“At last there was a rustle of silken skirts in the hall, and we knew that our hour was come,” Alice continued. Everyone rose, bowed, and kept their heads down until the empress had taken her seat. Alice had low expectations for her girls after so much nervous excitement, “but there is where I did not fully understand my little peeresses,” she wrote with admiration. “From the moment there was need for it they showed the most perfect self-possession, and I have never had better or less timid recitations in my life than those that they made in the Empress’ presence.”
The empress stayed for half an hour, during which time Alice managed to steal several good glimpses. She saw a small, slight woman, “rather loaded down by her heavy dove-colored silk dress and dove-colored Paris bonnet with a white plume,” Alice reported. She was struck by the empress’s air of patient melancholy. “They say that she is a very intellectual woman, and one of great strength and beauty of character.”
When every girl had recited, the empress took her leave, and Alice dismissed her class, “feeling quite light hearted.” But the day was not over. The foreign teachers, it seemed, would be received individually by the empress along with the senior Japanese faculty. No time for rehearsals now. Ume gave Alice a few hasty instructions and told her to stand with a view into the audience room so that she could watch Ume’s example. But this eminently reasonable plan was quickly foiled. “As I was following this suggestion and moving toward a position in front of the door,” Alice wrote, “I was seized and held by my old enemy, the little secretary, who had evidently taken the idea into his erratic little head that unless physical force were applied to restrain her, that outside barbarian would rush right into the imperial presence.”
Luckily there was just time enough for a whispered conference when Ume reappeared moments later. Then it was Alice’s turn. Enter, bow, walk straight ahead, turn right ninety degrees to face the seated empress, step forward, bow. An attendant appeared with a large, white paper-wrapped bundle on a tray, which Alice lifted to her breast and touched with her forehead. Bow again. Retreat backward, holding the bundle high in respect. At the door, bow once more. The bundles, when Ume and Alice unwrapped them, proved to contain yards and yards of the finest white silk, valuable enough even without their imperial provenance.
The empress spent the entire day at school, and then everyone went home, exhausted and relieved. “I was very glad,” Alice remarked, “to order my horse and have a good ride to limber me up and make me feel myself once more a free American woman after all my unaccustomed bowing and cringing.”
ALL TOO SOON it was summer again. Alice’s year was drawing to an end. Her students brought farewell gifts: one class presented her with a doll dressed in the traditional costume of a girl of twelve, like themselves; another gave her emperor and empress dolls such as might appear on the topmost tier of a red-draped doll festival display, with doll-sized musical instruments, tea implements, and bento boxes to arrange around them.
There was a real baby to play with as well: Sutematsu had given birth to her second son, Kashiwa, at the beginning of June. Alice was fascinated by the novel details of the infant’s first weeks: his loose cotton clothes, with cloth ties instead of buttons and pins; the serenity of his caregivers. “Here, nobody ever makes a noise at a baby, or jiggles or shakes it, to stop it crying,” Alice marveled.
In the middle of July, just before Tokyo’s heat made scholarship impossible, the Peeresses’ School held its closing exercises—unusually grand in 1889, as the school was moving to brand-new quarters and the empress would be on hand to mark the occasion with a rare speech. Alice watched the elaborately choreographed proceedings with her usual mixture of avid interest and amusement, noting the graduates’ diplomas—“not at all like the sheepskins of our native land, but dainty little Japanese scrolls on rollers, with brown and gold brocade mountings”—and the impeccable precision with which the girls executed so many bows (“my back fairly ached from sympathy” ). There was music between the speeches, including a song written by the empress especially for the school, sung by the students with their heads reverently bowed:
Even a diamond, if not polished, will fail to shine;
People, too, unless they study, will not demonstrate true virtue.
If one is diligent every moment all day long,
Like the hands of a clock that move without pause
What is there that will not be achieved?
Diamonds and clocks were daringly Western references, as was the empress’s inspiration. Her lyric took its cue from the sixth of Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen virtues: “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Franklin, as introduced by Samuel Smiles in Self-help, was the most famous American name in Meiji Japan. But the comparison of scholarship to the measured, mechanical ticking of a timepiece was, perhaps inadvertently, less than inspiring.
The empress, all in white this time, again struck Alice as a poignant figure, powerless to bridge the gulf between her elaborate black-and-gold lacquered chair on the dais and the rows of young faces in front of her. “Somehow I always feel sorry for her,” Alice wrote, “and I think she would be sorry for herself, if she knew how much more fun it is to be a Yankee school-ma’am than an empress.”
A little more than a week later, Alice left for Kyoto, ending her year with another month of travel before sailing for San Francisco in September. Pragmatic to the core, she wasted little ink on valediction, but she was no less aware of how her extraordinary year had changed her. Having lived more in the Japanese style than almost any other foreigner, she nevertheless felt conspicuously foreign among the Japanese; her purpose in Japan had been educational rather than spiritual, which set her apart from the missionaries, but her high-minded idealism distanced her as well from the foreign merchants and diplomats. Much like the three friends she had followed to Japan, she found herself in a category by herself—but where Sutematsu, Ume, and Shige wrestled with bouts of discouragement and loneliness, Alice’s confident optimism, unobstructed by questions of identity, carried her forward, even when her path was less than clear. “The word ‘civilization’ is so difficult to define and to understand, that I do not know what it means now as well as I did when I left home,” she wrote ruefully.
She remained undaunted by the ambiguity, however, and her engagement with Japan was far from over. She may have been leaving the trio behind, but she was carrying their legacy into the future. When she boarded the ship that would take her home, she was not alone. Under departures on the British steamer Belgic, for San Francisco, the Japan Weekly Mail listed “Miss A. Bacon, child, and native servant.” Her young companion was Mitsu Watanabe, the five-year-old niece of Ume’s cousin. Alice, unfettered by familial obligations but eager to remain connected to her Japanese “family,” had adopted her. For the next decade, like Ume before her, Mitsu would grow up in America.
* Crown Prince Haru—later Yoshihito, the Emperor Taisho—was the child of an imperial concubine. Unable to bear children herself, the empress had adopted him.
13 ADVANCES AND RETREATS
“MY DEAR MRS. LANMAN,” wrote Ume in August of 1889, barely a month after school had ended. “Where do you think I am?” Even as Alice Bacon was still traveling through the Japanese countryside, enjoying the last weeks of her year in Japan, Ume, to her profound delight, had just arrived in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
For some time, ever since joining the faculty of the Peeresses’ School, Ume had been feeling the limitations of her education. The Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo was beginning to graduate women trained as teachers, and though she could hardly criticize their achievements, these growing ranks of enlightened—and ambitious—women shook Ume’s confidence in her own value. “I often wish I had had Sutematsu’s training,” she wrote, “which has been of no use to her,” she added peevishly.
It was maddening: Sutematsu and Shige, simply by virtue of their few years’ seniority, had made it to Vassar before their t
ime in America was up, and yet it was their marriages, not their college years, that had ensured their social and financial security. Too young for college, Ume had also been too young to retain the language skills and cultural identity that might have made marriage to a Japanese man conceivable. Now, as she entered her twenties and contemplated the rest of her life as a single working woman, she regretted the lack of a college degree. “I feel that now my mind is more developed than at the time I came back,” she wrote, “and that I would appreciate study more.” Teaching might be her lot, but anonymity didn’t have to be: “Though I may have enough education to carry me along through life in its ordinary paths, I want more than that.”
Even before Alice’s arrival in Tokyo, Ume had asked Mrs. Lanman to collect information for her: catalogs from Smith College, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke. Vassar was conspicuously absent from her list of requests, possibly because she was already familiar with the campus—but also perhaps because she preferred to choose her own path, rather than the one already trod by Sutematsu and Shige. Ume had reason to hope that the Peeresses’ School would continue to pay her salary if she took a leave for further study abroad, but before she broached the question she needed a clear sense of what her expenses might be.
Help arrived suddenly, and from an unexpected quarter. Since her return to Tokyo, Ume had become close to Clara Whitney, an American missionary’s daughter whose family had moved to Japan when she was fourteen, just a few years after Ume had left for America. Close in age, the two young women enjoyed each other’s company: Clara spoke good Japanese and was one of the few foreigners Ume knew with a degree of real bicultural understanding. Ume wasn’t particularly comfortable with the Whitneys’ fervent strain of Christian piety, and both Clara’s father and Ume’s had been scandalized when Clara (already six months pregnant) married a Japanese man several years her junior. Still, Clara was a friend, and Ume told her in confidence of her ambition to study further in the States.
Clara wasted no time. She wrote to her friend Mary Harris Morris, a Philadelphia matron passionately engaged in a dizzying array of educational and missionary projects. Because her husband, Wistar Morris, was a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mrs. Morris was in a position to dispense considerable philanthropic largesse, and she remembered Ume as a ward of the Lanmans. Without further ado, Ume became one of her causes: Mrs. Morris arranged for Ume to attend the newly founded Bryn Mawr College as a special student with reduced tuition, starting immediately. But having just gotten Alice settled in for her year of teaching in Tokyo, Ume couldn’t very well disappear; moreover, the administrators of the Peeresses’ School would need diplomatic handling if Ume was to win their support for her plan. Gratified but cautious, she pocketed Mrs. Morris’s offer for the time being.
The following spring Mrs. Morris renewed her encouragements. Ume dithered. “Mrs. Morris may be very kind, but don’t you think it would be better to be sent from the school, not to depend on her entirely?” she asked Mrs. Lanman. In the end, and somewhat to Ume’s surprise, the president of the Peeresses’ School endorsed her plan, granting her leave to study at Bryn Mawr for two years at her present salary—provided, of course, that she came back. “Won’t it be splendid!” she wrote, exultant. (Predictably, her delight was soon tempered with irritation: “You can not imagine the great mountain of work before me, and I dread to begin—it is such an undertaking.” )
As soon as the closing ceremonies at school were over, Ume was off. The eager twenty-four-year-old woman who sailed bore little resemblance to the quaking child who had once made the same journey. This time she steered her own course. Her new phase would be at once a step forward and a respite: her studies would advance her career in Japan and also provide a much-needed break. Seven years of struggle to prove her worth to her country had left Ume weary. And while she would remain at least as anomalous in Philadelphia as she was in Tokyo, America still felt more like home.
UME ENROLLED AT Bryn Mawr in September of 1889, the beginning of the college’s fifth year of existence. Immediately and joyfully in her element, she was surrounded by exactly the kind of unapologetically intellectual, independent women she had despaired of ever finding in Tokyo. Bryn Mawr’s students were an ambitious bunch, determined to prove themselves. “Our failures only marry,” the college’s imposing dean, Martha Carey Thomas, was heard to say. Here, at least, no one was going to question the path Ume had chosen, or try to find her a husband.
It was at Bryn Mawr that Ume began the deepest friendship of her life—with Anna Cope Hartshorne, a fellow student who would later become the most important supporter of Ume’s ambitions. From their first meeting, Anna was impressed with Ume’s maturity. They met at an afternoon tea hosted by Rose Chamberlin, a square-jawed, six-foot Englishwoman who taught German. “Miss Tsuda was guest of honor, and looked very small and dainty as she stood beside our tall hostess, but as I remember my impression it was less of her smallness than of Miss Chamberlin’s unusual height and breadth,” Anna wrote. “It was easy to see that their relation was already that of friends rather than teacher and pupil.” Ume, addressing the tea party guests on the subject of her life and work in Japan, was preternaturally poised: “Like a princess, and for the same reason, that she was used to being looked at and no longer gave a hoot, so to say.”
Though Ume’s nominal purpose in this second sojourn abroad was to learn more about American schools and teaching methods, at Bryn Mawr she chose biology, not English, as her focus. It is not hard to imagine her much-thwarted competitive streak driving her choice. Most of the male students sent abroad by the Meiji government had studied science or engineering, and returned to find prestigious positions waiting for them—a far cry from the lukewarm reception the trio had received. Here was a chance to prove that a woman could excel in a masculine field. And excel she did, eventually coauthoring an article with one of her professors entitled “The Orientation of the Frog’s Egg” in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science.
Ume’s scientific achievements did not, however, eclipse her larger mission. She spent her first summer vacation at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, collaborating with Alice on a different sort of manuscript: a treatise on the daily life of Japanese women, from birth to old age, peeress to peasant, in the cities and in the fields. Japanese Girls and Women, the first comprehensive work on its subject, found a publisher immediately. “I have today handed over the manuscript to Mr. [Horace E.] Scudder, editor of the Atlantic & one of the big bugs of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,” Alice wrote to Ume after she returned to Bryn Mawr for the start of the fall term in 1890. “I don’t want to be unduly hopeful, but I think he will take it and illustrate it.”
By the summer of 1891, the book was in print. Despite Ume’s extensive contributions to the project, Alice’s name appeared alone on the title page. This was not selfishness on Alice’s part: on the contrary, Alice took steps to ensure that the book’s copyright would revert to Ume upon Alice’s death; she also split the royalties scrupulously down the middle and sent Ume half of every payment. For all her ambition, Ume did not mind the omission; Alice’s sole authorship was prudence, and it was not misplaced.
Though optimistic about the future of Japanese womanhood, Japanese Girls and Women was far from complimentary about the present. “Better laws, broader education for the women, a change in public opinion on the subject, caused by the study, by the men educated abroad, of the homes of Europe and America,—these are the forces which alone can bring the women of Japan up to that place in the home which their intellectual and moral qualities fit them to fill,” the book declared. The Tokyo establishment was not amused. Even Ume’s father, the iconoclastic Sen Tsuda, was not ready to see his daughter’s name attached to such an explicit criticism of Japanese society. Her unusual position as a career woman was precarious enough.
The book was dedicated to Sutematsu, “in the name of our childhood’s friendship, unchanged and unshaken by the changes and separations of our maturer years,” and pre
faced by sincere gratitude to Ume, “an old and intimate friend” who had made “many valuable additions.” In several admiring reviews, the American press took note of Alice’s unusual degree of familiarity with her subject. “She does not evade, but tells exactly what she sees,” wrote the New York Times. “She has been industrious in finding the reasons for many things, and has been wise enough to have submitted her work to the criticism of Japanese ladies.”
But the reaction in Japan, where the tide of conservatism continued to rise, was not as enthusiastic. Less than a year earlier the emperor had issued his Imperial Rescript on Education, celebrating the basic tenets of Confucian morality: hierarchy, consensus, obedience. “This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education,” it read. Framed copies of the document hung in every school in Japan, and on national holidays schoolchildren chanted its text with heads bowed. The emperor, not Benjamin Franklin or Samuel Smiles, was the ideal they revered now. There wasn’t nearly as much room for the advancement of women in the lines they recited.
“I do not think it is so compromising to Ume as [her father and others] seem to think,” Sutematsu wrote to Ume and Alice during the summer of the book’s publication, “but it is better to be on the safe side, especially as now there is so much conservative spirit cultivated even among the best and most educated classes.” Alice offered to ask the publisher to remove Ume’s name from the preface. “If it will do any good to shift the blame onto me,” she suggested further to Ume, “you could write an open letter to one of the prominent Tokyo papers and say that your work on the book consisted largely in modifying my statements so that there should be nothing about them to hurt the Japanese national pride, and that at times I was so pigheaded that even your persuasions & arguments did not move me.” (The unpleasant fallout in Tokyo taught Alice to protect her friends. When, a few years later, she published an epistolary memoir of her year in Tokyo entitled A Japanese Interior, she gave Ume and Sutematsu pseudonyms and dedicated the volume to her own siblings, to whom the original letters had been written.)
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 23