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

by Janice P. Nimura

  As a woman whose life was being uprooted and transplanted in the service of her country for the second time, whose mind had been shaped by a culture most of her countrymen had never encountered, Sutematsu could only hope the first party would not prevail.

  AND THEN THE skies cleared, the water turned deep blue instead of grim gray, and the port of Yokohama was only a day ahead of them. Sutematsu, never one to pour out her feelings, wrote in her last shipboard words to Alice only of the glorious weather, and that she felt “splendid except for a nasty cold.” Ume, as usual, confided her innermost thoughts to Mrs. Lanman. “I am wild with joy and can hardly contain myself—next moment I am filled with strange misgivings,” she wrote. “You can imagine my face as red as a beet from now onward, from excitement.” She rushed about the ship, fixing in memory the wheelhouse, the kitchen, the steerage decks, and the officer’s quarters. Scanning the waves, she spotted a school of porpoises. “They swam all around us and so close that we could see them under the water and as they leapt up we could see their whole lengths. All around us the water foamed with their spoutings and we watched them with interest and curiosity[,] glad indeed to see something alive, in the water enjoying themselves.”

  It was a good omen. “Tomorrow turns a new page in my life,” Ume closed her letter. “May it be a good one.” Whatever happened after the Arabic docked, Ume was determined to fulfill the expectations of her family and her country. In the years to come, only a very few would ever be privy to the doubts that plagued her. Below her signature she added a postscript: “This letter intended only for your & Mr. L’s own reading.”

  Sutematsu and Ume lay awake most of their last night on board, talking until the wee hours in their shared stateroom. As dawn broke on Monday, November 20, 1882, they dozed at last, only to be woken by a voice shouting outside their door: “Land!” They dove into their clothes and raced each other up on deck, where the outline of mountains was emerging from the mist.

  “How do you feel now, since you have seen your country?” someone asked.

  “I cannot tell you how I feel,” Sutematsu replied, “but I should like to give one good scream.”

  It was several more hours before the Arabic dropped anchor. She was soon surrounded by small craft churning out to meet her. Sutematsu gave them only an idle glance; the Arabic was several days late, and the uncertainty of their arrival would surely have kept any welcoming party away. But Ume’s eyes were sharper: suddenly she gasped and pointed. On the deck of an approaching tugboat stood a knot of people frantically waving handkerchiefs. As it drew closer, the girls recognized the excited faces: Ume’s father and sister, Sutematsu’s sisters, and their dear Shige.

  Eleven years earlier they had watched from the deck of a different steamer as the edge of an alien land approached. Now, that once-foreign place was the only home they knew. It was the coastline ahead of them that was alien.

  * “Japanning” referred to the exceptionally hard black lacquer prized on decorative objects imported from Japan.

  PART

  III

  The standards of my own and my adopted country differed so widely in some ways, and my love for both lands was so sincere, that sometimes I had an odd feeling of standing upon a cloud in space, and gazing with measuring eyes upon two separate worlds.

  —ETSU INAGAKI SUGIMOTO,

  A Daughter of the Samurai, 1926

  From left to right: Ume, Alice, Shige, and Sutematsu, circa 1901. (Courtesy Vassar College Library Special Collections.)

  10 TWO WEDDINGS

  THE TUG FULL OF eager faces soon pulled alongside the Arabic. The rough crossing was over at last; Sutematsu and Ume had only to step onto the smaller boat for the short ride to the Yokohama docks, and solid ground. Yet as they thanked the American officers and said goodbye to the ship to which they had been confined for three weeks, their relief was tempered with regret. The crew had been kind to them, and the Arabic, despite its discomforts, was at least a familiar space. Once they disembarked, they would truly leave America behind.

  On the dock, their party was engulfed by eager jinrikisha men, “who though very polite were very persistent,” Sutematsu wrote. She and Shige, unwilling to delay their reunion a moment longer, got into a double one, while the others rode singly. The last time Sutematsu had ridden in a jinrikisha, eleven years earlier, she had felt very small; now, sitting in what felt like an “overgrown baby-carriage and whirled away through the narrow streets, lined on either side with tiny houses, I felt as if I were visiting Lilliput.” Ume, for her part, was determined to be delighted with everything Japanese. The strange conveyances were “so nice and comfortable,” she wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “You can’t imagine how nice.”

  Their first stop was the nearby home of Saburo Takaki, familiar to the trio from his years of service as Japanese consul in New York. He and his wife had joined the welcoming party and invited the travelers to lunch in Yokohama before they pushed on to their final destinations in Tokyo. Takaki’s wife inquired as to whether Sutematsu and Ume would prefer Japanese or Western-style cuisine. Japanese, of course, they eagerly assured her. But as the food was served, there was a nervous pause. Would the new arrivals remember how to use chopsticks?

  To everyone’s surprise—not least their own—the two young women took up the unfamiliar utensils without faltering. “I ate the lunch as naturally as one who has never left the soil of the Mikado’s empire,” Sutematsu wrote with bemused relief. “It is a strange fact that skill in using the chopsticks seems to be inherited and the last thing to be forgotten by Japanese otherwise denationalized.” Ume was especially heartened—here at least was one thing she still knew how to do—and basked in the approbation of her hosts. “I get along as well as anybody ever does with them,” she told Mrs. Lanman. “They all say so.”

  After lunch they walked to the train depot. The rail line between Tokyo and Yokohama, not quite complete when they had left, was by now an unremarkable part of the landscape. An hour brought them to Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station, not far from the Imperial Palace, where eleven more members of Ume’s family were on hand to meet their train, bowing and smiling. Another crowd of jinrikisha men gathered. But here the group divided—Sutematsu heading northwest to her mother’s house in the neighborhood called Ushigome; Ume, southwest to her father’s farm in the suburb of Azabu. They were on their own again, and their reeducation in being Japanese was under way.

  AFTER ONE MORE jolting hour in a jinrikisha, Sutematsu stepped down at the gate of the Yamakawa home. There was her mother, Toi, whose resolve to wait for the daughter she’d lost was at last rewarded. There was Kenjiro, looking taller and more dignified since Sutematsu had last seen him in New Haven six years earlier, standing beside a wife she had never met. Kenjiro was now a professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial University, a position hitherto held only by visiting Western advisers. And there were her sisters: the eldest, Futaba, who lived half the week at the Women’s Higher Normal School—Japan’s only teacher-training school for women—where she supervised a dormitory; Misao, back from Russia and working as a French interpreter; and Tokiwa, with her husband and small son, who promptly burst into tears at the sight of this strange new aunt, with her bizarre clothing and shoes and hair. He was the only one who betrayed his feelings so noisily, however. Sutematsu was safe now from flamboyant American embraces. After eleven years of separation, the Yamakawas expressed the joy of reunion with Japanese restraint.

  The house was crowded and busy—in addition to three generations of Yamakawas, there were three boarding students, a manservant, and three maids—but somewhat to Sutematsu’s embarrassment, she found herself the object of everyone’s concern. “They are so afraid I should get sick on account of the change of climate and clothing that they all devote themselves to me and I am in a fair way to become spoilt,” she wrote to Alice. Specially ordered foreign food arrived three times a day from a nearby restaurant—a degree of special treatment that Sutematsu had never received in her life and that, to her
relief, was short-lived. “After the first week I have been allowed to eat Japanese food with meat twice a day.”

  Another nephew, oldest brother Hiroshi’s ten-year-old son, was also glad to see the celebrity status of his “American Aunt” begin to subside. Apple of his grandmother’s eye, he had feared that Sutematsu’s return might displace him in Toi’s favor. “Oh, she is too big for Grandma’s baby,” he exclaimed with relief when they met. (Sutematsu, appalled at the way her mother indulged the boy, found him a nuisance.)

  Sutematsu was grateful now for the enforced study sessions with Kenjiro in New Haven, and the hours of Japanese conversation with Shige at Vassar. Her Japanese, though rusty, was surprisingly serviceable. “As soon as I touched my native soil, my tongue seemed to be loosened,” she wrote. Spoken fluency, at least, was rapidly returning; reading and writing would be another project entirely. With calm resolve, Sutematsu settled down to relearn her past. “My knees at this moment are aching as if they are coming to pieces,” she wrote to Alice from the tatami-matted floor. “I am busy making Japanese clothes for myself.”

  SUTEMATSU AND UME spent their second night in Japan with Shige, at her brother’s elegant home in Shinagawa. Ryo Yoshimasu, whose eye trouble had cut short her own American education, arrived for a brief and bittersweet reunion. “She does not show the ten years’ difference in her looks,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “She seemed glad to see me and asked after you and Mr. Lanman.” No one seemed to know what had become of Tei Ueda, the fifth girl. Beyond the curiosity of seeing the woman whose life had so briefly and intensely converged with theirs, however, the returnees had little to say to Ryo—and no truly comfortable language in which to say it.

  Once Ryo departed, the conversation could flow more freely. There was so much to discuss. Having extended her engagement until her friends’ return, Shige could wait no longer: she and Sotokichi Uriu would be married in ten days’ time. “The day the steamer sails with this letter she will be Mrs. Uriu,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “So often as Sutematsu and I have talked about it, we never dreamed of anything like this.”

  As bewildered now by their surroundings as they had been so long ago in San Francisco, Sutematsu and Ume had trouble imagining their friend setting up housekeeping in Japanese style. At dinner, Shige plied them with “every kind of mess imaginable,” Ume reported, amazed at how the strange flavors seemed somehow familiar. Sutematsu and Shige dressed Ume in a kimono, “and you don’t know how funny I looked,” Ume reported. “Then I took a Japanese hot bath, which would be very odd to you all, but which is very neat and pleasant.” It was certainly odd to Ume as well, whether or not she cared to admit it.

  Tucked up at last in Shige’s comfortable bedroom—the only one in the house with Western-style furniture—the three young women talked late into the night. “Shige is a great help, for she tells us what to do and what not,” wrote Ume. “Japanese etiquette is so strict and I am in fear all the time of making a bad blunder, and of being unintentionally rude.”

  . . .

  FOR UME, REENTRY into the Tsuda family was dismayingly difficult. The initial welcome had been glorious: relatives visiting, letters of congratulation arriving for her father, gifts of candy and fish and glowing red persimmons, celebratory sekihan (rice tinted pink with tiny red adzuki beans) for dinner. “So you see my return is a great thing,” Ume wrote with pride on her third day at home. In addition, the Tsudas’ house was reassuringly equipped with familiar objects. Ume’s father had provided a Western-style bedstead on which Ume spread a Japanese quilt—“so much lighter and warmer than American things.” She had a table in her room for her belongings, and a makeshift washstand. The house had a foreign-style parlor with chairs and carpet and a mantelpiece with a clock. Ume’s parents and sister Koto had converted to Christianity in her absence too, so every meal—served at a table, with chairs—was preceded by grace.

  But the house, isolated in the suburbs and surrounded by cultivated fields, was cramped and overflowing with siblings, most of whom had been born after Ume’s departure. She was often physically uncomfortable, especially in the rooms that were not furnished in Western style. “The hardest thing is . . . taking off the shoes,” she wrote. Koto had thoughtfully knitted house socks for her to wear, but it was strange to go shoeless in company. Instead of thonged sandals, Ume had only high-buttoned boots, and “it is the greatest nuisance to have to button and unbutton every time you go anywhere.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to trade her dresses for kimonos, or to give up her accustomed underpinnings of corset, camisole, petticoat, and stockings. This reluctance led to other difficulties. “I can’t yet sit down polite fashion”—kneeling with a straight back, heels tucked under bottom—“but they don’t make me at all.” “They,” in fact, treated Ume like an exotic doll. All the family and everyone who came to call exclaimed over every detail of her appearance. “My dresses have been shown over and over again—all my various things, hats, ribbons and everything,” she wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “You would have been astonished to see the regular show here one afternoon.” Long ago, the San Francisco ladies who had waylaid her in the corridors of the Grand Hotel had clucked over her embroidered kimono and hair ornaments in just the same way.

  And just as in that faraway hotel room, once again Ume had no idea what the people around her were saying. “If I could only speak my own language,” she wrote. But the little girl whose unself-conscious chatter had delighted the Lanmans now found herself, on the cusp of adulthood, painfully mute. Her father, the erstwhile interpreter, and her sister Koto, who had learned serviceable English at a mission school in Tokyo, translated for her when they could, but letters to America became the only real outlet for Ume’s distress. She poured her thoughts out in writing. “I am bound hand and foot, I am both deaf and dumb,” she lamented. “My father promises to get me some instruction books, but has not yet, and I have learned but little, sad to say, though Koto tries to teach me. But when there are six or seven ways to say anything and they tell me all, I get in a muddle truly.” Just as troubling, she had noticed that Shige, after only a year back in Japan, now occasionally stumbled when speaking English. “Oh, I don’t want to lose my English as Shige has,” she wrote in horror. “I must read and write and talk and keep it up.”

  For the first time in her life, Ume felt awkward. She had always been the little one, elfin, nimble, shinnying up a tree to reach her bedroom window in Georgetown. “But now in Japan I feel so big,” she wrote. “Sutematsu is uncomfortably tall for Japan. What a land of little people it is anyway!” Surrounded by unfamiliar faces, Ume no longer recognized herself. Writing to her best friends in Georgetown—the alliterative threesome of Mattie, Maggie, and Mamie—she flickered between insecurity and disdain. “Much to my alarm and horror do you know, I am actually growing more fat!!!” she moaned. “It is Japanese food I assure you, and then Japanese dresses so loose, and padded make me immense. Why I am almost tempted to take anti-fat,* were it not for my too great indifference to personal looks.” She was a scholar, chosen by her country—not a girl trying to win a husband. Feeling defensive, she aimed a jab: “In this respect, I don’t resemble my country women, because they think all the world of their looks and their beauty, for that is indeed their sole means of attraction.”

  For the first time in her memory, Ume physically resembled the women around her, yet she had never felt more conspicuous. Her face no longer drew stares, it was true; instead it was her actions that marked her. She was perpetually in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, her bows clumsy, her smiles too broad. “I long to jump around, rush wildly about and yet not have it thought strange,” she wrote. Ume was no longer a child, though; she was a young woman, with a heavy sense of responsibility to the government that had sent her abroad. “My father was talking the other day about the money spent on me,” she wrote in a low moment, “and said that it would have been enough in Japan to support a family more than comfortably.” Her American freedom and the freedom of
her girlhood were suddenly and simultaneously at an end.

  NOTHING SIGNALED THE momentous shift in the lives of these three more clearly than Shige’s imminent wedding. “Sutematsu and I hate to have Shige married and no longer a girl like one of us, but of course we don’t say anything,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. The week following their arrival, she and Sutematsu went shopping for Shige’s wedding gift. “If we had only known we could have bought her a lovely present in America, but here it was hard to find anything for her foreign home,” complained Ume, somewhat disingenuously. They had known full well that Shige would soon be married, but from the comfortable distance of half a world away, it had been easier not to think about it. The daunting question of whether a woman could live happily in Japan without a husband remained unanswered.

  Ume settled on a pair of pretty vases as a gift for Shige (“for twelve yen, and that was very reasonable” ), while Sutematsu chose “a sort of tea concern which I cannot express in English with a tea set and a candy plate,” as she described it to Alice. In this, at least, they did not worry about what was proper. Shige would appreciate their gifts whether or not they conformed to Japanese expectations.

  At seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, December 1, 1882, a small group of relatives and intimate friends gathered for the ceremony. “Such a curious mixture,” Ume wrote, “such a wedding never was before and never again will be known.” Radiant, the Japanese bride and Japanese groom were perfectly comfortable in foreign style from head to toe: Uriu in his naval uniform; Shige in maroon silk trimmed with swan’s down, specially ordered from Paris. Both devout Christians, the couple had arranged for a Christian service, though the officiant was a Japanese minister who read the vows in Japanese. The assembled guests included Uriu’s Annapolis roommate, Tasuku Serata, also in his naval uniform; Takashi Masuda, brother of the bride, in the haori jacket and skirt-like hakama trousers worn by men of rank on formal occasions; Takashi’s American colleague Robert Irwin, in a swallowtail coat; Sutematsu and Ume in their best black silk; and the rest of the female guests in kimonos. Western attire notwithstanding, all the guests sat on the tatami-matted floor.