Virginia Review of Asian Studies: 19 (2017): 212-218

Virginia Review of Asian Studies: 19 (2017): 212-218

ISSN: 2169-6306

Bryant: family

THE WOMEN BEFORE ME: BINDING FAMILY TIES STRETCHING FROM SHOGUNAL JAPAN TO GERMANY AND THE U.S.

Lacey Turney Bryant[1] Mary Baldwin University

[Lacey Turney Bryant wrote this biographical essay on her family’s connections with Japan, China, Germany and the U.S. since the 1850s for my class in Asian Women. It is a good example of the interconnectivity that has taken place between East Asian and Western cultures since the mid-nineteenth century. ED.]

Trudi, an Aunt, Lina, Aunt’s Adopted Son, Tilde, Yuki, and Patsi, the Maltese

(Left to Right)

There are four generations hand painted on a family tree made by my Grandmother Tilde. The women in my family have stories that began at the base of this tree in the Edo Period in Japan and continues with me in America in 2017. I knew none of them, having only met my grandmother once in 2012 three years before her death on Christmas Eve, 2015. Despite never knowing or speaking with any of the other women I know that their fascinating, mysterious lives are the preamble for my own. The purpose of this essay is to explore the women in my family in their place and time in history, and who all except me, were born and raised in Japan.

My Great-Great Grandmother Yuki Nakao was born in Edo (Tokyo), the shohunal capital of Japan in February, 1854 during the Edo period (1602-1868). During this two century-long era my grandmother would have had no legal rights to own property, receive an education or participate in politics. Yuki would have been cut off from anyone that was not a Japanese because of an exclusionary edict put in to place nearly 200 years before. (Life for Japanese Women, 2017), and life would have consisted of being a good wife and mother. She may have faced an arranged marriage except for the fact that in 1853 American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in the Edo Bay, and trade between America and Japan was opened creating a societal structure far different from what was before. (Edo Period, 2017) It was during these years of new rights and freedoms for women that Yuki would marry an Englishman named Frederick Goodison. The marriage took place in 1871 in Yokohama, Japan.

Yuki and Frederick may have had other children, but the baby girl whose name is written on the family tree is Lina Nakao Goodison born in the port city of Kobe, Japan. Although she was born in Japan her father was English, so she too was given “English” as her nationality. According to other family members, Lina married very young, perhaps age 16, to a Chinaman. Her husband was a photographer and he took many stylized and posed photographs of Lina. For reasons and in ways I do not know, she divorced him and returned to Kobe with their daughter, Trudi.

Lina

The years of Lina’s life were lived during the first years of the Meiji Period (1868-1912). The restoration opened trade and began the modernization of Japan. Women like Lina were newly able to choose their spouse, keep custody of their children (like Trudi), and own or inherit land in their own name. (Life for Japanese Women, 2017) This newly open trade with Europe and America brought the family of Carl Bernhard Henn and Berta Elisabeth Johann to Kobe along with their family that included their son Carl Walter Henn. Thanks to the newly industrialized country and international trade, Carl W. became a trade merchant. Carl W. Henn was recognized as being “German” as his nationality having been born in Hamburg, Germany prior to moving to Kobe.

In 1911 one year before the end of the Meiji Era and the beginning of the Modern Era in Japan, Lina and Carl would meet and marry in Kobe, Japan. Their marriage rang in the post-Meiji era After Trudi Lina and her new husband Carlwould have four more children: Carl, Elisa, Roland, and Tilde. All four of the children were registered as “German” patriots. My grandmother, Tilde, was born in Kobe, Japan in January of 1926 at home with the help of her father who untwisted the umbilical cord from around her neck and spanked her to resuscitate her. She was the youngest of the five children born to Lina and Carl. She described herself as a happy child who loved to dance at the sound of any music even in the street, she loved lilacs, and her Maltese dog Pasti.

Tilde age 3 and 7

After the death of her father Carl Henn the year following her birth, Lina sent the three middle children to German family members in Essen, Germany. Lina said many years later that her heartbreak at that time was almost more than she could bear, and she considered throwing herself in front of the train that carried her three children away except that she had Trudi and my Grandmother was a baby in her arms.

Trudi and Tilde with Dolls

Because of her German father, Tilde and Trudi went to a German school, saw German doctors when ill, and practiced Catholicism instead of the typical Japanese religions of the time. The three women lived through so much beginning with the great Hanshin Flood of 1938 in Kobe, Japan. She wrote that

We went to school as usual and all of a sudden the water and the mud was coming down the streets washing everything with it. First the garbage can and small debris. Then houses came tumbling down first in a big cloud of dust. Then piece by piece people were being swept away. Luckily we had a big wall around the school. The teachers gathered by the gate and fished a lot of people from the fast running waters. It was one of the most horrible experiences in our lives.

Hanshin Flood Kobe, Japan 1938

(Picture taken from Wikipedia)

In 1933 Adolph Hitler came to power, and as a “German” she had to join the Hitler Youth at age seven. She said she wore a special uniform and once a week met for an education session about the new government. For over six years she remained a member and describes the time as a series of field trips, camping and ski trips; she never told of any feelings she may have had about Hitler or the Nazis.

Hitler Youth 1940

After high school Lina and Tilde moved to Yokohama, Japan (Trudi had gotten engaged and moved to Karuizawa) where she was required by the German government to do a year of duty at a refugee home for German women and children. The women were the wives of German soldiers incarcerated by the English during World War II. They were on their way to being sent back to Germany, but had to wait until the war ended. Following that Tilde was sent to the German Embassy to business school, but soon the war made being in the city too dangerous. The Americans were beginning to bomb the Japanese with firebombs and so most everyone evacuated to the mountains of Karuizawa. In 1944, soon after leaving for the mountains, Yokohama, was bombed by the Americans. Family members who had not moved to the mountains said that they hid in a Japanese graveyard covered in quilts and pouring water over each other to stay cool. Tilde’s little Maltese dog Patsi that had been left behind did not survive the bombing. Reflecting on the bombings Tilde wrote in 1999:

After the bombing was all over in Yokohama…I went back to see the burned-out city. I never forgot the desolation the firebombs left in the city. I remember also clearly where nurses and helpers were washing bandages of injured people from the hospital nearby. Water mains were broken, but I saw one pipe sticking out of the ground that they were using to wash out bandages.

All the little homes and shops were all burnt to ashes. Soon after they dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan finally surrendered. Then the American occupation swarmed in everywhere. They came in jeeps and big trucks. Lots of officers of the American Forces stayed there for R & R.

The shoes that Tilde had had for years had holes in the bottoms as she walked up and down the hill to a Japanese hotel in Sengokuhara, but no one seemed to notice. She was a Red Cross hostess to the American soldiers taking R&R at the hotel after the Japanese surrender that August 1944 (Occupation of Japan, 2017). She said the soldiers were nice and polite. She had dates and went to dances every Saturday night. She received several marriage proposals, but fell in love with and married one serviceman who noticed the holes in her shoes and bought her a new pair, he was Robert Turney from Memphis, Tennessee, USA. They married in April of 1946 and lived in a Quonset hut, a prefabricated semi-circular structure, (Quonset hut, 2017) on the army base in Yokohama.

Tilde on the Army Base Tilde and Robert Holding My Dad and Uncle Richard

Tilde’s family waved good-bye to them as they left the following September in 1946. She writes of seeing her mother Lina’s old face and wished she had never left her. A long trip to America followed aboard the army transport ship the “Monterey” to San Francisco. This leg of her trip was followed by a trip on a train, alone, to Memphis to meet her new Mother and Father in Law.

Not long after Tilde left Japan her brothers and sister were repatriated back to Germany by the United States Government because they were “German”. Lina told that the U. S. government took everything they owned sending Lina to live in an Austrian compound in Karuizawa, Japan. Lina lived there with a guardian named Mr. Schreck until 1955 when she passed away. Tilde never got over the sorrow that she had left her mother all alone.

Life in America was at times heartbreaking with the divorce from Robert, and the loss of custody of her first two sons, Richard, and my father Robert. Eventually Tilde remarried, moved to California, and raised three more children; she remained there until she died in 2015. Besides loss and family separation and tragedy the fact that Yuki, Lina, and Tilde carried on their lives without bitterness with a kind and gentle hearts is the gift from the women before me. The stories I do not know, that I have to imagine or dream about as well as the ones my grandmother told, tell me that I come from a collection of three tenacious and brave women. There are over 160 years of German, Japanese and American history with deep complicated roots that create a family tree that now includes my name, penciled in at the top.

My Brother Daniel, Tilde, and Me in 2012

Hanford, California

References

Edo period. (2017, April 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:59, April 16, 2017,

from

Life for Japanese Women. (n.d.) Retrieved 12:02, April 16, 2017 from

List of floods. (2017, April 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:09, April 20, 2017, from

Occupation of Japan. (2017, April 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:37, April 17, 2017, from

Quonset hut. (2017, April 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:27, April 17, 2017,

from

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[1] Lacey Turney Bryant is a Social Work major at Mary Baldwin University. “I look forward to being a victim and witness advocate, helping victims of crimes or witnesses to crimes navigate the court system. I am also the mother of two sons who keep me constantly entertained and mystified by my own good fortune.”