Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (31 page)

Clara wasted no time. She wrote to her friend Mary Harris Morris, a Philadelphia matron passionately engaged in a dizzying array of educational and missionary projects. Because her husband, Wistar Morris, was a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mrs. Morris was in a position to dispense considerable philanthropic largesse, and she remembered Ume as a ward of the Lanmans. Without further ado, Ume became one of her causes: Mrs. Morris arranged for Ume to attend the newly founded Bryn Mawr College as a special student with reduced tuition, starting immediately. But having just gotten Alice settled in for her year of teaching in
Tokyo, Ume couldn’t very well disappear; moreover, the administrators of the Peeresses’ School would need diplomatic handling if Ume was to win their support for her plan. Gratified but cautious, she pocketed Mrs. Morris’s offer for the time being.

The following spring Mrs. Morris renewed her encouragements. Ume dithered. “Mrs. Morris may be very kind, but don’t you think it would be better to be sent from the school, not to depend on her entirely?” she asked Mrs. Lanman. In the end, and somewhat to Ume’s surprise, the president of the Peeresses’ School endorsed her plan, granting her leave to study at Bryn Mawr for two years at her present salary—provided, of course, that she came back. “Won’t it be splendid!” she wrote, exultant. (Predictably, her delight was soon tempered with irritation: “You can not imagine the great mountain of work before me, and I dread to begin—it is such an undertaking.” )

As soon as the closing ceremonies at school were over, Ume was off. The eager twenty-four-year-old woman who sailed bore little resemblance to the quaking child who had once made the same journey. This time she steered her own course. Her new phase would be at once a step forward and a respite: her studies would advance her career in Japan and also provide a much-needed break. Seven years of struggle to prove her worth to her country had left Ume weary. And while she would remain at least as anomalous in Philadelphia as she was in Tokyo, America still felt more like home.

U
ME ENROLLED AT
Bryn Mawr in September of 1889, the beginning of the college’s fifth year of existence. Immediately and joyfully in her element, she was surrounded by exactly the kind of unapologetically intellectual, independent women she had despaired of ever finding in Tokyo. Bryn Mawr’s students were an ambitious bunch, determined to prove themselves. “Our failures only marry,” the college’s imposing dean, Martha Carey Thomas, was heard to say. Here, at least, no one was going to question the path Ume had chosen, or try to find her a husband.

It was at Bryn Mawr that Ume began the deepest friendship of her life—with Anna Cope Hartshorne, a fellow student who would later become the most important supporter of Ume’s ambitions. From their first meeting, Anna was impressed with Ume’s maturity. They met at an afternoon tea hosted by Rose Chamberlin, a square-jawed, six-foot Englishwoman who taught German. “Miss Tsuda was guest of honor, and looked very small and dainty as she stood beside our tall hostess, but as I remember my impression it was less of her smallness than of Miss Chamberlin’s unusual height and breadth,” Anna wrote. “It was easy to see that their relation was already that of friends rather than teacher and pupil.” Ume, addressing the tea party guests on the subject of her life and work in Japan, was preternaturally poised: “Like a princess, and for the same reason, that she was used to being looked at and no longer gave a hoot, so to say.”

Though Ume’s nominal purpose in this second sojourn abroad was to learn more about American schools and teaching methods, at Bryn Mawr she chose biology, not English, as her focus. It is not hard to imagine her much-thwarted competitive streak driving her choice. Most of the male students sent abroad by the Meiji government had studied science or engineering, and returned to find prestigious positions waiting for them—a far cry from the lukewarm reception the trio had received. Here was a chance to prove that a woman could excel in a masculine field. And excel she did, eventually coauthoring an article with one of her professors entitled “The Orientation of the Frog’s Egg” in the
Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science
.

Ume’s scientific achievements did not, however, eclipse her larger mission. She spent her first summer vacation at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, collaborating with Alice on a different sort of manuscript: a treatise on the daily life of Japanese women, from birth to old age, peeress to peasant, in the cities and in the fields.
Japanese Girls and Women
, the first comprehensive work on its subject, found a publisher immediately. “I have today handed over the manuscript to Mr. [Horace E.] Scudder, editor of the Atlantic & one of the big bugs of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,” Alice wrote to Ume after she returned to Bryn Mawr for the start of the fall term
in 1890. “I don’t want to be unduly hopeful, but I think he will take it and illustrate it.”

By the summer of 1891, the book was in print. Despite Ume’s extensive contributions to the project, Alice’s name appeared alone on the title page. This was not selfishness on Alice’s part: on the contrary, Alice took steps to ensure that the book’s copyright would revert to Ume upon Alice’s death; she also split the royalties scrupulously down the middle and sent Ume half of every payment. For all her ambition, Ume did not mind the omission; Alice’s sole authorship was prudence, and it was not misplaced.

Though optimistic about the future of Japanese womanhood,
Japanese Girls and Women
was far from complimentary about the present. “Better laws, broader education for the women, a change in public opinion on the subject, caused by the study, by the men educated abroad, of the homes of Europe and America,—these are the forces which alone can bring the women of Japan up to that place in the home which their intellectual and moral qualities fit them to fill,” the book declared. The Tokyo establishment was not amused. Even Ume’s father, the iconoclastic Sen Tsuda, was not ready to see his daughter’s name attached to such an explicit criticism of Japanese society. Her unusual position as a career woman was precarious enough.

The book was dedicated to Sutematsu, “in the name of our childhood’s friendship, unchanged and unshaken by the changes and separations of our maturer years,” and prefaced by sincere gratitude to Ume, “an old and intimate friend” who had made “many valuable additions.” In several admiring reviews, the American press took note of Alice’s unusual degree of familiarity with her subject. “She does not evade, but tells exactly what she sees,” wrote the
New York Times
. “She has been industrious in finding the reasons for many things, and has been wise enough to have submitted her work to the criticism of Japanese ladies.”

But the reaction in Japan, where the tide of conservatism continued to rise, was not as enthusiastic. Less than a year earlier the emperor had issued his Imperial Rescript on Education, celebrating the basic tenets of Confucian morality: hierarchy, consensus, obedience. “This is the glory
of the fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education,” it read. Framed copies of the document hung in every school in Japan, and on national holidays schoolchildren chanted its text with heads bowed. The emperor, not Benjamin Franklin or Samuel Smiles, was the ideal they revered now. There wasn’t nearly as much room for the advancement of women in the lines they recited.

“I do not think it is so compromising to Ume as [her father and others] seem to think,” Sutematsu wrote to Ume and Alice during the summer of the book’s publication, “but it is better to be on the safe side, especially as now there is so much conservative spirit cultivated even among the best and most educated classes.” Alice offered to ask the publisher to remove Ume’s name from the preface. “If it will do any good to shift the blame onto me,” she suggested further to Ume, “you could write an open letter to one of the prominent Tokyo papers and say that your work on the book consisted largely in modifying my statements so that there should be nothing about them to hurt the Japanese national pride, and that at times I was so pigheaded that even your persuasions & arguments did not move me.” (The unpleasant fallout in Tokyo taught Alice to protect her friends. When, a few years later, she published an epistolary memoir of her year in Tokyo entitled
A Japanese Interior
, she gave Ume and Sutematsu pseudonyms and dedicated the volume to her own siblings, to whom the original letters had been written.)

But Ume opted to ignore Alice’s suggestions. The disgruntled conservatives in Tokyo were too far away to bother about, and meanwhile the book was proving an excellent springboard for her reputation in America. She began to promote the cause of Japanese women’s education more widely and more forcefully—one lecture, to the Massachusetts Society for the University Education of Women, was titled “Education and Culture—What Japanese Women Want Now.” By 1892, Ume had inspired her benefactress, Mary Harris Morris, and Bryn Mawr’s Martha Carey Thomas to organize the American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women, to be granted for study at Bryn Mawr. A fifteen-member committee of affluent Philadelphia matrons raised eight thousand dollars in short order.

Alice, too, used the attention garnered by her book to advance her own cause. In August 1891, vacationing with a sister in Norfolk, Connecticut—one town over from Colebrook—she held a “Japanese tea and chopstick supper” at the village hall, with girls in kimonos serving refreshments. “The tables were beautifully arranged and decorated and no end of amusement was caused by the ludicrous efforts of the hungry ones to satisfy their cravings with the chop-sticks, which by the way were the only instruments allowed under penalty of a fine,” reported the local paper. The event raised two hundred dollars for the Hampton Institute.

D
ESPITE
U
ME’S EFFORTS
on behalf of female students, her idea of a woman’s place was surprisingly old-fashioned. Where Martha Carey Thomas exhorted her students to leave domesticity behind for the higher calling of scholarship, Ume advocated education only insofar as it raised women to a level of intellectual equality with their own menfolk. Yes, a few exceptional (or perhaps unfortunate) souls would follow in her footsteps, advancing to the college level in order to become the teachers of the new generation. But that new generation would not necessarily aspire to the example of its teachers. “Wives must fit themselves to be companions of educated men, and mothers that they may wisely influence their sons,” Ume told her audiences, “and there must be true sympathy of thought between them in the home.” Good wife, wise mother: the Meiji ideal of
ryosai kenbo
persisted.

Sutematsu, whose retreat to domestic life had so disappointed Ume, was in fact a paragon of the new Japanese woman that Ume hoped to train: the intellectual equal of her husband, his helpmeet and companion rather than his obedient drudge, engaged with world affairs and charitable efforts, raising educated sons and daughters for the good of the nation. Sutematsu did not, however, share the rosy confidence in the future of Japanese womanhood that
Japanese Girls and Women
set forth. Alice and Ume had been “all together too sympathetic,” Sutematsu insisted. “You left out, if I may be allowed to criticize, all that pettiness, envy and untruthfulness
which seem to me to go side by side with some of the best qualities in a Japanese woman.” Her frustrations made a striking counterpoint to Ume’s speeches: raised for intellectual achievement, Sutematsu found the domestic sphere, even at her exalted level, claustrophobic, while Ume, having forsaken domesticity altogether, struggled with the loneliness of her professional path.

Ume disdained the concessions that her two married friends had made to Japanese convention—from the deference they showed their husbands to the slender
kiseru
pipes they now smoked. “Are you horrified?” Sutematsu wrote to her old Vassar friend Anne Southworth. “Almost all Japanese ladies smoke and we make no secret of it. Mrs. Uriu (Miss Nagai that used to be) began it and I followed. Miss Tsuda vainly tried to dissuade us from this pernicious practice, but now she has given it up as a bad job. You don’t know what a soothing thing it is.” Loneliness and financial insecurity may not have weighed as heavily on Sutematsu and Shige, but the tensions inherent in their hybrid identities were no less real. Ume could hold herself apart from other Japanese women, but Sutematsu and Shige, as the wives of prominent men, did not have that luxury.

Though her marriage to Iwao Oyama had proved unusually happy, Sutematsu found the scrutiny attached to her high social profile bruising. Her duties as the wife of the minister of war kept her busy enough, but on top of that she now held the official title of “Advisor on Westernization in the Court.” Her post required frequent visits to the palace, either to guide the empress and her ladies in the details of wardrobe and etiquette, or to serve as an interpreter for the wives of foreign dignitaries. This she was glad to do, appalled as she was by the backward attitudes of the court conservatives, foremost among whom was Utako Shimoda herself, the former lady-in-waiting who directed the Peeresses’ School. “I have no patience with her,” Sutematsu fumed to Ume and Alice with uncharacteristic heat. “She ought to be kicked out of that school, I have no hesitation in saying that to every one, although it may not be for the good of my children if she hears it.”

Mrs. Shimoda and Sutematsu might both have been deeply committed to educating girls, but there the affinity ended. The woman Sutematsu had
once described as a “deep thinker” had proved unable to transcend her conservative roots. “What do you think the girls, especially her boarders, say?” Sutematsu raged. “That it is not patriotic to wear Japanese dresses made of
foreign stuffs
, and that to drink
milk
or eat
meat
are disloyal to Japan!!! What do you think of a teacher that puts such ideas into girls heads?” Unfortunately, too many parents of Peeresses’ students shared Mrs. Shimoda’s ideas.