Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (22 page)

S
UTEMATSU AND
U
ME
spent their second night in Japan with Shige, at her brother’s elegant home in Shinagawa. Ryo Yoshimasu, whose eye trouble had cut short her own American education, arrived for a brief and bittersweet reunion. “She does not show the ten years’ difference in her looks,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “She seemed glad to see me and asked after you and Mr. Lanman.” No one seemed to know what had become of Tei Ueda, the fifth girl. Beyond the curiosity of seeing the woman whose life had so briefly and intensely converged with theirs, however, the returnees had little to say to Ryo—and no truly comfortable language in which to say it.

Once Ryo departed, the conversation could flow more freely. There was so much to discuss. Having extended her engagement until her friends’ return, Shige could wait no longer: she and Sotokichi Uriu would be married in ten days’ time. “The day the steamer sails with this letter she will be Mrs. Uriu,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “So often as Sutematsu and I have talked about it, we never dreamed of anything like this.”

As bewildered now by their surroundings as they had been so long ago in San Francisco, Sutematsu and Ume had trouble imagining their friend setting up housekeeping in Japanese style. At dinner, Shige plied them with “every kind of mess imaginable,” Ume reported, amazed at how the strange flavors seemed somehow familiar. Sutematsu and Shige dressed Ume in a kimono, “and you don’t know how funny I looked,” Ume reported. “Then I took a Japanese hot bath, which would be very odd to you all, but which is very neat and pleasant.” It was certainly odd to Ume as well, whether or not she cared to admit it.

Tucked up at last in Shige’s comfortable bedroom—the only one in the house with Western-style furniture—the three young women talked late into the night. “Shige is a great help, for she tells us what to do and what not,” wrote Ume. “Japanese etiquette is so strict and I am in fear all the time of making a bad blunder, and of being unintentionally rude.”

. . .

F
OR
U
ME, REENTRY
into the Tsuda family was dismayingly difficult. The initial welcome had been glorious: relatives visiting, letters of congratulation arriving for her father, gifts of candy and fish and glowing red persimmons, celebratory
sekihan
(rice tinted pink with tiny red adzuki beans) for dinner. “So you see my return is a great thing,” Ume wrote with pride on her third day at home. In addition, the Tsudas’ house was reassuringly equipped with familiar objects. Ume’s father had provided a Western-style bedstead on which Ume spread a Japanese quilt—“so much lighter and warmer than American things.” She had a table in her room for her belongings, and a makeshift washstand. The house had a foreign-style parlor with chairs and carpet and a mantelpiece with a clock. Ume’s parents and sister Koto had converted to Christianity in her absence too, so every meal—served at a table, with chairs—was preceded by grace.

But the house, isolated in the suburbs and surrounded by cultivated fields, was cramped and overflowing with siblings, most of whom had been born after Ume’s departure. She was often physically uncomfortable, especially in the rooms that were not furnished in Western style. “The hardest thing is . . . taking off the shoes,” she wrote. Koto had thoughtfully knitted house socks for her to wear, but it was strange to go shoeless in company. Instead of thonged sandals, Ume had only high-buttoned boots, and “it is the greatest nuisance to have to button and unbutton every time you go anywhere.”

She couldn’t bring herself to trade her dresses for kimonos, or to give up her accustomed underpinnings of corset, camisole, petticoat, and stockings. This reluctance led to other difficulties. “I can’t yet sit down polite fashion”—kneeling with a straight back, heels tucked under bottom—“but they don’t make me at all.” “They,” in fact, treated Ume like an exotic doll. All the family and everyone who came to call exclaimed over every detail of her appearance. “My dresses have been shown over and over again—all my various things, hats, ribbons and everything,” she wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “You would have been astonished to see the regular show here one afternoon.” Long ago, the San Francisco ladies who had waylaid
her in the corridors of the Grand Hotel had clucked over her embroidered kimono and hair ornaments in just the same way.

And just as in that faraway hotel room, once again Ume had no idea what the people around her were saying. “If I could only speak my own language,” she wrote. But the little girl whose unself-conscious chatter had delighted the Lanmans now found herself, on the cusp of adulthood, painfully mute. Her father, the erstwhile interpreter, and her sister Koto, who had learned serviceable English at a mission school in Tokyo, translated for her when they could, but letters to America became the only real outlet for Ume’s distress. She poured her thoughts out in writing. “I am bound hand and foot, I am both deaf and dumb,” she lamented. “My father promises to get me some instruction books, but has not yet, and I have learned but little, sad to say, though Koto tries to teach me. But when there are six or seven ways to say anything and they tell me all, I get in a muddle truly.” Just as troubling, she had noticed that Shige, after only a year back in Japan, now occasionally stumbled when speaking English. “Oh, I don’t want to lose my English as Shige has,” she wrote in horror. “I must read and write and talk and keep it up.”

For the first time in her life, Ume felt awkward. She had always been the little one, elfin, nimble, shinnying up a tree to reach her bedroom window in Georgetown. “But now in Japan I feel so big,” she wrote. “Sutematsu is uncomfortably tall for Japan. What a land of little people it is anyway!” Surrounded by unfamiliar faces, Ume no longer recognized herself. Writing to her best friends in Georgetown—the alliterative threesome of Mattie, Maggie, and Mamie—she flickered between insecurity and disdain. “Much to my alarm and horror do you know, I am actually growing
more fat
!!!” she moaned. “It is Japanese food I assure you, and then Japanese dresses so loose, and padded make me immense. Why I am almost tempted to take anti-fat,
*
were it not for my too great indifference to personal looks.” She was a scholar, chosen by her country—not a
girl trying to win a husband. Feeling defensive, she aimed a jab: “In this respect, I don’t resemble my country women, because they think all the world of their looks and their beauty, for that is indeed their sole means of attraction.”

For the first time in her memory, Ume physically resembled the women around her, yet she had never felt more conspicuous. Her face no longer drew stares, it was true; instead it was her actions that marked her. She was perpetually in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, her bows clumsy, her smiles too broad. “I long to jump around, rush wildly about and yet not have it thought strange,” she wrote. Ume was no longer a child, though; she was a young woman, with a heavy sense of responsibility to the government that had sent her abroad. “My father was talking the other day about the money spent on me,” she wrote in a low moment, “and said that it would have been enough in Japan to support a family more than comfortably.” Her American freedom and the freedom of her girlhood were suddenly and simultaneously at an end.

N
OTHING SIGNALED THE
momentous shift in the lives of these three more clearly than Shige’s imminent wedding. “Sutematsu and I hate to have Shige married and no longer a girl like one of us, but of course we don’t say anything,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. The week following their arrival, she and Sutematsu went shopping for Shige’s wedding gift. “If we had only known we could have bought her a lovely present in America, but here it was hard to find anything for her foreign home,” complained Ume, somewhat disingenuously. They had known full well that Shige would soon be married, but from the comfortable distance of half a world away, it had been easier not to think about it. The daunting question of whether a woman could live happily in Japan without a husband remained unanswered.

Ume settled on a pair of pretty vases as a gift for Shige (“for twelve yen, and that was very reasonable” ), while Sutematsu chose “a sort of tea concern which I cannot express in English with a tea set and a candy
plate,” as she described it to Alice. In this, at least, they did not worry about what was proper. Shige would appreciate their gifts whether or not they conformed to Japanese expectations.

At seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, December 1, 1882, a small group of relatives and intimate friends gathered for the ceremony. “Such a curious mixture,” Ume wrote, “such a wedding never was before and never again will be known.” Radiant, the Japanese bride and Japanese groom were perfectly comfortable in foreign style from head to toe: Uriu in his naval uniform; Shige in maroon silk trimmed with swan’s down, specially ordered from Paris. Both devout Christians, the couple had arranged for a Christian service, though the officiant was a Japanese minister who read the vows in Japanese. The assembled guests included Uriu’s Annapolis roommate, Tasuku Serata, also in his naval uniform; Takashi Masuda, brother of the bride, in the
haori
jacket and skirt-like
hakama
trousers worn by men of rank on formal occasions; Takashi’s American colleague Robert Irwin, in a swallowtail coat; Sutematsu and Ume in their best black silk; and the rest of the female guests in kimonos. Western attire notwithstanding, all the guests sat on the tatami-matted floor.

When the ceremony was over, the guests enjoyed supper in foreign style, served by waiters in suits. There was even a wedding cake, “which Mr. Uriu had presented him by the Pitman girls ages ago, for his wedding, little thinking then who would cut it,” Ume reported. (It must have been an especially durable confection; Uriu had taken his leave of his foster sisters in New Haven more than a year earlier.) “Shige looked so pretty and happy and truly it is a good match—love on both sides,” Ume continued. A love match: of all the strange details of this most unusual wedding, here was—at least in Japanese eyes—the strangest.

T
HE EXCITEMENT OF
the wedding was a welcome distraction from the looming question of what would come next for Sutematsu and Ume. The prospect was fairly bleak. Shige had had a much easier time upon her return, her path eased not only by her engagement but by her field
of expertise: one did not need to be literate in Japanese in order to teach the piano. She had settled quickly into a position with the Ministry of Education’s Music Investigation Committee, founded to introduce Western music into the Japanese national curriculum and soon to become the government-sponsored Tokyo Music School. Her position as a piano instructor paid her the highest salary of any woman in Japan.

With neither fiancés nor serious musical training, Sutematsu and Ume could not follow where Shige had led, though truth be told, their sights were set higher. Where Shige was content to teach and eager to start a family, Sutematsu and Ume dreamed of founding a school. So they decided to begin where they had left off: with Kiyotaka Kuroda, the man who had recruited them in the first place. This tactic was complicated by the fact that Kuroda’s bureau, the Hokkaido Colonization Board, had ceased to exist earlier that very year, its demise tainted with scandal: Kuroda had attempted to sell off the board’s assets to his Satsuma cronies. His wife’s death around this time had added a tabloid edge to Kuroda’s sudden notoriety: rumors flew that he had killed her in a drunken rage, though he was eventually cleared of this charge. (The negative publicity did little permanent harm to Kuroda’s reputation. Before the decade was out, he would serve as Japan’s second prime minister.)

Despite all this, Kuroda remained a logical first step. Within a week of their arrival, Sutematsu and Ume presented themselves at his house, escorted by Ume’s father as translator. Kuroda received his young guests—perhaps the first women ever to pay him a personal call—in a Western-style room. “A fine distinguished soldier-like man he was,” Ume wrote, “and he conversed with us kindly, passing many compliments as to our education according to Japanese custom and rather embarrassing us, but we managed to thank him.” Kuroda pressed his unusual visitors to stay. He had gathered some colleagues and invited a troupe of blind musicians to entertain on traditional instruments: the three-stringed
samisen
and zither-like
koto
. “So we stayed, and he entertained us and we had refreshments and heard some queer music, but very fine according to their ideas.” This was followed, to the young visitors’ increasing discomfort, by
geisha singing. After nearly three hours, Kuroda turned to his guests in their Western dresses. To their horror, he asked them to sing as well.

There was but one way out of this predicament. “As we could not refuse, and no one who knew music was present, Sutematsu and I dragged through ‘In the Gloaming’ and ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’—a thing I never did before, and want to laugh at the idea of it even now,” Ume reported later, utterly bemused. They had come to discuss the solemn question of their role in the future of Japan, and found themselves sharing a bill with professional entertainers—something no wellborn Japanese woman would ever contemplate. And while their renditions of the sentimental love song and the stately hymn were doubtless charming, with the exception of Ume’s father no one in the room understood a word.

That night, at Ume’s house, the two young women discussed the future. It had been a disheartening afternoon. “All these great men in Japan are not Christians and are, besides, very immoral,” Ume wrote. “We feel as if we were a drop in an ocean.” How could they win the support of influential men like Kuroda if they were seen as mere curiosities? And were those men, with their fondness for sake-pouring geisha (on Sundays, no less!), really likely to support the goal of raising the status of women through education?

Their impatience to get to work was driven by an increasing sense of unease in their own homes. The Yamakawas were an accomplished group, grateful to have left the hunger and hopelessness of exile far behind, but their lives were by no means luxurious. Kenjiro and his older brother Hiroshi, now a general in the Imperial Army, still retained a strong sense of obligation to the scattered remnants of Aizu’s samurai. Twenty different relatives and friends received their financial support, and there were always several students boarding with the Yamakawas at any given moment. “I am not willing to be an added expense to my family,” Sutematsu told Alice.