Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (8 page)

Ten-year-old Shige was stunned. After three years at the temple school in the village, she could read and write in Japanese, but she had never uttered a word of English. How could she possibly fulfill the government’s expectations for her future? Takashi had played a hunch, however, when he submitted his sister’s application. Shige’s situation was hardly idyllic: her adoptive mother, who took a harsh approach to child rearing, had never warmed to her. Frightening as the prospect of America seemed, the unknown future might offer an improvement over the difficult present. Shige was not sorry to say goodbye to the Nagais.

T
WO DAYS AND
nights of nausea passed in the cramped cabin. Well-wishers had sent the girls off with boxes of sweets that were now stacked to the ceiling, making the small space even smaller. Chinese waiters brought
unrecognizable meals they could not bring themselves to touch. Mrs. DeLong, their chaperone, spoke no Japanese, and the men of the delegation, while occasionally helpful as interpreters, knew nothing about the needs of young girls. Their stewardess had been taught the Japanese for “what do you want?” but the girls had no words to respond with in English. When hunger did penetrate their queasiness, they picked at the pile of sweets, which only made things worse.

On the third day they had a visit from the delegate in the cabin next door. A dapper, outspoken Finance Ministry official who would go on to become a pioneer of Japanese journalism, Gen’ichiro Fukuchi was a veteran of two previous overseas missions. The challenges of an ocean voyage were not new to him. He swept into the girls’ cabin, quickly taking in the five pale and clammy faces and the half-empty boxes of confectionary, and sprang into action. Opening the porthole, he seized the remaining cakes and flung them overboard. “All our entreaties and wails were in vain,” Shige recalled.

It was a week before any of the girls left their cabin. Ume recovered first, venturing up the metal steps that led to the deck and gazing, awestruck, at the tall American sailors and their smartly uniformed officers. Once all the girls were up, they had a proper tour: the luxurious saloons and dining rooms, the thunderous engines and the churning paddle wheels, whose sound was the only proof that the ship was moving on the featureless expanse of ocean. “Passengers are forbidden to approach the cages over the paddlewheels or wander outside the deck railings,” read the rules posted aboard ship. “Do not talk to officers on watch.” Each day the captain announced their degree of longitude, which the ambassadors dutifully recorded. Those who had acquired wristwatches carefully adjusted them to the new time.

Rain fell, and kept falling for nearly half the voyage. Once the ship itself had become familiar, there was nothing to look at. “We did not see so much as the silhouette of a single island,” the embassy’s scribe Kume noted. “Although it was the time of the full moon, the fact that we could hardly ever see it intensified our feelings of loneliness.” Hirobumi Ito, one
of the senior ambassadors and a close friend of the cake-flinging Fukuchi, came to check on the girls, who were still mourning the loss of their sweets. A small man with a large personality, lowborn but aiming high, Ito was something of a peacock, handsome and gallant and fond of life’s pleasures, his boyish smile verging on a smirk. At twenty-two he had smuggled himself out of Japan to study in London; now, at thirty, he was the minister of public works. “He told us to come to his room and he would give us something nice, if we behaved properly,” Shige later remembered. To each girl he gave a precious piece of
misozuke
pickle, a taste of home that settled both their stomachs and their nerves. It would not be the last time Ito changed the girls’ circumstances for the better.

The enforced idleness of shipboard life lay heavily on the delegates. The men of the Iwakura Mission were ambitious, determined, proud, and insecure. Samurai from the southern domains savored the triumph of their rise to power, but still felt more deeply loyal to their own domains than to each other. Those who had once served the toppled shogunate held deep-seated grudges. Enemies until just recently, they had not entirely finished becoming allies. Now they faced the daunting challenge of introducing their new leadership to the wider world.

Those with some experience abroad patronized those who had never left Japan. One delegate, an official with the judicial department, held tutorials on Western table manners: forks on the left, knives on the right, cut your meat into pieces first instead of picking up a whole chop and gnawing off a bite. Don’t slurp. The younger and more arrogant junior delegates, resenting such schoolmarmish meddling, only slurped and stabbed with greater abandon.

The presence of young girls in this idle and simmering group was provocative. The two oldest, Ryo and Tei, both fourteen, were nearly of marriageable age. They were the only Japanese females the men would see until the mission returned home, and not every delegate was as appropriately solicitous as Ito and Fukuchi. One day, Ryo was alone in the girls’ cabin when a man named Nagano, a secretary with the foreign department, stumbled in, drunk. Ryo was struggling to fend him off when her
roommates returned. Sutematsu, shaking with outrage, ran for Ambassador Okubo.

Though there were two secretaries called Nagano with the embassy, it is easier to suspect the lecherous one as having been Keijiro Nagano, a man with a colorful history. Back in 1860, at the tender age of sixteen, he had joined the first mission to America as an apprentice interpreter. His youthful high spirits, in contrast to his stiffly straight-faced countrymen, had instantly attracted the attention of the American press; dubbing him “Tommy,” reporters swarmed him, and everywhere he went the ladies swooned. The daily papers tracked his activities almost more assiduously than those of the ambassadors he served. He wrote love notes to American girls on pink stationery and inspired a polka composed in his honor, with a refrain that captured the odd ardor of his fans, at once admiring and condescending:

Wives and maids by scores are flocking

Round that charming, little man,

Known as Tommy, witty Tommy,

Yellow Tommy, from Japan.

Now twenty-eight, still slight of stature if no longer quite so pretty, Nagano may yet have considered himself a ladies’ man. But flirting with anonymous foreign girls was not the same as groping the daughter of a samurai. Perplexed by this unprecedented situation, and painfully aware of the eyes of the American crew upon them, the mission’s leaders decided to hold a trial; wasn’t that what enlightened Westerners would do? It would be an edifying exercise in foreign legal protocol, it would hold the transgressor to account, and (to be honest) it would provide a little entertainment. The voyage was long, and the delegates were bored.

The strutting Ito, having observed courtrooms in London during his sojourn there, would play the judge. Other delegates would take the roles of prosecutor and defense attorney. Takayuki Sasaki, the embassy’s senior official in charge of judicial affairs, was appalled. It was one thing, he
argued, to hold a mock trial with a fictitious case, but the offense here was real. Whether it had been a serious crime or just a bit of minor mischief, making a show of bringing it to “court” risked yet more disgrace to the girl, her molester, and, by extension, the embassy itself. All this before their ship even reached shore. What would the foreigners think?

Predictably, the trial was a farce, with no judgment reached. “Little irregularities might not affect big countries of the West,” wrote a fuming Sasaki in his journal, “but our country has just begun to take the path of progress and is, as it were, still a child without learning, having achieved nothing. It had better be cautious of doing anything amiss.” Nagano, for his part, was nonchalant. “To divert our boredom,” his journal entry reads, “a sham trial, inspired by a little happening, was held.” None of the delegates recorded a word about Ryo’s humiliation or the discomfort of the other girls.

T
HE
A
MERICA
PLOWED
steadily toward San Francisco, sighting nothing but an occasional albatross riding the wind like a kite. “Goonies,” the sailors called them. Two days from port, seagulls appeared, swooping so low they nearly touched the heads of the passengers. “Apparently, when crossing the ocean,” Kume wrote, “if you see goonies you are far from land, but if you see gulls you know you are nearing land.” The first leg of the journey, then, was almost over.

Sent off by their families, largely ignored by the men of the mission, and unable to converse with their American chaperone, the five girls in their tiny cabin had nothing to do but wonder.

PART

II

The customs of all countries are strange to untrained eyes.

—
ETSU INAGAKI SUGIMOTO
,
A Daughter of the Samurai,
1926

Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige in Philadelphia,
1876.
(Courtesy Tsuda College Archives.)

5    “INTERESTING STRANGERS”

T
HE SUN HAD RISEN
hours since, but fog still lingered in San Francisco Bay as the steamer
America
made her slow and regal way through the Golden Gate. It was Monday, January 15, 1872. As Fort Alcatraz slid past, salvos of artillery rang out—a thirteen-gun salute, one shot fired for each of the original states. In the first-class cabins, a few of the Japanese delegates were counting. They were somewhat disappointed not to reach a higher number. “America is a democratic country and practices simplicity with respect to the level of politeness and etiquette displayed,” the scribe Kunitake Kume confided philosophically to his journal.

Flags decorated every mast, the Stars and Stripes and the Circle of the Sun fluttering fore and aft of the smokestacks amidships. As the ship settled into her berth, an unusual group gathered on the promenade deck, led by two men. One, gazing eagerly at his home port after long absence, wore a dark beard, a winter coat, and an Astrakhan hat of Persian lamb: Charles DeLong, American ambassador, returning from two years of service in Japan. A native New Yorker, DeLong had chased adventure to the gold fields of California by the age of seventeen. Supplementing his speculative ventures with a law practice, he moved into politics, where he proved more of an opportunist than an idealist. He had accepted the post of minister to Japan in 1869 and had taken to the glamour of diplomatic life like a duck to water. His natural charm had always served him well.

But it was the other man who drew the stares of those watching from the pier. He stood, straight and slim and solemn, in midnight-blue robes of embroidered silk tied with cord. Two swords of different lengths swept down from his sash. The sides of his head were shaved and the remaining hair drawn up into a topknot, over which he wore a black lacquered headdress—more like a box than a hat—tied securely under his chin. Strong black brows slashed downward to an aquiline nose and a mouth turned down at the corners. Heavy-lidded eyes surveyed the crowds of people gathered below. Tomomi Iwakura, minister of the right, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, made an imposing first impression. Once a chamberlain in the court of the Emperor Meiji’s father, and then a key player in the maneuverings that restored the son to power, he embodied both Japan’s past and its future.

Behind him stood dozens of his entourage, inelegant by comparison, dressed, as one reporter noted, “in the most outlandish English ready-made garments of all styles since the flood.” When the ship was safely moored, a more sharply tailored party of local notables came on board to greet the exotic visitors, their genial smiles and outstretched hands met with stiff bows.

Twenty-three days after leaving Yokohama, the men of the Iwakura Mission were ready to set foot on foreign soil. As the sober group filed down the gangplank, a splash of vivid color brought up the rear. A wave of excitement rippled through the crowd. Emerging from behind the ample girth of their chaperone, Mrs. DeLong, five girls stepped carefully into view. They were swathed in bright silk, lavishly embroidered from collar to hem and tied with broad contrasting sashes. Two carried themselves with the reserve of young women, hatless, their hair upswept and crowned with tortoiseshell combs. The other three, clearly younger, wore gay floral ornaments in their lacquered coiffures, though their faces were carefully composed. So these were the princesses sent by the Mikado!