I hope my adopted son and daughter, who carry the Helm name, will also feel some connection to the Helm crest.

That language school at the University of Michigan, along with the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School, trained a whole generation of Japan experts. Some of the students such as my father, who was in Cahill’s class, were “BIJ”s. They were chosen because they were born and raised in Japan and were proficient in the language. George Moore and Hans Baerwald, also in Dad’s class, were both BIJs and both went on to become professors with expertise in Japan. Most of the other students were chosen based on I.Q. because it was understood that Japanese was such a difficult language to learn. One of the students, Joe Guilfoile, who would later serve on the board of our family company, Helm Brothers, told me that he had been plucked from college and ordered to study French. At the last minute, they said they had plenty of French speakers and needed more people to study Japanese so they moved him into the Japanese language school at Michigan.

Dad used to complain about how tough the school was. (While he had an edge in spoken Japanese, he said it was hard to compete in the written language with all the geniuses at the school who seemed to have photographic memories.) But of course all the students were thrilled not to be fighting at the front, where they would be sent if they didn’t keep up with their grades. Here’s a fund write up on the  Intensive Japanese Language School at Michigan established in 1942.

…hundreds of American soldiers could be seen traversing the streets of Ann Arbor constantly writing invisible Japanese characters in the air—often to the befuddled stares of passing pedestrians. With local interest piqued, in January 1943, Major General George V. Strong, an assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt it necessary to dictate the following telegram to the University:

“IT IS THE DESIRE OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT THAT NO REPEAT NO PUBLICITY OF ANY KIND BE GIVEN THE ARMY LANGUAGE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE APPRECIATED.”

The army, it seems, regarded the Japanese Language School’s presence in Ann Arbor as a military secret. Nevertheless, the Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News both found the program too good to ignore and ran frequent stories about it. Student life in the language school was intense. Students were housed in the East Quadrangle and were expected to be dressed and present at 6:08 each morning. Classes were from 8:00 to 10:30am, then resumed at 1:00pm each day except Fridays, when Japanese films were shown. Study hall at 8:00pm was mandatory in the Law Library for all students with lower than B averages; lights out at 10:30. Rumors ran on with stories of tunnels in the basement of East Quad or skillful escapes over gates to avoid bed checks.

War is always tragic. But it’s even more tragic when we go to war, as we often do now, with little or no knowledge of the languages or cultures of the nations where we are fighting. I don’t believe in being nostalgic about war. But it does seem like the language schools were one way in which the U.S. got it right during World War II.

In the course of our long years in Japan, members of the Helm family met and married into many interesting families of old “Japan hands,” of whom one of the most interesting is the Bernard family. My great aunt Lillian was the daughter of Charles Helm and his first cousin Louise. Lillian married Barnie Bernard, whose father was C.B. Bernard. C.B. Bernard came to Yokohama in the early 1870s and was member of many of Yokohama’s early institutions, including YC&AC. Bernard was a tea merchant, but he is best known for his beautiful woodblock prints and water colors.

At the beginning of World War II, Lillian and her family, who were British, had to leave Japan. Since they were part-Japanese, they were not allowed to enter the United States. “Not wanting us to be put in a detention camp,” Pauline writes, “my folks chose to live in Venezuela and later Argentina, during the war years. We went back to Japan in 1949, but Grandpa died in 1947.”
They urged C.B.Bernard to accompany them, but he didn’t want to leave his Japanese wife behind so he stayed. He and his wife spent the war years in a prison camp where they nearly starved to death. At the time, C.B. Bernard had one granddaughter, Lillian’s first daughter Pauline, who he called Peto. During their separation, C.B. Bernard drew little pictures accompanied by stories that he sent to his granddaughter.

The picture above on the top is one of a series of pictures that C.B. Bernard sent to Pauline. (The one on the bottom is a print Bernard did of Osaka.) The picture on the top was accompanied by a note written on letterhead of the Yokohama United Club, a lunch club popular at the time. (My grandfather used to complain that the Yokohama United Club wouldn’t allow him to become a member because he was half Japanese.) The message says:

Dear Peto,
Ask Papi to sing it to you.
Grandpa
January 28 ’41.

The drawing shows Bernard and his wife waving farewell to the ship as it steams off to Argentina. The words were meant to be sung to the tune “It’s a long long way to Tipperary.”
My cousin, and former high school teacher at Yokohama International School, Bertie Bernard, now alternates between homes in London and Yokohama. He is writing a history of the Bernards, and I look forward to reading that book.

I received a remarkable letter from Chi Carmody, a law professor in Ontario, Canada, who recently came across a cache of photographs while preparing his father’s house for sale. In doing research, he came across my book and sent me photographs with a letter describing the unusual way in which our two families are connected, while also revealing details I had not known about my own family.

The first photograph shows the wedding of Jim Helm to Elizabeth Wiedemann in Yokohama in 1909. Jim Helm, as I describe in Yokohama Yankee, was the tall, athletic old brother of my grandfather Julie. It was Jim’s wife, Elizabeth, who introduced my grandfather Julie to my grandmother Betty in Brooklyn. Carmody reveals an aspect of that relationship I had not known. I had always wondered how Jim met Elizabeth. Well it turns out Elizabeth’s father worked for New York Life Insurance in Yokohama, and the two families likely knew each other.

The second picture shows my grandfather Julie with Elizabeth’s brother’s son, Fred–that is, Elizabeth Wiedemann’s nephew. The picture was taken in the summer of 1923. That may have been the summer Julie first met Betty, or it could have been a subsequent trip. But he would returned from that trip to be faced, soon afterward, with the great Kanto earthquake of September 1923. (I’ll have to check to see if Helm brothers was insured by New York Life. I think they were.)

The fascinating part of the story is how Chi Carmody ended up with all these pictures of the Wiedemanns that he sent me. It turns out that Elizabeth Wiedemann’s brother, Ernst, who had also lived in Yokohama, returned to New York and married Ella Hendrickson (the employee of a printing company), became active in Brooklyn politics and probably got to know George Carmoody, Chi’s grandfather. Ernst and Ella had a single son named Fred who was born about 1916. Fred is the one in the picture with my grandfather, Julie. Ernst died of pneumonia in 1929 at age 47.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, Fred Wiedemann met Charles, the son of George Carmody, the Brooklyn politician who was Chi’s uncle. Charles and Fred lived together and shared a bed, relatives confirm. They both also work for New York Life Insurance Co., like Fred’s father, Ernst. They buy a bungalow at Breezy Point in Brooklyn, then called the “Irish Riviera.” Chi says there are many pictures of the couple enjoying themselves at Breezy Point.

According to family lore, Chi writes, Fred was on one of the U.S. naval vessels that docked at Hiroshima right after the atomic bomb blast. Story has it that the radiation was so strong, many of the men in the ship vomited overboard and later got cancer.

Fred returned to New York after the war and lived with his mother. On weekends Charles and Fred slept together in the front bedroom while Fred’s mother, Ella, occupied the rear of the house. In the summer Charles and Fred lived together at their home at Breezy Point.

In 1950, Fred contracted lung cancer. It’s unclear if the disease was related to his exposure to radiation at Hiroshima. Charles looked after Fred in his dying days and took care of the funeral arrangements. After Fred’s death, Ella invited Charlie to move in with her and informally adopted him.

l: Why did you leave Germany.

J: It seemed old. Set in its ways. I didn’t want to do what my father wanted me to do. I didn’t want to be responsible for all my siblings. I wanted to see the world. It seemed to me there was so many exciting things happening in the rest of the world.

L; but why not just stay in America.

J: yes it was different. It was exciting in its way. But once I had a taste for this new life, I wanted more. I wanted to keep encountering new experiences. It seemed to me that the only way to live was to keep moving. If you stayed in one place, life just got boring.

L: I did that in the beginning to. I just kept moving and moving. France, India, New York, JapanBoston, back to Japan. What got you into the Wakayama deal.

J; it was just too exciting to turn down. What an opportunity to see the real japan. And to be training soldiers. That is too funny. Japanese no less. I look at the rickshaw man and I cannot imagine him in a uniform. These small fellows with their stern features and their quick smiles. I cannot imagine them with a musket.

J; and then we arrive and these fellows are training with sticks. Can you imagine that. The are marching around like a lot of little boys with sticks thrown over their shoulders. It was a challenge to me to try to make these men into real soldiers. Koppen had done a pretty good job with the officers. But the regular soldiers. That is another story. I had these young samurai fellows and these old guys.

L: yes yes. But what did you feel about Japan. Did you fall in love with it?

J: What a notion. Love? I don’t know. I suppose I loved Germany. Japan. It was this strange place. Everything about it was strange. Did I fall in love with it. No. But I was entranced by it. Every little thing caught me as if I were in some strange fairy tale. The way the ladies are so demure. They may give you a brief glance then they hide their faces. They cover their mouths when they smile. In front of the large warehouses where they sold the material for their kimono. The women would gather and gossip.  There I would hear them laugh like I had never heard them laugh in Yokohama.

There was something about the poorest peddler. The way he balanced his tree hung with pots and pans that was twice his height. He never seemed to tire under his load. He called out a strange tune as he walked in the streets calling for customers. There was a moaning quality to it. At first I found it noisy and disturbing. But then I found it lonely when the sound was not there.

How about Wakayama?

The young girls who carry their baby brothers on their backs. The ladies working in their blue pantaloons in the muddy rice fields. It is all just so beautiful. It is all just so charming. I can just walk and walk and never get tired of it. There is something about the countryside that you do not find in Yokohama. There is a community. There is a sense of belonging. Wakayama had that.

L: How did they treat you in Wakayam.

J: like a god. They thought I was just the greatest thing. They thought I could do magic. I was always showing them how they could do things better. Not just bridges and tunnels. I showed them knots that would keep their shoes tied. And they were showing me all manner of things. I took my first Japanese bath there in one of there large metal tubs. You have to wear wooden geta so you don’t burn your feet because a fire is lit under the steel tub.

They showed me how to use a Japanese bow. The Japanese could shoot the bulls eye of a target while galloping on horseback. I guess what impressed me most was their desire to learn. Once they decided to learn, they worked very hard. They learned quickly. They were not at all like those lazy men on the docks in Yokohama.

They still seem to me like dolls. It is inconceivable that fully grown men and women can be so small. When they walk beside me they take two steps to my one, like children.

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

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the German navy

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The u.s. 8^th 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.

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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.

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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 4^th.

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

The Pacific Science Center has a powerful exhibit called RACE: Are we so different? Using an imaginative combination of interviews, history and video imagery, they shed light on a discourse about race in our country that for most of our history has remained shrouded by a fog of misinformation.

The exhibit starts by noting that there is no genetic basis to what we think of as race. “Not one characteristic, trait or even gene distinguishes all the members of one so-called race from all the members of another so-called race. And the gene for skin color is unrelated to genes for any other characteristic whether hair form, blood type or intelligence.

“[Racism] is not about how you look, it’s about how people assign meaning to how you look,” Robin Kelley, a historian, a historian explains.

The other starling revelation is that racism is a relatively modern phenomena dating back to about the 17th century. Prior to that, people judged others based on religion, wealth and status but seldom on skin color. The Greeks, for example, did not classify people according to skin color.

Racism emerged in the United States in large part to justify slavery, which was such a significant party of our early economy. (Slavery did exist before but it was based on the victor enslaving the defeated and had nothing to do with skin color.) While the U.S. was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” the country’s elite had to explain why some people did not receive the same privileges as others. The same flawed rationales that were used to put down slaves was used to justify late laws that discriminated against Asians.

The legal arguments for many of our racially based laws, for example, were pretty ludicrous. the naturalization act of 1790, for example, said that only “free white persons” can be U.S. citizens. So how did they define white? Well, one exhibit points out that in 1922, an immigrant Japanese businessman, Takao Ozawa, argued before the Supreme Court that he was whiter than most Europeans. But the court said he could not be defined as white because Japanese were Mongolian rather than Caucasian. But then the following year that same court argued that Asian Indians were not white according to “common understanding” even though they were classified as Caucasians,

Today, aside from discrimination based on skin color, many people also face linguistic discrimination. Studies have shown that people seeking jobs or apartments are often turned away if their accents suggest they might be Chicano or African-American.

The conclusion: We humans have a lot of misperceptions about race that feed into our prejudices. The reality, as Steve Olson writes in “Mapping Human History: Genes race and our common origins,” is that “The chimapanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have more than twice as much variety in their mitochondrial DNA as do all the 6 billion people living on earth…

The exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is on until January. Don’t miss it.

I received this document from my friend Jan Baerwald. It is one chapter in a memoir written by Mr. Strauss. We don’t know his first name, but he is the father of Ulrich Strauss, a former diplomat who had been a good friend to Jan and my father, gave my mother her job as a translator at the Tokyo war crimes trials, and who is the author of “The Anguish of Surrender,” a great book about Japanese prisoners of war.  

In the early 1930’s, the “Western” population of Japan, at that time a country of 65 millions, numbered about ten thousand. A “Westerner” was anybody not Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Of these 10000 foreigners 900 were Jews of various nationalities. One half of them called themselves Sephardim. They were descendants of Baghdad Jews who in the 19th century had ventured to Bombay and Shanghai. Some old people among them spoke Arabic, the younger ones English. Their sympathies were with Zionism. The most powerful family-clan, the Sassoons, leaned towards England. One Sassoon, a captain in the Royal Welsh fusiliers, became an English poet of renown, another one was knighted and became Under-Secretary for Air.

                The White-Russian Jews in Japan had fled from Siberia during the American-Japanese intervention in 1918-20. At that time a Japanese division and an American infantry regiment had jointly penetrated up to Lake Baikal in a futile attempt to stem the conquest of Eastern Siberia by the Bolsheviks. They did not even succeed to save the leader of the White Russian army, Admiral Kolchak, who was finally sold by Czech troops to the Communists – for two wagon loads of coal. My secretary was a Siberian Jewess. She escaped the massacre of Nikolaevsk in 1920 and was carried to safety by her parents over the ice of the frozen Amur River. There were not more than one hundred German speaking Jews from Germany, Austria,  Czechoslovakia and last but not least one Swiss Jew – Mr. Weil, the cook of the Grand Hotel in Yokohama. He became important when we had to phone frequently with Shanghai to coordinate our efforts with the refugee committee in that city. We were afraid that the secret police would listen and cause us difficulties. So we asked Mr. Well to telephone with another Swiss in Shanghai. Weil spoke Baseldytsch, the man in Shanghai spoke Bernduetsch; but nevertheless they understood each other, and the Japanese were utterly confused since even they  could not make out what strange languages were spoken.

In 1933 a few refugees from Germany arrived in Japan. Three men, Ernst Baerwald, Henry Steinfeld and I decided to meet when the occasion demanded it and organize help. By 1935 the company for which I was working became Japanese owned. Among us three I was the only one employed by Japanese interests. That was the reason why most government contacts fell to me while Baerwald attended to financial, Steinfeld to logistic problems.

Already in 1933 the waves of Nazism reached Japanese shores. One of the first letters my company, the Columbia records factory, received after Hitler had come to power was to advise us that the recordings of Jewish artists were “no more available”. Mr. Suginami, head of our foreign artists department, came to me with our record catalogue and a big frown: “Mr. Straus, as you know our Government is very friendly with the new German Government and I could well imagine that measures similar to those in Germany may be considered by the Japanese Government, too. After all we have common enemies. Therefore please mark in this catalogue all artists of Jewish ancestry and if you are not sure who is Jewish, the German Consulate will assist you” – I opened the artists section of the catalogue and started with the violinists: Elman, Goldberg, Heifetz, Huberman, Kreisler, Menuhin, Szigheti, Zimbalist. I marked them all. Suginami looked over my shoulder and nodded with deep understanding: “Oh, I see, so-called Aryans – I think that is the right word the Germans are now using – are not allowed to play the violin.”

Early in 1934 after we had placed a few Jewish refugees in Japan my telephone at the Nippon Columbia Company rang. The caller introduced himself as Mr. Suzuki of the Ministry of the Interior. He asked sternly: “Excuse me am I connected with the Jewish Consulate?” I thought only for a split second and said “Yes”. I knew that the Japanese could not imagine any group of people without proper and orderly representation. They knew that German Jews were no more covered by the German Consulate and therefore a Jewish Consulate was not so far-fetched. Mr. Suzuki expressed his satisfaction and continued: “We have a rather difficult case. There is a gentleman in Tokyo who is very sick. He is in hospital but has no family to take care of him. Would you please take the necessary steps,” I asked . “Is he Jewish?” “Well, not exactly, he is a Negro, if that interests you, and he plays the trumpet at the Florida Dance Hall. I am afraid he has tuberculosis. He says that Jamaica is his country. We contacted the British Consulate and they told us that they know the man who claims that he lost his passport but they are not at all sure that he is a British subject. They rather rudely – I have to tell you – declined to take care of him and that is the reason why I am coming to you”. I told Mr. Suzuki that the Jewish Consulate would be highly pleased to fulfill the wish of the Japanese Government whose charitable attitude towards wayward aliens we so greatly admire.

Early in 1936 the attitude of the Japanese Government towards Jewish refugees stiffened considerably. The Japanese had heard that many European Governments curbed the influx of German Jews for fear that they may become a public burden and could not be deported to their country of origin. We were deeply worried about the growing German – Japanese alliance. It was at that time that I wrote a memorandum (attached at the end of this chapter) which I had discussed with my boss Mr. Mikitaro Miho, the president of Nippon Columbia and Mr. Gisuke Aikawa, the owner of the Company. Mr Aikawa had promised me that if I would write a memorandum on “The Jewish question” he would see to it that it would be read by Mr. Goto, the Minister of the Interior. I made sure that the names of many German Jews, especially physicians were well known to the many Japanese who had flocked to German universities. The memorandum was successful. The ordinances which made it so difficult to land Jewish refugees in Japan were withdrawn. As a result of this change in policy a great number of refugees including my parents, my parents-in-law and Carol with her first husband’s family could come to Japan. My work as a “Jewish Consul” let me meet many colorful personalities.

 Wilhelm Foerster

It was not easy to find work for Jewish refugees. Japan had never been allowing any appreciable number of foreigners to make a living there. For all practical purposes there were no industrial enterprises in Japan owned by foreigners. An exception was Mr. Foerster’s turret lathe factory in Omori. Foerster was a compactly built man in his early forties who looked like an ex-convict – and was. In his early youth he went from his native Germany to the United States where he found a job with Ford in Detroit. This job lasted only three weeks when he was fired because he had beaten up his foreman so that the poor fellow had to be hospitalized. From Detroit Foerster went to the Soviet Union. Again he found a job in an automobile factory near Moscow. After two months he was expelled from the Soviet Union because he had beaten up his foreman. He came to Japan in the middle or late twenties, got a loan from the German owner of a honky-tonk and set up a turret lathe plant. He was rather successful. Foerster, prior to 1933 had been a wild anti-semite. The moment Hitler came to power,  Foerster became a militant pro-semite. He declared that from now on he would employ only Jews in his office and he did so. He just hated all authorities and – perhaps – Jews were available at cheaper wages than other foreigners in Japan. In the early 1930’s he engaged in business with another German in Tokyo, who cheated him. Foerster went to his office and beat him up. The man had to be hospitalized. Foerster was hauled into court and the Japanese judge told him: “Mr. Foerster I have to send you to jail in accordance with Japanese law. But I want to tell you that when listening to this I came to the conclusion that you have a valid claim against your accuser since his dealings with you were rather shady.”Foerster shook his head: “I have to decline your kind suggestion, Your Honor” he said “I have beaten up the man and I am quits.”

Foerster had an odd assortment of European employees. It included a Turkish speaking Czech who had studied for the priesthood but had run away the day before ordination. Naturally I was on very good terms with Foerster, the philosemitic oddball. In 1938 I sold him a Viennese engineer named Stern, a sad looking man who always had his head on the left shoulder. He was modest and shy. In the late thirties the Japanese had frequent air raid alarm rehearsals. During one of those blackouts Mr. Stern was arrested because he had taken the opportunity to speak to a Japanese girl on the street. Foerster had lengthy talks with the police on the subject and got Stern released. He then assembled his staff and I was called in because, naturally, I as the engineers’ supplier was co-responsible for his deeds. Finally Foerster with the full dignity of a judge pronounced judgment.  “Mr. Stern is to be conducted to Number Nine, the world-famous whore house in Yokohama – at the company’s expense because he has been found not guilty.” During the war Foerster criticized the Japanese Government and was jailed. When the Americans landed in 1945 Foerster wrote an insulting letter to General MacArthur and was deported.

Friedrich Ratsky

By the year 1938 I had become quite well known among Japanese industrialists as a supplier of experienced – and inexpensive – manpower. More and more Jewish refugees arrived from Germany, many of them with specialized skills which somehow were usable in Japan. One day I got a call: Mr. Yamaguchi the president of the Tottori Iron Works requested my visit. It was only a ten minute drive from Columbia Records where, at that time I had become General Manager. Mr. Yamaguchi received me in his spacious office, surrounded by at least a dozen of his aides. I was duly impressed. Yamaguchi motioned me to be seated:

“Mr. Straus I have heard many good things about you – do you have an expert on armor-plating?”

I looked straight at him: “Mr. Yamaguchi, I have the complete list of Jewish experts available in Germany and also in Shanghai, and if somebody would, indeed, have such an odd profession as an armor-plating expert, I would know it. l can assure you that we don’t have such a man.”

Mr. Yamaguchi smiled: “I think we can help you. We have found in the library of the Imperial University in Tokyo a book on armor-plating, written in the German language and published in Vienna in 1914. It was written by a man named Friedrich Ratsky. He is just the man we want to have.”

“Mr. Yamaguchi” I said “I do not know whether Mr. Ratsky is alive or Jewish but I will try to find out”. The same evening I sent a telegram to the Jewish Community in Vienna – freshly occupied by the Germans which read:

“Friedrich Ratsky author book entitled Armor-plating published                                                               by Heinrich Mueller Vienna 1914 has excellent chance for                                                                    executive position with firstclass Japanese company – Straus”

Four days later I had a reply from Vienna:

“Thanks for your utmost kindness Friedrich Ratsky left                                                                           Vienna for Trieste boarding steamer Hie Maru stop will                                                                        arrive Yokohama hopefully on schedule”

I went to Yamaguchi’s office and declared: “Mr. Yamaguchi, you are a lucky man indeed. Not only is Mr. Ratsky alive and Jewish but I have been authorized by him to negotiate an employment agreement with you”. We sat down. There was a little bit of bargaining but not too much. Finally we agreed on 600 yen a month which at that time had a buying power of 1000 dollars today. Yamaguchi was willing to pay Ratsky’s trip from Europe to Japan, and he volunteered to pay for the return trip too because Ratsky’s agreement ran for two years and Yamaguchi wanted to make sure that his expert would get out of Japan and the reach of competitors after Tottori had learned all there is about armor-plating. After we had agreed on the main points – it took several hours – Yamaguchi suggested: “Mr. Straus I think you now have to send a telegram to Mr. Ratsky and get his agreement to the terms we have negotiated.”

“Oh no, Mr. Yamaguchi, I told you that I have a power of attorney from him. Let’s sign what we have agreed upon.”

“Alright but just a moment, when will Mr.  Ratsky  arrive here?”

I told Yamaguchi that I didn’t know exactly when he would arrive, but it won’t be very long perhaps about six or seven weeks. Of course, I wanted first to have a look at Mr. Ratsky before I delivered him. I signed the agreement. I got a down payment on salary plus the steamer fare. I reported on my deal to the other members of the Jewish Committee, Steinfeld and Baerwald, who both were satisfied with the arrangements made.

The day when the Hie Maru was due to arrive I went to the pier in Yokohama. Down the gangway came a man who had a Tyrolean hat with a kind of huge shaving brush on top. He carried a Scottish plaid over his arm and looked a bit like the kind of pig’s head which one could still sometimes see in the shop windows of old-fashioned butchers in Germany. That, I guessed, was my man. I approached him: “Are you Mr. Ratsky?” “Sure” he nodded “and you are Mr. Straus. You are a wonderful man, Mr. Straus, you got me a job, and I got out of Austria just in the nick of time, really. You know, Hitler had just made his triumphant entry into Vienna.”

We went to the custom’s hall where Mr. Ratsky’s baggage was inspected. There were a lot of apparatuses I had never seen before, but I didn’t want to ask questions. I only looked at Mr. Ratsky and asked: “Are you alone or are you married?”

“No, no, I am not married”

“Excuse me,” I continued, “of course you don’t speak Japanese but do you speak English?”

“No, I don’t speak English”

“Mr. Ratsky, this is a rather strange story, I would, in all my life, not have expected that we could find a Jewish expert on armor-plating.”

He stared at me: “What? Armor-plating? Me?”

“Yes, aren’t you the author of a book on armor-plating published in Vienna in 1914?”

“Oh, my dear Mr. Straus – now I have to tell you a story: My father had been a manufacturer in Styria, in Graz, and he made padlocks, I assure you they were the best padlocks in Europe. The old man made a lot of money, but – somehow he got it into his head that I, his son, should have an engineering degree. I don’t know why  – after all, he got rich without engineering.  But, O.K. I went to Vienna, the wine there was very good. I took some kind of a cram course and passed the exam though I rarely attended the lectures. And then, finally, I found a fellow who for – how much was it? – 500 kronen wrote my thesis on armor-plating.I went back to Graz and, you may believe me, I am the best padlock salesman in Europe.”

A little bit taken aback, I took him by the arm and walked with him out of the customs-hall, and out in the bright sunlight, who was there, but Mr. Yamaguchi, accompanied by at least twenty of his employees. They bowed deeply, Yamaguchi was smiles all over.

“Mr. Straus, we of course knew that such a famous man as Mr. Ratsky would be too modest to like a formal reception and we fully understood that you, therefore, didn’t want us to know that he would arrive on the Hie Maru, but, of course, thanks to our good relations with the steamship companies it was easy for us to get the passenger lists and – here we are. Pardon me, Mr. Straus, is Mr. Ratsky married?” I replied in the negative.

“This is very good. We have a nice house for him in Omori; and we have a very pretty housekeeper for him. But first, we have arranged a little dinner for Mr. Ratsky and you in a well-known tea-house in Omori .And if you would kindly ride with me in my car, our Executive Vice President will ride with Mr. Ratsky.”

In the car Mr. Yamaguchi continued: “By the way we of course don’t expect Mr. Ratsky to know Japanese. We therefore have employed an elderly gentleman to give him language lessons, daily, at the office. For three months Mr. Ratsky will have no duties whatsoever except to learn Japanese.”

In Omori, it was the usual boring geisha-party. I had no chance to talk with Ratsky who was placed at the other side of the room. After two hours and twenty cups of sake Yamaguchi whispered into my ear: “Now, Mr. Straus, it is perhaps the right time to send Mr. Ratsky to his new home and I suggest that you don’t accompany him – to avoid embarrassment when he meets Miss Fumiko, his housekeeper.”

I left, I sweated a bit though it was still spring, and in the evening we had a meeting of the Jewish Committee. I reported. Henry Steinfeld looked worried: “Well, Hans, what can we do? Tomorrow morning you should see Yamaguchi, explain the whole story and give him back his money. But what can we do with a padlock salesman in Japan? I guess the Committee has to support Ratsky. Well, 150 yen a month down the drain, can’t be helped.”

Baerwald was of another opinion. He, a director of the German dye-trust, had been in Japan for over 30 years and had become very tatamisé, as the French say. Tatami is the straw matting covering the floor of Japanese houses. If a man has become tatamisé he has become Japanized without any hope of redemption. Well Baerwald objected: “You know, Hans, the Japanese are funny people; sometimes they just like somebody.”  Steinfeld interrupted: “If they are looking for an armor-plating expert, my dear Ernst, they don’t want somebody they just like”. Baerwald rebutted: “What can we lose anyway? Don’t tell the story to Yamaguchi. We have three months  time. In the meantime the padlock salesman learns some Japanese. Of course we ask him to surrender his salary to us. We put it together with the steamer fare into a new Tottori bank account. We give Ratsky 150 yen a month out of our own pockets. On that he can eat.” Baerwald had been right most of the time, and we two gave in. I saw Ratsky the next day and he agreed with our proposal.

Three months had passed when the telephone rang. It was Yamaguchi:  “Mr. Straus, I am sorry to disturb you but we have to talk with you very urgently. Would you be so kind as to come to us right away.” I said “Yes, Mr. Yamaguchi, I know”. I put my checkbook into my pocket and took a taxi. At the gate of the Tottori Iron Works I was greeted by an elderly Japanese, Ratsky’s language teacher. Ratsky had not learned a word of Japanese, but by that time the teacher spoke Viennese rather fluently. I was ushered into Mr. Yamaguchi’s office. This time only four of his employees were in attendance. I was offered a chair and even a cigar, something rare in Japan at the time. Yamaguchi, after some comments on the weather, mumbled:

“Mr. Straus, this is a very disagreeable matter.”

I muttered “Yes, Mr. Yamaguchi, I know” and reached into my pocket to make sure that I had my checkbook.

Yamaguchi said: “No, my dear Mr. Straus, you cannot know”

“Excuse me, but I think I know”

“No, Mr. Straus, let me explain to you. When we employed Mr. Ratsky I didn’t tell you who our customer is. Now this is of course to be treated strictly confidential; but we know your reputation for discretion and your attachment to Japan. I know you will not talk about it. I have no choice but to disclose to you that our customer is the Imperial Navy”

I suppressed a grin. I resisted the temptation to reveal that I hadn’t thought that anybody else would buy armor-plates. So I just silently bowed.

Yamaguchi got nearly inaudible: “Well, Mr. Straus, I am sorry to inform you that the Imperial Navy has not approved Mr. Ratsky’s employment. We only can express our deepest regrets, we have to obey orders. Now, we have prepared a check for Mr. Ratsky to cover the remainder of his two-year contract. But we have probably taken a man out of an important position in Austria and if Mr. Ratsky or the Jewish Committee has any further claims against Tottori – we consider ourselves a decent company – we are willing to meet these claims.”

I said quickly and bowed again: “I thank you very much. We understand your situation and we have no further claims. We fully sympathize with you” I took Ratsky around the shoulder and whispered to him in German “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We drove to his house in Omori. The door to the house was opened by a young man. I queried: “Ratsky I was told you had a pretty housekeeper – where is she?”

“Oh I fired her, I didn’t like her”

We went into the house. It was an ordinary Japanese home but it looked strange. It was rather dark as all the walls were decorated with rugs, something no Japanese would ever do.

“Ratsky, what’s that?”

He said with pride: “That is my hobby. I am a rug weaver”

“Is that the equipment I saw at the Yokohama customs?”

“Yes, that’s what I am doing most of the time”

We sat down and I took out my checkbook:

“Mr. Ratsky, the Jewish Committee owes you quite some money. We paid you only 150 yen a month and here is the balance. Mr. Ratsky, you are a well-to-do man now.  May I ask you for a small contribution for the Jewish Committee”

“Certainly” he said and gave me a generous amount.

I asked: “Mr. Ratsky what are you going to do now?”

He beamed: “It’s wonderful: now I am going to weave every day”

I left. In the evening I reported to Baerwald and Steinfeld. Baerwald just said “I told you so, the Japanese are funny people. Sometimes they just like a man”

Three or four weeks passed when my telephone rang and a voice at the other end inquired: “Are you Mr. Straus, do you know Mr. Ratsky?”

I retorted: “I am sorry, but who are you?”

“I am speaking for Mr. Watanabe the president of the Kagoshima Steel Mill. My name is Fujimura.”

“Yes, Mr. Fujumura, I know Mr Ratsky, but I regret to say that Mr. Ratsky’s services are not available”

“But Mr. Straus, you are not well informed so it seems. We know that he is no more with Tottori.”

“That is correct but nevertheless his services are not available because – to be quite frank with you – we, in the Jewish Committee have some people who understand something about engineering and we have found that Mr. Ratsky is actually not an armor-plating expert. He is a padlock salesman. That is the reason why his services are of no use to Kagoshima Steel Mill”

“Yes, Mr. Straus we know that Tottori paid him 600 a month – we are willing to go higher”

“I am awfully sorry, Mr. Fujimura, but what I said is the truth. The Jewish Committee cannot back up Mr. Ratsky any longer, and we decline to negotiate on his behalf anymore. He is not an armor- plating expert. And by the way, Mr. Fujimura, don’t you know why he had to leave Tottori? The customer – you know – has refused to give approval for his employment and I guess there is no other customer for armor-plating in this country”

“Mr. Straus” Mr. Fujimura replied a bit haughtily “I do not want to say anything derogatory about our competitors. Tottori is a very fine company. Their standing, their reputation, are excellent, but, when it comes to political pull – they can’t compare with us. Now, may I tell you that we have the permission of the customer to employ Mr. Ratsky,”

I got desperate: “I am awfully sorry Mr. Fujimura, but he still is not an armor-plating-expert”

“Mr. Straus, we are adult people, we are not children. We know the risks we are taking and we ask you to get us into touch with Mr. Ratsky, since we do not have his address”

I took a deep breath: “By the way did I hear you say a thousand yen per month?”

“Yes, but we know that the trip has been already paid by Tottori, so we are not willing to pay the trip, and we offer him a one year contract starting immediately”

I replied abruptly: “I am awfully sorry but Mr. Ratsky is not used to one year contracts, he only signs two year contracts”

‘Just a moment Mr. Straus” He left the telephone, he came back a bit out of breath: “O.K. – a two year contract but not the trip expenses”

I told him that I would let him know, That evening we had a meeting of the Jewish Committee. Baerwald said: “You know, Hans, the Japanese are funny people – sometimes they just like a man.  And what can happen? You have handled that very well – let him go”

Ratsky had to be informed on his new opportunity. It could not be done in writing: no foreigner would in those days mail a letter in which the name of a Japanese company engaged in defense work would be mentioned. In 1936 an elderly English lady wrote a letter to her sister in England full of chit-chat and social gossip. The letter concluded: “These lines may reach you with some delay because of our censorship” Within 2 days the lady got the following note from her post office: “Dear Sir or Madam as the case may be – we herewith return your letter of March 3rd. Please note that there is no censorship in Japan.”

Under these circumstances I had to visit Mr. Ratsky. I gave his address to the cab driver, the Ohta-ku district, the 6th block, house number 346. We drove in a general southward direction. My driver stopped at a police box and was informed that we were in the 2nd block but that the 6th block was 3 miles to the east and was surrounded by the first, seventh and eleventh blocks. After another half hour we hit a 6th block police box. My driver insisted that I myself talk to the policeman – he would be more inclined to listen to a Westerner than to a lowly cabbie.

“Number 346” the policeman mused “is that near the Tiger Gate or behind the Thunderstorm Shrine” I professed ignorance and wrote down Ratsky’s name.

“Is he bald?” the policeman inquired

“No, he isn’t”

“Is he the man with the 4 naughty children?”

“No, he has no children”

“Ah, maybe he is the man with the wife who talks too much?”

“No, he is not married, but a few months ago he had a very pretty housekeeper”

“Excuse me Sir but you foreigners have strange ideas about beauty – you even don’t recognize the advantages for love-making which a bow-legged lady offers”

“Perhaps it helps you: Mr. Ratsky is an Austrian”

“Now we have it: I know all Australians around here. Does he drink 6 or 12 bottles of beer a day?”

Finally Ratsky’s rug weaving did the trick. We were told that his house number 346 was easy to find: it was adjacent to number 2, settled in the Momoyama period 350 years ago and number 1020 settled under Emperor Taisho (1912-1926). We got a sketch and we found Ratsky. He agreed to go to Kagoshima.

A few days later I accompanied him to the railroad station. After all, he was now a donor. He travelled with all his belongings. The young man from his house came along. He had four cages with canary birds with him. And he left for Kagoshima.

A week later the telephone rang – Ratsky: “Mr. Straus I am back; could I see you right away?”

He came to my office still wearing his Tyrolean hat.

I asked: “What happened?”

He shrugged his shoulders: “The old story”

I stared at him: “What do you mean?”

He explained: “Yes, they had the permission from the Navy, that was correct. But the Tottori spies heard about it and the company bitterly complained about the obvious discrimination – to somebody higher up in the Navy. I got fired. Look here’s the check – two years again.

“Alright Mr. Ratsky. This is a fortuitous situation. Now you can do some more rug-weaving.”

“Yes, and I am going to let my family come”

“So you are married after all?”

“Oh no but there are my parents, my widowed sister and her two sons.”

“You are a good man Mr. Ratsky and if you want to have any advice from the Jewish Committee – money, of course you don’t need – just let us know.”

The family indeed managed to emigrate. One of the nephews had been a medical student at the Vienna University. The Nazi takeover had prevented him from taking his final examination. On the boat he met an American missionary who suggested that he should go to Peking to finish his studies. The young man sent a telegram to his uncle in Tokyo asking him for 30 dollars a month to study in Peking. Ratsky cabled back:

“35 dollars agree” Upon arriving in Peking the young man found out that he could study medicine in Peking alright, but that the lectures and exams were in Chinese. He learned Chinese, married a Swedish girl during the war and is now a famous surgeon in Denver Col.

The second nephew was a junior Austrian judge. What was one to do with a junior Austrian judge in Japan? I made the rounds and finally hit upon Joe Goltz of Columbia Pictures.

“Joe, you need an accountant with good legal knowledge in your difficult business and I have a nice Jewish fellow at 300 yen a month”

“Hans” he said “I have a very good Japanese accountant to whom I pay 75 and I am not going to employ your nice Jewish fellow.”

I pleaded: “Joe, he has an old mother”

“Old mother -O.K., send him over.”

Joe gave him a job. Today he is a successful C.P.A. in New Orleans, La.

Ratsky, when last heard of, and that was in 1950, was in jail in Vienna – on a charge of homosexuality.

Elmira Goldberg

One evening in the late thirties, Narumi our cook came into the living room: “Mr. Straus, there is a lady – no a woman – outside who wants to see you.” I went to the front door and there was a woman of indefinite age. Maybe she was in her mid – or late – fifties. She looked kind of haggard and greyish. She asked me whether I was Mr. Straus, and I asked her to come in. She said that the Jewish emigration office in Berlin had requested her to call on me after arrival in Japan. This was not unusual. We offered her something to eat and to drink but she refused and said that she had already had her dinner. I asked the usual question: “What can we do for you?”

“Oh, absolutely nothing Mr. Straus. I need neither money nor advice. I only came because the people in Berlin told me to call on you.”

That was indeed a new departure. That had never happened before. “May I ask you Miss Goldberg, do you have relatives or friends in Japan, do you know anybody here?”

“Oh yes – I know many people, I have many friends in Japan.”

“How come?”

“Oh, I knew many Japanese gentlemen who studied in Berlin”

“May I ask you what kind of work you did?”

“I was a ballet dancer at the Berlin State Opera.”

I looked at her. She did not look exactly like a ballet dancer but that may have been thirty years ago and I did not ask any further questions. The conversation was pleasant. Miss Goldberg indeed had no requests and she left an hour or no later. I assured her that whenever she would need any advice or if her financial situation changed she should not hesitate to turn to the Jewish Committee.

Several months passed and we did not hear from her any more, but one day Narumi announced that “our” policeman wanted to talk to me. In those days the police made regular calls to all households in their precinct but especially often to those of foreigners. The policeman usually came Saturday afternoon, took off his shoes and went into the kitchen in his stocking feet holding his saber in one hand and his white cotton gloves in the other hand. Usually he only asked: “Any change in your family, any new arrival?” – which once caused Mrs. Baerwald to ask back whether it takes with the Japanese longer than the 9 months it takes with us. Every week the police asked our cook a few cursory questions: what newspapers we are reading, what guests had been to our house and to whom we had written letters. She was supposed to know all this exactly. That Saturday however the policeman just asked bluntly to see me. The cook ushered him into the living room. I offered him a chair. He sat down very uneasily, took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.

“Mr. Straus” he said after a cup of tea “I have a very important subject to talk over with you which threatens the security of the Empire of Japan – do you know Miss Goldberg?”

“Yes, I do. She has been once at our house”

“Mr. Straus. I do not want you to misunderstand me. I believe that we Japanese are not – allow me to say – as narrow-minded as you Westerners sometimes are. We have much more understanding for human nature and are less harsh than the Christians of the West are.”

“Yes, you are quite right. I have lived in Japan long enough to entirely agree with you.”

“Well, Miss Goldberg is a special case” he continued “the investigation department of the metropolitan police has designated four men for a thorough study of her case.

“Excuse me but what is her case?”

“Honorable Mr. Straus, I can only repeat what I said before that we Japanese are much more liberal in certain matters than you foreigners are, but…..” Then he trailed off.

“Come on” I pleaded “tell me frankly what she did. Did she do anything wrong? Violation of foreign currency regulations?”

“Oh nothing of the kind and if she would have restricted her activities to the professors of the Forestry Department of the Imperial University, we would have nothing to complain about.”

I asked: “Excuse me but what activities are you talking about?”

He said: “She has been a ballet dancer in Berlin.”

I countered: “I don’t think that the Forestry Faculty is interested in ballet dancing, so what is it all about?”

“She is selling her charms as far as we can make out.”

I said “That’s impossible! She is a homely old woman.”

“Mr. Straus, tastes are different in this world and the honorable aged professors of the Forestry Faculty don’t share your opinion. And, if Miss Goldberg, as I said before would restrict her business to the honorable elderly gentlemen – no objection. But recently she has thrown her considerable charms at the students, and that is something about which we are concerned. Not about the sexual aspect of the situation – in that we are not interested – but we have to protect our young people from the dangerous ideas of undisciplined Western democracy” He wiped his brown again.

I remained serious: “I assure you I did not know any of these things, I even do not know where Miss Goldberg is living. But, if you will give me her address I will make it my business to visit her one of these days and since somebody must have vouched for her when she was admitted for residence in Japan – I will try to convince this person that he should try to terminate his guarantee for Miss Goldberg’s behavior, and then what can we do? She will have to go to Shanghai.”

“Oh no, Mr. Straus – that is all wrong. We have nothing against her service to the faculty. We only want to protect our students against liberal influences. This is urgent. We cannot wait. I have a car outside and if you don’t mind we will go together right away.”

Miss Goldberg’s home was nearby. It was a small foreign style house furnished and decorated in the taste of the turn of the century. Over the sofa hung a picture of the last German emperor – on horse-back. I addressed Miss Goldberg rather sternly:

“We have got a report about your mode of living and I have to tell you that the Jewish community cannot tolerate it.”

Our policeman interrupted “Please restrict yourself to the subject: the students”

Miss Goldberg smiled: “But they are such nice boys” but then she promised to abide by the wishes of the Japanese Government, although, she said it was with a very heavy heart that she would refuse the youngsters and restrict herself to her old Berlin customers the faculty members of the Forestry Department. But then she disclosed that there were some gentlemen who were not among her Berlin clientele but were interested in her – faculty members of the Agricultural Department. She inquired whether there were any objections against them. Our policeman drew himself up and pronounced with a sweeping gesture: “Absolutely none: All the faculties are at your disposal.”

Again a few months passed, the doorbell rang, it was Miss Goldberg. I inquired politely:

“Any more trouble with the police?”

“None whatsoever” and then she told me that her sister would come to Japan.

I asked timidly: “Does she – eh – practice the same profession?”

“Oh no, my sister is a dressmaker. She comes with her husband”

I asked: “Does your sister need any financial support from the Committee?”

“Frankly, yes. Since you, a director of the Committee have spoiled my business with the younger generation, I feel it is your moral obligation to support the emigration of my sister”

I had to agree but pointed out that the extent of help depended on the merits of the case. I asked whether the sister could pay for her and her husband’s tickets from Germany to Japan.

“No she can’t” Miss Goldberg answered. “You know of the boycott against Jews in Germany. Her husband has been out of a job for many years and her own business had come to a complete standstill.”

At that time we did not yet get financial support from Jewish organizations in the States. I therefore expressed our regret that at this point we were unable to pay travelling but assured Miss Goldberg that we would take care of her sister once she arrived in Japan.

“It’s too late” Miss Goldberg said, “they are already on the boat.”

“But you told me before that she had no money to pay for travelling expenses.”

“That is correct, but she is coming C.O.D. – you know – cash on delivery”

“No” I said “this is impossible. There is no steamship company which does not demand payment in advance.”

“Yes, that’s the normal way, I know. But I have to tell you that back in Berlin the forestry students were not my only acquaintances. I was also on excellent terms with some of the directors of N.Y.K., the biggest Japanese steamship company who frequently came to Germany. As a special favor to me they have arranged that my sister and my brother-in-law could travel to Japan. They trusted my promise that the Jewish Committee in Tokyo would pay.”

What could we do? We had a meeting of the Jewish Committee. Steinfeld was enthusiastic “A dressmaker is God-sent. There is no European dressmaker in Tokyo. The Japanese dressmakers are lousy. My wife says that the ladies of the diplomatic corps would pay any amount for dresses made by a European. It is now September. At least two hundred diplomats’ wives will need new dresses for the official New Year reception at the Imperial Palace. We are in business.”Baerwald was sceptical. He did not think so highly of the diplomatic corps. He said that these ladies cannot be relied upon as regular customers since they frequently travel to Shanghai to buy dresses there.

The sister and her husband – Mr. and Mrs Gruenbaum arrived and we paid N.Y.K. Both Gruenbaums were pleasant people. We had a meeting of the Jewish Committee with our wives attending. Plans were agreed upon to open a dress shop in a fashionable district. A small house was rented for the purpose. Mrs. Steinfeld travelled to Shanghai to buy French patterns. Now we must know that her husband was a very meticulous man. Every year shortly after New Year he sent a check to the customs in Yokohama. He had recalculated import duties which were underbilled to his company the previous year. He was honest and a bit Prussian. Import duties in Japan for dress patterns were high but Mrs Steinfeld smuggled in a whole suitcase of patterns. After all this was charity.

An ad in the “Japan Advertiser” brought in many customers. Mrs. Gruenbaum worked day and night and on the night before Christmas her house burnt down. All the dresses perished in the flames, and the ladies of the diplomatic corps were faced with the unbearable: to appear with last year’s dresses at the Imperial Reception. That was of course the end of the Gruenbaum dress business.

We then had to turn to Mr. Gruenbaum to whom we had not paid any attention before. We had never even asked him what he did for a living in Germany. It turned out that he had been a salesman for mother-of-pearl buttons. He had never done anything else, all his life. Japan was at that time the world’s biggest exporter of mother-of-pearl buttons and there was absolutely no chance for a foreigner to earn his livelihood in this line. But I had developed a method to determine how uprooted people could be gainfully employed. One of my stock questions was: What would you like to do if you had all the money in the world and if you had plenty of time on your hands.

Mr. Gruenbaum said without hesitation: “Fishing” That was not too good. One could not make a living as a fisherman in Japan. I ventured: “Mr. Gruenbaum don’t you have another hobby?”

“Oh yes, I play the violin,”

“This is just wonderful. Why didn’t you tell us right away? There is a huge demand in Japan for European violinists. Would you please play something for us, so that we can get an idea: I am with Columbia Records and if you are really good we will make recordings with you.”

Mr. Gruenbaum didn’t bring a violin with him from Germany, so we got one from our friend Ernst Baerwald who was a very good amateur and Mr. Gruenbaum treated us to a private recital. It was just awful. He scratched on the noble instrument in such a way that we all got chills down our spines. Nevertheless I was put to work – music was my field. I made the rounds and came across Mr. Takasaki the owner of a small music school. He was enthusiastic although I told him that Mr. Gruenbaum was not a very outstanding artist. “A medium grade or even a bad German violinist is better for the image of my school than none” he said “I can’t pay him much of course, say 150 yen per month.”

Mr. Gruenbaum was duly employed and after three months it was my duty to check whether his employer was satisfied. Mr. Takasaki regretted that unfortunately Mr. Gruenbaum had quit a month ago. Steinfeld and I summoned our fiddler and asked him sternly why he had given up the only position to which he could aspire.

He retorted: “I have private pupils now.”

“But, Mr. Gruenbaum, with private pupils you would have to work very hard to make 150 yen.”

“150 yen isn’t very much for two people, Mr. Straus, but my private pupils pay me 320 yen.”

“Now, Mr. Gruenbaum, how many pupils do you have?”

“Not too many.”

“We have helped you and we think we have the right to be informed. How many pupils do you have?”

“I have one.”

“Who is it? Wait a moment – who could it be? There is a Baron Yamagiwa – he is crazy – everybody in Tokyo knows that – he is the only one who would have sent his son to you.”

“No, it isn’t the Baron – and I am sorry but I was told not to divulge the name.”

We told Mr. Gruenbaum that he owed the Jewish Committee to disclose the name of his pupil. A man who is crazy enough to pay him 320 yen a month would also spend money for other good purposes such as helping other Jewish refugees. We pushed Gruenbaum to the wall and finally it came out: that our friend Ernst Baerwald had taken one lesson a month with Gruenbaum for whom he felt sorry. Baerwald was a much better violinist than Gruenbaum but he was also very goodhearted. Early in 1940 a transport of several hundred refugees came through Japan. They had steamship tickets to the United States but none of them had any money. We decided that each one of the refugees should get five dollars packet money from us. Steinfeld and I overruled Baerwald who pleaded for at least seven dollars per person. Later we found out that Baerwald had put the Committee’s five dollar bills into his right pocket from which he made his disbursements. But if an old woman boarded – and there were many of them – Baerwald reached into his left pocket where he kept his own money and produced an additional five dollars. And if the old woman was from Frankfurt she rated twenty five dollars from the left pocket.

Not all the weird situations we encountered in the Jewish Committee were as harmless as those I have related. There was a Jewish dentist in Tokyo by the name of Silberstein. It was in fall of 1939 when he told us that before he came to Japan he had become engaged to a Polish-Jewish lady who had fled to the Soviet Union when the Germans overran Poland. The Russians put her into a concentration camp in Siberia. Could we do anything to get her out of the camp and bring her to Japan?

Baerwald knew the Japanese Ambassador to Moscow (and later Foreign Minister in the Tojo cabinet) Fumihiko Togo who had a German wife. Baerwald wrote to Togo who succeeded to get Miss Sonia out of the Siberian camp. She was allowed to leave the Soviet Union – a rare occurrence. The first word we had from her was a telegram from Harbin in Manchuria and three days later she arrived in Tokyo. We expected her to be a half-starved, ill dressed woman, the way all refugees from Eastern Poland looked. But she was exceedingly well dressed, by any standard, she was well fed and in excellent spirits. Moreover she was a very attractive woman. She could not marry her fiancé immediately since some papers were lacking. Thus we quartered her with a Japanese musician couple, pupils of our pianist-friend Leonid Kreutzer and close friends of the Konoye family. Viscount Konoye was the leading conductor in Japan, his brother Prince Konoye was the Prime Minister.

A few weeks after Miss Sonia’s arrival, I ran into my old friend Karl Rosenberg who was very susceptible to feminine charms. Several times we had some minor scandals in connection with our friend’s love-life. That time Rosenberg was raving about Miss Sonia. With glowing eyes he told me what a wonderful woman she was and how often he had met her. And then he said: “But now I have to tell you something which is really phantastic: “The Russians did not release her unless she promised to work for them as an undercover agent in Japan” I was flabbergasted. The Jewish community lived a very precarious life. The Nazis tried their best to convince the Japanese that we were just a bunch of communists and should be turned over to the kempetai – the military police, for questioning. We all knew that “questioning” meant torture. Only recently Mr. Cox, the Reuter correspondent had jumped to his death – or been thrown – out of the window at police headquarters. And now the Jewish Committee had put a Soviet spy into the home of a Japanese family closely connected with the Prime Minister’s family! Rosenberg confided in me that on the coming Tuesday he was to go to the back of the Maruzen book store. There in the archeological section he was to meet a man to whom after an exchange of passwords he was to hand a report of Miss Sonia. I implored Rosenberg not to do it under any circumstances, but he was adamant, he insisted to do the beautiful lady a favor.

In desperation I rushed home to get together with Steinfeld and Baerwald but they were both at a summer resort four hours away. I took the next train and at nine o’clock in the evening I met my friends. Baerwald just listened and then just said that he was taking the next train to Tokyo. Only later did we learn that that very night at three thirty in the morning he had the Prime Minister woken up, dragged out of bed and told him the whole story – thus saving our group from disaster. I took it upon myself to meet with Miss Sonia and tried to convince her that while being honest with the Japanese police she should also withstand the expected attempts of the police to now enroll her as a Japanese counter-intelligence agent. When we sailed for the United States on October 31, 1940 a stranger pressed an envelope into my hand. It was an exciting letter from our friend K: The police had minded my attempts to influence Miss Sonia, only by the skin of our teeth did we escape torture or death.

I could go on for a long time telling you about the great Jewish migration in those years. Some of the stories I saw unfolding were comical, many were tragic. There was the exciting affair of a Dr. Kindermann, a German Jew who turned out to be a Nazi informer. There was the sudden arrival of 2700 Polish Jews who had fled to Lithuania at that time still an independent state. In connection with this transport the Japanese Finance Ministry told us how to circumvent its own currency regulations.

In general the Japanese Government went out of its way to help Jewish refugees in Japan. It was less benevolent in Japanese-dominated Shanghai with its 18000 Jews who after the outbreak of the war were brutally treated – but not worse than other Westerners.

There remains a word to be said about the history of Japan’s relations with Judaism and Jews.

In the 1920’s a Dr. Kawamorita asserted that the first emperor of Japan was a scion of the House of King David. Another “scholar” Dr. Oyabe stated that the word Mikado – the ancient title of the Japanese Emperor – can be traced back to Gad, one of the lost 10 tribes of Israel.  One of the Imperial treasures, the sacred Mirror, Oyabe reported, was once owned by King Solomon. A Dr. Fujisawa in 1925 claimed there was a spiritual affinity between Judaism and Shinto based on Origin – “a Chosen People” and aim – “the whole world under one roof” Bishop Nakada of a revivalist church wrote a book in 1930: “God is a sun and a shield” taking its title from the 84th Psalm and interpreting the sun as Japan and the shield as the Star of David. So much for mythology.

But there is no clear-cut dividing line between mythology and history. In 1614 a book written by a Portuguese, Fernao Mendes Pinto, was published posthumously under the title of Peregrinaçam. The author claimed that he discovered Japan in 1543. An admirer of Francis Xavier, he was a member of the Society of Jesus for two years. There is pretty conclusive proof that Pinto was of Jewish origin but the evidence is equally conclusive that he was a very resourceful liar.

When Japan was opened to the West in 1854, Jews arrived from Europe and the Middle East. The first Jewish tombstone in the International Cemetery in Yokohama dates from 1865.

A number of Russian Jewish prisoners of the Russo-Japanese War came to Japan in 1905 after the siege of Port Arthur. Among them was Joseph Trumpeldor whose left arm was amputated in Japan. He was killed in action in Palestine in 1920 and became the hero of militant Zionism. During the Russo-Japanese War Jacob Schiff an American Jewish banker, born near Wuerzburg, secured the first international loan for Japan and became the first non-royal foreigner to be received in private audience by Emperor Meiji. The Japanese loan negotiator was Korekiyo Takahashi whom I met and learned to admire shortly before his assassination on February 26, 1936 when he was Finance Minister in the Okada Cabinet. (His grandson Korenobu called himself Toby when as a student he was our weekly guest in Forest Hills, N.Y. in the early 1950’s. He married a girl of the Tokugawa clan who were shoguns for 250 years and became an IBM executive.)

Only few Japanese became infected with antisemitism when they came in contact with czarist officers in Siberia in 1920 and in Manchuria in 1931.

In 1935 Mr. Gisuke Aikawa purchased Nippon Columbia for whom I was working. The huge Japanese industrial conglomerates – Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo – were opposed to the limitless expansionist plans of the Imperial Army. The Army therefore supported Aikawa, a relative upstart who banked on the new Japanese satellite, called Manchukuo. Aikawa dreamed of hundred thousand Jews settling in Manchuria, since too few Japanese volunteered to emigrate to a country of severe winters and roving bandits. The Russian colony in Harbin grew rapidly after 1901 the year I was born, when the Transiberian Railroad was extended through Chinese dominated Manchuria to Russian Wladiswostok. The Russian influx accelerated after the 1917 Revolution, so that when the Japanese took over in 1931 there were 13000 Russian Jews in Harbin. Contrary to their co-religionists in Western Russia, they spoke Russian not Yiddish; the sympathies of the majority were Zionist. The Japanese authorities in  Manchuria were divided vis-a-vis the “Jewish Problem.” Some made life for the Harbin Jews unbearable so that by 1939 8000 Jews had migrated to Shanghai and Tientsin. It was through Aikawa that I obtained some modicum of influence on Harbin affairs. The Soviets, eager to satisfy Jewish nationalism in Russia, had in 1928 established a Jewish Soviet Republic, Biro Bidjan in Siberia adjacent to the Manchurian border. Biro Bidjan was a complete failure: only a few thousand Russian Jews settled there. Aikawa seriously planned to plant 50000 German Jews in Manchuria. In 1938 an “All Jewish Congress” was held in Harbin. The Zionist flag was unfurled besides the Japanese and the Hatikvah, the Zionist anthem, was sung; but the Tokyo Jews were not invited because they were non-Zionist and the Hongkong and Shanghai Jews did not come because they were pro-Chinese. In 1939 another Harbin conference was staged where the Japanese spokesman Dr. Kotsuji addressed the audience in Hebrew. On December 31, 1940 Yosuke Matsuoka (a former Foreign Minister who had negotiated the Tripartite Pact) declared at a private dinner party at his Tokyo residence: “Anti-Semitism will never be adopted by Japan. True, I concluded a treaty with Hitler but I never promised him to be an anti-Semite. And this is not only my personal opinion, but it is a principle of the entire Japanese empire since the day of its foundation.”

In all my dealings with the Japanese Government on Jewish matters I found compassion and understanding. I would like you, my grandchildren, not to forget this.

MEMORANDUM SUBMITTED IN JANUARY 1936 TO MR. GOTO, JAPANESE MINISTER OF INTERIOR

Dear Sir:

I have been requested to give a brief outline of the Jewish question and I wish to say that this is not an easy task for me. I am a Jew by religion and origin but at the same time I am a German national. My ancestors have been living in Germany as many centuries as I can trace them back. In the case of my own family our records go back 180 years, in the case of my wife’s family they go back 460 years.

Jews of Palestine origin have come to Germany and other Western European countries as early as 2,000 years back, namely with the Roman legions in the rank of which there always was a number of Jews owing to the Roman domination over Palestine. In the year 70 A.D. the independent Jewish state in Palestine was destroyed by force of arms and then Jews in greater numbers were spread all over Europe and also in Germany. It is not astonishing that the overwhelming majority of German Jews always felt 100% German and the treatment under which they have to suffer now in Germany hits them the more.

Anti-Jewishism or Anti-Semitism as it is often called, has always been a feature in European history owing to the religious discrepancies between the Christian majority and the Jewish minority, especially during the Crusades in the 12th century religious fanatism flared up highly.

During the time the Jews were an independent nation in Palestine they had the same professions as all other people. The majority were farmers whereas trade in old Palestine mostly was in the hands of intellectually more advanced foreigners, such as Phoenicians and Greeks. During the Middle Ages, however, religious oppression excluded Jews from nearly all walks of life except trade, and especially banking business because in those days Christian religion forbade Christians to loan money on an interest basis. About 120 years ago those restrictions were abolished in Germany and from that time on Jews filtered into nearly all professions, but their hard, centuries old training gave them a decided advantage in the field of trade and also in the scientific fields as in the legal and medical profession and it is for this reason that the Jews occupy in all Western countries a more important position than would be due to them in accordance with their small number.

As said above, Jews in Germany are feeling German, Jews in England are feeling English, and Jews in France are feeling French, just the same as Japanese Christians feel Japanese.

Conservatism imbued in the Jewish religion has always made Jews strong supporters of the conservative order in the world and in all countries in which they were treated well, as for instance in England, they have contributed a lot of statesmen to the conservative camp.

There were two men who committed suicide in Germany on November 9th, 1918, the day when the German Emperor had to flee to Holland and the dream of German Imperial might broke down: an old pensioned general and the Jew Albert Bailin, the promoter of German shipping interests and leader of the Hamburg American Line. Thus in the world war, Jews of all nations have fought against each other just the same as Christians of all nations did, and only in times of obvious attacks on the Jews as a group there developed something like a feeling of Jewish solidarity.

Jewish nationalism or Zionism is only 40 years old. It has arisen as a by-product of European neo-nationalism but less than 10% of the Jews living in the whole world adhere to this nationalistic Jewish movement whereas the other 90% do not wish to be anything else than nationals of the country in which they are living and with which they have shared its history.

Jews have been the subject of antagonism in various countries for various reasons. They were an easy object of such an antagonism because they are a well-defined minority group different from the majority by their religion. In addition to these religious differences European Jews were different from other Europeans by certain features which branded them as “foreign”, as “oriental” (Toyo Jin). The family system existing among Jews especially appeared to be rather strange to Westerners. Moreover, their importance in the life of the nation is rather striking and by attacking Jews a party movement is able to promise to its followers to vacate a great number of important positions.

In old tsarist Russia, for instance, Jewish merchants played quite an interesting role and when the Bolshevik movement came into power in 1917 it was the Jewish community in Russia which was hit most severely. The Jews as arch-capitalists were declared more or less enemies of the state, and it is therefore not surprising to find a rather important percentage of Jews among the White Russians refugees in all countries of the world. Furthermore, Jews were persecuted in Russia because most of them adhered stubbornly to the faith of their forefathers and the destructive communists directed their attack against religion which they considered as a bulwark of the capitalistic system. Hundreds of Jewish temples in Russia were burnt down by the Bolshevik hordes; hundreds of Jewish priests were shot and imprisoned. It did not help Jews at all that a few of the Bolshevik leaders, like Trotzky, were of Jewish origin. These depraved demagogues did not feel Jewish at all, just the same as Lenin and Stalin never had at any time felt any sympathy for their fellows-Christians of the bourgeois class.

In Germany, anti-semitism is based on the programme of the Nazi party as laid down in Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”. Books like Rosenberg’s “Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts”, attacking Jewish religion as the foundation stone of Christianity were read widely and together with the political – economical reasons stated above, supported the Government’s campaign, which latter was based on the new creed of the superiority of the Aryan race. The dogma of the purity of the Aryan race was carried as far as, for instance resulting in German members of the Nazi party resigning from the party which is considered to be the elite of the nation, if they want to marry a Japanese girl.

The object of this letter, dear Sir, is to give as unbiased as possible picture of the Jews as a group which I may say, without feeling immodest, has contributed a great deal to the welfare of mankind. Attached is list of few Jews, whose names are well known throughout the world.

There are a few hundreds of Jews living in Japan, all of them of whatever nationality they may be always felt happy and contented in this country because Japan never took any part in any discriminative steps against certain religious or racial groups.

Jews have contributed not a small lot to the progress of science in Japan in their role as teachers of Japanese students abroad. Commercial relations of Japan with Jews of various nationalities are manifold. It is a fact that most of the Japanese export to North and South America and to Africa is taken up by Jewish firms. It is to be hoped that the Japanese Government will show its time honoured sense of fairness against the Jews and will not fall in with methods adopted by Germany for problems which do not exist in Japan. It is especially to be hoped that the discriminative ordinances which seem to have been prepared in connection with the entry of German Jews refugees are withdrawn. The economical conditions in Japan make an influx of foreigners in any greater number entirely impossible. It should be of no concern to the Japanese Government whether a few dozens of refugees find a haven in this country.

DISTRIBUTION OF JEWS IN THE MOST IMPORTANT                                                                                          COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD

I just attended my first literary event last weekend. The Mazama Festival of Books took place in the Methow Valley, about three and a half hours northeast of Seattle. The trip took an extra hour because mudslides had closed a mountain pass. But it was well worth the detour. I had lots of time to get to know the other 17 authors presenting over dinner and drink in one of the most beautiful settings in the world.

Tucked away in the Cascade mountains, the Methow Valley has an alpine feel to it, though the little villages are more Western than European. The valley is so tucked away, many people in Seattle don’t know of its existences. And local residents like to keep it that way. A couple decades ago, they fought efforts by developers to build a ski resort there, a successful battle that prevented that rural paradise from becoming another Vail or Aspen. The local general store sells delicious scones baked with fresh blueberries and blackberries. The local inn serves homemade granola filled with nuts and a giant side dish of fruit. And all around you are mountains, forest and meadows.

The stage for the book festival was set up in a meadow so that the audience could see the mountains rising up behind the speakers. To keep the discussions interesting, Art Gresh, the financier who founded the festival and organized it together with the wonderful folks from Methow Arts, brought in from New York, two beautiful and charming young women: Katherine Lanpher, a journalist and former talkshow host, and Lauren Cerand, a book publicist. They had both read the books of the writers they were interviewing and took charge of the stage with grace and wit while always managing to draw out the best of each writers. I haven’t yet read the works of all the writers but I plan to. Meawhile, I found their lives as engaging as I expect to find their works.

The first session was “Writing Wilderness.” Shannon Huffman Polson, a former Microsoft executive, spoke of her book “A Border Life” about how she set out on a pilgrimage to retrace the steps her parents took when they were killed by a grizzly bear. Asked by Katherine what wilderness was, she defined it as the place in nature where you are no longer in control of your surroundings. Ana Maria Spagna, also on the panel, worked for many years for the park service and lives in an isolated corner of Lake Chelan unconnected to the rest of the world by road. She saw wilderness in a friendlier light, a place where people could live in communion with nature.  Ana is the author of half a dozen books including Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness.

Two other artists who derive their inspiration from nature are Dia Calhoun, a children’s book writer, and  author most recently of “After the River the Sun,” about a boy who loses both his parents to drowning and is sent to live with his uncle in the country. The boy, who initially wants to do nothing more than play games, falls in love with the countryside. Dia says she used to call herself a writer of young adult fiction, but had to keep aiming at a younger audience to find the innocent children she loves to write for.

Nikki Mcclure makes papercuts that are impossible to describe in words. You just have to see the beautiful work.

Nikki says the we are overloaded in modern society. “When you disconnect from that you open your natural senses and they bring you back to yourself.“ She says that when she hears the osprey talking, she can tell the salmon are coming. Many of her woodcuts focus on seasonal themes.

Dia and Nikki both stressed the importance of periodically leaving behind the things that tether us to the modern world and reconnecting with the wilderness. “We forget we are part of nature. We live observed lives,” says Dia. “In nature you are not observed so you can observe.” In addition to writing books, Dia also designs corporate logos to help make a living. She did the Alaska Air logo and the tailwork for Aloha Airlines.

Shawn Vestal read from a short story that drew on his childhood growing up as a Mormon. His writing was beautifully crafted, and was interested to learn that he’d been a newspaper writer most of his life and went back to school in his 40s to get his Masters in Fine Arts. He says the degree taught him to do what he needed to do to write well.

My session was called “The Map of Memory” and I was surprised at how many people connected to my talk about Japan. One of the young men working at the Trail’s End Bookstore, which had all of our works for sale, had studied Japanese for three years while another had actually grown up in Japan. Among others in the audience many had traveled to Japan or done business with the Japanese. All had good memories of japan.

The most fiery session of the festival was the one entitled “under pressure.” Peter Nathaniel Malae, a man of Samoan heritage and  author of Our Frail Blood believes that to write about violence in an authentic way you have to have experienced it—to have it in your bones. “By the age of ten I understood violence. My stories are from real life, not from research.”

He’s a big fan of Hemingway and likes to quote what he wrote in Death in the Afternoon: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water.”  What Hemingway is saying, says Peter, is that “The authority of the story in not in the scene. You feel the force of it.”

Peter says he writes 500 words a day. He writes about the immigrant experience including how, in the process of becoming American, you lose your indigenous culture. He says that all his best friends are imaginary, fictitious characters. “I don’t cook it up. It’s happening in my brain. I’m not aware of it.” He says he believes that books should be at least 51 percent hope for the sake of the reader, but he doesn’t’ think he succeeded with his latest book.

On the stage with Peter was Vanessa Veselka, author of the award-winning book “Zazen.” She says the book is about “What do you do when there is nothing to do.” Or, in more frightening terms “sitting still in fire.” She says there should be a price to pay for ugliness. She says readers are so trained to look for the love story that she is careful to avoid setting scenes that will lead the reader in that direction. She also tries to avoid sanitized discussions of important issues like race. In Zazen, for example, she writes about how her character’s leftist mother is happy to have black grandchildren, a not-so-veiled criticism of the tendency to exoticize race. Vanessa says our nation needs to find something to unify the races. “The center cannot hold. We need something greater than geography and money to sustain a people.”

Sharma Shields read from her funny, beautiful and yet dark book of short stories “Favorite Monster,” while Ellen Welcker read from beautifully moving prose book “The Botanical Garden.”

Peter Mountford read from his upcoming book “The Dismal Science” which, like his earlier book, delves into the moral choices we make as market forces push us to make questionable decisions. Also on his pane was Scott Elliott, a creative writing professor at Whitman who recently completed the beautifully written novel “Temple Grove.”   He says his approach to writing is to “Put characters in places where their principles are challenged.” The key thing, he says is to have a rich question you want to explore. Ideally, you don’t know the answer making it more likely that you will surprise yourself.

Some of my favorite sessions came toward the end. Alexis Smith read from her book “Glacier,” which starts with starkly simple language but keeps adding layer upon layer to the characters as the story progress until, after a short 150 pages, you love the character and hate to leave them behind. On the same panel was Greg Spatz who read from a book of short stories “Half as Happy.” Spatz is a miracle worker who not only writes amazing stories and is a professor of creative writing, but manages to do this while also traveling 100 days of the year playing the fiddle in a band. I ascribe his success to his wonderful wife, who accompanied him to the festival and even played some tunes for us together with her husband.

The last session was presented by Kate Lebo and Jessica Lynn Bonin who collaborated to produce “A Common Book of Pie.” Kate, who teaches pie making, wrote the recipes and the poetry while Jessica painted the illustrations. Part of the book is a kind of astrology of pie. Kate asked members of the audience what their favorite pie was and based on that choice read a poem that described their personalities. Each was charming and perceptive and somehow always seemed appropriate.

I’ve now been invited to read at quakelit, a book festival in San Francisco. It will be a bigger crowd, but I can’t imagine any literary experience as rich and rewarding as the Mazama Book Festival.

But on the way home, I heard someone talking about how, in so many religions, there is a philosophy that the individual finds some kind of transcendental state when he or she recognizes that we are really one with the world. We don’t really live as individuals, we really are part of this grand organism, some greater design. It then occured to me that looking at family history is a way of taking one piece of that grand organism and understanding a small part of it. Surely it’s insufficient. A study of family alone leaves out the friends and aquaintances and special relationships including bosses and lovers that has such a profound influence on us. Yet, perhaps it is one step toward deeper understanding.

Mother’s Alzheimers is steadily getting worse. Was it 6 years ago that she strolled into my kitchen and said she had “crossed the border” into Alzheimers? She had been have strange experiences of traveling of seeing strange places. She told me once she was living “an active life–in my mind.” Once, on the way back from an overnight stay at the hospital, she described hearing some noises and climbing up the stairs to find there was a grand ball taking place. Someone gave her a glass of wine. Later she danced. “I had a wonderful time,’ she said. “In the hospital?” I asked. She said yes.

Today, as I was taking her home she kept getting confused about where she had lived when. “I remember living with a couple for my room and board,” she said. Yes, that was in college I said.

“Well, you are going to have to help me map it all out, one day,” I’m getting very confused. It reminded me of the time a couple years ago when Marie found a scrap of paper on which my mother had tried to write the names of all us kids as well as the names of our wives and children. She had given up after filling in just a few names.

Fortunately, she continues to enjoy life and to be appreciative of those around her.

I think of it this way. Suppose you do a Google search on Japan. The first time you type into the search box:  “Japan, beauty, culture” you might come up with articles and posts that would portray Japanese beautiful gardens, its stunning Kabuki theater and its bold woodblock prints. But if you were to type in “Japan, insular, nuclear waste” you would come up with articles that portray the darker side of Japan. The better you know Japan–or the more you understand the complexity of life–the more careful you would be in choosing those key words to come up with a full picture of Japan. In the same way, the frame of mind we are in when we go about remembering something invariably has a big impact on the kinds of events and images that we draw from our memory banks.

The book struck me because the way I looked at Japan and my family–the things I remembered and understood–evolved a great deal from the beginning of the book to the end. I know understand that simply by framing my book as one about living for five generations as outsiders in Japan, invariably had a significant impact on what I drew from my memory and what I understood about Japan. The book was written over many years, and by the time I completed the book, I was a quite different person, and I tried to allow that more mature perspective to add depth to the feelings and sentiments I expressed in the earlier chapters.

Today, as I meet people who read my book but also knew my father, many are surprised by this “dark” side of him. They have fond memories of my father, and wonder if I was sometimes unfair to him. Perhaps I was. But of course, many of them knew my father when he was in the army and in college, the happiest time of his life. I knew him at his worst, and at a time when I was most impressionable.

I do not regret what I wrote. But I continue the journey the book began of understanding who my father was as a man–his strengths and shortcomings–and learning from him long after we buried him splitting his ashes between the foreign cemetery in Yokohama and the cemetery in Piedmont, California.

Many people have asked, for example, whether it was difficult to be so honest in my book. What I think they mean is: “How can you make yourself look so insensitive. My Japanese translator really doesn’t like this. She is sometimes horrified by what I write. In the book, I describe going to a city orientation about how adopted parents should behave, for example, I admit to feeling competitive with the Japanese parents. Although I say that I am embarrassed by these feelings, I nevertheless confess to feeling pleased when the Japanese parents seem so shocked by the idea that they will have to tell their adopted children that they are not the birth parents. Of course, in Japanese they still say “real” parents. So adoptive parents are told they will have to reveal to their children that they are not the  “real” parents. The translator wonders if I should soften the language so as not to put off my readers.

Hmmm. Certainly, the way a Japanese reader looks at my book is going to be very different from the way an American reader looks at it. And sometimes the translator has a point. There is one place, for example, where I say: “I assumed there were so few children available for adoption because of the widespread use of abortion as a means of birth control, a result of policies discouraging the use of birth-control pills.” In retrospect, I realize that I was taking a dig at Japan for discouraging the use of the pill for so long even as there were so many abortions. If you think about it, there is no logical reason why using abortion rather than the pill would result in fewer children put up for adoption. The real issue, as the translator points out, is that the Japanese have a strong aversion to having children they don’t think they can take care out. Isn’t it better to abort a child the “throw them away” as so many parents in China do? If you take that argument to the extreme, you might use it to explains why there was a fair amount of infanticide in early Japan.

So some readers will be offended by my comment. And perhaps I was a little off base in my commentary. An the translator has even found one or two factual inaccuracies.   (It turns out the government did approve a dozen marriages between Japanese and foreigners. The imperials adviser who wrote in his diary that he had helped arrange the first wedding between a Japanese and a foreigner was wrong.)  I will certainly change.all factual inaccuracies.

But how far do you go in making changes to please the local readers. At what point do you start to change the nature of the book–the arc of the narrative.. Some people say a translation isn’t the same book anyway, but that doesn’t feel right. Lots of tough decisions. What do you think?. .   

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan by Leslie Helm

reviewed by Ray Moore

30 June 2013 — Leslie Helm was born and raised in Yokohama after World War II, attended Yokohama International School from nursery through high school, then earned his B.A. in political science and M.A. in Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied journalism at Columbia University. He was a business reporter in Seattle before returning to Tokyo as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in 1990. He and his wife adopted two Japanese children, and he began research into his family history using memoirs, letters, interviews and personal recollections.

The result is Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan, a fascinating account of his multinational, biracial family in Japan. Reproducing many of these primary sources, this family history provides insight into the many interactions between Japanese and Americans for 140 years.

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Before I knew it I had scheduled six talks in five days. Two of the talks where one-and-a-half hour sessions in Japanese! I hadn’t given a speech in Japanese in 30 years. And never for more than 15 minutes. Now they were asked me to give 45-minute talks. I could feel the tension rising as the day approached.

I wasn’t going to wing these talks. I wrote out my commencement speech and my book speech. And I asked a Japanese friend, Kozy Amemiya, to translate my book speech into Japanese. I planned to read it.But I hadn’t read Japanese aloud since I was in grade school. And my Japanese was very rusty. But it was a challenge I wanted to take on. It was about time I did something to improve my Japanese. But I didn’t have enough time to prepare while working full time, so I had another friend, Yoko, read the speech into a digital tape recorder so I could listen to it and get the rhythm of the talk down.

On the 9-hour trip to Japan, I spent almost the entire time listening to the speech on my digital recorder as I followed the text. There were so many kanji characters I couldn’t read so I had to jot down phonetic notes to help me along. The more I practiced, the more I realized how foolish I had been to agree to speak for 45 minutes in Japanese. I’ve never given an English speech that lasted more than 30 minutes, I suddenly realized.

One benefit: My short book speeches in English now seemed easy. When I stood before three hundred or so students and parents at the Yokohama International School graduation on Saturday morning, I was relaxed. Everyone seemed attentive and that added to my confidence.

But it was hot in the room and the ceremony went on and on. It was steaming hot in the auditorium. For some reason the decision was made not to open the windows. Yet there was no air conditioning, so the school had given out Japanese fans to everyone, and the audience were all fanning themselves as I stood up on the podium.

The talk went well, I thought. I had spent 14 or 15 years at that school so it was an emotional experience. But I knew the audience and that helped me get my message across. Most of them, like me, had spent much of their lives in Yokohama. And like me, many were part Japanese. Mixtures of Japanese and South African, Australian and every flavor of European.One of the graduates was the son of a YIS alumni who I knew. Two of my former high school teachers were there. They gave me high marks for the talk.

The following day, Sunday, I gave my book talk at the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club. Here was another place where I had spent much of my youth. As I waited to speak, I looked over at the huge athletic field in the distance. There were two Japanese teams playing soccer. The club was now facing hard times so it was renting the field to any team willing to pay. There was game after game. The field was never idle as it had often been in my day. The lawn bowl green was much as I had remembered it. Everybody in their whites, playing quietly, as if there was all in a silent film. I peeked my head in the bowling alley next door to the room where I was speaking. With just four lanes, the bowling alley seemed tiny. And nobody was playing so it felt empty, almost haunted. In my day it had always been packed, the sounds of bowling pins crashing flooded the room with a constant clatter.And I thought I could hear the distant echo of that sound as I looked down the dark empty alleys.

I knew the  YC&AC audience would be tougher than any audience in the United States, Japan was nothing knew to them. Many of them had lived in Japan for generations. Many of them were part Japanese. Many of them knew my father. I wasn’t sure how they would react. Soon after I finished my talk, one woman stood up feeling clearly a little irritated. “I don’t know why you are carrying all this baggage,” she said. “I’m half-Japanese and I’m proud of it.”  A man got up to say I had been too hard on my father. He said my father had helped him so much when he had been down and out and that I should know what a good man my father had been. I nodded my head. It was true. He had helped many people out. I felt myself feeling smaller.

Then John Hasegawa stood up. I had know him as Johnny Paul. He had been several grades ahead of me at YIS. A bit of a mischief maker, as I recall. His mother had taught my Japanese class. John told the group that he knew exactly where I was coming from. He had been raised as John Paul because his mother knew he would have trouble growing up part-Japanese and had wanted him to have an identity as a foreigner. He later learned that Paul was a made up name. His real name was Hasegawa. Paul had long felt alienated both in Japan and in the U.S. He said my book touched a deep chord in him. And then there were many others who stood up to agree. Afterward, the box of books we had prepared quickly sold out. I felt I had passed some kind of test in front of the toughest audience.

But the next day, Monday, was yet another challenge. This time I was to speak at the Foreign Correspondence Club of Japan. This had been my home on two assignments as foreign correspondent. On my second assignment I had been vice president in charge of working with the club staff, so I knew many of the people who worked there. Only a few foreign correspondents were still there from my day, but I had also invited many Japanese friends to the talk, so there were close to a hundred in the audience. Many of the Japanese in the audience couldn’t understand my talk, but fortunately, before the talk we had a video in Japanese that had been put together by my translator, Yumiko, which gave the basics of my family story..

this talk when relatively well. The biggest challenge turned out to be trying to spend time afterward with all the different Japanese friends I had invited. Normally we met with people separately. We had never met two sets of friends together let alone several dozen. It was awkward. People pushed envelopes in my hand. When I got home, I was throwing away papers when I came across a blank, unopened envelope. When I opened it, I found 10 crisp $50 bills. When I finally figured out who the gift was from, I asked the friend why the gift. They had helped me, not the other way around. “Just a gift in celebration,” the friend said. .

Now I had a day off. On Tuesday, through contacts with a friend, I had the opportunity to meet a descendant of a Japanese shogun. He had read my book and loved it. He said he would mention it to some friends of his at NHK, Japan’s public television station. He looked at me soberly and said: “You know, there are just a few books that I read so thoroughly I take with me to the bathroom to read. This was one of them,”

Wednesday was my first Japanese talk. A professor who was a friend of Yumiko, the Japanese woman who is translating my book, had asked me to speak to her class at Yokohama City University. I figured that since it was a small class, there would be no problem. Still, I practiced several times again, listing to the tap of the speech any time I was sitting on a train.

But when I stood before that small class of no more than 30 students, I froze. The light wasn’t good, and I realized I had printed out the speech in letters that were too small to read easily. I felt like a third grader being asked to stand before the class and read a passage from a book full of difficult words I couldn’t pronounce. I struggled with many of the kanji characters and read much more slowly than I should have. Afterward, the students had few questions, and I found it awkward filling out the time. One young man who had spent most of his life in Canada, stopped by to talk to me afterward. “Why didn’t you just speak in English,” he asked. I was embarrassed.

I had another talk that afternoon in Tokyo. I took a train and subway to the German Institute for Japanese Studies. It is one of several institutes around the world sponsored by the German government. It supports serious research on a variety of current issues in Japan. Fortunately, I wasn’t expected to speak in German. I was please that John Campbell was there. He is a well known scholar of Japanese studies and I had read his work in college. There were several German scholars and a few foreign residents who had read the review of my book in the Japan Times earlier in the week. This time there were less than 10 people. It was fun talking to the group. One of the German scholars spoke of how many of the students of her generation used the dictionary written by my grandfather, Robert Schinzinger. “We used to say ‘Where’s my Schinzinger,” she recalled. There was much interest in the adoption system in Japan.

Finally, my last talk was at Rikkyo University, another class of Japanese students. But this time there were more than 80 students. I had practiced some more so this time my reading was a little better, although I was still embarrassingly slow. Fortunately, after the talk we had a vigorous question and answer session. While my talk was formal and a little stilted, now I could speak colloquial Japanese and I felt totally comfortable. The professor told me over drinks later that the Q&A session had been the best part. I promised myself that the next time, even if they asked me to speak 45 minutes, I would do only a short written speech and do the rest in a discussion format, which I enjoyed so much more.

The trip was rewarding, however, An editor from a Japanese publishing house attended my last talk and told me he was interested in publishing my book in Japanese. I met with a Japanese literary agency, Uni Japan, which is now representing me. They have presented proposals to five publishers and are waiting for a reply. So it was a busy week. But in a short time I had passed through several stages of my early life including the school, the athletic club and the press club. The Japanese talks presented me with a new challenge, one I will face again and again if all goes well and my book finally published in Japanese.

.

Thank you so much for letting me celebrate this special day with you. What an impressive group you are. You come from Australia, Canada, Denmark, China, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, the Philippines, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. AND, of course, in every one of you, whether by blood or by culture or both, there is much of Japan, of Yokohama and of YIS. That’s a rich legacy, and as you go out into the world, treasure it for it will serve you well.

Never forget that you attended school and shared friendships in a very special city. Yokohama is a place where two great cultures of the West and East first came together in a major way 150 years ago. And all of you educated as you have been in a  multi-national, multi-ethnic, multicultural school. Those cross-cultural  smarts are part of your DNA. The world needs people like you. Don’t hide that talent. Nurture it. One day, when you least expect it you will find those talents a huge asset.

Yokohama is also synonymous with resilience. It has survived and thrived in the face of as much hardship as perhaps any city in the world. In 1866, soon after it was founded as a western settlement, virtually the whole town was wiped out by fire. In 1923, 90 years ago, a massive earthquake ignited a firestorm that killed 140,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama.

Most foreigners left Yokohama. They believed nothing was left here for them. The rest went to work to rebuild the city. Among those hardy souls who had the gumption, the guts to build, from those ashes, a new school. Yokohama International School was founded just a year after the earthquake.  What greater symbol of hope can there be after a major disaster than to build a new school.

Just two decades later, Yokohama was once again destroyed, this time by firebombs. Yet Yokohama and YIS rose again. So as you go out into the world you face the hardships you will invariably face, remember Yokohama. Remember how it came back again and again and again.  Whatever sorrow, you must have the courage to face it, embrace it and then go on with life.

Look for the silver lining. In Japan, there is an old saying “with fire comes prosperity.” That’s because fires offer an opportunity to start afresh.

Five years ago I got into a fight with my boss and I was fired for the first time in my life. I was at times furious at other times depressed. But I took the time to renew old contacts and soon found another, better job. More importantly, I took the time to finish a book that was recently published. Getting fired turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.

Like many of you, I spent a lot of time at YIS. In 1959, my first day of school, my father carried me over his shoulder to nursery school while I screamed. I was four years old. I ended up loving it. Nursery and kindergarten were the only grades in which I ever got straight A’s.

I struggle through a lot of school. I remember penmanship class. I was about 8. I sat at an old wooden desk as the teacher explained, yet again, that good penmanship would be key to my future.

I picked up my dip  pen. Seems like the middle ages but we still used a little stick with a steel nib at the end. I dipped the pen into the ink pot on my desk and began to write, watching as bubbles of ink formed on the curls of my ps and qs. After every few sentences, I picked up some blotting paper to soak up the extra ink. As I wrote there was this constant sense of impending disaster. You see, I knew that it was only a matter of time.

I would forget to use the blotting paper and the edge of my sleeve would catch  the bubbles of ink and smear them across the paper If penmanship with the key to the future, I was doomed.

I wish I could whisper in that little kids ear. “Don’t sweat it, in a couple of years they’ll have these really cool new devices called ballpoint pens. Since I also tended to have trouble organizing my thoughts, maybe I would also tell him about the computers that would make it so easy to rewrite things that even someone as scatter brained as I was could actually make a living as a writer. I don’t think I would have believed the future me.

So Lesson #1:  What often seem like insurmountable obstacles can suddenly disappear. Don’t be discouraged. If something interests you, if you care enough about it, you will be astonished by the force you have within you to accomplish what you want.

Let’s jump forward to 1969. I was in 8^th grade. I didn’t want to change schools but it looked like I would have little choice. We had no high school at the time. A few teachers including Edward Bernard and Ian Kerr, who are here today, and a group of parents decided, why not create a high school. If you think about it, it was a crazy idea: to build a new high school on some of the most expensive land in Japan.

I expect creating a new school today would require years of study and endless meetings. But YIS just started adding one new grade every year. We were a pathetic lot at first. Nine people in my graduating class. I’m not sure how well we were prepared for college. But we survived. And the school just kept getting better and better.

So lesson two. Great things can come from small steps. The trick is to keep at it. That’s how we can make the world a better place. Start small, with something manageable. But keep at it. I know. Some things seem impossible. Climate scientists are telling us today that we are headed toward inevitable disaster. If we continue our current rate of carbon emissions, in less than a decade we could reach the point of no return. Temperatures rise, deserts spread, ocean levels climb and ocean acidification kills off most of the coral in the world. By 2050 something like a million species will disappear from the earth.

I have to admit it’s a scary prospect. But you know, in 1973 when I graduated from YIS, the Soviet Union and the United States were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at each other. We knew that the world could come to an end at some point. It was just a question of time before some idiot pushed the button.

Miracles do happen. The cold war ended without destroying the planet. Of course, unlike with the cold war, when it comes to climate change every one in the planet needs to get involved. It will require every skill from engineering and biology to computer sciences and diplomacy. It will require empathy toward people on the other side of the planet. It will require understanding other cultures.

You see, for all the talk of globalization, we are still a planet at war with itself. We are divided by wealth, by ethnicity, by religion and yes, by national borders. Yet addressing climate change, by its very nature must involve the whole planet.

What great group of people to start taking this on than you here today. You have important cross cultural skills. Combine that with the power of social networking, and you as individuals have powers and possibilities to create change that previous generations could not have dreamed of.

It’s important to help address those issues. But don’t let the fear of the future cloud the present. Indeed don’t let anything whether its your future education, your future mate or your future  children cloud your experience of the present, because, in the end, that’s all there is.

When you are at work, work with all your heart. When he are with friends and your parents talk with them. Listen to them. laugh with them. When you are in the woods, listen to the wind and the birds.In the end, as you well know, the money you earn make keep you comfortable, but it is the people you love that you will treasure.

What make me hopeful is young people like yourselves. You have an awareness of the many cultures around the world that few others have. Combine that with the power of social networks and the great advances in technology, and you as individuals have the power to create change that previous generations could not have dreamed of.

Never forget that you shared very special friendships in a very special city and at a very special school. Living in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environment, cross-cultural smarts are part of your DNA.

The world needs people like you. Don’t hide that talent. Nurture it. On day, when you least expect it, you will find they are a huge asset to you and to the world.

Here’s the review:

Social Sciences Reviews | June 1, 2013

Families who pass on these stories of tragedy and success are doing a better job of preparing their children for the tough times ahead accourding to an article today in the New York Times by Bruce Feiler Feiler cites a study of four dozen families  that concluded that “The more children know about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.” The rationale, says Feiler, was that people who knew more of their families had a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, something that crossed several generations.

Feiler quotes management guru Jim Collins arguing that a successful family can be similar to a succcessful business enterprise. Collins recommended that families, like good corporations, should have a mission statement that helps to identify their core values.

I’m not sure I believe all of this. It seems to me that the family that passes on to its children all those family stories would also tend to be the families that were well functioning and spent more time together. Since the kids of families who have their act together probably, on the whole, deal better with adversity, than those that do not, the study of the four dozen families that asked family members how much they knew about their grandparents may have simply been measuring the extent to which a family was cohesive and well-organized rather than the extent to which a child feel’s like he or she is part of some kind of intergenerational enterprise..

Even so, as wrirter, I like this notion that stories are important. But, of course, I tend to think stories are important for the lessons they teach regardless of whether those stories about your own family or about someone else’s family. After all, that’s one reason we read: to learn from the experiences of others.

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So what did I learn. For one thing, I learned just how difficult it is to talk about issues of race, culture and identity. They are tied up in so many other things, each of which comes with so much baggage..

My father, for example, was also born and raised in Japan. Both his parents were half Japanese. Both were raised in Japan. Growing up, I often heard my father say sharp things about “the Japanese.” At first I thought it was because of all the frustrations he faced dealing with the Japanese bureaucracy as a business person. As I drilled down, however, I learned more about how my father grew up hiding his Japanese heritage first as a high school student, when he was shocked one morning to wake up and read in the local newspaper the headline “Piedmont Helms Japs,”  and later as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Occupation of Japan.

I asked one of my father’s white childhood friends about this issue of identity and she insisted Dad never faced discrimination but always had this “chip on his shoulder about the whole race thing.” What she didn’t realize, I now understand, is that even if we “mixed bloods” seldom face overt discrimination, we often internalize subtle cues. Why did I never admit to myself growing up, that I was part Japanese, for example? Nobody discriminated against me for being part Japanese. After all, I passed as white. I assume it was because I adopted all the insecurities of my father.

When you are raised without a strong sense of who you are, you become extremely sensitive to what people say around you. One great uncle Jim, for example, never forgot it when he was at a sports club in Kobe and overheard someone in the locker room at the sports club say: “Jim’s a good sort. He knows his place.” Doesn’t sound like a horribly racist thing to say, but Jim never got over that remark.

I love the book. The designer, Josh Powell, is also based in Seattle so that allowed us to go back and forth on a lot of the pictures in the book. Just before sending the book to the printers, we added a picture of my son with the American flag in the chapter opener about my family coming home to Seattle. So when I opened up the newly printed book I was tickled to find yeat another picture I hadn’t realized Josh was going to use.

The picture is of me on a boat wearing a silly sun hat. Perhaps I may have been whisting, but I suspect I was just looking dorky, like I often did.The photo may be the Josh’s ironic take on the title “Yokohama Yankee.” But I like the picture because of the counterpoint between this picture and a cute picture of my son, later in the book, with the American flag.

Stille’s story hits home to me as I wait for my memoir “Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan” to hit the book stores in mid-March. Like Stille, a couple of family members are uncomfortable with what I have written. One uncle, in particular, had been insistent that I send him a copy of the manuscript. When I sent him an early version of the book and didn’t hear from him for eight months, I was surprised and followed up with an email asking him for any comments and corrections. He answered emphatically: “I do NOT have any comments and I do NOT have any corrections.”  So I was taken aback when I received a note a month ago, weeks after it was too late to make any corrections. He said he loved the book, but thought my portrayal of my father and grandfather was harsh.Although it was very late, I told him that if there was anything factually inaccurate, I might still be able to make some minor changes. He told me to leave it as it was..

The interaction with my uncle left me feeling a little uncomfortable. In retrospect, I wish I had been as persistent as Stille was in getting an earlier response from his aunt who, like my uncle, had been clearly reluctant to read the manuscript.

But even if I had tried to respond to my uncle’s concerns, I wonder if he would have been satisfied. Brenda Peterson, the author of the wonderful memoir “I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding rapture here on earth,” told me early in the process of writing my book that I should be prepared to have family members upset with what I wrote. If they don’t like what your write, she said, “Tell them to write their own book.”

Peterson’s point, of course, is that the writer, looking at a person or  event from his or her perspective, is invariably going to portray things in a way that seems unfamiliar to other members of the family. We are all different people with different experiences, so it’s hardly surprising that we look at similar situations in different ways. If you have siblings, I’m sure you’ve had the experience where you have completely different memories of the same event.

In my uncle’s case, our perspectives are particularly different because the man who was my difficult father, was his much-respected older brother. And his strongest memories of my father were of him as a young man before he faced life’s toughest challenges. So he found it impossible to believe my father was the difficult man I depicted in my book

There is another reason my uncle may have found my father unfamiliar. What drove me to write the family memoir in the first place was that my decision to adopt Japanese children had raised tough questions about my identity–about the extent to which I had avoided accepting my Japanese heritage. My memoir, therefore, focused on the way the characters in my family, over five generations, addressed the issue of identity. No doubt my grandfather and father were honest and generous, and I do mention those traits. But the incidences I highlight in my memoir are those that shed light on how my family addressed their lives as outsiders in both the United States and Japan. Looking at my family members, and how they experienced life in Japan across two world wars, through that particular lens, revealed a family some of my relatives may not have been familiar with. That’s not surprising, since for generations my relatives had refused to discuss their Japanese heritage. In my father’s case, it was only very late in life that he admitted to me, for example, that his half-Japanese father beat him when he spoke Japanese at home and that his half-Japanese mother suffered discrimination both in Japan and the United States.

I’ve told my relatives that the book reflects my own particular perspective. Even if they don’t share that perspective, I hope they will enjoy my story of the family’s experiences as they survived a particularly fascinating, sometimes heart-wrenching, century-and-a-half of modern Japanese history.

COLUMN ONE : Japanese Wise Up to Gangsters : Yakuza have long been tolerated and even romanticized. But with financial scandals and violent tactics, lawmakers and residents are saying enough is enough.

The 33 members of the press group await him, holding flute glasses filled with champagne. “I see there are a lot of real veteran reporters on this trip,” says Miyazawa, adding that he wants to “build a relationship of trust (with President Clinton) so we can deal with most problems on the phone.”
Now it’s the turn of the leader of the prime minister’s kisha (press) club to rise and offer a toast. “We pray for your success in seeking to build a relationship of trust with America,” says the group leader as he lifts his glass. ” Kampai !”

” Kampai !” the reporters toast in turn.

Thus begins Miyazawa’s trip to the United States with press coverage handled by a band of respectful, almost loyal reporters.

When Miyazawa flew to Washington this month, he sought to present Japan as an open society ready to take up new responsibilities as an equal partner with America. But the kisha club Miyazawa took with him is an example of the special social institutions that sometimes can make Japan appear impenetrable to outsiders. And the trip provided a rare opportunity for an American reporter allowed to travel with the group to watch one of the more powerful of those institutions in action.

Close ties between reporters and the people they cover is hardly unusual in Japan. There are about 400 kisha clubs throughout Japan. They act as news cartels that grant members special access to the government agencies, political parties and industry groups they cover. In exchange, the reporters abide by an unwritten pact that commits them to avoid embarrassing the officials or ministries they cover.

Membership in the clubs is limited to a core group of mainstream Japanese daily newspapers. Non-members, which include magazine and small-circulation newspaper reporters, are excluded from briefings and press conferences, although foreigners are occasionally allowed in some clubs as observers.

The power of the kisha club is considerable. When Miyazawa gave a rare interview to a group of American correspondents shortly before leaving for Washington, his kisha club demanded that they be briefed about the interview as soon as it was over.

Each Jan. 1, the prime minister gives a special interview to reporters from his constituency in Hiroshima. The kisha club will only allow the interview on the condition that local reporters be forbidden to ask questions of national interest.

On the Washington trip, one thing immediately became obvious: The power of the kisha club does not translate into better or more critical reporting. Rub shoulders with the White House press corps and you are liable to get a stream of the latest irreverent jokes about the Administration. The questions to the President and his spokespersons can be blunt–even obnoxious. The Japanese reporters, however, treat their prime minister with kid gloves. “What demands do you expect from the American side?” Miyazawa is asked during a brief session on the plane. His response: “Clinton is trying to deal with his deficits so I expect there will be some requests.”

American reporters are eager to find an original angle on a story. The Japanese reporters huddle to make sure they not only agree on the important points but have the same quotes. “Sometimes what he says isn’t very clear so we discuss it among ourselves to agree on an interpretation,” one reporter explains.

There is little criticism of the prime minister. A few reporters grumble that Miyazawa’s cabin on this aircraft is bigger than their own living rooms, and that it represents a waste of taxpayer money. The $260-million plane, the largest Boeing produces, was purchased as part of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s effort to cut Japan’s trade surplus. It was delivered in the fall of 1991 but has been used only twice. It contains a large conference room–but one that can’t be used because of the airplane noise. Japanese press reports include none of this detail.

In many ways, the traveling kisha club is no different than the typical Japanese tour group. On arrival, the group is invited by the Japanese Embassy to a steakhouse where a table is set for 40. The dinner is ordered in advance. The Embassy host explains that the restaurant has virtually every beer imaginable. But when one reporter orders Heineken, all the rest choose the same beer to avoid causing trouble.

At the Madison Hotel, the working press room set up for the kisha club reporters is a Japanese sanctuary. There are Japanese box lunches of rice and pickles. There are bags of rice crackers and cartons of sake. A special room has been crammed full of tax-free goods specifically aimed at the Japanese reporters.

The American aboard is ignored by the Japanese reporters until the morning after arriving in Washington, when the group is led into the Oval Office, where Clinton and Miyazawa are posing for photographers and TV cameras. “What did you mean, Mr. President, when you said that Japanese say ‘yes’ when they mean ‘no’?” asks a Japanese reporter, referring to a remark Clinton made to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in Vancouver this month.

“I don’t know whether to answer yes or no,” says Clinton. Then Miyazawa pipes up: “It reminds me of the song, ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’ ” Back in the bus, the reporters call on the American in their midst to explain the significance of the remarks.

The Japanese reporters, however, become clearly uncomfortable when the American colleague asks about a briefing that he discovers has been scheduled that evening with Miyazawa. They clearly don’t want him there. After negotiations with the group leader and the Foreign Ministry public affairs office, it is eventually agreed that the American may attend. The ground rule: The discussion is to be limited to domestic politics. No questions will be asked about Miyazawa’s historic meeting that morning with Clinton.

The kisha club jealously guards its prerogatives. At one point, the group leader calls a meeting to discuss a serious breach of conduct. A Washington-based Japanese reporter, they have discovered, has used information from a briefing in an evening edition instead of waiting until the next morning’s edition as the club members had agreed. It is decided that the club’s officers will determine what sanctions to impose.

Back on the plane and headed home, the champagne is poured again, and the prime minister is there to give his little talk. “Thank you for all your trouble. You must be very tired,” he says. “I have to say with respect to your reporting that it was not quite accurate in representing the situation,” he adds, suggesting that he and Clinton are not as far apart on trade issues as their press conference may have indicated.

Rather than get the prime minister to clarify his position, the group leader maintains the harmony by apologizing. “We are sorry if we may have oversimplified the issues, but please understand that we were writing under a tight deadline. And as you know, most of us are not well versed on economic issues.”

Evidently peace has been established, because shortly before the plane lands, the crew delivers a bottle of 17-year-old Scotch to each reporter as a personal gift from the prime minister.

COLUMN ONE : In Japan, Scorn for America : Some see a nation that has fallen from grace. Others express open contempt. Gut-level dislike of the U.S. is now common enough that the Japanese have coined a word for it.

I failed to see this because I regarded myself as white. When discussing issues of race, being white rarely seems a matter of interest. Race typically comes up in the United States in the context of diversity or discrimination.. Whites still have many advantages by virtue of being the dominant race, in spite of efforts at affirmative action.

Yet, in the course of writing my book and doing research on my father and my grandfather’s family, I came to understand that the experience of racism can be transmitted even if the skin color is not.

My father, for example, was beaten by his father whenever he spoke Japanese. He was half-Japanese but he was an American citizen. He left Japan with his family to live out the war years in California. There he had to hide his Japanese heritage for his family risked being sent to the internment camps where all people of Japanese blood were being detained. Dad studied Japanese during the war and served in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. There, too, he hid his Japanese.

That experience was a deep part of Dad’s psyche and resulted in a kind of split personality. Dad could be kind and generous to the Japanese, but at the same time he could act in the most racist way toward them. And he was deeply insecure and unsure about his identity. He transmitted that uncertainty to me. Without ever being aware of it, I inherited that split identity. I always thought it had more to do with growing up as an :”outsider” in Japan. And I’m sure that experience exacerbated things. But ultimately, it was more about the absence of a core identity as either  Japanese or American. I’ve learned that, this is not such a terrible thing. There are many people in the world like me. There are the first generation immigrants who are slowly losing the ways of their mother country the longer they stay in America and yet continue to feel like outsiders here. It is a great feature of America that, in spite of instances of racism, this country is more open to people of other cultures than just about any other country in the world. We have had to. Because, if you think about it, that’s who we are as a nation.. . .

Even so, it’s good to have the book completed. I remember going through my great- grandfather’s reminiscences and wishing there were more details. I remember opening my grandmother Betty Stucken Helm’s notebook and reading the first few paragraphs of what was supposed to be her life’s story. She ended with  “Oh the stories I could tell.”  My father, too, made an effort to start a family history. He went on for two or three pages before ending. Now I have a book. It’s intensely personal. I look at the five generations of my family in Japan through my own feeling of growing up as an outsider in Japan and adopting two children there. Relatives who grew up in New Zealand, Germany or the United States may have a very different take on  the family. My uncle, for example, was unhappy with my portrayal of his father. But he was a younger child and he had a very different experience of his father than my father Don. I suspect there could be 10 memoirs written of the Helm family’s long presence in Japan and they could all be very different. One might glorify the family. Another might focus on the business. Since I started my exploration from the perspective of being an outsider, I have no doubt that this particular portal into the family color the decisions I made about what to write and how to portray it.

The book is done and I’m nervous. I feel very exposed and vulnerable. But I feel good about what I’ve written.