UME, NOW SEVENTEEN, had received her high school diploma from the Archer Institute just as Sutematsu graduated from Vassar. Like many only children an avid reader, Ume had continued to excel in high school, adding Shakespeare and Wordsworth to the novels by Dickens and Scott that she loved to devour. “Miss Tsuda’s progress in Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, and French has been much in advance of her class, she having a clear insight into all the branches to which she has devoted herself,” read her certificate from Archer.
After a decade as the adored foster daughter of the Lanmans, Ume had grown into a sprightly, accomplished, affectionate, and opinionated girl—a familiar face in Georgetown social circles. Her farewell party was covered by the press. “The regret for her departure is as general as it is genuine,” reported the Evening Critic. But although Ume’s memories of Japan had faded almost completely, her adopted country could not quite see her as an American. “Miss Tsuda is a very intelligent young girl, and while her face is of a decidedly national type, it is attractive, and even pretty. Her hair is a marvel of length and thickness, and is a real burden to the small head that carries its weight. She has completed her education at one of our best schools, and goes back home a really good English scholar.”
The Lanmans and Alice accompanied Sutematsu and Ume for much of the journey west. In Chicago, Ume’s foster parents made their reluctant farewells and entrusted the travelers to the care of J. D. Davis and his wife, missionaries returning to Japan. The little party continued west, marveling all over again at the sight of antelope herds and prairie dog towns from the windows of the train, and stopping in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Alice at last said goodbye to the young woman she regarded as a sister.
The girls were unprepared for their effect on the residents of Cheyenne, a railroad town that only fifteen years earlier had been a blank space on the western edge of the Great Plains. Stares and whispers had always been part of their lives in America, but their intimate circles in Georgetown and New Haven and Poughkeepsie had long since ceased to find them exotic. In Cheyenne, they were curiosities all over again. Davis was in town to speak about his work in Japan; he had helped to build the first church in Cheyenne a dozen years earlier. Naturally, the minister hosting them assumed the Japanese girls in his care were part of the package. Before a large gathering of the town’s various congregations at the Cheyenne Opera House, the minister, a Mr. Sanders, announced that Mrs. Davis would address the Ladies’ Missionary Meeting the next day—as would one of the Japanese young ladies.
“I was thunderstruck,” Sutematsu wrote indignantly to Alice from the train afterward. “I never heard of such a thing. I thought it was impertinent of Mr. Sanders to speak in that way when he had not said anything to us at all.” It wasn’t the public speaking that daunted her—she had dazzled the commencement audience at Vassar only a few months earlier; it was the idea that she was a spectacle, and that the public expected her to perform for them.
The people of Cheyenne wanted to hear from a real Japanese girl, but Sutematsu was entirely uninterested in sharing her intimate memories with strangers. “I did not know what to say,” she wrote, “but Mrs. Davis suggested that I should speak of the summer of our coming to this country and also of what I expect to do on my return.” If the ladies of the Missionary Meeting were looking for a personal account of the far-off Orient, they must have been disappointed.
The girls were the talk of the town. “Indeed we have been lionized since we came to Cheyenne,” Sutematsu wrote with incredulity. “Actually a reporter came to interview us! Fortunately we were out so we escaped the ordeal.” It was with some relief that they boarded the westbound train. “The people were very hospitable and warm hearted, but rather trying as they were rather inquisitive.”
Ume, less self-conscious, managed to find some humor in the naked stares. At one point in their journey, two “real Indians” boarded the train, settling in the dining car. The children seated near Ume and Sutematsu begged for permission to go look. “Their mother remarked it might not be polite or agreeable,” Ume wrote, “whereupon I said that if Stematz and I would go, it would only be a fair exchange of free shows, as probably the Japanese are as great curiosities to the Indians as they are to us.”
Onward to San Francisco, where they were hosted in Berkeley by Charles Lanman’s friend John H. C. Bonté, the secretary of the Board of Regents of the University of California. Their stay was a whirl of entertainment, as Sutematsu reported breathlessly to Jessie Wheeler: “We have since we’ve been here been invited to two parties and there is to be one at this house tomorrow and we go to a what is called Junior Day on Saturday which consists of speaking by the students followed by dancing.” This was more like it: California may have seemed like another world, with gardens full of blooming fuchsia and green peas and strawberries on the table in October, but the elite social life of a university town felt perfectly familiar. For the moment, Sutematsu and Ume put aside their thoughts of what lay ahead. The Bonté girls were good company. “We all climbed a tree yesterday,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “Stematz and I had a hard time to get down, and were laughing so much that we could hardly hold on.”
From the moment they had parted in Chicago, Ume had begun writing reams of chatty letters home to Adeline Lanman at a prolific pace that she would maintain almost without pause for the next three decades. Younger than Sutematsu in more than just years, Ume reacted to her changing surroundings like the sheltered American young lady she was: with breezy strokes of startling insensitivity. “It is so strange to see so many Chinese here,” she wrote from Berkeley.
In San Francisco we saw the street that leads to Chinatown and dirty enough it is. Miss Fannie [the Bontés’ daughter] said it would be unsafe for any ladies to walk there without gentlemen. It is a horrid part of the city. All the servants that are employed here are Chinese, and such contrary things they are sometimes, leaving without any warning or any reason. They are generally honest, do not steal and are thrifty, but one has to be careful and watch them to see they are neat. Many of them do not mind telling lies. You may be thankful you have colored servants. If ‘niggers are overrunning Washington,’ it is nothing to the Chinese here.
Now it was Ume’s turn to sound like a missionary. “They smoke opium and go regularly to those awful dens, and there seems to be no way to reach them and make them better.”
The girls had arrived in San Francisco at a moment of acute racial tension. Anti-Chinese rioting had become commonplace: the Chinese workers who had built the transcontinental railroad were blamed for the depressed wages and sagging economy that followed the end of the Civil War and the slowing of the gold rush. Just five months earlier Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending all Chinese immigration. Blithely unaware of any irony, Ume wrinkled her nose and wrote, “I hardly wonder at the people out here not wanting any more of these Chinamen.” Were it not for her elegant clothes and her prominent chaperones, she might have been mistaken for one herself.
Before they sailed, one of the Japanese diplomats paid a call. “You know he talked very bad English, and we could not exactly make out [what he was trying to say],” Ume wrote. Gradually the girls understood that the man was worried about protocol: how would Sutematsu and Ume be compensating the Bontés for their hospitality? Shocked, the girls protested that their hosts had welcomed them as friends; it would be appalling to offer them money in return. “Whereupon he said he would instruct the government to send them a present. For this I am glad, but it seemed such a queer proceeding as it was our own private affair what we did or [where we] stayed. Well there are funny people in the world,” Ume concluded. It was their first reminder of something Ume had allowed to drift to the back of her consciousness: she was an official representative of Japan in America, and as far as the Japanese government was concerned, her affairs were also theirs.
San Francisco was a brief idyll, shadowed by the approach of their departure. On her last day in Berkeley, Ume took a break from her
packing to write one more time. “I think I realize that I am really leaving America,” she confided to Mrs. Lanman. “Before, I felt as if I were on a summer trip, but a long sea voyage is entirely different.” Surrounded by trunks and piles of clothing, she gazed out the window and wondered whether she would ever return. “I am hoping against hope that tomorrow will be bright and sunshiny, for I want America to look its brightest,” she wrote. “We have not had one gloomy day yet, and if tomorrow is, I shall be so sorry.” But mindful of her reader, bereft and anxious back in Washington, Ume forced a smile. “Let everything rest in God’s hands, and feel that whatever happens all is best,” she instructed her foster mother.
The steamer Arabic left San Francisco on October 31. “Ume Tsuda and Stematz Yamakawa are now at sea,” John Bonté wrote to the Lanmans the next day. “We have the profoundest respect and the warmest love for both of them, and I cannot tell which sentiment is the strongest. Few American young ladies could, in the same period, win so much love and esteem. We part with them with great reluctance.”
“I EXPECT AFTER the first days of seasickness to enjoy the trip very much,” Ume had written to Mrs. Lanman before they sailed. “It will be like a seashore sojourn.”
It wasn’t. Despite the lateness of the season, the Arabic’s captain chose the northern route, shorter but rougher. The elegant cane-and-walnut steamer chair Sutematsu and Ume had bought for sunbathing on deck went unused. Though the Arabic’s inbound journey from Yokohama to San Francisco had set a new record of thirteen days and twenty-one hours, the outbound trip dragged on for three weeks.
“The purser who has crossed this ocean fifty seven times says that he never had so rough a passage before,” Sutematsu wrote to Alice. “Actually it has been so stormy that most of the time we could not sit, walk, sleep or eat with any comfort at all. Sometimes I had to hold on to my seat and all I could do was to try not to be thrown down and at night I have been kept awake because I dare not go to sleep for fear I should be flung out of my berth.” Dishes crashed to the floor at every meal; trunks burst open and scattered their contents over the staterooms. And with their course charted just south of the Aleutian Islands, it was bitterly cold.
The company on board did not add much to their comfort. Of nineteen first-class passengers, thirteen were missionaries. “Although it is very pleasant to be with such good, staid people, I wish we had some young people who are not quite so quiet and good,” Ume wrote when she was feeling well enough to hold a pen. The captain apparently agreed: “He says that the storms are due to the fact that there are so many missionaries on board this vessel,” Sutematsu told Alice. “I presume he thinks they are so many Jonahs, but it is to be hoped that he will not propose to throw any of them overboard.” Sutematsu had brought along a pack of cards, but she and Ume hesitated to play—the missionaries would not approve.
Aside from these discomforts, shipboard life was plush—and this time the girls could enjoy it. There were electric bells by the berths for calling the stewardess, tea and toast in bed, multiple courses at lunch and dinner, a well-stocked library, a ladies’ lounge, a smoking room for the gentlemen, and “plenty of waiters & China boys” to bring whatever was needed. Most of the passengers, including the Davises, sat at the captain’s table. The Japanese girls, along with a couple of younger unmarried travelers and a Chinese gentleman and his wife, were at the purser’s table. Both Sutematsu and Ume took note of the mealtime pecking order, with the nonwhites excluded from the captain’s company, but Ume shrugged it off: “It is much nicer at our table, for we laugh and talk, and it is very pleasant indeed.”
Ume found the Chinese couple “the object of some curiosity.” A Chinese passenger in first class was indeed a rarity. Built specifically to capitalize on the flood of Chinese emigrants over the previous three decades, the Arabic carried far more human cargo in steerage than in its limited first-class accommodations. Beneath the spacious staterooms where Sutematsu and Ume picked queasily at their tea and toast, hundreds of Chinese coolies, likewise returning to their native land, were enduring the journey under very different conditions.
As the Arabic pitched and yawed across the unusually turbulent Pacific with its unusually placid first-class passengers, Sutematsu and Ume had nothing but time in which to contemplate their uncertain futures. What did they know of Japan? Ume had the photographs her mother had sent with her eleven years earlier: her parents’ house, a family portrait with her grandmother, a picture of herself and her mother hand in hand. She had been petted by Japanese dignitaries and had heard her foster father discussing the affairs of the Japanese legation at home.
But at seven she had been too young to retain many memories of her Japanese childhood, and by the time she had matured enough to take an interest in her native country, she had already begun to feel like an American girl. She had absorbed from the Lanmans a worldview steeped in Christian morality. Her attitude toward “the Japanese” was not far different from that of any of the young missionary women aboard the Arabic: curiosity, a determination to bring enlightenment to the unenlightened, and a healthy dose of trepidation. “We must not make enemies, or offend their taste, but conform as much as possible yet improve their customs & method of dressing, of society, etc. in our own little circles,” Ume wrote. Mrs. Davis warned that conversion to Christianity in Japan was as yet far more common among the poor. “Hard to be thought ignorant or of inferior mind because we follow Him,” Ume mused. “I think we know something at least of the difficulties, but do not imagine that either of us feels any differently from what we did—we still want to go, and were it ten times darker and gloomier we would not[,] if we could[,] turn back.” Japan is a “new beautiful country,” Ume stoutly declared to Mrs. Lanman. “Come and see me sometime soon and you will see me in my home so happy indeed,” she wrote, whistling a cheerful tune to banish her fear. She no longer spoke a word of her mother tongue.
Sutematsu’s understanding of Japan was far more sophisticated. Nearly twice Ume’s age when she had left Japan, she carried with her indelible memories of her ancestral home, her extended family, and the traumatic defeat of her domain at the hands of the emperor’s forces. Her brother Kenjiro had kept her understanding of the rapidly shifting political situation in Japan current. While Ume had become, at her core, an American girl, Sutematsu still identified herself as Japanese—an identity she occasionally found uncomfortable.
“Japan is no longer a land of mysteries,” she had proclaimed to the members of the Philalethean Society during her junior year:
But in spite of many travelers and numberless books and lecturers, only a few Americans know truly what Japan is. Not long ago an intelligent and well educated young lady asked me seriously if we had lakes and rivers. Another innocently inquired, “Do you have grave-yards in Japan?” . . . Perhaps the most intelligent query I have ever received was from a little girl of seven years, who, after asking whether we considered a dish of mice a rare delicacy, looked at me earnestly for a moment, and then asked gravely, “What makes you look so different from us? Is it because you are Japaned?”*
Sutematsu may have been irritated by the tactless ignorance of certain Americans, but after eleven years, and despite her bravado, Japan had in some ways become a land of mysteries to her as well. Yet it was still, paradoxically, hers:
It is not to be wondered at, that Americans have such peculiar ideas about our country, considering how very different it is from other parts of the world. You say we do every thing upside down. We turn the leaves of a book from left to right; we write up and down instead of horizontally; we place the surname before the Christian name; and so on. There is no limit to the list of our oddities.
Her tone is sardonic, but it masks a note of uncertainty. Sutematsu could no longer read or write in Japanese; the books whose pages she turned (from right to left) were all in English. She signed herself “Stematz Yamakawa,” and not the other way round. She may have claimed Japanese “oddities” as her own, but they were not much mor
e comfortable to her than to the thoughtless young ladies who exclaimed over them.
The rest of the essay, which Sutematsu titled “Recollections of Japanese Family Life,” dwelled on childhood memories of her family’s sprawling compound: the lotus blossoms, the spare and elegant rooms, the loyal servants. She was describing a world that had begun to disappear even before she sailed for America. Her family had lost everything in the Boshin War, and the old domains had been reorganized into prefectures just before she left Japan. In 1876 the Meiji government had abolished the samurai class entirely. The world of Sutematsu’s childhood had been erased.
“Consequently, you must constantly make the distinction between the Old Japan where the feudal system, and the darkness of the Middle Ages still held sway,” she instructed her readers confidently, “and the New Japan with telegraphs and railroads, banks and universities, and a government rapidly transforming itself into a limited monarchy.” This was the Japan in which she would be making her future. Soon she would see it for the first time; as yet, it existed for her only in her imagination.
For a New Haven–raised Vassar graduate, however, Sutematsu’s sense of Japan was startlingly accurate. In the essay on Japanese politics she had written for the Vassar Miscellany in her senior year, she followed her summary of Japan’s transformation with a conclusion that acknowledged the uncertainty of Japan’s future:
What will be the end of these agitations no one ventures to predict. In fact, the people of Japan could be divided into three most diverse parties: first, those who are conservative, who believe in the ancient regime and who strenuously oppose the introduction of any new principle or foreign civilization; the second class are those who advocate reform but believe in slow and sure progress; the third class are thoroughly discontented with the past and present and desire a change at any cost. Which of these is strong enough to overcome the other two, can not yet be decided.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 15