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

by Janice P. Nimura

  The second admirer whose eyes had followed Sutematsu as she delivered Shakespeare’s lines two months earlier had been a member of the audience. A portly man of middle age, jowly and grave, one of the highest-ranking present that night, he had taken careful note of the young woman’s cosmopolitan grace. Shortly following Sutematsu’s triumph as Portia, her brothers received a formal and utterly unexpected inquiry: Iwao Oyama, minister of war, requested the hand of their youngest sister in marriage.

  The proposal was shocking. Oyama was one of the most powerful men in the Meiji government. He was forty years old, a recent widower with three small daughters, a battlefield veteran whose barrel chest afforded barely enough room for his decorations. And he was a Satsuma man: sworn enemy of the Aizu.

  This, more than anything, stunned Sutematsu’s family. During the siege of Tsuruga Castle, in the last desperate days of the Boshin War, Oyama had been one of the “potato samurai” closing in on the beleaguered Aizu from the surrounding hills. He had himself fired the very cannonballs that Sutematsu and her sisters had dodged within the castle walls. He bore scars from that battle—perhaps from the very ammunition the girls had helped to make. Fifteen years had passed, the war was long over, and Oyama was now Hiroshi Yamakawa’s superior officer in the army. But at a deeper level, he remained the enemy. The Yamakawas turned him down flat.

  Oyama had more in common with Sutematsu, however, than was at first apparent. One month after she had sailed for San Francisco with the Iwakura Mission in 1871, he had boarded a French mail boat and headed in the other direction, via the Indian Ocean, to study European military technology. Determined to master French, he had settled in Geneva (there were too many Japanese expatriates in Paris for his taste). He had lived abroad for nearly three years and returned with a taste for all things European. He understood better than most that a modern Japanese statesman needed a consort who was comfortable with public life and conversant in current affairs, and he knew his daughters would benefit from a stepmother who could teach them Western ways.

  Still mourning his first wife, a woman no older than Sutematsu who had succumbed to complications of childbirth just the summer before, Oyama hadn’t intended to remarry so soon. But Sutematsu was the only woman in Japan with a bachelor’s degree. She spoke English like a native, and some French too. She was tall and slim and elegant and poised. She dressed well, and she knew how to dance. She was perfect.

  Oyama’s dapper cousin Tsugumichi Saigo, minister of agriculture and the ranking Satsuma leader in Tokyo, took it upon himself to act as go-between and bring the Yamakawas around. Honoring them with several personal visits, he shrewdly appealed to the family’s outsized sense of duty. Yes, Satsuma and Aizu had a troubled history. But the new Japan depended on its most talented citizens to stand together and lead the nation forward. The union of such an accomplished daughter of Aizu with the heroic minister of war—the very man who had chosen the ancient poem that provided the lyrics for Japan’s new national anthem—would set an example for all Japanese citizens to transcend the past. Couched in those terms, the offer was harder to reject. But while the Yamakawas retained many of the attitudes of their samurai heritage, they had absorbed enough of Western ways to agree that the decision was not theirs to make. Sutematsu would choose her own path.

  A year earlier she would have found the idea of such a marriage absurd. Oyama was a stranger, a statesman, old enough to be her father—it would be as if Portia married the duke at the end of the play instead of Bassanio. All her life Sutematsu had planned to pursue the goal of promoting women’s education in Japan. How could she possibly join her life to Oyama’s? Or to anyone’s?

  But the months since her return had been chastening ones, in terms of both the work available to her and the larger issue of the place of women in her native country. She could toil away, tutoring English privately until her literacy in Japanese improved, and then perhaps join the faculty at the Normal School, like her sister. But would standing before a classroom of girls every day for the rest of her life really make much of a difference?

  Uprooted at the age of eleven, she had spent half her life as the one who was not like the others, the only Japanese girl that most around her had ever met. Must she now spend the rest of her life as the only unmarried woman—still the odd one out, even in her native land? Before, at least, she’d had Shige to share her strange circumstances; with Shige married, there was only Ume, who had never been the same kind of soulmate. The future that Sutematsu had imagined now looked terrifyingly lonely. She did not love Iwao Oyama—she had only just met him—but he was intelligent and well respected, and he seemed to understand the strangeness of her position. With him, it might be possible to serve her country as well as herself: to be both useful and happy.

  “What must be done is a change in the existing state of society,” she wrote, “and this can only be accomplished by married women.” Nine months earlier, she had stood before the assembled guests at Vassar’s commencement as a star student, an orator, a leader. Newspapers had reported her remarks on international policy. Classmates and professors had spoken of her glittering future. As Oyama’s wife, with access to the most rarefied levels of power, she might yet fulfill some of their expectations.

  “By the way do you remember I told you that I had an offer from a gentleman in a rather high position,” Sutematsu wrote to Alice with studied nonchalance. “Well, he has asked me again and I am thinking of it.” It was the first week in April, and Sutematsu had in fact already made the difficult decision to accept Oyama’s proposal. Telling Alice of her decision, however, was even harder. “If I thought that if I did not teach, I would be perfectly useless to Japan, I would not hesitate to devote my whole life to teaching, but I feel sure that I can do some service to the country by giving up my pet plan,” she continued. “It is all so strange and confusing and I cannot tell what is right or what is wrong.” Was it selfish or selfless to change her mind?

  HOURS OF INTIMATE conversation with Shige and Ume had been spent debating Sutematsu’s decision; “she grew thin with worrying and pondering and wavering,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman. Ume’s own response flickered between envy and relief. With this one dramatic step Sutematsu would vault past them all—even those they had once held in awe. Kiyonari Yoshida, the former Washington chargé d’affaires who had attended the Philadelphia Centennial with them, was now back in Tokyo as well. “I wonder what he thought and said when he heard of it first,” Ume wrote, “because he always considered us children or girls, and now Sutematsu is as good and better in the Japanese sense than Mrs. Y,† and Sutematsu’s husband older than he.”

  Sutematsu would never need to worry about money again. “Mr. Oyama is rich, has a lovely house entirely foreign, rather Frenchy, and Sutematsu will always wear foreign dress, and have everything she wants,” Ume wrote. She could “have lovely entertainments, dances, dinner parties, bring ladies and gentlemen together, show the great men what a woman can be and can do, and be Madam Oyama,” Ume imagined. At the same time Sutematsu would be “no more our Steam, our Vassar graduate, or hospital nurse, or school teacher.” Oyama’s powerful colleagues would never seek Sutematsu’s counsel, and their wives could never match her intellect. There would be no more cozy late-night discussions at Shige’s; Sutematsu’s new rank would not permit such informality. And though Oyama’s reputation was irreproachable—“He never drinks, or does any of those dreadful things others do, and he is very pleasant, and I am sure very, very kind”—to Ume he was a cipher: there was, for one thing, no language in which they could converse. No, she could not imagine making the choice on which Sutematsu had settled.

  For Sutematsu, the marriage was not simply about wealth or influence. It was a chance to take root. By July, she could explain herself more clearly to Alice (who had already received the startling news, via Ume’s indiscretion, from Mrs. Lanman). “Although they all love me at home, I am not absolutely needed,” she wrote,

  and the feeling that if I were dead, pe
ople would miss me but not mourn for me for very long used to make me very blue indeed. Mother has a grandson to whom she is wholly devoted, besides having lots of other children beside myself. All my brothers and sisters are either married or have children. Shige has her husband, and so none of these people can be said to be dependent on me for their comfort, but now it is different. I have someone whose happiness is in my keeping and whose children’s welfare is in my hands.

  She had traveled a very long way from the day, eleven months earlier, when she had exhorted Alice to hurry up and move to Tokyo, where they would keep house together and found their own school. “I would never take such a step without due consideration and I think I have done right,” she insisted to Alice. “He is so thoroughly good that I am sure I may trust my future to him. I suppose you will not like it and I have thought over that too, but I felt that in questions of this nature one can not hope to please everybody.” Her words betrayed a lingering unease. “I felt somehow that I was ungrateful to you, but I know that you are too generous to think so,” she wrote. “Besides, you would not wish that this feeling should prevent me from doing what I think would be for my future happiness and welfare.” She tried not to dwell on how her decision would affect Alice’s future happiness and welfare. “I hope you are not angry with me. It is for the best.”

  Alice’s reaction has not survived, and Sutematsu did not write again for the better part of a year. She was busy, to be sure, with French lessons now on top of her Japanese studies, and social calls on Oyama’s acquaintances, and dressmaker’s fittings for her trousseau. But her letters to Alice from this point are few and far between. The Vassar girl’s frank confidences cease. The wife of the minister of war would need to keep her feelings more to herself.

  THE WEDDING WAS small and private, as befitted a widower embarking on matrimony for the second time. Neither Shige nor Ume was present. Ume had stolen a peek at the wedding dress at Sutematsu’s house a few days earlier: exquisitely embroidered silk, with a long court train and custom-made lace at the throat, she reported to Mrs. Lanman. Oyama had given Sutematsu a diamond ring with three brilliant-cut stones, ordered from Switzerland. (It looked “all together too magnificent on my scraggy fingers,” Sutematsu wrote to Alice.) But otherwise, as far as Ume was concerned, the great event was disappointingly anticlimactic: “so matter-of-fact, so simple and quiet, that it seems strange,” Ume wrote. “She just left one house and went to the other, dressed in the gorgeous dress that no one saw except the people of the house, and there is no fuss, no wedding trip, no jollification, or sending off.” What was the good of marrying an important man if you couldn’t have an important wedding? “As it is,” Ume complained, “I don’t feel that she is married one single bit.”

  The ceremony took place at Oyama’s house. Afterward, friends and relatives received wedding announcements engraved in spidery script on large squares of ivory card: Le Ministre de la Guerre General Oyama Iwao à l’honneur de faire part de son mariage avec Mlle Yamagawa qui a eu lieu à Tokio le 8 Novembre 1883. A handful of the couple’s most intimate acquaintance were invited to dinner the following evening. Already, Sutematsu seemed different to Ume, “acting hostess to all the ladies so well that I could not see but a little of her.” Ume longed to get her alone, hear about the ceremony, ask her what lavish presents she had received. But “Steam,” the big sister, the confidante, was not available. “I must teach my tongue not to call her Stematz in the presence of others, but ‘Okusan’ (Madam) or else Mrs. Oyama,” Ume resolved. “Shige is always Shige, company or not, but I can’t be so familiar with Stematz except when we are alone, and we won’t be alone often.” Ume found the dinner uncomfortable: the conversation was all in Japanese, and Sutematsu—Madame Oyama—could be of no help to her.

  Nor was Shige there to toast her dearest friend that night. A jolting jinrikisha ride to a formal dinner was not a good idea for her just then: four days later she gave birth to her first child, a girl named Chiyo.

  Sutematsu was now married; and Shige, a mother. “I must get used to the idea,” wrote Ume, “and not mind being all alone.”

  * Allan’s Anti-Fat, an elixir derived from seaweed, was a popular Victorian weight loss supplement.

  † Mrs. Yoshida was a former geisha, a woman of rank by marriage only, not by birth. Several of the highest-ranking Meiji leaders took their favorite geisha as wives, perhaps because exposure to the West had taught them to look more favorably upon love matches, but also because a woman trained in the arts of music and conversation was useful as a consort for a Western-style statesman.

  11 GETTING ALONG ALONE

  “PLEASE DON’T WRITE MARRIAGE to me again—not once,” Ume protested to Mrs. Lanman at the beginning of that first summer back in Tokyo. “I am so sick of the subject, sick of hearing about it and discussing it. I am not going to marry unless I want to.” She and Sutematsu and Shige had been a country of three—tiny, perhaps, but secure. Now everything had changed. Their friendships remained, but the country of three had become, at least in Ume’s eyes, a country of one.

  Having made her aversion to matrimony clear, Ume had no choice but to embrace the question of work. On the plus side, she was better qualified than almost anyone in Japan to teach English and Western ways. The trouble was that, all of a sudden, those skills weren’t necessarily what everyone wanted to learn. After a decade of headlong enthusiasm for Western ideas, the blistering pace of change was making some reformers queasy. “A few years ago everything foreign was liked, and the cry was progress. Now, Japanese things are being put ahead, and everything foreign is not approved of, simply because it is foreign,” Ume wrote. “If we wish the government to endow for us an English school for girls, we have come home at a bad time.”

  During the 1870s, while the girls were abroad, Japan had hired thousands of American and European engineers, technicians, and consultants, paying them handsomely. In the years immediately following the departure of the Iwakura Mission, the Meiji government had replaced the traditional lunar calendar with the Gregorian, created a conscript army, instituted a national land tax, and mandated four years of compulsory education for both boys and girls—huge strides toward national stability and international relevance. In 1877, just a year after participating in the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Japan held its first National Exhibition in Tokyo’s Ueno Park, not far from the temple where the shogun’s forces had made their last stand less than a decade earlier. There were displays of art, produce, manufactured goods, and livestock. Japan’s own Machinery Hall featured a mechanical loom invented by a Japanese man.

  Even as crowds of spectators in Tokyo celebrated Japan’s progress, however, at the other end of the country a desperate last stand for the traditions of the past was under way. Takamori Saigo was a burly and charismatic statesman who had broken with the Meiji leadership over its rapid reforms: in his mind, the samurai class should remain in control and assert Japan’s growing strength more aggressively.* Retreating to his Satsuma stronghold near the southern city of Kagoshima, Saigo dug in. Tens of thousands of disaffected samurai rallied to his cause, but the new imperial conscript army, equipped with state-of-the-art artillery, vastly outnumbered them. By the end of that summer the Satsuma Rebellion was over: the rebels in the south had been decimated, and the iconic Saigo had committed suicide. The forces of modernization seemed to have triumphed unequivocally.

  Two years later, in 1879, former US president Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Japan. The Meiji leaders—especially those who remembered visiting the White House with the Iwakura Mission in 1872—were beside themselves. The hero of the American Civil War was a natural idol for a group of former samurai who had triumphed in Japan’s upheaval and had just finished using Western military technology to silence their own challenge from rebels in the south. No matter that Grant himself advised the Meiji leadership against liberalizing Japanese society too quickly. “It is said that Grant is receiving more honor from the Japanese than any crowned head has ever re
ceived,” wrote eighteen-year-old Clara Whitney, an American missionary’s daughter. “One Japanese lady remarked that General Grant is treated so much like a god here that a temple to his honor should be erected immediately.” Geisha danced for him in red-and-white-striped kimonos with underrobes of star-spangled blue and circlets of silver stars in their hair—graceful personifications of the American flag. The emperor himself stood to shake Grant’s hand—the first Western hand the sovereign had touched.

  Mutsuhito had undergone his own transformation since the departure of the Iwakura Mission. His parting words to them in 1871 had been delivered in full court dress, the only clothing in which he had ever appeared. Within two years, he had set aside his robes in favor of Western-style military uniforms, and cropped his hair short. He appeared in public with some regularity now. Once an almost mythical figure, the emperor had emerged from behind the screens, his new wardrobe a powerful symbol of Japan’s reinvention.

  Books on foreign ways and places sold briskly, few more popular than a translation of the Scotsman Samuel Smiles’s Self-help, which the Japanese read as a manual of Western success. “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,” Smiles declared, “and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength.” America, in particular, was glorious proof of this wisdom, only a century after its independence. Surely Japan could do likewise, perhaps even more rapidly.

  In 1872, as the Iwakura girls were studying their first English primers in Washington, the Meiji leaders had promulgated a new Fundamental Code of Education, with an emphasis on self-improvement and individual opportunity. The old domain schools had indoctrinated samurai boys in the ways of loyalty and filial piety; from now on, children from every level of society would attend school with the aim of “building up their characters, developing their minds, and cultivating their talents” in order to “make their ways in the world, employ their wealth wisely, make their businesses prosper, and thus attain the goals of life.” Samuel Smiles would have approved.