Griffin Bay Author Event

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

Book Talk & Slide Show With Seattle Author Leslie Helm
Griffin Bay Bookstore
Saturday Evening, October 26, 7:00 Pm

Griffin Bay Bookstore & the San Juan Island Library are excited to co-sponsor an evening book talk and slide show with Leslie Helm, author of Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan on Saturday, October 26, 7:00 pm. Make sure to attend this special event and hear Leslie Helm talk about a remarkable story: his family’s long and ambiguous ties to Japan.

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 embrace his Japanese and American heritage. Yokohama Yankee is the first book to look at Japan across five generations both from the inside and through foreign eyes.

James Fallows of the Atlantic called it “A marvelous and eloquent work of family history (that) sheds 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.” The Library Journal gave the book a starred review, calling it “A lovely, unsettling family story and a vivid traversal of modern Japanese history that will impress the jaded Japan scholar and inspire the curious general reader or memoir fan.”

About the Author
Leslie Helm was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan where his family has lived since 1869. He worked as Tokyo correspondent for Business Week for four years in the early 1980s before becoming the magazine’s Boston bureau chief in 1986. He returned to Asia in the early 1990s to cover Japan and Korea for the Los Angeles Times. It was during his years abroad that he adopted two Japanese children and began the research that would result in his family memoir: Yokohama Yankee: My family’s five generations as outsiders in Japan. Leslie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in Asian studies. He attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on a U.S. Japan Friendship Commission fellowship. He now lives in Seattle with his family where he enjoys bicycling, squash and snowshoeing.

What Others Are Saying
In a Seattle Times book review, David Takami wrote, “Helm is a resourceful and talented writer, part researcher and part raconteur. His sleuthing takes him to remote corners of the Japanese archipelago to track down leads about his relatives. His Japanese language skills help him gain access to historical records at Japanese government offices and temples and to interview local officials. Helm uses his unique cultural and family history to present nuanced and subtle impressions of Japan and foreigners who live in the country, shedding light on both cultures.” — David Takami, author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle.

“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.” —Sheila K. Johnson, Los Angeles Review of Books

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