Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (6 page)

Yet there were no applicants. Who would send a small daughter away while she was still useful at home, only to get her back too late to marry, assuming anyone would want to marry a girl untutored in the duties of a Japanese wife? And to America, of all places, where the loud, smelly, yellow-haired, blue-eyed barbarians wore their filthy shoes right into the house and gorged on animal flesh at every meal? For most families high placed enough to see the recruiting notices, it was unthinkable. As the Iwakura Mission’s departure date approached, Kuroda was forced to launch a second round of recruiting. This time he received responses from a handful of applicants, all of whom were accepted at once.

S
UTEMATSU KNEW NOTHING
of this. In the spring of 1871, after the Aizu exiles’ first hungry winter in snowbound Tonami, her brother Hiroshi had sent her to Hakodate, just across the Tsugaru Straits in Hokkaido. Already far from her homeland, she would now be isolated from her family
as well—but at least she would be fed. Compared to barren Tonami, Hakodate was a bustling oasis; one of the first ports opened to foreign trade as a result of Commodore Perry’s negotiations in 1854, it was now a regular destination for diplomats and missionaries, as well as traders. Sent to lodge with Takuma Sawabe, one of Japan’s first Russian Orthodox converts, Sutematsu later moved to the home of a French missionary family and spent six months in a town whose harbor buzzed with international shipping. Western-style buildings had sprung up to house the consular staffs of nine different countries—with sash windows that slid up instead of sideways, white clapboard siding instead of unpainted wood, shingled roofs instead of tile or thatch, wrought-iron fences instead of plastered walls. Sutematsu had never seen homes built without tatami floors and shoji screens. Hakodate was a first taste of the West.

By the time Kuroda issued his recruitment notices, Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro had already left for America. Hiroshi, leader of the exiled Aizu domain, had no trouble imagining his youngest sister there as well. She had acquitted herself admirably, during both the siege of Wakamatsu and the longer trials of prison camp and exile. She showed promise as a student, and Hiroshi had confidence she could rise to the challenges of a foreign classroom at least as honorably as she had faced the struggles of the previous three years. At the very least, her departure would mean one less sister to support. And who knew? If she managed to return someday, accustomed to American ways and speaking fluent English, perhaps she could contribute somehow to Japan’s modernization—and to the rehabilitation of her family’s good name.

In October of 1871 Hiroshi traveled to Hakodate to inform his sister that she would be leaving immediately for Tokyo. There she would board a ship for America, where she would study at government expense for a decade. Sutematsu had no way to comprehend his words. He might as well have told her she was moving to the moon. But her Aizu training left no room for disobedience. She packed to leave without question.

On her way south to Tokyo, she stopped in Tonami to bid her mother farewell. Toi was horrified by the decision to send her daughter away, but
Hiroshi was the head of their household, and his decision was final. When they parted, Toi bestowed a new name on her youngest child—a common practice among the literate classes to mark a new life phase. From now on, the erstwhile Sakiko would be called Sutematsu, an odd name to the Japanese ear, written with the characters for “discard” and “pine tree” :
The second character contained an echo of the Matsudaira family, lords of Aizu, and of Wakamatsu, seat of the domain, to signify her origins; the first could be read as bitter acknowledgment that such a proud lineage had come to an end. It was time to let go of the past. But
matsu
(“pine” ) is also a homonym for the verb “to wait.” A girl cast to the winds, then—sacrificed to circumstance, yet noble and enduring like the pine. Her mother would await her return.

A
GIRL OF
eleven, under normal circumstances, is betwixt and between: too big for dolls and playing house, eager to be entrusted with “real” responsibilities, yet not quite wise enough to make out the road ahead. But Sutematsu had already seen more horror than most adults: the heaps of bodies left unburied during the siege of Tsuruga Castle, the dying agony of her sister-in-law, the slower deaths from hunger and cold in Tonami, the separation from her family in Hakodate. The festival dolls arranged on their red-draped tiers each spring in Aizu were but a hazy memory of a life that now seemed to have belonged to someone else. Her home no longer existed, her mother had bid her a final farewell, and now she would leave Japan itself behind, along with the only language she could speak. Hiroshi hurried her to Tokyo, where officials from the Hokkaido Colonization Board and the Ministry of Education were waiting—along with four other girls, looking every bit as bewildered as Sutematsu felt.

Two of them were already young women: Ryo Yoshimasu and Tei Ueda, both fourteen years old. The other two, Sutematsu was relieved to note, were younger, even smaller than she was. Shige Nagai, stocky and round-faced with laughing eyes, was ten. Ume Tsuda, exquisitely pretty, was only six. Ryo and Tei instinctively took Sutematsu under their
wing—she had come from so far away, and had no one to help her in Tokyo—while Sutematsu, always the littlest sister, suddenly acquired two littler ones in Shige and Ume.

After so much loss, here was a new family of sorts. All five were samurai daughters, all five from families on the losing side of the recent upheaval. These were the chosen girls, if chosen they were, as there exists no record of any others having applied. Life accelerated quickly. The girls’ recruitment having been a hasty afterthought, their departure with the Iwakura Mission was already upon them.

W
HETHER IN REMOTE
Aizu or bustling Tokyo, a samurai girl’s life had always been lived largely within her family compound’s walls. Now every day seemed to consist of dashing from place to place. Hitherto, people moved about on foot, or else rode in a
kago
, a basketlike palanquin swinging queasily from bamboo poles borne on the shoulders of trotting bearers. The passenger might be cushioned by a folded futon, but the dusty and jolting journey was never comfortable. In Tokyo, however, the kago had been replaced by the smoother and more maneuverable
jinrikisha
. The two-wheeled, canopied buggies raced up and down Tokyo’s narrow streets, pulled by wiry runners wearing leggings and broad bowl-shaped hats to keep off the sun. By 1871, not two years after their invention, there were twenty-five thousand jinrikishas plying Tokyo’s narrow streets, their rattling wheels and shouting runners adding considerably to the urban din.

Bowling along on wheels was novelty enough, but the girls also received an invitation to ride the new seventeen-mile railway from Tokyo to Yokohama, financed by the British and so recently completed it was not yet open to the public. The Japanese contractors who built the line (under close foreign supervision) had never seen a train. It had an English chief engineer and a foreign crew, and, to the girls’ astonishment, it pulled itself.

There were formal functions to attend, hosted by high-ranking officials. There was no time to have Western-style clothes made, but unlike Western dresses, kimonos were sewn with straight seams from cloth of
standard width and needed no fitting. The new finery, paid for by the government, was urgently required. These were the first girls ever selected to receive a foreign education, and in honor of that extraordinary circumstance, they would be the first girls of samurai rank ever granted an audience with the empress herself.

T
HE EMPRESS HARUKO
had only recently undergone her own transformation into the first lady of the court. A pedigreed daughter of the Kyoto nobility—an ancient and inbred class distinct from the samurai—she was something of a prodigy: reading at the age of three, composing poetry at five, studying calligraphy at seven, and plucking the
koto
(a stringed instrument) at twelve. She was equally adept in the traditional arts of tea ceremony and flower arrangement. Her family was one of the five from which the imperial consort was traditionally chosen. Her suitability was unquestioned except for a single detail: she was older than her intended. This in itself was not insurmountable; there was precedent for imperial unions with older women. The problem was that the difference in their ages was three years—an inauspicious number. But no matter. The girl’s official birth date was quickly shifted later by one year, and in January 1869 the marriage went forward—the groom sixteen, his bride, officially, eighteen.

Until her marriage, Haruko—along with all her foremothers—had lived a life confined strictly within the limits of etiquette, protocol, and the precincts of the imperial palace. Within the year, she and the Emperor Mutsuhito had relocated to Tokyo. Two more years had passed, and the cascade of changes had been dizzying. Most recently, the Meiji leaders had decided that the “delicate and effeminate old aristocrats” who had heretofore managed every aspect of daily life in the imperial household in Kyoto should be replaced by “manly and incorruptible samurai” as the emperor’s most intimate advisers. These advisers had a new responsibility: tutoring the young emperor in history and current affairs, both foreign and domestic. Japan’s emperors had always lived in seclusion, kept in ignorance of the wider world by the shoguns who held true power. All Mutsuhito’s
father had seen of Commodore Perry’s visit in 1853 were the demonic caricatures of Edo’s woodblock artists. Breaking the precedent of centuries, the young emperor would henceforth become a student of the times.

More shocking yet, the empress and her ladies were expected to attend these lectures as well, and listen closely. Not only would the young empress be the highest-ranking woman in Japan; she would be the most well-informed too. The wife of an emperor had hitherto functioned solely as the bearer of his heirs, her life lived behind screens, unseen by any but her ladies-in-waiting. Haruko would be a modern consort, appearing beside her husband to encourage the efforts of Japan’s modernizers, and to represent a unified nation to the world.

On the morning of November 9, 1871, the Empress Haruko had yet to emerge onto the global stage. Nor could the girls who bowed before her in awe that day have imagined that one day they would join her there.

W
ITH THEIR VISIT
to the empress, the girls had become part of the official chronicle of Japanese history. Their next stop was a photographer’s studio, for a formal portrait commemorating the imperial audience.

Though the first photographs had reached Japan via Dutch traders in Nagasaki as early as the 1840s, professional photographers did not arrive until the 1860s—just in time to capture Old Japan as it confronted the onslaught of the new. Superstitions regarding the preternaturally accurate images were rife at first. “Once photographed, your shadow will fade,” one warned; “twice photographed, your life will shorten.” Another insisted that if three people sat for a portrait together, the one in the middle would die early. Within a few years, however, photography had become one of seven “tools of civilization and enlightenment,” along with newspapers, the postal system, gaslights, steam engines, international exhibitions, and dirigible balloons. By 1871, sitting for a formal photograph was a proud event, the privilege of a select few that rarely included women, let alone young girls.

Still strangers to each other, the girls must have felt as uncomfortable as they appear in the photo. Tei and Ryo sit as stiff as bookends on
either side, toes together and heels apart. The photographer has angled their seats precisely toward each other; swathed in similar kimonos of pale silk, elaborately embroidered with fruits and flowers, they stare blankly past each other’s ears. Tei folds her fingers demurely inside her sleeves. Between them, the three younger girls are less carefully composed. Seated in the center, Sutematsu clasps her hands in her flowered lap, lips pursed slightly to one side, hair sculpted into high loops like butterfly wings. Shige stands to her right, her dark kimono in somber contrast, and both girls gaze frankly at the unfamiliar contraption pointing their way. Perched on Sutematsu’s other side, Ume is distracted by something beyond the camera, her diminutive features dwarfed by her own complicated coiffure. Ryo holds one of Ume’s hands in hers, perhaps steadying her. Though the new wet-plate collodion process had taken firm hold among the growing ranks of Japan’s studio photographers—reducing exposure time from minutes to seconds—it was nevertheless hard for a six-year-old to sit perfectly still.

Stylized and expressionless, the girls look like dolls. Their portrait leaves out as much as it preserves: no suggestion of the violent upheaval just past, no trace of the bewilderment and gut-gripping fear with which the girls must have contemplated their immediate future. Five daughters of the losing side had been repackaged for the coming victories of the new Japan, and their own feelings on the subject were irrelevant.