Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (25 page)

Two years later, in 1879, former US president Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Japan. The Meiji leaders—especially those who remembered visiting the White House with the Iwakura Mission in 1872—were beside themselves. The hero of the American Civil War was a natural idol for a group of former samurai who had triumphed in Japan’s upheaval and
had just finished using Western military technology to silence their own challenge from rebels in the south. No matter that Grant himself advised the Meiji leadership against liberalizing Japanese society too quickly. “It is said that Grant is receiving more honor from the Japanese than any crowned head has ever received,” wrote eighteen-year-old Clara Whitney, an American missionary’s daughter. “One Japanese lady remarked that General Grant is treated so much like a god here that a temple to his honor should be erected immediately.” Geisha danced for him in red-and-white-striped kimonos with underrobes of star-spangled blue and circlets of silver stars in their hair—graceful personifications of the American flag. The emperor himself stood to shake Grant’s hand—the first Western hand the sovereign had touched.

Mutsuhito had undergone his own transformation since the departure of the Iwakura Mission. His parting words to them in 1871 had been delivered in full court dress, the only clothing in which he had ever appeared. Within two years, he had set aside his robes in favor of Western-style military uniforms, and cropped his hair short. He appeared in public with some regularity now. Once an almost mythical figure, the emperor had emerged from behind the screens, his new wardrobe a powerful symbol of Japan’s reinvention.

Books on foreign ways and places sold briskly, few more popular than a translation of the Scotsman Samuel Smiles’s
Self-help
, which the Japanese read as a manual of Western success. “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,” Smiles declared, “and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength.” America, in particular, was glorious proof of this wisdom, only a century after its independence. Surely Japan could do likewise, perhaps even more rapidly.

In 1872, as the Iwakura girls were studying their first English primers in Washington, the Meiji leaders had promulgated a new Fundamental Code of Education, with an emphasis on self-improvement and individual opportunity. The old domain schools had indoctrinated samurai boys in the ways of loyalty and filial piety; from now on, children from every level
of society would attend school with the aim of “building up their characters, developing their minds, and cultivating their talents” in order to “make their ways in the world, employ their wealth wisely, make their businesses prosper, and thus attain the goals of life.” Samuel Smiles would have approved.

But some who read Smiles closely noticed, as well, this corollary to his message: “Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects.” What were all these foreign experts if not help from without? Had Japan gone too far in its emulation of the West? Was it in danger of compromising its newfound strength? In 1878, on a tour of the provinces accompanied (and strongly influenced) by Nagazane Motoda, his personal adviser on Confucian ethics, the emperor pronounced himself dismayed by the Western influences he observed in provincial classrooms. Upon their return, Motoda summarized the emperor’s reactions in an imperial rescript, “Great Principles of Education.” Published the same year as Grant’s visit, it signaled the beginning of a retrenchment in educational policy. “In recent days, people have been going to extremes,” it read.

They take unto themselves a foreign civilization whose only values are fact-gathering and technique, thus violating the rules of good manners and bringing harm to our customary ways . . . The danger of indiscriminate emulation of Western ways is that in the end our people will forget the great principles governing the relations between ruler and subject, and father and son.

Morality, not technical knowledge, should be the primary purpose of universal education, the document continued, and to that end, “the study of Confucius is the best guide.” Enlightenment must not undermine the moral authority of the emperor. Education should promote obedience, not self-reliance. Japan must resist the false gods of Western progress.

Japan’s determined leap toward foreign ways had launched the trio on their adventures in America, but in their absence that momentum had begun to falter. The girls had become a paradox, sent by their emperor to
learn what was increasingly condemned in his name. They had returned just as the general rage for novelties like beef and ballroom dancing was beginning to cool, replaced by a revival of interest in traditional arts like the tea ceremony. “There must be a certain kind of charcoal and teapot,” Ume griped, “the cup must be wiped and dusted so many times and a half and placed just so and so, and the tea fixed just this way, and I could fill pages with description and rules, though I think them very tiresome and useless.”

But the reaction was more than just a matter of fashions and pastimes. Confucian teachings—like the eighteenth-century treatise “Greater Learning for Women” that Sutematsu had learned by heart as a child in Aizu—held that women should be subordinate to men in all things. Women’s education had no place in a society ruled by these principles. Many families preferred to keep their daughters at home, despite the new requirement to send them to school. If they were educated at all, young women should study to be good wives, wise mothers, and loyal subjects—not teachers. Anything beyond elementary education for women was virtually nonexistent, and what progress had been made now began to seem precarious. “In the normal school, Sutematsu told me, they are giving up the foreign rooms, floors, chairs, and cot beds, and going back to Japanese style,” wrote Ume. “Well, they are fools because in a year or so they will buy them all back again, and keep on piling up the expenses in their changeable fickle ways, and why, when they take a step forward, need they take a half one back?”

As the months passed, however, it became clear even to Ume: these early signs of conservative backlash were real. The government that had sent the girls to America was no longer so committed to the ideas they had learned there.

B
Y THE END
of that first spring, Ume despaired of ever repaying the debt she owed Japan. On bad days, she expressed her unhappiness in the same bleak terms Sutematsu had used before her decision to marry. “If
I thought that by my dying I could elevate these daughters of Japan, I should be glad to do so,” she wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “Is it not easier to give up life, and see a work
done
than to blindly grope and try, and see the end unattained, and fret and worry over impossibilities?”

For Ume, the months following Sutematsu’s engagement proved the grimmest. Stranded in the Azabu farmhouse, “devoured with fleas” and tormented by mosquitoes, Ume tried to make herself useful: serving tea to visitors, tidying her room, studying Japanese, and scolding her seven younger siblings into submission. She took solace in her precious piano, purchased for her by the Lanmans with the last of her stipend. Having survived its journey from Washington mostly unscathed, it now dwarfed the Tsuda family’s small parlor.

In Georgetown, Ume had been a daughter of the elite; in Tokyo, her family’s social standing was more ambiguous. Sen Tsuda, Ume’s father, had pursued an eclectic assortment of progressive ideas during Ume’s years in America. He had traveled to the Vienna Exposition in 1873, and in the years following his return he helped found a missionary school for girls, a school for the deaf and blind, and a school of agriculture. He was a member of the intellectual club known as the Meirokusha, where he fraternized with some of the brightest minds of the Meiji leadership. He enjoyed a brief commercial success with the “Tsuda rope,” a pollination technique imported from Holland, involving a woolen rope painted with honey to brush against ears of grain. He arranged for a commemorative tree to be planted in honor of President Grant’s visit.

But to his samurai peers, Tsuda’s enthusiasm for farming seemed déclassé, and his embrace of American-style equality extreme: he had even gone so far as to change his official status from samurai to
heimin
, or commoner. His fervent embrace of Christianity likewise marked him as an eccentric. By the time of Ume’s return, with the national appetite for foreign ways fading, her father’s influence was in decline. And though she was comforted by his religious choice, Ume was appalled to discover that shortly before his conversion, Tsuda had fathered a child with a servant—perfectly acceptable by samurai standards but profoundly shocking to an
upper-middle-class daughter of Georgetown. As a mentor and patron, then, Ume found her father less than ideal, especially in comparison with Shige’s wealthy businessman brother or Sutematsu’s powerful fiancé—both men paragons of cosmopolitan elegance.

Shige, always the most maternal of the trio, worried about Ume’s isolation. She sent a colleague from the music school to tune Ume’s piano, and shared her concerns in letters to America. “Mrs. Lanman she misses you, and your love, your home, your country, more than any of us,” she wrote to Georgetown. “Our director at the School of Music is anxious to have Ume teach for us, but I think the distance is so great and she is needed at home.” (The distance was a convenient excuse as far as Ume was concerned; to Mrs. Lanman she confided, “I think music would not do much to gain me influence.” )

Ume was irked by Shige’s report to Mrs. Lanman—“I think it very unwise and wild of Shige to write you such a letter”—and disgusted by everyone’s harping on her least favorite subject: marriage. Sutematsu was trying to steer her toward her own disappointed suitor, Naibu Kanda, while Mrs. Lanman dropped hints about Sotokichi Uriu’s Annapolis roommate. “Please don’t write anything about Mr. Serata,” Ume shot back. “I always laughed at such an idea, and at him, for I don’t even like him particularly, and poor and everything.” The youngest and smallest member of the trio, it seems, had the highest standards.

Perhaps betraying her own insecurities, Ume reserved her harshest disapproval for the American missionaries in Tokyo. “They are entirely too stuck up, and can not reach any but the lowest kind of people because they will not conform to Japanese ways,” she wrote. “Talk of hardships and privations—they have their families, and their homes, the best of comforts, dress well, go off on holidays, have a good time, know nothing of Japanese, and still they are doing all this, for the work for God’s sake. Doing what?” Here were people no different from those she had lived among in Washington: secure—even smug—in the knowledge that they were doing God’s work, surrounded by the comforts of home, subsidized by their churches, and free from any imperative to adapt to their
alien surroundings. And here was Ume, without a clear purpose or means of support, deeply discomfited by the awkwardness she felt in her native land, unwilling to admit even to herself that part of what she felt for the missionaries was envy. Her girlhood had been full of prizes and prominent acquaintance. Now, as one Japanese among many, she burned with the frustration of the underestimated.

To put it less charitably, Ume was something of a snob. When assessing her prospects for employment as a teacher, she quickly ruled out the missionary schools, “which only poorer classes attend, and to which no one of any rank would send a daughter,” she wrote. But by May of 1883 her ennui had become unbearable. Back in 1874 her father had helped found Kaigan Jogakko (“Seaside Girls’ School” ) under the auspices of the Methodist Mission in the foreign settlement at Tsukiji; it was there that Ume’s older sister Koto had learned her English. The Methodists were happy to have Ume teach English, world history, and geography, and though the pay wasn’t much and the commute was an hour each way by jinrikisha, it was only for the summer term—just six weeks.

Ume looked upon her appointment with a mixture of pride and disdain. “Now are you not surprised that I am going to be a school ma’am right away, and teach the little Japanese?” she wrote gaily to Mrs. Lanman. “Hurrah! for the first beginning, though so little. It will seem very funny to hear lessons and order the children and keep quiet, and really and truly earn money. Why, I feel like a child and a schoolgirl myself, and really I am only eighteen.”

The weeks of teaching slid by swiftly. “I am so busy, you can’t imagine,” Ume exclaimed, though in fact she taught for only three hours each afternoon, and never more than eight girls at a time. Teaching felt a bit like playacting: “Indeed you would be surprised to see how I can be severe and dignified.” She was careful, however, to qualify the pleasure she took in her pupils. “Do not suppose, Mrs. Lanman, that these girls have anything of the refinement, sense of true honor, or moral standards like girls I have known,” she wrote. When the term was over Ume was pleased to be asked back for the fall, but she declined. Teaching was hard work, she had
discovered. “I think I am young yet, and I hate sometimes to think of the drudgery and monotony of it always.”

Her privileged Georgetown girlhood had left her unprepared for her own future. Marriage was abhorrent; anonymous teaching, a thankless grind. The recognition she craved now seemed a hopeless dream, but she clung to it anyway. “I want to have my school, and never marry, though I do not say I shall never do so, because it is so
hard
, so very
hard
, to get along alone.” Especially when Sutematsu, having decided against getting along alone, had suddenly ascended to the glittering ranks Ume regarded with such fascination.

When Sutematsu shared a rumor that Ume was under consideration as interpreter to the empress, Ume’s imagination exploded: “But what a position that might be—almost a sinecure! At New Year’s and formal occasions only would the interpreter be needed, and when a wife of some minister or great lady is presented. Would it not be great? I could then see the best society.” Prestige, elegant surroundings, minimal responsibilities—what could be better? But even as Ume gushed to Mrs. Lanman, she knew her Japanese skills barely allowed her to communicate with the Azabu housemaids, let alone translate the ornate language spoken at court. It was gratifying, still, to think of her name on the lips of the powerful.