Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (2 page)

In a month, the girls would board a ship for America. By the time they returned, if all went as planned, they would be grown women.

1      SAMURAI DAUGHTER

O
F THE FIVE GIRLS
on their way to America, the middle one in age, Sutematsu Yamakawa, had traveled the farthest, whether the distance was reckoned in miles or memories. She was born a warrior in the waning days of an era without war, February 24, 1860. The youngest child of the late Shigekata Yamakawa, chief retainer of the lord of Aizu, she was called Sakiko then: “blossom child.” In that northern domain of dramatic peaks and paddy-terraced valleys, she would be one of the last to live the rhythms and rituals of a samurai family.

Perched high on a hill, the gleaming white walls and swooping tiered roofs of Tsuruga Castle dominated the town of Wakamatsu, seat of Aizu’s leaders. An inner moat ringed the castle keep, and an outer moat enclosed an area of more than five hundred acres, within which stood granaries, stables, and the homes of the highest-ranking samurai. Earthworks rose from the inner bank, pierced by sixteen gates.

The Yamakawa compound, itself comprising several acres, stood near a northern gate of the castle. It was a traditional
bukeyashiki
, or samurai mansion, a sprawling walled maze of single-story buildings and courtyard gardens, home to the family for generations. The newer part of the compound was pristine and spare, comprising graceful rooms floored with hay-scented tatami mats, perfectly empty of everything except what might be required in
the moment: floor cushions and low, lacquered tables at mealtimes; thick sleeping quilts at night, along with the wooden headrests used instead of pillows to protect carefully dressed hair from disarray. The only ornaments were to be found in the alcoves known as
tokonoma
, where might hang an antique scroll appropriate to the season, accompanied perhaps by a single spray of blossoms from the garden arranged in a ceramic vase.

The garden itself provided the decorative element absent from the interiors. A hidden spring in its center fed a tiny waterfall, which in turn filled a miniature lake stocked with goldfish darting beneath pink and white lotus blossoms. A diminutive series of carefully sculpted hills surrounded the lake, creating the illusion of a more expansive landscape. A rustic bridge crossed a stream and led to a ceremonial teahouse. In warm weather the paper-paned
shoji
screens that formed the outer walls of the main building slid back, allowing the breezes and the meticulous beauty of the garden to enter every room.

Serene and elegant as the setting might be, this was yet the home of warriors. The main gate of the compound, never unattended, was itself an imposing edifice, its tiled roof sweeping outward in deep eaves over massive timbers. Anterooms in which guards might keep watch unseen were tucked behind walls. The lavatory was roofed with unsupported tile; an intruder intending to catch an adversary in a vulnerable position would tumble straight through.

For a child like Sutematsu, the compound’s walls were the edges of the world. Everyone she knew lived within them: her mother, grandfather, brothers and sisters and sisters-in-law, as well as stewards, maids, pages, gardeners, gatekeepers, and the children’s nurse, who had her own tiny cottage on the grounds. The servants were like family themselves, many having been raised in the compound from childhood.

As new structures were added to the complex, older ones fell into disuse. A casual visitor could become lost. A child’s imagination could roam free. Sutematsu and the other children would gather in an abandoned room after dark to play the
hyaku monogatari
, or hundred tales. Gathered around
a lamp in the middle of the tattered tatami-matted floor, each child would take a turn telling a
kaidan
, a ghost story of the past:
Kitsune Yashiki
, or “The Foxes’ Mansion” ;
Yuki-Onna
, “The Snow-Woman” ;
Jikininki
, “The Flesh-Eating Goblin.” After each telling the light was lowered, until the children sat trembling in the haunted darkness, determined not to betray their samurai training by showing fear.

T
HE SAMURAI WERE
a hereditary warrior class, and though by Sutematsu’s time battles were largely the stuff of legend, samurai culture was shaped by ideals of courage, obedience, austerity, and martial prowess that led directly back to a more warlike age. Totaling about seven percent of Japan’s thirty million people, the samurai as a class contributed nothing to the Japanese economy. They administered public life and cultivated the arts of war and of peace—including poetry, calligraphy, and scholarship—supported by a stipend from the lord of their particular domain, to whom they owed ultimate allegiance. Holding themselves to a lofty code of loyalty and honor, they left the baser necessities of production and trade to commoners.

According to Japanese mythology, the first emperor had descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu two thousand years before. Over the centuries, however, true power had come to rest with the shogun, a military dictator nominally appointed by the emperor, who served as a kind of divine endorsement. Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa clan, had established his headquarters at Edo (modern Tokyo) in the late sixteenth century. The Tokugawas consolidated administrative control over hundreds of territorial warlords, or
daimyo
, leaving the emperor enshrined in virtually powerless seclusion as a living symbol of Japan’s divine heritage. Rarely seen, and insulated from the outside world by a small city of pureblood imperial courtiers, the emperor lived “above the clouds” in tranquil Kyoto, while nearly three hundred miles to the northeast in bustling Edo, the shogun ran the country.

Once in power, the Tokugawas’ first priority was their own stability.
To that end they devised an ingenious administrative system to preserve the delicate balance between the shogun, in Edo, and the hundreds of daimyo spread across the islands of Japan—each with his own domain, his own castle stronghold, his own loyal samurai retainers. Each daimyo was free to collect his own taxes, make his own local laws, and arm his own troops, as long as he also agreed to contribute money and laborers for Tokugawa projects including highway maintenance, mining, and palace construction. The shogun, attending to international relations, left the daimyo largely alone.

Largely, but not entirely. In a masterstroke of administrative cunning called
sankin kotai
, or “alternate attendance,” the shogun required each daimyo to maintain a second palatial residence in Edo, where in alternating years his presence in attendance on the shogun was mandatory. And though the daimyo returned to their own territories roughly every other year, their wives and children were required to remain in Edo, safely under the shogun’s eye.

Alternate attendance was essentially a ritualized hostage system, with an extra twist: it was fabulously expensive. Not only did each daimyo need to build, staff, and maintain an Edo compound appropriate to his rank; he also had to pay for the lavish procession to or from his own domain each year—an important opportunity to advertise his own power and dignity. All of which served to discourage unrest: it was much harder for a power-hungry daimyo to cause trouble for the shogun when he had no revenue left to spend on making war.

The unintended benefits of the system were considerable. The continuous tide of daimyo and their retinues flowing to and from Edo required a well-maintained highway network and provided regular trade for inns and teahouses along the road. News, ideas, and fashions flowed constantly from the vibrant whirl of Edo to the most remote castle towns. And every daimyo’s heir, no matter how provincial his ancestral home, grew up a city boy, sharing experiences in common with the elites of every region of Japan.

. . .

T
O THE NORTH
, remote from both Kyoto’s ancient refinements and Edo’s brash urbanity, lay the domain of Aizu, Sutematsu’s home, harsher in both climate and culture. Walled in by mountains, Aizu was unusually isolated even for Japan, whose extreme topography made travel and communication a continual challenge. Getting in or out of the domain entailed scrambling over high mountain passes where deer and monkeys were more numerous than people, and bear and wild boar more of a threat than brigands. Aizu was a land unto itself, its local dialect all but incomprehensible to rare sojourners from other regions.

Aizu was the fiefdom of the Matsudairas, a collateral branch of the Tokugawa family, which by 1860 had governed Japan in relative peace for two and a half centuries. In a country formed of rival domains, Aizu was known for its martial prowess, its substantial standing army, its code of conduct for soldiers and commanders alike, and its fierce loyalty to the Tokugawas. “Serve the shogun with single-minded devotion,” the Aizu code began. “Do not measure your loyalty by the standard of other domains.” Sharing the triple hollyhock crest of the Tokugawas, the Matsudairas established their seat in the castle town of Wakamatsu, a hundred miles north of Edo at the convergence of five roads spidering across northeastern Honshu, Japan’s main island. It was a strategic spot, linking the Tokugawa stronghold with northern regions more distant both geographically and politically.

Just as the castle in Wakamatsu presided over the landscape, the injunctions of the Aizu code dominated the lives of the samurai families living within the castle precincts. Confucian morality—placing men over women, parents over children, benevolent rulers over dutiful subjects—blended easily with martial hierarchy. “Do not neglect military readiness,” the Aizu code instructed. “Do not confuse the duties of the higher and lower ranks. Older brothers should be respected and younger brothers loved. Lawbreakers should not be treated with lenience.” An Aizu retainer,
whether escorting his lord on the road to Edo or overseeing domain affairs at home, was to comport himself with discipline at all times, setting aside personal pettiness in the service of his daimyo. And last, “the words of women should be totally disregarded.”

At the turn of every year, the retainers gathered in the presence of their lord while the head of the domain school read the Aizu code aloud. Aizu’s school, the Nisshinkan, or “Hall of Daily Progress,” rose on the west side of the castle. Here, starting at the age of ten, the sons of Aizu’s samurai families—including Sutematsu’s brothers—studied the Chinese classics and the arts of war, but also mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. It was a forward-looking curriculum that tapped the steady trickle of Western ideas entering Japan through the solitary Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, far to the south. Domain schools had been established throughout Japan during the Tokugawa period. The Nisshinkan, with its two-story lecture halls and its own observatory, was among the finest.

The Nisshinkan’s schoolboys were members of neighborhood “ten-men groups,” officially sanctioned gangs who pledged loyalty to each other and hostility to other groups in a miniature imitation of domain politics. Each group’s leader rounded up his mates in the morning, marched them to school, and presided over the ritual of surrendering their swords to the sword rack for the duration of classes. After school he marched them home again. Even outside of school, behavior followed strict rules, read out periodically by the head boy: a junior version of the code followed by their fathers.

1.  We must not disobey our elders.

2.  We must always bow to our elders.

3.  We must not lie.

4.  We must not act in a cowardly manner.

5.  We must not pick on those who are weaker.

6.  We must not eat in public.

7.  We must not talk to girls.

The boys responded in unison: “Those things that are forbidden, we must not do.” And then they were free: to explore each other’s houses, swim in the river Yukawa, or slide down pine-needled hillsides on empty rice bags. Those who broke the rules suffered ostracism or a beating.

The conduct of girls, though less public, was no less carefully policed. A set of seventeen “Instructions for the Very Young” exhorted all children to wake early, wash and rinse their mouths, and refrain from eating until their parents had taken up their own chopsticks. Yawning in front of elders was strictly prohibited. The samurai of Aizu encouraged their daughters to develop strength of character by excelling in their studies, but girls learned to read and write at home. Unlike her brothers, Sutematsu rarely had occasion to venture beyond her own front gates.

After breakfast the adults would gather for tea in her mother’s room. While they chatted, the children might savor a few pieces of
kompeito
, the knobbly sugar candy that was a traditional treat among the refined classes.
*
Then it was time for the girls and younger boys to gather in the schoolroom, where their tutor waited.

While boys learned passages by rote from the ancient
Classic of Filial
Piety
, a girl’s syllabus would include the eighteenth-century treatise
Onna daigaku
(“Greater Learning for Women” ), which placed Confucian moral obligations in the context of a woman’s life. “The only qualities that befit a woman are gentle obedience, chastity, mercy, and quietness,” it instructed, placing obedience—to parents, and subsequently to husband and in-laws—above all. Obedience did not necessarily entail meekness, though. An Aizu girl received a dagger as part of her trousseau, and her mother made sure she knew how to use it—not only in self-defense, but to take her own life, should her honor be stained.

As part of their daily recitation, Sutematsu and her sisters chanted
in unison passages like: “The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are: indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy, and silliness.” Silliness included vanity: “It suffices for her to be neat and cleanly in her person and in her wearing apparel. It is wrong in her, by an excess of care, to obtrude herself on other people’s notice.” For writing practice, the girls copied out the same passages once more, engraving them in their minds as truth even while still too young to grasp their full implications.