Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (16 page)

You asked me to write you a letter or rather a composition on what I thought about the improvement in Japan and how they ought to make improvement. I think it wrong to make everything different in Japan . . . I would like Japan to keep the language and dress as they did and write the same but have America schools and have Japanese schools too. They ought to keep on making china and bronzes and sword just as they did but in a few things the Japanese ought to change, such things as the scissors, and a few others, for in a few things the Americans make better. I wish they would (all the people in Japan) become Christians and all the temples become churches it would be too much trouble to build new churches, but take all the idols and everything and change a few thing and have that as a church it would make beautiful churches.

In fact, Ume’s exposure to the appeal of all things Western had begun before she ever left Japan. As a teenager, her father had been one of the young samurai manning the outdated coastal artillery as Commodore Perry steered his astonishing black ships toward Edo. From that moment Sen Tsuda had resolved to cast his lot with the West: leaving his domain behind, he set out for Edo and by his midtwenties had learned enough English to win a position as interpreter to the shogun. The restoration of the emperor ended that career, but in 1869 Tsuda landed on his feet: he became the manager of Tokyo’s first hotel catering to foreigners.

The Hoterukan was a perfect symbol of the early Meiji era. Taking its name from the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “hotel” with the suffix
-kan
(“building” ) added, it was a spectacularly awkward convergence of East and West, with Western-style sash windows set into walls of traditional diamond-patterned
namako
tiles. The gardens were Japanese, but the interiors were plastered and painted in the foreign style. There were two hundred rooms on three stories, and a staff of more than a hundred. To
the Japanese, the massive building was impressive, immortalized in dozens of popular prints, but it was expensive and inconvenient, built on mosquito-ridden reclaimed swampland, and foreigners found the food inedible. The business foundered, and Tsuda quit after less than two years. The Hoterukan burned to the ground in 1872, just after the girls arrived in America. It was a spectacular failure, but there Tsuda learned enough about Western ways to propel him into his next incarnation, as a pioneer importer and cultivator of exotic produce: strawberries, asparagus, eggplants, figs. Tsuda was soon advising the Meiji government on Western agriculture.

Like many Japanese reformers, Tsuda regarded Western strength and Christianity as inseparably entwined. Though he and his family did not actually convert until after Ume’s departure, Tsuda never shared Kenjiro Yamakawa’s wary hostility toward the barbarians’ religion. Ume, embraced by an American family for whom piety was paramount, had no reason to resist. A year after arriving at the Lanmans’, she asked to be baptized. Eager to grant her gratifying request, but mindful of the Japanese ambivalence toward Christianity, the Lanmans brought her to their friend Octavius Perinchief, pastor of a nonsectarian church in Pennsylvania and an adviser to Arinori Mori on educational policy. “I think I have baptised grown persons whose convictions and views were not so well defined as hers,” Perinchief wrote. Ume’s vision of turning temples into churches proved prescient. “Ume will be glad to know that I have hired a fine temple and have removed all the Idols and every Sunday afternoon Mr. Soper
†
preaches in the temple, which we all attend and many of the neighbours,” Tsuda wrote to Lanman in 1875. Ume’s sister Koto joined in her parents’ embrace of Christianity. “You went away from us and I think you will have trouble,” she wrote to Ume in English, “but if we believe in Jesus Christ and get help from Him then we shall be happy.”

Ume certainly seemed to believe. In a small cottage in the Georgetown garden lived Jeffrey and Margaret Savell, a black couple who worked for the
Lanmans. Charles Lanman liked to recount how Ume would visit the cottage on Sunday mornings with her Bible and prayer book, and conduct a miniature Sunday school for the elderly pair. Years later, Jeffrey, now a widower, wondered what had become of the girl from Japan. “O sir, she was a good child sure,” he told Lanman, “and she told Margaret how to get to heaven.”

For the time being, though, heaven was a home in Georgetown, where the little girl was praised by her teachers and adored by her foster parents, who traveled with her through New England and as far as Canada in the summers and introduced her to the most prominent members of their circle. She shook Senator Charles Sumner’s hand and sat on Longfellow’s lap. “A kiss to your little Japanese ward,” Longfellow closed one letter to Lanman.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1876, the three girls posed together for a rare photo. Sutematsu stands in the middle, tall and straight in bold stripes, belted narrowly at the waist with a broad ribbon tied at the side. Her hair is pulled back, with curly bangs cut in front. The full cheeks of her childhood have lengthened into more mature planes; her expression is both severe and serene. To her left stands Shige, half a head shorter, arm linked through her friend’s striped sleeve. Shige’s face, still round, is softer and less austere, framed with ruffles at the collar and the same curly bangs. Sutematsu’s right arm encircles Ume’s shoulders as the smaller girl leans into her hip, reaching up to hold her hand. Sutematsu and Shige have the shapely grace of young women; Ume, the simpler dress and gamine features of a girl. All three regard the world with striking poise. “The trio,” as they called themselves, was united for a much-anticipated visit. Sutematsu was sixteen; Shige, fifteen; Ume, eleven. And the United States of America was one hundred.

In honor of the centennial, a great exposition was taking place in Philadelphia, an “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine” so prodigious that it became synonymous with the national birthday itself. “Have you been at the Centennial?” people asked each other. “How do you like the Centennial?” The traumas of the recent
past—the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873, with its ensuing economic depression—receded for a season as America celebrated the prodigious resources and innovations that would “sooner or later lift the nation from its slough of despond, and place it at the head of the phalanx of progress.”

Two hundred and fifty pavilions rose on 285 acres in Fairmount Park, with a custom-built narrow-gauge railway to move the spectators from one building to the next. The colossal Main Building—at a symbolic 1,876 feet long, the largest building in the world—enclosed an area the size of six football fields and housed exhibitors from thirty-seven countries. The centennial art exhibition in Memorial Hall featured everything from shocking French and Italian nudes to
The Dreaming Iolanthe
, a bas-relief sculpted in butter by a farmer’s wife from Arkansas. The milk pan that held the sculpture was nested in a bowl of ice for the duration of that unusually hot summer.

The most popular attraction was Machinery Hall, where foreign and local visitors alike could behold the proof of America’s imminent shift from an agricultural nation to an industrial one. The Otis elevator, the Remington typewriter, and Alexander Bell’s telephonic telegraphic receiver were all on display, but the central attraction was the majestic Corliss steam engine, an “athlete of steel and iron” that powered all the exhibits in the hall. William Dean Howells, editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, waxed rhapsodic: “Wherever else the national bird is mute in one’s breast, here he cannot fail to utter his pride and content.” As a nation, America was coming of age, pivoting from brash upstart to mentor, and the proof was in Machinery Hall. “Let the new cycle shame the old!” proclaimed the last line of the hymn that John Greenleaf Whittier composed for the opening of the exhibition. The song threatened to eclipse “Hail Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in its instant popularity.

Between May and November, nine million people paid fifty cents apiece to exult in their nation’s achievements and travel the world without leaving Philadelphia. Many countries had built freestanding structures, and Japan had two: a model “dwelling” and a bazaar, filled with “dragons,
and mats, tea cups, and lanterns, cabinets, and carved ivory” that entranced passersby, especially the ladies. The garden surrounding the bazaar was a classically miniaturized Japanese landscape, “a plesaunce for a palace of puppets,” remarked one observer, “while a single American oak over-canopied the whole park.” Visitors were delighted, though somewhat in the manner of visitors to a zoo. “The quaint little people, with their shambling gait, their eyes set awry in their head, and their grave and gentle ways, how can it be in them . . . to make such wonderful things?” commented one. “It is a great pity not to see them in their own outlandish gear, for picturesqueness’ sake,” lamented Howells. Most of the Japanese exhibitors had quickly found themselves Western clothes after several “Asiatics,” both Japanese and Chinese, were harassed on opening day.

In July, Sutematsu and Shige traveled down from New Haven to meet Ume and the Lanmans and join the throngs in Philadelphia. Four years had passed since their first bewildering kimono-clad days in San Francisco. Now they strolled from pavilion to pavilion, well tailored and at ease. Amid so much that was exotic, they were relatively inconspicuous, enthralled along with everyone else by the scale and scope of the displays, from the gigantic torch-bearing hand of the Statue of Liberty, rising out of a kiosk at which you could make a donation toward the future construction of her pedestal, to the unfamiliar snacks for sale, including bananas, sold individually wrapped in foil for the exorbitant price of ten cents. In contrast, when 113 young members of the Chinese Educational Mission visited the Centennial Exhibition a month later, they became one of the attractions, touring the grounds in loose Chinese jackets and cloth shoes, their long queues hanging down their backs from beneath jaunty Western-style boaters. Their schoolwork was on display in the Connecticut pavilion, and each boy had the chance to shake hands with President Grant.

The girls might have been overlooked entirely, had it not been for the presence of Kiyonari Yoshida, the Japanese minister, who joined the Lanman party staying at the home of Octavius Perinchief, a forty-minute drive
from the exhibition. The Perinchief house became an informal Japanese headquarters that summer, with members of Japan’s Centennial delegation coming to pay their respects to Yoshida and his wife. The bicultural group made repeated visits to the exhibition and spent afternoons discussing its marvels, with Yoshida and his colleagues joining the girls on the Perinchiefs’ lawn for croquet. Makoto Fukui, the head of the Centennial delegation, was bemused by the gargantuan spectacle of the exhibition: “The first day crowds come like sheep, run here, run there, run everywhere. One man start, one thousand follow. Nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say damn great many times, get very tired, and go home.”

Ume was less critical. “The Main Building is one third of a mile long, and is the most interesting of all the parts,” she wrote to a friend in Georgetown. “The main entrance has over the door an organ, the largest in the United States.” The Japanese department in the Main Building had “bronzes, laquer-ware, and china of greatest variety and splendor,” Ume noted with the same intrigued curiosity as any American spectator, and Machinery Hall was “quite wonderful.” If the Centennial Exhibition inspired national pride in Ume, that sentiment was at least as American as it was Japanese. But after several visits, she began to see Fukui’s point: “After all, it is very tiresome work to walk about so much, looking at the things.” The heat and the crowds took their toll: in the wake of the Philadelphia trip, Ume came down with typhoid fever, her only serious bout with illness during her years with the Lanmans.

T
HE FOLLOWING SPRING,
in April 1877, Sutematsu graduated from Hillhouse High School. As at Miss Abbott’s School, the students who received diplomas from Hillhouse were mostly female; the boys in the class had departed to prepare for the exams that would admit them to college. The commencement exercises were elaborate, with students speaking on “Dickens’ Pictures of English Home Life,” “The Turkish Question,”
and “The Woman of the Past, the Present, and the Future,” among other topics, and interludes of music by Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Handel. The class of ’77 had composed its own graduation song, a sentimental farewell to friends and teachers expressing a hope that God might “crown every life with richest love.” Sutematsu was the only girl in the class who would go on to earn a college degree.

Graduations can give graduates an inflated sense of their own maturity. “I went to see Miss Abbott last evening, and I am glad I did,” wrote Rebecca Bacon to her stepmother in high dudgeon that summer. It had just come to her attention that Sutematsu and Shige intended to spend some of their summer vacation on Long Island, at the beach in Southampton. “This enterprise, I find, is planned by the two Japanese girls on their own unassisted resposibility [
sic
],” she scrawled, her indignation evident in misspellings, underlined words, and uncharacteristic exclamation points. “The way in which the children have arranged it shows at once their intention to direct things for themselves and their incapacity to do it,” Rebecca continued. The plan, she reported, was for the girls to

go
by themselves
to Southampton, where they intended to put up at a Hotel!!! They protested—or Stemats did—that they were quite competent to do it—“oh yes,
with
Shige” ! for company—or talk of that kind. Miss A very promptly shut down on
that
—she told Stemats that she had no idea that Mrs. Bacon would allow her to go to a Hotel in that way; and that if she would, she herself would not permit Shige to do it . . . Now it is plain that Stemats is getting “too big for her breeches” and ought to be made to see that because she is an inexperienced child she does wrong to herself not to consult those who have her in charge.