Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (27 page)

In his absence, relieved of the formal duties of a minister’s wife, Sutematsu could turn her attention to the kinds of projects she had hoped her marriage might facilitate. Her visits to court—there had been a second one at New Year’s, when she had been asked to translate for the empress—had been dismaying. “If I told you all I know about the life of our Empress, you would think Japan was absolutely a barbarous country,” she wrote to Alice. “The court is a separate world and the people [who] live in it do not know any other or care to know any better one.” A few years back, before the conservative reaction had set in, the imperial family had shaken off some of its archaic ways; the empress had even ridden out on horseback, with a sidesaddle. But since then, the gates had swung shut once more. How could Japanese women hope for enlightenment, Sutematsu wondered, when the empress herself was trapped by the traditions of centuries past?

Ito shared Sutematsu’s concern, both for the backwardness of Japan’s court and for the plight of its women. At the end of February he invited Sutematsu, Utako Shimoda, Foreign Minister Inoue, and several other “learned ladies” to his home. Ume, of course, was already there. To this illustrious and superlatively well-educated group he posed the question of how best to bring Japanese women out of the shadows. By the end of the
meeting the group had sketched the outlines of a new idea: a school for wellborn girls under the patronage of the empress.

“Do you know that
the
dream of my life is to be now realized?” Sutematsu wrote excitedly to Alice. At last, a school where powerful men would be proud to send their daughters, and where those daughters could open their minds to Western ideas. At the same time, “as the school is to be partly supported by the court, the Empress and the ladies of the court will be obliged to visit the school, by which means education and western ideas are to [be] introduced to the very center of court.” The new school would thus “kill two birds with one stone.” Ito appointed a planning committee of two: Utako Shimoda and Sutematsu.

If they were successful, Ume would be appointed to teach English. “What a splendid thing if it could be established and arranged!” Ume wrote, though her attention at the meeting was distracted by her friend’s newest piece of jewelry. “I must tell you that Sutematsu wore that night her wedding present from Mr. Oyama, a most tremendous diamond this size”—here she drew a circle half an inch in diameter—“or larger with five smaller ones around it making a most magnificent pin, one of the finest I ever saw. How it did glitter!”

For Sutematsu, the prospect of a Peeresses’ School glittered more than any of Oyama’s lavish gifts. “We are to set up a school just as we think best with no one to interfere, with much money to command, with the support of the most influential men of Japan,” she told Alice. “Is not that just what I should like?” At first she had demurred; she had enough to do just then, learning to manage an elaborate household and three small stepdaughters. But Ito was adamant: she had a debt to repay her country; she was the only woman in Japan with a college degree; her marriage placed her in an ideal position of influence. At his request, Sutematsu sent him descriptions of her Vassar courses and the calendar of the college year.

I
TO’S BRACING ENCOURAGEMENTS
seemed to blow away the fog of uncertainty Sutematsu had come to feel about her ability to bring the
lessons of her American past to bear on her Japanese future. In addition to long-range planning for the new school, she was soon immersed in another more immediate project—this one conceived to enlighten not just the daughters of Tokyo society, but their mothers as well.

Drawn to nursing ever since her brief stint at the Connecticut Training School, Sutematsu had recently toured Tokyo’s Charity Hospital, founded only a couple of years previously. Whereas the University of Tokyo’s hospital, influenced by German ideas, admitted indigent patients only insofar as they were useful in research, this new hospital followed a more humanitarian, English model—its explicit mission to serve the poor. Though the new venture enjoyed the patronage of an imperial prince, philanthropy was one Western habit that had not yet taken hold among Tokyo’s elite, and the hospital was having trouble covering its expenses.

Raising funds for good causes had been part of the social fabric of New Haven, and Sutematsu had spent plenty of girlhood Saturdays sewing for charity with the members of Our Society or attending church sales. What better way to introduce the idea to her countrywomen than to raise money for the women’s department of the new hospital? With Ito’s encouragement, Sutematsu soon found herself spearheading the first charity bazaar Japan had ever seen.

“You don’t know what an undertaking this is!!” Ume wrote to Mrs. Lanman. “These Japanese ladies, many of them, especially the high ones, never heard of charity, never worked to help, never probably gave a thought to it, and to work something with their own hands and give it and
sell
it! is something unheard of. To sell what they make is very lowering, and to them it is something very strange, for they are so proud and high and aristocratic.”

Within a few weeks, a committee including Sutematsu, her French-speaking sister Misao, Ume, Mrs. Ito, and a few other well-placed matrons had persuaded more than two hundred ladies to participate. Their handicrafts poured into the Itos’ home: paintings, embroidery, baskets, dresses, footstools, toys. Ume contributed two china dolls in foreign dress. Oyama’s department donated the services of a military band, and the Rokumeikan itself was reserved for three days in June.

By the morning of the twelfth, all was in readiness. The Rokumeikan was decked in Japanese flags and evergreen arches, and fifteen stalls showed off the dazzling array of items for sale, including fan-shaped hairpins inscribed with “Ladies Benevolent Society” in English. “These were made for the occasion and are like souvenirs of the fair,” wrote Ume, “and everyone, nearly, wished for one.” Tobacco pouches bearing the same inscription “sold like anything.” The lady organizers wore knots of purple silk cord. Ume helped Mrs. Ito at her table, and Shige joined Sutematsu at hers. A tearoom, likewise staffed by the ladies, offered lemonade and ice cream.

The opening morning was quiet; from ten o’clock until noon, only those of the highest rank were admitted. Behind their tables, the lady organizers were demure, helping those who expressed interest in a purchase, and otherwise hanging back. But in the afternoon, when the doors opened to general ticket holders, they seemed to lose their inhibitions. Increasingly, to Ume’s amusement, “they urged the people to buy and praised their own goods, and brought their own particular friends to their own particular table, and actually forced them to buy.” Husbands found themselves charmed out of their change; it was all, after all, for a good cause. “If you could have seen the way in which the gentlemen were really robbed of all their money by the persuasion of the ladies, you would not have believed that these were the shy, proper dames of Tokio,” wrote Ume. The foreigners, among the most enthusiastic shoppers, “said they felt as if they were in America.”

Sales of the pedigreed handicrafts were so good that the committee was forced to rush out and buy more merchandise to refill the stalls before reopening the next day. Jinrikishas clogged the road in front of the Rokumeikan, and lines of kimono-clad patrons waited patiently to take off their wooden clogs before entering. More than ten thousand people visited the bazaar, drawn by the novelty of buying a handmade trinket from a government minister’s wife. Sutematsu and the committee had hoped to raise a thousand yen. The net proceeds were six times that figure.

“It is a matter for universal admiration that ladies of such high rank
should show themselves perfectly
au fait
in conducting the sale of the exhibits; and their kind and earnest manner left a most pleasing impression on all who visited the Bazaar,” commented one Japanese newspaper. There were critical voices amid the general acclaim, however; another paper was less impressed, complaining that the event “was neither refined, elegant, nor admirable.” The foreign press, though approving of the event itself, smirked that Japanese women might be taking things too far: “We have a very sincere admiration for the gentle grace and modest unobtrusiveness which distinguish the fair sex in this part of the world, and we cannot be pleased to see these charming qualities exchanged for the styles and methods which Western Ladies have thought fit to adopt at charity bazaars.” The
Chugai Bukka Shimpo
, a financial paper founded by none other than Shige’s brother Takashi Masuda, wryly proposed a bazaar at which merchants could unload stale goods, marked up several times, at stalls staffed by geisha.

It was impossible to deny the overall success of the endeavor, however. The bazaar at the Rokumeikan became an annual event, and a critical source of funding for the Charity Hospital. Sutematsu and her committee had shown Tokyo’s highest-ranking women a way to participate in the welfare of their nation.

It was a moment to savor. Despite their various choices in regard to marriage, despite the relative indifference of most of the Meiji leaders, Sutematsu, Shige, and Ume were all engaged in work for the benefit of Japan. They were teaching, planning, and introducing Japanese girls and women to some of the ideas they had brought home from America. If Ito’s new school could be realized, the future looked even brighter.

T
HE HIGH SPIRITS
of June 1884 wilted somewhat in the heat of midsummer. The winter “illness” that had prevented Sutematsu from traveling to Europe with her husband, she now revealed to Ume, was morning sickness. She was halfway through her first pregnancy. “I must say she began early,” Ume clucked. The baby, a girl named Hisako, would arrive
in November, a week before Sutematsu’s first wedding anniversary, and months before Oyama’s return. Her birth would temporarily eclipse Sutematsu’s involvement in planning the new Peeresses’ School.

Shige, too, was beginning to suspect that another Uriu might be on the way, though it was too early to share the news with her friends. A second child, so close to the first, would put increased strain on Shige’s teaching responsibilities at the music school. On top of these concerns, her husband’s health was shaky; earlier in the spring he had suffered a hemorrhage in his throat, and Shige had suspended her teaching while he recovered.

And now a third pregnancy, from an unexpected quarter, hastened the end of Ume’s sojourn within Tokyo’s inner circle. Ume’s mother was expecting yet another baby any day, and Ume could deny her responsibilities no longer. “At such a time, and by all laws of Japanese custom, and of ordinary human nature I must come home, and be home, and stay home,” she wrote. She would return to Azabu to help her family. As wearying as the formalities of the Ito household had occasionally been for “free and easy-going Ume,” as she described herself, it was difficult to leave the Itos. “I shall never regret the peep into the rank so different from mine, so different from America,” she wrote. “I shall never go back again, I think. I do not know what will happen in the coming future.”

T
HE BABIES ARRIVED
in due course: Ume’s newest sister, Tomi, that summer; Sutematsu’s firstborn daughter, Hisako, in November; and Shige’s second child, a boy named Takeo, in early spring. As she approached her twentieth birthday, Ume wrote a contemplative Christmas letter to Georgetown. “On the whole, I am glad this year ’84 is most gone,” she mused. “I had so much to worry about, trying to teach Miss Ito, and endeavoring to do my best in my ignorance of Japanese customs and language. Yes, it was hard and I am glad it is over. I hope the next year will somehow be better and smoother, and that my way will be clearer.” Shige and Sutematsu were mothers now, their hands and minds full of responsibilities
that Ume did not share. But before 1885 was over, Ume’s life would be consumed with a comparably momentous event: the birth of a school.

In September, ending months of delay and doubt, a scroll arrived at the Tsuda home in Azabu, directing Ume to present herself at ten o’clock on a Monday morning at the Imperial Household Ministry, “accompanied by a relative,” to receive her appointment as a founding member of the faculty at the new Peeresses’ School.

“I must say that paragraph ‘accompanied by a relative’ was most thoughtfully put in, for it is not customary,” Ume wrote, “and I had been on pins and needles wondering how in the world I was to get along at all alone to get my appointment, and my Japanese far from perfect.” Dressed in her best blue silk, and with her father by her side, she threaded the hallways of the ministry and received the precious documents that made her an employee of the Meiji government, hired to teach English with a salary of 420 yen annually, and the bureaucratic rank of
jun sonin
. (Shige, she was quick to point out to Mrs. Lanman, held the lower rank of
hannin
in her position at the government music school.)

Accompanied by Utako Shimoda, who was appointed directress of the new school, Ume spent the rest of the day paying calls on Hirobumi Ito and all the officials who had had a part in her hiring. When, exhausted, she returned to Azabu at last, she found her home in an uproar: her father had spread the good news in her absence, and all the relatives had arrived. “We had quite a grand dinner in honor of the day, and I received congratulations from all around on my appointment, especially on the rank,” she reported with pride. At least for the moment, all the doubt and frustration of the preceding years receded. “I have my papers, and am now a teacher in the school of the Empress.”

Classes at the Peeresses’ School, or Kazoku Jogakko, began on the fifth of October. Ume was pleased with her new surroundings, especially the faculty room. “I have such a nice desk here, a great big one in the farthest part of the room by the window, where it is light and pleasant. It is indeed the place of honor in this room, and it is the best place,” she boasted to Mrs. Lanman. Without much to occupy her, and somewhat uncomfortable
among her new colleagues, she wrote at unusual length to her foster mother that week; it gave her an excuse to sit at her new desk and look professional. She taught only three hours each day, and her scholars were somewhat distracted; everyone’s attention was focused instead on the upcoming opening exercises of the school, which the empress herself would attend.