Regardless of the political implications, though, two things were clear: the new schools would need new teachers to staff them, and at least some of their graduates would seek further study. By 1900, fifty-two schools had opened, serving twelve thousand middle-grade girls. Beyond that, the sole option for higher education was the Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo.
There had never been a better moment for Ume’s plan. Everything was coming together. “I had a letter from Alice Bacon, and she is expecting to come to Japan very soon now,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman in February. In March, Alice traveled to Philadelphia to discuss with Ume’s supporters—Anna Hartshorne, Martha Carey Thomas, Mrs. Morris, and others—the practical details of the English school Ume envisioned. Naming themselves the Committee to Help Miss Tsuda’s School in Japan, they quickly raised two thousand dollars. A month later Alice was on her way. Mr. Takamine’s offer of a position at the Women’s Higher Normal School gave her security, but her true intent was to aid in the realization of Ume’s dream.
She did not travel alone. Mitsu Watanabe, the five-year-old Alice had brought home with her in 1889, was now a young woman. Like Ume eighteen years earlier, Mitsu stepped off the boat in Yokohama with only the vaguest memories of her life before America. But she would avoid Ume’s dispiriting struggle to claim a niche for herself in her homeland. Within a few months, a new school would urgently need her skills.
IN JULY OF 1900, when classes had ended for the summer, Ume resigned, giving up her rank, her salary, and her fifteen-year connection with the most prestigious school for girls in Japan. The news caused an uproar. “No one would believe me when I asked to resign and I had some fights to go thro’ and some yet before me,” Ume wrote in high spirits to Bryn Mawr friends. “But I am now free [she underlined the word twice] and have burned, so to speak, all my ships behind me.” It felt purer, somehow, to work for the education of women unencumbered by imperial obligations. “I wanted to get away from all the Conservatism and Conventions of my old life, and now I am only a commoner, free to do what I like.” Like her father before her, she had renounced her title to pursue a progressive ideal.
She wrote to Martha Carey Thomas in a more sober mood. “It has been a more difficult thing to leave the school than anyone in democratic America could realize, but I have been able to do so, I think, honorably. I do not feel, however, that I can, for two or three years yet, appeal to my Japanese acquaintances for help for my own plans.” Even if the Tokyo elite could have fathomed her decision, they were unlikely to open their purses to support it; successful charity bazaars aside, the tradition of philanthropy had still not taken hold in Japan. If Ume’s plan was to succeed, foreigners would have to fund it. She and Alice retreated to a hot-spring resort in the mountains for a brief summer respite before their work began in earnest. “Write me and keep me up in courage,” Ume entreated her Bryn Mawr friends.
The first thing Ume needed was a house. The school she imagined was not simply a matter of desks and classrooms; it was to be a home for her students. Teachers and many of the girls would live under the same roof, with lessons springing as much from their informal interactions as from books and classroom instruction. The primary subject would be English, but the larger curriculum would emphasize character over scholarship. The goal, as Ume saw it, was not just to produce English speakers, or even simply English teachers, but to graduate women who had absorbed Western ideas about the vital importance of women’s education, whether or not they ever set foot in a classroom again.
On Friday, September 14, 1900, fourteen students squeezed into a small room in a small rented house for the opening ceremony of Joshi Eigaku Juku, the “Women’s Home School of English.”* Ten young women had signed on for Ume’s three-year program; the other four were older students who were finishing their preparations for the English certification exam. Their teachers were Ume, Alice, and Utako Suzuki, who had lived with Ume while a student at the Peeresses’ School. Alice’s daughter Mitsu, though still a teenager, assisted them. Sutematsu—now the Marchioness Oyama—was present that day in her capacity as patron and official adviser, adding a note of distinction to the unprepossessing surroundings.
The ceremony began with a respectful recitation of the Imperial Rescript on Education. Though her resignation from the Peeresses’ School may have been shocking, Ume had no intention of alienating those in power any further. The Confucian conservatism of the text made an odd counterpoint to Ume’s own opening speech, which she delivered in Japanese, though she had written her notes in English.
Gesturing to their cramped surroundings, Ume reminded her new students that fine classrooms and large libraries were not the most essential components of a successful school. Far more important were “the qualifications of the teacher, the zeal, patience and industry of both teachers and pupils, and the spirit in which they pursue their work.” The very smallness of their newborn institution was its greatest virtue, she continued: “It is possible to impart a certain amount of knowledge at one time to a large class, but in true education, each one ought to be dealt with as a separate individual, for we know that one’s mental and moral characteristics vary as do the faces of each one of us.” Ume’s school would cultivate thoughtful individuals, not dolls reciting from memory: women who knew how to reason for themselves, independent of their teachers or their husbands.
Ume’s philosophy strayed far from the Confucian idea of a woman’s place, and she was acutely aware that the students of Joshi Eigaku Juku were pioneers, with a grave responsibility to disprove the disapproving. In Ume’s mind, the very future of higher education for women in Japan was at stake. “Any criticism will mostly come, not so much on our courses of study or methods of work, but on points which simply require a little care and thoughtfulness on your part—the little things which constitute the making of a true lady,” she told the girls: “the language you use, your manner in intercourse with others—your attention to the details of our etiquette.” Though her pedagogy was progressive, her students must nonetheless be proper. “I ask you not in any way to make yourselves conspicuous or to seem forward, but to be always gentle, submissive and courteous as have always been our women in the past.” Ume may have been inspired by Dorothea Beale and Martha Carey Thomas, but she could not entirely turn her back on Confucius.
THE HOUSE, RENTED for fifty yen—not much, but still more than Ume had earned in a month at the Peeresses’ School—had seven rooms, including the kitchen and Alice’s and Ume’s bedrooms. Every room was a classroom during the school day. The furniture was no more than what a modest home would contain, and for many of their lessons the girls sat on the tatami. Ume’s own books constituted their library, and her pictures were their only decoration. Her battered piano accompanied their hymns and, as they had no hymnbooks, Alice typed up new sheets for them to sing from each week.
In the first six months, enrollment more than doubled. Entrance standards were stiff; Ume knew that weak students would do nothing to help her school establish its reputation. Alice donated her teaching eight hours a week and gave a class on current affairs every Friday. English alone would not develop the integrity that Ume hoped to foster; “while endeavoring to perfect yourselves in this branch,” she exhorted her students, “do not neglect other things, which go to make up the complete woman.” In addition to English, course work included Japanese and Chinese literature, history, and ethics. Just as Bryn Mawr prided itself on matching Harvard’s broad curriculum, Ume’s school would demonstrate that girls could study at the same level as boys.
Ume’s students were surprised to discover that school no longer consisted of scribbling down what the teacher said, memorizing it, and then regurgitating it for exams. Ume expected her girls to prepare their work before class, offer their own opinions during classroom discussions, and disagree with their teachers if those opinions diverged. In a culture that revered its teachers, no matter how mediocre, this was a revolutionary approach. Still, there was no excuse for sloppiness. The basic
s—grammar, pronunciation, spelling—were essential, Ume believed, and she drilled her girls relentlessly until they got the details right. “Try again! Once more! Repeat!”
Once her scholars were ready to move on to more advanced material, Ume created her own syllabi, choosing texts—Little Lord Fauntleroy and Silas Marner were favorites—that tended, self-consciously or not, to feature cheerful children buffeted by the winds of fate. Ume and Alice both contributed to a biweekly magazine, The English Student, and also published retellings of well-loved tales in English. One of these, Popular Fairy Tales, written by Mitsu and revised by Alice, presumably sprang from Mitsu’s decade of childhood in America. “The English is excellent—simple, strong and pure,” declared the Japan Weekly Mail.
By the following spring the little house was bursting. Still unable to purchase a suitable building, Ume moved her school to another cheap rented house, centrally located near the Imperial Palace. This one was spacious and came with a pedigree—it had once belonged to a nobleman—but that was the extent of its charms. The place leaked every time it rained, always in a different spot. There was no heat. The beams were warped, and seemed unlikely to hold the roof up much longer. The damp had opened such gaps in the walls and around the door frames that sound traveled freely between adjacent bedrooms and classrooms—“a great advantage, one of the pupils remarked, when one was ill and could not attend class, and yet could follow all the lesson in bed,” Ume wrote. On top of all this, the place was said to be haunted: two rooms had apparently been the scene of a tragedy. Not one to indulge sentiment, Ume claimed these two as her bedroom and parlor, “and since I never saw the ghosts, our girls ceased to expect them.”
Haunted or not, the extra space was welcome. Now that there was enough room for everyone, Ume and Alice began a series of monthly literary gatherings reminiscent of the club activities that Sutematsu and Shige had enjoyed at Vassar. The meetings moved English outside the classroom, and provided opportunities for friends of the school to observe the girls’ progress. One of these occasions, in late May, was held in honor of the empress’s birthday. “The girls had some recitations and dialogues, and then acted out Little Red Riding Hood,” Ume reported to Mrs. Lanman. “Our musician in the house, who has a lovely voice, sang and one of our day scholars, who is a violinist, gave a performance, and so it was a very nice entertainment indeed.” The evening finished with tea, cake, and strawberries.
Music, strawberries, Grandma and the Wolf—Ume was giving her students a taste of her own American childhood, with its lively social life. As the second year of classes began, Sutematsu invited everyone for a picnic. The entire school walked to the big house in Onden—no endless jinrikisha processions for this group—and spent the day. Sutematsu showed the girls her home—“we even went up to the cupola on the very tip top,” wrote Ume—and fed them sandwiches and cake. There were games in the house and tennis on the lawn, and one of the Oyama boys showed the girls his Vistascope, a stereoscope with photo cards that seemed to move when you held the viewer to your face. The girls were enthralled. “Some of them had never seen a handsome foreign house and they thought it beautiful,” wrote Ume. “We came home about six o’clock, very tired and happy.” Whereas most Japanese students studied English as if it were Latin—to be conjugated and translated but never actually spoken—Ume’s girls learned to live in it. “I am very proud of them,” she wrote.
It would have been impolite to mention that she was proud of herself, but her satisfaction emerged in other ways. That fall, the second of her school’s existence, the Ministry of Education appointed Ume to the Board of Examiners for the English Teaching Certificate. A few months later, Ume sat in a row with three other examiners (all male) as each of the sixty-four finalists for the certificate (only four of them women) stood before them to demonstrate their command of spoken English. The candidates “were not boys, either, but grown-up men, some of them teachers,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman. “I tried to behave very properly and dignified.” A woman—an unmarried woman at that—was sitting in judgment upon men. “It really was a great responsibility,” she wrote, “and it is something to be proud of, something to add to my record that for once I did what never has been done by a woman before.”
After the move to the new house, in Motozonocho, Kojimachi, Ume sent Mrs. Lanman her new address. “I am sorry it is so long, but letters are sure to reach me even if only Tokio is on them.” It was true: a letter addressed to “Ume Tsuda, Educator, Tokyo” would reach its mark. Ume had chosen a far steeper path by remaining stubbornly single, but she had at last found her place.
IT HAD BEEN thirty years since three bewildered, shawl-wrapped girls emerged onto a snowy railway platform in Washington, thirty years since a group of newly minted Japanese statesmen traveled across an ocean and a continent to negotiate with the president of the United States. In March of 1902, the surviving members of the Iwakura Mission gathered for a reunion. It was held at the private Peers’ Club, but the attendees remembered the ornate building by an earlier name: the Rokumeikan, symbol of the enthusiasm for all things Western that had propelled the mission on its journey in the first place. By the close of the 1880s, the Rokumeikan had come to represent the worst excesses of Meiji-era reform. The construction of the nearby Imperial Hotel had obviated the need for a government guesthouse for foreign visitors, and the building had been sold.
Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume, the only women invited to the gathering, attended together. “The gentlemen treated us beautifully,” Ume reported. “Most of the men were old men, grey and baldheaded, and I was the baby of the party, as I was the baby on the ship in the old days, when the America went over from Japan to America.” As in the old days, the men did the talking; dinner was followed by speeches, “to which we women only listened and enjoyed.” The event made the papers, which published the reminiscences of the participants in installments for weeks after the fact.
What they remembered was not the blizzard of new information they had collected, now so thoroughly assimilated into Japan’s armed forces, industries, and government. The stories they told instead recalled their mistakes and embarrassments: the craving for rice and pickles instead of yet another meal of rare roast beef; the relief at trading an ill-fitting suit for the comfort of a kimono in the privacy of a hotel room; the struggle with Western cutlery; the moment, during their audience with President Grant, when a vice-ambassador’s headdress fell to the floor and he scooped it up and put it on backward in his haste. The hall rang with laughter as each man confessed his blunders or exposed his colleagues. The leaders of a modern twentieth-century nation looked back with fond amusement on the wobbly first steps of their nineteenth-century selves.
But for the girls, the embassy had been the beginning of their most formative years. The night of the reunion, both Marquis Oyama and Admiral Uriu happened to be away. The three women left the hall and climbed into Sutematsu’s waiting carriage, their heads full of memories. They spent the night together, curled up on Sutematsu’s foreign furniture, all considerations of rank and obligation laid aside. For that night they felt like girls again, “and it was a grand spree for all of us indeed,” wrote Ume to Adeline Lanman.
Once more a country of three, they understood each other better than anyone in the world. The experiences that linked them transcended the great differences in the lives they had chosen: the grande dame; the working wife and mother; the unmarried educator. They had faced different challenges and found different sources of solace, but they had always held on to each other.
A YEAR INTO her second Japanese sojourn, Alice had been devastated to learn of her brother Alfred’s sudden death; a bout of diphtheria shortly afterward compounded her low spirits. Though she was determined to see Ume through the second year of her fledgling venture, Alice knew her time in Japan was coming to an end. Before her departure, she and Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige all gathered at a photographer’s studio. The group portrait taken that day—the only photo of all four together—captures a mixt
ure of pride, optimism, and something like regret.
Alice—her broad shoulders squared in an unfussy black dress, a trace of gray at her temple, the strong line of her jaw beginning to soften in middle age—is the solid center of the group, her face directed with determination to one side. At her shoulder a kimono-clad Ume, not much taller standing than Alice is sitting, looks directly into the camera with a serene half smile. Shige stands on Alice’s other side, bespectacled and more reserved in a kimono of a darker hue, meeting the lens with something less than her usual frank good cheer. Sutematsu, seated knee-to-knee with Alice, completes the composition, but where the other three are straight, she is curved, her gaze sliding out of the frame, her expression more tentative. Her hands are hidden in the pale silk of her kimono sleeves. It is tempting to read the photo as a record of the sitters’ states of mind.
“The school is getting along so nicely now, and I have all the work I can possibly take, and with sixty scholars, I have quite enough to do,” Ume had written in January. Whether propelled by fate or by her own will, she had traveled, arguably, farther than any Japanese woman ever had, and all the journeys now seemed to have been aimed directly toward this moment of fulfillment. “It was only a few days ago I was thinking how useful has been all that miscellaneous reading I did as a child in your library,” she mused to Mrs. Lanman. Her childhood passions, so different from those of her peers in Japan, now seemed purposeful. “I feel quite sure now that my work will do some good, and perhaps my life and example will not be in vain—it was my wish for many years that it might be so, but now I feel it may be so,” she wrote. The old ambivalence about her choices had faded; her school was now her home. “It has given me much happiness and friends, and I believe it is truly my life work.” Alice’s departure would be a blow, but there was reason to believe that Anna would shortly arrive to take her place, fulfilling the promise she had made on the train to the seaside years earlier.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 27