A Tokyo native of Austrian parentage, Hedwig Schreck, 61, recently retired from her career at TV Asahi. She now runs workshops that focus on Japanese cultural arts and crafts out of The Schreck House, the home where she grew up in Tokyo’s Hiroo neighborhood.
1. Can you share the story of your family's arrival to Japan? My paternal grandfather came to Kobe in 1920 as a submarine engineer. The Japanese government was interested in learning this technology, and he was involved in Japan’s Taisho Era (1912-26) industrialization process. He next moved to Yokohama and worked for a German company, then to Tokyo where he founded his own company in 1927 in steel and heavy industries, representing German and Austrian companies that imported technologies to Japan for things like tunnels and bridges.
2. So your family must have seen a lot of the dramatic history of that time period? Yes, definitely. I recently found a letter that my grandfather wrote to his brothers describing how his home burned down after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. He also continued running his company through World War II, working from Karuizawa, since business had to go on. He returned to Germany during the 1960s, so I never met him or had any personal connection.