Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (17 page)

Burdened as she was with the care of elderly parents and dependent siblings, all to be managed on a budget that did not stretch to frivolous beach trips, Rebecca’s pique was not hard to understand. “I do not think it best for her to go to Southampton,” she closed. “Miss A told me
that yesterday Shige heard that Mrs. Lanman & Ume were to spend the summer there.” That was the last straw, apparently—though the Lanmans were obvious chaperones for Sutematsu and Shige, Rebecca must have balked at the irksome image of Sutematsu spoiled by the indulgent Mrs. Lanman.

In the end, Sutematsu went, with the Japanese embassy forwarding a check for fifty dollars to cover expenses. The days of her dependence on the Bacons were coming to an end.

*
Though the modern transliteration of the name is “Uryu” rather than “Uriu,” the family always used the older spelling in English, and continues to do so to this day.

†
Junius Soper was an American Methodist missionary responsible for the conversions of Sen and Hatsuko Tsuda.

8    AT VASSAR

“M
OST OF US IN
Japan are radicals,” wrote a student who used the nom de plume of “Stranger” in the inaugural issue of the
Gleaner
, published by Hillhouse High School students. “In this century of science and civilization, we don’t like to live the life of the Middle Ages. We like changes and modern improvements.”

It is likely that “Stranger” was Sutematsu. Though four boys from the Chinese Educational Mission were her schoolmates, she was the only Japanese student at Hillhouse at the time. The subject matter, too, seems to resonate with her experience. Kenjiro had done his work well: his sister may have come of age in America, but she still identified herself as a daughter of Japan. And despite Japan’s determined leap toward Western civilization and enlightenment, there remained certain ideas too radical for a daughter of Japan to take seriously. “One is women’s rights,” Stranger declared. “We don’t believe that woman was made to preside over a political assembly, or to pronounce judgement on the bench, or to ascend the pulpit and discourse on theology.” Not that Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton were advocating goals as lofty as these, but their brand of extremely public activism in the service of equality for women made Sutematsu decidedly uncomfortable.

The other arena in which Japanese tradition triumphed over Western ways, Stranger continued, was the training of children. “We don’t believe in children’s independence,” wrote the girl whose
own family had sent her halfway around the world at the age of eleven. “In Japan children are taught to obey their elders, and to believe that the way of their parents’ is always better and wiser than their own.” She had obeyed, and continued to believe. That she was now more fluent in English than Japanese and cramming hard for college entrance examinations was a paradox she seemed not to see. No daughter of Japan had ever held a college degree, or dreamed of earning one. In heeding her empress’s mandate to be educated, Sutematsu was leaving the way of her elders forever.

E
VEN IN
A
MERICA
, higher education for women was an idea in its infancy. Only a tiny handful of women’s institutions—Wellesley, Smith, Vassar—had actually received charters as colleges, and of these, only Vassar had been admitting students for more than a decade. Catherine Bacon happened to pay a visit to Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, New York, several years after its opening. “I have never seen such a wonderful place as this college is, so quiet and at night after ten o’clock, there is something very striking, almost awful in the silences, when you remember that four hundred human beings are under the same roof,” she wrote to her husband.

Matthew Vassar had no formal education. Building his family’s modest brewery into the nation’s largest, he took his rightful place among the Poughkeepsie elite while still in his thirties. In 1861, approaching the age of seventy and eager to invest in his own immortality, he placed a tin box containing $408,000—half his fortune—before the handpicked board of Vassar Female College, an institution that did not yet exist.

His family thought he was mad, but Vassar was firm. “I considered that the mothers of a country mold the character of its citizens, determine its institutions, and shape its destiny,” he told his new trustees. “Next to the influence of the mother, is that of the female teacher, who is employed to train young children at a period when impressions are most vivid and lasting.”

Vassar Female College was unlike any existing institution of higher learning, most notably because all of its students lived together in a single grand edifice: the spectacular Main Building, five hundred feet wide and
five stories high, “heated by steam, lighted with gas, ventilated in the most perfect manner, and supplied throughout with an abundance of pure soft water.” The building had its own elevator, along with a chapel, a library, an art gallery, lecture halls, and faculty apartments. Approached by a stately avenue lined with still-diminutive evergreens, it dominated the landscape. Observers compared it to the Palais des Tuileries in Paris.

“I think of Alice constantly & wish she might be able to come here[,] for I have never seen any thing more delightful, than the arrangements for health and out of door pleasures, and any body with the will, has opportunities for culture not offered I think, in any other place,” Catherine marveled when she visited. “I mean for girls,” she added.

As it turned out, the Bacons could not afford to send Alice to college. But in September of 1878, the opening of Vassar’s fourteenth academic year, Sutematsu Yamakawa and Shige Nagai moved into the Main Building, their tuition paid by the Japanese government. They were the first nonwhite students to enroll. Shige would be a special student in the music department, and Sutematsu had been accepted for the full four-year baccalaureate degree.

Sutematsu had grown up with Alice for a sister, and matched her in ambition and ability. She rose to any challenge that presented itself. Vassar, the first of the group of women’s colleges that would later be known as the Seven Sisters, claimed to offer women the same education that Yale and Harvard offered young men. In this, at least, Sutematsu had no qualms about claiming her equal right.

Vassar’s student accommodations were elegant, with carpets and rockers, upholstered sofas and wall-mounted bookshelves, and imposing bedsteads carved of black walnut, wide enough for two girls to share. Servants kept the rooms tidy, and a formidable “lady principal” kept the girls in line. There were indoor bathrooms on each floor, and students were required to bathe twice a week. Each day ended with chapel after dinner, and Bible class and a longer service were held on Sundays. Meals were taken in the dining hall, where each girl had a regular place and provided her own napkin. For recreation, girls could stroll the gravel paths of the
two-hundred-acre campus, go boating or skating on the lake, and visit the college’s own bowling alley. Twenty minutes of quiet privacy were enforced twice a day, and it was recommended that students use that time for prayer. Everyone got up at 6:30, and lights-out was at ten. Board and tuition was four hundred dollars per year.

Vassar was a little world unto itself, and its professors formed the pantheon of deities. Truman Backus, head of the English department, riveted and inspired the girls with his youth and passion, both for literature and for current affairs. “He waked us up and kept us awake and we never wanted to miss a class for fear we should miss something,” remembered one student. “He made us do our own thinking and that is the mark of a true teacher.” Others seemed more interested in looking at him than listening to him. “You should see his Cassius-like proportions,” gushed one girl to her mother. “‘Long, and lank and brown as is the ribbed sea-sand,’ and above all his keen blue eyes.”

If Professor Backus was dazzling, the Dutchman Henry Van Ingen, head of the art department, was dear. Gentlemanly and approachable, he put every girl at ease with his quiet humor while holding them to his own high standard. When one student, copying a Raphael cherub, balked at completing the nude figure, Van Ingen was firm: “What’s the matter? Finish it up! Put in everything you see. What the Lord made you don’t need to be ashamed of.” The girls adored him. “I expect to talk about him in every letter,” wrote one. “He is our oasis in a sea of troubles—to mix metaphors.”

Most memorable of all was Miss Maria Mitchell, astronomer. (At Vassar, male professors were addressed as “Professor” ; female faculty were considered merely teachers and referred to as “Miss.” ) The first building to be completed on the Vassar campus was the Observatory—a trim, two-story brick building crowned with a dome and equipped with a powerful telescope—and from the college’s inception Miss Mitchell claimed it as her domain. Stout, squat, and square-jawed, her hair styled in incongruously dainty ringlets, she cut an unforgettable figure. She had discovered a comet, which was named for her, and she counted among her personal
friends all the notable women of the day, including Julia Ward Howe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She had no patience for etiquette or the ninnies who fretted over it.

Miss Mitchell’s blunt candor discomfited many, but she was as unfiltered with praise as with criticism. Many a new girl took heart from her cheerful “How are you getting on?” during the first weeks of term. “Learn as if you will live forever; live as if you will die tomorrow” was her motto, and she insisted that female faculty be recognized for their accomplishments alongside the men. She was famous for her “dome parties,” at which those lucky enough to receive an invitation enjoyed charades, strawberries and cream, and Miss Mitchell’s own poetry, composed for the occasion. She knew, though, that even her most gifted students were unlikely to choose the life of a celibate scientist. At one party she offered this verse to her guests:

Who lifting their hearts to the heavenly blue

Will do woman’s work for the good and true;

And as sisters or daughters or mothers or wives

Will take the starlight into their lives.

Reaching for the stars was lonely work. Vassar’s students may have been pioneers in higher education for women, but after graduation most of them would dedicate their lives to marriage and motherhood, not scholarship.

A
LL FRESHMEN TOOK
Latin, math, and natural history; to this, Sutematsu’s first-year schedule added English composition, German, and elementary drawing. Shige, enrolled as a special student in the School of Music, studied music history and theory, voice, piano, and organ. She also took English composition and French, and a little math in her first year (arithmetic had been a weak spot on her entrance exam). For the first time since those initial months in Washington, the two girls lived together and, at Sutematsu’s insistence, added one more subject to their course of study:
Japanese. Every day they would retire to their room for an hour to chat in their mother tongue.

Though she submitted loyally to her friend’s enforced language practice sessions, Shige would much rather have been out enjoying herself. Where Sutematsu was studious and elegant, Shige was excitable and full of fun. As a student she was not particularly distinguished, but she was beloved: indispensable at candy pulls and sleigh rides, or when someone gave a “spread” and ordered ice cream and cake from town. She loved to dance; her rendition of the Highland fling rendered her classmates helpless with laughter. And when they were laid up in the infirmary, it was Shige who came with get-well wishes. “I have no memory of an hour’s indisposition at Vassar that I did not hear the click, click of Singhi’s [
sic
] funny little walk as she came down the corridor bringing me a pitcher of lemonade and unlimited sympathy,” wrote one friend.

Shige was a regular performer at college concerts, and her interpretations of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Mozart were always greeted with warm applause; notices in the
Vassar Miscellany
praised her spirited expressiveness. The well-regarded musician and scholar Frederick Ritter, native of Strasburg, headed the School of Music, and Shige became his student. Though she studied the canon of European classical music, she did not forget the melodies of her childhood. “Japanese arias given me by Miss Shige Nagai,” reads a note scribbled in Ritter’s hand at the top of a sheaf of hand-notated staff paper.

Sutematsu cultivated a different image: graceful but reserved, intellectual, ambitious. She excelled at English and contributed highly polished essays to the
Miscellany
. She projected an air of cosmopolitanism. To her classmates she looked “like a beautiful Jewess of a poetic type”—less alien, though still exotic. Shige, on the other hand, “was broadly and indubitably Japanese.” While Shige frolicked at blindman’s buff, Sutematsu honed her chess game and beat all her teachers at whist. Another English instructor, Helen Hiscock, described “a sense of reserve power” in the tall, slender girl. “When the class-room was depressed by
that ‘sleepiness’ which experienced teachers dread, Stematz
*
could confound her languid American classmates with a brilliant recitation in literature or logic.”

The only time anyone ever saw a flush of excitement on Sutematsu’s calm face was at the college post office, where from time to time she received a letter that had traveled farther than any girl in Poughkeepsie—except Shige—had ever dreamed of going. It might be from Kenjiro in Tokyo, full of politics and international affairs. Or it might even be from Russia. Sutematsu was not the only girl in her family who had been sent abroad—one of her older sisters, Misao, was in St. Petersburg. Separated for most of their lives, the two sisters shared little common experience and no written language: Misao’s life was lived in French. When a letter from this distant sister arrived, Sutematsu convened an informal council of her friends—some to help compose an appropriate letter in reply, others to put it into decent French. Helping Sutematsu was so much more entertaining and exotic than writing their own letters home.

Just as Shige and Ume had always deferred to Sutematsu as their leader, her classmates soon looked to her as well. By the end of her first year she had been elected president of her class for the year to come. “I believe it was on account of her studiousness that she was appointed, or it may have been because she was a favorite, I do not know which,” fourteen-year-old Ume wrote to her mother in Tokyo, betraying perhaps a touch of envy. The accolades had to this point been mostly hers.