Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (28 page)

Ume found the rehearsals tiresome, and the prospect of the actual ceremony filled her with dread. “I know just how I ought to do, but I am afraid I will lose my head, and be put out, forget the many signals and not put the girls through the proper forms,” she worried. “It is just like me to stare blankly when the signal is made and forget my part before so many.” The little sprite who had blithely recited “The White-Footed Deer” before her elementary school classmates was no longer so sure of herself. In Georgetown, each accomplishment had made her a minor celebrity. Among the elite of etiquette-obsessed Tokyo, every public appearance was an opportunity for her to fail.

On the day of the ceremony Ume dressed carefully in a gold brocade gown made specially for the occasion. “My dress really did look nice, and it was praised as being very handsome, though it did not cost so much really as it seemed,” Ume wrote, tempering her satisfaction with a show of pragmatism, as befitted a working woman. “It had a long train to it and I felt very dignified with it sweeping about.” The empress arrived in a grand carriage, followed by a procession of smaller conveyances containing her ladies-in-waiting.

Before Ume had a chance to ask about protocol, she was summoned to make her bow. Though the setting was now a girls’ school classroom rather than an imposing palace audience chamber, the twenty-year-old American-educated teacher who stood before her sovereign that morning felt very much like the bewildered kimono-clad six-year-old she had once been. “I did not know what to do, and I am sure I did not do it right, but I walked in without any instruction and bowed three times, as I believed must be done,” she wrote. “But as I had to hold down my head, bow and come out, I could not see where the Empress was, nor how she looked at all.”

After the empress had made the rounds of the various classes, the entire school gathered in the assembly hall, joined by an audience of illustrious guests. Ume took her place with the faculty in front of the long rows of girls; Sutematsu, now the Countess Oyama, stood to one side with the court ladies and others of noble rank. General Oyama had been raised to the rank of count by the Peerage Act of 1884, which conferred titles on non-nobles who had been of unusual service to Japan. “Countess” is “a very empty title, as [Sutematsu] herself said, and most absurd, but nevertheless hers in right, and that is what she is to be called in truth,” Ume had written with poorly disguised envy. “It all sounds very fine, it seems to me, in name at least, and it may have some effect on the Europeans, at any rate.”

A band played. “After the music ceased, the Empress arose and read something, of which I understood only a little,” reported Ume, “but it spoke of the education of women, and the necessity of schools, urging both teachers and scholars to work upwards.” Had Ume more perfectly comprehended the empress’s words, she might have felt less approving. Though the empress had progressed to reading her own speeches rather than expressing them through an intermediary, she was hardly a progressive. “We consider women’s duty is to possess the virtues of obsequiousness, to attend to their parents as well as to their fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law, assist their husbands, to conduct their family affairs properly, and, when they become mothers, to give their children home instruction,” the empress had exhorted the assembled daughters of the nobility that afternoon. “To qualify themselves for these, they must acquire a proper knowledge of things.”

Scholarship would assist these girls in the higher pursuit of chastity, benevolence, and filial piety. After all, went the prevailing wisdom, learning unanchored by sound moral teachings was at best useless and at worst dangerous. Though honored as their teacher, Ume—educated, unmarried, earning her own keep—was hardly a model for her highborn students to emulate.

Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume had accomplished a great deal since being
uprooted and transplanted all over again. Largely forgotten by the government that had sent them abroad, they had preserved their sense of duty and made significant strides toward fulfilling it, despite Japan’s growing ambivalence toward Western ways. But despite all this, they remained anomalies—Ume most of all. On the holiday celebrating the emperor’s birthday that November, citizens of her rank were required to pay their respects at court—a privilege Ume had craved since her return to Japan, and to which she looked forward with nervous anticipation. But aside from Mrs. Shimoda, who as a former lady-in-waiting fell into a different category, Ume was the only woman of her bureaucratic rank. It would not do to have an unaccompanied woman among the men at the imperial audience. “So they asked me
privately
, you see, not to come, for they would not know what to do with me,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman, covering her disappointment with a show of relief. On the appointed day, when her colleagues went to the palace, Ume had the day off—“far nicer than to have to bow one’s head off at court,” she insisted staunchly.

*
His younger brother Tsugumichi Saigo, mustachioed and trim in contrast to Takamori’s imposing bulk, was the agriculture minister who would later persuade Sutematsu to accept Iwao Oyama’s proposal.

12    ALICE IN TOKYO

T
HE NEXT THREE YEARS
passed swiftly for the trio, the regular rhythm of the academic year punctuated by the excitement of new babies. Shige doubled the size of her brood to four, on top of her teaching schedule. Sutematsu had a second child—which, with her three stepdaughters, brought her total to five—and found herself increasingly in the spotlight as her husband’s star continued to rise.

Ume, secure at last in her prestigious teaching position and free of parental cares, had begun to enjoy herself, her letters preoccupied with gossip and social events. A cholera epidemic ravaged Tokyo in the summer of 1886, but Mrs. Lanman was not to worry, “as very few of the better classes catch it.” The news that cholera had claimed the life of Ryo Yoshimasu, eldest of the original Iwakura girls, filled just half a paragraph. Ryo had married and borne a child, but beyond that Ume knew little, except that she lived in “reduced circumstances.” The trio had not kept up with their old friend. “She seemed so different and changed, and we could not feel as we used to do, so we have lost sight of her,” Ume wrote. “It is very sad to think that this is the end of poor Rio.”

Ume’s letters revealed a consciousness caught between cultures: she identified as a Japanese but thought more like an American. When Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado
opened in London and New York to great acclaim, she was full of righteous indignation. “Just
suppose, if on the Japanese stage in one of the Tokyo theatres Queen Victoria and the British royal family were made the subject of a ridiculous play,” she fumed to Mrs. Lanman, “why, the British representative would soon appeal for redress and make a great fuss.” But her outrage was undermined by curiosity. “Can’t you send me the libretto of it just for fun?”

That same fall, Japan was convulsed over the
Normanton
incident, in which a British cargo steamer, en route from Yokohama to Kobe, ran aground and sank. The two dozen Japanese passengers drowned, while the foreign captain and crew were saved. The British captain claimed that the victims, being Japanese, had not understood his exhortations in English to board the lifeboats. The Japanese press howled, and antiforeign sentiment exploded. “I send you a newspaper containing some accounts of the matter, which is indeed very curious,” wrote Ume to Mrs. Lanman. But on to more important news: she had gotten a raise and a promotion in rank, and the emperor’s mother had invited the whole school to see Giuseppe Chiarini’s Royal Italian Circus, then visiting Tokyo.

Ume seemed somewhat oblivious to her compatriots’ increasing wariness of foreign influence. When Prime Minister Ito hosted Japan’s first costume ball at the Rokumeikan in April of 1887, Ume was pleased to receive an invitation, and dazzled by the scene: “old Emperors waltzing with peasant girls and Dutch maidens, old daimios polka-ing with the Goddess of Liberty and a jinricksha man and a Japanese carpenter in the same set with Queen Elizabeth.” But those outside Ito’s charmed circle were disgusted by the display, not to mention the rumors that in the wee hours Ito himself had seduced the pretty young wife of one of his councillors. The evening would come to be seen as a turning point in Japan’s cultural history: the moment when the love affair with Western fashions soured for good. “The fancy ball made a great stir, and some of the newspapers made fun of the whole affair,” Ume reported blithely. “Still it was a great success and everyone who went enjoyed it.”

The following summer Ume left her parents’ home and moved closer to the school with a widowed cousin who also taught there—a decision at once pragmatic and symbolic, confirming Ume’s determination to remain
independent. Her new household included the cousin’s small niece and Ume’s little sister Fuki, a Peeresses’ student. The arrangement was congenial enough, though in quiet moments Ume betrayed the wistful longing that lurked always near the surface. “I love to think of you two, the same unchanged couple sitting by the fire in your own cozy room, just as I left you,” she wrote to the Lanmans that winter. “Someday, when you are least expecting it, I will come in upon you, and find you in your old places, and I, I will take mine between you.” With Shige and Sutematsu pouring their energies into motherhood, Ume had little opportunity to unburden herself to a kindred spirit.

T
HOUGH PROUD OF
her job, Ume was less than enthralled by her daily responsibilities. “I have received notice to go to school,” she wrote at the beginning of her second year, “and though the lessons do not begin until the first of the month, we teachers must go a week ahead of time. There we must decide our lessons, the hours, and make all the arrangements, which are too bothersome.” She was unimpressed by the intellectual caliber of her highborn students, hampered as they were by the prescribed habits of their class and gender. “The girls of the nobility are stupid as a rule,” she wrote, and on another occasion: “I wonder if these human dolls can learn much.” Job security had not dispelled her underlying ambivalence about having a job in the first place: “It is far from easy work to go from class to class and room to room doing the same thing over and over again, and teaching the same things, although, you know, I am very fond of teaching and enjoy school very much indeed.”

Her school bore little resemblance to the ones she had attended in Washington. Hirobumi Ito had become Japan’s first prime minister in December 1885 and named Arinori Mori his minister of education, but their forward-thinking idealism and Sutematsu’s Vassar-inspired input notwithstanding, the Peeresses’ School was a strikingly conservative institution. Mrs. Shimoda, as directress, came to school each day in traditional court dress, and most of the students, ages six to eighteen, dressed
in kimonos with purple
hakama
, the flowing skirt-like trousers worn on formal occasions. In addition to Japanese, Chinese literature, English or French, and history, the girls studied morals, calligraphy, drawing, sewing, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, household management, and formal etiquette. Instruction in arithmetic ceased once they reached their teens. Most of the students arrived by jinrikisha, the back of each conveyance emblazoned with a family crest, often followed by another carrying a maid. Maids and jinrikisha men waited at the school all day to escort their charges home again.

With enrollment growing, and English taught daily in the six higher grades, Ume was increasingly busy. By the end of the second year it was decided that the school would hire a foreigner to join the English department. But while Ume was eager to share her teaching load, the idea of a newcomer irked her; the school had recently hired a Frenchwoman who was paid more than Ume for fewer hours.

Then Ume had an idea. What if Alice Bacon was the new English teacher? Since 1883, Alice had been a teacher at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, the school where her late sister Rebecca had once been assistant principal. Alice had written to Ume not long before, expressing her concern for Sutematsu’s shaky health, and Ume had the sense that a sojourn in Japan might be attractive to her. “You know, she has a very fine education, and has been used to teaching for ever so long, and she has had a good training with all those Indians and Negroes at Hampton,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman—once again revealing her American influences, and aligning herself with Alice as a bringer of enlightenment to the uncivilized. Hiring Alice, she felt certain, would please everyone: the Peeresses’ School would gain a talented teacher, and Ume would enjoy the comfort of daily contact with a friend from her old life.

By the fall of 1887, the start of the school’s third year, it was official. “Your letter with its unexpectedly good terms reached me a day or two ago,” Alice wrote in October. “I have now decided to accept the offer for one year.” She would arrange for a replacement at Hampton, and sail for Japan the following summer. A blizzard of questions followed: Could she
bring her dog? Could she keep a horse? How many school days in the week? Would she need to learn some Japanese before she could start? “I mean to write to Stematz by this mail,” she concluded, “so must close this catechetical letter.”

Alice’s salary at the Peeresses’ School would be twice what Ume earned, but as it was Alice, Ume felt the sting far less than she might have otherwise. “It costs so much more for a foreigner to live than for a Japanese,” she rationalized, “and then she has to come out on purpose, so I don’t feel that my pay is too little.”

N
INE MONTHS LATER
, Alice stepped ashore at Yokohama. Upon her arrival in June, she departed immediately to tour the country as far afield as Kyoto; she deputized Ume and Sutematsu, meanwhile, to arrange housing for her return to Tokyo. They found a perfect place: the vacant home of Japan’s ambassador to Russia, ten minutes from the school and appointed half in Japanese and half in Western style, to facilitate the entertainment of foreign visitors. If Ume and Alice pooled their resources, the two households could share one roof and more spacious quarters than either could afford alone. Alice proclaimed herself delighted, and returned from her sightseeing in September to set up housekeeping. “Alice has been very busy getting things settled, getting her furniture, utensils, stove, carpets, and other things, and I have had to assist her as, of course, she could not talk to the tradesmen,” Ume wrote in September.