Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (21 page)

Sutematsu may have been irritated by the tactless ignorance of certain Americans, but after eleven years, and despite her bravado, Japan had in some ways become a land of mysteries to her as well. Yet it was still, paradoxically, hers:

It is not to be wondered at, that Americans have such peculiar ideas about our country, considering how very different it is from other parts of the world. You say we do every thing upside down. We turn the leaves of a book from left to right; we write up and down instead of horizontally; we place the surname before the Christian name; and so on. There is no limit to the list of our oddities.

Her tone is sardonic, but it masks a note of uncertainty. Sutematsu could no longer read or write in Japanese; the books whose pages she turned (from right to left) were all in English. She signed herself “Stematz Yamakawa,” and not the other way round. She may have claimed Japanese “oddities” as her own, but they were not much more comfortable to her than to the thoughtless young ladies who exclaimed over them.

The rest of the essay, which Sutematsu titled “Recollections of Japanese Family Life,” dwelled on childhood memories of her family’s sprawling compound: the lotus blossoms, the spare and elegant rooms, the loyal servants. She was describing a world that had begun to disappear even before she sailed for America. Her family had lost everything in the Boshin War, and the old domains had been reorganized into prefectures just before she left Japan. In 1876 the Meiji government had abolished the samurai class entirely. The world of Sutematsu’s childhood had been erased.

“Consequently, you must constantly make the distinction between the Old Japan where the feudal system, and the darkness of the Middle Ages still held sway,” she instructed her readers confidently, “and the New Japan with telegraphs and railroads, banks and universities, and a government rapidly transforming itself into a limited monarchy.” This was the Japan in which she would be making her future. Soon she would see it for the first time; as yet, it existed for her only in her imagination.

For a New Haven–raised Vassar graduate, however, Sutematsu’s sense of Japan was startlingly accurate. In the essay on Japanese politics she had written for the
Vassar Miscellany
in her senior year, she followed her summary of Japan’s transformation with a conclusion that acknowledged the uncertainty of Japan’s future:

What will be the end of these agitations no one ventures to predict. In fact, the people of Japan could be divided into three most diverse parties: first, those who are conservative, who believe in the ancient regime and who strenuously oppose the introduction of any new principle or foreign civilization; the second class are those who advocate reform but believe in slow and sure progress; the third class are thoroughly discontented
with the past and present and desire a change at any cost. Which of these is strong enough to overcome the other two, can not yet be decided.

As a woman whose life was being uprooted and transplanted in the service of her country for the second time, whose mind had been shaped by a culture most of her countrymen had never encountered, Sutematsu could only hope the first party would not prevail.

A
ND THEN THE
skies cleared, the water turned deep blue instead of grim gray, and the port of Yokohama was only a day ahead of them. Sutematsu, never one to pour out her feelings, wrote in her last shipboard words to Alice only of the glorious weather, and that she felt “splendid except for a nasty cold.” Ume, as usual, confided her innermost thoughts to Mrs. Lanman. “I am wild with joy and can hardly contain myself—next moment I am filled with strange misgivings,” she wrote. “You can imagine my face as red as a beet from now onward, from excitement.” She rushed about the ship, fixing in memory the wheelhouse, the kitchen, the steerage decks, and the officer’s quarters. Scanning the waves, she spotted a school of porpoises. “They swam all around us and so close that we could see them under the water and as they leapt up we could see their whole lengths. All around us the water foamed with their spoutings and we watched them with interest and curiosity[,] glad indeed to see something alive, in the water enjoying themselves.”

It was a good omen. “Tomorrow turns a new page in my life,” Ume closed her letter. “May it be a good one.” Whatever happened after the
Arabic
docked, Ume was determined to fulfill the expectations of her family and her country. In the years to come, only a very few would ever be privy to the doubts that plagued her. Below her signature she added a postscript: “This letter intended only for your & Mr. L’s own reading.”

Sutematsu and Ume lay awake most of their last night on board, talking until the wee hours in their shared stateroom. As dawn broke on Monday, November 20, 1882, they dozed at last, only to be woken by a voice shouting
outside their door: “Land!” They dove into their clothes and raced each other up on deck, where the outline of mountains was emerging from the mist.

“How do you feel now, since you have seen your country?” someone asked.

“I cannot tell you how I feel,” Sutematsu replied, “but I should like to give one good scream.”

It was several more hours before the
Arabic
dropped anchor. She was soon surrounded by small craft churning out to meet her. Sutematsu gave them only an idle glance; the
Arabic
was several days late, and the uncertainty of their arrival would surely have kept any welcoming party away. But Ume’s eyes were sharper: suddenly she gasped and pointed. On the deck of an approaching tugboat stood a knot of people frantically waving handkerchiefs. As it drew closer, the girls recognized the excited faces: Ume’s father and sister, Sutematsu’s sisters, and their dear Shige.

Eleven years earlier they had watched from the deck of a different steamer as the edge of an alien land approached. Now, that once-foreign place was the only home they knew. It was the coastline ahead of them that was alien.

*
“Japanning” referred to the exceptionally hard black lacquer prized on decorative objects imported from Japan.

PART

III

The standards of my own and my adopted country differed so widely in some ways, and my love for both lands was so sincere, that sometimes I had an odd feeling of standing upon a cloud in space, and gazing with measuring eyes upon two separate worlds.

—
ETSU INAGAKI SUGIMOTO
,
A Daughter of the Samurai,
1926

From left to right: Ume, Alice, Shige, and Sutematsu, circa 1901
. (Courtesy Vassar College Library Special Collections.)

10    TWO WEDDINGS

T
HE TUG FULL OF
eager faces soon pulled alongside the
Arabic
. The rough crossing was over at last; Sutematsu and Ume had only to step onto the smaller boat for the short ride to the Yokohama docks, and solid ground. Yet as they thanked the American officers and said goodbye to the ship to which they had been confined for three weeks, their relief was tempered with regret. The crew had been kind to them, and the
Arabic
, despite its discomforts, was at least a familiar space. Once they disembarked, they would truly leave America behind.

On the dock, their party was engulfed by eager jinrikisha men, “who though very polite were very persistent,” Sutematsu wrote. She and Shige, unwilling to delay their reunion a moment longer, got into a double one, while the others rode singly. The last time Sutematsu had ridden in a jinrikisha, eleven years earlier, she had felt very small; now, sitting in what felt like an “overgrown baby-carriage and whirled away through the narrow streets, lined on either side with tiny houses, I felt as if I were visiting Lilliput.” Ume, for her part, was determined to be delighted with everything Japanese. The strange conveyances were “so nice and comfortable,” she wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “You can’t imagine how nice.”

Their first stop was the nearby home of Saburo Takaki, familiar to the trio from his years of service as Japanese consul in New York. He and his wife had joined the welcoming party and invited
the travelers to lunch in Yokohama before they pushed on to their final destinations in Tokyo. Takaki’s wife inquired as to whether Sutematsu and Ume would prefer Japanese or Western-style cuisine. Japanese, of course, they eagerly assured her. But as the food was served, there was a nervous pause. Would the new arrivals remember how to use chopsticks?

To everyone’s surprise—not least their own—the two young women took up the unfamiliar utensils without faltering. “I ate the lunch as naturally as one who has never left the soil of the Mikado’s empire,” Sutematsu wrote with bemused relief. “It is a strange fact that skill in using the chopsticks seems to be inherited and the last thing to be forgotten by Japanese otherwise denationalized.” Ume was especially heartened—here at least was one thing she still knew how to do—and basked in the approbation of her hosts. “I get along as well as anybody ever does with them,” she told Mrs. Lanman. “They all say so.”

After lunch they walked to the train depot. The rail line between Tokyo and Yokohama, not quite complete when they had left, was by now an unremarkable part of the landscape. An hour brought them to Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station, not far from the Imperial Palace, where eleven more members of Ume’s family were on hand to meet their train, bowing and smiling. Another crowd of jinrikisha men gathered. But here the group divided—Sutematsu heading northwest to her mother’s house in the neighborhood called Ushigome; Ume, southwest to her father’s farm in the suburb of Azabu. They were on their own again, and their reeducation in being Japanese was under way.

A
FTER ONE MORE
jolting hour in a jinrikisha, Sutematsu stepped down at the gate of the Yamakawa home. There was her mother, Toi, whose resolve to wait for the daughter she’d lost was at last rewarded. There was Kenjiro, looking taller and more dignified since Sutematsu had last seen him in New Haven six years earlier, standing beside a wife she had never met. Kenjiro was now a professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial University, a position hitherto held only by visiting Western advisers.
And there were her sisters: the eldest, Futaba, who lived half the week at the Women’s Higher Normal School—Japan’s only teacher-training school for women—where she supervised a dormitory; Misao, back from Russia and working as a French interpreter; and Tokiwa, with her husband and small son, who promptly burst into tears at the sight of this strange new aunt, with her bizarre clothing and shoes and hair. He was the only one who betrayed his feelings so noisily, however. Sutematsu was safe now from flamboyant American embraces. After eleven years of separation, the Yamakawas expressed the joy of reunion with Japanese restraint.

The house was crowded and busy—in addition to three generations of Yamakawas, there were three boarding students, a manservant, and three maids—but somewhat to Sutematsu’s embarrassment, she found herself the object of everyone’s concern. “They are so afraid I should get sick on account of the change of climate and clothing that they all devote themselves to me and I am in a fair way to become spoilt,” she wrote to Alice. Specially ordered foreign food arrived three times a day from a nearby restaurant—a degree of special treatment that Sutematsu had never received in her life and that, to her relief, was short-lived. “After the first week I have been allowed to eat Japanese food with meat twice a day.”

Another nephew, oldest brother Hiroshi’s ten-year-old son, was also glad to see the celebrity status of his “American Aunt” begin to subside. Apple of his grandmother’s eye, he had feared that Sutematsu’s return might displace him in Toi’s favor. “Oh, she is too big for Grandma’s baby,” he exclaimed with relief when they met. (Sutematsu, appalled at the way her mother indulged the boy, found him a nuisance.)

Sutematsu was grateful now for the enforced study sessions with Kenjiro in New Haven, and the hours of Japanese conversation with Shige at Vassar. Her Japanese, though rusty, was surprisingly serviceable. “As soon as I touched my native soil, my tongue seemed to be loosened,” she wrote. Spoken fluency, at least, was rapidly returning; reading and writing would be another project entirely. With calm resolve, Sutematsu settled down to relearn her past. “My knees at this moment are aching as if they
are coming to pieces,” she wrote to Alice from the tatami-matted floor. “I am busy making Japanese clothes for myself.”