Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (30 page)

“The procession was the finest that I have seen yet,” wrote Alice. For the first time, the emperor and empress rode together in one carriage—an unprecedented acknowledgment of the Western idea that marriage raised the empress to the same exalted level as her husband. The coach was especially gorgeous, Alice thought, “drawn by six black horses, each led by a magnificent black, white, and gold liveried groom.” The coachman was bedecked in so much gold trim that he didn’t look real. The chrysanthemum crest glittered on the doors and panels, and crowning the roof was a golden finial in the shape of a phoenix. But at this point Alice was forced to bow with everyone else, “so that I saw nothing more but the top of the Empress’s bonnet as she turned to look at her little peeresses, who seem to have a warm place in her heart.”

Alice’s interest in the event went deeper than its ceremonial trappings. Several days later, she was visiting Sutematsu when General Oyama joined them, bearing with him the official English translation of the new constitution. “With the greatest pride he pointed out to me the twenty-eighth article, which guarantees religious liberty to all Japanese subjects,” Alice
reported, equally proud. Leonard Bacon’s exchanges with Arinori Mori seventeen years earlier had led directly to the article’s inclusion.

The moment was bittersweet, however: on the very day of the constitution’s promulgation, Mori was assassinated by an imperial loyalist who found his liberal attitudes toward Japanese tradition disrespectful. Five days after the emperor and empress rode by in triumphant splendor, Alice watched Mori’s solemn funeral cortége pass near her house. “It seems so terrible that I can not realize it,” Ume wrote of the man who had at first reacted to her seven-year-old self with such dismay. “I owed him a great deal when in America.”

In April, Alice’s eagerness to gaze directly upon the empress was at last satisfied. The chief patroness of the Peeresses’ School was coming to visit and would be sitting in on Miss Bacon’s English class. Empress Haruko had undergone a transformation quite as profound as her husband’s in the years since the Iwakura Mission had sailed. Gone were the blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows, the cone-shaped ceremonial robes. The empress now ordered her gowns from Paris like any Western statesman’s wife, and made regular appearances at charity bazaars and other public functions. For all her foreign finery, however, she was still an object of mysterious fascination.

When Alice arrived at school on the appointed day, the imperial accessories—lacquered tableware, silver smoking sets, upholstered chairs—had already arrived, and everyone was buzzing with adrenaline. After one last session of ceremonial bowing practice with Ume, Alice settled down by the window to wait. Gazing down into the yard, she watched as a mounted officer arrived bearing a purple silk flag embroidered with the gold chrysanthemum. After him came “quite a cavalcade” of soldiers with red and white pennants, and at last the red-and-gold coach containing the empress. Her ladies, having arrived earlier, formed a double line from the coach to the door, and Her Majesty entered the school.

When Alice reached her classroom, she found her girls in an uproar and an unfamiliar chair—exquisite black lacquer, with gold chrysanthemums and a purple brocade seat—standing near her desk. Claiming the
class’s attention with some difficulty, Alice had just begun the lesson when footsteps clattered along the hall and the door burst open. “The girls rose in their places, and I turned toward the door, expecting to see the Empress standing there, but no one appeared but a tousle-headed little secretary, who gazed distractedly into the room, muttered incoherently, and then shut the door with a bang,” Alice wrote. “The girls dropped back into their seats, my heart began to beat again, and we went on with the lesson.” A few minutes passed, and then the whole episode repeated itself: hurrying feet, wild-eyed secretary, incoherent exclamations, slammed door—followed by an explosion of nervous giggles from students and teacher alike.

“At last there was a rustle of silken skirts in the hall, and we knew that our hour was come,” Alice continued. Everyone rose, bowed, and kept their heads down until the empress had taken her seat. Alice had low expectations for her girls after so much nervous excitement, “but there is where I did not fully understand my little peeresses,” she wrote with admiration. “From the moment there was need for it they showed the most perfect self-possession, and I have never had better or less timid recitations in my life than those that they made in the Empress’ presence.”

The empress stayed for half an hour, during which time Alice managed to steal several good glimpses. She saw a small, slight woman, “rather loaded down by her heavy dove-colored silk dress and dove-colored Paris bonnet with a white plume,” Alice reported. She was struck by the empress’s air of patient melancholy. “They say that she is a very intellectual woman, and one of great strength and beauty of character.”

When every girl had recited, the empress took her leave, and Alice dismissed her class, “feeling quite light hearted.” But the day was not over. The foreign teachers, it seemed, would be received individually by the empress along with the senior Japanese faculty. No time for rehearsals now. Ume gave Alice a few hasty instructions and told her to stand with a view into the audience room so that she could watch Ume’s example. But this eminently reasonable plan was quickly foiled. “As I was following this suggestion and moving toward a position in front of the door,” Alice wrote, “I was seized and held by my old enemy, the little secretary, who
had evidently taken the idea into his erratic little head that unless physical force were applied to restrain her, that outside barbarian would rush right into the imperial presence.”

Luckily there was just time enough for a whispered conference when Ume reappeared moments later. Then it was Alice’s turn. Enter, bow, walk straight ahead, turn right ninety degrees to face the seated empress, step forward, bow. An attendant appeared with a large, white paper-wrapped bundle on a tray, which Alice lifted to her breast and touched with her forehead. Bow again. Retreat backward, holding the bundle high in respect. At the door, bow once more. The bundles, when Ume and Alice unwrapped them, proved to contain yards and yards of the finest white silk, valuable enough even without their imperial provenance.

The empress spent the entire day at school, and then everyone went home, exhausted and relieved. “I was very glad,” Alice remarked, “to order my horse and have a good ride to limber me up and make me feel myself once more a free American woman after all my unaccustomed bowing and cringing.”

A
LL TOO SOON
it was summer again. Alice’s year was drawing to an end. Her students brought farewell gifts: one class presented her with a doll dressed in the traditional costume of a girl of twelve, like themselves; another gave her emperor and empress dolls such as might appear on the topmost tier of a red-draped doll festival display, with doll-sized musical instruments, tea implements, and
bento
boxes to arrange around them.

There was a real baby to play with as well: Sutematsu had given birth to her second son, Kashiwa, at the beginning of June. Alice was fascinated by the novel details of the infant’s first weeks: his loose cotton clothes, with cloth ties instead of buttons and pins; the serenity of his caregivers. “Here, nobody ever makes a noise at a baby, or jiggles or shakes it, to stop it crying,” Alice marveled.

In the middle of July, just before Tokyo’s heat made scholarship impossible, the Peeresses’ School held its closing exercises—unusually grand
in 1889, as the school was moving to brand-new quarters and the empress would be on hand to mark the occasion with a rare speech. Alice watched the elaborately choreographed proceedings with her usual mixture of avid interest and amusement, noting the graduates’ diplomas—“not at all like the sheepskins of our native land, but dainty little Japanese scrolls on rollers, with brown and gold brocade mountings”—and the impeccable precision with which the girls executed so many bows (“my back fairly ached from sympathy” ). There was music between the speeches, including a song written by the empress especially for the school, sung by the students with their heads reverently bowed:

Even a diamond, if not polished, will fail to shine;

People, too, unless they study, will not demonstrate true virtue
.

If one is diligent every moment all day long,

Like the hands of a clock that move without pause

What is there that will not be achieved?

Diamonds and clocks were daringly Western references, as was the empress’s inspiration. Her lyric took its cue from the sixth of Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen virtues: “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Franklin, as introduced by Samuel Smiles in
Self-help
, was the most famous American name in Meiji Japan. But the comparison of scholarship to the measured, mechanical ticking of a timepiece was, perhaps inadvertently, less than inspiring.

The empress, all in white this time, again struck Alice as a poignant figure, powerless to bridge the gulf between her elaborate black-and-gold lacquered chair on the dais and the rows of young faces in front of her. “Somehow I always feel sorry for her,” Alice wrote, “and I think she would be sorry for herself, if she knew how much more fun it is to be a Yankee school-ma’am than an empress.”

A little more than a week later, Alice left for Kyoto, ending her year with another month of travel before sailing for San Francisco in September. Pragmatic to the core, she wasted little ink on valediction, but she
was no less aware of how her extraordinary year had changed her. Having lived more in the Japanese style than almost any other foreigner, she nevertheless felt conspicuously foreign among the Japanese; her purpose in Japan had been educational rather than spiritual, which set her apart from the missionaries, but her high-minded idealism distanced her as well from the foreign merchants and diplomats. Much like the three friends she had followed to Japan, she found herself in a category by herself—but where Sutematsu, Ume, and Shige wrestled with bouts of discouragement and loneliness, Alice’s confident optimism, unobstructed by questions of identity, carried her forward, even when her path was less than clear. “The word ‘civilization’ is so difficult to define and to understand, that I do not know what it means now as well as I did when I left home,” she wrote ruefully.

She remained undaunted by the ambiguity, however, and her engagement with Japan was far from over. She may have been leaving the trio behind, but she was carrying their legacy into the future. When she boarded the ship that would take her home, she was not alone. Under departures on the British steamer
Belgic
, for San Francisco, the
Japan Weekly Mail
listed “Miss A. Bacon, child, and native servant.” Her young companion was Mitsu Watanabe, the five-year-old niece of Ume’s cousin. Alice, unfettered by familial obligations but eager to remain connected to her Japanese “family,” had adopted her. For the next decade, like Ume before her, Mitsu would grow up in America.

*
Crown Prince Haru—later Yoshihito, the Emperor Taisho—was the child of an imperial concubine. Unable to bear children herself, the empress had adopted him.

13    ADVANCES AND RETREATS

“M
Y DEAR
M
RS
. L
ANMAN
,” wrote Ume in August of 1889, barely a month after school had ended. “Where do you think I am?” Even as Alice Bacon was still traveling through the Japanese countryside, enjoying the last weeks of her year in Japan, Ume, to her profound delight, had just arrived in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

For some time, ever since joining the faculty of the Peeresses’ School, Ume had been feeling the limitations of her education. The Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo was beginning to graduate women trained as teachers, and though she could hardly criticize their achievements, these growing ranks of enlightened—and ambitious—women shook Ume’s confidence in her own value. “I often wish I had had Sutematsu’s training,” she wrote, “which has been of no use to her,” she added peevishly.

It was maddening: Sutematsu and Shige, simply by virtue of their few years’ seniority, had made it to Vassar before their time in America was up, and yet it was their marriages, not their college years, that had ensured their social and financial security. Too young for college, Ume had also been too young to retain the language skills and cultural identity that might have made marriage to a Japanese man conceivable. Now, as she entered her twenties and contemplated the rest of her life as a single working woman, she regretted the lack of a college degree. “I feel that now my mind is more developed than at the time I came back,” she wrote, “and that I would
appreciate study more.” Teaching might be her lot, but anonymity didn’t have to be: “Though I may have enough education to carry me along through life in its ordinary paths, I want more than that.”

Even before Alice’s arrival in Tokyo, Ume had asked Mrs. Lanman to collect information for her: catalogs from Smith College, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke. Vassar was conspicuously absent from her list of requests, possibly because she was already familiar with the campus—but also perhaps because she preferred to choose her own path, rather than the one already trod by Sutematsu and Shige. Ume had reason to hope that the Peeresses’ School would continue to pay her salary if she took a leave for further study abroad, but before she broached the question she needed a clear sense of what her expenses might be.

Help arrived suddenly, and from an unexpected quarter. Since her return to Tokyo, Ume had become close to Clara Whitney, an American missionary’s daughter whose family had moved to Japan when she was fourteen, just a few years after Ume had left for America. Close in age, the two young women enjoyed each other’s company: Clara spoke good Japanese and was one of the few foreigners Ume knew with a degree of real bicultural understanding. Ume wasn’t particularly comfortable with the Whitneys’ fervent strain of Christian piety, and both Clara’s father and Ume’s had been scandalized when Clara (already six months pregnant) married a Japanese man several years her junior. Still, Clara was a friend, and Ume told her in confidence of her ambition to study further in the States.