Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (5 page)

Western technology had helped the imperial forces win the war. It was clear to Aizu’s leaders what their sons needed to learn, but books did not fill hungry bellies. The refugees suffered from malnutrition, intestinal parasites, and anemia. Sutematsu, turning eleven, spent her days spreading nightsoil on the fields and looking for shellfish to contribute to her family’s meager meals.

W
ITH THE CESSATION
of hostilities, the young Emperor Meiji and his court settled into new rhythms and rituals in their “eastern capital.” Townspeople reminded themselves to call their city Tokyo now, rather than Edo. Sutematsu’s second brother, Kenjiro, now sixteen, had managed to make his way there. Posing as a temple acolyte, he had escaped an Aizu prison camp under the protection of a monk. His exceptional academic ability soon attracted the patronage of sympathetic Choshu leaders, and for the next year, living under an alias, he was able to study, moving frequently when the rumor of his fugitive status resurfaced. Eventually he was able to settle in Tokyo, but his origins still counted against him, blocking his access to the most prestigious schools. Though there was less snow in Tokyo than in the wilds of Tonami, Kenjiro found himself nearly as hungry as his exiled family.

It wasn’t just the defeated people of Aizu who found life a struggle in the early years of Meiji. The name of the new era signified the intent of the new leadership: Meiji means “enlightened rule.” A circle of energetic, reform-minded, and startlingly young men emerged to lead a new and improved Japan, packaging their agenda as the divine word of the “restored” emperor. With his endorsement, they rapidly began to dismantle the status quo.

The wave of change that had swept the shogun from power left behind an uneasy coalition of men whose loyalties were ancient and fundamentally
provincial. “Japan” was an abstract concept; each domain was a country unto itself. With the common enemy defeated, old rivalries threatened to reemerge. The “potato samurai” from Satsuma and Choshu had ousted the Tokugawas and confiscated their base, but they and all the other domains remained intact, each with its own army.

In August of 1871, the emperor summoned the lord of every domain to Tokyo for an announcement that, while predictable, was no less stunning: the domains were henceforth abolished, their age-old boundaries erased, replaced by a system of prefectures administered by Tokyo-appointed governors. The former daimyo, generously compensated with money and titles, their debts now assumed by the new central government, put up little resistance. Lower-ranking samurai, on the other hand—even those who had backed the winning side in the recent conflict—lost their stipends, their rank, their accustomed place in the social hierarchy. The forward-thinking ones found their way into business or government service. The rest opened their ancestral storehouses and sold what they could, sinking into genteel poverty. Foreign visitors to Japan were delighted with the buyer’s market in souvenirs. “The curio-shops displayed heaps of swords which, a few months before, the owners would less willingly have parted with than with life itself,” declared one popular guidebook.

The Yamakawa men—capable Hiroshi and his clever younger brother Kenjiro—would be among the forward-thinking ones. Their family might have lost the security and prestige that their affiliation with the shogun had once provided, but with their Aizu pride intact, they were determined to reclaim it. Neither could have imagined the part their little sister would play in the fulfillment of that vow.

3    “A LITTLE LEAVEN”

T
HE FATES OF TWO
of the Yamakawas would be determined in part by a broad-faced, bull-necked man named Kiyotaka Kuroda, whose Satsuma origins would once have marked him decisively as their enemy. A man of intense enthusiasms—for liquor as well as for national development—Kuroda embodied the quantum leap of Meiji leadership. Less than a decade earlier, traveling in the retinue of the lord of Satsuma on the road to Edo, Kuroda had been appalled to see a party of British day-trippers on horseback—including a
woman
—gawking at his lord’s elaborate palanquin as it passed, flanked by retainers and servants all wearing the cross-within-a-circle crest of xenophobic Satsuma. Oblivious to the townspeople prostrating themselves in the dust, the barbarians had lingered, chatting, by the side of the road—until the horsemen closest to them charged with drawn swords, killing one man, wounding two others, and separating the lady’s hat from her head, along with some of her hair. The Richardson Incident of 1862, named for the dead man, provoked Britain to bombard the Satsuma seat of Kagoshima within a year. It was this demonstration of Britain’s military might that hastened the realization in Satsuma that “expelling the barbarians” might not be a particularly practical course.

Several years later, the two-sworded, silk-robed samurai Kuroda, attacker of foreigners, had become a mustachioed Meiji bureaucrat in a well-tailored Western-style military uniform.
Turning to the West for guidance, he traveled to the United States, touring coal mines, lumber mills, and breweries; observing American farming and mining techniques; and inviting American experts to advise the newly created Hokkaido Colonization Board, formed to strengthen the Japanese presence in the northern territories, which were eyed covetously by neighboring Russia. Richly endowed with forests and fishing grounds, Hokkaido was inhabited only by indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes of bear-worshiping Ainu. What better place, Kuroda argued, to send the displaced and disaffected remnants of the cash-strapped warrior class?

Upon his return to Japan, Kuroda recruited promising young men to study abroad and help him in his cause—among them Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro, still a struggling student in Tokyo. Kenjiro was selected despite, but also because of, his lineage: though the stain of defeat still tarnished the name of Aizu, no one doubted the strength and resolve of its warriors, and its cold winters were thought to be good preparation for life in Hokkaido. In January 1871 sixteen-year-old Kenjiro sailed for America, with a Tokyo-made “Western-style” suit that looked more like a kimono, and secondhand shoes, conspicuously white and several sizes too big.

I
T WASN’T JUST
the men of business Kuroda had observed in America. Throughout the trip, he had been astonished by American women. At home, females of his rank stayed largely out of sight; the teahouses and reception rooms where men transacted business were strictly off limits. Samurai wives sewed, served, bore children, and managed the household for their husbands, who spent their leisure hours in the pleasure quarters, enjoying the attentions of a different sort of woman, trained in music, dance, and sparkling conversation rather than the domestic arts. Women were obedient or entertaining; beyond that, they were unimportant.

But these American women! They had opinions, which they didn’t hesitate to offer—and the men listened. They joined their husbands at social gatherings and official ceremonies. They presided at table. Men gave up their seats for women, doffed their hats to them, made way for them on
the sidewalk, fetched and carried for them. In public. Clearly, American women had a happier lot than their Japanese sisters. Why?

The answer, Kuroda concluded, was education. American women of the higher classes were well-informed and well-read, and though naturally they did not aspire to lead businesses or armies, they were the intellectual companions of their husbands and sons, who turned to them not just for practical needs, but for emotional and spiritual strength. Surely this rich home life helped explain the staggering successes of American men in industry and commerce. Upon reaching Washington and the company of his friend Arinori Mori, the young and rather dashing Japanese chargé d’affaires there, Kuroda shared his conclusions, even going so far as to exhort Mori to find himself an American wife. Reassuring Kuroda of his patriotism, Mori politely declined.

Undaunted, Kuroda went back to Japan and drafted a memorandum to the Meiji government. The goal of colonizing wild Hokkaido would never be accomplished by sending mostly untrained men north and hoping for the best. The first thing to do, he wrote, was to educate Japanese women, who bore the responsibility for the first decade of their children’s lives. Educated mothers would raise enlightened sons, who would then grow up to lead Japan, “as a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” Unwritten, but perhaps implied, was a warning: as long as the Japanese kept their women in the shadows, Westerners would have trouble recognizing Japan as a civilized nation.

Young men like Kenjiro Yamakawa were already studying abroad and returning with invaluable tools. It was time to send young women to join them. Upon their return, they would be qualified to teach in the girls’ schools that Kuroda envisioned; they would also make excellent wives for the new statesmen of Japan as they emerged onto the global stage.

Kuroda’s thoughts were well received, aligned as they were with the fundamental goals of the reform-minded Meiji leaders. One of their first acts upon seizing power had been to draft a statement of purpose: the Charter Oath, proclaimed by the emperor at his enthronement in 1868. The oath announced the radical intentions of the new government: to overhaul Japan’s political, economic, and social institutions and guide the country
toward equal footing with the West. “Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature,” it read. “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.” The restrictions on engagement with the wider world, enforced over the preceding two and a half centuries, were thus reversed at a stroke.

Kuroda’s timing was excellent. In the fall of 1871, Tomomi Iwakura, a former courtier and newly minted Meiji minister, announced a plan to lead an embassy to the nations with whom Japan had signed treaties, starting with the United States. It was time to heed the call of the Charter Oath and seek knowledge throughout the world. The delegates would observe Western institutions and technology firsthand, introduce Japan’s new leadership to foreign governments, and broach the issue of renegotiating the unequal trade agreements forced on the doomed shogunate more than a decade earlier. Dozens of students would travel with the embassy. Why not add a few girls?

I
N THE YEARS
following the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships, Japan had sent other official embassies abroad, with mixed success. The first, to the United States in 1860, was largely ceremonial: a chance for the shogunate to assert its dignity in the wake of the first humiliating unequal treaty signings, as much for the Japanese audience as for the Americans. A middle-ranking and rather motley group, the members of this first delegation had only the sketchiest concept of life outside Japan; many were selected merely for their willingness to consider going abroad. Inexperienced, nervous, and deeply wary of the West, they shuffled through their diplomatic obligations hurriedly, refusing many invitations and determined to get home as soon as possible.

The Americans, flattered that Japan had chosen to visit their nation first, greeted the Japanese “princes” with ecstatic enthusiasm. In New York, hundreds of thousands of spectators watched the procession of ambassadors down Broadway on June 16, 1860, escorted by seven thousand
welcoming troops, a spectacle immortalized by Walt Whitman in “The Errand-Bearers” :

Over sea, hither from Niphon,

Courteous, the Princes of Asia, swart-cheek’d princes,

First-comers, guests, two-sworded princes,

Lesson-giving princes, leaning back in their open barouches,

bare-headed, impassive,

This day they ride through Manhattan.

But those impassive faces belied bewilderment and discomfort. Yukichi Fukuzawa, the prolific author and educator whose works would one day enlighten Aizu’s exiled sons, was a twenty-five-year-old member of that first delegation. Despite years of study in Dutch and English, he found himself baffled by such novelties as horse-drawn carriages, ice cubes, and ballroom dancing. Even a smoke was a challenge: seeing nothing he recognized as an ashtray, Fukuzawa emptied the bowl of his pipe into a wad of paper that he stashed in his sleeve. Wisps of smoke began to emerge from his robe. “The light that I thought I had crushed out was quietly setting me afire!”

Though the press coverage of the 1860 embassy was almost universally respectful, the behavior of the average American citizen did not always rise to that standard. When the envoys arrived in Washington, mobs surrounded their carriages and gaped. “One burly fellow swore that all [the Japanese men] wanted was to have a little more crinoline and be right out decent looking nigger wenches,” noted a reporter.

The group led by Tomomi Iwakura in 1871 would be far more impressive. Eleven years after the journey of Whitman’s inscrutable princes, Japan had not just a new government but a new attitude on the part of its young statesmen: active, curious, determined, embracing the future rather than protecting the past. Many of Iwakura’s men had already studied abroad, and several spoke competent English. The average age of the forty-six ambassadors was thirty-two.

Among them were most of the rising stars of Japan’s new leadership, including the very men who had written the Charter Oath. Many of them would become household names in the decades to come: Takayoshi Kido, a senior councillor; Hirobumi Ito, minister of public works; and Toshimichi Okubo, minister of finance. Kunitake Kume, a Confucian scholar, was the embassy’s official scribe; his monumental
True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe
would fill five volumes and sell thousands of copies.

The addition of a few girls to the sizable contingent of young male students joining the delegation would not be a problem. The American ambassador, Charles DeLong, would be traveling with the group, and his wife, Elida Vineyard DeLong, would make a convenient chaperone. In his position as deputy chair of the Hokkaido Colonization Board, Kuroda began recruiting for his pet project. The offer was generous: ten years in America, all expenses paid, with a stipend of eight hundred dollars per year—a stunning sum to spend on anyone, let alone untested girls.