Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (14 page)

Ume, for her part, was delighted at the prospect of moving back to Georgetown. The girls were practicing letter writing in their morning English classes, so Ume wrote to Adeline Lanman. “My Dear American mother,” she began,

You are a very nice woman. You are kind to me. You love me. Yesterday we will go to the woods and we have a very nice time. You are kind and I never forget. I am very glad this winter stay at your house.

The words loop across the page, the letters beautifully formed but not quite connected, as if written one at a time, with pauses for effort. “Your affectionate Japan daughter,” Ume signed off. She might be losing the girls
she had come to regard as older sisters, but she was gaining parents more solicitous and indulgent than any adults she had ever known.

On the evening of October 30, 1872, Sutematsu and Shige boarded the night train bound for New Haven, escorted by Mori. After eight months, Washington had begun to feel familiar; now here was yet another journey to a place they couldn’t imagine, full of people they had never met, but on whom they would again be utterly dependent. In Sutematsu’s case, however, apprehension was edged with excitement. She did know one person in New Haven. The last time she had seen her brother was in the smoking ruins of Wakamatsu, four long years earlier. She couldn’t recall his face clearly, but at the moment he was the only Japanese man in New Haven. He wouldn’t be hard to spot.

Ten hours later their train pulled into New Haven’s Union Station—not the monumental red-brick edifice that stands today, but its smaller predecessor on Chapel Street, an eccentric building graced by a central tower that looked startlingly like the topmost tiers of Tsuruga Castle. But the girls had no time to wonder at this odd vision. Begrimed and bleary from their night of travel, they were whisked along Church Street. The vast town green, with its three stately churches, opened out to the left, with the buildings of Yale College just visible beyond. A few moments later they pulled up in front of a well-tended white clapboard house on the right.

“The two Japanese girls came today,” Leonard Bacon wrote in his date book for October 31. “Mr. Mori, the Japanese embassador [
sic
] dined with us.” The two men found much to discuss; Mori was drafting a recommendation to his government arguing against the ban on Christianity in Japan, and Bacon, naturally, had plenty to offer on the subject. Mori would incorporate many of Bacon’s ideas, which eventually found their way into the Meiji government’s revised laws on religious tolerance. Kenjiro needn’t have worried. The man who would raise his sister was himself helping to ensure that Japan would not condemn her Christian upbringing.

Bacon and Mori wasted no time making the girls’ situation official. That same day, Bacon presented Mori with a document outlining their
terms. “Mrs. Bacon and my daughters will be watchful over the health, morals, and manners of these young ladies, and will take care that their training is like that of daughters in the best New England families,” it read in part. The girls would study at home until they had acquired the skills they needed to go to school. “When they shall have learned to read English with sufficient facility,” Bacon continued, “we shall take care to interest their minds in such books as will be useful to them.” Useful to them in becoming educated ladies, that is—teachers, perhaps, but not scholars.

Bacon’s opinion of female scholarship was mixed. His younger sister, Delia—considered an intellectual prodigy—had won fame as an author, speaker, and playwright, only to become fixated on the idea that authorship of Shakespeare’s plays should actually be attributed to a group of wits including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Walter Raleigh. “I have all along regarded her darling theory as a mere hallucination,” her brother wrote. Delia had died in an asylum at the age of forty-eight.

In Leonard Bacon’s mind, a girl’s highest goal was not to dazzle the intellectual world but to run a well-organized household. His memorandum to Mori on the girls reflected this view:

We expect them to acquire that knowledge of domestic duties and employments which qualifies an American lady to become the mistress of a family. We expect that they will be taught and will be willing to learn whatever our own daughters learn of work proper to a lady who may have occasion not only to direct the servants in her house but often to teach them how to perform their work.

Mori was more than satisfied; here was the very attitude that had created the women the Meiji reformers had noticed and admired. “Good wife, wise mother,” or ryosai kenbo in Japanese—that was the phrase that would soon enter the argot of the Meiji era, and that was the kind of woman Japan needed in order to move forward. Her contribution would be vital, but limited to the domestic sphere.

But these larger goals were far from the girls’ minds as they learned
their way around the house on Church Street. After just a few days at the Bacons’, two things had become clear: Sutematsu and Shige were delightful children, and they weren’t going to get very far with their English as long as they lived in the same house. By the end of the week, Shige had left for Fair Haven, a mile or two away, where another prominent minister, John S. C. Abbott, had agreed to take her in. “We were sorry to part with her eminently Mongolian features and her propensity to see the comical side of things,” Bacon wrote. “She was almost the more interesting one.” But having come to know Kenjiro, Bacon couldn’t very well pack his sister off to another family—and anyway, Bacon continued, Sutematsu “had charmed us all with her simplicity, her intelligence, and her affectionately confiding ways.”

It had been a year—almost to the day—since the Empress Haruko had gazed at five kneeling girls from behind her screen. Now there were three, and for the first time each of the three was on her own. Their American education could begin in earnest.

*
Already acquainted with Kenjiro, the Bacons focused their correspondence in the summer of 1872 on Sutematsu alone, but the eventual plan called for both Sutematsu and Shige to join their household.

7    GROWING UP AMERICAN

T
HOUGH
S
HIGE AND
U
ME
looked to her as the senior member of their unusual trio, Sutematsu settled into the Bacon family as the littlest sister. With the exception of the imposing Leonard Bacon, it was a household of women: Catherine, Leonard’s second wife, whose arthritis often confined her to her bed; Rebecca, more Catherine’s peer than her stepdaughter, briskly efficient manager of the family’s daily details; and Nelly and Alice, the last of the fourteen Bacon children still living at home, ages sixteen and fourteen.

Within a few months, Sutematsu—or “Stemats,” as her name was pronounced and written by her American friends—had become a treasured member of the family. Even the crusty hired Irishwomen who helped with the washing and cooking thought so, “and if they are aware that she is a ‘haythen,’” wrote Bacon, “that makes no difference to them.”

The formidable minister himself quickly developed something of a soft spot for his new ward. In the spring of Sutematsu’s first year in New Haven, P. T. Barnum’s “Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome” stopped there, attracting every child in the area like a magnet. “Barnum’s great menagerie was here two days, but, to my great disappointment, we were unable to give Stemats the opportunity of seeing it,” Bacon wrote. “The little girl’s disappointment we could not doubt, but she did not
exhibit any sort of vexation.” Only a year earlier, the girl herself had been the object of just the kind of stares drawn by Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid. She may have missed the circus, but she had clearly crossed over to the side of the gawkers.

Each day, Sutematsu went to Mrs. Bacon’s room after breakfast and spent several hours studying with her. Nelly was her music teacher, sitting next to her on the piano bench in the parlor. But it was with Alice that Sutematsu formed the strongest bond. Similar both in age and in scholarly intensity, the two girls were soon inseparable. And though Sutematsu worked diligently at her lessons, it was undoubtedly the time spent with this new sister that made the most immediate impact on her progress. Chattering away to Alice, instead of to Shige and Ume, she improved her English by the day.

In Alice Mabel Bacon, the youngest of fourteen, one might have expected a pampered pet, but Alice was a serious-minded soul with a sharp wit, a passion for books, and an unusually open mind. She was not the first studious female in the family. Her oldest half-sister Rebecca had only recently returned home to help her invalid stepmother; before that, Rebecca had held the position of assistant principal at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, founded to educate free blacks after the Civil War. A couple of years earlier, when Alice was twelve, she had spent a year living with Rebecca at Hampton, attending classes and even teaching a bit. The other teachers had called Alice “the Little Professor.” Like Sutematsu, she possessed a self-reliance that belied her years, and she understood what it meant to live among people unlike herself.

Before long, Sutematsu was ready to walk with Alice to Grove Hall Seminary, a small primary school for girls run by Miss Maria Monfort just a block away. A three-story frame building, it was topped with a cupola and set well back from the brick herringbone sidewalk. Sutematsu’s world suddenly expanded from the Bacon women to a whole classroom full of girls. As she had studied at home as a child, and then not at all during the years of war and dislocation, it was her first experience in a large group of her peers.

Autograph books were all the rage at Grove Hall, and a classmate named Carrie had a beautiful one, bound in tooled green leather, with “Autographs” stamped in fancy gilt letters. When it was her turn to sign, Sutematsu turned the little oblong book so that her page was tall rather than wide, and wrote her name in Japanese, four kanji characters marching down the page. Alice, never one to suffer fools, was equally unafraid of making a statement. “Cease your chatter, and follow me,” she wrote in Carrie’s book—in elegant Greek. Then, switching back to English, “Yours truly, A. M. Bacon.” One wonders whether autograph-seeking Carrie ever deciphered that page.

Meanwhile, Kenjiro made sure that Sutematsu’s English did not replace her native tongue entirely, and that her growing comfort with American ways did not eclipse her identity as a dutiful subject of the Japanese empire. They met for weekly lessons in Japanese language and Confucian philosophy. Sutematsu complained these were far more onerous than all the rest of her schoolwork in English, but underneath the griping her samurai pride was intact—enough to show off her calligraphy in Carrie’s autograph book, at least. When Kenjiro completed his degree and returned to Japan in 1875, he continued his tutelage remotely, sending his sister long letters on Japanese politics. She appreciated his attentiveness, though she did wish he’d tell her more about their family.

Sutematsu’s education continued outside the classroom as well. Though the Bacons were far from wealthy, Leonard Bacon’s stature won him membership in the Hillhouse Society, a group of New Haven’s leading academics and businessmen who met regularly to discuss scholarship, art, and civic affairs. Hillhouse Avenue, lined with mansions and stately elms, was home to most of them; just a few years earlier, Charles Dickens had declared it the most beautiful street in America. The Hillhouse wives had their own group, Our Society, founded to provide aid to needy women and children. Sutematsu attended meetings with Alice, sewing clothes and making diapers for struggling black families or refugees from the Franco-Prussian War. It was her first exposure to charity; private philanthropy was unknown in Japan.

The days had room in them for play as well as work. Across the street from the Bacons lived the family of William Dwight Whitney, professor of Sanskrit at Yale and secretary of the American Oriental Society. Whitney’s eldest daughter, Marian, fell just between Alice and Sutematsu in age, and she was their schoolmate as well as their neighbor. Another serious scholar growing up in a family that prized learning above most things, Marian was also tremendous fun. In the cold months the girls played checkers and went sleighing and skated in the frozen back yards of their friends; in warmer weather they climbed trees and swam. Sutematsu joined in with grace and enthusiasm. “I remember how, when we began to learn to dive, her lithe figure would spring into the air from the little raft and go down straight as an arrow into the water, while we splashed and floundered and fell flat upon the surface,” Marian wrote.

New Haven’s summers were sweltering, and the Bacons were in the habit of escaping northward to the deeper shade and cooler breezes of Colebrook, a village high in the Litchfield Hills. It was fifty miles by train to Winsted, and another dusty hour by cart from there. Not much more than an inn, a store, and a church, Colebrook was home to the Carrington sisters, Catherine Bacon’s unmarried cousins, both in their late twenties. Miss Kate and Miss Sarah took in boarders to supplement the income from their parents’ farm, and their city cousins were regular summer guests. There were lakes to bathe in, fish to catch, and evenings filled with poetry and charades.

In the summer of 1874 there was another lodger at the Carringtons’ white frame house down the hill from the center of the village: Tan Yaoxun (or Yew Fun Tan, as he was known at the time), one of two boys from the Chinese Educational Mission whom Miss Kate and Miss Sarah had agreed to host. Tan was twelve. Like Sutematsu, two years his senior, the boy enjoyed Catherine Bacon’s motherly attentions. At the end of that summer, when Catherine left with the girls for the start of school in New Haven, Tan’s letters followed her. “Do you remember saying that you would like to hear from me frequently?” he wrote. “I have not forgotten what you have said, if you have.” He told Mrs. Bacon of his triumphs and travails at
fishing—“I was provoked because I could not catch that
big trout
, though I ought not to let my angry passions rise”—and sent his best “to the Miss Bacons and all.” “All,” presumably, included the Bacons’ unusual ward. Tan’s path and Sutematsu’s would continue to intersect in the years to come.