Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back

by Janice P. Nimura

  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.

  During the lengthy lessons, the children knelt formally on the tatami, permitted to move only their hands and lips. On frigid days, when the temperature within the paper-walled schoolroom matched that in the garden outside, no charcoal hibachi burned, but no one dared tuck her hands into the front of her kimono. When the summer sun turned the room into an oven, no one fluttered a fan. To discipline the body was to discipline the mind.

  Not all traditions were so harsh. Handed down from mother to daughter in every samurai family was a precious set of elaborately costumed dolls representing the imperial court. The Yamakawa collection numbered more than a hundred, and a whole room was reserved for them. For most of the year this was a playroom for the girls, who could rock their favorite babies and play house, unmolested by their brothers. The third day of the third month, however, brought the excitement of hinamatsuri, the Doll Festival, when the dolls took pride of place in the main reception room of the house, arrayed on a tiered stand draped in red. At the top stood the emperor and empress, their courtiers, musicians, and soldiers arrayed beneath them, along with doll-sized furniture, carriages, and tiny dishes filled with real delicacies. And since the dolls themselves were never seen to taste these offerings, could a little girl help it if she tasted on their behalf?

  Life was rhythm and ritual, discipline and etiquette; it was impossible to imagine any other way. But after two and a half centuries of relative calm, a political shift as violent as any earthquake was about to shake Japan.

  JAPAN UNDER THE Tokugawas was a place preoccupied with preserving the status quo. In 1606, as part of his consolidation of power, the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, had declared Christianity illegal. The notion that every man owed his first allegiance to God was an unacceptable threat to the Confucian hierarchy, not to mention Ieyasu’s still fragile supremacy. In addition, Christian missionaries might become the vanguard of European colonization, as had happened in the Philippines.

  The Tokugawas expelled the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries who had proselytized in Japan since the 1550s. They drastically curtailed trade with Europe, eventually limiting it to a single Dutch vessel permitted to dock each year at the man-made and closely guarded islet of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. And within four decades, they killed tens of thousands of Japanese Christian converts.

  The antiforeign stance of the Tokugawas only hardened over time. In 1630, the shogunate passed laws prohibiting its subjects from ever leaving its shores or returning from abroad. A hapless fisherman, driven out to sea by a sudden storm and shipwrecked on a foreign shore, would be arrested immediately upon his return, were he lucky enough to find his way home. Though limited trade continued with China and Korea, and the Dutch provided a yearly infusion of information from Europe, Japan had essentially placed its own security above the attractions of commercial profit and global engagement. After centuries of territorial warfare, the Tokugawas presided over an extended peace.

  By the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, it was increasingly hard to ignore the wider world. Russia was eager for access to the rich fisheries and timber of Japan’s northernmost island of Ezo, modern-day Hokkaido. British and American whaling ships, having extended their reach to the Pacific, appeared in Japanese ports seeking provisions and did not appreciate being turned away. When news of China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s filtered in, the threat of military aggression from the West was no longer theoretical.

  Sutematsu’s home in landlocked Aizu may have been remote from these encounters, but its warriors were hardly unaware. As early as 1806, the shogunate deployed hundreds of Aizu samurai to patrol coastlines for years at a time as far north as Ezo, as well as southward to the areas around Edo. Back in Aizu, their leaders bore the cost of their deployment, borrowing heavily from local merchants and slashing samurai stipends.

  The dynamic domestic growth of the Pax Tokugawa was beginning to slow, and its relative calm to fray. The old social hierarchy tilted and tottered. Commoners groaned under the pressure of taxes levied to pay the stipends of the warrior class, while merchant entrepreneurs amassed
new fortunes and bought themselves the right to wear the two swords of the samurai. Ancient samurai families, their stipends reduced, found themselves unable to afford the trappings required by their station; men raised never to touch money now had to borrow it or find a way to earn some. Leaders of the outer domains, those without deep-rooted loyalties to the Tokugawas, began to rely more on their own opinions and less on the directives of the shogun. Uncomfortably aware of the foreign vessels visible on the horizon, many began to pay closer attention to “Dutch learning,” especially Western military technology.

  An interest in Dutch ideas, or rangaku (from the Japanese transliteration of “Holland” : Oranda), had begun to take hold among intellectual innovators in Japan in the middle of the eighteenth century. Though the shogunate continued to treat foreigners with extreme suspicion, foreign books—on astronomy, geography, medicine, and technology, if not Christianity—were welcome, collected and carefully preserved. Some of the most distinguished scholars in Japan shifted their reverence from things Chinese to things Dutch, taking Dutch sobriquets, studying the language, and even drawing detailed landscapes complete with windmills. Though Japan remained nominally closed to Western trade, many Japanese elites were quite familiar with Western ideas. Most of the population, however, continued to think of foreigners as distant cousins of the long-nosed, goblin-faced tengu spirits that haunted forests and mountains.

  THIS STATE OF affairs persisted until July 8, 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry piloted his squadron of four “black ships” into Edo Bay and demanded the right to trade on behalf of the United States. Two of the ships were steam frigates belching ominous clouds of coal smoke, and all four bristled with cannon, including the latest in naval armament, the Paixhans gun, capable of firing explosive shells rather than the inert cannonballs upon which naval warfare had previously relied. It was a demonstration not just of military strength, but of technological supremacy.

  The island nation of Japan possessed not a single naval vessel, and what coastal batteries existed were outdated and poorly maintained. The sword was still the signature weapon of the samurai, the physical embodiment of his prowess and his honor. This had been a conscious choice on the part of the shogunate more than a century earlier. Japan’s metalworkers had rapidly adopted gunsmithing when the Portuguese first introduced firearms in 1543, and they were soon producing matchlock guns and cannon of the highest quality. But guns were impersonal, inelegant, and inappropriate in heroic hand-to-hand combat. A weapon as indiscriminately lethal as a gun made no distinction between daimyo and peasant. An unskilled, anonymous foot soldier, armed with a matchlock, could fell an elite swordsman from a safe distance. Was this the way of the warrior? Taking over production of guns and gunpowder, the shogunate gradually reduced its orders over the course of the seventeenth century—a trend aided by the fact that under Tokugawa rule, there were no battles to fight. Japan’s gunsmiths faded into oblivion, and the warrior class reverted to the sword.

  Most of the cannon mounted in Edo’s defense were more than two hundred years old, designed to fire balls of six to eight pounds. Perry’s guns were sixty-four-pounders. One of his officers bragged that the Americans could have loaded their guns with the diminutive Japanese cannon and fired them back at their owners.

  The night of Perry’s arrival, an unusually bright meteor appeared in the sky over Edo, bathing the bay in an eerie blue light and adding a shiver of divine portent to the feeling of dread that gripped the city. (Perry’s men, naturally, took it as an encouraging sign.) Nine days later, having presented a letter from President Millard Fillmore and fired off a few rounds for dramatic effect, Perry sailed away, promising to return for an answer the following spring.

  The shogunate was in turmoil, compounded by the inconvenient fact that the shogun himself, Ieyoshi, had dropped dead during the month of Perry’s visit, and his twenty-nine-year-old successor, Iesada, had the emotional and intellectual faculties of a child. Clearly, the isolationist policies of the preceding centuries were doomed, but how could Japan engage with the West from a position of such weakness? Was there a way to adopt Western technologies without bowing to the barbarians? Officials in Edo took the unprecedented step of asking the daimyo for advice—in itself an admission of weakness. The daimyo, for the most part, rejected the prospect of trade with the Americans, but only a few advocated for war. It wasn’t much of a mandate.

  When Perry returned in February 1854 with twice as many ships, the shogunate compromised, reluctantly granting the Americans two treaty ports and the right to establish a consulate. The door having now opened a crack, the mercantile nations of the West proceeded to wrench it wide: within five years, the shogunate had signed agreements with the French, the British, the Russians, and the Dutch, opening yet more ports, fixing low import duties, and granting foreign nationals extraterritorial immunity.

  The lopsided treaties were humiliating and seriously undermined the authority of the shogun. The ways of the past were increasingly irrelevant, while the way forward remained frighteningly unclear. “Our historians bid us to obey the maxims, to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, to change nothing in them,” a senior official in Edo told Henry Heusken, secretary to the new American consulate. “If you do this, you will prosper; if you change anything, you will fall into decay. This is so strong that if your ancestors bid you to go by a roundabout way to go to a certain spot, even though you discover a route which goes directly there, you may not follow it. You must always follow the path of your ancestors.” Now foreigners with modern guns had forced the shogun from his ancestors’ path.

  Edo’s woodblock artists were quick to capitalize on Perry’s visit and the arrival of subsequent embassies, printing hundreds of thousands of broadsides depicting the monstrous black ships, the long-nosed and strangely hairy sailors, the bizarre uniforms that encased men’s arms and legs in tight-fitting tubes, their feet in thump-heeled boots. Were the barbarians’ feet made without heels, to require such footwear?

  As these images, along with news of the treaties, spread throughout the islands of Japan, waves of opposition to Edo’s concessions rippled in their wake. In addition to the grumbling daimyo of the outer domains, disaffected low-ranking samurai emerged as a threat to the shogun’s control. Calling themselves shishi, or “men of high purpose,” many renounced their domain loyalties and took the emperor, secluded in Kyoto, as a symbol of Japan’s divine heritage. “Sonno joi,” rang their rallying cry: revere the emperor, expel the barbarians. Preferring heroic action to diplomacy, they espoused a virulently xenophobic strain of terrorism, attacking the shogun’s officials as well as traders who had dealings with foreigners, and sometimes targeting the foreigners themselves.

  Sutematsu had never seen a foreigner. Despite the astronomical observatory at the domain school, despite the Western-style homes popping up to house European traders and diplomats in the treaty ports, despite the rising interest in military technology and European languages, and the sporadic eruptions of violence perpetrated by disgruntled samurai, in towns and villages across Japan the traditional rhythms of everyday life persisted—nowhere more so than in isolated Aizu.

  By the 1860s there was still no one in a position of power anywhere in Japan with a truly intimate understanding of the West. A tiny handful of men had ventured to America, England, and continental Europe, sent officially by the shogun or smuggled out and back by reform-minded daimyo, but their brief sojourns served only to prove the urgency of learning more. The most extreme enthusiasts of “Dutch learning” had only the foggiest notion of what life in America or Europe was really like.

  * Kompeito, from the Portuguese confeito, was introduced to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century. Like many other imports, from Zen Buddhism to tempura, it was adopted so completely that its foreign origins are often forgotten.

  2 THE WAR OF THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

  NEWS FROM THE SOUTH reached Aizu slowly, and most of it was unsettling. Her brothers’ sober discuss
ions were not for Sutematsu to join, but in houses with paper walls, no conversation was ever completely private. She could hear the intensity in their voices, and she wondered at the unfamiliar words: kobu gattai, the vague goal of reconciliation between the imperial court and the shogunate. Yet weren’t the emperor and the shogun on the same side? Didn’t the samurai of Aizu swear to uphold the shogun, whose power was granted by the emperor? Why did her brothers look so serious, and so fierce?

  Yoshinobu, last of the Tokugawa shoguns, was a thwarted visionary, a man whose fondness for pork, Western-style horsemanship, and portrait photography did not sit well with those conservatives who wished only for all foreigners to go away. Pushed reluctantly into a doomed office in 1867, he imagined sweeping changes: Western-style cabinet ministries in place of the shogunate’s council of elders; a professional standing army equipped with modern weapons and financed by a new tax system; the promotion of industry. But it was too late to convince the southern domains to support him.

  Those who muttered against the shogunate were not limited to any one region, but they were concentrated in the prosperous southern domains of Satsuma (on the island of Kyushu) and Choshu (on the southwestern tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu). Bitter rivals historically, the two domains had by 1866 sealed a secret alliance, vowing to replace the shogunate with a new government led by a restored emperor. These southern domains were better armed and better organized than the shogun’s allies, and they had shrewdly wrapped their cause in the “brocade banner” of imperial legitimacy, neatly casting their adversaries in the role of traitors.

  Ironically, the positions of the two fiercely opposed sides were roughly aligned by this time. After more violent encounters with Western warships over the years, the reactionary xenophobia of the shishi—the disaffected “men of high purpose”—had come to seem quixotic. No one actually harbored delusions about expelling foreigners any longer, and both sides had moved toward the conviction that a unified Japan—grounded in Confucian ethics and strengthened by imported Western weapons and industrial technology—was critical to dealing with threats both internal and external. But the brash young reformers of Satsuma and Choshu were determined to slash away the impenetrable thicket of bureaucracy that had grown up around the shogun over the centuries.