Mori and Northrop were already good friends. Part of Mori’s job as Japanese chargé d’affaires in Washington was to keep track of the nearly two hundred Japanese students already in the United States, most of them sponsored by the Japanese government. Because of these young men, Mori had become a student of the American educational system, touring schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the establishment of public education was already well under way. When the question of what to do with the girls arose, Northrop was the obvious man to ask, and his work with Yung made it clear that appropriate host families would not be hard to find. Especially since Mori was no longer trying to place five girls, but three.
Ryo’s eyes had never recovered from the glare of the western snows. Though she wore a green eyeshade to protect them, chronic inflammation made studying nearly impossible. Doctor after doctor examined her, and all agreed: if she continued to strain her eyes, she risked blindness. No longer physically able to carry out her role as foreign student, she would have to return home, Mori decided. Tei, closest to Ryo in age and temperament and showing signs of acute homesickness, would go with her.
Perhaps following Yung Wing’s example of placing pairs of students together, Mori set out to find a home for Sutematsu and Shige, now twelve and eleven. Consultation with Kenjiro, Northrop, and Addison Van Name, a scholar of the Far East who was Yale’s librarian, yielded a likely prospect: the family of Leonard Bacon, a prominent Congregational minister in New Haven. Letters discussing the terms of the arrangement were soon flying between New Haven and Washington.
“I went to see Mrs. Van Name today about the little Jap,” wrote Bacon’s eldest daughter, Rebecca, to her father that summer. “She was very glad to hear that perhaps we would like Miss Yamagawa [sic] and will write to her brother right away. In the mean time, some one may have snapped her up, but that is not likely. I told her that Mr. Van Name & B. G. Northrop might say what they thought would be a fair price for her, and you would see.”*
Ume, having imprinted on the older girls like an orphaned chick, was horrified by the news that they would be leaving her behind. But her distress was soon mitigated by Mori’s next decision: Ume was to return to the Lanmans, at least for now. Still only seven, Ume needed a mother as much as a teacher, and Adeline Lanman had fallen in love with the child, her “sunbeam from the land of the rising sun.”
LEONARD BACON WAS a pillar of New Haven’s intellectual elite: the pastor of First Church in the center of the town green for more than four decades, a professor of theology at Yale, a prolific writer and editor. At seventy he had the craggy visage of a biblical patriarch: domed forehead, imposing eyebrows, white beard, and a mouth whose corners seemed pressed down by the weight of his thoughts. He had nine children from his first wife, and five more with his second; firstborn Rebecca was forty-six, and Alice, the youngest, fourteen.
New Haven was a stronghold of Congregationalism, which traced its ideology directly back to the Puritan settlers of New England, and Bacon’s pulpit was one of the most influential. He was a magisterial moderate, always eloquently seeking the middle ground, confident in the power of Protestant orthodoxy to promote both moral and social progress. Throughout his career he had been vocal in his support of the antislavery movement, while remaining a harsh critic of the extremist approach of the abolitionists. Blacks were not inherently inferior, he agreed, but as they could surely never shake off the crushing degradation of white racism, the solution was not to give them equal rights as Americans but rather to send them back to Africa. There they could prosper, and, not coincidentally, share the gospel with the rest of their unenlightened race.
The Japanese girls, too, would be able to spread enlightenment in another remote land struggling in darkness: when they returned to Japan in ten years, they would carry Christianity with them. Meanwhile, the years they spent in New Haven would bring a different, if no less significant, benefit. Though rich in ideas, the sprawling Bacon household was perennially short of cash. Here, then, was a doubly attractive prospect: an opportunity to enhance the family finances and uplift the distant heathen without ever leaving New Haven.
The question of race was peripheral. In 1872 the few Japanese in America—nearly all of them from the samurai class—had come to learn and return home, not to demand equality or take American jobs. Freed slaves were a problem and Chinese coolies were a plague, but Japanese students were a worthy project. They would study hard, and then leave. The presence of Kenjiro in New Haven offered convenient insurance: if something went awry, he would be right there.
Unmarried, middle-aged Rebecca, a teacher who had helped raise her own siblings and now served as her father’s right hand, sounded a note of caution, however. She had met one of the young Japanese men studying near New Haven and was not impressed, especially after a report that he was gravely ill. “They don’t stand this climate too well and there is that responsibility to be counted in about this child,” she wrote to Bacon, who had fled New Haven’s heat for the relative cool of the Litchfield Hills. “They are puny folks & can hardly lift the end of a trunk—the men. But they selected healthy ones to send over.”
As Kenjiro and Van Name batted the question of compensation back and forth, Rebecca rolled up her sleeves and did the due diligence, consulting other host families in the area on weekly stipends. “Mrs. Hotchkiss suggests $13.00,” she told her father, “but evidently doesn’t think $15.00 too much.” Catherine, Bacon’s second wife, was often bedridden; a boarding student might provide some welcome companionship, and the younger Bacon daughters could help with English and music instruction.
Following Rebecca’s advice, Bacon approved the deal: for fifteen dollars a week per girl, he would provide room, board, and laundry, along with instruction in English, arithmetic, and geometry. Clothing, books, piano lessons, and medical attention were extra. (Rebecca had done very well for the Bacons. Northrop’s original call for families to host the Chinese boys stipulated sixteen dollars per week for each pair of boys—though this disparity may also have had something to do with the prevailing American attitude toward Japan versus China, or the relatively greater Japanese enthusiasm, and hence budget, for sending students abroad.)
In contrast to his hardheaded daughter, Bacon framed the arrangement as more familial than financial. “What we propose,” he wrote to Van Name, “is to receive her not simply as a boarder and lodger, but as if she were the child of some relative or near friend, who would expect us to have a parental care over her and to treat her with all parental kindness. She will be in the family as if she were one of our grandchildren.”
Kenjiro approved, and even gave permission for his sister to attend church with Bacon and his family. “However I beseech him not to give her any religious instructions, which I will give her,” Kenjiro wrote. The practice of Christianity was, after all, still illegal in Japan. His impressionable sister must be shielded from its influence.
AS WASHINGTON’S SWAMPY humidity gave way to the drier breezes of fall, the odd little household on Connecticut Avenue prepared to disband. Ryo and Tei were the first to leave, retracing their journey across the continent and then the Pacific in the care of Mrs. Thomas Antisell, the wife of an Irish-American engineer employed by the same Hokkaido Colonization Board that had sponsored the girls. By the end of October they were back at the Grand Hotel in San Francisco. “During their stay in the East”—the East Coast this time, not the mysterious Orient—“the young ladies acquired a good knowledge of English, discarded their rich Oriental costumes, and assumed the garb of fashionable American girls, and now present a stylish appearance,” chirped the San Francisco Bulletin approvingly. The two teenagers were anything but cheerful, though. They had failed in their mission, and upon returning to Tokyo, would soon disappear into anonymity. The bond that had formed between them and the three younger girls was broken forever.
Ume, for her part, was delighted at the prospect of moving back to Georgetown. The girls were practicing letter writing in their morn
ing English classes, so Ume wrote to Adeline Lanman. “My Dear American mother,” she began,
You are a very nice woman. You are kind to me. You love me. Yesterday we will go to the woods and we have a very nice time. You are kind and I never forget. I am very glad this winter stay at your house.
The words loop across the page, the letters beautifully formed but not quite connected, as if written one at a time, with pauses for effort. “Your affectionate Japan daughter,” Ume signed off. She might be losing the girls she had come to regard as older sisters, but she was gaining parents more solicitous and indulgent than any adults she had ever known.
On the evening of October 30, 1872, Sutematsu and Shige boarded the night train bound for New Haven, escorted by Mori. After eight months, Washington had begun to feel familiar; now here was yet another journey to a place they couldn’t imagine, full of people they had never met, but on whom they would again be utterly dependent. In Sutematsu’s case, however, apprehension was edged with excitement. She did know one person in New Haven. The last time she had seen her brother was in the smoking ruins of Wakamatsu, four long years earlier. She couldn’t recall his face clearly, but at the moment he was the only Japanese man in New Haven. He wouldn’t be hard to spot.
Ten hours later their train pulled into New Haven’s Union Station—not the monumental red-brick edifice that stands today, but its smaller predecessor on Chapel Street, an eccentric building graced by a central tower that looked startlingly like the topmost tiers of Tsuruga Castle. But the girls had no time to wonder at this odd vision. Begrimed and bleary from their night of travel, they were whisked along Church Street. The vast town green, with its three stately churches, opened out to the left, with the buildings of Yale College just visible beyond. A few moments later they pulled up in front of a well-tended white clapboard house on the right.
“The two Japanese girls came today,” Leonard Bacon wrote in his date book for October 31. “Mr. Mori, the Japanese embassador [sic] dined with us.” The two men found much to discuss; Mori was drafting a recommendation to his government arguing against the ban on Christianity in Japan, and Bacon, naturally, had plenty to offer on the subject. Mori would incorporate many of Bacon’s ideas, which eventually found their way into the Meiji government’s revised laws on religious tolerance. Kenjiro needn’t have worried. The man who would raise his sister was himself helping to ensure that Japan would not condemn her Christian upbringing.
Bacon and Mori wasted no time making the girls’ situation official. That same day, Bacon presented Mori with a document outlining their terms. “Mrs. Bacon and my daughters will be watchful over the health, morals, and manners of these young ladies, and will take care that their training is like that of daughters in the best New England families,” it read in part. The girls would study at home until they had acquired the skills they needed to go to school. “When they shall have learned to read English with sufficient facility,” Bacon continued, “we shall take care to interest their minds in such books as will be useful to them.” Useful to them in becoming educated ladies, that is—teachers, perhaps, but not scholars.
Bacon’s opinion of female scholarship was mixed. His younger sister, Delia—considered an intellectual prodigy—had won fame as an author, speaker, and playwright, only to become fixated on the idea that authorship of Shakespeare’s plays should actually be attributed to a group of wits including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Walter Raleigh. “I have all along regarded her darling theory as a mere hallucination,” her brother wrote. Delia had died in an asylum at the age of forty-eight.
In Leonard Bacon’s mind, a girl’s highest goal was not to dazzle the intellectual world but to run a well-organized household. His memorandum to Mori on the girls reflected this view:
We expect them to acquire that knowledge of domestic duties and employments which qualifies an American lady to become the mistress of a family. We expect that they will be taught and will be willing to learn whatever our own daughters learn of work proper to a lady who may have occasion not only to direct the servants in her house but often to teach them how to perform their work.
Mori was more than satisfied; here was the very attitude that had created the women the Meiji reformers had noticed and admired. “Good wife, wise mother,” or ryosai kenbo in Japanese—that was the phrase that would soon enter the argot of the Meiji era, and that was the kind of woman Japan needed in order to move forward. Her contribution would be vital, but limited to the domestic sphere.
But these larger goals were far from the girls’ minds as they learned their way around the house on Church Street. After just a few days at the Bacons’, two things had become clear: Sutematsu and Shige were delightful children, and they weren’t going to get very far with their English as long as they lived in the same house. By the end of the week, Shige had left for Fair Haven, a mile or two away, where another prominent minister, John S. C. Abbott, had agreed to take her in. “We were sorry to part with her eminently Mongolian features and her propensity to see the comical side of things,” Bacon wrote. “She was almost the more interesting one.” But having come to know Kenjiro, Bacon couldn’t very well pack his sister off to another family—and anyway, Bacon continued, Sutematsu “had charmed us all with her simplicity, her intelligence, and her affectionately confiding ways.”
It had been a year—almost to the day—since the Empress Haruko had gazed at five kneeling girls from behind her screen. Now there were three, and for the first time each of the three was on her own. Their American education could begin in earnest.
* Already acquainted with Kenjiro, the Bacons focused their correspondence in the summer of 1872 on Sutematsu alone, but the eventual plan called for both Sutematsu and Shige to join their household.
7 GROWING UP AMERICAN
THOUGH SHIGE AND UME looked to her as the senior member of their unusual trio, Sutematsu settled into the Bacon family as the littlest sister. With the exception of the imposing Leonard Bacon, it was a household of women: Catherine, Leonard’s second wife, whose arthritis often confined her to her bed; Rebecca, more Catherine’s peer than her stepdaughter, briskly efficient manager of the family’s daily details; and Nelly and Alice, the last of the fourteen Bacon children still living at home, ages sixteen and fourteen.
Within a few months, Sutematsu—or “Stemats,” as her name was pronounced and written by her American friends—had become a treasured member of the family. Even the crusty hired Irishwomen who helped with the washing and cooking thought so, “and if they are aware that she is a ‘haythen,’” wrote Bacon, “that makes no difference to them.”
The formidable minister himself quickly developed something of a soft spot for his new ward. In the spring of Sutematsu’s first year in New Haven, P. T. Barnum’s “Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome” stopped there, attracting every child in the area like a magnet. “Barnum’s great menagerie was here two days, but, to my great disappointment, we were unable to give Stemats the opportunity of seeing it,” Bacon wrote. “The little girl’s disappointment we could not doubt, but she did not exhibit any sort of vexation.” Only a year earlier, the girl herself had been the object of just the kind of stares drawn by Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid. She may have missed the circus, but she had clearly crossed over to the side of the gawkers.
Each day, Sutematsu went to Mrs. Bacon’s room after breakfast and spent several hours studying with her. Nelly was her music teacher, sitting next to her on the piano bench in the parlor. But it was with Alice that Sutematsu formed the strongest bond. Similar both in age and in scholarly intensity, the two girls were soon inseparable. And though Sutematsu worked diligently at her lessons, it was undoubtedly the time spent with this new sister that made the most immediate impact on her progress. Chattering away to Alice, instead of to Shige and Ume, she improved her English by the day.
In Alice Mabel Bacon, the youngest of fourteen, one might have expected a pampered pet, but Alice was a serious-minded soul wi
th a sharp wit, a passion for books, and an unusually open mind. She was not the first studious female in the family. Her oldest half-sister Rebecca had only recently returned home to help her invalid stepmother; before that, Rebecca had held the position of assistant principal at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, founded to educate free blacks after the Civil War. A couple of years earlier, when Alice was twelve, she had spent a year living with Rebecca at Hampton, attending classes and even teaching a bit. The other teachers had called Alice “the Little Professor.” Like Sutematsu, she possessed a self-reliance that belied her years, and she understood what it meant to live among people unlike herself.
Before long, Sutematsu was ready to walk with Alice to Grove Hall Seminary, a small primary school for girls run by Miss Maria Monfort just a block away. A three-story frame building, it was topped with a cupola and set well back from the brick herringbone sidewalk. Sutematsu’s world suddenly expanded from the Bacon women to a whole classroom full of girls. As she had studied at home as a child, and then not at all during the years of war and dislocation, it was her first experience in a large group of her peers.
Autograph books were all the rage at Grove Hall, and a classmate named Carrie had a beautiful one, bound in tooled green leather, with “Autographs” stamped in fancy gilt letters. When it was her turn to sign, Sutematsu turned the little oblong book so that her page was tall rather than wide, and wrote her name in Japanese, four kanji characters marching down the page. Alice, never one to suffer fools, was equally unafraid of making a statement. “Cease your chatter, and follow me,” she wrote in Carrie’s book—in elegant Greek. Then, switching back to English, “Yours truly, A. M. Bacon.” One wonders whether autograph-seeking Carrie ever deciphered that page.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 10