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

by Janice P. Nimura

  The stately chords of “Hail Columbia”—composed for George Washington’s first inaugural in 1789, and used as the national anthem for most of the nineteenth century—were soon blaring triumphantly from the parlor windows and out to the streets below. Earlier Japanese travelers had returned with reports of the headache-inducing unpleasantness of barbarian music. Sitting appreciatively in a crowded parlor just a few feet from a full military band must have been a strain.

  At the concert’s conclusion, lusty cheers and applause from outside were redoubled when Iwakura and DeLong emerged onto a balcony. The noisy enthusiasm, while gratifying, was somewhat startling to the delegates. “Western people are ever eager to promote trade and like to extend a warm welcome to foreign visitors,” Kume wrote. “Such gatherings, which are part and parcel of American customs, are unusual in Japan.” Iwakura drew a scroll from his sash and unrolled it to a length of several yards, though the speech he read from it in Japanese was brief. Both men withdrew. The crowd, however, was not ready to go home, shouting for the popular DeLong to say a few words. He demurred: it went against protocol for him to speak publicly; this wasn’t the setting for bending the rules; his heart was too full at this important moment for him to express his feelings . . . oh, very well, if you insist.

  Ambassador DeLong’s remarks instructed his audience to consider these visitors in a distinctly different light from the “Orientals” already among them. “Let the Chinese be not confounded with the Japanese,” he told the people of San Francisco. “California need never fear an influx of coolie labor from the Japanese Empire.” Depraved China had no choice but to export its impoverished masses; noble Japan, on the contrary, would shortly be forced to look abroad for labor to fuel its new and gleaming industries. “While the Chinese have been forced to wear the chain of slavery, the Japanese have never had a master; their intellects are as sharp as their weapons,” DeLong declaimed.

  His argument was not new. A dozen years earlier, when the first Japanese embassy had visited the United States, an up-and-coming new magazine devoted to the “American idea” had crystallized the attitude toward the exotic East. In a lengthy essay, the Atlantic Monthly had described a Japan poised to eclipse its larger Asian neighbor. The focus of the world would shift away from China, “for, in spite of all Celestial and Flowery preconceptions, it is impossible to view with any sincere interest a nation so palsied, so corrupt, so wretchedly degraded, and so enfeebled by misgovernment, as to be already more than half sunk in decay; while, on the other hand, the real vigor, thrift, and intelligence of Japan, its great and still advancing power, and the rich promise of its future are such as to reward the most attentive study.” China, at that point on the brink of defeat in the Second Opium War, hobbled by addiction and humiliated by the mercantile nations, was no match in the American imagination for virtuous, vigorous Japan. Here was a nation with grit and goals, eager to emulate American progress, like-minded in every way.

  This perspective had only intensified over the succeeding decade as the economic boom fueled by the gold rush faded, nowhere more than among white San Franciscans, unanimous in their scorn. The Chinese “hordes” undercut white workers for jobs and then sent their earnings home, they made no attempt to adopt local customs or costumes, and then they returned to a country that was inexplicably uninterested in American-made telegraph lines and railroads. The progressive and enlightened Japanese, on the other hand, having been awakened from their centuries-long sleep by America’s own Commodore Perry, seemed to embrace everything they found on this side of the Pacific.

  While immigrant Chinese men continued to wear their hair in braided queues down their backs, most of these Japanese visitors had cut off their samurai topknots, and within days of their arrival were sporting black silk hats to complement their ill-fitting Western suits. The city’s fashionable hatters were quick to pounce on this high-profile market, and soon all the delegates were vying for the prize of highest and shiniest topper. Iwakura ordered samples brought to his room. When none proved a decent fit, the hatter sent one of his staff with a conformator, an elaborate mechanical contraption of wooden slats and metal pins used to take precise measurements of clients’ heads. The ambassador, it turned out, had a remarkably small head. His aides had a hilarious time trying on the conformator. “And that is what we want with Japan,” commented the Chronicle, “—to sell them ‘plug’ hats—and the wise man will soon see to what extent the principle can be carried.”

  . . .

  THE NEXT TWO weeks were a whirl of tours and entertainments for the men of the mission. They visited factories, hospitals, schools, courthouses, barracks, forts, and rail yards, asking endless questions and taking copious notes. One of the first stops was the San Francisco Assaying and Refining Works, just a few blocks down Montgomery Street from the Grand Hotel. The gold rush may have slowed to a trickle, but mining companies were still processing what remained. The delegates looked on as workers weighed, tested, and melted the precious stuff; each got the chance to heft a gold bar in his hands. Then it was on to the Kimball Carriage Manufactory, the Mission Woolen Mills, the Bank of California, the Union Foundry, and on, and on.

  It wasn’t all work. On the way back to the hotel one afternoon, a beaming middle-aged gentleman hailed the delegation at the corner of Fourteenth and Mission Streets, in front of a rococo stone entrance topped with statues, flagpoles, and a sign in letters three feet high: WOODWARD’S GARDENS. R. B. Woodward himself, “the Barnum of the West,” beckoned them into his personal pleasure grounds. A wealthy hotelier, Woodward had converted a mansion on six acres into the most popular attraction in San Francisco. Visitors could explore picture galleries and greenhouses, ogle peacocks and buffalo, and visit the Museum of Natural Wonders, which featured fossils, taxidermy, and a gold nugget weighing ninety-seven pounds. A purveyor of exotica himself, Woodward could hardly resist the appeal of such exotic visitors, though he did not go so far as to waive the twenty-five-cent admission fee. Public amusements of this sort were as yet unknown in Japan. Finance Minister Okubo and future prime minister Ito were persuaded to try the box swings, and everyone took a ride on the rotary boat, a wind-powered floating merry-go-round circling a fountain.

  A trip to the theater was that evening’s featured entertainment—a drama entitled Rouge et Noir, about the evils of gambling, at the opulent California Theatre. The place was packed by the time the silk-robed Iwakura arrived with his more soberly suited entourage. Squeezing through at last, they found that the attention of the audience turned more often toward their flag-decked boxes than toward the action on stage. Adding to the excitement was the presence of Mrs. DeLong, escorting the two oldest girls, still in kimonos. “Several milliners are at present engaged in making them English outfits,” the Chronicle reported with a note of disappointment. “If we mistake not, the romance attached to these ladies will all wear off when their Oriental habiliments are doffed for our more common attire . . . No doubt they are the most beautiful Japanese ladies in the United States to-day—there are no others—but if they accept the garments of our fashionable belles, thousands can be found much more beautiful than they.” The report was, in fact, premature; it would be several more weeks before the powerless girls managed to secure Western-style wardrobes.

  The trip to the theater was a rare outing. Though the Japanese men were making appearances all over the city, the girls kept to their rooms to avoid the “furore” their presence caused, taking all their meals there. The older ones could receive visitors in Mrs. DeLong’s rooms in the afternoons, but the three youngest were almost never seen. The days were long and bewildering. Without a word of English, the girls were entirely dependent on Mrs. DeLong. “We hardly dared to go out into the hotel corridors by ourselves, for fear we would get lost, and not know our rooms again, as we had no way of asking in any case,” Ume later remembered. One day, when Ume ventured into the hall with another of the girls, a group of women and children happened by. Delighted by this encounter with the �
��Japanese princesses,” the women carried the girls off to their rooms, where they fingered the silk of their costumes, traced the embroidery on their sashes, and stroked their hair to their heart’s content. They brought out toys and pictures for their doll-like guests, chattering unintelligibly while the girls waited in increasing discomfort, wondering when they might be released and how on earth they would find their way back.

  Language was only the most obvious of the barriers the girls faced. None of them having ever encountered a black person, they were terrified of the hotel’s waiters. When Mrs. DeLong took all five of them to see Emerson’s Minstrels perform at the Alhambra Theatre one evening, the spectacle only confused them further: the white performers in blackface, thought Ume, “could not be creatures of this world.”

  The girls were perplexed as well by the women they saw: the chambermaids and laundresses who worked in the hotel seemed to be made straight, like themselves, but the female hotel guests all sprouted odd humps from their backsides. Was there some sort of magic that deformed the bodies of the wealthy? Mrs. DeLong soon explained the strange mechanics of the bustle—and dined out on the anecdote for days. “The simplicity of these daughters of the Orient is really touching,” the Chronicle chuckled fondly.

  SAN FRANCISCO WAS now seized with enthusiasm for things Japanese. The firm of Haynes & Lawton, specializing in silver plate, was quick to publicize its stock of Japanese bronzes and porcelain “to impart a classic inspiration to the drawing-room and boudoir.” “Japonisme,” a term first used that very year, need not be limited to the salons of Paris, promised these advertisements. Those who had made their fortunes on the American frontier could now grace their parlors with antique objets by reaching across the Pacific instead of the Atlantic—and how fortuitous that Haynes & Lawton was so conveniently located on the ground floor of the Grand Hotel. “Lovers of the quaint and curious in art, and who are interested in this ingenious and progressive people,” should hasten to Market Street, instructed the Chronicle.

  Within a few weeks the leading photographic studio of Bradley & Rulofson, just a stone’s throw from the hotel, was advertising an exhibition of portraits of the embassy, including “a splendidly executed group representing the ‘high Japs.’” This photo, along with one of Mrs. DeLong and the girls, was later published as an etching in Harper’s Weekly, providing the rest of the country with a glimpse of “our Japanese visitors.”

  Crowds dogged them everywhere. Four days after their arrival the city honored the embassy with a parade and military review. A grandstand for the dignitaries rose in front of the hotel, but ordinary bystanders had to risk the sidewalks; there were reports of women and children badly hurt in the crush. The crowd, estimated at fifty thousand, somewhat marred the martial spectacle, as onlookers spilling into the street prevented the Second Brigade of the National Guard from marching in straight lines. “The streets were so densely packed with hat-covered heads that there was no room to insert even a needle,” Kume wrote. Iwakura, perhaps wisely, pleaded indisposition and kept to his room.

  The whirl of excursions only intensified as the days passed. In every situation, however unforeseen, the Japanese proved themselves to be good sports. For dessert at one official luncheon, a huge cake in the shape of a woman—representing “America”—was set down in front of Iwakura. Baffled, he turned to his host, who advised him to cut it and distribute the pieces to the lunch guests. Inspired, Iwakura cut off the two hands of the figure and presented them to two ladies nearby, explaining as he did so that likewise “Japan extends the hand of friendship to her American friends.”

  A week after arrival Iwakura made his way to the offices of Western Union, where a private office had been equipped with telegraphic equipment linked directly to the East Coast. He exchanged greetings with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish in Washington, and then sent a message to Samuel Morse himself. “The Embassy from Japan desires to inform the inventor of the Electric Telegraph that his fame is well known in Japan, and that within a few months one thousand miles of telegraph wire will be opened for business in their country,” the telegraph read. In reply, the eighty-year-old Morse welcomed the Japanese “to the sphere of telegraphic intercourse.” The moment was one of mutual—though perhaps not mutually understood—satisfaction: Japan striding with determination toward a future on equal footing with the West, America proudly and paternally bestowing its technological advancements on a nation still entangled with its benighted feudal past. But Iwakura’s mission was to gather ideas in the service of Japanese sovereignty. His men were studying the West in order to resist Western incursions in the future.

  Before leaving the telegraph office, Iwakura sent a personal message to his three young sons, who, having preceded him across the Pacific, were now studying in New Jersey, at Rutgers Grammar School. Among the very first Japanese students to come to America under the auspices of the new Meiji leadership, they were planning to meet him in Chicago as the embassy traversed the continent. “Affectionate Father,” they responded immediately, “we rejoice to hear from you.”

  The climax of the embassy’s stay in San Francisco was a lavish banquet. Dinner for two hundred was served at eight o’clock in the flag-bedecked, flower-strewn dining room of the Grand Hotel. The menu, printed in gold, silver, crimson, blue, and mauve, was dizzying: oysters, soups, fish, cold appetizers (including the intriguing “Westphalia Ham, décoré à la Japonaise”), four boiled offerings, eight entrées, and seven kinds of roasted meat. There were a dozen vegetable dishes, and twice that number of desserts. The champagne was courtesy of Krug and Roederer, and the tables were crowned with edible ornaments including a Temple of Fame, an Arc de Triomphe, a Treble Horn of Plenty, and a “Gothic Pyramid.”

  When all appetites had been sated, the speeches began. Newton Booth, the newly installed governor of California, declared that Japan was “the Great Britain of the Pacific—the England of the Orient,” thus banishing Japan’s foreignness with a single rhetorical flourish. “It is something new in history for a nation to apply for matriculation as a student in the university of the world, where the modern professors are the telegraph, the steam-engine and the printing press, and where the course taught is what we call Christian civilization,” he continued, deftly defining Japan as a sort of visiting scholar, gratifyingly clever, somewhat awestruck, and completely unthreatening.

  Iwakura thanked him but quickly ceded the floor to his charismatic vice-envoy, Hirobumi Ito. Extended sojourns in England and America had taught the younger man an ease and comfort among foreigners that many of his colleagues lacked. Now in charge of modernizing Japan’s infrastructure, Ito spoke—in English—of dazzling progress in the construction of railroads, lighthouses, and oceangoing vessels, skipping nimbly over the turmoil that had recently convulsed Japan. “Our Daimios magnanimously surrendered their principalities, and their voluntary action was accepted by a General Government,” he declared. Japan’s progress included social as well as technological advancement, Ito insisted. “By educating our women, we hope to ensure greater intelligence in future generations. With this end in view, our maidens have already commenced to come to you for their education.” Though not, perhaps, for their entertainment. The girls were not among the invited guests that evening.

  Speech after speech followed, but no one placed Ito’s vision of Japan ascendant in clearer context than the Reverend Horatio Stebbins, of San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church. The arrival of the embassy, he said, “seems a repetition of the old story where the magii [sic] of the East was led to where the Child lay. That star still lives and stands where it is most cherished. Welcome, most illustrious descendants of the old stock. Your presence is more welcome than the incense of frankincense and myrrh.” Stebbins’s hyperbole may have been champagne fueled, but it captured the Americans’ mood: the guests from the East were welcome, their tribute graciously received, but the star they followed was American. The assembled guests roared their approval.

  A FEW DAYS before the emb
assy was to leave San Francisco, Mrs. DeLong received a letter from the State Central Woman Suffrage Committee of California, to be translated for the girls. “Your visit to this country has an especial significance to those women of America who have been and are laboring for the rights and privileges belonging to a broader field of action than has before been open to them; and they rejoice that this movement is simultaneous in Japan and other enlightened nations, marking, as it does, a new era in the history of the world.” The encounter may have been good publicity for the suffrage committee, but it is doubtful the girls had the faintest idea what they were talking about. Nothing resembling representative government yet existed in Japan. It would be nearly two decades before even the wealthiest Japanese men had the right to vote. (As for woman suffrage, Japanese women would not win the right to vote until 1945, when the American Occupation enforced it.)

  But as baffling and overwhelming as these two weeks of hectic welcome in San Francisco had been, they were only a prelude. Early on the morning of January 31, the Iwakura embassy boarded a special train to begin a journey that was still a novelty even for most Americans: crossing the continent by rail. It was not yet three years since the pounding of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, at the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah Territory. By the time they reached Washington, DC, their final destination, the girls would see more of their new country than most of their American hosts ever had, or would.

  They traveled in style. George M. Pullman had introduced his revolutionary sleeper cars just in time to capitalize on transcontinental travel, and five of them had been ordered to accommodate the embassy. During the day, long plush-upholstered seats faced each other across a central table in each compartment; at night, porters reclined the seats to form lower berths and released overhead latches to drop the upper berths down. There were curtains for privacy, ornate floral paintings on the ceiling, mirrored panels, carpets on the floor, and glass wall-sconces to make the gilt accents sparkle. “It is all quite opulent,” wrote Kume in awe. At a breathtaking average speed of twenty miles per hour, the train seemed to soar above the ground. On straightaways it could go nearly thirty.