Vassar Female College was unlike any existing institution of higher learning, most notably because all of its students lived together in a single grand edifice: the spectacular Main Building, five hundred feet wide and five stories high, “heated by steam, lighted with gas, ventilated in the most perfect manner, and supplied throughout with an abundance of pure soft water.” The building had its own elevator, along with a chapel, a library, an art gallery, lecture halls, and faculty apartments. Approached by a stately avenue lined with still-diminutive evergreens, it dominated the landscape. Observers compared it to the Palais des Tuileries in Paris.
“I think of Alice constantly & wish she might be able to come here[,] for I have never seen any thing more delightful, than the arrangements for health and out of door pleasures, and any body with the will, has opportunities for culture not offered I think, in any other place,” Catherine marveled when she visited. “I mean for girls,” she added.
As it turned out, the Bacons could not afford to send Alice to college. But in September of 1878, the opening of Vassar’s fourteenth academic year, Sutematsu Yamakawa and Shige Nagai moved into the Main Building, their tuition paid by the Japanese government. They were the first nonwhite students to enroll. Shige would be a special student in the music department, and Sutematsu had been accepted for the full four-year baccalaureate degree.
Sutematsu had grown up with Alice for a sister, and matched her in ambition and ability. She rose to any challenge that presented itself. Vassar, the first of the group of women’s colleges that would later be known as the Seven Sisters, claimed to offer women the same education that Yale and Harvard offered young men. In this, at least, Sutematsu had no qualms about claiming her equal right.
Vassar’s student accommodations were elegant, with carpets and rockers, upholstered sofas and wall-mounted bookshelves, and imposing bedsteads carved of black walnut, wide enough for two girls to share. Servants kept the rooms tidy, and a formidable “lady principal” kept the girls in line. There were indoor bathrooms on each floor, and students were required to bathe twice a week. Each day ended with chapel after dinner, and Bible class and a longer service were held on Sundays. Meals were taken in the dining hall, where each girl had a regular place and provided her own napkin. For recreation, girls could stroll the gravel paths of the two-hundred-acre campus, go boating or skating on the lake, and visit the college’s own bowling alley. Twenty minutes of quiet privacy were enforced twice a day, and it was recommended that students use that time for prayer. Everyone got up at 6:30, and lights-out was at ten. Board and tuition was four hundred dollars per year.
Vassar was a little world unto itself, and its professors formed the pantheon of deities. Truman Backus, head of the English department, riveted and inspired the girls with his youth and passion, both for literature and for current affairs. “He waked us up and kept us awake and we never wanted to miss a class for fear we should miss something,” remembered one student. “He made us do our own thinking and that is the mark of a true teacher.” Others seemed more interested in looking at him than listening to him. “You should see his Cassius-like proportions,” gushed one girl to her mother. “‘Long, and lank and brown as is the ribbed sea-sand,’ and above all his keen blue eyes.”
If Professor Backus was dazzling, the Dutchman Henry Van Ingen, head of the art department, was dear. Gentlemanly and approachable, he put every girl at ease with his quiet humor while holding them to his own high standard. When one student, copying a Raphael cherub, balked at completing the nude figure, Van Ingen was firm: “What’s the matter? Finish it up! Put in everything you see. What the Lord made you don’t need to be ashamed of.” The girls adored him. “I expect to talk about him in every letter,” wrote one. “He is our oasis in a sea of troubles—to mix metaphors.”
Most memorable of all was Miss Maria Mitchell, astronomer. (At Vassar, male professors were addressed as “Professor” ; female faculty were considered merely teachers and referred to as “Miss.” ) The first building to be completed on the Vassar campus was the Observatory—a trim, two-story brick building crowned with a dome and equipped with a powerful telescope—and from the college’s inception Miss Mitchell claimed it as her domain. Stout, squat, and square-jawed, her hair styled in incongruously dainty ringlets, she cut an unforgettable figure. She had discovered a comet, which was named for her, and she counted among her personal friends all the notable women of the day, including Julia Ward Howe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She had no patience for etiquette or the ninnies who fretted over it.
Miss Mitchell’s blunt candor discomfited many, but she was as unfiltered with praise as with criticism. Many a new girl took heart from her cheerful “How are you getting on?” during the first weeks of term. “Learn as if you will live forever; live as if you will die tomorrow” was her motto, and she insisted that female faculty be recognized for their accomplishments alongside the men. She was famous for her “dome parties,” at which those lucky enough to receive an invitation enjoyed charades, strawberries and cream, and Miss Mitchell’s own poetry, composed for the occasion. She knew, though, that even her most gifted students were unlikely to choose the life of a celibate scientist. At one party she offered this verse to her guests:
Who lifting their hearts to the heavenly blue
Will do woman’s work for the good and true;
And as sisters or daughters or mothers or wives
Will take the starlight into their lives.
Reaching for the stars was lonely work. Vassar’s students may have been pioneers in higher education for women, but after graduation most of them would dedicate their lives to marriage and motherhood, not scholarship.
ALL FRESHMEN TOOK Latin, math, and natural history; to this, Sutematsu’s first-year schedule added English composition, German, and elementary drawing. Shige, enrolled as a special student in the School of Music, studied music history and theory, voice, piano, and organ. She also took English composition and French, and a little math in her first year (arithmetic had been a weak spot on her entrance exam). For the first time since those initial months in Washington, the two girls lived together and, at Sutematsu’s insistence, added one more subject to their course of study: Japanese. Every day they would retire to their room for an hour to chat in their mother tongue.
Though she submitted loyally to her friend’s enforced language practice sessions, Shige would much rather have been out enjoying herself. Where Sutematsu was studious and elegant, Shige was excitable and full of fun. As a student she was not particularly distinguished, but she was beloved: indispensable at candy pulls and sleigh rides, or when someone gave a “spread” and ordered ice cream and cake from town. She loved to dance; her rendition of the Highland fling rendered her classmates helpless with laughter. And when they were laid up in the infirmary, it was Shige who came with get-well wishes. “I have no memory of an hour’s indisposition at Vassar that I did not hear the click, click of Singhi’s [sic] funny little walk as she came down the corridor bringing me a pitcher of lemonade and unlimited sympathy,” wrote one friend.
Shige was a regular performer at college concerts, and her interpretations of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Mozart were always greeted with warm applause; notices in the Vassar Miscellany praised her spirited expressiveness. The well-regarded musician and scholar Frederick Ritter, native of Strasburg, headed the School of Music, and Shige became his student. Though she studied the canon of European classical music, she did not forget the melodies of her childhood. “Japanese arias given me by Miss Shige Nagai,” reads a note scribbled in Ritter’s hand at the top of a sheaf of hand-notated staff paper.
Sutematsu cultivated a different image: graceful but reserved, intellectual, ambitious. She excelled at English and contributed highly polished essays to the Miscellany. She projected an air of cosmopolitanism. To her classmates she looked “like a beautiful Jewess of a poetic type”—less alien, though still exotic. Shige, on the other hand, “was broadly and indubitably Japanese.” W
hile Shige frolicked at blindman’s buff, Sutematsu honed her chess game and beat all her teachers at whist. Another English instructor, Helen Hiscock, described “a sense of reserve power” in the tall, slender girl. “When the class-room was depressed by that ‘sleepiness’ which experienced teachers dread, Stematz* could confound her languid American classmates with a brilliant recitation in literature or logic.”
The only time anyone ever saw a flush of excitement on Sutematsu’s calm face was at the college post office, where from time to time she received a letter that had traveled farther than any girl in Poughkeepsie—except Shige—had ever dreamed of going. It might be from Kenjiro in Tokyo, full of politics and international affairs. Or it might even be from Russia. Sutematsu was not the only girl in her family who had been sent abroad—one of her older sisters, Misao, was in St. Petersburg. Separated for most of their lives, the two sisters shared little common experience and no written language: Misao’s life was lived in French. When a letter from this distant sister arrived, Sutematsu convened an informal council of her friends—some to help compose an appropriate letter in reply, others to put it into decent French. Helping Sutematsu was so much more entertaining and exotic than writing their own letters home.
Just as Shige and Ume had always deferred to Sutematsu as their leader, her classmates soon looked to her as well. By the end of her first year she had been elected president of her class for the year to come. “I believe it was on account of her studiousness that she was appointed, or it may have been because she was a favorite, I do not know which,” fourteen-year-old Ume wrote to her mother in Tokyo, betraying perhaps a touch of envy. The accolades had to this point been mostly hers.
When she returned as a sophomore, Sutematsu’s new office required her to address the incoming freshmen at the Sophomore Party, a duty she discharged with notable grace. She was invited to join the Shakespeare Society, reserved for those of literary attainment. Her marks were among the highest in the class, and her company was coveted. Each year the college observed Founder’s Day, a holiday in honor of Matthew Vassar’s birthday; in her junior year Sutematsu was named marshal for the event and led the festivities in Japanese dress. There was something of the fairy tale about this tall, dark girl who insisted she wasn’t a princess: who among the other girls had ever needed to dispel a rumor like that?
The largest student organization on campus was the Philalethean Society, “Lovers of Truth,” founded originally as a literary club. By the time Sutematsu and Shige arrived, the group was responsible for most of the entertainment on campus: recitations, lectures, music, and especially comic dramas. (Love of truth did not extend to trousers; girls playing male roles wore false mustaches but men’s clothing only as far as the waist, over their usual long skirts.) Though Sutematsu refrained from taking the stage in a dramatic role, her name did appear on evening programs in other ways. “Miss Yamakawa’s essay was perhaps the most enjoyable of the exercises,” the Vassar Miscellany reported in the fall of 1880. “She told us of life in a Japanese household, and by her vivid description of some of the scenes of her childhood easily held the attention of all.” Who could match the romance of Sutematsu’s lost childhood world, where “the sacred lotus spread its broad, shield-like leaves” across the surface of an ornamental lake, “no profane shoes were allowed to make their defacing marks” on the soft paleness of the tatami-matted floors, and a small army of pages, maids, gardeners, and gatekeepers kept the expansive compound running smoothly?
DEPARTURE FOR VASSAR had not severed Sutematsu and Shige’s earlier friendships. During their three-month summer vacations they returned to New Haven or traveled to cooler destinations, often in the company of Ume and the Lanmans. Charles Lanman had made it a decades-long habit to spend part of the summer on Block Island, a pristine spot off the coast of Rhode Island. The Lanmans stayed at the Ocean View Hotel, among the most lavish resorts in New England, where the girls shared veranda strolls and evening card parties with generals and judges, politicians and writers—the cream of Gilded Age society.
Ume delighted in the company of the older girls on these trips. Ocean bathing was a favorite activity, especially for Sutematsu, “who is a fine swimmer,” Ume wrote admiringly, “and is perfectly at home in the water.” Lanman took the girls driving to the cliffs at the island’s southern end, where they could gaze at the waves foaming over the rocks. On one memorable evening they were invited for a moonlight sail. Ume recounted the scene for her mother: “The night was very still, and there was no breeze, so we went on very slowly. The reflection of the moon on the water was very beautiful, and as we went on, several persons began to sing songs of all kinds, which sounded very sweetly.”
In June of 1881, Ume traveled to Poughkeepsie for commencement. The ten years granted the girls by the Japanese government were drawing to a close, and though Sutematsu and Ume had successfully petitioned for one-year extensions to complete their respective college and high school degrees, for Shige three years of college was enough. Her health was uncertain; her eyes were giving her trouble. She had earned a certificate in music from Vassar. And Sotokichi Uriu was graduating from the Naval Academy at Annapolis and returning to Japan.
Shige had never lost touch with the boy who had lived across the street in Fair Haven. Uriu had even come to Vassar once, part of a contingent of cadets invited to supply dance partners at a Vassar fête. He made his way to Poughkeepsie again that June. His life and Shige’s had followed similar paths, ones that diverged profoundly from those of nearly every other Japanese on earth. It was becoming clear to both of them that the road forward was one they might walk together.
The close of the school year at Vassar comprised several acts: the president’s baccalaureate address; a musical soiree, at which Shige and the other five music school graduates were the featured performers; Class Day, at which the seniors passed the torch to the juniors; and finally commencement. As Shige took her place with the graduates that year, and Sutematsu had her own responsibilities with the junior class, Ume, feeling quite grown-up, assumed the role of hostess at the festivities, finding seats for Shige’s guests, including Uriu. “The girls say I was very convenient,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “I was on my feet all day going here & there, playing the agreeable & going to bed late, getting up early and seeing everything, that I felt utterly worn out.”
At commencement, the graduates took the front rows of the chapel and the younger classes filled the galleries as Shige’s teacher, Professor Ritter, played an organ voluntary. The centerpiece of the program was a debate between two seniors “as to whether the negro is doomed or not.” The speaker for the affirmative declared that “wherever an inferior and superior race were brought together the inferior succumbed and went into servitude.” Her opponent, though holding out more hope for the future of the black man, opened her remarks with “flat head, flat nose, and thick lip” and allowed as how “it could not be expected he would emerge from slavery with high ideas of literature and art.”
If anyone suffered a moment of discomfort at the airing of this topic in the presence of Shige, Sutematsu, and their guests, it went unrecorded. In most minds, these polished college girls were in a separate racial category altogether: colored, to be sure, but also talented, dutiful, and deserving—a credit to their progressive (if still heathen) nation, as well as to Vassar. “It is evident from their actions that the president and faculty desire much to get me,” Ume wrote, “but I guess they won’t.” One more year was all the Japanese government had granted.
BY OCTOBER, SHIGE was in San Francisco, ready to embark on the steamer Oceanic, bound for Japan. The city that had gawked at her nearly a decade earlier was now admiring, if still faintly patronizing. “Through her connection with the Abbott family she came into close association with other famous literary families of New-England, and imbibed the spirit as well as the habits and customs of those with whom she lived,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “She is now a graceful girl, with petite figure, bright an
d intelligent face, and polished but unaffected manners, dressing prettily in American costume.” A “thorough New-England girl in all her instincts,” she offered a ringing valedictory comment:
My country will never become advanced until her women and mothers are educated, and our women will never, as a class, be educated so long as they marry so early, for the years from 15 to 20 they should spend in school.
She made no mention of what she planned to do with her American education. She was twenty, and she had studied hard; by her own logic, she was free to marry. Daunting though it might be to return to the land she had last seen as a ten-year-old, her intended was waiting for her. Though it had always been the tradition in samurai families to arrange appropriate marriages between young people who had barely met, Shige would marry a man of her own choosing. She sailed with more excitement than dread, eager to join Sotokichi Uriu and embark on a new phase of her life, permanently partnered by a husband uniquely able to understand her.
She was not the only Japanese female on board. Her companion for the journey was a young girl named Shiori Louisa Wakayama, about the same age as Shige had been when she first sailed for America—and her story was a strange echo of Shige’s own.
The girl was the daughter of Norikazu Wakayama, a member of the Iwakura Mission with whom Shige had traveled to America in 1872. While visiting New York with the embassy, Wakayama had stayed in a boardinghouse run by a Jamaican-born woman named Julia Shanahan, a divorcée “of Spanish descent, black eyed, stylish and well educated.” Mrs. Shanahan had followed Wakayama to Japan shortly after his departure. Three years later she returned to Brooklyn with his daughter in tow. She had agreed, she said, to educate the girl in America, with Wakayama paying her the lavish sum of a thousand dollars per annum. Years had passed, the money had ceased to arrive, and then Wakayama brought suit to reclaim his daughter. Despite a tearful appearance by the distraught girl on the witness stand, the judge had ruled in her father’s favor, and now Shiori Louisa was on her way back to Japan, entrusted to Shige’s care for the journey.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 13