Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (37 page)

“I haven’t laughed so much for years,” Sutematsu told them after an hour of delighted catching up. “In Japan we do not laugh much after we are old women.” She was forty. Of the three Iwakura girls, she was the only one who never left Japan again. But the fact that this daughter of Aizu could write, with a self-deprecating chuckle, that she was no different from an average American woman was, in itself, extraordinary.

I
N
A
PRIL OF
1902, Alice started her packing, and she and the trio took every opportunity to spend a few last days together. There was a luncheon at Sutematsu’s home, and Shige spent as much time as she could at Ume’s school. On the day of departure, a crowd of well-wishers gathered at Shimbashi Station to see Alice off. Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume rode the train with her to Yokohama. There was time for a quiet lunch before the steamer sailed—four middle-aged women, at ease in their surroundings, chatting intimately in English. It was a very different meal from the Yokohama
reunion twenty years earlier when Shige, welcoming her closest friends to their unfamiliar native land, wondered suddenly whether they could still handle chopsticks.

“I feel so strange,” Ume had written to Mrs. Lanman after that long-ago lunch, “like a tree that is transplanted and takes a little while to get accustomed to new surroundings. And think to what different soil I have been transplanted.” The three Iwakura girls, twice uprooted, had flourished by all outward measures, each in her own way fulfilling the mandate conferred upon them even as their government lost sight of it. Outside of themselves, only Alice, perhaps, truly understood the cost. They had grown into women with the odd ability to see their native land through foreign eyes. They were home, and yet at some deep level they would never cease to be homesick.

When lunch was finished, the women escorted Alice to the harbor. Her ship sailed at three o’clock. “None of us stayed until the steamer left the dock,” Ume wrote. “It is so forlorn to see the steamer go off in the distance.”

*
Joshi Eigaku Juku is sometimes translated as “Women’s English School” or “Women’s Institute of English Studies,” but
juku
carries a connotation of private, noninstitutional instruction, which Ume herself exploited when she described her school to English speakers.

15    ENDINGS

U
ME’S SCHOOL GREW RAPIDLY.
In 1903 it moved to a proper home at last, a well-equipped building next to the British embassy. The initial funding for this relocation had come from the Gaiyukai, a club made up of Japanese women, including Sutematsu and Shige, who had lived abroad; a surprise gift of six thousand dollars from a Boston benefactress arrived soon after, and the school settled into a space it would occupy for the next two decades. The following year it received government approval as a
senmon gakko
, or vocational college, the highest standard a women’s private school could then attain, and by 1905 the Ministry of Education had ruled that Ume’s graduates were not required to sit the certification exam for a teaching license.

Ume’s sister Koto enrolled two daughters, where they joined Sutematsu’s daughter, Hisako. Shige talked of sending her younger girls when they grew older. “So you see, the girls are gathering around this school as a center,” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman with pride. She had nearly a hundred and fifty students that year, drawn from across Japan. Anna Hartshorne, who had indeed returned just as Alice departed, became vital to Ume’s project as a teacher and administrator. Anna was also Ume’s closest companion; the two women bought a cottage with an ocean view in Kamakura, to which they retreated whenever possible.

The school’s role as a counterweight to government conservatism
had never been more important. War was once more imminent, with its attendant surge of nationalism—especially since for the first time, Japan was facing off against a Western nation. Japan’s defeat of China in 1895 had provided an opportunity for Russia in the region, and by the beginning of 1904, tensions between Russia and Japan had come to a head, once again over control of Korea. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 was longer, bloodier, and more complicated than the conflict a decade earlier. Japan achieved a string of impressive victories over the Russian military machine, and the conflict ended in a stalemate broken only by the diplomatic intervention of Theodore Roosevelt, confirming Japan’s arrival as a global power at last.

Once again Iwao Oyama played a central role, this time as commander-in-chief of Japan’s forces in Manchuria, prompting the emperor to raise Oyama’s rank from marquis to prince when the war was over. Vice Admiral Sotokichi Uriu was also in the thick of the action, leading a naval squadron that sank two Russian ships in the earliest engagement of the war; he was later made a baron. Their wives were equally prominent on the home front: raising money, assembling “comfort bags” for soldiers, and describing everything in letters to Alice Bacon, who used their reports to encourage donations from sympathetic Americans.

Sutematsu’s and Shige’s eldest sons, born a year apart, were too young to go to war against Russia, but they followed in their fathers’ military footsteps as cadets. Sutematsu glowed with pride over reports from the naval academy: “Takashi, who used to give me so much anxiety, I am happy to say, has improved wonderfully,” she wrote to Alice, “and he is a great comfort.”

Sutematsu and Shige had always met their milestones in step: New Haven, Vassar, marriage, firstborn baby girls, and then sons born less than a year apart. In April 1908, they faced tragedy together. Takashi Oyama and Takeo Uriu were both assigned to training maneuvers aboard the cruiser
Matsushima
, a ship Takeo’s father had once captained. They were at anchor in the Pescadores, shortly before dawn, when an accidental explosion tore through the gunpowder magazine. The ship sank rapidly, and nearly two-thirds of her crew died, Takashi and Takeo among them.

Alice wrote to both mothers as soon as she heard the devastating news. “It was a great comfort to receive such loving words,” Sutematsu replied. “At times I am very rebellious and say to myself, why should such a bright young life be taken, when there are others who could be better spared? . . . I try not to grieve too much[,] for if I give away too much to my feelings, it distresses my husband and adds to his sorrow and hurts Chachan’s
*
tender heart.” Shige, warmhearted and generous as always, submerged her own loss in concern for Sutematsu. “Poor Stematz, she is taking the new grief bravely but she needs your beautiful thoughts and your deep love,” she wrote to Alice. “You know how her life and soul depended upon Takashi, the bright, joyous boy who resembled her so much. I wished to see her and yet when I grasped her hands, I could not help weeping for her hair was turning grey and she tried to hide all her emotions.”

Perhaps partly to distract herself with happier memories, Shige made a trip back to the United States in 1909, accompanying her husband on a tour that included a visit to the White House, the Naval Academy Ball at Annapolis, a stay with old friends in New Haven, and Vassar’s commencement exercises. At the Vassar alumnae banquet, Shige rose to speak, “slowly and carefully as though she had grown somewhat rusty in her use of the English language,” reported the
Poughkeepsie Eagle
. “There is no Vassar among us yet,” Shige told the assembled guests, “but education for women and education methods are progressing.” She presented the college with a gorgeous silver bowl, a gift from the empress in honor of Vassar’s role in inspiring the development of women’s education in Japan.

I
N
J
ULY OF
1912, a few months shy of his sixtieth birthday, the Emperor Meiji died and an era came to an end. His funeral procession, more than twenty thousand strong, stretched for miles. There were nobles in full-dress uniform, Diet members in tailcoats, rank upon rank of soldiers at
attention—and at the center, the emperor’s hearse: a replica of an ancient wooden oxcart built in the old imperial capital of Kyoto, surrounded by attendants in traditional court dress. Born above the clouds, Mutsuhito had descended to become the symbol of Japan’s rise. The forty-four years of his reign had been marked by vision and folly, blistering progress and deep frustration. His country was now a player on the world’s stage, and his funeral was a chance to unite Japan’s promising future and her glorious past in a single dazzling spectacle. The flood of public grief completed the project that the young leaders of the Iwakura Mission had first imagined: the Land of the Gods as a modern power, her citizens sharing a single proud national identity. The new emperor, Yoshihito, took the reign name of Taisho, “great righteousness.”

The Empress Haruko—the era’s most visible good wife, and a wise mother to her subjects, though not to any children of her own—lived less than two years longer. Just weeks before her death, Ume lost her own dearest mother figure: Adeline Lanman, nearly ninety. Ume had visited Mrs. Lanman one last time in 1913 during a trip to promote her school, and had found her lonely and infirm, the house in Georgetown crumbling around her. Putting her foster mother’s finances in order, Ume called in carpenters and painters, leaving her old home much more comfortable than when she had arrived. But three months later, Mrs. Lanman was dead.

As she entered her fifties, Ume’s momentum slowed. Her school—now a college—continued to thrive, but the cause on which she had based her life’s work was shifting around her. One of her own early students, Raicho Hiratsuka, had founded a literary magazine, called
Seito
(“Bluestocking” ), that gave voice to a new activist mood. Its first issue opened with a manifesto: “When Japan was born, woman was the sun, the true human being. Now she is the moon! She lives in the light of another star. She is the moon, with a pale face like that of a sickly person.” Ume saw Hiratsuka as part of “a new generation of selfish women,” bent on confirming the establishment’s worst fears about educated women forgetting their place. It was unseemly, she insisted, for women to agitate and struggle; change would be granted from above to women who had proved the value of their
scholarship. “The real work is now being done in quiet ways,” she wrote, “which are after all our Oriental ways.”

Sutematsu tended to agree with her. “I am sorry to say young girls nowadays are not like what they used to be,” she wrote to Alice. “They have lost the best characteristics of Japanese women”—grace, forbearance, discipline, duty—“without gaining the best side of foreign education. It may be that I am rather old fashioned, but it seems to me that female education in Japan is not advancing in the right direction.” In darker moments, Ume called the noisy radicals “agents of the devil.” Her health began to fail; in 1917 she was hospitalized for the first time with complications of diabetes. The strain of her teaching schedule and the endless quest for financial security had begun to tell.

The one constant—impervious to time or political tide—was the sustaining friendship among the trio. On a gray afternoon in the fall of 1916, Shige and Sutematsu made their way to Ume’s house for tea; hardly an unusual event, but that day they would be joined by one more. Before long a jinrikisha clattered to a halt at Ume’s door, carrying a woman of about their age, dressed in a sober kimono, her hair pulled severely back from her long face. She climbed down, and the four women regarded each other speechlessly, abruptly transported to their first overwhelming weeks in America.

Tei Ueda, the fifth girl sent with the Iwakura Mission, had surfaced at last, married to a doctor and living in Ueno, not far from Shige. In the decades since her premature return to Japan with Ryo Yoshimasu, Tei had watched the successes of her erstwhile companions from the shadows of obscurity, ashamed of her own failure. The four women talked for hours, reaching back to the year when they had clung to one another, and trying to bridge the gap that had opened between them.

The occasion was noteworthy enough that the
Asahi Shimbun
sent a reporter to cover it. Whatever their struggles, their triumphs, or their legacies, the most astonishing thing about these women during their lifetimes remained their childhood journey to another world. “A Circle of Friends Missed Since Washington,” read the headline two days later.
“Madame Ueda Invited to Miss Tsuda’s Residence; All Rejuvenated by Innocent Reminiscences.”

A
LICE
B
ACON MADE
another visit to Japan just after the Russo-Japanese War, gathering material for her writing, but she never taught there again. Retired from the Hampton Institute, she settled in New Haven, where she was on hand to look after Sutematsu’s nephew Makoto—Kenjiro’s boy—when he arrived to study biochemistry at Yale. Alice’s adopted daughter Mitsu married and started a family in Tokyo, where the trio kept an eye on her. Meanwhile, Alice adopted a second Japanese ward: Makiko Hitotsuyanagi, a former student of Ume’s whose scholarship at Bryn Mawr had been interrupted by illness. Makiko became Alice’s right hand at her camp in New Hampshire, the primary project of Alice’s later life. Reflecting her two great passions, the camp was home to sixteen champion English sheepdogs and featured several buildings constructed and furnished in Japanese style. Alice was proud to tell visitors that Deephaven was the only place in America where one could enjoy a proper Japanese bath. It survives as a family camp to this day.

Alice died in 1918 at the age of sixty-one, her funeral held in New Haven’s Center Church, where her father had preached his sermon every Sunday. She willed Deephaven to her two Japanese daughters. Her death was a blow to her friends in Tokyo, who had relied on her letters full of bracing Yankee wisdom.

It was especially hard on Sutematsu, who had recently found herself alone once again. At the end of 1916, two months after the birth of the first grandson to bear his name, Iwao Oyama had collapsed while accompanying the young Emperor Taisho to observe military maneuvers. The emperor sent his personal physician, a stream of gifts, and even a supply of soup to help save his trusted old counselor, to no avail. Oyama received a state funeral, and Sutematsu withdrew from public life, moving into her remaining son’s household. “There is no use in telling you of all that the loss of my husband means to me,” Sutematsu wrote to Alice. She had
hoped her friend would make one last trip to Japan, to ease the loneliness of widowhood.