Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (19 page)

Two days later, Tan and Sutematsu stood with the family at Bacon’s graveside. Noah Porter, Yale’s president, was struck by this visible testament to Bacon’s unusually large heart. “Could he have foreseen that among the multitude of devout men who followed him to his burial these representatives would be present from China and Japan, as members of his own household and of the household of faith, he would have said, in anticipation: ‘I shall not have lived in vain,’” Porter wrote in his obituary.

Leonard Bacon had never faltered in his support of these two young people, whose foreignness had not prevented them from feeling like members of his family. Though the Chinese government had recalled its students, fearing the influence of Christianity, Bacon saw to it that Tan remained at Yale, raising funds from his own friends for Tan’s support. “I have never expressed to you nor to Dr. Bacon nor to Nellie & Alice my gratitude for every comfort I have received at your hands because all these kindnesses were so much like home love and care that I could not do it,” Tan wrote in a condolence letter to Catherine.

Back at Vassar after the funeral, Sutematsu was pleased to receive a photograph of Bacon as a keepsake from Catherine. “It is such a perfect likeness that every time I look at it I feel as if Dr. Bacon was speaking to me. It stands on my desk just above my head as I sit to read or write, and as I look up, I am reminded of that noble and beautiful life, which had done so much for me,” she wrote to Catherine. “I am sure it will be a great help to me to have the picture[,] for when I look at it I can not but wish to be good and true as he would wish to have me to be.”

Her foster father was gone, her years in America nearly done. But the mail that winter brought heartening reminders of what lay in store: a letter from her sister in St. Petersburg, enclosing a pearl ring and the news that she would be returning to Tokyo in April; and another from Shige. “I was nearly wild when I saw the well known handwriting and the envelope was torn up with lightening [
sic
] rapidity and its contents devoured with the greatest speed,” Sutematsu wrote to Catherine Bacon. With Shige’s letter was a present: a warm quilted hood, blue with a red lining. “I find it very useful in these cold piercing days when I go coasting or skating,” she wrote.

A
LL TOO SOON
it was commencement time again. Class Day, June 13, was glorious, the trees in front of the Main Building dressed up with ribbons in the college colors of rose and silver, representing the dawn of women’s education breaking through the gray of the past. In the chapel, the thirty-nine members of the class of 1882 listened with rapt attention to their chosen class representatives: an Orator, a Historian, and a Sibyl, whose job it was to deliver affectionate prophecies for each graduate.

Sutematsu received her full share of both giggles and respect. The Sibyl predicted that their Japanese classmate would be mightily relieved to return to a land where friends didn’t express their friendship quite so physically (Sutematsu was notorious for her discomfort when greeted with an enthusiastic embrace). “However[,] she does not have much rest,” the prophecy continued, “as the following slip from a Tokio newspaper will
testify: ‘The leader of reform among women in Japan is Stematz Yamakawa. She is of the élite of Japanese society, and is both stylish and popular.’” Her classmates nodded in recognition as the Sibyl concluded: “Her ‘little brown hands’ have almost more than they can do now, managing her boarding school. But she is doing good work, and is making better use than most of us of her Vassar education.”

Emerging blinking into the sunshine, the seniors completed the ritual burial of their class records under their chosen tree and passed the ceremonial spade to the juniors with due solemnity. That evening, before joining their families and teachers in the dining hall for music and dancing, they gathered for their class supper, a last chance to share the intimacy of four years together. Seated at a single long table, they howled with laughter at the final toasts—“Ironic and Otherwise”—devised for each girl. Sutematsu, smirking good-naturedly, was named “Most Careless.”

The weather held for commencement the next morning. At 10:30 the graduates took their seats in the front rows of the chapel, surrounded by alumnae and guests; the Japanese consul in New York, Saburo Takaki, was present with half a dozen of his staff. His government had provided Sutematsu with lavishly embroidered silk for her graduation dress, and the audience murmured as she stood before them, one of ten senior speakers.

Consul Takaki was not disappointed. Where her fellow orators had chosen as their themes “The Conscience of Science,” “The Decline of Speculative Philosophy,” or the relative merits of Alexander II, Sutematsu addressed “British Policy toward Japan,” condemning the unequal trade agreement that persisted between the two nations. The speech was “the most interesting of the whole series,” declared the
Poughkeepsie Eagle
, “an eloquent plea for the independent nationality of Japan.” The
Chicago Tribune
called it “the most notable, as it was the most enthusiastically applauded oration of the day.” Sutematsu had proved herself as canny as she was eloquent: without directly criticizing her adopted country, whose policies toward Japan were similarly patronizing, she had made her point nonetheless. The original goal of the Iwakura Mission—treaty revision—remained incomplete.

News of Sutematsu’s achievement reached all the way to Japan. “Never before had a foreigner’s speech moved an American audience so much,” trumpeted the
Asahi Shimbun
. “Miss Yamakawa brought great honor not only to herself, but to her country.” Tomomi Iwakura and his ambassadors, many now among the most prominent figures in Japan, never imagined they would read such news of the little girl who had traveled with them.

A
ND THEN THERE
was nothing left to do but pack and fill out the form headed “To Students Leaving College” : “By what train do you wish to leave Poughkeepsie? Do you wish the College to take your baggage to depot? If so, how many and what Pieces?” For thirty-eight members of the graduating class, the train would take them home—to teach, perhaps, but most likely to marry. For Sutematsu, it would be the first leg of a much longer journey.

In her graduation portrait, Sutematsu stands with regal calm, dazzling in embroidered white silk. She is twenty-two—the same age as the empress behind the screen had been more than a decade before.

*
Though her New Haven circle always wrote “Stemats,” the newly fledged college girl signed herself “Stematz” and continued to do so for the rest of her life.

9    THE JOURNEY “HOME”

C
ATHERINE
B
ACON HAD NOT
made the trip to Poughkeepsie to see her foster daughter graduate; her health had not permitted it. At the end of July she was buried beside her husband in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery. For the second time in her life, Sutematsu found herself without parents.

“I cannot realize the great change that has taken place,” she wrote to Alice a few days after Catherine’s death. “It has been like a terrible dream to me and though I keep thinking about it, I cannot possibly realize it. To you of course it must seem more real and I cannot but keep thinking of your changed life.” But her beloved foster sister’s new status as an independent adult created an opportunity. “Whichever way you decide to spend your winter,” Sutematsu continued, “the time will not be very long for I hope very earnestly that you will be able to come out to Japan next spring. I don’t know whether your relatives will approve of your taking such a step, but I hope your wish to work with me for the good of Japan may be realized. You can do much here I know, but your opportunity to sacrifice yourself for the sake of others is indeed endless in Japan.”

Though the Bacons had not been able to send Alice to college, she had continued her studies independently. Radcliffe College would not be chartered until 1894, but Harvard had begun to offer special examinations for women in 1874. Administered in several cities, the tests were the same as those given to male applicants
to Harvard College. A woman who earned a passing mark would receive a certificate from Harvard’s president confirming her achievement. In 1881, Alice received certificates in three subjects. Her results won her the right to study with Harvard professors at the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women in Cambridge, familiarly known as the Harvard Annex. But there was no money for her tuition, and besides, she was needed at home: her oldest half sister, the capable Rebecca, had died just as Sutematsu left for Vassar, and Catherine was failing. Now, with Catherine gone, Alice was on her own. Once she had tidied her family’s affairs, she was free to pursue a career. Indeed, she had no choice.

A new chapter, daunting and exhilarating, was beginning for both women, aligned in their assumption that their lives would be devoted to work, not family. Yes, a woman’s highest calling was that of good wife and wise mother, but an educated woman could also fulfill her moral mission in the classroom, where she might have an even greater impact on the next generation. To both of these ambitious young women, marriage seemed unlikely, even undesirable, whereas together they might do great work in a land that seemed in desperate need of their skills.

There would be no summer vacation in the Litchfield Hills for Sutematsu that year. As departure loomed, she was determined to soak up any information that might be useful to an advocate for women’s education. For the months of July and August, she enrolled at the Connecticut Training School for Nurses. Alice’s oldest half brother, Francis Bacon, was a professor of surgery at Yale’s medical school; his wife, Georgeanna, had nursed soldiers during the Civil War and written the definitive work on the subject:
A Handbook of Nursing for Family and General Use
. A decade earlier they had helped to found the nursing school, and they made it possible now for Sutematsu to spend her summer studying there.

“I am now in the diet kitchen and I find the work pretty hard,” she wrote to Alice in Colebrook. “Still I suppose it is good for me to have to wash pots and shovel coal and scrub the floor . . . I make from two to three gallons of beef tea every day and about a gallon and a half of chicken soup.
Besides these I have to make custards, gruels, porridges, etc. It is of course very interesting but I don’t like it so well as regular nursing.”

As New Haven sweltered in the summer heat, Sutematsu indulged in daydreams of a life in Japan that looked suspiciously like the one she had enjoyed in New England, full of meaningful work, genteel recreation, and stimulating company. She and Alice would keep house together, chaperoned by Sutematsu’s mother in Tokyo, and hosting whatever Bacon relatives or Vassar alumnae happened by. Alice would teach English; and Sutematsu, physiology and gymnastics. “You see we would live in American style if you like while we can [procure] Japanese things for my mother, or we could live half and half,” Sutematsu imagined. “When the summer vacations come we might go north and visit the home of my childhood and further up to Yesso [Ezo, or Hokkaido] and see the Ainus since you are so much interested in ethnology.”

Suspended for the summer between the American college girl she had been and the Japanese educational reformer she was determined to be, Sutematsu strove mightily to keep her eyes on a rosy future instead of peering down into the gulf that lay between. It wasn’t easy. “Perhaps I am counting the chickens before they are hatched and building castles in the air,” she mused more soberly. “Still it is pleasant to think about it when there is no harm done by it.”

As the fall approached, postcards and letters flew between Sutematsu and her Vassar friends. “I hope I shall see you before I start for the far-off Orient,” she wrote to her classmate Jessie Wheeler, sounding more like a missionary contemplating a sojourn among the heathen than a Japanese woman about to return to her native land. A week later her airy tone had sharpened, betraying a building anxiety: “Do you mean to say that you won’t go through New Haven before the tenth of Oct.?” she scribbled to Miss Wheeler. “It is disgusting of you to put it off so late, when you know I want to see you so much . . . So hurry up.”

Alice was packing up her life as well. She and her siblings had inherited the white clapboard house on Church Street, but money was tight, and renting the house would provide a little income. By the end of September
Sutematsu was chagrined to realize she would not be able to invite her Vassar friends to stay after all: “Every thing is already upside down and the whole house is in a state of confusion.” With little left in New Haven to hold her, and with the promise of a future with Alice in Japan to sustain her, Sutematsu left New Haven for New York in October to meet Ume and begin their journey back.

U
ME, NOW SEVENTEEN
, had received her high school diploma from the Archer Institute just as Sutematsu graduated from Vassar. Like many only children an avid reader, Ume had continued to excel in high school, adding Shakespeare and Wordsworth to the novels by Dickens and Scott that she loved to devour. “Miss Tsuda’s progress in Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, and French has been much in advance of her class, she having a clear insight into all the branches to which she has devoted herself,” read her certificate from Archer.

After a decade as the adored foster daughter of the Lanmans, Ume had grown into a sprightly, accomplished, affectionate, and opinionated girl—a familiar face in Georgetown social circles. Her farewell party was covered by the press. “The regret for her departure is as general as it is genuine,” reported the
Evening Critic
. But although Ume’s memories of Japan had faded almost completely, her adopted country could not quite see her as an American. “Miss Tsuda is a very intelligent young girl, and while her face is of a decidedly national type, it is attractive, and even pretty. Her hair is a marvel of length and thickness, and is a real burden to the small head that carries its weight. She has completed her education at one of our best schools, and goes back home a really good English scholar.”