Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (36 page)

In the first six months, enrollment more than doubled. Entrance standards were stiff; Ume knew that weak students would do nothing to help her school establish its reputation. Alice donated her teaching eight hours a
week and gave a class on current affairs every Friday. English alone would not develop the integrity that Ume hoped to foster; “while endeavoring to perfect yourselves in this branch,” she exhorted her students, “do not neglect other things, which go to make up the complete woman.” In addition to English, course work included Japanese and Chinese literature, history, and ethics. Just as Bryn Mawr prided itself on matching Harvard’s broad curriculum, Ume’s school would demonstrate that girls could study at the same level as boys.

Ume’s students were surprised to discover that school no longer consisted of scribbling down what the teacher said, memorizing it, and then regurgitating it for exams. Ume expected her girls to prepare their work before class, offer their own opinions during classroom discussions, and disagree with their teachers if those opinions diverged. In a culture that revered its teachers, no matter how mediocre, this was a revolutionary approach. Still, there was no excuse for sloppiness. The basics—grammar, pronunciation, spelling—were essential, Ume believed, and she drilled her girls relentlessly until they got the details right. “Try again! Once more! Repeat!”

Once her scholars were ready to move on to more advanced material, Ume created her own syllabi, choosing texts—
Little Lord Fauntleroy
and
Silas Marner
were favorites—that tended, self-consciously or not, to feature cheerful children buffeted by the winds of fate. Ume and Alice both contributed to a biweekly magazine,
The English Student
, and also published retellings of well-loved tales in English. One of these,
Popular Fairy Tales
, written by Mitsu and revised by Alice, presumably sprang from Mitsu’s decade of childhood in America. “The English is excellent—simple, strong and pure,” declared the
Japan Weekly Mail
.

By the following spring the little house was bursting. Still unable to purchase a suitable building, Ume moved her school to another cheap rented house, centrally located near the Imperial Palace. This one was spacious and came with a pedigree—it had once belonged to a nobleman—but that was the extent of its charms. The place leaked every time it rained, always in a different spot. There was no heat. The beams were warped, and seemed unlikely to hold the roof up much longer. The damp had opened
such gaps in the walls and around the door frames that sound traveled freely between adjacent bedrooms and classrooms—“a great advantage, one of the pupils remarked, when one was ill and could not attend class, and yet could follow all the lesson in bed,” Ume wrote. On top of all this, the place was said to be haunted: two rooms had apparently been the scene of a tragedy. Not one to indulge sentiment, Ume claimed these two as her bedroom and parlor, “and since I never saw the ghosts, our girls ceased to expect them.”

Haunted or not, the extra space was welcome. Now that there was enough room for everyone, Ume and Alice began a series of monthly literary gatherings reminiscent of the club activities that Sutematsu and Shige had enjoyed at Vassar. The meetings moved English outside the classroom, and provided opportunities for friends of the school to observe the girls’ progress. One of these occasions, in late May, was held in honor of the empress’s birthday. “The girls had some recitations and dialogues, and then acted out
Little Red Riding Hood
,” Ume reported to Mrs. Lanman. “Our musician in the house, who has a lovely voice, sang and one of our day scholars, who is a violinist, gave a performance, and so it was a very nice entertainment indeed.” The evening finished with tea, cake, and strawberries.

Music, strawberries, Grandma and the Wolf—Ume was giving her students a taste of her own American childhood, with its lively social life. As the second year of classes began, Sutematsu invited everyone for a picnic. The entire school walked to the big house in Onden—no endless jinrikisha processions for this group—and spent the day. Sutematsu showed the girls her home—“we even went up to the cupola on the very tip top,” wrote Ume—and fed them sandwiches and cake. There were games in the house and tennis on the lawn, and one of the Oyama boys showed the girls his Vistascope, a stereoscope with photo cards that seemed to move when you held the viewer to your face. The girls were enthralled. “Some of them had never seen a handsome foreign house and they thought it beautiful,” wrote Ume. “We came home about six o’clock, very tired and happy.” Whereas most Japanese students studied English as if it were Latin—to be conjugated and translated but never
actually spoken—Ume’s girls learned to live in it. “I am very proud of them,” she wrote.

It would have been impolite to mention that she was proud of herself, but her satisfaction emerged in other ways. That fall, the second of her school’s existence, the Ministry of Education appointed Ume to the Board of Examiners for the English Teaching Certificate. A few months later, Ume sat in a row with three other examiners (all male) as each of the sixty-four finalists for the certificate (only four of them women) stood before them to demonstrate their command of spoken English. The candidates “were not boys, either, but grown-up men, some of them teachers,” Ume told Mrs. Lanman. “I tried to behave very properly and dignified.” A woman—an unmarried woman at that—was sitting in judgment upon men. “It really was a great responsibility,” she wrote, “and it is something to be proud of, something to add to my record that for once I did what never has been done by a woman before.”

After the move to the new house, in Motozonocho, Kojimachi, Ume sent Mrs. Lanman her new address. “I am sorry it is so long, but letters are sure to reach me even if only Tokio is on them.” It was true: a letter addressed to “Ume Tsuda, Educator, Tokyo” would reach its mark. Ume had chosen a far steeper path by remaining stubbornly single, but she had at last found her place.

I
T HAD BEEN
thirty years since three bewildered, shawl-wrapped girls emerged onto a snowy railway platform in Washington, thirty years since a group of newly minted Japanese statesmen traveled across an ocean and a continent to negotiate with the president of the United States. In March of 1902, the surviving members of the Iwakura Mission gathered for a reunion. It was held at the private Peers’ Club, but the attendees remembered the ornate building by an earlier name: the Rokumeikan, symbol of the enthusiasm for all things Western that had propelled the mission on its journey in the first place. By the close of the 1880s, the Rokumeikan had come to represent the worst excesses of Meiji-era reform. The construction
of the nearby Imperial Hotel had obviated the need for a government guesthouse for foreign visitors, and the building had been sold.

Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume, the only women invited to the gathering, attended together. “The gentlemen treated us beautifully,” Ume reported. “Most of the men were old men, grey and baldheaded, and I was the baby of the party, as I was the baby on the ship in the old days, when the
America
went over from Japan to America.” As in the old days, the men did the talking; dinner was followed by speeches, “to which we women only listened and enjoyed.” The event made the papers, which published the reminiscences of the participants in installments for weeks after the fact.

What they remembered was not the blizzard of new information they had collected, now so thoroughly assimilated into Japan’s armed forces, industries, and government. The stories they told instead recalled their mistakes and embarrassments: the craving for rice and pickles instead of yet another meal of rare roast beef; the relief at trading an ill-fitting suit for the comfort of a kimono in the privacy of a hotel room; the struggle with Western cutlery; the moment, during their audience with President Grant, when a vice-ambassador’s headdress fell to the floor and he scooped it up and put it on backward in his haste. The hall rang with laughter as each man confessed his blunders or exposed his colleagues. The leaders of a modern twentieth-century nation looked back with fond amusement on the wobbly first steps of their nineteenth-century selves.

But for the girls, the embassy had been the beginning of their most formative years. The night of the reunion, both Marquis Oyama and Admiral Uriu happened to be away. The three women left the hall and climbed into Sutematsu’s waiting carriage, their heads full of memories. They spent the night together, curled up on Sutematsu’s foreign furniture, all considerations of rank and obligation laid aside. For that night they felt like girls again, “and it was a grand spree for all of us indeed,” wrote Ume to Adeline Lanman.

Once more a country of three, they understood each other better than anyone in the world. The experiences that linked them transcended the great differences in the lives they had chosen: the grande dame; the working
wife and mother; the unmarried educator. They had faced different challenges and found different sources of solace, but they had always held on to each other.

A
YEAR INTO
her second Japanese sojourn, Alice had been devastated to learn of her brother Alfred’s sudden death; a bout of diphtheria shortly afterward compounded her low spirits. Though she was determined to see Ume through the second year of her fledgling venture, Alice knew her time in Japan was coming to an end. Before her departure, she and Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige all gathered at a photographer’s studio. The group portrait taken that day—the only photo of all four together—captures a mixture of pride, optimism, and something like regret.

Alice—her broad shoulders squared in an unfussy black dress, a trace of gray at her temple, the strong line of her jaw beginning to soften in middle age—is the solid center of the group, her face directed with determination to one side. At her shoulder a kimono-clad Ume, not much taller standing than Alice is sitting, looks directly into the camera with a serene half smile. Shige stands on Alice’s other side, bespectacled and more reserved in a kimono of a darker hue, meeting the lens with something less than her usual frank good cheer. Sutematsu, seated knee-to-knee with Alice, completes the composition, but where the other three are straight, she is curved, her gaze sliding out of the frame, her expression more tentative. Her hands are hidden in the pale silk of her kimono sleeves. It is tempting to read the photo as a record of the sitters’ states of mind.

“The school is getting along so nicely now, and I have all the work I can possibly take, and with sixty scholars, I have quite enough to do,” Ume had written in January. Whether propelled by fate or by her own will, she had traveled, arguably, farther than any Japanese woman ever had, and all the journeys now seemed to have been aimed directly toward this moment of fulfillment. “It was only a few days ago I was thinking how useful has been all that miscellaneous reading I did as a child in your library,” she mused to Mrs. Lanman. Her childhood passions, so different from those of her peers
in Japan, now seemed purposeful. “I feel quite sure now that my work will do some good, and perhaps my life and example will not be in vain—it was my wish for many years that it might be so, but now I feel it may be so,” she wrote. The old ambivalence about her choices had faded; her school was now her home. “It has given me much happiness and friends, and I believe it is truly my life work.” Alice’s departure would be a blow, but there was reason to believe that Anna would shortly arrive to take her place, fulfilling the promise she had made on the train to the seaside years earlier.

That same year, Ume took legal steps to establish her own household, removing her name from her father’s household register—an unheard-of step for a single woman. She added the suffix “-ko” to her first name: “Umeko” sounded more modern. She took care to record her status as
shizoku
, or samurai; she might have severed her ties to the imperial household and spent her life in the promotion of Western ideas and women’s education, but she still claimed the proud past of her ancestors. In the photo Ume radiates a calm confidence. Her youthful face seems lit from within.

Shige had become a mainstay of the Women’s Higher Normal School, beloved by everyone from the principal to the youngest student for her patience, her warmth, and her sympathy. For Uriu-
sensei
, everyone did their best work. She had chosen her path in 1881—as wife, mother, music teacher—and never strayed from it, or seemed to doubt it. But six children and an often-absent husband had tired her. Within the year, she would retire from teaching, suffering from nervous strain and the beginning, at age forty-one, of an unexpected seventh pregnancy.

As for Sutematsu, the girl who had left Vassar covered in glory had not fulfilled her promise in quite the way her classmates had predicted. Though she could look with satisfaction at the philanthropic projects she had inspired and the educational efforts she supported, her life was devoted mostly to the running of her prominent household. As the Vassar class of 1882 gathered for its twentieth reunion that year, Sutematsu sent in her news with a show of chagrin. Miss Tsuda’s school was doing wonderfully well, she wrote. “As for myself, what can I say that will be of interest to you? Absolutely nothing,” she wrote.

My life, compared with yours, is so uneventful . . . do you care to hear why I discharged one of my servants, or that I have engaged new ones, or that I have had some military officers to dinner who talked shop all the time, or that my youngest boy was very stupid at lessons and I lost my patience, or that my silk worms which I am rearing are not doing well on account of the cold weather, or that I am bothered out of my life with all sorts of societies, clubs and associations which send me letters by reams, etc., etc.? No, that kind of story is the same all over the world and in that respect I don’t think my life is different from that of the average American woman.

Sutematsu had not founded a school, or joined the “noble army of spinsters.” Japan’s first college graduate had receded behind lacquered layers of prestige and position, her curled bangs the last outward trace that remained of the spirited Vassar girl. New Haven friends who visited her in Tokyo in 1900 found her “older, we felt, than she ought to be,” graceful as ever, but somehow subdued.