Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (18 page)

When she returned as a sophomore, Sutematsu’s new office required her to address the incoming freshmen at the Sophomore Party, a duty she discharged with notable grace. She was invited to join the Shakespeare Society, reserved for those of literary attainment. Her marks were among the highest in the class, and her company was coveted. Each year the college observed Founder’s Day, a holiday in honor of Matthew Vassar’s
birthday; in her junior year Sutematsu was named marshal for the event and led the festivities in Japanese dress. There was something of the fairy tale about this tall, dark girl who insisted she wasn’t a princess: who among the other girls had ever needed to dispel a rumor like that?

The largest student organization on campus was the Philalethean Society, “Lovers of Truth,” founded originally as a literary club. By the time Sutematsu and Shige arrived, the group was responsible for most of the entertainment on campus: recitations, lectures, music, and especially comic dramas. (Love of truth did not extend to trousers; girls playing male roles wore false mustaches but men’s clothing only as far as the waist, over their usual long skirts.) Though Sutematsu refrained from taking the stage in a dramatic role, her name did appear on evening programs in other ways. “Miss Yamakawa’s essay was perhaps the most enjoyable of the exercises,” the
Vassar Miscellany
reported in the fall of 1880. “She told us of life in a Japanese household, and by her vivid description of some of the scenes of her childhood easily held the attention of all.” Who could match the romance of Sutematsu’s lost childhood world, where “the sacred lotus spread its broad, shield-like leaves” across the surface of an ornamental lake, “no profane shoes were allowed to make their defacing marks” on the soft paleness of the tatami-matted floors, and a small army of pages, maids, gardeners, and gatekeepers kept the expansive compound running smoothly?

D
EPARTURE FOR
V
ASSAR
had not severed Sutematsu and Shige’s earlier friendships. During their three-month summer vacations they returned to New Haven or traveled to cooler destinations, often in the company of Ume and the Lanmans. Charles Lanman had made it a decades-long habit to spend part of the summer on Block Island, a pristine spot off the coast of Rhode Island. The Lanmans stayed at the Ocean View Hotel, among the most lavish resorts in New England, where the girls shared veranda strolls and evening card parties with generals and judges, politicians and writers—the cream of Gilded Age society.

Ume delighted in the company of the older girls on these trips. Ocean bathing was a favorite activity, especially for Sutematsu, “who is a fine swimmer,” Ume wrote admiringly, “and is perfectly at home in the water.” Lanman took the girls driving to the cliffs at the island’s southern end, where they could gaze at the waves foaming over the rocks. On one memorable evening they were invited for a moonlight sail. Ume recounted the scene for her mother: “The night was very still, and there was no breeze, so we went on very slowly. The reflection of the moon on the water was very beautiful, and as we went on, several persons began to sing songs of all kinds, which sounded very sweetly.”

In June of 1881, Ume traveled to Poughkeepsie for commencement. The ten years granted the girls by the Japanese government were drawing to a close, and though Sutematsu and Ume had successfully petitioned for one-year extensions to complete their respective college and high school degrees, for Shige three years of college was enough. Her health was uncertain; her eyes were giving her trouble. She had earned a certificate in music from Vassar. And Sotokichi Uriu was graduating from the Naval Academy at Annapolis and returning to Japan.

Shige had never lost touch with the boy who had lived across the street in Fair Haven. Uriu had even come to Vassar once, part of a contingent of cadets invited to supply dance partners at a Vassar fête. He made his way to Poughkeepsie again that June. His life and Shige’s had followed similar paths, ones that diverged profoundly from those of nearly every other Japanese on earth. It was becoming clear to both of them that the road forward was one they might walk together.

The close of the school year at Vassar comprised several acts: the president’s baccalaureate address; a musical soiree, at which Shige and the other five music school graduates were the featured performers; Class Day, at which the seniors passed the torch to the juniors; and finally commencement. As Shige took her place with the graduates that year, and Sutematsu had her own responsibilities with the junior class, Ume, feeling quite grown-up, assumed the role of hostess at the festivities, finding seats for Shige’s guests, including Uriu. “The girls say I was very convenient,”
Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “I was on my feet all day going here & there, playing the agreeable & going to bed late, getting up early and seeing everything, that I felt utterly worn out.”

At commencement, the graduates took the front rows of the chapel and the younger classes filled the galleries as Shige’s teacher, Professor Ritter, played an organ voluntary. The centerpiece of the program was a debate between two seniors “as to whether the negro is doomed or not.” The speaker for the affirmative declared that “wherever an inferior and superior race were brought together the inferior succumbed and went into servitude.” Her opponent, though holding out more hope for the future of the black man, opened her remarks with “flat head, flat nose, and thick lip” and allowed as how “it could not be expected he would emerge from slavery with high ideas of literature and art.”

If anyone suffered a moment of discomfort at the airing of this topic in the presence of Shige, Sutematsu, and their guests, it went unrecorded. In most minds, these polished college girls were in a separate racial category altogether: colored, to be sure, but also talented, dutiful, and deserving—a credit to their progressive (if still heathen) nation, as well as to Vassar. “It is evident from their actions that the president and faculty desire much to get me,” Ume wrote, “but I guess they won’t.” One more year was all the Japanese government had granted.

B
Y
O
CTOBER
, S
HIGE
was in San Francisco, ready to embark on the steamer
Oceanic
, bound for Japan. The city that had gawked at her nearly a decade earlier was now admiring, if still faintly patronizing. “Through her connection with the Abbott family she came into close association with other famous literary families of New-England, and imbibed the spirit as well as the habits and customs of those with whom she lived,” reported the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “She is now a graceful girl, with petite figure, bright and intelligent face, and polished but unaffected manners, dressing prettily in American costume.” A “thorough New-England girl in all her instincts,” she offered a ringing valedictory comment:

My country will never become advanced until her women and mothers are educated, and our women will never, as a class, be educated so long as they marry so early, for the years from 15 to 20 they should spend in school.

She made no mention of what she planned to do with her American education. She was twenty, and she had studied hard; by her own logic, she was free to marry. Daunting though it might be to return to the land she had last seen as a ten-year-old, her intended was waiting for her. Though it had always been the tradition in samurai families to arrange appropriate marriages between young people who had barely met, Shige would marry a man of her own choosing. She sailed with more excitement than dread, eager to join Sotokichi Uriu and embark on a new phase of her life, permanently partnered by a husband uniquely able to understand her.

She was not the only Japanese female on board. Her companion for the journey was a young girl named Shiori Louisa Wakayama, about the same age as Shige had been when she first sailed for America—and her story was a strange echo of Shige’s own.

The girl was the daughter of Norikazu Wakayama, a member of the Iwakura Mission with whom Shige had traveled to America in 1872. While visiting New York with the embassy, Wakayama had stayed in a boardinghouse run by a Jamaican-born woman named Julia Shanahan, a divorcée “of Spanish descent, black eyed, stylish and well educated.” Mrs. Shanahan had followed Wakayama to Japan shortly after his departure. Three years later she returned to Brooklyn with his daughter in tow. She had agreed, she said, to educate the girl in America, with Wakayama paying her the lavish sum of a thousand dollars per annum. Years had passed, the money had ceased to arrive, and then Wakayama brought suit to reclaim his daughter. Despite a tearful appearance by the distraught girl on the witness stand, the judge had ruled in her father’s favor, and now Shiori Louisa was on her way back to Japan, entrusted to Shige’s care for the journey.

The daily papers had covered the dispute avidly that summer. “When
it came time for Louisa to part from Mrs. Shanahan, whom she calls ‘Mamma,’ she was greatly affected,” reported the
New-York Tribune
. Though the papers were discreet, it seems clear that Mrs. Shanahan was Shiori Louisa’s mother. “But for her queer little almond-shaped eyes she would readily have passed for an American girl,” noted the
New York Times
, with “creamy skin, jet-black hair, and sweet, shy face, presenting physically a marked contrast to the usual type of Japanese girl, being large and nobly developed.” Her father’s country was notoriously wary of half bloods, and she spoke no Japanese. Shige, struck by the weird symmetry of their lives, must have been a comfort to her—and sighed in private relief at the relative security of her own situation.

A
S
S
HIGE SAILED
for Japan, Sutematsu returned to Vassar for her senior year. She missed her roommate’s warm presence. “I think of Shige very often and wonder what she is doing so far away,” she wrote to Ume. “I would give anything to know how she felt as she landed and met her friends.” Ume had nearly completed her high school degree at the Archer Institute, a small secondary school for the daughters of Washington’s elite; Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, wife of the president and a personal friend of Mrs. Archer, attended the closing exercises each June to present the medals and diplomas. Ume had continued to win the praise of all who taught her. Archer’s Bavarian music master deemed her “an ambitious persevering & truly polite pupil—Her progress compares favorably with that of our European & American girls of her age.”

Alone at Vassar and four years closer to adulthood, Sutematsu envied Ume. “If I could see you I should so like to have a regular old talk with you,” she wrote from her dormitory. “I must manage to come down. Dear me how nice it will be to sit by that open fire in Mrs. Lanman’s parlor. It makes me blue to think of the contrast between what is there and what is here. It is an awful wet day and there is nothing cheerful about anything here. I wish I was with you now. It makes me home-sick to think of Mrs. Lanman’s house with all the comforts and luxuries.”

Shige was thinking of Georgetown too, despite the joy and excitement of her return to Japan. She was officially engaged to Sotokichi Uriu, and reunited with her family: her older brother Takashi Masuda, who had steered her toward America so many years ago, was now president of the Mitsui Trading Company, which would soon come to dominate Japanese trade. But when Shige wrote to Adeline Lanman from Tokyo, her longing for “the past happy days” saturated every page. “I cannot, I must not, I will not go back to those days in reality, for God has given me to teach others the bright example which you and other American friends have shown me. I am a child to learn no longer, I am a teacher, every one comes to me to know what to do . . . and I am old in their eyes, if I cannot feel old myself,” she wrote. “I came in the right time. I feel sure that with God’s help I can do some good.” But beneath her brave words was a homesickness more acute than Sutematsu’s rainy-day blues. “I long now to be with you in your bright cheerful parlor to kiss Mr. Lanman’s bearded cheek, to listen to Ume’s nonsense, to hear the crackle of the burning timber from your bright hearth, to see your quick movement, always busy for some one’s comfort, O! Mrs. Lanman.”

Shige was careful to keep her letters to Vassar lighthearted, but they made Sutematsu uneasy nonetheless. Her friend was about to marry a man whose glittering career as a naval officer was all but assured. Though Shige wrote of the bewilderment of returning to a world now every bit as alien as America had once been, her happiness bubbled through; though there was dismay at forsaking the freedoms of a college girl for the constraints of a Japanese bride, there was also delight. “Bring lots of buttons,” she wrote cheerfully, skipping nimbly past the larger questions she knew her friend faced. Whether or not Shige managed to find meaningful work in the service of women’s education in Japan, her position in Japanese society, at least, was secure. But how did one go about reentering Japanese society as a single woman, one determined to work and not to marry? Sutematsu’s classmates couldn’t help noticing her uncharacteristic moodiness that year.

There was little time for gloom, though. Sutematsu was now president of the Philalethean Society, organizing meetings and dramatic productions
on top of her classes in chemistry, composition, geology, history, philosophy, literature, and Greek. She also found time to instruct the Vassar community on her nation’s recent political history. “In spite of modern sources of information,” she wrote in the
Vassar Miscellany
that year, “most Americans seem to have the vaguest idea about the political or the social condition of the Island Empire.” She followed this assertion with an essay that neatly summarized events from the heyday of the shoguns through the rise of the Meiji leadership. Kenjiro would have been proud.

A
T
C
HRISTMASTIME
S
UTEMATSU
returned to New Haven, where all thoughts of her studies and her future were suddenly banished by grief: on Christmas Eve of 1881, at the age of seventy-nine, Leonard Bacon died. His wife and his three youngest children were at his bedside, along with Sutematsu and Tan Yaoxun, the Chinese boy known from Colebrook summers, now a junior at Yale. It was Tan who ran for the doctor that night, but he was too late.