Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (4 page)

Ironically, the positions of the two fiercely opposed sides were roughly aligned by this time. After more violent encounters with Western warships over the years, the reactionary xenophobia of the
shishi
—the disaffected “men of high purpose”—had come to seem quixotic. No one actually harbored delusions about expelling foreigners any longer, and both sides had moved toward the conviction that a unified Japan—grounded in Confucian ethics and strengthened by imported Western weapons and industrial technology—was critical to dealing with threats both internal and external. But the brash young reformers of Satsuma and Choshu were determined to slash away the impenetrable thicket of bureaucracy that had grown up around the shogun over the centuries.

As these imperial loyalists consolidated power in the south, the Tokugawa leadership teetered. Rather than provoke full-scale civil war, Yoshinobu resigned—a move that disgusted his most loyal allies but revealed his clearer grasp of the political reality, and helped avoid a certain amount of bloodshed. In January 1868 imperial forces occupied Edo Castle, abolished the shogunate, and proclaimed the “restoration” of the fifteen-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito, known by his reign name as Meiji. A new era had begun.

I
N THE NORTHERN
domains, however, the old era endured a little longer. Though the Tokugawas were finished, their staunchest vassals were not ready to concede to the upstart southerners. Sutematsu’s homeland of Aizu was at the center of this northern alliance of five domains, which
fought a series of losing battles against the emperor’s well-equipped forces in what would become known as the Boshin War, the War of the Year of the Dragon, 1868.

Bound by the Aizu code, these men fought on, even though their cause was now obsolete, determined to clear the unjust stain of treason from their honor. Or so they told themselves. It was easier to reconcile their grim last stand with the “Way of the Warrior” rather than the messier political reality. In fact, Aizu’s daimyo, the able and determined Katamori Matsudaira, was risking the survival of his domain for the chance to lead Japan forward—and perhaps even claim the shogunate itself. Unfortunately, his arsenal fell short of his ambition, and his enemies in the south exacted a terrible revenge.

Recognizing that power lay with Western military technology, and having more funds at their disposal than were available to the cash-strapped shogunate, the southern domains had bought Minié rifles and shell-firing cannon directly from foreign traders years earlier. Aizu, on the other hand, had little in the way of modern weaponry; hastily constructed wooden cannon, reinforced with hoops of bamboo, could fire rocks but had an unfortunate tendency to burst after a few rounds. The daimyo of Aizu had at last begun to purchase weapons from foreign dealers, but his supplies were low and his forces untrained in comparison to the well-armed warriors from the south. The technological superiority of the emperor’s forces had little effect on Aizu defiance, however: to an Aizu warrior, a Satsuma man was nothing but a “potato samurai.” (Sweet potatoes were known as
satsuma-imo
.)

That spring, as Sutematsu and her sisters arranged the tiers of dolls for
hinamatsuri
, their mother stared grimly at the figurine representing the emperor, now the symbolic leader of their enemies. With summer came a sound like distant thunder: cannon fire, echoing in the mountains. Girls of the samurai class tied back their sleeves and bound their hair with white headbands to practice with the
naginata
, a wickedly curved blade at the end of a long pole, preparing to defend their homes. The length of the weapon enabled a woman to keep a larger attacker at a distance, mitigating
her disadvantage in height or weight. The weapons were a familiar sight to Sutematsu, hanging on their rack in the guardroom of the Yamakawa compound, their slender shafts marching up the wall like the rungs of a ladder. She had only ever seen them used for practice. The boys stayed home now, their classes suspended—the Nisshinkan had become a field hospital. Aizu was bracing for the worst: a desperate last stand in defense of a world that had already ended.

The graceful, winglike roof lines of Tsuruga Castle—
tsuru
means “crane”—belied its massive fortifications. Sheer walls twenty feet thick rose vertically from the moats, each massive block of stone bearing the chisel marks of the laborers who had wrestled it into place centuries earlier. In places, the drop from the top of the wall to the algae-green surface of the moat was fifty feet. On the inside, the walls were a maze of stone steps, some flights broad enough for fifteen men to run straight up toward the outer edge; others, barely wide enough for one, tracing diagonal paths up and down at intervals. The castle itself rested on a stone foundation two stories high.

Atop one corner of the wall surrounding the castle stood a bell tower, a squat, square lookout of studded timbers rising from a base of stone, tapering slightly to a tiled roof. On August 23, 1868, the bell clanged urgently, summoning all who could hear it to take shelter within the castle walls. Imperial forces, as many as thirty thousand of them, had entered the town. Sutematsu’s mother, Toi, gathered her four youngest children and her daughter-in-law—two older sons were off fighting—and headed toward the sound of the bell.

The scene was chaos: those who sought shelter struggled through driving rain and enemy fire. The rain-soaked wooden houses burned slowly, sending up choking clouds of dense smoke. Crowds jammed the streets. After a couple of hours, the castle gates were shut—there was no more room within. Desperate refugees milled outside the walls, enemy bullets whizzing overhead. The Yamakawa women were, for the moment, safe inside.

Hundreds of others had not left their homes when the bell began its
clamor. Determined not to hinder their side, they opted for a ceremonial exit. Donning the white robes of the dead, the wives of absent warriors helped their elderly parents to commit ritual suicide before killing their children and finally themselves. In the home of one senior councillor alone, his mother, wife, two sisters, and five daughters died. Two of the teenage daughters composed their farewell poem together:

Hand in hand, we will not lose our way,

So let us set forth on the mountain path to death.

Now the sounds of enemy cannon boomed within the ring of mountains that cradled Wakamatsu; the very air seemed to shake. The rhythmic pop of rifle fire sounded to the children like beans roasting in a pan.

Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro, a few weeks shy of fourteen, had joined the Byakkotai, or “White Tiger Brigade,” a reserve unit of teenagers. Not quite strong enough to manage a rifle, he was soon sent back with other younger boys to help guard the castle. He was lucky. On August 22, a unit of twenty White Tigers had lost their commander and become separated from the main force. At dawn the next day, gazing down from a hilltop at their castle wreathed in smoke, they assumed the worst: that their stronghold had been taken, their lord slain, their domain defeated. Kneeling together in despair, they killed themselves. Only one of the twenty survived. The tale is retold to this day in textbooks, tourist brochures, and manga as a paradigm of warrior honor.

A
T TWENTY-THREE
, Sutematsu’s eldest brother, Hiroshi, was a respected commander in the Aizu hierarchy. When word of the siege at Wakamatsu reached him, it was clear that the enemy lines would be impenetrable by the time he could return with his unit to defend the castle. And so Hiroshi resorted to guile: dressing his men as peasants, he commandeered flutes and drums and the feathered costumes of the region’s annual lion dance. Posing as a troupe of performers, his men paraded into
the castle in broad daylight. The daimyo, impressed, promptly put Hiroshi in charge of defense for the duration of the siege.

Besieged inside the castle walls along with three thousand of their men, fifteen hundred women and children broke into work brigades—some to wash and cook rice, some to clean the crowded and increasingly filthy interior spaces, some to nurse the wounded, and some to make gun cartridges. Sutematsu, a sturdy child of eight with wide-set eyes that missed little, trotted back and forth, bringing lead shot from one storehouse and stacking finished cartridges in another.

Her sister was among the cartridge makers. Yearning for a more active role, the teenager scavenged pieces of discarded armor, chopped off her hair, pulled down the corners of her mouth in a classic samurai grimace, and announced that she was off to join the fighting. Obedience, however, was as deeply ingrained in her as the warrior spirit, and when her mother forbade her to leave the castle, she grudgingly stayed put.

During the last days of the month-long siege, as the sixty cannon of the imperial forces continued to pound the castle, Toi sent Sutematsu with the other girls to fly kites high above the walls, as if it were a holiday.
We are still here
, the kites declared.
We do not fear you.
As shells rained down, it fell to the women to smother them with wet quilts before they exploded. Hiroshi’s wife, Tose, was running toward one when it burst. The shrapnel just grazed Sutematsu’s neck, but it caught her sister-in-law in the chest. Tose’s wounds festered, and she begged Toi to fulfill her duty as a warrior: to give Tose a good death.

“Mother, mother, kill me!” she cried. “Where is your courage? Remember you are the wife of a samurai!”

But though Toi wore on her belt the razor-sharp dagger carried by all women of her rank, she could not bring herself to kill her daughter-in-law. She had, after all, elected to seek shelter in the castle when the shelling began, rather than committing ritual suicide. Tose died in agony.

On September 22, the daimyo of Aizu reluctantly surrendered. Over the castle flew a white flag sewn by the women besieged within. The sudden silence, after a month of constant shelling, was eerie. Every house
within the outer moat of the castle had burned to the ground. The elegant rooms and exquisite gardens of Sutematsu’s childhood lay in ruins. The white walls of the castle itself were scarred and blistered, its tiled roofs pocked with holes.

Casualties on both sides in the Boshin War numbered nearly six thousand, with Aizu alone accounting for almost half of that total. Despite their decisive victory, the imperial forces took no chances, for the determination of Katamori Matsudaira, Aizu’s daimyo, was undisputed. The night of his surrender they placed him under guard in a temple, with six cannon carefully aimed at his door.

Along with her mother and sisters, Sutematsu left the wreckage of Wakamatsu for a prison camp a few miles away. She was filthy, hungry, and crawling with lice. The world she had known was gone.

A
YEAR WENT
by before the new Meiji government decided the fate of the defeated Aizu: exile to the newly created province of Tonami, a barren and nearly uninhabited region at the northern tip of Honshu. The Meiji government chartered American ships to ferry them, and in the spring of 1870 the Yamakawa women boarded the paddle wheel steamer
Yancy
at Niigata—their first glimpse of the sea. The American sailors gave them biscuits, and they nibbled the strange new food while standing at the rail and watching the coast unfurl. But the novelty faded quickly; as the ship slowly threaded its way north, there was ample time for doubt and depression to take hold, compounded, miserably, by seasickness.

Hiroshi, the oldest Yamakawa brother, was now one of Aizu’s leaders, chief of the domain office in Tonami, and responsible for the lives of seventeen thousand refugees. Weary warriors were reunited with their wives and children, and for a time their lot seemed to improve. It was summer, conditions were far cleaner and less crowded than at the camps they had left behind, and there were mushrooms to gather and fish to catch. But the exiled samurai of Aizu were not farmers, and as the weather turned colder the gravity of the situation became clear: not enough rice, no proper shelter
or warm clothes. Supplies of firewood ran out. Porridge froze solid in the pot. The settlers dug for the roots of bracken under the snow, collected the seaweed that washed up on the shore, and tried to make meager stores of soybeans and potatoes last. The lucky ones ate dog meat.

Hiroshi’s position did not help the Yamakawas’ plight; on the contrary, he led by example, putting the needs of his people before those of his family. Desperate to feed his mother and sisters, Hiroshi quietly negotiated with the local tofu dealer to buy
okara
, the pulpy by-product of tofu production often used as animal feed. When other samurai got wind of this humiliating arrangement, they forced Hiroshi to abandon his plan. An Aizu warrior did not eat fodder. Hiroshi expressed his despair only obliquely, in poetry:

To those who ask of Tonami in the north,

tell them this;

It is a land before human time.

Samurai training had not included any of the practical skills these harsh surroundings demanded, save one: endurance, stiffened by the strict code that had put the Aizu on the losing side in the first place. “If those scoundrels from Satsuma and Choshu ever hear that the Aizu samurai have died of starvation, they’ll ridicule us,” one father told his son. “Our domain will go down in infamy. This is a battlefield, do you hear? It’s a battlefield until the day Aizu wipes the stain from its honor.”

In spite of cold and hunger, the exiles soon established a school for their sons, though the curriculum took a striking new direction. The boys now read the works of Yukichi Fukuzawa, an educational innovator and leading proponent of Western learning, chanting rhythmic couplets on world geography and history instead of Confucian philosophy. Taking his cue from the Western writers he was translating, Fukuzawa sorted the countries of the globe into categories: Savage, Barbarous, Half-Civilized, and Enlightened. “Although Europe is now without doubt the most civilized and enlightened continent in the world,” he wrote, “it was in a chaotic
and ignorant state in the old days.” Japan might not be as enlightened as Europe, but at least it wasn’t savage, like Africa, and given time, there was hope for improvement.