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

by Janice P. Nimura

  But Ume opted to ignore Alice’s suggestions. The disgruntled conservatives in Tokyo were too far away to bother about, and meanwhile the book was proving an excellent springboard for her reputation in America. She began to promote the cause of Japanese women’s education more widely and more forcefully—one lecture, to the Massachusetts Society for the University Education of Women, was titled “Education and Culture—What Japanese Women Want Now.” By 1892, Ume had inspired her benefactress, Mary Harris Morris, and Bryn Mawr’s Martha Carey Thomas to organize the American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women, to be granted for study at Bryn Mawr. A fifteen-member committee of affluent Philadelphia matrons raised eight thousand dollars in short order.

  Alice, too, used the attention garnered by her book to advance her own cause. In August 1891, vacationing with a sister in Norfolk, Connecticut—one town over from Colebrook—she held a “Japanese tea and chopstick supper” at the village hall, with girls in kimonos serving refreshments. “The tables were beautifully arranged and decorated and no end of amusement was caused by the ludicrous efforts of the hungry ones to satisfy their cravings with the chop-sticks, which by the way were the only instruments allowed under penalty of a fine,” reported the local paper. The event raised two hundred dollars for the Hampton Institute.

  DESPITE UME’S EFFORTS on behalf of female students, her idea of a woman’s place was surprisingly old-fashioned. Where Martha Carey Thomas exhorted her students to leave domesticity behind for the higher calling of scholarship, Ume advocated education only insofar as it raised women to a level of intellectual equality with their own menfolk. Yes, a few exceptional (or perhaps unfortunate) souls would follow in her footsteps, advancing to the college level in order to become the teachers of the new generation. But that new generation would not necessarily aspire to the example of its teachers. “Wives must fit themselves to be companions of educated men, and mothers that they may wisely influence their sons,” Ume told her audiences, “and there must be true sympathy of thought between them in the home.” Good wife, wise mother: the Meiji ideal of ryosai kenbo persisted.

  Sutematsu, whose retreat to domestic life had so disappointed Ume, was in fact a paragon of the new Japanese woman that Ume hoped to train: the intellectual equal of her husband, his helpmeet and companion rather than his obedient drudge, engaged with world affairs and charitable efforts, raising educated sons and daughters for the good of the nation. Sutematsu did not, however, share the rosy confidence in the future of Japanese womanhood that Japanese Girls and Women set forth. Alice and Ume had been “all together too sympathetic,” Sutematsu insisted. “You left out, if I may be allowed to criticize, all that pettiness, envy and untruthfulness which seem to me to go side by side with some of the best qualities in a Japanese woman.” Her frustrations made a striking counterpoint to Ume’s speeches: raised for intellectual achievement, Sutematsu found the domestic sphere, even at her exalted level, claustrophobic, while Ume, having forsaken domesticity altogether, struggled with the loneliness of her professional path.

  Ume disdained the concessions that her two married friends had made to Japanese convention—from the deference they showed their husbands to the slender kiseru pipes they now smoked. “Are you horrified?” Sutematsu wrote to her old Vassar friend Anne Southworth. “Almost all Japanese ladies smoke and we make no secret of it. Mrs. Uriu (Miss Nagai that used to be) began it and I followed. Miss Tsuda vainly tried to dissuade us from this pernicious practice, but now she has given it up as a bad job. You don’t know what a soothing thing it is.” Loneliness and financial insecurity may not have weighed as heavily on Sutematsu and Shige, but the tensions inherent in their hybrid identities were no less real. Ume could hold herself apart from other Japanese women, but Sutematsu and Shige, as the wives of prominent men, did not have that luxury.

  Though her marriage to Iwao Oyama had proved unusually happy, Sutematsu found the scrutiny attached to her high social profile bruising. Her duties as the wife of the minister of war kept her busy enough, but on top of that she now held the official title of “Advisor on Westernization in the Court.” Her post required frequent visits to the palace, either to guide the empress and her ladies in the details of wardrobe and etiquette, or to serve as an interpreter for the wives of foreign dignitaries. This she was glad to do, appalled as she was by the backward attitudes of the court conservatives, foremost among whom was Utako Shimoda herself, the former lady-in-waiting who directed the Peeresses’ School. “I have no patience with her,” Sutematsu fumed to Ume and Alice with uncharacteristic heat. “She ought to be kicked out of that school, I have no hesitation in saying that to every one, although it may not be for the good of my children if she hears it.”

  Mrs. Shimoda and Sutematsu might both have been deeply committed to educating girls, but there the affinity ended. The woman Sutematsu had once described as a “deep thinker” had proved unable to transcend her conservative roots. “What do you think the girls, especially her boarders, say?” Sutematsu raged. “That it is not patriotic to wear Japanese dresses made of foreign stuffs, and that to drink milk or eat meat are disloyal to Japan!!! What do you think of a teacher that puts such ideas into girls heads?” Unfortunately, too many parents of Peeresses’ students shared Mrs. Shimoda’s ideas.

  Sutematsu’s proximity to the empress did not endear her to the women of her own circle, and neither did her husband’s place in the emperor’s inner sanctum of advisers. The Oyamas had recently moved to a grand new house built on several acres of land two miles west of the palace, in the quiet suburb of Onden (near today’s bustling pop-culture mecca of Harajuku). Designed by a German architect, the house satisfied General Oyama’s florid European preferences: brick-built and massive, it was lavishly endowed with arches, dormer windows, French furniture, and a pointed turret rising from one corner. (Though the children grew up in Western clothing, they spent most of their time in the Japanese-style wing attached to the back of the house, “for their mother was too wise to bring them up as strangers to the customs of their own country,” wrote a foreign friend.) In November 1890, just as the family finished settling in, the emperor himself paid a call.

  Mutsuhito had embraced a new policy of visiting his most senior councillors in their homes, in order to know them more personally. He arrived at the Oyamas’ at one o’clock in the afternoon and was still enjoying their hospitality—music, a performance of noh drama, staged readings of Chinese poetry—at ten o’clock that evening. His reluctance to leave was gratifying, but the elaborate event was exhausting and did nothing to alleviate the envy of Sutematsu’s acquaintances. They clucked over her wealth, her Parisian gowns, her exalted rank—all this for a woman who couldn’t even write decent Japanese and was known to address her husband by his first name!

  HAVING WON THE esteem of her Philadelphia benefactors and the respect of her college, not to mention a year’s extension on her original two-year plan, Ume returned to Tokyo in 1892. A certificate signed by Bryn Mawr’s president called her “an intelligent, apt and diligent student” and declared, “Miss Tsuda has shown at this college all the virtues that grace and adorn the womanly character, and bears with her the honour, esteem and kindly regard of all the officers and students of the college.” All, perhaps, save Martha Carey Thomas, who could not understand Ume’s determination to resume her teaching career in Japan rather than pursue a scientific one in the United States. Bryn Mawr had offered Ume a position as a laboratory assistant, but she turned it down. “I don’t believe Miss Thomas ever quite forgave her what probably seemed ingratitude and misprisal of true scholarship,” wrote Anna Hartshorne.

  Miss Thomas’s view, with its emphasis on individual achievement, was a particularly American one; what she failed to grasp was that Ume, her American youth notwithstanding, had never relinquished her identity as a daughter of Japan. Tempting as it might have been to pursue an academic career in Pennsylvania, it was more important to fulfill the mission she had accepted as a child. Ume may have craved
recognition, but always in the context of her larger obligation.

  Ume resumed her work at the Peeresses’ School and poured herself into her new project, promoting the newly created American Women’s Scholarship that would encourage other young women to follow her example. While at Bryn Mawr, she had discovered a source of great energy in the audiences she addressed; back in Tokyo, she sought new ones. “Feeling as I do, that the one thing that Japan needs most at the present day is the elevation of the future wives and mothers, can you wonder that I most thoroughly desire a class of earnest, native women workers who can take up the work, showing in their own persons a happy combination of Japanese education, refinement, and culture, and the best results of Western civilization and religion?” she asked in the pages of the Japan Weekly Mail.

  We want living examples to show the scoffing world that education does not spoil a woman. We want a woman to plead the wrongs of women. We want a clear head and a clever tongue to show the men how much is unjust in the lives of women. We want better teachers for our schools, and leaders in good movements pertaining to women.

  Flush with a sense of renewed purpose in her vocation, Ume thought it especially galling, upon her return, to find that Sutematsu and Shige were still trying to play matchmaker. Ume was twenty-seven years old. When would her closest friends finally accept the path she had chosen? In her mail that fall, Alice found an exasperated screed from Ume, which she answered with the wisdom of personal experience. “I am afraid it is a fault of married women all the world over to patronize the unmarried and try to marry them off,” she wrote to Ume. “Don’t be worried by it. When you are as old as I am, I think that even Stematz & Shige will give you up.”

  Ume was equally irritated by her two dearest friends’ relative lack of activist resolve. Here, too, the invaluable Alice provided perspective. “I am sorry that you find the gap widen between yourself & them, and sorry too that they are so inclined to be conservative & to drift with the tide,” she wrote, “but a married woman is handicapped and has her husband’s wishes and her children’s future to think of while independent old maids like you and me can do as we choose and at least harm no one but ourselves by our enthusiasms or our mistakes and failures.” Alice’s soothing words must have had some effect. That fall, Ume convened a Japanese selection committee for the American scholarship, many of whose members had studied abroad. One of them was Shige.

  Though she was now the mother of five with a sixth on the way, Shige had continued to teach, first at the Tokyo Music School and subsequently at the Women’s Higher Normal School. Never as ambitious as Sutematsu or Ume, she had quietly managed to achieve a balance between teaching and family that was no less extraordinary. Her willingness to contribute her time to Ume’s cause may have had something to do with a sudden shift in her household duties. Her responsibilities as a mother were growing, but she would soon have less work to do as a wife. In September of 1892, her husband left for Paris to take up a post as naval attaché to the Japanese embassy there. He would not return for four years.

  . . .

  SOTOKICHI URIU WAS not the only military man who found his responsibilities increasing in 1892. After more than a decade of service, Iwao Oyama had recently submitted his resignation, but it was only a matter of months before he was recalled to his former office. Japan was mobilizing for war.

  During the 1870s Japan had poured its energies into reform at every level, from education to industry to the structure of government. Domestic improvements took priority; the Western powers had made it quite clear they were not interested in negotiating with a nation they considered backward. But Japan’s leaders remained acutely aware of their global context, and in the 1880s they watched with growing alarm as an increasingly industrialized Europe scrambled for new colonial territories. While the Meiji leaders were building a nation, other nations had been building empires, their reach drawing ever closer. The French were now in Indochina, the Americans in Hawaii, the Russians and the British fighting over central Asia. The “civilized” nations of the world were asserting sovereignty over the “unenlightened.” If Japan had truly achieved its own enlightenment, it needed to protect itself from foreign encroachment, and perhaps do a little asserting of its own as well. Among all things Western that Japan had adopted in the previous decades, imperialism—an idea the West never meant to export—was rapidly becoming the most important.

  Korea quickly became the focus of Japan’s ambition. In 1876 the Japanese had taken a page from Commodore Perry’s book and tried a little gunboat diplomacy of their own, “opening” Korea to trade as the Americans had once “opened” Japan: forcing the establishment of treaty ports and securing extraterritorial immunity for Japanese nationals. Ever since, China and Japan had eyed each other warily, each concerned about the other’s domination of the Korean peninsula dangling between them.

  By the early 1890s, Japan’s leaders saw control of Korea as vital to Japanese national security. Only under enlightened Japanese influence—rather than the enfeebled patronage of China—could Korea withstand the predatory threat of the Western colonizers. The Meiji government, now firmly established, directed a steadily increasing flow of funds to the military: the army began to stage large-scale maneuvers, and the navy added larger warships and transports to its fleet. In the spring of 1894, a Korean peasant rebellion prompted both China and Japan to send in troops, setting the stage for direct confrontation. In July, Japanese forces seized the royal palace and forced the Korean king to endorse the expulsion of the Chinese.

  For the first time since the sixteenth century, when the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi had launched his own brutal and ill-fated invasion of Korea, Japan faced war on foreign soil. On August 1, Japan declared war on China. At the head of Japan’s Second Army was General Iwao Oyama.

  “Of course I feel much anxiety,” wrote Sutematsu to Alice that fall, “but at the same time I know that we shall be victorious in the end, and my husband though he may suffer many privations, still he will return after conquering China, all safe & well.” The war effort was a tonic, chasing away the miasma of gossip and frustration that often sickened her. She rushed to gather whatever her warrior husband would need to face a frigid Chinese winter: fur linings for his coat and boots, woolen socks and flannel shirts, underwear padded with silk wadding, a hot-water bottle, and a supply of kairo hand warmers—cloth-covered tin boxes with holes in one end, inside which a stick of charcoal could burn for hours.

  When she wasn’t helping her husband, Sutematsu turned her attention to larger projects. “In July a committee of sixty ladies of which I was a member started to collect money among women & the result was a tremendous success,” she wrote. “You have no idea—at least I cannot half express to you—of the enthusiasm of the people and the way they offer everything they possess to afford comfort to the soldiers.” Primed by the example of the charity bazaars that Sutematsu had helped start a decade earlier, the female elite of Tokyo participated in full force. The empress herself led the Ladies’ Volunteer Nursing Association, and Sutematsu joined in rolling bandages for the Red Cross. “We all wear nurses’ costume and we carbolize our hands & clothes in a truly hospital style[,] for the Army is very strict about antiseptic treatment,” she told Alice. “We have made millions of bandages but we are still making them.”

  Years later, Sutematsu was still struck by the efforts of her peers: “They who never dressed themselves without maids waiting on them, they who never held in their hands anything heavier than their handkerchiefs, they who never went outside of their houses without two or three attendants, all come alone to the hospital with their little lunch baskets and their bundles containing their nurse’s uniforms.” Behind the polished façade of the general’s elegant wife, the spirit of the Aizu girl who had helped defend her castle survived. As she watched the bustle of preparation on the parade ground and at the train station, Sutematsu confided to Alice, “I felt as if I wanted to be a soldier too.”

  China’s army was vastly la
rger than Japan’s, and her navy boasted twice as many vessels. Western observers did not share Sutematsu’s sublime confidence that her husband’s forces could best their massive neighbor. But Japan had something to prove. Her navy crushed the Chinese fleet in one decisive battle, and her disciplined army pushed China’s disorganized forces off the peninsula. Within a few months, Western newspapers had changed their tune regarding “the plucky little island empire.” In America, doubt shifted quickly to self-congratulation. “Behind all this eagerness to learn of Japan’s affairs there is a dot of pride in the fact that our American progression may have had something to do with her determination to force civilized ‘ways and means’ upon China,” the New York Times reported.

  The war was over in eight months. “I tell you,” Alice wrote to Ume, “Japan is coming up in the eyes of Christendom now that she has proved her ability to carry on a successful war after civilized standards.” The irony, of course, was not lost on her: “Unfortunately in spite of our avowed Christianity, physical force seems still to be the surest road to respect & consideration among nations.”

  Victory unleashed a storm of patriotic fervor in Japan. “Now we are no longer ashamed to stand before the world as Japanese,” wrote Tokutomi Soho, founder of Japan’s first news magazine, Kokumin no tomo (“The People’s Friend” ). “Before, we did not know ourselves, and the world did not yet know us. But now that we have tested our strength, we know ourselves and we are known by the world.” (This national pride would suffer a blow just a month after the victory, when Russia along with France and Germany insisted that Japan return territory ceded by China. The so-called Triple Intervention turned Japan’s joy to frustration and refocused its military energies against a new opponent, Russia.)