Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (33 page)

For the first time since her Vassar graduation speech, Sutematsu was visible to the world. “Whatever the war may have done,” wrote Alice to Ume, “it has certainly been good for Stematz in giving her just the stirring up that she needed.”

. . .

B
UT THE PURPOSEFUL
energies of the Sino-Japanese War ebbed quickly. Ume’s routine at the Peeresses’ School continued, as did her philosophical divergence from Utako Shimoda, a woman whose idea of “good wife, wise mother” was grounded in Confucian obedience, not Western liberal arts. For all the heady idealism of those planning meetings at Ito’s house long ago, the scholarly ambitions of a Vassar or a Bryn Mawr had never taken root at the Peeresses’ School. “Those students who study at this school must remember that in the future when they are married they are to become good wives; that when they become mothers, wise women; that to their parents and parents-in-law, they are to be gentle and kind homemakers,” read the school’s mission statement. Marriage and motherhood were not questions of if, but when. To this end, the girls should strive to “acquire such qualities and virtues as befit noble women,” never allowing themselves to be distracted by “empty words, or swept by fancies.” Etiquette, calligraphy, a smattering of the classics, perhaps a few words of English or French: these were virtues. Science, history, philosophy—for a woman, surely fanciful.

A Japanese educator of women, according to Mrs. Shimoda, should be like a gardener who works to make common plants as attractive as possible within their natural limits. “But if he attempts to raise something extraordinary and new—that is, if he tries to raise eggplants from cucumber vines, or to make cherry blossoms come out of willow trees, he will have spent his energy for no practical purpose,” she wrote. “Not only that, but he may thereby kill the vines or break the branches of the willow trees.”

Ume, a girl with Japanese roots who had flowered in America, must have found this particularly hard to hear. Her loneliness returned, redoubled. Alice was far away, absorbed in the foundation of a training hospital at the Hampton Institute. The stimulating companionship of Bryn Mawr classmates was out of reach. On top of that, just as all of Tokyo had become distracted by the outbreak of the war, Ume’s younger sister Fuki had died of a kidney ailment. Nearly ten years younger than Ume, Fuki
had been as much a daughter as a sister: Ume had brought Fuki to live with her when she first began to teach at the Peeresses’ School and had paid her sister’s tuition there.

“I can not realize she is dead,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “I have had so much to do with her and for her that she seems a part of my life.” Within the year, yet another of Ume’s dearest was gone: Charles Lanman died at the age of seventy-five. Her American father would never again beam with pride at his adopted daughter’s achievements. The emotional bedrock that the Lanmans in Georgetown had always provided was no longer so solid.

Days of listening to the etiquette-obsessed daughters of the wealthy parroting beginner’s English without comprehension or ambition left Ume depressed. “I feel quite at a loss, and do not seem as if I could pick up the threads of life again,” she wrote to Bryn Mawr friends. “Nothing has changed in the aspects of affairs out here, educationally or otherwise. We still remain, as before, at a dead stand. Sometimes I think I shall get on board of a ship and steal away from it all, and not care or try anymore.”

Ume’s frustration was apparent to her students: the playful young teacher who had once delighted in showing the girls how to play prisoner’s base at recess had become a terror in the classroom, pounding her desk with her fist when recitations went wrong. Alice, as always, tried to raise her spirits. “Don’t be discouraged my dear,” she wrote. “God is going to give you the chance to do plenty of good work before you are through. He doesn’t put such women as you into the world for nothing.”

S
UTEMATSU, TOO, WAS
wrestling with grief and hopelessness. Her eldest stepdaughter, Nobuko, had married at seventeen—too early in Sutematsu’s private judgment, but as the girl was not actually her daughter, she deferred to the Oyama family’s wishes. The groom, Yataro Mishima, was a promising (and strikingly handsome) young man, a viscount’s son who had just returned from study in America to receive an appointment in the Ministry of Agriculture. Though traditional in its union of two powerful
families, the match was also decidedly modern: the two young people adored each other. Their wedding, in 1893, had been a happy distraction from the threat of war. But the first winter of Nobuko’s married life had been difficult: influenza struck Tokyo, and Nobuko became exhausted nursing her new husband’s family. None too strong herself, she, too, fell ill and was slow to recover. Her in-laws sent her back to the Oyamas to convalesce. Tuberculosis had taken hold.

Mishima was an only son, honor bound to give his family an heir. Nobuko could not produce one, and her illness—stigmatized and poorly understood—posed a more direct threat as well: what if Mishima became infected too? His widowed mother charged her son to do his duty: divorce his wife and find a healthier bride to replace her. In the face of filial obligation, modern love was irrelevant.

Outraged for his daughter’s sake, but recognizing the futility of argument, Oyama agreed to the Mishimas’ request for a divorce. Nobuko, recuperating at the home of relatives in the country, was kept in the dark, her correspondence with Mishima intercepted by servants. It was only when a maid let one of Mishima’s letters slip through by mistake that Nobuko learned what was afoot. By the fall of 1895 the marriage was over. “Because I am responsible for taking care of my family, my own opinions have no importance,” Mishima wrote to Sutematsu in anguished apology. “I know it seems a cowardly excuse, but I believe this misfortune must be the result of something bad I did in a previous life.” Alice, practical as ever, saw the affair in sociological terms rather than karmic ones. “I am so sorry to hear of that divorce,” she wrote to Ume. “It simply confirms my opinion that nothing can go quite right in Japan until something is done about making the marriage tie more binding.”

Nobuko’s despair did nothing to improve her health. Her father brought her home to the big house in Onden, where her stepmother drew on everything she had once learned at the Connecticut Training School for Nurses to save her. The Oyamas built Nobuko a separate wing to protect the rest of the children from infection; they paid special attention to her diet and
made sure she got outside when the weather was mild. But their efforts were in vain: by May of 1896, at the age of twenty, she was dead. Her tragedy was sickening proof that, American admiration notwithstanding, little had changed for Japanese women. Here was a daughter of privilege, blessed with an education and the most enlightened of parents, her heart broken and her life shortened by a social code that set the value of a wife far below the needs of her husband and his family. Sutematsu’s desperate efforts to nurse her only set tongues wagging: what kind of evil stepmother exiled her ailing child to a distant part of the house and prevented her family from visiting her?

A novel based transparently on Nobuko and Mishima’s doomed romance became a runaway best seller soon after Nobuko’s death. It was titled
Hototogisu
, after a small cuckoo that symbolized tragic love in Japanese poetry; its mournful call was interpreted as a lament for a lost mate. Some legends held that the bird sang out its grief until blood poured from its throat—a particularly apt allusion for a tubercular heroine. Though the young couple and General Oyama were portrayed sympathetically, Sutematsu received less kindly treatment. The fictional stepmother, sent to England as a girl, had returned “knowing more about the English language, perhaps, than any one in Japan,” but her bizarre skill served nothing but her own pride and brought unhappiness to her husband’s family. “Her first concern, after entering the new household, was to change or abolish everything” that evoked the more traditional ménage presided over by the general’s first wife. Though the novel came down firmly on the side of modern love, its author made it plain that a woman like Sutematsu took Western ideas several steps too far. “Dressed in the European fashion, exhaling a strange perfume,” her fictional alter ego was “lacking all delicacy, egotistic, pedantic, and with manners hardly engaging.”

Such criticisms were discomfiting enough when whispered behind the sleeves of high-ranking wives; in print for all of Japan to read, they were unbearable. All of Japan, that is, except Sutematsu. Written Japanese was still a challenge for her, and it is unlikely she read the book herself.

. . .

S
HIGE SENT LOVE
and support to her struggling friends when she could, but six children and a teaching schedule spread her cheerful energy thin. In August of 1896, while the Oyamas were still in mourning for Nobuko, the Urius enjoyed a moment of celebration: finished with his posting in Paris, Sotokichi Uriu came home at last. Shige greeted him with their youngest daughter, Sakae, in her arms; the four-year-old had never met her father.

The reunion was brief, however; early in the new year, Sotokichi Uriu began a new tour of duty at sea, taking the helm of a cruiser. His renewed absence was difficult enough, but then bad news arrived: in the course of practice maneuvers, Uriu’s ship had collided with another and run aground. As befitted his position as captain, Uriu assumed full responsibility for the accident, and the naval authorities took him into custody.

Shige was distraught. Uriu was being held hundreds of miles away in Shikoku, the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, while she was in Tokyo with six children, one of whom—her eldest son, Takeo—happened to be quite ill. Shige’s brother Takashi Masuda, who had always played the role of father figure, begged her to come stay with him or let him pay her way to visit her husband. Shige wanted nothing more than to rush to Uriu’s side, but like her stalwart husband, she remained at the helm of her household. A court-martial sentenced Uriu to three months in prison. Onlookers muttered that the Satsuma-dominated upper echelons of the naval command had made a fair hearing for a man with Uriu’s Tokugawa-loyalist origins impossible, but the sentence held.

In the end, admiration for Uriu’s forthrightness and humility prevailed, and upon his release he found his reputation surprisingly untarnished. He resumed his command, and with it, his extended absences from home. “No wonder Shige says she does not want her daughters to marry naval men!” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman.

. . .

A
S THE NINETEENTH
century drew to a close, it seemed as if there was a frustration for every triumph. Shige rejoiced in her large brood and her principled husband, and took pride in her teaching, though the strain of balancing it all was beginning to tell. Ume’s second studious sojourn in America had raised her reputation as an educational crusader, which made the claustrophobic conservatism of the Peeresses’ School all the more galling to her. Sutematsu had felt her energies return during the adrenaline-infused months of the Sino-Japanese War, and General Oyama’s star continued to rise; after the victory the emperor had raised his title from count to marquis and had put him in charge of the crown prince’s education. But though arguably in possession of a more powerful intellect than her two friends, Sutematsu had less to engage it with, constrained as she was by her rank and household duties. America might admire her, but many in Japan did not, and this ambivalence took a toll.

To Alice, the foster sister with whom she’d once dreamed of setting up house, eschewing husbands, and founding a school to educate girls for the benefit of Japan, Sutematsu now wrote with more resignation than enthusiasm: “My husband grows fatter every year and I thinner.”

14    THE WOMEN’S HOME SCHOOL OF ENGLISH

I
T WAS A SNOWY
afternoon in February 1897. The train from Tokyo to the seaside resort of Hayama was unheated, but Ume and Anna had a compartment to themselves. They took off their shoes, tucked their feet under them, and spread a traveling rug over their laps. Snug despite the storm, unable to see much beyond the windows, they talked of the future. Earlier that month, Anna’s father had died in Tokyo, and Anna had reluctantly booked her passage back to Pennsylvania. To console her, and to cheer herself as well, Ume had invited her away for the weekend.

In the years since Ume had left Bryn Mawr, Anna and her widowed father had come to Japan twice. Henry Hartshorne, a Quaker doctor and the author of a respected medical textbook, had been invited to speak, and Anna, his only child, had taught English literature at a Quaker school that Ume’s father helped to found. Later, the Hartshornes had returned as lay missionaries. Anna’s presence delighted Ume; for her part, Anna described their acquaintance as having “ripened into one of the happiest friendships ever permitted to humanity.” They liked to think their affinity had been foreshadowed: back in 1867, when Ume’s father traveled to San Francisco for the shogun, one of the books he had carried home in his trunk was Henry Hartshorne’s
Essentials of the Principles and Practice of Medicine
.

Ume and Anna had had countless discussions about the status of women in Japan, but as the train rattled through the outskirts of Tokyo, Ume began to describe an idea she had as yet shared with few others. Though the government now permitted women to sit the exam for an English Teachers’ Certificate, there were almost no qualified candidates. A girl who attended missionary schools learned English but not much else; a graduate of the Women’s Higher Normal School received teacher training but little advanced instruction in English. (The Peeresses’ School, whose highborn students would never need to earn a living, did not figure in Ume’s calculus.) “Here was a distinct practical demand,” Anna remembered, “but further, said Miss Tsuda, through English rightly handled she could give her girls access to all that world of Western thought which educated men had part in, but which was a sealed book to most of their women-kind.”