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

by Janice P. Nimura

The house was a perfect architectural expression of its bicultural occupants. Ume and her cousin, Mrs. Watanabe, lived with their gaggle of young girls (a few boarding students, in addition to Ume’s little sister and Mrs. Watanabe’s niece) in the larger Japanese side. Ume arranged her room with her Western bedstead and furniture, but otherwise the rooms were traditional. On Alice’s side—accessible by a separate entrance through which it was permissible to walk in shoes—the windows were of glass instead of rice paper, the doors swung open instead of sliding, and there was carpet on the floors rather than tatami mats. The two halves of the house were connected by the engawa, a polished wood veranda roofed by the deep eaves of the house and overlooking the garden. Even the kitchen had two halves: Alice’s cook prepared Western-style meals on an imported cast-iron stove, while a second cook steamed rice and grilled fish at an earthen Japanese stove. The servants lived in quarters behind the kitchen, and there was even a small stable for Alice’s hoped-for horse.

  Alice was an outsized presence in this hybrid household. This was partly literal: in height and breadth (not to mention opinionated self-confidence) she simply took up more space than tiny Ume and her equally diminutive dependents. And it was partly material: upon arrival, Alice promptly acquired new furniture, hung new wallpaper, and installed a state-of-the-art brass Rochester lamp, whose perforated burner provided a far more brilliant light than did the standard kerosene models. Mrs. Watanabe, “a dear little sweet-faced widow, the chaperon of our establishment,” Alice wrote, “poetically remarked that my lamp was like the sun, and theirs was like a little star.”

  Then there was Bruce. Bruce was Alice’s beloved border collie, and much to the chagrin of her housemates, she considered him part of the family. “He will insist on following Alice everywhere she goes, and so comes into our rooms sometimes,” Ume complained to Mrs. Lanman. There was no teaching Bruce manners of any kind, let alone Japanese manners. “The dog is an attendant that I would willingly dispose of,” Ume continued, “but I can’t help that, and keep him out of our side as much as possible.” The combination of ill-behaved Bruce and imposing Alice, her shrewd eyes taking in every detail from behind her glittering pince-nez, caused a sensation every time they left the house. An evening stroll along the nearest shopping street was never simple. “Apparently, a foreign lady with a dog shopping at that time of night is not a common sight in this part of the city, and we began to feel very much like a traveling show,” Alice commented dryly.

  Two weeks after moving in, Alice reported to work. As the Peeresses’ School began its fourth academic year, the girls—among them Sutematsu’s stepdaughters—lined up by size for the opening assembly, orderly as ever, though slightly more motley this year. The school now required foreign dress for its students, even though many of their parents had no experience wearing it. Uncomfortable as they were in scratchy wool stockings and ill-fitting leather shoes, the girls preserved the stillness of statues. Neither dazzled by their aristocratic pedigrees nor dismissive of their odd costumes, Alice saw only a group of children deserving of her sympathy, like the black students she had taught at Hampton. “Their lives are more or less stunted and cramped by the circumstances of their birth,” she wrote of both groups, “the pickaninnies by poverty and the disabilities of their low social position, the peeresses by the rigid restraints and formalities that accompany their rank.”

  That evening, Alice looked over the English textbooks she had taken home from the school’s library. One of them, a “Universal History,” proclaimed, “The only historic race is the Caucasian, the others having done little worth recording.” The line drew a sardonic smile. “It seems to me,” she reflected, “that this will be a very interesting piece of news to a class of Japanese girls who are already quite familiar with the wonderfully stirring and heroic history of their own country.” She asked Ume what the girls might think. “I should think they would say that the book was written by a Caucasian,” Ume retorted smartly. Alice chuckled. “I have decided to skip the introduction which contains this statement,” she wrote, “so as to avoid showing my pupils the self-conceit of my own race.”

  Though Alice’s mind was very much her own, it remained always, and to a remarkable extent, open. She embraced her new surroundings with characteristic enthusiasm. Each morning she registered her attendance at school with her new signature seal. “I have just learned to seal my name right side up, and to recognize it when it is written in Japanese, and I regard this as a great advancement over my former state of ignorance,” she reported with wry satisfaction. A bell signaled the start of each class, and after fifty minutes a man walking the corridors with a pair of clappers signaled its end. A great deal of ceremonial bowing took place between lessons. “The whole thing is very pretty, and I am charmed with this manner of calling to order and dismissing classes,” Alice commented. “It might have a civilizing effect, if introduced into American schools.”

  At least as satisfying as the classroom work was the chance, after years of separation, to spend time with Sutematsu and her growing family. In the winter of 1886, Sutematsu had delighted her husband by giving him an heir, Takashi. (General Oyama protested merrily that he had hoped for yet another daughter to join his quartet of little girls, but that it was lucky this baby was a boy, because it was terribly ugly.) But since Takashi’s birth, Sutematsu’s health had wavered. She suffered a miscarriage in the wake of the 1886 cholera epidemic; pregnant yet again a year later, and tending to a daughter’s sore throat, she was bending over a steam inhaler when it exploded, spraying her in the face with scalding water. The shock induced premature labor, and the baby, another girl, died two days later. Sutematsu recovered slowly.

  Alice’s bracing presence was a comfort—one that Sutematsu sorely needed. On top of all the pregnancies and illnesses, the Lady of the Rokumeikan had become something of a lightning rod for the conservative press. Her effortless Western ways and her public endorsement of women’s education had made her a target of gossip; one paper even hinted that her marriage was doomed—a baseless rumor that was nevertheless picked up by American reporters. “Sutematsu feels very badly about the newspaper stories about her, and I don’t wonder either,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. But even Ume’s sympathy was tempered with criticism. “Sutematsu does not try to be popular, and her ill health and all makes society a kind of burden to her. Very often she refuses to see visitors, and I think that is wrong of a lady in her position.” For once, Ume was content with her relatively low profile. “Japan has not quite made up its mind yet, whether women may have the same freedom as men,” she wrote. “She is trying to find flaws in all who have gone ahead of time.”

  Sutematsu began to withdraw, turning away from the critical public eye toward her responsibilities at home. Her years at Vassar had begun to seem like a distant mirage. “Would that I could go about now in a green and blue plaid dress, with a turn-down collar under the left ear or otherwise!” she wrote to a Vassar classmate. “But alas! now my dresses have to come from Paris, and believe me, my dear Miss Howe, a plaid dress with a pig-tail hanging down one’s back is a much more comfortable costume than all your French dresses.” Concerned about Sutematsu’s fragile health and low spirits, Alice called at her residence nearly every day.

  Alice was especially fond of the Oyamas’ son, who was not quite three. Little Takashi “regards me with great favor,” she wrote, “partly because I ride horseback, and partly because I am so different from the rest of his small world.” Whenever Alice came to visit, Takashi claimed her for his own. “When I have kissed him, he grows bolder, and stretches out his chubby hand to pat and smooth my cheeks,” Alice wrote. “I think that the color of my face was what led him to begin this patting,—he wanted to see if it rubbed off.” Alice’s ruddy complexion wasn’t the only difference Takashi noticed. After the patting, “he passes his little fingers all around my eye-sockets, with a view to ascertaining whether they really are as deep-set and hollow as they look.” Though not usually fond of sitting stil
l, Takashi loved to curl up in Alice’s ample lap, to her private delight. “He calls me Bacon Chan, a kind of diminutive of Bacon San, or Miss Bacon.”

  Her own parents dead, her siblings married and scattered, Alice relished playing host to her Japanese “family.” In November, she transported Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige to New England for the afternoon, racing home from school to prepare a Thanksgiving feast. The weather had turned cold at last, and Alice made chicken pie, turkey with oyster sauce, celery salad, and pumpkin pie. She even managed to get hold of some cranberry sauce, “most rare of all,” exclaimed Ume, “which I had not eaten since I came back from America.” The trio, cozy together in Ume’s parlor (Alice’s dining room was too small to hold them all), stuffed themselves silly and told Alice it tasted like home.

  ALICE’S YEAR IN Tokyo was unusually full of pageantry. On the emperor’s birthday in November of 1888, thanks to General Oyama, she had a front-row seat as the Heavenly Sovereign reviewed his well-equipped Western-style troops. “He did not look to me so very different from other people,” Alice remarked matter-of-factly. “He is a skillful and daring horseman, it is said, but he rides in the old Japanese style, sitting all in a heap like a bag of meal, his legs dangling straight down on each side of the horse, and his elbows twitching and jerking with every motion of the animal.”

  Twenty years had wrought an extraordinary transformation: the Emperor Meiji, no longer invisibly “above the clouds,” appeared before his subjects in much the same sort of gold-trimmed uniform as his fellow monarchs across the Western world. The ceremonial pomp that surrounded him was both awe inspiring and highly public; dazzled, few of his subjects reflected on the recent vintage of most of these “imperial traditions,” many of them imported straight from Europe along with the guns and gold braid.

  In December, the students of both the Peers’ and Peeresses’ schools were invited to tour the recently rebuilt Imperial Palace. Edo Castle, vacated by the shogun in 1868 as he capitulated to the young emperor, had subsequently burned; the audience chamber in which the girls had bowed before the empress no longer existed. Now at last the emperor was ready to move into a new home within the ancient ramparts. While the grand apartments remained vacant, the students would have the privilege of visiting them.

  The girls would go at noon, followed by the boys two hours later. The short journey to the palace was an unexpected challenge. Two hundred and fifty girls needed to board two hundred and fifty jinrikishas, which then had to line up in order of their passengers’ rank before the unwieldy procession could set out. “It was a funny sight when at last we were off, and our long, black line squirmed around the curves of the moats, looking like a procession of ants,” Alice wrote. “I never before felt quite as much as if I were part of a circus.”

  There was another bottleneck at the palace gate, where everyone dusted off their shoes with their handkerchiefs, “lest a particle of dust from them should soil the sacred precincts,” and then the unwieldy group proceeded along verandas and corridors affording views of grand public rooms and gardens. Alice was impressed in spite of herself (“The throne room is really magnificent” ), but Ume, no longer an awestruck six-year-old, was more critical: “The one thing that strikes one is that there is too much [that is] brilliant and gay in one place—the richly ornamented ceilings take away from the gorgeous carpets; the one kills the other.” Though the private quarters were furnished traditionally, the public rooms were not. The State Chamber featured a coffered ceiling lavishly painted with chrysanthemums, paulownias, and peonies, with ruby-colored drapes framing the carpeted dais, on which stood the emperor’s throne, a gilded German armchair with scarlet cushions. The inlaid floors gleamed in the light of crystal chandeliers.

  The girls, enthralled by their opulent surroundings, moved slowly; before they were halfway through, the boys had arrived at the palace gate. Alice looked on with some amusement. “As girls take more interest in upholstery than boys, the peers gained on the peeresses,” she noted, but among the boys was the Crown Prince Haru;* if his group caught up, the girls would be forced to stop and bow until he passed. They hurried, but to no avail. “Miya-sama!” the cry went up. “His Majesty the Prince!” Everyone bent low, “all for the sake of a very minute boy in a little school uniform, with a little school knapsack on his back,” Alice wrote. “I must say, that rather went against the grain with me. I don’t mind bowing to officials and dignitaries, but when it comes to doubling myself up in an abject manner before a boy of seven, I don’t like it.”

  The great event of the year—indeed of the Emperor Meiji’s reign thus far—occurred just after the imperial family took up residence in the new quarters. Over the previous two decades it had become abundantly clear to Japan’s leaders that the true mark of a civilized nation was representative government. On February 11, 1889, a state holiday commemorating the birth of Japan’s mythical first ruler, the emperor bestowed upon his subjects Japan’s first constitution, authorizing the creation of a bicameral Imperial Diet, on the Prussian model. No matter that sovereignty remained securely in the sacred person of the emperor, not the people; the promulgation of the constitution seemed to the Japanese a monumental step toward recognition on the global stage, and they celebrated accordingly.

  Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume must have found the occasion especially satisfying. Of the ten officials whose signatures followed the emperor’s on the precious document, the first was Kiyotaka Kuroda, the man whose idea it had been to send them to America so long ago. He was now prime minister. Under Kuroda’s name was that of his predecessor and Ume’s patron, Hirobumi Ito, regarded as the constitution’s framer. Ito and another signer, Justice Minister Akiyoshi Yamada, had both traveled with the girls as part of the Iwakura Mission. Further down the list were Iwao Oyama, Sutematsu’s husband, and Arinori Mori, the minister of education, who had greeted the shawl-wrapped girls on a snowy Washington train platform once upon a time. The lives of those bewildered children had become entwined with those of the most powerful men in Japan.

  “The procession was the finest that I have seen yet,” wrote Alice. For the first time, the emperor and empress rode together in one carriage—an unprecedented acknowledgment of the Western idea that marriage raised the empress to the same exalted level as her husband. The coach was especially gorgeous, Alice thought, “drawn by six black horses, each led by a magnificent black, white, and gold liveried groom.” The coachman was bedecked in so much gold trim that he didn’t look real. The chrysanthemum crest glittered on the doors and panels, and crowning the roof was a golden finial in the shape of a phoenix. But at this point Alice was forced to bow with everyone else, “so that I saw nothing more but the top of the Empress’s bonnet as she turned to look at her little peeresses, who seem to have a warm place in her heart.”

  Alice’s interest in the event went deeper than its ceremonial trappings. Several days later, she was visiting Sutematsu when General Oyama joined them, bearing with him the official English translation of the new constitution. “With the greatest pride he pointed out to me the twenty-eighth article, which guarantees religious liberty to all Japanese subjects,” Alice reported, equally proud. Leonard Bacon’s exchanges with Arinori Mori seventeen years earlier had led directly to the article’s inclusion.

  The moment was bittersweet, however: on the very day of the constitution’s promulgation, Mori was assassinated by an imperial loyalist who found his liberal attitudes toward Japanese tradition disrespectful. Five days after the emperor and empress rode by in triumphant splendor, Alice watched Mori’s solemn funeral cortége pass near her house. “It seems so terrible that I can not realize it,” Ume wrote of the man who had at first reacted to her seven-year-old self with such dismay. “I owed him a great deal when in America.”

  In April, Alice’s eagerness to gaze directly upon the empress was at last satisfied. The chief patroness of the Peeresses’ School was coming to visit and would be sitting in on Miss Bacon’s English class. Empress Haruko had undergone a t
ransformation quite as profound as her husband’s in the years since the Iwakura Mission had sailed. Gone were the blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows, the cone-shaped ceremonial robes. The empress now ordered her gowns from Paris like any Western statesman’s wife, and made regular appearances at charity bazaars and other public functions. For all her foreign finery, however, she was still an object of mysterious fascination.

  When Alice arrived at school on the appointed day, the imperial accessories—lacquered tableware, silver smoking sets, upholstered chairs—had already arrived, and everyone was buzzing with adrenaline. After one last session of ceremonial bowing practice with Ume, Alice settled down by the window to wait. Gazing down into the yard, she watched as a mounted officer arrived bearing a purple silk flag embroidered with the gold chrysanthemum. After him came “quite a cavalcade” of soldiers with red and white pennants, and at last the red-and-gold coach containing the empress. Her ladies, having arrived earlier, formed a double line from the coach to the door, and Her Majesty entered the school.

  When Alice reached her classroom, she found her girls in an uproar and an unfamiliar chair—exquisite black lacquer, with gold chrysanthemums and a purple brocade seat—standing near her desk. Claiming the class’s attention with some difficulty, Alice had just begun the lesson when footsteps clattered along the hall and the door burst open. “The girls rose in their places, and I turned toward the door, expecting to see the Empress standing there, but no one appeared but a tousle-headed little secretary, who gazed distractedly into the room, muttered incoherently, and then shut the door with a bang,” Alice wrote. “The girls dropped back into their seats, my heart began to beat again, and we went on with the lesson.” A few minutes passed, and then the whole episode repeated itself: hurrying feet, wild-eyed secretary, incoherent exclamations, slammed door—followed by an explosion of nervous giggles from students and teacher alike.