Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (38 page)

The First World War mobilized Japan once more, but this time Sutematsu left the Red Cross activities to her daughter-in-law. She remained active as a trustee of Ume’s school, though; as Ume’s health declined, the question of a successor became more acute. In January 1919, Ume resigned. Sutematsu had hoped that Alice’s second daughter, Makiko, now back in Japan, might take Ume’s place, but Makiko opted for marriage to an American architect instead.

The influenza pandemic had just reached Tokyo, and Sutematsu sent her family to their country retreat to escape it, but she couldn’t bring herself to join them while the issue of Ume’s replacement remained unresolved. On February 5, Sutematsu watched with relief as Matsu Tsuji, a member of Ume’s faculty, was ceremonially named the college’s acting president.

The next day Sutematsu woke with a sore throat. Within two weeks, the flu had claimed her. “Princess Oyama is characterized as having been naturally intellectual, sensitive and retiring, always in frail health but with energy and charm that made her socially brilliant,” read one obituary. “She had an alert keen mind, a quick sense of humor, but with a spirit too kind for sarcasm. Her old samurai ideals of duty and selflessness had become a habit, and probably hastened her death.” She was sixty years old.

First Adeline Lanman, then Alice, and now Sutematsu: three of Ume’s staunchest supporters were gone. A week after Sutematsu’s death, Ume suffered a small stroke, and six months later a larger one, which partly paralyzed her right arm; for the last ten years of her life she was largely housebound and increasingly isolated. When the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 flattened the college along with most of Tokyo, it was Anna Hartshorne, still full of energy in her midsixties, who left immediately for America to raise the money to rebuild. She was gone for more than two years, and though her campaign was triumphantly successful—eventually raising five hundred thousand dollars from donors including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace—Ume missed her profoundly. Anna did return, however, and she would remain
at her teaching post until 1940, when a trip home to Philadelphia was made permanent by the outbreak of another war.

O
N
N
OVEMBER 3, 1928
, two years after Yoshihito’s death, with rising-sun flags flying from every house, his son Hirohito officially received the sacred imperial treasures—the sword, the mirror, and the jewel—that confirmed him as emperor. That same evening, after a brief battle with cancer, Shige died at home at the age of sixty-seven. The following evening, JOAK, Tokyo’s first radio station, broadcast Carl Maria von Weber’s
Invitation to the Dance
in her honor. A concert waltz, meant for a listening audience rather than a dancing one, it had been Shige’s favorite piece, and the last she had performed in public—an apt choice for the woman who had helped teach her compatriots how to behave in a ballroom.

Sotokichi Uriu, always the sicklier member of the couple, would outlive his wife by nearly a decade. His grief was matched by that of his brother-in-law, Takashi Masuda, the young samurai who had sent his littlest sister to America. Masuda, like Uriu now a baron, had retired from the Mitsui Trading Company and turned his energies to the arts. On the occasion of his sister’s death, he expressed his emotions in
tanka
, an ancient poetic form:

Her childish face lingers even now

America-bound, long ago

More than half a century had passed since seven-year-old Ume had watched her two dearest friends leave Washington for New Haven; now once again, she was the one left behind. She still had Anna, but as her health declined, what had always been a possessive relationship grew somewhat obsessive. The brief diary entries of Ume’s last months make note of every moment spent in Anna’s company.

Ume died less than a year after Shige, in August of 1929, at the age of sixty-four. After her death, the school she founded was renamed Tsuda Eigaku Juku—the “Tsuda Home School of English”—an unusually personal
tribute. And when the post-earthquake rebuilding was at last complete, Ume’s ashes were moved to a quiet corner of the new campus in the northwestern suburb of Kokubunji, marked by an imposing granite slab and surrounded by a grove of her namesake plum trees—a shrine in spirit, if not in fact.

Today, Japanese elementary school children learn Ume’s name in social studies, though few recognize Sutematsu’s or Shige’s. Tsuda College, as it is known in English, still thrives, with an undergraduate enrollment of twenty-five hundred women studying English, mathematics, computer science, and international studies. They sometimes refer to themselves as “Umekos,” and when a final examination or an important job interview looms, many find their way to that quiet, plum-shaded corner of campus to ask Ume for help.

*
“Chachan” was the family’s pet name for Hisako, Sutematsu’s daughter.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O
N THE DAY
, nearly a decade ago, when I first pulled Alice Bacon’s
A Japanese Interior
from its basement shelf at the New York Society Library, I never imagined the voyage it would send me on, or the extraordinary people I would meet along the way.

Several descendants of the protagonists and their families shared stories and artifacts and provided a living link to the past: Jean Bacon Bryant, Akiko Kuno, Michio Tsuda, Setsuko Uriu, Yvonne Ying-yue Yung. Three generations of Tsuda College alumnae in the Fujita family shared their perspective on how the school has evolved across the decades.

Sachiko Tanaka and Takako Takamizawa were the fairy godmothers of my research in Tokyo, providing critically important encouragement and access. Librarians and archivists unlocked trove after trove of letters, documents, and photographs, especially Akira Sugiura and Yuki Nakada of Tsuda College, Dean M. Rogers of Vassar, James W. Campbell of the New Haven Museum, Rie Hayashi of the International House of Japan, Fernanda Perrone of Rutgers, and Brandi Tambasco of the New York Society Library.

Many experts, friends and strangers both, were startlingly generous with insights and advice: Margaret Bendroth, Lesley Downer, Elisabeth Gitter, Robert Grigg, Ann Havemeyer, James Huffman, James Lewis, James Mulkin, Anne Walthall, Barbara Wheeler. Special thanks to Daniel Botsman, chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale, whose extensive and thoughtful comments were a gift.

For close reading (and close friendship) I am grateful to Jessica Francis Kane, Gail Marcus, Zanthe Taylor, Carlton Vann, and Isaac Wheeler.

This project would never have become a book without Rob McQuilkin, who makes the most extravagant promises and keeps them; and Alane Salierno Mason, whose editorial wisdom never falters. The indefatigable Stephanie Hiebert devoted countless hours to the details. Nancy Howell drew the beautiful map.

My profoundest thanks go to Yuzo Nimura, tireless researcher, translator, and father-in-law. My work would have been impossible without him.

But the true inspiration for this book is my husband, Yoji Nimura, who took me to the other side of the world, and our children, Clare and David, who brought us back again. Home is wherever you are.

NOTES

PROLOGUE

15
  motley uniforms: William Elliot Griffis,
The Mikado’s Empire
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 366.

16
  Oiled hair: Julia Meech-Pekarik,
The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization
(New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 112.

17
  Her teeth were blackened: Basil Hall Chamberlain,
Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected With Japan, For the Use of Travellers and Others
, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 57; Gina Collia-Suzuki, “Beautiful Blackened Smiles,”
Andon
92 (2012): 46–48.

17
  They did not touch the refreshments: Shige Uriu, “The Days of My Youth,”
Japan Advertiser
, September 11, 1927.

17
  “Considering that you are girls”: Yoshiko Furuki,
The White Plum, a Biography of Ume Tsuda: Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women
(New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 11–12.

1:  
SAMURAI DAUGHTER

19
  The Yamakawa compound: Sutematsu Yamakawa, “Recollections of Japanese Family Life,”
Vassar Miscellany
, November 1, 1880, 49–54.

23
  “Serve the shogun”: Teruko Craig, introduction to
Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro
, by Goro Shiba (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 4.

24
  “1. We must not disobey our elders”: Ibid., 6.

25
  And then they were free: Goro Shiba,
Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 34; R. P. Dore,
Education in Tokugawa Japan
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 105–6.

25
  “Instructions for the Very Young”:
Craig, introduction to
Remembering Aizu
, 7.

26
  “The five worst maladies”: Basil Hall Chamberlain,
Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, for the Use of Travellers and Others
, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 459–61.

28
  taking Dutch sobriquets: Donald Keene,
The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 124.

29
  One of his officers bragged: Noel Perrin,
Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879
(Boston: David R. Godine, 1979), 72.

29
  Perry’s men, naturally: Matthew C. Perry,
The Japan Expedition, 1852–1854: The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 91.

30
  “Our historians bid us to obey”: Henry Heusken,
Japan Journal, 1855–1861
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 183.

2:  
THE WAR OF THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

33
  “brocade banner”: Peter Duus,
Modern Japan
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 80.

34
  “potato samurai”: Goro Shiba,
Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 42.

34
  Girls of the samurai class: Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 44.

36
  “Hand in hand”: Teruko Craig, introduction to Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 17.

36
  The rhythmic pop of rifle fire: Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 51.

36
  Not quite strong enough: Sakumi Hanami,
Danshaku Yamakawa Sensei Den
[The biography of Baron Yamakawa] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), chap. 2.

36
  The tale is retold to this day: The story of the Byakkotai traveled far beyond Aizu, morphing from a heroic tale of Old Japan into a rallying symbol for militarists both in Japan and beyond. In 1928, impressed by the depth of the young fighters’ loyalty to their lord, Benito Mussolini sent a Pompeian column to be erected at the gravesite on Iimori Hill overlooking the castle. The monument still stands, inscribed in Italian and dated “year VI of the Fascist Era.”

37
  Her sister was among: John Dwight, “The Marchioness Oyama,”
Twentieth Century Home
, 1904.

38
  The night of his surrender: Harold Bolitho, “Aizu, 1853–1868,”
Proceedings of the British Association for Japanese Studies
2 (1977): 16.

38
  the paddle wheel steamer
Yancy
: Akiko Kuno,
Unexpected Destinations: The Poignant Story of Japan’s First Vassar Graduate
, trans. Kirsten McIvor (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), 46.

39
  Desperate to feed his mother: Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 91.

39
  “To those who ask”: Hiraku Shimoda,
Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 59.

39
  “If those scoundrels”: Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 89.

39
  The boys now read: Shiba,
Remembering Aizu
, 91–92.

39
  “Although Europe is now”: Akiko Uchiyama, “Translation as Representation: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Representation of the ‘Others,’” in
Agents of Translation
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009), 67–68.

41
  “The curio-shops displayed”: Basil Hall Chamberlain,
Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, for the Use of Travellers and Others
, new ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892), 397.

3:  “
A LITTLE LEAVEN
”

43
  “Western-style” suit: Sakumi Hanami,
Danshaku Yamakawa Sensei Den
[The biography of Baron Yamakawa] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939), chap. 2.

44
  “as a little leaven leavens”: Charles Lanman, ed.,
The Japanese in America
(New York: University Publishing, 1872), 46.

46
  “Over sea, hither from Niphon”: Walt Whitman, “The Errand-Bearers,”
New-York Times
, June 27, 1860.

46
  Even a smoke: Yukichi Fukuzawa,
The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (1899; New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 113.

46
  “One burly fellow”: Masao Miyoshi,
As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States
(New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 65.

50
  Bowling along on wheels: Edward Seidensticker,
Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 47; Julia Meech-Pekarik,
The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization
(New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 86.