Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (26 page)

An invitation to a grand fête hosted by Kaoru Inoue, the foreign minister, was another consolation. “I don’t hide it that I do want to go to the government ball,” she wrote, “for I shall meet a lot of the great people & I want to look nicely & may be it will help my school plans.”

On November 3, the emperor’s birthday, a thousand invited guests gathered at the foreign minister’s official residence. Gaslight illuminated the imperial chrysanthemum crest on the front gate, and colorful lanterns glowed from the eaves of the house and across the grounds. The reception rooms were filled with flowers, outmatched in splendor only by the costumes of the revelers: military uniforms trimmed in gold, gowns from Paris, and several examples of traditional court dress, “very curious and very beautiful,” Ume reported. There was dancing, for those who knew how, though the dancers were mostly foreigners. Fireworks burst overhead, momentarily blotting out the stars.

Shige, just days from the birth of her daughter, was forced to miss the fun, as she would miss Sutematsu’s wedding later the same week. Uriu escorted Ume, in white (she decided against her train), and Sutematsu was “lovely in blue crepe.” The American consul general was there, and the Lord Mayor of London. But the most intriguing person Ume met that evening was not a foreigner. Midway through the festivities, a slim and elegant older man, resplendent in military decorations and gold braid, presented himself to Ume.

“Who am I?” he asked, his neatly trimmed goatee framing a mischievous smile. “Can you guess?”

Baffled, and growing more embarrassed with each passing moment, Ume confessed that no, she could not.

“I am Ito,” he said. “Don’t you remember? You were only so high,” holding his hand flat at waist height, “when I saw you last—and now you are back.”

And so it was: Hirobumi Ito, who had once cheered up five homesick, seasick girls with pieces of pickle on the steamship carrying the Iwakura Mission to San Francisco, and entertained them with bedtime stories when they were snowbound in Salt Lake City. Then, he had been the youngest of the five senior ambassadors; now he was minister of the imperial household. (In another two years, he would become Japan’s first prime minister.) “He is such a great man now,” Ume wrote ruefully, “that I could not but feel embarrassed when he asked if I had forgotten him.” Still, the encounter would prove fateful.

“W
ILL YOU REALLY
believe it, when I tell you that I am at work already, begun since my last letter to you?” Ume scrawled to her foster parents. Barely a month had passed since she stood stammering before Ito at the foreign minister’s ball, but her failure to recognize him had apparently done her no harm. “It seems he is very anxious to help women, education, and [in] every way, and he is very progressive,” Ume wrote. She had found her patron.

Ito introduced Ume to Utako Shimoda, a woman whose path to prominence had been as traditional as Ume’s was radical. Ten years older than Ume, and likewise from a samurai family fallen on hard times, Mrs. Shimoda had won a place at court following the restoration of the emperor. Her fluency in the classics and her skill as a poet had made her a favorite of the empress, who renamed her in honor of her talent:
uta
means “poem” or “song.” Utako had left the court to marry, but the marriage was a troubled one, and powerful friends, including Ito, had helped her establish Toyo Jojuku, a small private school for the wives and daughters of the elite.
Toyo
, an allusion to Chinese poetry, translates as “young peaches” ; it was feminine polish that Mrs. Shimoda’s school provided, not teacher training. Ito’s own wife (another former geisha) and daughter had been among the first pupils.

Ito hoped to add English instruction to Mrs. Shimoda’s curriculum, and who better to teach it than Ume? Meanwhile, the two women could tutor each other—an hour of English in exchange for an hour of Japanese each day—and since the Ito residence in Nagatacho was quite nearby, Ume could afterward share lunch with Mrs. and Miss Ito, and give them a lesson as well. Ume was beside herself. “Oh, I am so grateful and thankful—you have no idea how I feel about it. It seems as if God had just raised up this friend when most I needed it, and I do believe it is an answer to prayer,” she wrote. “Just to think I am a teacher, and of these great people, and am earning, and beginning my way for the future. Is it not good?” Ito’s power and charm dazzled her, and she tried not to dwell on his reputation as one who was, in Sutematsu’s words, “fond of the pleasures of Japanese life.” (Ito would later be suspected of carrying on an affair with Utako Shimoda, but of this Ume remained happily unaware.)

Even Sutematsu blessed the arrangement: “If you have Mr. Ito as a friend you need not fear.” Privately, Sutematsu had never considered Ume well suited to teaching—“she had so much petting in America,” she confided to Alice—but Ume’s new students, so few and so genteel, were a good fit. “On the whole, I do like the work very much and really believe I like to teach a great deal,” Ume wrote, boasting to the Lanmans of the “ingenuity and muscles” her conversation lessons required.

She savored the stiffly formal etiquette of lunch at the Itos’. It almost made up for Sutematsu’s lavish new home next door, and the fact that the second Madame Oyama had recently been presented at court—an invitation Ume had no reason to expect anytime soon. Of the five girls who had bowed in awe before the empress a dozen years earlier and received her mandate to study abroad, the only one to have been invited back into her presence so far was the one who had married a government minister. Ume did not dwell on the implications. “[Sutematsu] said it was not formidable at all, but very easy and simple,” she wrote breezily to the Lanmans. “The Empress talked to her through one of the ministers, and asked her a lot of questions, and then they had dinner and came away after that.”

The string of fortuitous developments was not yet over. A week into Ume’s new routine, Ito came to see her during her lessons. Would it not make more sense, he asked, if she took up residence in his household? There would be no jinrikisha commuting to eat up her earnings and her free time; her friend Sutematsu would be close by; and the Ito women could help Ume with Japanese, both language and manners. “He also wishes me to go out among the higher circles, get among people, and have an introduction into Japanese classes that I could not from my home,” Ume wrote. “With any future idea of doing good, which must mostly be done among higher classes, I should have to learn now.” However accomplished she might have been considered in Georgetown, what Ume needed now was a crash course in Japanese etiquette. In exchange, she could provide the Ito women with some essential training in Western dress and deportment, as befitted the family of a Meiji statesman.

It was hard to know how to respond. There could be no question of Ito’s generosity, but would Ume feel like nothing more than the hired help? Then again, she mused, “we three girls must often consider that we are in part government property” and must do whatever possible to advance the condition of Japanese women. But beneath these sober considerations, Ume was having trouble restraining her excitement: “to think I might live in a minister’s house!!” The next day, a letter from Ito arrived,
addressed to her father. “I want to talk to you on business about Ume,” it read. “Please come.”

B
UOYED BY THESE
new developments, Ume was particularly pleased when an elegant invitation reached the farmhouse in Azabu. On the thirteenth of December, General and Madame Oyama would host a “grand evening entertainment.” The ball would celebrate their recent marriage, and provide Ume with her first glimpse inside the building of the moment: the Rokumeikan.

Opened only weeks earlier, the Rokumeikan was the architectural embodiment of the Meiji government’s ambitions. Conceived as a government guesthouse, it was an elaborate two-story Italianate pile in blinding white brick, with a ballroom, dining room, music room, billiard room, and elaborate suites for state visitors. Just as the general population was beginning to sour on Western fads, the Rokumeikan became the epicenter of foreign fashion for the most rarefied circles of society. Its name, translated as the “Deer Cry Pavilion,” alluded to a classical Chinese poem, in which the bark of a stag is heard as guests from afar gather to enjoy the hospitality of a generous host.

In contrast to the traditional teahouses where statesmen met to drink sake and enjoy the talents of geisha, at the Rokumeikan wives in the latest Paris fashions would join their husbands, nibbling foreign delicacies and perhaps even attempting the steps of the waltz. To its admirers it was a glorious expression of the Meiji spirit, determined to put Japan on equal footing with the great powers of the West. To its conservative detractors it represented the worst excesses of Japan’s slavish aping of undignified foreign ways. And to its foreign critics it brought to mind “a second-class casino in a French hot-springs resort.”

On the night of the ball, the Oyamas stood together at the top of the wide staircase as nearly a thousand guests arrived. They received each foreigner with a handshake, and each Japanese invitee with a series of formal bows—“a gymnastic feat which would have killed any American
woman,” commented an American observer. Sutematsu, the epitome of cosmopolitan grace in her wedding gown, three star-shaped diamond pins in her hair, won the unqualified approval of all: “a perfect hostess and the most delightful ball ever given in Tokyo.” Before long, she would be known as
Rokumeikan no kifujin
: the “Lady of the Rokumeikan.”

Shige, nursing her newborn, had to stay home once again, but Ume was in her element. “I enjoyed myself so much talking and meeting people, and flourishing about in my train which I donned for the first time, and got along nicely in it,” she wrote, allowing herself a moment of self-satisfaction. What could be better? A glittering evening in the best society, prestigious work and the prospect of more to come, and all without the ultimate compromise: a husband. Sutematsu, she reported with horror, “is almost like a regular Japanese wife,” and even Shige deferred to Uriu in all things. “Such a life is killing to me,” Ume wrote. “I get quite provoked with these horrid men, and yielding women, who surprise me so much. In America, how different!” Sutematsu’s life might be full of parties and servants, but Ume claimed not to be tempted. “I am much more happy in my work, I am sure.”

Already her work had wrought undreamed-of changes in her daily life. Ito’s arguments for Ume’s relocation had convinced her parents, who left the decision to their daughter. The very next week Ume moved in with the Itos, any nagging sense of guilt over deserting her cramped, impecunious home rapidly dispelled by the wonders of her new surroundings. “I have
two
rooms, upstairs, large and pleasant,” she gloated. “You have no idea how it is—servants on every hand ready to wait and do.” Her window looked out over exquisite gardens. Meals were served in foreign style and, as befitted an expert in foreign ways, Ume wore Western clothes exclusively. “I shall have all the comforts and luxuries that Sutematsu has,” she wrote with satisfaction. “Of course, temporarily, without marrying for it as she did.”

I
N THE NEW
year, 1884, Ume took to life at the Itos’ with her usual mixture of enthusiasm and complaint. As her work at Mrs. Shimoda’s school
would not begin until March, she found herself more of a ladies’ companion than a teacher: helping young Miss Ito assemble a Western wardrobe at the shops in Yokohama (“an awful bother” ); introducing her to the piano; standing awkwardly at Mrs. Ito’s elbow during formal dinners, trying to translate the platitudes of the foreign guests.

What she enjoyed most was the opportunity to converse with Ito himself, in English: “very serious talks on all sorts of subjects,” the kinds of discussions that she had joined regularly in Georgetown, and that she missed acutely. Like the Lanmans, Ito seemed genuinely interested in what Ume had to say. “Sometimes when I tell him about many things, about books, or interesting things about women’s work, he tells me I must tell Japanese ladies all these sorts of things,” Ume wrote. “He wants me to learn and to bring me forward so that I can, and he is very kind.”

But it was with the Ito women that Ume spent most of her time, including a three-week trip to the hot-spring resort of Atami, which, after briefly admiring the scenery, Ume found painfully boring. She wanted to feel grateful, but struggling through English lessons with the stiffly polite Mrs. Ito and her spoiled elder daughter was “very hard and rather slow,” and outside of lessons no one spoke any English at all. She knew she should be taking advantage of this immersion to advance her Japanese skills, but it was discouraging to grope for simple words when she was so eager to discuss complicated things. “I would give a great deal, a good many hours of my life,” she wrote to the Lanmans from Atami, “just to be your little girl and pet again.”

It was a relief to return to Tokyo and a more convivial routine. Ume taught English at Mrs. Shimoda’s school three mornings a week, tutored the Itos at home after lunch, and went home to Azabu on the weekends. “You see how well-filled every moment is,” she wrote proudly, though her private thoughts about life as a working woman were ambivalent at best. She remembered a composition she had written as a young schoolgirl: “Is Labor a Blessing or a Curse?” “I suppose if I could have a life of pleasure and nothing else, I should not want work,” she wrote, knowing full well that option was not available. If she had to work, she was happy to be a teacher. But her confidence waxed and waned from one line to the next.
“You know I detest sewing, and am not fond of housework very much, so I think I am quite in my right corner and place, and am sure you too rejoice with me, though I am only a teacher; yet a teacher’s work is a noble one.”

A
T LEAST
U
ME
could see Madame Oyama more now than she had in recent months. Sutematsu had organized a group to study
sumi-e
ink painting once a week and invited Ume to join, free of charge. Ume was delighted: “Is it not lovely,” she asked Mrs. Lanman, “to take drawing lessons in such a pleasant way and company?” General Oyama had just left for Europe, sent by the Meiji government to study Prussian military systems, and though there had been some talk of Sutematsu accompanying him, she had been ill recently. He had embarked alone and would be away for nearly a year.