Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (9 page)

They may not have been princesses, but they were the first Japanese females ever to venture abroad in the service of their nation. The two eldest would retrace their steps within the year, but the three younger ones
would not see their homeland again for a decade. Sutematsu was eleven. Shige was ten. And Ume, her eyes darting in wonder from the houses to the carriages to the well-dressed women in the crowd, had turned seven at sea.

T
HE DOCKSIDE CROWDS
parted to allow the members of the embassy to reach a line of waiting carriages. Walking between walls of onlookers, the girls kept their eyes down, uncomfortably conscious of their clothes, their hair, the staring eyes on every side. Mrs. DeLong strutted alongside them like a proud hen with unusually colorful chicks, enjoying the sensation they made.

The carriage ride from the Embarcadero to the Grand Hotel lasted only a few blocks—hardly enough time to savor the novelty of horse-drawn transport. The streets were filled with the rattle of carriage wheels, churning up clouds of gritty dust between rows of buildings “as densely packed as the teeth of a comb,” wrote Kume. The hotel, a gleaming white confection of pediments and cupolas and oriel windows, rose four splendid stories at the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets.

The Grand Hotel was only a few years old, and its appointments dazzled the delegates. The lobby floor, paved with marble, was waxed to a treacherous sheen. The sparkle of crystal chandeliers vied with the glitter of gilt. Each suite had its own bathroom, with pure drinking water available at the twist of a faucet, and mirrors of limpid clarity. The scribe Kume, furiously scribbling notes on everything, waxed poetic with delight. “At night when one loosens a screw and sets the gas afire, the planets and stars circle above one as light glows inside white jade,” he wrote of the lamps in his room. “There are lace curtains on the windows that make one think one is looking at flowers through mist.” A button on the wall, when pressed, rang a bell hundreds of feet away to summon the hotel staff. But most extraordinary of all was what happened when a porter ushered Kume into a tiny chamber off the lobby, in which a few hotel guests were already standing, quite still and oddly expectant. A metal grille clanged shut. “I was shocked
when it suddenly started to move and we were pulled upward,” he wrote of his first elevator ride.

The procession of welcoming parties began first thing the next morning: the handful of Japanese students already in San Francisco; the city’s mayor, William Alvord; the gentlemen of the press, with each of whom Iwakura and his colleagues shook hands. The reporter from the
San Francisco Chronicle
had prepared carefully for this moment. “
Annata, anaata ohio doko morrow morrow
!” he exclaimed, beaming with pride at being able to address the dignified visitor in his native tongue. Iwakura bowed gravely and, through his interpreter, thanked the man for his good wishes and his perfect command of Japanese. The reporter took his leave, quite satisfied with himself, though what he had actually uttered was gibberish.
*

At noon it was time for the officers of the army and navy, though it was almost one o’clock by the time everyone had assembled in the hotel’s ballroom. The floor had been covered with canvas, the walls draped in the flags of both nations. Iwakura and DeLong sat on an upholstered sofa—a posture that was more comfortable for the American. None of the Japanese visitors were accustomed to sitting on chairs, which made their dangling legs go numb.

By two o’clock the military men had left and it was time for the consular corps. The doors of the ballroom were by now crowded with well-dressed onlookers, and while the embassy waited for the consuls to appear, a gaggle of young ladies entered, holding hands for mutual support. They introduced themselves to Iwakura, who chuckled and shook their hands. The spectators were charmed, and the delegates kept their shock to themselves. Women—and not even of age!—at a diplomatic ceremony?

Representatives of England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Switzerland, Sicily, and
Portugal presented their credentials. “The city of San Francisco, standing at the threshold of this continent, holds out her hands and bids you welcome,” proclaimed the president of the Chamber of Commerce, for whom good fellowship was clearly good business. San Francisco’s merchants stood ready to extend the doctrine of Manifest Destiny across the Pacific, expanding the market for American products and American ideas. Iwakura was gracious but clear in reply. Japan was eager to trade, but his mission had a more specific mandate: to open the question of negotiating more equitable terms than the United States and the other treaty nations had hitherto allowed.

The parade of dignitaries had worn on for more than five hours. For the delegates, unaccustomed to any form of salute more intimate than a bow—even from their own mothers—the endless clasping of hands was overwhelming. They retired to their rooms, followed by the eyes of hotel guests who gathered in knots near the entrances to the reception areas, hoping for a glimpse. The luxurious accommodations provided little relief, though—at least not until the tables and chairs and desks had been pushed aside, and the exhausted men could repose at last on the carpeted floor.

Their rest was brief. The daily papers had announced that the Japanese embassy would be serenaded that evening, and by the appointed hour of ten o’clock, well-wishers and gawkers choked the streets surrounding the hotel. The Second Artillery Band was punctual. Making their first formal appearance, the five Japanese girls joined the delegates, necks craning all around them as they took their seats. “They were all attired in elegant costumes and appeared to know that they were attracting attention, and shrank from it as all well bred young ladies should do,” a reporter noted approvingly. Well-bred or not, the girls were genuinely uncomfortable; unlike the men of the delegation, they were powerless to secure the camouflage of Western clothing without assistance, and that, Mrs. DeLong so far refused to give. Attention was not something she shrank from.

The stately chords of “Hail Columbia”—composed for George Washington’s first inaugural in 1789, and used as the national anthem for most of the nineteenth century—were soon blaring triumphantly from the parlor windows and out to the streets below. Earlier Japanese travelers had
returned with reports of the headache-inducing unpleasantness of barbarian music. Sitting appreciatively in a crowded parlor just a few feet from a full military band must have been a strain.

At the concert’s conclusion, lusty cheers and applause from outside were redoubled when Iwakura and DeLong emerged onto a balcony. The noisy enthusiasm, while gratifying, was somewhat startling to the delegates. “Western people are ever eager to promote trade and like to extend a warm welcome to foreign visitors,” Kume wrote. “Such gatherings, which are part and parcel of American customs, are unusual in Japan.” Iwakura drew a scroll from his sash and unrolled it to a length of several yards, though the speech he read from it in Japanese was brief. Both men withdrew. The crowd, however, was not ready to go home, shouting for the popular DeLong to say a few words. He demurred: it went against protocol for him to speak publicly; this wasn’t the setting for bending the rules; his heart was too full at this important moment for him to express his feelings . . . oh, very well, if you insist.

Ambassador DeLong’s remarks instructed his audience to consider these visitors in a distinctly different light from the “Orientals” already among them. “Let the Chinese be not confounded with the Japanese,” he told the people of San Francisco. “California need never fear an influx of coolie labor from the Japanese Empire.” Depraved China had no choice but to export its impoverished masses; noble Japan, on the contrary, would shortly be forced to look abroad for labor to fuel its new and gleaming industries. “While the Chinese have been forced to wear the chain of slavery, the Japanese have never had a master; their intellects are as sharp as their weapons,” DeLong declaimed.

His argument was not new. A dozen years earlier, when the first Japanese embassy had visited the United States, an up-and-coming new magazine devoted to the “American idea” had crystallized the attitude toward the exotic East. In a lengthy essay, the
Atlantic Monthly
had described a Japan poised to eclipse its larger Asian neighbor. The focus of the world would shift away from China, “for, in spite of all Celestial and Flowery preconceptions, it is impossible to view with any sincere interest a nation
so palsied, so corrupt, so wretchedly degraded, and so enfeebled by misgovernment, as to be already more than half sunk in decay; while, on the other hand, the real vigor, thrift, and intelligence of Japan, its great and still advancing power, and the rich promise of its future are such as to reward the most attentive study.” China, at that point on the brink of defeat in the Second Opium War, hobbled by addiction and humiliated by the mercantile nations, was no match in the American imagination for virtuous, vigorous Japan. Here was a nation with grit and goals, eager to emulate American progress, like-minded in every way.

This perspective had only intensified over the succeeding decade as the economic boom fueled by the gold rush faded, nowhere more than among white San Franciscans, unanimous in their scorn. The Chinese “hordes” undercut white workers for jobs and then sent their earnings home, they made no attempt to adopt local customs or costumes, and then they returned to a country that was inexplicably uninterested in American-made telegraph lines and railroads. The progressive and enlightened Japanese, on the other hand, having been awakened from their centuries-long sleep by America’s own Commodore Perry, seemed to embrace everything they found on this side of the Pacific.

While immigrant Chinese men continued to wear their hair in braided queues down their backs, most of these Japanese visitors had cut off their samurai topknots, and within days of their arrival were sporting black silk hats to complement their ill-fitting Western suits. The city’s fashionable hatters were quick to pounce on this high-profile market, and soon all the delegates were vying for the prize of highest and shiniest topper. Iwakura ordered samples brought to his room. When none proved a decent fit, the hatter sent one of his staff with a conformator, an elaborate mechanical contraption of wooden slats and metal pins used to take precise measurements of clients’ heads. The ambassador, it turned out, had a remarkably small head. His aides had a hilarious time trying on the conformator. “And that is what we want with Japan,” commented the
Chronicle
, “—to sell them ‘plug’ hats—and the wise man will soon see to what extent the principle can be carried.”

. . .

T
HE NEXT TWO
weeks were a whirl of tours and entertainments for the men of the mission. They visited factories, hospitals, schools, courthouses, barracks, forts, and rail yards, asking endless questions and taking copious notes. One of the first stops was the San Francisco Assaying and Refining Works, just a few blocks down Montgomery Street from the Grand Hotel. The gold rush may have slowed to a trickle, but mining companies were still processing what remained. The delegates looked on as workers weighed, tested, and melted the precious stuff; each got the chance to heft a gold bar in his hands. Then it was on to the Kimball Carriage Manufactory, the Mission Woolen Mills, the Bank of California, the Union Foundry, and on, and on.

It wasn’t all work. On the way back to the hotel one afternoon, a beaming middle-aged gentleman hailed the delegation at the corner of Fourteenth and Mission Streets, in front of a rococo stone entrance topped with statues, flagpoles, and a sign in letters three feet high: WOODWARD’S GARDENS. R. B. Woodward himself, “the Barnum of the West,” beckoned them into his personal pleasure grounds. A wealthy hotelier, Woodward had converted a mansion on six acres into the most popular attraction in San Francisco. Visitors could explore picture galleries and greenhouses, ogle peacocks and buffalo, and visit the Museum of Natural Wonders, which featured fossils, taxidermy, and a gold nugget weighing ninety-seven pounds. A purveyor of exotica himself, Woodward could hardly resist the appeal of such exotic visitors, though he did not go so far as to waive the twenty-five-cent admission fee. Public amusements of this sort were as yet unknown in Japan. Finance Minister Okubo and future prime minister Ito were persuaded to try the box swings, and everyone took a ride on the rotary boat, a wind-powered floating merry-go-round circling a fountain.

A trip to the theater was that evening’s featured entertainment—a drama entitled
Rouge et Noir
, about the evils of gambling, at the opulent California Theatre. The place was packed by the time the silk-robed Iwakura arrived with his more soberly suited entourage. Squeezing through at last, they
found that the attention of the audience turned more often toward their flag-decked boxes than toward the action on stage. Adding to the excitement was the presence of Mrs. DeLong, escorting the two oldest girls, still in kimonos. “Several milliners are at present engaged in making them English outfits,” the
Chronicle
reported with a note of disappointment. “If we mistake not, the romance attached to these ladies will all wear off when their Oriental habiliments are doffed for our more common attire . . . No doubt they are the most beautiful Japanese ladies in the United States to-day—there are no others—but if they accept the garments of our fashionable belles, thousands can be found much more beautiful than they.” The report was, in fact, premature; it would be several more weeks before the powerless girls managed to secure Western-style wardrobes.

The trip to the theater was a rare outing. Though the Japanese men were making appearances all over the city, the girls kept to their rooms to avoid the “
furore
” their presence caused, taking all their meals there. The older ones could receive visitors in Mrs. DeLong’s rooms in the afternoons, but the three youngest were almost never seen. The days were long and bewildering. Without a word of English, the girls were entirely dependent on Mrs. DeLong. “We hardly dared to go out into the hotel corridors by ourselves, for fear we would get lost, and not know our rooms again, as we had no way of asking in any case,” Ume later remembered. One day, when Ume ventured into the hall with another of the girls, a group of women and children happened by. Delighted by this encounter with the “Japanese princesses,” the women carried the girls off to their rooms, where they fingered the silk of their costumes, traced the embroidery on their sashes, and stroked their hair to their heart’s content. They brought out toys and pictures for their doll-like guests, chattering unintelligibly while the girls waited in increasing discomfort, wondering when they might be released and how on earth they would find their way back.