First Adeline Lanman, then Alice, and now Sutematsu: three of Ume’s staunchest supporters were gone. A week after Sutematsu’s death, Ume suffered a small stroke, and six months later a larger one, which partly paralyzed her right arm; for the last ten years of her life she was largely housebound and increasingly isolated. When the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 flattened the college along with most of Tokyo, it was Anna Hartshorne, still full of energy in her midsixties, who left immediately for America to raise the money to rebuild. She was gone for more than two years, and though her campaign was triumphantly successful—eventually raising five hundred thousand dollars from donors including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace—Ume missed her profoundly. Anna did return, however, and she would remain at her teaching post until 1940, when a trip home to Philadelphia was made permanent by the outbreak of another war.
ON NOVEMBER 3, 1928, two years after Yoshihito’s death, with rising-sun flags flying from every house, his son Hirohito officially received the sacred imperial treasures—the sword, the mirror, and the jewel—that confirmed him as emperor. That same evening, after a brief battle with cancer, Shige died at home at the age of sixty-seven. The following evening, JOAK, Tokyo’s first radio station, broadcast Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance in her honor. A concert waltz, meant for a listening audience rather than a dancing one, it had been Shige’s favorite piece, and the last she had performed in public—an apt choice for the woman who had helped teach her compatriots how to behave in a ballroom.
Sotokichi Uriu, always the sicklier member of the couple, would outlive his wife by nearly a decade. His grief was matched by that of his brother-in-law, Takashi Masuda, the young samurai who had sent his littlest sister to America. Masuda, like Uriu now a baron, had retired from the Mitsui Trading Company and turned his energies to the arts. On the occasion of his sister’s death, he expressed his emotions in tanka, an ancient poetic form:
Her childish face lingers even now
America-bound, long ago
More than half a century had passed since seven-year-old Ume had watched her two dearest friends leave Washington for New Haven; now once again, she was the one left behind. She still had Anna, but as her health declined, what had always been a possessive relationship grew somewhat obsessive. The brief diary entries of Ume’s last months make note of every moment spent in Anna’s company.
Ume died less than a year after Shige, in August of 1929, at the age of sixty-four. After her death, the school she founded was renamed Tsuda Eigaku Juku—the “Tsuda Home School of English”—an unusually personal tribute. And when the post-earthquake rebuilding was at last complete, Ume’s ashes were moved to a quiet corner of the new campus in the northwestern suburb of Kokubunji, marked by an imposing granite slab and surrounded by a grove of her namesake plum trees—a shrine in spirit, if not in fact.
Today, Japanese elementary school children learn Ume’s name in social studies, though few recognize Sutematsu’s or Shige’s. Tsuda College, as it is known in English, still thrives, with an undergraduate enrollment of twenty-five hundred women studying English, mathematics, computer science, and international studies. They sometimes refer to themselves as “Umekos,” and when a final examination or an important job interview looms, many find their way to that quiet, plum-shaded corner of campus to ask Ume for help.
* “Chachan” was the family’s pet name for Hisako, Sutematsu’s daughter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ON THE DAY, nearly a decade ago, when I first pulled Alice Bacon’s A Japanese Interior from its basement shelf at the New York Society Library, I never imagined the voyage it would send me on, or the extraordinary people I would meet along the way.
Several descendants of the protagonists and their families shared stories and artifacts and provided a living link to the past: Jean Bacon Bryant, Akiko Kuno, Michio Tsuda, Setsuko Uriu, Yvonne Ying-yue Yung. Three generations of Tsuda College alumnae in the Fujita family shared their perspective on how the school has evolved across the decades.
Sachiko Tanaka and Takako Takamizawa were the fairy godmothers of my research in Tokyo, providing critically important encouragement and access. Librarians and archivists unlocked trove after trove of letters, documents, and photographs, especially Akira Sugiura and Yuki Nakada of Tsuda College, Dean M. Rogers of Vassar, James W. Campbell of the New Haven Museum, Rie Hayashi of the International House of Japan, Fernanda Perrone of Rutgers, and Brandi Tambasco of the New York Society Library.
Many experts, friends and strangers both, were startlingly generous with insights and advice: Margaret Bendroth, Lesley Downer, Elisabeth Gitter, Robert Grigg, Ann Havemeyer, James Huffman, James Lewis, James Mulkin, Anne Walthall, Barbara Wheeler. Special thanks to Daniel Botsman, chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale, whose extensive and thoughtful comments were a gift.
For close reading (and close friendship) I am grateful to Jessica Francis Kane, Gail Marcus, Zanthe Taylor, Carlton Vann, and Isaac Wheeler.
This project would never have become a book without Rob McQuilkin, who makes the most extravagant promises and keeps them; and Alane Salierno Mason, whose editorial wisdom never falters. The indefatigable Stephanie Hiebert devoted countless hours to the details. Nancy Howell drew the beautiful map.
My profoundest thanks go to Yuzo Nimura, tireless researcher, translator, and father-in-law. My work would have been impossible without him.
But the true inspiration for this book is my husband, Yoji Nimura, who took me to the other side of the world, and our children, Clare and David, who brought us back again. Home is wherever you are.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
15 motley uniforms: William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 366.
16 Oiled hair: Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 112.
17 Her teeth were blackened: Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected With Japan, For the Use of Travellers and Others, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 57; Gina Collia-Suzuki, “Beautiful Blackened Smiles,” Andon 92 (2012): 46–48.
17 They did not touch the refreshments: Shige Uriu, “The Days of My Youth,” Japan Advertiser, September 11, 1927.
17 “Considering that you are girls”: Yoshiko Furuki, The White Plum, a Biography of Ume Tsuda: Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 11–12.
1: SAMURAI DAUGHTER
19 The Yamakawa compound: Sutematsu Yamakawa, “Recollections of Japanese Family Life,” Vassar Miscellany, November 1, 1880, 49–54.
23 “Serve the shogun”: Teruko Craig, introduction to Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro, by Goro Shiba (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 4.
24 “1. We must not disobey our elders”: Ibid., 6.
25 And then they were free: Goro Shiba, Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 34; R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 105–6.
25 “Instructions for the Very Young”: Craig, introduction to Remembering Aizu, 7.
26 “The five worst maladies”: Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, for the Use of Travellers and Others, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 459–61.
28 taking Dutch sobriquets: Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 124.
29 One of his officers bragged: Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1979), 72.
29 Perry’s men, naturally: Matthew C. Perry, The Japan Expedition, 1852–1854: The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 91.
30 “Our historians bid us to ob
ey”: Henry Heusken, Japan Journal, 1855–1861 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 183.
2: THE WAR OF THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON
33 “brocade banner”: Peter Duus, Modern Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 80.
34 “potato samurai”: Goro Shiba, Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 42.
34 Girls of the samurai class: Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 44.
36 “Hand in hand”: Teruko Craig, introduction to Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 17.
36 The rhythmic pop of rifle fire: Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 51.
36 Not quite strong enough: Sakumi Hanami, Danshaku Yamakawa Sensei Den [The biography of Baron Yamakawa] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), chap. 2.
36 The tale is retold to this day: The story of the Byakkotai traveled far beyond Aizu, morphing from a heroic tale of Old Japan into a rallying symbol for militarists both in Japan and beyond. In 1928, impressed by the depth of the young fighters’ loyalty to their lord, Benito Mussolini sent a Pompeian column to be erected at the gravesite on Iimori Hill overlooking the castle. The monument still stands, inscribed in Italian and dated “year VI of the Fascist Era.”
37 Her sister was among: John Dwight, “The Marchioness Oyama,” Twentieth Century Home, 1904.
38 The night of his surrender: Harold Bolitho, “Aizu, 1853–1868,” Proceedings of the British Association for Japanese Studies 2 (1977): 16.
38 the paddle wheel steamer Yancy: Akiko Kuno, Unexpected Destinations: The Poignant Story of Japan’s First Vassar Graduate, trans. Kirsten McIvor (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), 46.
39 Desperate to feed his mother: Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 91.
39 “To those who ask”: Hiraku Shimoda, Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 59.
39 “If those scoundrels”: Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 89.
39 The boys now read: Shiba, Remembering Aizu, 91–92.
39 “Although Europe is now”: Akiko Uchiyama, “Translation as Representation: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Representation of the ‘Others,’” in Agents of Translation (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009), 67–68.
41 “The curio-shops displayed”: Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, for the Use of Travellers and Others, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 397.
3: “A LITTLE LEAVEN”
43 “Western-style” suit: Sakumi Hanami, Danshaku Yamakawa Sensei Den [The biography of Baron Yamakawa] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), chap. 2.
44 “as a little leaven leavens”: Charles Lanman, ed., The Japanese in America (New York: University Publishing, 1872), 46.
46 “Over sea, hither from Niphon”: Walt Whitman, “The Errand-Bearers,” New-York Times, June 27, 1860.
46 Even a smoke: Yukichi Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (1899; New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 113.
46 “One burly fellow”: Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 65.
50 Bowling along on wheels: Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 47; Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 86.
51 The Empress Haruko: Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 105.
51 “delicate and effeminate”: Ibid., 201.
52 Superstitions: Japan Photographers Association, A Century of Japanese Photography (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 7.
52 “tools of civilization and enlightenment”: Japan Photographers Association, Century of Japanese Photography, 9.
54 “urge them on toward civilization”: Albert A. Altman, “Shinbunshi: The Early Meiji Adaptation of the Western-Style Newspaper,” in Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 63.
54 “Five Young Girls”: “Five Young Girls Leave for Study in America,” Shinbun Zasshi, November 1871.
4: “AN EXPEDITION OF PRACTICAL OBSERVERS”
55 “If we would profit”: Charles Lanman, ed., The Japanese in America, (New York: University Publishing, 1872), 6–7.
56 “What heartless people”: Yoshiko Furuki, The White Plum, a Biography of Ume Tsuda: Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 6.
57 its settlers dead or dispersed in poverty: The grave of one of the women, a nursemaid named Okei, still stands. It is believed to be the first grave of a Japanese woman in America.
57 “What wonder”: Ume Tsuda, “Japanese Women Emancipated,” Chicago Record, February 27, 1897. Reprinted in Ume Tsuda, The Writings of Umeko Tsuda [Tsuda Umeko monjo] (Kodaira, Japan: Tsuda College, 1984), 77.
59 “Sailors on the decks”: Kunitake Kume, The Iwakura Embassy, 1871–73: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe, ed. Graham Healey and Chushichi Tsuzuki (Chiba, Japan: Japan Documents, 2002), 30.
59 In his account of their departure: Ibid.
59 “It was a very beautiful day”: Ume Tsuda, The Writings of Umeko Tsuda (Kodaira, Japan: Tsuda College, 1984), 475; Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 18.
60 “The bride was left alone”: Shige Uriu, “The Days of My Youth,” Japan Advertiser, September 11, 1927.
62 Japanese for “what do you want?”: Tsuda, Writings of Umeko Tsuda, 475.
62 “All our entreaties”: Uriu, “Days of My Youth.”
62 “Passengers are forbidden”: Kume, Iwakura Embassy, 1871–73, 31.
62 Those who had acquired wristwatches: Kunitake Kume, Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe 1871–1873, ed. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8.
62 “We did not see so much as”: Ibid., 8–9.
63 “He told us to come”: Uriu, “Days of My Youth.”
63 held tutorials on Western table manners: Akiko Kuno, Unexpected Destinations: The Poignant Story of Japan’s First Vassar Graduate, trans. Kirsten McIvor (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), 60.
64 Though there were two secretaries called Nagano: The other Nagano with the Iwakura mission, Fumiakira Nagano, was secretary to the chief judicial minister, Sasaki. Some scholars think the man who molested Ryo was Fumiakira: he was a southern samurai and therefore predisposed to abuse the girls, whose families were on the losing side; and he was close to Sasaki, which would explain why Sasaki argued vehemently against holding a trial at all. Sasaki, unfortunately, referred to both Naganos indiscriminately by surname in his journal, so we may never know which it was.
64 He wrote love notes: Masao Miyo-shi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 43.
64 “Wives and maids”: “Tommy Polka” (Philadelphia: Lee & Walker, 1860), Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
65 “Little irregularities”: Furuki, White Plum, 7.
65 “To divert our boredom”: Ibid.
65 “Apparently, when crossing the ocean”: Kume, Iwakura Embassy, 1871–73, 35.
5: “INTERESTING STRANGERS”
69 “Interesting Strangers”: “The Japanese Embassy,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 10, 1872. In anticipation of the embassy’s arrival, the Chronicle exhorted its readers to extend a warm welcome to the Japanese visitors: “The Japanese people occupy toward this nation a very important position; they send their youth here for education, who, unlike the Chinese, adopt our costume and our customs, and will in time carry to their Oriental homes many
of the habits and feelings acquired among us . . . It is necessary that some steps should be immediately taken by our civic authorities and leading men to give these interesting strangers, and to Minister DeLong, a proper reception when they land upon our shores.”
69 “America is a democratic country”: Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed through Their Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 93.
70 “in the most outlandish”: “The Japanese,” New-York Times, January 17, 1872.
71 “as densely packed as”: Kunitake Kume, The Iwakura Embassy, 1871–73: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe, ed. Graham Healey and Chushichi Tsuzuki (Chiba, Japan: Japan Documents, 2002), 64.
71 The Grand Hotel: Kume, Iwakura Embassy, 1871–73, 65.
71 “I was shocked”: Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries, 93–94.
72 “Annata, anaata ohio”: “The Orientals,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 17, 1872.
73 Iwakura was gracious: Ibid.
74 “Western people are ever eager”: Kunitake Kume, Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe 1871–1873, ed. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16.
74 “Let the Chinese be not confounded”: “Orientals,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 17, 1872.
74 “American idea”: Cullen Murphy, “A History of the Atlantic Monthly” (from a presentation given in 1994), Atlantic Monthly Group, 2001, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/about/atlhistf.htm.
74 “for, in spite of all Celestial”: “Japan,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1860, 722.
75 Iwakura ordered samples: “Iwakura’s Head,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 1872.
75 “And that is what we want with Japan”: “The Japanese,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 1872.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 29