TWO DAYS AND nights of nausea passed in the cramped cabin. Well-wishers had sent the girls off with boxes of sweets that were now stacked to the ceiling, making the small space even smaller. Chinese waiters brought unrecognizable meals they could not bring themselves to touch. Mrs. DeLong, their chaperone, spoke no Japanese, and the men of the delegation, while occasionally helpful as interpreters, knew nothing about the needs of young girls. Their stewardess had been taught the Japanese for “what do you want?” but the girls had no words to respond with in English. When hunger did penetrate their queasiness, they picked at the pile of sweets, which only made things worse.
On the third day they had a visit from the delegate in the cabin next door. A dapper, outspoken Finance Ministry official who would go on to become a pioneer of Japanese journalism, Gen’ichiro Fukuchi was a veteran of two previous overseas missions. The challenges of an ocean voyage were not new to him. He swept into the girls’ cabin, quickly taking in the five pale and clammy faces and the half-empty boxes of confectionary, and sprang into action. Opening the porthole, he seized the remaining cakes and flung them overboard. “All our entreaties and wails were in vain,” Shige recalled.
It was a week before any of the girls left their cabin. Ume recovered first, venturing up the metal steps that led to the deck and gazing, awestruck, at the tall American sailors and their smartly uniformed officers. Once all the girls were up, they had a proper tour: the luxurious saloons and dining rooms, the thunderous engines and the churning paddle wheels, whose sound was the only proof that the ship was moving on the featureless expanse of ocean. “Passengers are forbidden to approach the cages over the paddlewheels or wander outside the deck railings,” read the rules posted aboard ship. “Do not talk to officers on watch.” Each day the captain announced their degree of longitude, which the ambassadors dutifully recorded. Those who had acquired wristwatches carefully adjusted them to the new time.
Rain fell, and kept falling for nearly half the voyage. Once the ship itself had become familiar, there was nothing to look at. “We did not see so much as the silhouette of a single island,” the embassy’s scribe Kume noted. “Although it was the time of the full moon, the fact that we could hardly ever see it intensified our feelings of loneliness.” Hirobumi Ito, one of the senior ambassadors and a close friend of the cake-flinging Fukuchi, came to check on the girls, who were still mourning the loss of their sweets. A small man with a large personality, lowborn but aiming high, Ito was something of a peacock, handsome and gallant and fond of life’s pleasures, his boyish smile verging on a smirk. At twenty-two he had smuggled himself out of Japan to study in London; now, at thirty, he was the minister of public works. “He told us to come to his room and he would give us something nice, if we behaved properly,” Shige later remembered. To each girl he gave a precious piece of misozuke pickle, a taste of home that settled both their stomachs and their nerves. It would not be the last time Ito changed the girls’ circumstances for the better.
The enforced idleness of shipboard life lay heavily on the delegates. The men of the Iwakura Mission were ambitious, determined, proud, and insecure. Samurai from the southern domains savored the triumph of their rise to power, but still felt more deeply loyal to their own domains than to each other. Those who had once served the toppled shogunate held deep-seated grudges. Enemies until just recently, they had not entirely finished becoming allies. Now they faced the daunting challenge of introducing their new leadership to the wider world.
Those with some experience abroad patronized those who had never left Japan. One delegate, an official with the judicial department, held tutorials on Western table manners: forks on the left, knives on the right, cut your meat into pieces first instead of picking up a whole chop and gnawing off a bite. Don’t slurp. The younger and more arrogant junior delegates, resenting such schoolmarmish meddling, only slurped and stabbed with greater abandon.
The presence of young girls in this idle and simmering group was provocative. The two oldest, Ryo and Tei, both fourteen, were nearly of marriageable age. They were the only Japanese females the men would see until the mission returned home, and not every delegate was as appropriately solicitous as Ito and Fukuchi. One day, Ryo was alone in the girls’ cabin when a man named Nagano, a secretary with the foreign department, stumbled in, drunk. Ryo was struggling to fend him off when her roommates returned. Sutematsu, shaking with outrage, ran for Ambassador Okubo.
Though there were two secretaries called Nagano with the embassy, it is easier to suspect the lecherous one as having been Keijiro Nagano, a man with a colorful history. Back in 1860, at the tender age of sixteen, he had joined the first mission to America as an apprentice interpreter. His youthful high spirits, in contrast to his stiffly straight-faced countrymen, had instantly attracted the attention of the American press; dubbing him “Tommy,” reporters swarmed him, and everywhere he went the ladies swooned. The daily papers tracked his activities almost more assiduously than those of the ambassadors he served. He wrote love notes to American girls on pink stationery and inspired a polka composed in his honor, with a refrain that captured the odd ardor of his fans, at once admiring and condescending:
Wives and maids by scores are flocking
Round that charming, little man,
Known as Tommy, witty Tommy,
Yellow Tommy, from Japan.
Now twenty-eight, still slight of stature if no longer quite so pretty, Nagano may yet have considered himself a ladies’ man. But flirting with anonymous foreign girls was not the same as groping the daughter of a samurai. Perplexed by this unprecedented situation, and painfully aware of the eyes of the American crew upon them, the mission’s leaders decided to hold a trial; wasn’t that what enlightened Westerners would do? It would be an edifying exercise in foreign legal protocol, it would hold the transgressor to account, and (to be honest) it would provide a little entertainment. The voyage was long, and the delegates were bored.
The strutting Ito, having observed courtrooms in London during his sojourn there, would play the judge. Other delegates would take the roles of prosecutor and defense attorney. Takayuki Sasaki, the embassy’s senior official in charge of judicial affairs, was appalled. It was one thing, he argued, to hold a mock trial with a fictitious case, but the offense here was real. Whether it had been a serious crime or just a bit of minor mischief, making a show of bringing it to “court” risked yet more disgrace to the girl, her molester, and, by extension, the embassy itself. All this before their ship even reached shore. What would the foreigners think?
Predictably, the trial was a farce, with no judgment reached. “Little irregularities might not affect big countries of the West,” wrote a fuming Sasaki in his journal, “but our country has just begun to take the path of progress and is, as it were, still a child without learning, having achieved nothing. It had better be cautious of doing anything amiss.” Nagano, for his part, was nonchalant. “To divert our boredom,” his journal entry reads, “a sham trial, inspired by a little happening, was held.” None of the delegates recorded a word about Ryo’s humiliation or the discomfort of the other girls.
THE AMERICA PLOWED steadily toward San Francisco, sighting nothing but an occasional albatross riding the wind like a kite. “Goonies,” the sailors called them. Two days from port, seagulls appeared, swooping so low they nearly touched the heads of the passengers. “Apparently, when crossing the ocean,” Kume wrote, “if you see goonies you are far from land, but if you see gulls you know you are nearing land.” The first leg of the journey, then, was almost over.
Sent off by their families, largely ignored by the men of the mission, and unable to converse with their American chaperone, the five girls in their tiny cabin had nothing to do but wonder.
PART
II
The customs of all countries are strange to untrained eyes.
—ETSU INAGAKI SUGIMOTO,
A Daughter of the Samurai, 1926
Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige in Philadelphia, 18
76. (Courtesy Tsuda College Archives.)
5 “INTERESTING STRANGERS”
THE SUN HAD RISEN hours since, but fog still lingered in San Francisco Bay as the steamer America made her slow and regal way through the Golden Gate. It was Monday, January 15, 1872. As Fort Alcatraz slid past, salvos of artillery rang out—a thirteen-gun salute, one shot fired for each of the original states. In the first-class cabins, a few of the Japanese delegates were counting. They were somewhat disappointed not to reach a higher number. “America is a democratic country and practices simplicity with respect to the level of politeness and etiquette displayed,” the scribe Kunitake Kume confided philosophically to his journal.
Flags decorated every mast, the Stars and Stripes and the Circle of the Sun fluttering fore and aft of the smokestacks amidships. As the ship settled into her berth, an unusual group gathered on the promenade deck, led by two men. One, gazing eagerly at his home port after long absence, wore a dark beard, a winter coat, and an Astrakhan hat of Persian lamb: Charles DeLong, American ambassador, returning from two years of service in Japan. A native New Yorker, DeLong had chased adventure to the gold fields of California by the age of seventeen. Supplementing his speculative ventures with a law practice, he moved into politics, where he proved more of an opportunist than an idealist. He had accepted the post of minister to Japan in 1869 and had taken to the glamour of diplomatic life like a duck to water. His natural charm had always served him well.
But it was the other man who drew the stares of those watching from the pier. He stood, straight and slim and solemn, in midnight-blue robes of embroidered silk tied with cord. Two swords of different lengths swept down from his sash. The sides of his head were shaved and the remaining hair drawn up into a topknot, over which he wore a black lacquered headdress—more like a box than a hat—tied securely under his chin. Strong black brows slashed downward to an aquiline nose and a mouth turned down at the corners. Heavy-lidded eyes surveyed the crowds of people gathered below. Tomomi Iwakura, minister of the right, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, made an imposing first impression. Once a chamberlain in the court of the Emperor Meiji’s father, and then a key player in the maneuverings that restored the son to power, he embodied both Japan’s past and its future.
Behind him stood dozens of his entourage, inelegant by comparison, dressed, as one reporter noted, “in the most outlandish English ready-made garments of all styles since the flood.” When the ship was safely moored, a more sharply tailored party of local notables came on board to greet the exotic visitors, their genial smiles and outstretched hands met with stiff bows.
Twenty-three days after leaving Yokohama, the men of the Iwakura Mission were ready to set foot on foreign soil. As the sober group filed down the gangplank, a splash of vivid color brought up the rear. A wave of excitement rippled through the crowd. Emerging from behind the ample girth of their chaperone, Mrs. DeLong, five girls stepped carefully into view. They were swathed in bright silk, lavishly embroidered from collar to hem and tied with broad contrasting sashes. Two carried themselves with the reserve of young women, hatless, their hair upswept and crowned with tortoiseshell combs. The other three, clearly younger, wore gay floral ornaments in their lacquered coiffures, though their faces were carefully composed. So these were the princesses sent by the Mikado!
They may not have been princesses, but they were the first Japanese females ever to venture abroad in the service of their nation. The two eldest would retrace their steps within the year, but the three younger ones would not see their homeland again for a decade. Sutematsu was eleven. Shige was ten. And Ume, her eyes darting in wonder from the houses to the carriages to the well-dressed women in the crowd, had turned seven at sea.
THE DOCKSIDE CROWDS parted to allow the members of the embassy to reach a line of waiting carriages. Walking between walls of onlookers, the girls kept their eyes down, uncomfortably conscious of their clothes, their hair, the staring eyes on every side. Mrs. DeLong strutted alongside them like a proud hen with unusually colorful chicks, enjoying the sensation they made.
The carriage ride from the Embarcadero to the Grand Hotel lasted only a few blocks—hardly enough time to savor the novelty of horse-drawn transport. The streets were filled with the rattle of carriage wheels, churning up clouds of gritty dust between rows of buildings “as densely packed as the teeth of a comb,” wrote Kume. The hotel, a gleaming white confection of pediments and cupolas and oriel windows, rose four splendid stories at the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets.
The Grand Hotel was only a few years old, and its appointments dazzled the delegates. The lobby floor, paved with marble, was waxed to a treacherous sheen. The sparkle of crystal chandeliers vied with the glitter of gilt. Each suite had its own bathroom, with pure drinking water available at the twist of a faucet, and mirrors of limpid clarity. The scribe Kume, furiously scribbling notes on everything, waxed poetic with delight. “At night when one loosens a screw and sets the gas afire, the planets and stars circle above one as light glows inside white jade,” he wrote of the lamps in his room. “There are lace curtains on the windows that make one think one is looking at flowers through mist.” A button on the wall, when pressed, rang a bell hundreds of feet away to summon the hotel staff. But most extraordinary of all was what happened when a porter ushered Kume into a tiny chamber off the lobby, in which a few hotel guests were already standing, quite still and oddly expectant. A metal grille clanged shut. “I was shocked when it suddenly started to move and we were pulled upward,” he wrote of his first elevator ride.
The procession of welcoming parties began first thing the next morning: the handful of Japanese students already in San Francisco; the city’s mayor, William Alvord; the gentlemen of the press, with each of whom Iwakura and his colleagues shook hands. The reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle had prepared carefully for this moment. “Annata, anaata ohio doko morrow morrow!” he exclaimed, beaming with pride at being able to address the dignified visitor in his native tongue. Iwakura bowed gravely and, through his interpreter, thanked the man for his good wishes and his perfect command of Japanese. The reporter took his leave, quite satisfied with himself, though what he had actually uttered was gibberish.*
At noon it was time for the officers of the army and navy, though it was almost one o’clock by the time everyone had assembled in the hotel’s ballroom. The floor had been covered with canvas, the walls draped in the flags of both nations. Iwakura and DeLong sat on an upholstered sofa—a posture that was more comfortable for the American. None of the Japanese visitors were accustomed to sitting on chairs, which made their dangling legs go numb.
By two o’clock the military men had left and it was time for the consular corps. The doors of the ballroom were by now crowded with well-dressed onlookers, and while the embassy waited for the consuls to appear, a gaggle of young ladies entered, holding hands for mutual support. They introduced themselves to Iwakura, who chuckled and shook their hands. The spectators were charmed, and the delegates kept their shock to themselves. Women—and not even of age!—at a diplomatic ceremony?
Representatives of England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Switzerland, Sicily, and Portugal presented their credentials. “The city of San Francisco, standing at the threshold of this continent, holds out her hands and bids you welcome,” proclaimed the president of the Chamber of Commerce, for whom good fellowship was clearly good business. San Francisco’s merchants stood ready to extend the doctrine of Manifest Destiny across the Pacific, expanding the market for American products and American ideas. Iwakura was gracious but clear in reply. Japan was eager to trade, but his mission had a more specific mandate: to open the question of negotiating more equitable terms than the United States and the other treaty nations had hitherto allowed.
The parade of dignitaries had worn on for more than five hours. For the delegates, unaccustomed
to any form of salute more intimate than a bow—even from their own mothers—the endless clasping of hands was overwhelming. They retired to their rooms, followed by the eyes of hotel guests who gathered in knots near the entrances to the reception areas, hoping for a glimpse. The luxurious accommodations provided little relief, though—at least not until the tables and chairs and desks had been pushed aside, and the exhausted men could repose at last on the carpeted floor.
Their rest was brief. The daily papers had announced that the Japanese embassy would be serenaded that evening, and by the appointed hour of ten o’clock, well-wishers and gawkers choked the streets surrounding the hotel. The Second Artillery Band was punctual. Making their first formal appearance, the five Japanese girls joined the delegates, necks craning all around them as they took their seats. “They were all attired in elegant costumes and appeared to know that they were attracting attention, and shrank from it as all well bred young ladies should do,” a reporter noted approvingly. Well-bred or not, the girls were genuinely uncomfortable; unlike the men of the delegation, they were powerless to secure the camouflage of Western clothing without assistance, and that, Mrs. DeLong so far refused to give. Attention was not something she shrank from.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 6