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

by Janice P. Nimura

  It was hard to know how to respond. There could be no question of Ito’s generosity, but would Ume feel like nothing more than the hired help? Then again, she mused, “we three girls must often consider that we are in part government property” and must do whatever possible to advance the condition of Japanese women. But beneath these sober considerations, Ume was having trouble restraining her excitement: “to think I might live in a minister’s house!!” The next day, a letter from Ito arrived, addressed to her father. “I want to talk to you on business about Ume,” it read. “Please come.”

  BUOYED BY THESE new developments, Ume was particularly pleased when an elegant invitation reached the farmhouse in Azabu. On the thirteenth of December, General and Madame Oyama would host a “grand evening entertainment.” The ball would celebrate their recent marriage, and provide Ume with her first glimpse inside the building of the moment: the Rokumeikan.

  Opened only weeks earlier, the Rokumeikan was the architectural embodiment of the Meiji government’s ambitions. Conceived as a government guesthouse, it was an elaborate two-story Italianate pile in blinding white brick, with a ballroom, dining room, music room, billiard room, and elaborate suites for state visitors. Just as the general population was beginning to sour on Western fads, the Rokumeikan became the epicenter of foreign fashion for the most rarefied circles of society. Its name, translated as the “Deer Cry Pavilion,” alluded to a classical Chinese poem, in which the bark of a stag is heard as guests from afar gather to enjoy the hospitality of a generous host.

  In contrast to the traditional teahouses where statesmen met to drink sake and enjoy the talents of geisha, at the Rokumeikan wives in the latest Paris fashions would join their husbands, nibbling foreign delicacies and perhaps even attempting the steps of the waltz. To its admirers it was a glorious expression of the Meiji spirit, determined to put Japan on equal footing with the great powers of the West. To its conservative detractors it represented the worst excesses of Japan’s slavish aping of undignified foreign ways. And to its foreign critics it brought to mind “a second-class casino in a French hot-springs resort.”

  On the night of the ball, the Oyamas stood together at the top of the wide staircase as nearly a thousand guests arrived. They received each foreigner with a handshake, and each Japanese invitee with a series of formal bows—“a gymnastic feat which would have killed any American woman,” commented an American observer. Sutematsu, the epitome of cosmopolitan grace in her wedding gown, three star-shaped diamond pins in her hair, won the unqualified approval of all: “a perfect hostess and the most delightful ball ever given in Tokyo.” Before long, she would be known as Rokumeikan no kifujin: the “Lady of the Rokumeikan.”

  Shige, nursing her newborn, had to stay home once again, but Ume was in her element. “I enjoyed myself so much talking and meeting people, and flourishing about in my train which I donned for the first time, and got along nicely in it,” she wrote, allowing herself a moment of self-satisfaction. What could be better? A glittering evening in the best society, prestigious work and the prospect of more to come, and all without the ultimate compromise: a husband. Sutematsu, she reported with horror, “is almost like a regular Japanese wife,” and even Shige deferred to Uriu in all things. “Such a life is killing to me,” Ume wrote. “I get quite provoked with these horrid men, and yielding women, who surprise me so much. In America, how different!” Sutematsu’s life might be full of parties and servants, but Ume claimed not to be tempted. “I am much more happy in my work, I am sure.”

  Already her work had wrought undreamed-of changes in her daily life. Ito’s arguments for Ume’s relocation had convinced her parents, who left the decision to their daughter. The very next week Ume moved in with the Itos, any nagging sense of guilt over deserting her cramped, impecunious home rapidly dispelled by the wonders of her new surroundings. “I have two rooms, upstairs, large and pleasant,” she gloated. “You have no idea how it is—servants on every hand ready to wait and do.” Her window looked out over exquisite gardens. Meals were served in foreign style and, as befitted an expert in foreign ways, Ume wore Western clothes exclusively. “I shall have all the comforts and luxuries that Sutematsu has,” she wrote with satisfaction. “Of course, temporarily, without marrying for it as she did.”

  IN THE NEW year, 1884, Ume took to life at the Itos’ with her usual mixture of enthusiasm and complaint. As her work at Mrs. Shimoda’s school would not begin until March, she found herself more of a ladies’ companion than a teacher: helping young Miss Ito assemble a Western wardrobe at the shops in Yokohama (“an awful bother” ); introducing her to the piano; standing awkwardly at Mrs. Ito’s elbow during formal dinners, trying to translate the platitudes of the foreign guests.

  What she enjoyed most was the opportunity to converse with Ito himself, in English: “very serious talks on all sorts of subjects,” the kinds of discussions that she had joined regularly in Georgetown, and that she missed acutely. Like the Lanmans, Ito seemed genuinely interested in what Ume had to say. “Sometimes when I tell him about many things, about books, or interesting things about women’s work, he tells me I must tell Japanese ladies all these sorts of things,” Ume wrote. “He wants me to learn and to bring me forward so that I can, and he is very kind.”

  But it was with the Ito women that Ume spent most of her time, including a three-week trip to the hot-spring resort of Atami, which, after briefly admiring the scenery, Ume found painfully boring. She wanted to feel grateful, but struggling through English lessons with the stiffly polite Mrs. Ito and her spoiled elder daughter was “very hard and rather slow,” and outside of lessons no one spoke any English at all. She knew she should be taking advantage of this immersion to advance her Japanese skills, but it was discouraging to grope for simple words when she was so eager to discuss complicated things. “I would give a great deal, a good many hours of my life,” she wrote to the Lanmans from Atami, “just to be your little girl and pet again.”

  It was a relief to return to Tokyo and a more convivial routine. Ume taught English at Mrs. Shimoda’s school three mornings a week, tutored the Itos at home after lunch, and went home to Azabu on the weekends. “You see how well-filled every moment is,” she wrote proudly, though her private thoughts about life as a working woman were ambivalent at best. She remembered a composition she had written as a young schoolgirl: “Is Labor a Blessing or a Curse?” “I suppose if I could have a life of pleasure and nothing else, I should not want work,” she wrote, knowing full well that option was not available. If she had to work, she was happy to be a teacher. But her confidence waxed and waned from one line to the next. “You know I detest sewing, and am not fond of housework very much, so I think I am quite in my right corner and place, and am sure you too rejoice with me, though I am only a teacher; yet a teacher’s work is a noble one.”

  AT LEAST UME could see Madame Oyama more now than she had in recent months. Sutematsu had organized a group to study sumi-e ink painting once a week and invited Ume to join, free of charge. Ume was delighted: “Is it not lovely,” she asked Mrs. Lanman, “to take drawing lessons in such a pleasant way and company?” General Oyama had just left for Europe, sent by the Meiji government to study Prussian military systems, and though there had been some talk of Sutematsu accompanying him, she had been ill recently. He had embarked alone and would be away for nearly a year.

  In his absence, relieved of the formal duties of a minister’s wife, Sutematsu could turn her attention to the kinds of projects she had hoped her marriage might facilitate. Her visits to court—there had been a second one at New Year’s, when she had been asked to translate for the empress—had been dismaying. “If I told you all I know about the life of our Empress, you would think Japan was absolutely a barbarous country,” she wrote to Alice. “The court is a separate world and the people [who] live in it do not know any other or care to know any better one.” A few years back, before the conservative reaction had set in, the imperial family had shaken off some of its archaic
ways; the empress had even ridden out on horseback, with a sidesaddle. But since then, the gates had swung shut once more. How could Japanese women hope for enlightenment, Sutematsu wondered, when the empress herself was trapped by the traditions of centuries past?

  Ito shared Sutematsu’s concern, both for the backwardness of Japan’s court and for the plight of its women. At the end of February he invited Sutematsu, Utako Shimoda, Foreign Minister Inoue, and several other “learned ladies” to his home. Ume, of course, was already there. To this illustrious and superlatively well-educated group he posed the question of how best to bring Japanese women out of the shadows. By the end of the meeting the group had sketched the outlines of a new idea: a school for wellborn girls under the patronage of the empress.

  “Do you know that the dream of my life is to be now realized?” Sutematsu wrote excitedly to Alice. At last, a school where powerful men would be proud to send their daughters, and where those daughters could open their minds to Western ideas. At the same time, “as the school is to be partly supported by the court, the Empress and the ladies of the court will be obliged to visit the school, by which means education and western ideas are to [be] introduced to the very center of court.” The new school would thus “kill two birds with one stone.” Ito appointed a planning committee of two: Utako Shimoda and Sutematsu.

  If they were successful, Ume would be appointed to teach English. “What a splendid thing if it could be established and arranged!” Ume wrote, though her attention at the meeting was distracted by her friend’s newest piece of jewelry. “I must tell you that Sutematsu wore that night her wedding present from Mr. Oyama, a most tremendous diamond this size”—here she drew a circle half an inch in diameter—“or larger with five smaller ones around it making a most magnificent pin, one of the finest I ever saw. How it did glitter!”

  For Sutematsu, the prospect of a Peeresses’ School glittered more than any of Oyama’s lavish gifts. “We are to set up a school just as we think best with no one to interfere, with much money to command, with the support of the most influential men of Japan,” she told Alice. “Is not that just what I should like?” At first she had demurred; she had enough to do just then, learning to manage an elaborate household and three small stepdaughters. But Ito was adamant: she had a debt to repay her country; she was the only woman in Japan with a college degree; her marriage placed her in an ideal position of influence. At his request, Sutematsu sent him descriptions of her Vassar courses and the calendar of the college year.

  ITO’S BRACING ENCOURAGEMENTS seemed to blow away the fog of uncertainty Sutematsu had come to feel about her ability to bring the lessons of her American past to bear on her Japanese future. In addition to long-range planning for the new school, she was soon immersed in another more immediate project—this one conceived to enlighten not just the daughters of Tokyo society, but their mothers as well.

  Drawn to nursing ever since her brief stint at the Connecticut Training School, Sutematsu had recently toured Tokyo’s Charity Hospital, founded only a couple of years previously. Whereas the University of Tokyo’s hospital, influenced by German ideas, admitted indigent patients only insofar as they were useful in research, this new hospital followed a more humanitarian, English model—its explicit mission to serve the poor. Though the new venture enjoyed the patronage of an imperial prince, philanthropy was one Western habit that had not yet taken hold among Tokyo’s elite, and the hospital was having trouble covering its expenses.

  Raising funds for good causes had been part of the social fabric of New Haven, and Sutematsu had spent plenty of girlhood Saturdays sewing for charity with the members of Our Society or attending church sales. What better way to introduce the idea to her countrywomen than to raise money for the women’s department of the new hospital? With Ito’s encouragement, Sutematsu soon found herself spearheading the first charity bazaar Japan had ever seen.

  “You don’t know what an undertaking this is!!” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “These Japanese ladies, many of them, especially the high ones, never heard of charity, never worked to help, never probably gave a thought to it, and to work something with their own hands and give it and sell it! is something unheard of. To sell what they make is very lowering, and to them it is something very strange, for they are so proud and high and aristocratic.”

  Within a few weeks, a committee including Sutematsu, her French-speaking sister Misao, Ume, Mrs. Ito, and a few other well-placed matrons had persuaded more than two hundred ladies to participate. Their handicrafts poured into the Itos’ home: paintings, embroidery, baskets, dresses, footstools, toys. Ume contributed two china dolls in foreign dress. Oyama’s department donated the services of a military band, and the Rokumeikan itself was reserved for three days in June.

  By the morning of the twelfth, all was in readiness. The Rokumeikan was decked in Japanese flags and evergreen arches, and fifteen stalls showed off the dazzling array of items for sale, including fan-shaped hairpins inscribed with “Ladies Benevolent Society” in English. “These were made for the occasion and are like souvenirs of the fair,” wrote Ume, “and everyone, nearly, wished for one.” Tobacco pouches bearing the same inscription “sold like anything.” The lady organizers wore knots of purple silk cord. Ume helped Mrs. Ito at her table, and Shige joined Sutematsu at hers. A tearoom, likewise staffed by the ladies, offered lemonade and ice cream.

  The opening morning was quiet; from ten o’clock until noon, only those of the highest rank were admitted. Behind their tables, the lady organizers were demure, helping those who expressed interest in a purchase, and otherwise hanging back. But in the afternoon, when the doors opened to general ticket holders, they seemed to lose their inhibitions. Increasingly, to Ume’s amusement, “they urged the people to buy and praised their own goods, and brought their own particular friends to their own particular table, and actually forced them to buy.” Husbands found themselves charmed out of their change; it was all, after all, for a good cause. “If you could have seen the way in which the gentlemen were really robbed of all their money by the persuasion of the ladies, you would not have believed that these were the shy, proper dames of Tokio,” wrote Ume. The foreigners, among the most enthusiastic shoppers, “said they felt as if they were in America.”

  Sales of the pedigreed handicrafts were so good that the committee was forced to rush out and buy more merchandise to refill the stalls before reopening the next day. Jinrikishas clogged the road in front of the Rokumeikan, and lines of kimono-clad patrons waited patiently to take off their wooden clogs before entering. More than ten thousand people visited the bazaar, drawn by the novelty of buying a handmade trinket from a government minister’s wife. Sutematsu and the committee had hoped to raise a thousand yen. The net proceeds were six times that figure.

  “It is a matter for universal admiration that ladies of such high rank should show themselves perfectly au fait in conducting the sale of the exhibits; and their kind and earnest manner left a most pleasing impression on all who visited the Bazaar,” commented one Japanese newspaper. There were critical voices amid the general acclaim, however; another paper was less impressed, complaining that the event “was neither refined, elegant, nor admirable.” The foreign press, though approving of the event itself, smirked that Japanese women might be taking things too far: “We have a very sincere admiration for the gentle grace and modest unobtrusiveness which distinguish the fair sex in this part of the world, and we cannot be pleased to see these charming qualities exchanged for the styles and methods which Western Ladies have thought fit to adopt at charity bazaars.” The Chugai Bukka Shimpo, a financial paper founded by none other than Shige’s brother Takashi Masuda, wryly proposed a bazaar at which merchants could unload stale goods, marked up several times, at stalls staffed by geisha.

  It was impossible to deny the overall success of the endeavor, however. The bazaar at the Rokumeikan became an annual event, and a critical source of funding for the Charity Hospital. Sutematsu and her committee had shown T
okyo’s highest-ranking women a way to participate in the welfare of their nation.

  It was a moment to savor. Despite their various choices in regard to marriage, despite the relative indifference of most of the Meiji leaders, Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume were all engaged in work for the benefit of Japan. They were teaching, planning, and introducing Japanese girls and women to some of the ideas they had brought home from America. If Ito’s new school could be realized, the future looked even brighter.

  THE HIGH SPIRITS of June 1884 wilted somewhat in the heat of midsummer. The winter “illness” that had prevented Sutematsu from traveling to Europe with her husband, she now revealed to Ume, was morning sickness. She was halfway through her first pregnancy. “I must say she began early,” Ume clucked. The baby, a girl named Hisako, would arrive in November, a week before Sutematsu’s first wedding anniversary, and months before Oyama’s return. Her birth would temporarily eclipse Sutematsu’s involvement in planning the new Peeresses’ School.

  Shige, too, was beginning to suspect that another Uriu might be on the way, though it was too early to share the news with her friends. A second child, so close to the first, would put increased strain on Shige’s teaching responsibilities at the music school. On top of these concerns, her husband’s health was shaky; earlier in the spring he had suffered a hemorrhage in his throat, and Shige had suspended her teaching while he recovered.

  And now a third pregnancy, from an unexpected quarter, hastened the end of Ume’s sojourn within Tokyo’s inner circle. Ume’s mother was expecting yet another baby any day, and Ume could deny her responsibilities no longer. “At such a time, and by all laws of Japanese custom, and of ordinary human nature I must come home, and be home, and stay home,” she wrote. She would return to Azabu to help her family. As wearying as the formalities of the Ito household had occasionally been for “free and easy-going Ume,” as she described herself, it was difficult to leave the Itos. “I shall never regret the peep into the rank so different from mine, so different from America,” she wrote. “I shall never go back again, I think. I do not know what will happen in the coming future.”