Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back

by Janice P. Nimura

  More shocking yet, the empress and her ladies were expected to attend these lectures as well, and listen closely. Not only would the young empress be the highest-ranking woman in Japan; she would be the most well-informed too. The wife of an emperor had hitherto functioned solely as the bearer of his heirs, her life lived behind screens, unseen by any but her ladies-in-waiting. Haruko would be a modern consort, appearing beside her husband to encourage the efforts of Japan’s modernizers, and to represent a unified nation to the world.

  On the morning of November 9, 1871, the Empress Haruko had yet to emerge onto the global stage. Nor could the girls who bowed before her in awe that day have imagined that one day they would join her there.

  WITH THEIR VISIT to the empress, the girls had become part of the official chronicle of Japanese history. Their next stop was a photographer’s studio, for a formal portrait commemorating the imperial audience.

  Though the first photographs had reached Japan via Dutch traders in Nagasaki as early as the 1840s, professional photographers did not arrive until the 1860s—just in time to capture Old Japan as it confronted the onslaught of the new. Superstitions regarding the preternaturally accurate images were rife at first. “Once photographed, your shadow will fade,” one warned; “twice photographed, your life will shorten.” Another insisted that if three people sat for a portrait together, the one in the middle would die early. Within a few years, however, photography had become one of seven “tools of civilization and enlightenment,” along with newspapers, the postal system, gaslights, steam engines, international exhibitions, and dirigible balloons. By 1871, sitting for a formal photograph was a proud event, the privilege of a select few that rarely included women, let alone young girls.

  Still strangers to each other, the girls must have felt as uncomfortable as they appear in the photo. Tei and Ryo sit as stiff as bookends on either side, toes together and heels apart. The photographer has angled their seats precisely toward each other; swathed in similar kimonos of pale silk, elaborately embroidered with fruits and flowers, they stare blankly past each other’s ears. Tei folds her fingers demurely inside her sleeves. Between them, the three younger girls are less carefully composed. Seated in the center, Sutematsu clasps her hands in her flowered lap, lips pursed slightly to one side, hair sculpted into high loops like butterfly wings. Shige stands to her right, her dark kimono in somber contrast, and both girls gaze frankly at the unfamiliar contraption pointing their way. Perched on Sutematsu’s other side, Ume is distracted by something beyond the camera, her diminutive features dwarfed by her own complicated coiffure. Ryo holds one of Ume’s hands in hers, perhaps steadying her. Though the new wet-plate collodion process had taken firm hold among the growing ranks of Japan’s studio photographers—reducing exposure time from minutes to seconds—it was nevertheless hard for a six-year-old to sit perfectly still.

  Stylized and expressionless, the girls look like dolls. Their portrait leaves out as much as it preserves: no suggestion of the violent upheaval just past, no trace of the bewilderment and gut-gripping fear with which the girls must have contemplated their immediate future. Five daughters of the losing side had been repackaged for the coming victories of the new Japan, and their own feelings on the subject were irrelevant.

  That same evening the girls were invited to a dinner at the home of Toshimichi Okubo, a Satsuma samurai who, having risen to the post of finance minister, was now, at forty-one, one of the highest-ranking members of the embassy about to depart. With his chiseled features, expressive eyes, and wavy hair cropped in the new style and parted on the side—no samurai topknot—Okubo cut a dashing figure. Many years later the girls would still remember the long tatami-matted room full of men drinking sake while geisha played music, danced, and kept the cups always full. Unmarried girls were not usually the dinner guests of statesmen.

  Girls weren’t usually the subject of newspaper articles either. Japanese journalism was still in its infancy, but Takayoshi Kido, another leader of the imminent embassy and an author of the Charter Oath, saw it as a key component of modernization. His newspaper, the Shimbun Zasshi, founded just months earlier to educate the people on the aims of the new government and “urge them on toward civilization,” covered the story. “Five Young Girls Leave for Study in America,” ran the astonishing headline. Fewer than twenty years had passed since Commodore Perry’s black ships first sailed into Edo Bay.

  4 “AN EXPEDITION OF PRACTICAL OBSERVERS”

  ON THE OCCASION OF a state dinner just before the embassy sailed, the emperor addressed his court and the men who would lead the Iwakura Mission with a speech of startling frankness. “If we would profit by the useful arts and sciences and conditions of society prevailing among more enlightened nations,” the emperor said, “we must either study these at home as best we can, or send abroad an expedition of practical observers, to foreign lands, competent to acquire for us those things our people lack, which are best calculated to benefit this nation.” The Emperor of Enlightened Rule was effectively declaring his own land unenlightened.

  “Travel in foreign countries, properly indulged in, will increase your store of useful knowledge,” the emperor continued. Two hundred and fifty years of staying home made venturing abroad seem fundamentally unnatural—tempting, perhaps, but perilous, to be sampled sparingly, like strong drink. “Great national defects require immediate remedies,” he declared. The Land of the Gods, defective! But there was more. “We lack superior institutions for high female culture. Our women should not be ignorant of those great principles on which the happiness of daily life frequently depends. How important the education of mothers, on whom future generations almost wholly rely for the early cultivation of those intellectual tastes which an enlightened system of training is designed to develop!” The happiness of women was suddenly a goal of national policy; Japan could not progress to enlightenment without them.

  “Liberty is therefore granted wives and sisters to accompany their relatives on foreign tours, that they may acquaint themselves with better forms of female education, and, on their return, introduce beneficial improvements in the training of our children,” the emperor went on. Though the assembled notables remained impassive as they listened to these words—written for the emperor, no doubt, by some of their own number—they were not yet ready to heed them. None of the Iwakura Mission’s ambassadors brought their women along. If it was important for women to learn foreign ways, let the vanguard be the expendable younger daughters of other men.

  FRIENDS AND RELATIVES of the Iwakura delegates, many a bit worse for wear after the previous evening’s farewell parties, thronged the Yokohama waterfront as the girls stepped into a launch bobbing beside the pier, careful not to tread on the long kimono sleeves—the style for unmarried women—that draped nearly to their feet. Though a heavy frost covered the ground, the late-December sun was strong. Gawkers pressed in, hoping for a glimpse of the most famous men of the age, and wondering at the little girls included incongruously among them. Sitting stiffly under a white canopy alongside their chaperone, Mrs. DeLong, the girls searched the crowd on the dock for familiar faces as the rest of the embassy boarded other small boats.

  “What heartless people their parents must be,” Ume’s aunt overheard another bystander mutter. “Sending them to a barbarous land like America!” No one contradicted her. Some of those present may have been aware that the girls were not actually the first Japanese females to venture to America. In the wake of Aizu’s defeat, one John Henry Schnell, a Prussian arms dealer and military adviser to the daimyo, had led a small contingent of Aizu samurai and peasants (including his own Japanese wife) to California, bringing tea seeds and silkworms. The Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Colony, established in June 1869 in Placerville, east of Sacramento, had quickly shriveled in the unforgiving climate, its settlers dead or dispersed in poverty. “What wonder,” Ume wrote later, “that even five girls were found in the length of the kingdom whose parents would permit them to start on this perilous and d
aring undertaking!”

  Little thought had been spared for the practical aspects of preparing young girls for ten years in an alien land. The men of the mission had managed to acquire Western-style suits, perhaps not at the leading edge of fashion, but nevertheless serviceable. Many of the delegates also possessed sizable English vocabularies. The girls had neither. Little Ume was the only one whose trunk contained any items useful for a girl traveling to America: an English primer with the Roman alphabet, a small book entitled A Pocket Edition of Japanese Equivalents for the Most Common English Words, and a bright red woolen shawl, which looked rather odd with her kimono.

  They were gifts, she told the older girls, from her father, Sen Tsuda, who had been telling her stories of America for as long as she could remember. He knew how to speak English, she reported proudly; he had worked as an interpreter for the shogun, and had even once traveled to San Francisco, the very port for which they were bound. He returned with trunkfuls of reference books and manuals, but without his samurai topknot, which, in a fit of enlightened enthusiasm, he had cut off and shipped home en route. Ume had never forgotten her mother’s speechless shock when she opened the package.

  Tsuda’s time abroad had broadened his views on girl children. Upon his return, he insisted that Ume learn to read and write; not quite four years old, she was soon taking lessons morning and evening. A bright child, she learned the kana syllabary rapidly, progressing to the Chinese ideographs, or kanji, used in Japanese writing.

  Ume’s family, like Sutematsu’s, had found itself on the wrong side of the recent conflict, and having lost his position in the service of the shogun, her samurai father now struggled to regain his footing. Under the circumstances, he, too, was open to the possibility of reducing the number of mouths he had to feed. With Ume’s two little brothers to carry on his line, a daughter was, frankly, expendable. The plan to send girls to America intrigued him twice over, then: not only would he be relieved of the burden of the girl’s expenses, but an American-educated daughter might eventually return to him a little welcome prestige. Having a daughter who spoke English fluently and to whom Western customs were second nature could only raise his standing with the new government.

  At first, Tsuda planned to send his eldest daughter, Koto, but the girl balked. Ume, two years younger, was substituted at the last moment. When Ume was born on the last day of 1864, her father had stormed from the house at the news that his second child was a second daughter. He was still absent on the seventh day, when tradition dictated a baby should be named. Next to her mother’s bed stood a bonsai plum tree, ume in Japanese, so Ume it was—a name evoking the beauty and fortitude of the plum, which blooms before the snow has melted. Now, that strength would be tested. Still a month shy of her seventh birthday, Ume was less aware than Koto of the gravity of the decision. A strange and distant land called America? It sounded like a fairy story, and she was curious. Her English skills, at that point, were limited to “yes,” “no,” and “thank you.”

  IWAKURA, IN HIS courtier’s robes, stood regally on the deck of the steam-powered lead boat, while sailors plying long oars steered the small fleet of launches in his wake. Tiny Ume, in a flaming-red silk kimono embroidered with soaring cranes, chrysanthemums, and her namesake plum blossoms, made a bright spot that remained visible long after her boat had pulled away from the pier. Anchored farther out was the Pacific Mail steamship America, one of the largest paddle wheel steamers in the world: 363 feet from stem to stern, with more than an acre of deck. Today it flew the Japanese hinomaru, the red-on-white “Circle of the Sun,” alongside the American Stars and Stripes. The ship dwarfed the launches bearing the ambassadors as they drew alongside. A nineteen-gun salute rang out, then another fifteen salvos in honor of the departing American ambassador. Cannon smoke drifted over the water, and the echoes bounced back and forth across the harbor.

  At last more than a hundred delegates and their mountain of luggage were safely aboard. At noon one final cannon exploded, and as the ship’s anchors rose out of the water, the towering paddle wheels began to turn. The America was under way. “Sailors on the decks of the many foreign warships in Yokohama Bay all manned the rigging and doffed their caps in salute as we passed,” wrote Kunitake Kume, the official scribe. “We were followed for several miles by a crowd of well-wishers in a flotilla of boats.”

  It would be hard to overstate the high-minded sense of purpose with which these men set off, charged with opening a new era in the chronicle of Japan’s relations with the wider world. In the larger context of their mission, the five girls traveling with them were insignificant. In his account of their departure, Kume mistakenly noted only four.

  Beyond the waves, Mount Fuji rose in snow-robed majesty, the view from the ship’s deck unobstructed and stunning. “It was a very beautiful day when the vessel started,” Ume would write in one of her first English compositions, barely two years later. “How my heart beat as I saw the land fading away! I tried not to think about it.” The sun sank behind the mountains, but the travelers remained on deck, gazing west until the sea gleamed in the moonlight, serene and exquisite. But during the night the wind rose, and the exaltation of the view faded as the ship began to roll.

  THE THREE-WEEK VOYAGE was difficult. The Pacific in midwinter was full of storms, and the five girls were crammed into a single cabin, Ryo sharing a berth with Ume (“as she was such a tiny little tot” ), while Shige made do with a luggage rack for her bed. Shige’s sister had given her an old zori, a rice-straw sandal, instructing her to keep it under her pillow as a charm against seasickness. Sandal or no sandal, all five girls were soon bedridden and miserable.

  Just as Shige fell between Sutematsu and Ume in age, her life experience to this point fell somewhere between theirs as well. Like Ume, she had spent most of her childhood in Tokyo among elders intrigued by Western ideas and loyal to the shogunate. Her father, Takanosuke Masuda, had been governor of Hakodate, the northern treaty port from which Sutematsu had just come; her much older brother, Takashi, had begun to study English at the age of eleven. The family had moved back to Edo in 1861, the year Shige was born. She could just remember her father and teenage brother embarking on an embassy to Europe two years later. They had traveled via Shanghai and India and up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Shige had seen a photograph of the group posing in blinding sunlight before a vast stone head: the Great Sphinx.

  As with Sutematsu, the Boshin War had put an end to life as Shige knew it and separated her from her family. As the domains of the Northern Alliance had struggled to resist the emperor’s forces in July of 1868, gunfire had also shattered the leafy peacefulness of Koishikawa, Shige’s neighborhood just north of Edo Castle. Though the southern forces had already taken the castle and replaced the shogun with the young Emperor Meiji, pockets of resistance remained. More than a thousand of the deposed shogun’s men had formed a base at a temple in Ueno, barely a mile away. On the morning of Takashi’s wedding day, the emperor’s forces, wearing blue Western-style uniforms and the shaggy “red bear” wigs of the southern samurai, attacked.

  All day long Shige and her family listened to the whoosh and thump of shells. Smoke from acres of burning houses darkened the air. The groom hurried off with the other men of the house, their wedding finery discarded in favor of whatever weapons were at hand. “The bride was left alone with mother and the little ones,” Shige recalled, “but the house was in great commotion[,] for friends came hurrying in to take shelter from the shells.” By evening, the battle of Ueno was over, the last holdouts of the shogun’s forces routed. The heads of the losers were mounted on poles, and Shige was taken to gaze at them. “It was a terrible sight.”

  The city was in chaos, and especially dangerous for anyone who harbored loyalties to the losing side. Because Shige’s father and brother had made their careers in the service of the shogun, their family was directly threatened. Triumphant imperial soldiers roamed the streets, harassing Tokugawa loyalists for sport. Takashi had already lo
st two sisters to disease in early childhood, and he was determined not to lose another. To keep Shige safe, he decided the best course was to give her away.

  Takashi’s friend Gen’ei Nagai, a doctor he had met while serving in the shogun’s cavalry, was moving his family out of Tokyo with the exiled shogun’s retinue. Nagai would adopt Shige and take her far from the turbulent capital. With bewildering speed, Shige had a new surname, a new family, and a new home. Riding in a kago, she swayed and bumped along dusty roads for five days to the village of Mishima, southwest of Tokyo, which for the next three years would be her home.

  Thanks to the influence of well-placed friends on the winning side, Takashi soon secured a position in the Ministry of Finance. When the call for female students went out, he was intrigued. Not bothering to inform his little sister or her foster family, he submitted an application to the Hokkaido Colonization Board on Shige’s behalf. The Nagai family was startled when one day a horseman clattered up to their house, bearing word from Tokyo of Shige’s imminent departure for America.

  Ten-year-old Shige was stunned. After three years at the temple school in the village, she could read and write in Japanese, but she had never uttered a word of English. How could she possibly fulfill the government’s expectations for her future? Takashi had played a hunch, however, when he submitted his sister’s application. Shige’s situation was hardly idyllic: her adoptive mother, who took a harsh approach to child rearing, had never warmed to her. Frightening as the prospect of America seemed, the unknown future might offer an improvement over the difficult present. Shige was not sorry to say goodbye to the Nagais.