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

by Janice P. Nimura

  Their first stop was Sacramento, California’s capital. The schedule included a tour of the insane asylum at Stockton, and then it was on to the chambers of the state legislature. (Wags insisted that the delegates wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.) As usual, the girls stayed in their rooms at the Orleans Hotel, which afforded privacy but continued to hinder their education in American manners. They ate what was placed before them without much understanding of what it was or how it should taste, and because they usually dined alone, they remained unenlightened. When a pot of butter appeared on the table that evening, each girl took her spoon and scooped up a mouthful, there being no one to demonstrate its use as a condiment. At least their isolation allowed them to grimace and gag unobserved.

  Though the legislature had spent the previous few days bickering about who should be responsible for the entertainment expenses of the embassy (breaking off their arguments only when the delegates themselves entered the chambers for a visit), Sacramento saw the Japanese off with yet another banquet on their final evening, complete with miniature statues of President Grant gracing each table. The festivities ended with rousing choruses of “America,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Home, Sweet Home,” sung with more spirit than harmony. In the wee hours of the morning on February 2, the delegates began their transcontinental trip in earnest.

  THE SUN WAS high and the passengers still groggy when the train reached Cape Horn, a particularly stunning stretch of track high above the American River. “Far below, at the foot of the valley, was a tiny village near the river, which meandered like a winding sash,” marveled Kume. “We could see people the size of peas and inch-high horses moving along a thread-like road.” Two more locomotives were added for the climb above the snow line and across the Sierra Nevada. Flurries whipped past the double-hung windows, which began to fog over, obscuring tier upon tier of jagged peaks. Snowsheds covered the tracks for miles at a time, with shafts of sunlight reflecting off the snow and slashing into the darkened cars through gaps in the boards. At Summit, seven thousand feet above sea level, the train was coupled to a snowplow for the long descent.

  From there it was on to the Great Basin, with endless sagebrush desert replacing the dramatic Sierra. From the train the travelers could see Indians in the dome-shaped thatched dugouts of their winter camps—a long way from the cupolas of the Grand Hotel. “Having journeyed through a realm of civilization and enlightenment, we were now crossing a very ancient, uncivilized wilderness,” Kume wrote. He found no romance in the scene: “Their features display the bone structure often seen among our own base people and outcasts.”

  The next stop was Ogden, Utah Territory, which they reached on February 4—and were then unable to leave. Snow had blockaded the Union Pacific Railroad. They could consider themselves lucky: passengers trapped for days aboard snowbound trains farther east were surviving on salt fish and crackers, and piling out to help railroad workers shovel snow that had drifted as high as the smokestacks of the engines. Resigned, the delegates transferred to a branch line to wait out the delay in Salt Lake City, thirty-five miles to the south.

  In 1872, Salt Lake City was a handful of muddy streets with board sidewalks, frequented by ranchers, miners, soldiers, and new Mormon converts attracted from as far east as England. The Japanese travelers put up at the Townsend House, Salt Lake City’s leading hotel: a wood-frame building with a long veranda and a corral out back for cattle. Though there was a spacious “ball-room” upstairs, the bedrooms were tiny and the partitions between them thin.

  Within hours of arrival, Iwakura received an invitation from Brigham Young, patriarch of the Mormon Church, requesting the pleasure of his company. As diplomatic etiquette dictated that Young should be the caller and not the called-upon, the ambassador politely declined. The messenger insisted that Young was eager to meet the Japanese visitors but found it impossible to present himself at the Townsend House. Why?, the ambassador inquired. Well, said the messenger, the prophet Brigham unfortunately found himself detained at home in the custody of a federal officer. The first target of President Grant’s antipolygamy campaign, Young had been arrested for “lascivious cohabitation” several months earlier and was awaiting trial. He had sixteen wives and forty-eight children.

  Iwakura frowned. “We came to the United States to see the President of this great nation,” he said, choosing his words with care. “We do not know how he would like for us to call on a man who had broken the laws of his country and was under arrest.” A few days later, however, a party of touring delegates did make an official stop at Brigham Young’s house, in the company of Charles DeLong. “His power is equivalent to a feudal lord’s,” Kume wrote of Young, describing his house as “dignified and looking like a castle.” DeLong later claimed he hadn’t realized where their guides were taking them, but non-Mormon leaders were not amused. Iwakura, perhaps cannier than DeLong, had somehow arranged not to be part of the group that evening.

  For the duration of his stay, Iwakura maintained a discreet distance from Salt Lake City’s Mormons. Crowning the visit was a banquet hosted by the city’s leading gentiles—dinner for 120, followed by dancing. For once, the girls were in attendance. “Mrs. DeLong, with the bearing and mien of a queen, and the Japanese girls, in their rich, quaint costumes, absorbed the constant attention of the guests,” the Chronicle’s reporter relayed to San Francisco by telegraph. After dinner, the dignified speeches gave way to dancing—something the Japanese delegates found uncomfortable to watch. “The social customs in this remote mountain area were, we thought, somewhat less than refined,” Kume wrote delicately.

  Days of anticlimax followed, as departure was postponed again, and yet again. “We had seen everything which might possibly be interesting and the bright moon was now full,” Kume wrote. Many of the delegates frequented the Warm Springs Bath House, a mile away, where for a quarter they could soak chest-deep in heated pools—a pleasure denied to them since leaving Japan.

  Still kimono clad, the girls stayed out of sight; their clothes, in addition to making them conspicuous, did little to keep them warm. In addition, Ryo, having endured the embarrassment of the shipboard mock trial, was now suffering the effects of snow blindness, her eyes painful and watering from gazing at the dazzling landscape without protection. From the windows of the Townsend House, the girls saw snowball fights and sleigh riding for the first time. Hirobumi Ito, again more solicitous than the other ambassadors, visited their rooms to entertain them with ghost stories, switching to fairy tales when it was time for bed.

  After nearly three weeks the rails were cleared at last, and on February 22 the embassy left Salt Lake City for Chicago. Now two dining cars—Pullman’s latest innovation—were coupled to their train, which eliminated the need to stop for meals. After more than a month spent mostly confined to hotel rooms, the girls were overwhelmed by the vast landscapes through which they passed. Faces pressed to the windows, they watched the craggy peaks of the Wasatch Front glide by. After dark, the edges of the canyons were etched in moonlight against the sky.

  . . .

  HALFWAY THROUGH WYOMING Territory they crossed the Continental Divide and began the descent toward the Great Plains. Hours went by without a glimpse of anything that could be called a town. “Although one may tire of hearing about the vastness of the United States,” Kume wrote, “when one experiences it, it is even more astonishing than one could believe.” The Rockies had receded below the western horizon, and there was nothing in any direction but grass, cropped by herds of buffalo and bands of wild horses.

  As they approached the Missouri River, the scenery changed again: plowed fields and pastureland now, with wooded areas visible in the distance. Crowds gathered in the towns they passed. At Omaha, memorably, a group of schoolgirls came to the station, clapping and waving and blowing kisses; for the Japanese girls, it was a reassuring glimpse of friendly peers, however bewilderingly strange their behavior or the setting might be. Not all the onlookers were so welcoming. “Show yourselve
s, you yaller duffers,” men shouted, shoving up against the windows of the train. “Come out here, and let us see you.”

  A reception committee came out from Chicago to welcome the embassy at Aurora, a western suburb of the city. Thousands were on hand at the station, and the mood was festive. When the train pulled in, Aurora’s nimbler citizens leaped onto the couplings between the cars, climbed onto their roofs, and perched on each other’s backs. Faces crowded every window. The delegates were in the dining car, wielding their knives and forks with calm decorum at window-side tables draped with white linen, in stark contrast to the melee raging outside.

  The welcoming committee boarded, the train gathered speed, and within a mile the young Aurorans who had climbed atop the train jumped to the ground. As the aldermen of Chicago shook hands with the ranking ambassadors, the girls withdrew to a corner of the car, though the stripes and flowers of their kimonos were, as usual, conspicuous among the dark suits of the men. “Their features are less intellectual than those of the males, the noses and chins being indistinct of outlines, and indicating a want of firmness,” a Chicago Tribune reporter commented, and then he contradicted himself: “They seem to bear their isolation from the parental fireside, and the loss of fond mothers, with firmness.” Having read reports of these “intelligent, bright, and vivacious”—not to mention attractive—young ladies in the previous weeks, he was somewhat surprised by the quiet group, unable to communicate with the Americans and largely ignored by their male compatriots. They looked lonely.

  Carriages were waiting at the depot when the train reached Chicago on February 26. The vast station roared with freight and passenger cars trundling ceaselessly over an intricate web of track. “Most of the stations up to now had been rather insignificant places,” Kume noted. Chicago was a metropolis.

  The girls were wrapped against the cold in heavy red woolen shawls, as yet their only item of Western clothing. This was about to change, though; Mrs. DeLong’s intransigence had at last driven the girls to appeal directly to Iwakura, who ordered the necessary purchases to be made during this stop.

  Mayor Joseph Medill was on hand to receive the visitors when they reached their next hotel, Tremont House. His city was not at its best; just four months earlier, the Great Chicago Fire had left much of it a smoking ruin. Devastating fire was commonplace in the dense wood-and-paper streetscapes of Japanese towns. Iwakura expressed his sympathy and complimented “the wonderful recuperative powers of the American people after suffering severe injuries.” Before he left Chicago, he surprised his hosts with a donation of five thousand dollars for fire relief: a princely sum, and “the first money contribution ever made by heathen or pagan donors for the relief of Christian recipients,” noted the Tribune. One more gratifying sign that the Japanese were ready to lay aside their ancient ways and join the ranks of modern civilization.

  Iwakura’s three sons, who had left their studies in New Jersey and arrived in Chicago weeks earlier, now joined their father’s embassy. The “little almond-eyed gentlemen” had already succeeded in charming their hosts in Chicago: no “American boys of the same age, taken at random from our schools, would have passed through the ordeal of an interview with a ‘foreign’ journalist with half so much credit,” wrote the Tribune admiringly. That evening, Iwakura’s sons joined the girls for a walk, strolling through the burned-out blocks of the South Side. The boys had already spent a couple of years in American classrooms: here at last were a few sympathetic souls—teenagers, rather than ambassadors—who could tell the girls something of what awaited them.

  The train carrying the embassy pulled out of Chicago’s East Station the following evening. As the delegates rolled through Indiana and Ohio, the novelty of travel by rail wore thin. The girls were tired of sitting, but taking a stroll to the end of the car and back carried its own risks: a bump in the track could hurl an unwary passenger against the exposed stove, or send her toppling into the drinking-water tank. Opening the window meant a faceful of cinders and dust, and there was no venturing into the cars ahead or behind; the vestibule car, allowing passengers to pass from one car to the next in a moving train, had not yet been invented. There was no separate car for females either, so the girls, having nowhere to undress discreetly for bed, remained mostly clothed. The thin curtains did nothing to block the sound of the delegates’ snores. The tiny washroom contained a basin, a roller towel, a piece of soap, and very little privacy. On to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where the tracks ran through the center of town, and the cars were uncoupled and pulled by horses, with drivers on each car blowing horns to warn pedestrians. And finally, Washington.

  SNOW WAS FALLING in the District of Columbia on leap day, February 29, when the five Pullman cars at last rolled to a stop. Waiting on the platform was a lithe young Japanese man with a mane of black hair swept back from his brow, wise eyes and full lips framed by a strong brow and full beard. In contrast to his recently arrived compatriots, he seemed very much at home, his suit well cut, his linen freshly starched. Arinori Mori, Japanese chargé d’affaires in Washington, had, after all, spent most of his adult life abroad. Then again, he was only twenty-four.

  Mori’s early training as the son of a Satsuma samurai would have felt familiar to Sutematsu’s brothers in Aizu: discipline, stoicism, high standards. The difference, in Mori’s case, was his early attraction to English, in a domain whose leaders quickly realized the power of England and America. At the age of seventeen, Mori had joined a small group of students chosen by Satsuma leaders to be smuggled out of Japan. Three years of travel in England, Europe, and the American Northeast had accelerated his education. By 1871, the new Meiji government had appointed him the first official representative of Japan in Washington. Brilliant, precociously self-possessed, iconoclastic, and stubborn, he would be described by his friend Hirobumi Ito in later years as “a Westerner born of Japan.”

  Facilitating an encounter between the most powerful men in Japan and the most powerful men in America was part of Mori’s job—a challenge he faced with confident assurance. Taking charge of the five young females the ambassadors had brought with them, however, was daunting. Neither his samurai training nor his more recently acquired diplomatic skills had prepared Mori for this. Aside from a vague mandate to get them educated, the girls came with no instructions.

  As Iwakura and the rest took their time to disembark, the girls emerged onto the platform, wearing the ready-made clothes hastily purchased for them in Chicago beneath the red shawls that shielded them from the swirling snow. “The princesses, five in number, appeared to keep their conversation to themselves,” noted a reporter for the Evening Star, “but their eyes were not inactive—every movement about the depot was watched by them.” Mori’s eyes swept from Ryo and Tei, now wearing rather unbecoming black hats perched on their foreheads, past Sutematsu and Shige, in similar ruffled dresses, and down to doll-like Ume, all but engulfed in her shawl. “What am I to do?” he blurted into the ear of his American secretary, Charles Lanman. “They have sent me a baby!”

  Mori had been at his post for a year, with Lanman at his side for the last five months. An avuncular man in his midfifties, with a broad forehead and a shock of dark hair, Charles Lanman was a genial foil for Mori’s intensity. His path to the Japanese legation was eclectic. Born in Michigan, educated in Connecticut, and trained as an accounting clerk in New York, Lanman had settled in the capital in his early thirties, working first as a journalist and then as librarian to several branches of the federal government. He was the author of a shelf of books, an accomplished painter, an avid angler, and an eager explorer of the American wilderness, especially by canoe. He told good stories and cultivated a wide circle of friends. As a navigator of Washington’s social and diplomatic currents, he was enormously helpful.

  He was also—though married for more than two decades to a Georgetown heiress—childless. To Mori’s profound relief, Lanman and his wife, Adeline, had volunteered to look after the girls during their stay in W
ashington. As Mori began shepherding the delegates toward the twenty-nine carriages and two omnibuses standing ready to convey them to lavish accommodations at the Arlington Hotel, Lanman gathered the girls for the slightly longer ride to his house. After more than two months of steamship cabins, hotel rooms, and sleeping cars, they would bid the delegates and the DeLongs farewell and spend their first night in an American home. “It is said they parted from the Minister with great reluctance, as a very warm friendship had existed between them and Mrs. DeLong,” reported the Washington papers. Any reluctance on the part of the girls probably had more to do with fear of the unknown than actual affinity for the self-satisfied Elida DeLong, however. At the Lanmans’, they would find themselves in much better hands.

  CHARLES AND ADELINE Lanman lived in a stately brick house behind a white picket fence at 120 West Street (later known as P Street) in Georgetown. Built by Mrs. Lanman’s father sixty years earlier, it had been her wedding gift. Ivy climbed its walls, and towering trees shaded the spacious garden. Its interiors reflected the aesthetic and intellectual refinement of its inhabitants: stately Hepplewhite furniture with gleaming brass fittings, shelves of books and family silver, and walls hung with oil paintings and watercolors by English and American artists, including Lanman’s own work. His fishing paraphernalia had a room to itself. Since the beginning of his tenure with Mori, Lanman had also begun to collect Japanese bits and pieces: a vase, a sword, a kimono.

  Mori arrived at his secretary’s door the next day to check on his young charges. The girls were delighted with their gracious surroundings, but the Lanmans seemed overwhelmed: a houseful of children, even ones as well behaved as these, was clearly a strain. The plan was quickly modified. Sutematsu, Shige, and Tei would move to the nearby home of Mrs. Lanman’s sister, Mrs. Hepburn, while Ryo and young Ume—whose precocious chatter had already won the Lanmans over—would remain at 120 West Street.