Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (35 page)

Ever since Alice Bacon had left Tokyo a decade earlier, her Japanese friends had wished for her return. Now they saw their opportunity. Sutematsu asked Shige to sound out Takamine, and a few days later he paid a call on the Oyama residence. Sutematsu wrote to Alice that very evening. “It seems he wants just such a person as you for the school,” she told her foster sister: “an American lady of the right kind” to serve as a cultural model both inside and outside the classroom. “I think the school needs a foreign teacher of a strong character, who will influence the girls in the right way,” she went on. “Of course you may not be able to have your way always, still, Mr. Takamine is a man of very advanced ideas and he will be very sympathetic in your work.”

In her next letter Sutematsu continued the hard sell. The Normal School couldn’t pay much, but it would require Alice to teach only two hours a day, leaving her time for other pursuits—such as helping Ume, who had by now shared her pet plan with Alice. “You are very much admired by them and they are very anxious to secure your help,” Sutematsu wrote of Takamine and his colleagues. She followed flattery with a dash of guilt, for good measure: “They want you to come as soon as you can and I hope to hear a favorable reply, for if you will not come, the responsibility rests on my shoulders and they will say that I did not write in sufficiently attractive light to induce you to accept the position.”

Teaching at the Normal School would be even more attractive than Alice’s earlier stint at the Peeresses’ School. Shige would be a colleague, and Sutematsu suspected that Ume would shift her teaching duties to the Normal School upon her return, “for the other school is not at all to her liking and there are many teachers there who dislike her so much that it will not be pleasant for her when she comes back.” With Alice and Shige and Ume all teaching together, and Sutematsu advising in the background, it would be as close as they had yet come to the girlhood dream of starting their own school in Japan.

Alice’s responsibilities at Hampton prevented her from gratifying Sutematsu’s request on the spot. She had recently finished the construction of Hampton’s nurse-training hospital and was committed as well to a new project: in 1897, she had opened Deephaven, a summer retreat for academics and intellectuals on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. Life in America was full and rewarding for Alice, but still Japan beckoned; after all, at some point young Mitsu, Alice’s adopted daughter, would be ready to bring her American education back to her native land. Alice wrote a long letter to Ume in England, which Ume relayed to Georgetown. “She really seems to be contemplating coming to Japan again, and I shall be so glad if she does come,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “She has such good, substantial, sterling qualities which one can always depend upon, and I think a great deal of her as a friend.” As she contemplated her next chapter, reliable friends began to seem more important than ever.

U
ME RETURNED FROM
her year of wonders in the heat of midsummer, 1899. Within days of her arrival, she was summoned to the palace (along with her co-delegate from the previous summer’s Denver convention) to report her experiences to the empress herself. “It will be a fine ending to this year’s travels,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman. Here was the reception she had yearned for upon her first return to Tokyo in 1882, the recognition of her growing reputation as an authority on the education of women, and the satisfying conclusion of the empress’s original mandate delivered in 1871: “When, in time, schools for girls are established, you shall be examples to your countrywomen, having finished your education.” Ume had at last finished her education. She was ready to be an example.

The reality of the imperial audience was, as usual, less glorious than the prospect. Ume was pleased with her new dress—of foreign cut and Japanese fabric, appropriately—but August in Tokyo was a sticky time for bonnets and fitted bodices and lace collars. The encounter was mercifully brief. Ume and her colleague followed an official to the audience chamber and, after making their bows, stood before the empress—elegant in a pink
morning gown trimmed in white—and answered her questions face-to-face. Ume had spoken nothing but English for the past year. “It was a great honor, of course,” Ume wrote, “but a great trial to have to speak there before the Empress especially, as I feared I might make a mistake in speaking.” A final round of corset-creaking bows, then on to an antechamber, where there were tea and cakes and the usual ceremonial gifts of white silk.

More recognition followed as the fall approached. A reporter paid a call, hoping to interview Ume for a series on notable women. “I told him it was too soon for any such things, and I did not want it at all,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman. “I think he was much amused by my refusal.” Ume was pleased that items mentioning her return had appeared in the papers, but the idea that the press might regard the year just ended as the apex of her career was deeply irritating.

Ume resumed her schedule at both the Peeresses’ and the Women’s Higher Normal School, her voice rasping with the unaccustomed strain of speaking for hours at a time. Her days were full, but her mind was elsewhere. In December she began to commit her intentions to paper. “My dear Mrs. Morris,” she wrote to her benefactress in Philadelphia. “I have been wanting to write you especially of late to tell you that at the end of the present school year, I am going to ask to resign from my work in the Peeresses’ School, and take up the school work about which I talked to you last summer.” The letter went into the mail with another, to Martha Carey Thomas, restating Ume’s plans and asking for help in raising the funds for a schoolhouse.

There was no turning back now, but there was still a school year to finish out. Ume closed her letters with pleas for discretion. “I should dislike to have exaggerated reports and rumors of my work get abroad and Tokyo is a very dreadful place for gossip,” she wrote. “So please ask those who might speak of it to be careful, as I am not yet freed from my responsibilities to the government.”

Most discreet of all was Ume herself. No one at the Peeresses’ School or the Women’s Higher Normal School (except Shige, of course) had any inkling of her distracted state of mind. In January the government showed its approval by raising her salary along with her court rank. Ume appreciated
the extra money but barely paused to enjoy the news; she neglected to mention it in her letters for a month. A new millennium was dawning. “How strange it seems to be writing 1900!” she exclaimed. “I make mistakes all the time, and write eighteen and then have to correct it.”

It was an auspicious moment for new beginnings. In 1899, still riding the wave of patriotism that followed the Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji government had passed the Girls’ Higher School Law, mandating that every prefecture open at least one school for girls, equivalent to the middle schools that already existed for boys. Educated women were needed to raise educated sons to fight for Japan. A subsequent ordinance restricted mission schools by prohibiting religious education. Taken together, these moves expanded female education while placing it more firmly under government control.

Regardless of the political implications, though, two things were clear: the new schools would need new teachers to staff them, and at least some of their graduates would seek further study. By 1900, fifty-two schools had opened, serving twelve thousand middle-grade girls. Beyond that, the sole option for higher education was the Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo.

There had never been a better moment for Ume’s plan. Everything was coming together. “I had a letter from Alice Bacon, and she is expecting to come to Japan very soon now,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman in February. In March, Alice traveled to Philadelphia to discuss with Ume’s supporters—Anna Hartshorne, Martha Carey Thomas, Mrs. Morris, and others—the practical details of the English school Ume envisioned. Naming themselves the Committee to Help Miss Tsuda’s School in Japan, they quickly raised two thousand dollars. A month later Alice was on her way. Mr. Takamine’s offer of a position at the Women’s Higher Normal School gave her security, but her true intent was to aid in the realization of Ume’s dream.

She did not travel alone. Mitsu Watanabe, the five-year-old Alice had brought home with her in 1889, was now a young woman. Like Ume eighteen years earlier, Mitsu stepped off the boat in Yokohama with only the vaguest memories of her life before America. But she would avoid Ume’s
dispiriting struggle to claim a niche for herself in her homeland. Within a few months, a new school would urgently need her skills.

I
N
J
ULY OF
1900, when classes had ended for the summer, Ume resigned, giving up her rank, her salary, and her fifteen-year connection with the most prestigious school for girls in Japan. The news caused an uproar. “No one would believe me when I asked to resign and I had some fights to go thro’ and some yet before me,” Ume wrote in high spirits to Bryn Mawr friends. “But I am now
free
[she underlined the word twice] and have burned, so to speak, all my ships behind me.” It felt purer, somehow, to work for the education of women unencumbered by imperial obligations. “I wanted to get away from all the Conservatism and Conventions of my old life, and now I am only a commoner, free to do what I like.” Like her father before her, she had renounced her title to pursue a progressive ideal.

She wrote to Martha Carey Thomas in a more sober mood. “It has been a more difficult thing to leave the school than anyone in democratic America could realize, but I have been able to do so, I think, honorably. I do not feel, however, that I can, for two or three years yet, appeal to my Japanese acquaintances for help for my own plans.” Even if the Tokyo elite could have fathomed her decision, they were unlikely to open their purses to support it; successful charity bazaars aside, the tradition of philanthropy had still not taken hold in Japan. If Ume’s plan was to succeed, foreigners would have to fund it. She and Alice retreated to a hot-spring resort in the mountains for a brief summer respite before their work began in earnest. “Write me and keep me up in courage,” Ume entreated her Bryn Mawr friends.

The first thing Ume needed was a house. The school she imagined was not simply a matter of desks and classrooms; it was to be a home for her students. Teachers and many of the girls would live under the same roof, with lessons springing as much from their informal interactions as from books and classroom instruction. The primary subject would be English, but the larger curriculum would emphasize character over scholarship.
The goal, as Ume saw it, was not just to produce English speakers, or even simply English teachers, but to graduate women who had absorbed Western ideas about the vital importance of women’s education, whether or not they ever set foot in a classroom again.

On Friday, September 14, 1900, fourteen students squeezed into a small room in a small rented house for the opening ceremony of Joshi Eigaku Juku, the “Women’s Home School of English.”
*
Ten young women had signed on for Ume’s three-year program; the other four were older students who were finishing their preparations for the English certification exam. Their teachers were Ume, Alice, and Utako Suzuki, who had lived with Ume while a student at the Peeresses’ School. Alice’s daughter Mitsu, though still a teenager, assisted them. Sutematsu—now the Marchioness Oyama—was present that day in her capacity as patron and official adviser, adding a note of distinction to the unprepossessing surroundings.

The ceremony began with a respectful recitation of the Imperial Rescript on Education. Though her resignation from the Peeresses’ School may have been shocking, Ume had no intention of alienating those in power any further. The Confucian conservatism of the text made an odd counterpoint to Ume’s own opening speech, which she delivered in Japanese, though she had written her notes in English.

Gesturing to their cramped surroundings, Ume reminded her new students that fine classrooms and large libraries were not the most essential components of a successful school. Far more important were “the qualifications of the teacher, the zeal, patience and industry of both teachers and pupils, and the spirit in which they pursue their work.” The very smallness of their newborn institution was its greatest virtue, she continued: “It is possible to impart a certain amount of knowledge at one time to a large class, but in true education, each one ought to be dealt with as a separate individual, for we know that one’s mental and
moral characteristics vary as do the faces of each one of us.” Ume’s school would cultivate thoughtful individuals, not dolls reciting from memory: women who knew how to reason for themselves, independent of their teachers or their husbands.

Ume’s philosophy strayed far from the Confucian idea of a woman’s place, and she was acutely aware that the students of Joshi Eigaku Juku were pioneers, with a grave responsibility to disprove the disapproving. In Ume’s mind, the very future of higher education for women in Japan was at stake. “Any criticism will mostly come, not so much on our courses of study or methods of work, but on points which simply require a little care and thoughtfulness on your part—the little things which constitute the making of a true lady,” she told the girls: “the language you use, your manner in intercourse with others—your attention to the details of our etiquette.” Though her pedagogy was progressive, her students must nonetheless be proper. “I ask you not in any way to make yourselves conspicuous or to seem forward, but to be always gentle, submissive and courteous as have always been our women in the past.” Ume may have been inspired by Dorothea Beale and Martha Carey Thomas, but she could not entirely turn her back on Confucius.

T
HE HOUSE, RENTED
for fifty yen—not much, but still more than Ume had earned in a month at the Peeresses’ School—had seven rooms, including the kitchen and Alice’s and Ume’s bedrooms. Every room was a classroom during the school day. The furniture was no more than what a modest home would contain, and for many of their lessons the girls sat on the tatami. Ume’s own books constituted their library, and her pictures were their only decoration. Her battered piano accompanied their hymns and, as they had no hymnbooks, Alice typed up new sheets for them to sing from each week.