Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (12 page)

That was all the attention Mori could spare; the embassy was waiting. Washington’s social calendar was in full swing, its hotels and rooming houses full of legislators and lobbyists, diplomats and military men. The scribe Kume, still faithfully noting every detail, was impressed by the breadth and impeccable smoothness of Pennsylvania Avenue, its wide brick sidewalks lined with poplars. Washington was a city of visitors, it seemed to him, with no local products except legislation and national pride. Everyone was from somewhere else.

Those who braved the snow for a glimpse of the Japanese men were mostly disappointed: even had the weather been pleasant, the delegates had preparations to make over the weekend. President Grant would receive them formally on Monday, and there would be a State Department reception at the Masonic Temple Tuesday night. Thwarted reporters seized on the appearance of Keijiro Nagano, “the veritable ‘Japanese Tommy’ who visited this country several years ago and was so much admired by the ladies.”

After the terrible darkness of the Civil War—coinciding with Japan’s own period of domestic turmoil—the first glimmerings of the Gilded Age were emerging. The economy, fueled by rail expansion, was growing again; speculation was rampant. The mood of opportunism penetrated government to such a degree that “Grantism” had become a synonym for political corruption. Meanwhile, black Americans, including more than
a third of Washington’s 130,000 residents, had yet to feel the benefits of emancipation. “The separation between white and black people,” Kume noted, “is as distinct as that between clear and muddy water.”

Where the Japanese fit in this racially polarized moment was hard to tell. They were the talk of the town, even inspiring a cameo in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel
The Gilded Age
:

“Did you see those Japs, Miss Leavitt?”

“Oh, yes, aren’t they queer. But so high-bred, so picturesque. Do you think that color makes any difference, Mr. Hawkins? I used to be so prejudiced against color.”

“Did you? I never was. I used to think my old mammy was handsome.”

High-bred or picturesque? Noble or weird? For the formal presentation of their credentials to the president, the leaders of the embassy arrived in full court dress: purple and blue silk robes, richly inlaid swords, strange headgear. The papers covered every detail. The cornucopia-shaped hats of some of the ambassadors reminded one reporter “of the helmets worn by Roman warriors of old,” while their flowing black silk jackets were “worn similarly to the same garment in use by American ladies.” Iwakura, though possessed of “great natural dignity,” had “a feminine cast of features.” A strip of carpet was laid under the White House portico “upon which the Japanese were to walk in their dainty silken shoes.” Were they warriors or women?

At the very least, they were entertainment. At the State Department dinner the following evening, one legislator’s wife captured the titillated mood as the assembled guests waited for the ambassadors—now in Western suits—to appear. “A confused idea had prevailed, to some extent, that we were to have some kind of a tub-and-tight-rope exhibition, that they would spin tops and swallow pokers, and balance themselves on one another’s noses,” she reported. “To such expectant lookers-on it must have been a source of disappointment to see a line of small, yellow-skinned gentlemen wearing those badges of our social servitude, the regulation dress coat and white necktie.”

The delegates felt a similar kind of ambivalence toward their hosts that night, though they were apparently better at hiding it. The Americans promenaded past the dais with their ladies on their arms and then formed up for dancing, “the members of the Embassy being spectators and seeming to greatly admire the ‘giddy mazes of the waltz,’” the
Evening Star
reported. But what the delegates had learned at their audience with President Grant the day before made the dancing seem an especially frivolous distraction. “It will be a pleasure to us to enter upon that consultation upon international questions in which you say you are authorized to engage,” Grant had told them. But the delegates were not, in fact, authorized to engage. The mission’s intent had been merely to open the question of treaty renegotiation. The ambassadors bore no written mandate from their emperor to actually act. Meanwhile, Grant was ready to negotiate now. What to do?

Two weeks later, on March 20, Hirobumi Ito and Toshimichi Okubo, two of Iwakura’s highest-ranking deputies, boarded a train once again. Retracing the seven-thousand-mile journey they had just concluded, they would return to Tokyo for the necessary credentials. The embassy would remain in Washington, and wait.

T
O THESE UNCERTAINTIES
the girls remained happily oblivious. After a few days of fascination with the “princesses”—“Their mission is to be educated here, and to return to Japan to assist in rearing female wall flowers to adorn the court of the Mikado,” one skeptical reporter commented—the press had moved on. In the care of attentive hosts, enjoying the luxury of more settled surroundings for the first time in months, the girls did not miss their countrymen, preoccupied as they were with all things American.

They felt awkward and exposed at first in their new clothes: the stiff fabric buttoning snugly at throat and wrist, hugging the curves of waist and hip. Their high-buttoned leather boots creaked, and squeezed their toes. But now when they played tag, they could run with long strides instead of
the old pigeon-toed, kimono-wrapped shuffle. They could leap over the flagstone paths, their skirts swirling. They could sit on a garden bench and spread their knees wide, catching the windblown petals of spring in their unfamiliar laps. They watched the neighbor children, astonished at their antics. At home, boys might walk on stilts, but never girls. The neighbor children stared back. Sometimes their parents stopped to stare too.

Charles and Adeline Lanman, however, had nothing but warm respect for their unusual charges. Within days of their arrival, Mrs. Lanman wrote to Ume’s mother, enclosing photographs of herself, her husband, and their house. “Ume, in particular, is quick to learn. Everyone who meets her praises her manners, which we attribute to her upbringing,” she told Hatsuko Tsuda. “Ume and we already feel so close to each other that we worry how we will lament when the time comes for us to part.” In her reply, Hatsuko expressed gratitude, stiffened with sternness: “I wish you to understand that I shall be glad to have you treat her strictly, just exactly as you think will be best for her welfare without regard to our opinion, and that you and your husband will be, while she is in your country, the same as her father and mother.”

In samurai families, discipline was the guiding spirit: even in sleep, girls were expected to fold their bodies into the curved letter
ku
, though their brothers were free to sprawl across their futons like the five-pointed character
dai
, for “big.” In America the girls slept in four-legged beds raised high off the floor, and no one scolded them to keep their legs together under the blankets. The feather pillows had smothered them at first—so unlike the wooden headrests they had once used to preserve their carefully combed and oiled hair at night. Now the young ones wore their hair loose down their backs. Without the oil, it hung in soft waves.

A week after the girls’ arrival, a guest joined the Lanmans for dinner. Joseph Niijima, Amherst College’s first Japanese graduate, had come to Washington to interpret for the embassy. A decade earlier, Niijima had stowed away on an American ship, determined to study in the West. Now he was preparing for the ministry at Andover Theological Seminary, but he still remembered his equally English-obsessed
school friend in Edo, Sen Tsuda, Ume’s father. How strange to meet his daughter here! Ume and Ryo soon looked forward to Niijima’s visits. “They don’t understand what the ladies in the families speak to them,” he wrote, “so when I go there to see them they are delighted to see me, and ask me ever so many questions.”

A gossip columnist for the
New York Times
, invited for an evening at the Hepburns’, was equally charmed by the other three girls, though perhaps in spite of himself. “Their faces are quite pretty when not in repose,” he commented, “and their motions are graceful in the extreme.” He approved of their delicate manners, their croquet skills, their rapid mastery of the game of Parcheesi, and their sense of mischief. At dinner, Sutematsu turned to the young man next to her and addressed him in Japanese.

“Do you understand?” she asked with a twinkle.

The young wag, enjoying the attention of the assembled company, launched into his best impression of someone speaking an incomprehensible Asian language. “
Me gum gum forum chow chow sa ke no go
.”

“You talk Chinese,” the girl retorted, “not Japanese.”

T
HE DAYS AND
weeks passed with no particular schedule. Despite the constraints of the language barrier, despite the pinching shoes and fitted bodices, the girls were oddly unbound. By the end of May, Mori had found a house on Connecticut Avenue and moved all five girls in together, along with a cook and a governess, Miss Annie Loring. They studied English for two hours each morning, took piano lessons, and were otherwise left mostly to themselves. This domestic arrangement did little to acclimate the girls, but it was awfully fun. Mrs. Lanman stopped in to see them frequently, and they visited the Japanese legation, where the junior officials spoiled them. Long after bedtime they would light the gas and romp some more, unheard and unchecked by Miss Loring, who was soon succeeded by Miss Lagler. Five clever girls who could conspire in an unintelligible language made a challenging assignment for any governess.

Six months after they had boarded the steamship in Yokohama, it was
becoming harder for the girls to remember the rhythms of their earlier lives and the turmoil that had followed. Though Sutematsu could trace the faint scar on her neck where the shrapnel had struck her during the terrible siege of the castle, it felt like something that had happened to someone else. Shige seemed more like a sister than the ones she had left behind. To her mother, little Ume wrote in Japanese:

First I am happy to know you are all well. I am fine. As I already told you, we live together in Washington. At first Miss Loring taught us, but she went back to her home, so another teacher came. We study from 10 to 12 in the morning. Where we live now is 13 blocks from the Lanmans, but do not worry, Mrs. Lanman comes often to look after us. Ryo would have written to you, but her eyes are bad and she cannot study. She says to tell you she is sorry. I am reading a book for beginners. I am also reading a book about the Earth, and practicing handwriting. Please do not worry about me too much. From Ume.

It was the last letter she would write in her mother tongue.

*
The
Chronicle
reporter possessed more enthusiasm than expertise. In standard transliteration,
anata
is a casual form of “you,”
ohayo
means “good morning,”
doko
means “where,” and
morrow
remains indecipherable.

6    FINDING FAMILIES

A
FTER A FOUR-MONTH ROUND-TRIP
home and back, Ito and Okubo reached Washington in July of 1872, diplomatic credentials at last in hand, with imperial instructions to open international negotiations and not simply hammer out a bilateral treaty with the United States. But Secretary of State Hamilton Fish flatly refused to widen the scope of the discussion. Ito and Okubo had completed their exhausting errand in vain. There was nothing now to hold the frustrated Iwakura delegates in America. After brief stops in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, they would sail for London.

On a balmy evening in late July, the grounds of the Japanese legation glowed with dozens of paper lanterns. Arinori Mori had invited everyone—departing ambassadors, Japanese students remaining in America, the five girls, and the Lanmans—for a farewell dinner. The
Evening Star
’s reporter was vaguely disappointed that the much-discussed “princesses” attended in Western dress, but otherwise “everything passed off pleasantly.”