Several years later, the two-sworded, silk-robed samurai Kuroda, attacker of foreigners, had become a mustachioed Meiji bureaucrat in a well-tailored Western-style military uniform. Turning to the West for guidance, he traveled to the United States, touring coal mines, lumber mills, and breweries; observing American farming and mining techniques; and inviting American experts to advise the newly created Hokkaido Colonization Board, formed to strengthen the Japanese presence in the northern territories, which were eyed covetously by neighboring Russia. Richly endowed with forests and fishing grounds, Hokkaido was inhabited only by indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes of bear-worshiping Ainu. What better place, Kuroda argued, to send the displaced and disaffected remnants of the cash-strapped warrior class?
Upon his return to Japan, Kuroda recruited promising young men to study abroad and help him in his cause—among them Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro, still a struggling student in Tokyo. Kenjiro was selected despite, but also because of, his lineage: though the stain of defeat still tarnished the name of Aizu, no one doubted the strength and resolve of its warriors, and its cold winters were thought to be good preparation for life in Hokkaido. In January 1871 sixteen-year-old Kenjiro sailed for America, with a Tokyo-made “Western-style” suit that looked more like a kimono, and secondhand shoes, conspicuously white and several sizes too big.
IT WASN’T JUST the men of business Kuroda had observed in America. Throughout the trip, he had been astonished by American women. At home, females of his rank stayed largely out of sight; the teahouses and reception rooms where men transacted business were strictly off limits. Samurai wives sewed, served, bore children, and managed the household for their husbands, who spent their leisure hours in the pleasure quarters, enjoying the attentions of a different sort of woman, trained in music, dance, and sparkling conversation rather than the domestic arts. Women were obedient or entertaining; beyond that, they were unimportant.
But these American women! They had opinions, which they didn’t hesitate to offer—and the men listened. They joined their husbands at social gatherings and official ceremonies. They presided at table. Men gave up their seats for women, doffed their hats to them, made way for them on the sidewalk, fetched and carried for them. In public. Clearly, American women had a happier lot than their Japanese sisters. Why?
The answer, Kuroda concluded, was education. American women of the higher classes were well-informed and well-read, and though naturally they did not aspire to lead businesses or armies, they were the intellectual companions of their husbands and sons, who turned to them not just for practical needs, but for emotional and spiritual strength. Surely this rich home life helped explain the staggering successes of American men in industry and commerce. Upon reaching Washington and the company of his friend Arinori Mori, the young and rather dashing Japanese chargé d’affaires there, Kuroda shared his conclusions, even going so far as to exhort Mori to find himself an American wife. Reassuring Kuroda of his patriotism, Mori politely declined.
Undaunted, Kuroda went back to Japan and drafted a memorandum to the Meiji government. The goal of colonizing wild Hokkaido would never be accomplished by sending mostly untrained men north and hoping for the best. The first thing to do, he wrote, was to educate Japanese women, who bore the responsibility for the first decade of their children’s lives. Educated mothers would raise enlightened sons, who would then grow up to lead Japan, “as a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” Unwritten, but perhaps implied, was a warning: as long as the Japanese kept their women in the shadows, Westerners would have trouble recognizing Japan as a civilized nation.
Young men like Kenjiro Yamakawa were already studying abroad and returning with invaluable tools. It was time to send young women to join them. Upon their return, they would be qualified to teach in the girls’ schools that Kuroda envisioned; they would also make excellent wives for the new statesmen of Japan as they emerged onto the global stage.
Kuroda’s thoughts were well received, aligned as they were with the fundamental goals of the reform-minded Meiji leaders. One of their first acts upon seizing power had been to draft a statement of purpose: the Charter Oath, proclaimed by the emperor at his enthronement in 1868. The oath announced the radical intentions of the new government: to overhaul Japan’s political, economic, and social institutions and guide the country toward equal footing with the West. “Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature,” it read. “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.” The restrictions on engagement with the wider world, enforced over the preceding two and a half centuries, were thus reversed at a stroke.
Kuroda’s timing was excellent. In the fall of 1871, Tomomi Iwakura, a former courtier and newly minted Meiji minister, announced a plan to lead an embassy to the nations with whom Japan had signed treaties, starting with the United States. It was time to heed the call of the Charter Oath and seek knowledge throughout the world. The delegates would observe Western institutions and technology firsthand, introduce Japan’s new leadership to foreign governments, and broach the issue of renegotiating the unequal trade agreements forced on the doomed shogunate more than a decade earlier. Dozens of students would travel with the embassy. Why not add a few girls?
IN THE YEARS following the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships, Japan had sent other official embassies abroad, with mixed success. The first, to the United States in 1860, was largely ceremonial: a chance for the shogunate to assert its dignity in the wake of the first humiliating unequal treaty signings, as much for the Japanese audience as for the Americans. A middle-ranking and rather motley group, the members of this first delegation had only the sketchiest concept of life outside Japan; many were selected merely for their willingness to consider going abroad. Inexperienced, nervous, and deeply wary of the West, they shuffled through their diplomatic obligations hurriedly, refusing many invitations and determined to get home as soon as possible.
The Americans, flattered that Japan had chosen to visit their nation first, greeted the Japanese “princes” with ecstatic enthusiasm. In New York, hundreds of thousands of spectators watched the procession of ambassadors down Broadway on June 16, 1860, escorted by seven thousand welcoming troops, a spectacle immortalized by Walt Whitman in “The Errand-Bearers” :
Over sea, hither from Niphon,
Courteous, the Princes of Asia, swart-cheek’d princes,
First-comers, guests, two-sworded princes,
Lesson-giving princes, leaning back in their open barouches,
bare-headed, impassive,
This day they ride through Manhattan.
But those impassive faces belied bewilderment and discomfort. Yukichi Fukuzawa, the prolific author and educator whose works would one day enlighten Aizu’s exiled sons, was a twenty-five-year-old member of that first delegation. Despite years of study in Dutch and English, he found himself baffled by such novelties as horse-drawn carriages, ice cubes, and ballroom dancing. Even a smoke was a challenge: seeing nothing he recognized as an ashtray, Fukuzawa emptied the bowl of his pipe into a wad of paper that he stashed in his sleeve. Wisps of smoke began to emerge from his robe. “The light that I thought I had crushed out was quietly setting me afire!”
Though the press coverage of the 1860 embassy was almost universally respectful, the behavior of the average American citizen did not always rise to that standard. When the envoys arrived in Washington, mobs surrounded their carriages and gaped. “One burly fellow swore that all [the Japanese men] wanted was to have a little more crinoline and be right out decent looking nigger wenches,” noted a reporter.
The group led by Tomomi Iwakura in 1871 would be far more impressive. Eleven years after the journey of Whitman’s inscrutable princes, Japan had not just a new government but a new attitude on the part of its young statesmen: active, curious, determined, embracing the future rather than protecting the past. Many of Iwakura’s men had already studied abroad, and
several spoke competent English. The average age of the forty-six ambassadors was thirty-two.
Among them were most of the rising stars of Japan’s new leadership, including the very men who had written the Charter Oath. Many of them would become household names in the decades to come: Takayoshi Kido, a senior councillor; Hirobumi Ito, minister of public works; and Toshimichi Okubo, minister of finance. Kunitake Kume, a Confucian scholar, was the embassy’s official scribe; his monumental True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe would fill five volumes and sell thousands of copies.
The addition of a few girls to the sizable contingent of young male students joining the delegation would not be a problem. The American ambassador, Charles DeLong, would be traveling with the group, and his wife, Elida Vineyard DeLong, would make a convenient chaperone. In his position as deputy chair of the Hokkaido Colonization Board, Kuroda began recruiting for his pet project. The offer was generous: ten years in America, all expenses paid, with a stipend of eight hundred dollars per year—a stunning sum to spend on anyone, let alone untested girls.
Yet there were no applicants. Who would send a small daughter away while she was still useful at home, only to get her back too late to marry, assuming anyone would want to marry a girl untutored in the duties of a Japanese wife? And to America, of all places, where the loud, smelly, yellow-haired, blue-eyed barbarians wore their filthy shoes right into the house and gorged on animal flesh at every meal? For most families high placed enough to see the recruiting notices, it was unthinkable. As the Iwakura Mission’s departure date approached, Kuroda was forced to launch a second round of recruiting. This time he received responses from a handful of applicants, all of whom were accepted at once.
SUTEMATSU KNEW NOTHING of this. In the spring of 1871, after the Aizu exiles’ first hungry winter in snowbound Tonami, her brother Hiroshi had sent her to Hakodate, just across the Tsugaru Straits in Hokkaido. Already far from her homeland, she would now be isolated from her family as well—but at least she would be fed. Compared to barren Tonami, Hakodate was a bustling oasis; one of the first ports opened to foreign trade as a result of Commodore Perry’s negotiations in 1854, it was now a regular destination for diplomats and missionaries, as well as traders. Sent to lodge with Takuma Sawabe, one of Japan’s first Russian Orthodox converts, Sutematsu later moved to the home of a French missionary family and spent six months in a town whose harbor buzzed with international shipping. Western-style buildings had sprung up to house the consular staffs of nine different countries—with sash windows that slid up instead of sideways, white clapboard siding instead of unpainted wood, shingled roofs instead of tile or thatch, wrought-iron fences instead of plastered walls. Sutematsu had never seen homes built without tatami floors and shoji screens. Hakodate was a first taste of the West.
By the time Kuroda issued his recruitment notices, Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro had already left for America. Hiroshi, leader of the exiled Aizu domain, had no trouble imagining his youngest sister there as well. She had acquitted herself admirably, during both the siege of Wakamatsu and the longer trials of prison camp and exile. She showed promise as a student, and Hiroshi had confidence she could rise to the challenges of a foreign classroom at least as honorably as she had faced the struggles of the previous three years. At the very least, her departure would mean one less sister to support. And who knew? If she managed to return someday, accustomed to American ways and speaking fluent English, perhaps she could contribute somehow to Japan’s modernization—and to the rehabilitation of her family’s good name.
In October of 1871 Hiroshi traveled to Hakodate to inform his sister that she would be leaving immediately for Tokyo. There she would board a ship for America, where she would study at government expense for a decade. Sutematsu had no way to comprehend his words. He might as well have told her she was moving to the moon. But her Aizu training left no room for disobedience. She packed to leave without question.
On her way south to Tokyo, she stopped in Tonami to bid her mother farewell. Toi was horrified by the decision to send her daughter away, but Hiroshi was the head of their household, and his decision was final. When they parted, Toi bestowed a new name on her youngest child—a common practice among the literate classes to mark a new life phase. From now on, the erstwhile Sakiko would be called Sutematsu, an odd name to the Japanese ear, written with the characters for “discard” and “pine tree” : The second character contained an echo of the Matsudaira family, lords of Aizu, and of Wakamatsu, seat of the domain, to signify her origins; the first could be read as bitter acknowledgment that such a proud lineage had come to an end. It was time to let go of the past. But matsu (“pine” ) is also a homonym for the verb “to wait.” A girl cast to the winds, then—sacrificed to circumstance, yet noble and enduring like the pine. Her mother would await her return.
A GIRL OF eleven, under normal circumstances, is betwixt and between: too big for dolls and playing house, eager to be entrusted with “real” responsibilities, yet not quite wise enough to make out the road ahead. But Sutematsu had already seen more horror than most adults: the heaps of bodies left unburied during the siege of Tsuruga Castle, the dying agony of her sister-in-law, the slower deaths from hunger and cold in Tonami, the separation from her family in Hakodate. The festival dolls arranged on their red-draped tiers each spring in Aizu were but a hazy memory of a life that now seemed to have belonged to someone else. Her home no longer existed, her mother had bid her a final farewell, and now she would leave Japan itself behind, along with the only language she could speak. Hiroshi hurried her to Tokyo, where officials from the Hokkaido Colonization Board and the Ministry of Education were waiting—along with four other girls, looking every bit as bewildered as Sutematsu felt.
Two of them were already young women: Ryo Yoshimasu and Tei Ueda, both fourteen years old. The other two, Sutematsu was relieved to note, were younger, even smaller than she was. Shige Nagai, stocky and round-faced with laughing eyes, was ten. Ume Tsuda, exquisitely pretty, was only six. Ryo and Tei instinctively took Sutematsu under their wing—she had come from so far away, and had no one to help her in Tokyo—while Sutematsu, always the littlest sister, suddenly acquired two littler ones in Shige and Ume.
After so much loss, here was a new family of sorts. All five were samurai daughters, all five from families on the losing side of the recent upheaval. These were the chosen girls, if chosen they were, as there exists no record of any others having applied. Life accelerated quickly. The girls’ recruitment having been a hasty afterthought, their departure with the Iwakura Mission was already upon them.
WHETHER IN REMOTE Aizu or bustling Tokyo, a samurai girl’s life had always been lived largely within her family compound’s walls. Now every day seemed to consist of dashing from place to place. Hitherto, people moved about on foot, or else rode in a kago, a basketlike palanquin swinging queasily from bamboo poles borne on the shoulders of trotting bearers. The passenger might be cushioned by a folded futon, but the dusty and jolting journey was never comfortable. In Tokyo, however, the kago had been replaced by the smoother and more maneuverable jinrikisha. The two-wheeled, canopied buggies raced up and down Tokyo’s narrow streets, pulled by wiry runners wearing leggings and broad bowl-shaped hats to keep off the sun. By 1871, not two years after their invention, there were twenty-five thousand jinrikishas plying Tokyo’s narrow streets, their rattling wheels and shouting runners adding considerably to the urban din.
Bowling along on wheels was novelty enough, but the girls also received an invitation to ride the new seventeen-mile railway from Tokyo to Yokohama, financed by the British and so recently completed it was not yet open to the public. The Japanese contractors who built the line (under close foreign supervision) had never seen a train. It had an English chief engineer and a foreign crew, and, to the girls’ astonishment, it pulled itself.
There were formal functions to attend, hosted by high
-ranking officials. There was no time to have Western-style clothes made, but unlike Western dresses, kimonos were sewn with straight seams from cloth of standard width and needed no fitting. The new finery, paid for by the government, was urgently required. These were the first girls ever selected to receive a foreign education, and in honor of that extraordinary circumstance, they would be the first girls of samurai rank ever granted an audience with the empress herself.
THE EMPRESS HARUKO had only recently undergone her own transformation into the first lady of the court. A pedigreed daughter of the Kyoto nobility—an ancient and inbred class distinct from the samurai—she was something of a prodigy: reading at the age of three, composing poetry at five, studying calligraphy at seven, and plucking the koto (a stringed instrument) at twelve. She was equally adept in the traditional arts of tea ceremony and flower arrangement. Her family was one of the five from which the imperial consort was traditionally chosen. Her suitability was unquestioned except for a single detail: she was older than her intended. This in itself was not insurmountable; there was precedent for imperial unions with older women. The problem was that the difference in their ages was three years—an inauspicious number. But no matter. The girl’s official birth date was quickly shifted later by one year, and in January 1869 the marriage went forward—the groom sixteen, his bride, officially, eighteen.
Until her marriage, Haruko—along with all her foremothers—had lived a life confined strictly within the limits of etiquette, protocol, and the precincts of the imperial palace. Within the year, she and the Emperor Mutsuhito had relocated to Tokyo. Two more years had passed, and the cascade of changes had been dizzying. Most recently, the Meiji leaders had decided that the “delicate and effeminate old aristocrats” who had heretofore managed every aspect of daily life in the imperial household in Kyoto should be replaced by “manly and incorruptible samurai” as the emperor’s most intimate advisers. These advisers had a new responsibility: tutoring the young emperor in history and current affairs, both foreign and domestic. Japan’s emperors had always lived in seclusion, kept in ignorance of the wider world by the shoguns who held true power. All Mutsuhito’s father had seen of Commodore Perry’s visit in 1853 were the demonic caricatures of Edo’s woodblock artists. Breaking the precedent of centuries, the young emperor would henceforth become a student of the times.
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back Page 4
