Negotiating Identities: Mixed Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, History, Live Events, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2016-04-14 02:11Z by Steven

Negotiating Identities: Mixed Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea

University of San Francisco
McLaren Complex – MC 250
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, California 94117-1080
2016-04-14 through 2016-04-15

The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies is pleased to announce its spring symposium Negotiating Identities: Mixed-Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea, a conference to be held at the University of San Francisco on Thursday and Friday, April 14-15, 2016.

The highlight of the conference will be a keynote address by Emma Teng, Professor of History and Asian Civilizations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With this conference, the Center plans to provide a forum for academic discussions and the sharing of the latest research on the history and life experiences of mixed-race individuals in China, Japan, and Korea. The conference is designed to promote greater understanding of the cross-cultural encounters that led to the creation of interracial families and encourage research that examines how mixed-race individuals living in East Asia have negotiated their identities…

For more information and to register, click here.

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Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan [Presentation]

Posted in Asian Diaspora, History, Live Events, Media Archive on 2013-05-20 19:46Z by Steven

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan [Presentation]

German Institute for Japanese Studies (Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien)
Jochi Kioizaka Bldg. 2F
7-1 Kioicho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0094, Japan
Wednesday, 2013-06-12, 18:30 JST (Local Time)

Leslie Helm, Seattle Business Magazine

The DIJ Social Science Study Group is a forum for young scholars and Ph.D. candidates in the Social Sciences. Presentations on a scholar’s research project are about 45 minutes, followed by about 45 minutes of Q&A. The DIJ Social Science Study Group usually meets once a month, on a Wednesday from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.

Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great-grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870, married a Japanese woman and started a stevedoring and forwarding business in Yokohama. The family operates a successful business across two world wars by having sons take German, Japanese and U.S. citizenship, and transferring management among the sons as Japan shifts its alliances from the U.S. and Britain to Germany and Italy. While the business survives, the family suffers from its mixed-race identity and the inability to ever truly establish a sense of belonging in Japan. The book draws a contrast between the Helm family, and the family of Leslie’s mother, Barbara Schinzinger, whose father, Robert Schinzinger, taught German in Japan for sixty years but always maintained a strong identity as a German national with a duty to teach the Japanese about “the true Germany.”

In this presentation I am presenting my recently published book on this topic. My family history and our story of a multinational, biracial merchant family serves as historical document, shedding light on the political, economic, cultural, and racial interactions and tensions between Japan and the United States for more than a century and a half, right up to the present day.

For more information, click here. View the program here.

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‘Yokohama Yankee’: a family’s lineage in both Japan and America

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2013-05-11 21:16Z by Steven

‘Yokohama Yankee’: a family’s lineage in both Japan and America

The Seattle Times Books
2013-04-01

David Takami, Special to The Seattle Times

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan’ by Leslie Helm Chin Music Press, 360 pp.

Leslie Helm’s remarkable family memoir begins at a point of personal distress. At a memorial for his father in 1991, he feels conflicted about his relationship with his father and memories of his childhood. A few weeks later, Helm and his wife decide to adopt a Japanese child. This momentous prospect triggers unease about his lifelong ambivalence toward Japan and prompts him to explore his family’s long history in the country.

Now a Seattle resident and editor of Seattle Business magazine, Leslie Helm is bilingual in Japanese and has worked as a journalist in Japan for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times.

Helm’s great grandfather, Julius Helm, traveled from his native Germany to Japan in 1869 near the start of the Meiji Restoration when the country was emerging from 200 years of feudalism and self-imposed isolation. Reformers were eager to modernize Japan and looked to Western Europe and America for guidance. Helm helped upgrade the Japanese military and subsequently built a successful stevedoring business that thrived for more than half a century in the port city of Yokohama

Read the entire review here.

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Sheila K. Johnson on Yokohama Yankee

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive on 2013-04-30 03:27Z by Steven

Sheila K. Johnson on Yokohama Yankee

Los Angeles Review of Books
2013-03-13

Sheila K. Johnson, Anthropologist, Gerontologist, and Freelance Writer

Oh, To Be Japanese!

MANY FOREIGNERS have fallen in love with Japan — its physical beauty, its culture, its people. Most of these foreigners have been men, and some have married Japanese women or taken Japanese male lovers. A few have become naturalized Japanese citizens, but this can be a difficult process unless one happens to be Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), a famous early visitor and explicator of things Japanese who was adopted into his wife’s family, or Donald Keene (born 1922), an equally famous contemporary Japanologist, who became a citizen as an act of solidarity with Japan in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami.

In his book Yokohama Yankee, Leslie Helm tells the story of his part-German, part-Japanese, part-American family from the arrival of his great-grandfather Julius Helm in Yokohama in 1869 to his own adoption of two Japanese children in 1992. Intertwined with this story he recounts the vicissitudes of Japan’s history during this time — two world wars, massive earthquakes in 1923 and 1995, and his own ambivalence about being part Japanese and yet always being regarded there as an outsider, a gaijin.   

It is important to the Helm family story to understand that, until 1987, only children born to a Japanese father and a foreign mother could become Japanese nationals. The American sociologist William Wetherall, who married a Japanese woman and had two children with her, challenged this law because he wanted his children to have Japanese citizenship. After a lengthy legal battle the law was changed by giving the mother’s rights legal status.

Wetherall insists that Japanese citizenship laws have never been racist — as early 20th century American laws denying US citizenship to “Orientals” assuredly were. He argues that Japanese laws were merely rooted in the patrilineal social structure and household registers. But, given that Japan was a virtually monoracial society and enforced the exclusion of Westerners from its shores until the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, being a Japanese citizen has been, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as being ethnically Japanese.

In 1869, Leslie Helm’s great-grandfather Julius arrived in Yokohama from Germany. He’d first traveled to the US and briefly tried farming in Montana before taking the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco and then a ship to Japan. Yokohama was just becoming a busy port with ships bringing machinery and manufactured goods from Europe and the US before heading back loaded with silks, tea, and porcelain. Julius Helm quickly saw an opportunity to create a stevedoring and portage company; he soon owned horses, carts, and warehouses, and became a prosperous man. By 1871, he’d sent for two of his brothers from Germany and made them partners, and in 1875 he married his Japanese housekeeper, Hiro, who bore him seven children…

Read the entire review here.

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Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Biography, Books, History, Monographs on 2013-04-28 20:55Z by Steven

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

Chin Music Press
March 2013
320 pages
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-0-9844576-6-3

Leslie Helm, Author, also Editor
Seattle Business Magazine

Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal 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 his Japanese mistress. The family’s poignant experiences of love and war help Helm learn to embrace his Japanese and American heritage.

Yokohama Yankee is the first book to look at Japan across five generations with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great grandfather’s unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life.

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