Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (23 page)

Ume, having grown up in a household far less preoccupied with budgeting than the Bacons’ had been, was more concerned with the Tsuda family’s expectations than with their finances. “My Father,” she told Mrs. Lanman, “is very kind and indulgent, but seems to expect far too much from his foreign
daughter. He introduces me to people, I think with a proud way, and already wants and asks me to do many things which I don’t know. I hope his anticipations in me will not be too suddenly overthrown.” Ume did not burden her foster mother with a list of those anticipations, but prominent among them was certainly the one Ume feared most: a good marriage.

A
S FAR AS
Ume could tell, there was no word in Japanese for “spinster.” “Sutematsu and I inwardly lament over the fact that we shall do such an unprecedented thing as to live and die old maids,” Ume wrote. “But we won’t marry and don’t care to, and if we did, we would find it hard, for Japanese husbands require so much attention and obedience and do not treat their wives with a bit of respect and love, if they have any.” Well, there was Shige. “Of course, this is not always the case, but it is so in general,” Ume insisted. To Ume’s chagrin, Shige challenged her unequivocal stance—and as the weeks passed, Sutematsu, unnervingly, also seemed less and less firmly of Ume’s mind. Ume felt abandoned by her two older friends. “They seem to think, both of them (which is
very
hard),” she wrote, “that we must decide now whether we are willing to live single all our lives or not.” In other words, the question was still open—at least in Sutematsu’s mind, if not in Ume’s—and an answer was urgently required: “Everyone marries early, and if we put off, then we won’t have any offers.”

Eager for her dearest friends to share her happy state, Shige made her new home in Negishi, in the northeastern part of Tokyo, into a sort of clubhouse—a gathering place for the trio, as well as for friends of her husband: “young men who have been abroad and who are consequently more congenial than those who never have seen other countries,” Sutematsu told Alice. “We have a society of our own very different from purely Japanese one or foreign.” Here were men she could talk to, graduates of Amherst and Cornell and Yale who were fluent in English, certainly, but who also understood the language of Western scholarship and were not alarmed by a woman who spoke it. With the married Urius as chaperones, the young people discussed issues and played games from both sides of
the Pacific. The unrestrained laughter of men and women enjoying themselves together, however, was purely American.

Ume, barely eighteen and with no college experience, was the little sister at these gatherings, but Sutematsu was in her element. At Shige’s, she felt “perfectly at home,” able to relax while still forging valuable connections with young men who had taken up promising positions at the university or in government as soon as they returned with their degrees. (She tried not to mind that no such offer had yet come her way.) The only irritation she felt was at Shige’s tendency to play matchmaker. “[She] has presented me with no less than six lovers out of whom I may make my choice,” she complained to her Vassar classmate Jessie Wheeler. “There is no probability, however, of my forsaking the noble army of spinsters.”

In the face of Shige’s happiness and the demoralizing lack of interest from the Ministry of Education, though, it was difficult to remain resolved. “Oh, Alice, I don’t know what to do,” Sutematsu wrote in January 1883, not two months after her return.

It is perplexing this life. It is nothing but a perpetual struggle after some thing . . . What would you say if I were engaged? But never fear. I have so far refused to marry three distinct persons and perhaps I may not have another chance even if I were willing. One I might have married for position and money but I resisted the temptation . . . The others—well I suppose I might have married for love, for yet neither of them had money or rank—but I didn’t. So when you come to Japan you will still find me an old maid. Do you know Alice that girls who are above twenty are old maids? I am one and mother says that I may not have another offer . . . I am sure I don’t know what is going to become of Japan. I feel perfectly discouraged about my work.

Her ambition was at war with her pride. The truth was increasingly clear: an old maid in Japan, no matter how accomplished she might be, was an object of pity, if not outright scorn.

At the end of January, Shige’s brother Takashi provided a welcome
distraction from the grim challenges of life and work. He planned to throw a party to introduce the newlywed Urius to his wider circle; would the trio and friends like to entertain with a “private theatrical” ? They quickly settled on the final two acts of Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
—an English lesson and a cultural display in one. “The party will be a large affair and all sorts of swell people will come to it,” Sutematsu wrote with excitement. “But since half of them won’t understand English we have no fear of stage fright at all.”

For ten days it was almost like being back at Vassar with the Philalethean Society: casting, rehearsals, costumes. “Can you imagine me as Portia?” Sutematsu asked Alice. Actually, it wasn’t much of a stretch. Lovely, intelligent, regal, and completely convincing when disguised as a doctor of the law, Portia arrives at court to save noble Antonio from the bloodthirsty Shylock. In terms of beauty, bearing, and brilliance, surely there was no woman in Japan more qualified for the part. “At the trial scene I am to wear my fur cloak, a velvet cap and a black dress,” Sutematsu reported. “In the next act I shall wear my commencement dress.” Ume, appropriately, would play Portia’s clever young lady-in-waiting, Nerissa, with a rubber raincoat for her law clerk’s costume. They were indeed perfectly cast: two highly accomplished young women, playing characters who pose as young men in order to achieve otherwise impossible goals.

Uriu played the noble and generous Antonio, and Naibu Kanda, an Amherst graduate known as the finest English speaker in Japan, was Portia’s ardent suitor, Bassanio. Shige took the part of the duke, arbiter of justice, in an “ermine” cloak that Sutematsu fashioned of black cotton. Shylock stole the show, as played by Shige’s younger brother Eisaku, who had also studied abroad—“the best amateur performer I ever saw,” Sutematsu declared.

The party, by all accounts, was a great success. Ume especially enjoyed herself: the polished woodwork of the Masuda reception rooms glowed in the candlelight, the guests were elegantly dressed, and best of all, she wrote to Mrs. Lanman, the players “were relieved from the formalities of
sitting and talking all the time, and so we stayed in the other room and got our rather funny costumes fixed.” A narrator hidden behind a curtain read a synopsis of the story in Japanese, “and then we had the scene which went off beautifully and seemed to be enjoyed and appreciated.” At least they had demonstrated that “nice people” could enjoy entertainment at a social gathering without hiring professionals, Ume concluded, satisfied. But women in Japan had been banned from the stage for the last two hundred and fifty years. Aside from the trio in costume, the other female guests at the Masudas’ that night would never have dared a “private theatrical”—or even a game of charades—in mixed company.

Though the evening was meant to honor Shige and her new husband, it was Sutematsu’s turn as Portia that proved most memorable. Two men watched her that night with unusual interest. One was Naibu Kanda, who delivered his lines as Bassanio, Portia’s lover, with an ardor entirely unfeigned. Kanda had enjoyed Sutematsu’s company at Shige’s gatherings ever since her return, and he had already made his feelings clear; he was one of the suitors she had mentioned in her letters to Alice. An instructor of English at the university, and a devout Christian, Kanda was, in every respect, a catch. On the advice of her mother and Shige, Sutematsu hadn’t rejected him out of hand, informing him instead that she couldn’t possibly make a decision so soon after her return. If he needed an answer now, however, it would have to be no. Kanda decided to wait. “So we met very often and were very good friends,” Sutematsu told Alice later. “Of course it was very pleasant to have a young handsome man very attentive to you and to have him think your slightest wish is as a law.”

The heightened excitement of the play must have brought the situation to a head. Three days after the party, Sutematsu wrote to Alice in a state. “What a trouble it is to live!” she scrawled. “I have got into most horrible trouble and I don’t know what to do. You are my only comfort[,] for I can write to you and let off my feelings. I can’t talk to even Shige[,] for with her began the trouble and I am afraid we will have no end of row.” Flustered and apparently embarrassed, she would not explain herself, even to Alice. “I need not tell you the nature of the trouble,” she wrote, “for it is sufficient to say I am in it.”

It was another three weeks before Sutematsu told Alice the rest of the story. Playing Portia to Kanda’s Bassanio had ended her indecision. “I did have serious thoughts of saying yes,” she wrote, “for I liked him very much and he was in dead earnest.” But did her future really depend on a Bassanio? Shakespeare’s young hero is charming, impulsive, romantic, but somewhat hapless; in the end, it is Portia’s quick-wittedness that saves the day. Sutematsu certainly identified with Portia’s calm competence. “When I thought of it more, I did not think it would be best,” she wrote, “for one thing he is very young and boyish. So finally I wrote to him and told him that we better forget all that passed between us.”

Kanda did not give up easily. The very next day the “crazy boy . . . presented himself at our house demanding to see me,” Sutematsu recounted. When she said she was sick, he asked for her sister Futaba, the teacher. But Futaba was at work, so off he went to the Women’s Higher Normal School to plead his case. Futaba listened to him for more than an hour and brought his entreaties home that evening, but her little sister’s mind was made up. “And now he has written me a long letter and I feel dreadfully,” Sutematsu wailed to Alice, “for it seems more like a curse than any thing else.”

Doors seemed to be closing rather than opening. Sutematsu was briefly galvanized by the news that a position teaching physiology and zoology might be available at the Normal School. “It is just the place for me and I should like to teach Physiology above all others,” she gushed; it had been one of her strongest subjects at Vassar. The salary promised to be even higher than Shige’s—a welcome boost to Sutematsu’s tottering self-esteem. But the textbooks were all in Japanese, which Sutematsu still could neither read nor write. “I have to study it just like a new language and teach in that language within two weeks,” she wrote. “My mother says it is impossible but I mean to try if I am asked.” In the end, she was forced to concede that the obstacles were insurmountable. Meaningful, profitable employment seemed entirely out of reach, and marriage—if, indeed, she wasn’t already too old for it—like an admission of defeat. Her twenty-third birthday that month did not feel like cause for celebration.

The models Sutematsu had looked to in New Haven—unmarried,
independent women like Shige’s “Aunt” Nelly Abbott, director of her own school, and Alice Bacon’s oldest sister Rebecca, assistant principal at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute—simply had no counterparts in Japan. “Oh Alice, my views on various subjects change so rapidly,” she sighed. “I see now the necessity for Japanese women to be married . . . You can not tell till you have been in Japan and be a Japanese, but really it is necessary.” She owed a debt to her country, but no one seemed to have any idea how she was meant to repay it. “I wonder if you think as I do that the happiest period of one’s life is one’s childhood,” she wrote.

I feel more than ever the heavy responsibility of my future . . . and wish those careless days at Vassar could come back again. Oh Alice what a tangle this life is! I never used to think much of the dark side of life and used to feel so confident of the future and of my own strength but now I am not certain of either. People talk of dying for one’s country as a glorious thing, but to me, to live for one’s country seems infinitely more self-sacrificing. If it is possible that by the death of someone Japan could be benefitted in some way I would willingly, rather gladly be that one, but that is impossible.

There seemed to be no way forward.

J
UST WEEKS LATER
Ume wrote with intense urgency to Mrs. Lanman: “I have so much to write and tell you, you can’t imagine, and I want this letter to hurry up and reach you.” Several tantalizing pages on, she got to the point: “I have reached the climax of my letter, and the secret burning on the end of my pen is about to be put down. The secret is no longer a profound secret and Sutematsu says I may tell. This is it. Do you know our dear Sutematsu in a little while is going to be a great lady, one of the first in the land in position as she is now in mind?”

The second admirer whose eyes had followed Sutematsu as she delivered Shakespeare’s lines two months earlier had been a member of the
audience. A portly man of middle age, jowly and grave, one of the highest-ranking present that night, he had taken careful note of the young woman’s cosmopolitan grace. Shortly following Sutematsu’s triumph as Portia, her brothers received a formal and utterly unexpected inquiry: Iwao Oyama, minister of war, requested the hand of their youngest sister in marriage.

The proposal was shocking. Oyama was one of the most powerful men in the Meiji government. He was forty years old, a recent widower with three small daughters, a battlefield veteran whose barrel chest afforded barely enough room for his decorations. And he was a Satsuma man: sworn enemy of the Aizu.

This, more than anything, stunned Sutematsu’s family. During the siege of Tsuruga Castle, in the last desperate days of the Boshin War, Oyama had been one of the “potato samurai” closing in on the beleaguered Aizu from the surrounding hills. He had himself fired the very cannonballs that Sutematsu and her sisters had dodged within the castle walls. He bore scars from that battle—perhaps from the very ammunition the girls had helped to make. Fifteen years had passed, the war was long over, and Oyama was now Hiroshi Yamakawa’s superior officer in the army. But at a deeper level, he remained the enemy. The Yamakawas turned him down flat.