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

by Janice P. Nimura

Meanwhile, Kenjiro made sure that Sutematsu’s English did not replace her native tongue entirely, and that her growing comfort with American ways did not eclipse her identity as a dutiful subject of the Japanese empire. They met for weekly lessons in Japanese language and Confucian philosophy. Sutematsu complained these were far more onerous than all the rest of her schoolwork in English, but underneath the griping her samurai pride was intact—enough to show off her calligraphy in Carrie’s autograph book, at least. When Kenjiro completed his degree and returned to Japan in 1875, he continued his tutelage remotely, sending his sister long letters on Japanese politics. She appreciated his attentiveness, though she did wish he’d tell her more about their family.

  Sutematsu’s education continued outside the classroom as well. Though the Bacons were far from wealthy, Leonard Bacon’s stature won him membership in the Hillhouse Society, a group of New Haven’s leading academics and businessmen who met regularly to discuss scholarship, art, and civic affairs. Hillhouse Avenue, lined with mansions and stately elms, was home to most of them; just a few years earlier, Charles Dickens had declared it the most beautiful street in America. The Hillhouse wives had their own group, Our Society, founded to provide aid to needy women and children. Sutematsu attended meetings with Alice, sewing clothes and making diapers for struggling black families or refugees from the Franco-Prussian War. It was her first exposure to charity; private philanthropy was unknown in Japan.

  The days had room in them for play as well as work. Across the street from the Bacons lived the family of William Dwight Whitney, professor of Sanskrit at Yale and secretary of the American Oriental Society. Whitney’s eldest daughter, Marian, fell just between Alice and Sutematsu in age, and she was their schoolmate as well as their neighbor. Another serious scholar growing up in a family that prized learning above most things, Marian was also tremendous fun. In the cold months the girls played checkers and went sleighing and skated in the frozen back yards of their friends; in warmer weather they climbed trees and swam. Sutematsu joined in with grace and enthusiasm. “I remember how, when we began to learn to dive, her lithe figure would spring into the air from the little raft and go down straight as an arrow into the water, while we splashed and floundered and fell flat upon the surface,” Marian wrote.

  New Haven’s summers were sweltering, and the Bacons were in the habit of escaping northward to the deeper shade and cooler breezes of Colebrook, a village high in the Litchfield Hills. It was fifty miles by train to Winsted, and another dusty hour by cart from there. Not much more than an inn, a store, and a church, Colebrook was home to the Carrington sisters, Catherine Bacon’s unmarried cousins, both in their late twenties. Miss Kate and Miss Sarah took in boarders to supplement the income from their parents’ farm, and their city cousins were regular summer guests. There were lakes to bathe in, fish to catch, and evenings filled with poetry and charades.

  In the summer of 1874 there was another lodger at the Carringtons’ white frame house down the hill from the center of the village: Tan Yaoxun (or Yew Fun Tan, as he was known at the time), one of two boys from the Chinese Educational Mission whom Miss Kate and Miss Sarah had agreed to host. Tan was twelve. Like Sutematsu, two years his senior, the boy enjoyed Catherine Bacon’s motherly attentions. At the end of that summer, when Catherine left with the girls for the start of school in New Haven, Tan’s letters followed her. “Do you remember saying that you would like to hear from me frequently?” he wrote. “I have not forgotten what you have said, if you have.” He told Mrs. Bacon of his triumphs and travails at fishing—“I was provoked because I could not catch that big trout, though I ought not to let my angry passions rise”—and sent his best “to the Miss Bacons and all.” “All,” presumably, included the Bacons’ unusual ward. Tan’s path and Sutematsu’s would continue to intersect in the years to come.

  By 1875 Sutematsu was ready to sit the entrance examination for Hillhouse High School, the jewel in the crown of New Haven’s young public education system. Its graduates, if they were boys, tended to matriculate at Yale; if girls, to become teachers—at least until they married. The exam covered arithmetic, grammar, geography, and US history, along with penmanship, music, and drawing. “Analyze the following sentence,” read one grammar question: “They who are set to rule over others, must be just.” In geography, applicants were instructed to name a country corresponding to each of the following: “1. Savage, 2. Barbarous, 3. Half civilized, 4. Civilized, 5. Enlightened.” If she had ever peeked into her brothers’ schoolbooks—the progressive ones by Fukuzawa, that is, which they had studied in exile—this would have rung a bell.

  Three years earlier Sutematsu had lacked enough English to beg for a Western-style dress. She passed the test easily. There is no record of how she answered the geography question.

  AMONGST LESSONS, SKATING parties, trips to Colebrook, and tutorials with Kenjiro, Sutematsu looked forward to her visits with the one person whose company she particularly craved: Shige. No matter how rapid their progress in English or how kind their hosts, each found the other’s company a relief. Shige lived barely a half hour’s walk across town, but she and Sutematsu saw each other only occasionally, limited by their studies and the rhythms of their respective families.

  Though Leonard Bacon had regretted Shige’s departure, he had approved of her destination: the home of John Stevens Cabot Abbott, a Congregational minister as prominent as Bacon himself, though in a more secular sphere. A graduate of Bowdoin College, where his classmates had included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Abbott found more success and satisfaction as a best-selling author than as a pastor. His first book, The Mother at Home, or The Principles of Maternal Duty, published some forty years earlier, had catapulted him to fame; since then, he had penned voluminous illustrated histories on topics including the French Revolution, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Captain Kidd. Like Bacon, Abbott held views quite consistent with the Meiji reformers’ “good wife, wise mother” ideal of women’s education: “As the mother is the guardian and guide of the early years of life, from her, goes the most powerful influence, in the formation of the character of man.”

  The Abbotts were unusually well equipped to host a student: their home on East Grand Street—a squat, two-story house on a spacious corner lot—was also a school. The Civil War had taken a generation of young men and left a generation of single women, many of whom became teachers. Abbott’s eldest daughter Ellen, in her midthirties, was one of these. Unable to bear her own children, she helped mold the minds of others’. Miss Abbott’s School, operating out of two well-appointed parlors, served nearly a hundred children in three divisions: the Primary Department, introducing the basics to scholars as young as five; the Academic Department, for those ages ten to fifteen; and the Higher Course, offering philosophy, rhetoric, and languages. First among Miss Abbott’s staff was her mother, who taught English and natural science; four other teachers and a music master completed the faculty.

  Though boys made up half of the Primary Department, they tended to move on—to other schools, or private tutors—as they grew older. Nearly all of Miss Abbott’s more advanced students were girls, and it was a constant struggle to keep them focused on their studies. “To Parents,” she wrote in the school’s explanatory pamphlet:

  A single day’s absence, or an evening party, greatly interferes with educational advancement; for the next day, in nine cases out of ten, the pupil is unfitted or unprepared. Not having been present at the previous recitation, she has not known the new lesson, and entails upon herself difficulties which follow her often for weeks. A lesson lost can never be made up.

  The stern tone belied the jolly mood that prevailed at the Abbotts’, several degrees livelier and more relaxed than the Bacons’ Puritan uprightness. To Shige, Miss Abbott was soon “Aunt Nelly” : her teacher, to be sure, but also something between mother and friend. It was Nelly who introduced Shige to the Bible and taught her how to pray. In the summer, when the school was closed, Aunt N
elly took Shige on field trips: to the Berkshires in southwestern Massachusetts; to Boston, where Shige went strawberry picking and visited the Japanese art objects at the Athenaeum; to the beach at Nantucket, where Reverend Abbott had once led a congregation; to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Shige spotted tiny goats perched on the slopes of Mount Washington. When Abbott traveled to Bowdoin to preach at commencement, Shige tagged along and got Longfellow’s autograph.

  As Sutematsu had Alice Bacon and Marian Whitney for her companions, Shige had the Pitman girls: her classmate Helen, and Helen’s younger sisters Leila and Lizzie, whose parents were neighbors and close friends of the Abbotts. When Aunt Nelly was busy with home and school, the Pitmans were always nearby. In their company, gregarious Shige moved from the schoolroom out into the larger community, attending church and Sunday school, and the occasional social. One memorable evening she went with Helen and Leila to a spelling bee pitting the women of their church against those of another. There was a breathless moment when Mrs. Pitman misspelled “catastrophe,” but then her opponent erred in turn, and the match was saved. The winner received a silk umbrella, and the runner-up, a collection of Dickens.

  In the summer of 1875, fourteen-year-old Shige lost the dubious distinction of being the only Japanese student in the neighborhood. The Pitmans, following the Abbotts’ example, invited an aspiring naval cadet named Sotokichi Uriu* to live with them while he prepared to enter the academy at Annapolis. Ironically, the curriculum at the United States Naval Academy, established in 1845, was conceived in large part by Commodore Matthew Perry, who could never have imagined a Japanese midshipman at Annapolis when he sailed his black ships into Edo Bay in 1853.

  Small and slim, with delicate features, Uriu was eighteen. Unlike the girls, blindsided by the announcement of their selection as foreign students, Uriu had been in training since the age of twelve, chosen by the elders of his domain—Kaga, on the Sea of Japan coast—to study English, physics, chemistry, navigation, and engineering with foreign teachers at the domain school. At fifteen, he traveled three hundred miles on foot to enter the Imperial Naval Academy in Tokyo, where he was a star English student and also became interested in Christianity. At the same time, he was something of a traditionalist: a fine calligrapher, a formidable opponent at the board game called go, and fond of chanting the haunting lyrics of classical noh drama.

  Uriu’s ambitions matched his talents, but he kept his ferocious drive largely to himself. Plucky and popular, he was a good citizen and a loyal friend, if a bit serious-minded. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” he wrote in Shige’s autograph book, “and the Knowledge of the holy is understanding.” The Pitmans were fond of him, and even after he enrolled at Annapolis he continued to return to them for vacations. He made his foster family proud—though he tipped the scales at barely 115 pounds, his fellow midshipmen quickly acknowledged his superior moral stature. “It used to be a joke in our class that we included one Christian, and that one was Uriu,” one of his classmates remembered. When it came to soothing the “unruly spirits” in the class, Uriu was the one they turned to. What a lovely boy, Mrs. Pitman would tell Shige approvingly. He’d make a nice match for you.

  THOUGH INCREASINGLY AT home in New Haven, and secure in each other’s friendship, Sutematsu and Shige did not forget Ume back in Georgetown, and they made periodic trips to see her. Birdsey Northrop, keeping a paternal eye on the girls as Connecticut’s secretary of education, escorted Sutematsu and Shige to Washington at Christmas in 1874.

  “Ume is as talkative as ever,” Sutematsu wrote to Mrs. Bacon from Georgetown. “She can read, and recite poetries very well, and it was true that she received four prizes, do you not remember, that we read about it in news paper in Colebrook?” In contrast to the frugal Bacons, the Lanmans were lavish hosts. “After dinner,” Sutematsu wrote later the same day. “I can not write to you any more for I ate so much oysters, that I can not write.”

  In New Haven, Sutematsu and Shige spent hours thinking and talking about Japan, with Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro and then Shige’s neighbor Sotokichi Uriu adding to the conversation. In sharp contrast, Ume could barely remember life before the Lanmans, who treated her as a pampered daughter rather than an emissary from a foreign government. She had been such a little girl when she arrived, and the move to their home such a relief after the nomadic year that preceded it. Undistracted by family matters or financial concerns, Adeline Lanman devoted all her attention to Ume, who returned her affection in equal measure.

  “Dear Mrs. Lanman, I thought I would write you this note to tell you how I spent the evening and to tell you what time I went to bed so that if I was asleep when you came home you would know all,” she wrote the first time her new mother left her to go out for the evening. “I am now undressing. I shall try to be a good girl tomorrow, better than today. I have a hard time to find my nightgown. I have said my prayers and going to jump right into bed.” It is hard to imagine the youngest daughter of a samurai household scribbling such an intimate note to her absent mother, even assuming samurai mothers ever went visiting after dark.

  Ume’s orientation in the world was shifting. To her own mother, Hatsuko, she wrote—in English—of a dream she’d had: “I dreamt that I went home to get Koto [Ume’s older sister] to come with me to America. Mrs. Lanman went with me, and after we inquired a good many times, we were shown to a house. That was Mr. Tsuda’s. It was a American three story house and I rang the door bell and Koto came there she was so glad to see me.” For her part, Hatsuko was both startled by and grateful for the degree of attention her daughter was receiving. “I am always thinking that Ume is a great deal happier in your home than in Japan[,] for she enjoys such comfort under your care, and is loved as if she were your own child,” Hatsuko wrote (in Japanese) to Adeline Lanman. Ryo, the oldest of the original five girls, now back in Tokyo, had visited the Tsudas and described the Lanmans’ home in glowing terms.

  The Lanmans enrolled Ume at Miss Lucy Stephenson’s grandly named Georgetown Collegiate Institute, a small school for girls that had just opened its doors a few blocks away. A neighbor child, Martha Miller, also attended the school, and Ume and Mattie were soon fast friends. It was Mattie’s job to fend off the unwelcome attentions of children—both black and white—who tried to pull Ume’s long thick braid on their morning walk to school. It wasn’t long, however, before Ume established herself as something of a force. She excelled in croquet and lawn tennis, and always took the lead when friends came to play under the trees in the side garden. She was a fiercely competitive chess player, and a rather fussy eater, steering clear of unfamiliar dairy products—even ice cream—and preferring cured meats to fresh. The Lanmans delighted in her strong will. “She always decidedly objected to being interfered with by the offer of outside suggestions,” Charles Lanman wrote.

  By the end of her second year at Miss Stephenson’s, Ume was at the top of her class, covered with glory at the school’s second annual commencement ceremony, the news of which had reached Sutematsu and the Bacons in Colebrook. “A large number of premiums were distributed, and it will surprise the public to learn that not less than four of them were received by the young Japanese, Miss Ume Tsuda, for composition, writing, arithmetic and deportment,” the Daily National Republican announced. “And it may be stated here that, at a previous examination of the class in elocution, while the remainder of the pupils read their pieces from a book, this child recited hers from memory, without making a single mistake, and her piece was the White-footed Deer, by Bryant.”

  At eighteen stanzas, William Cullen Bryant’s ballad was indeed a feat of memorization for a nine-year-old. Proud of his charge, Charles Lanman wrote to the poet himself of Ume’s triumph. “If there is any merit in my poem,” Bryant replied, “it consists in the spirit of humanity towards the inferior animals which it inculcates. She may forget the poetry, such as it is; but the lesson, I hope, will not be forgotten.” Ume’s accomplishments, commented another ne
wspaper, “would imply that there is a live Yankee element in the Oriental mind.”

  As Ume’s life in English blossomed, her Japanese withered, though at first the Lanmans did their best to preserve it. A month or two after Ume settled in Georgetown, the Lanmans invited Kiyo Kawamura, a sixteen-year-old student, to live with them. Sent by his father to acquire an American education, but more interested in becoming an artist, Kawamura received instruction in English and painting from Charles Lanman in exchange for tutoring Ume in Japanese. The arrangement was brief: Kawamura left to pursue his art in Paris after six months.

  Two years later Ume was still without a tutor—a circumstance that the Japanese minister in Washington, Kiyonari Yoshida, deemed unacceptable. “Mr. Yoshida said I must learn Japanese,” Ume wrote to her mother. “He has a lady, or a maid, to keep company with his wife, and she will teach me Japanese.” These lessons, if they ever took place, were ineffective, however, and if Charles Lanman saw the situation as something of a “calamity,” Ume’s father did not share his dismay. In his correspondence with Lanman—always in English—Sen Tsuda expressed no concern at his daughter’s loss of fluency; she would pick it up again when she returned. His daughter was only too happy to agree. “Ume herself was wont to say that as she had come to America to study English, there was no sense in bothering herself with Japanese,” wrote Lanman.

  Spongelike, Ume soaked up the Lanmans’ upper-middle-class priorities: self-improvement and intellectual curiosity balanced by a Protestant piety convinced of its own righteousness and eager to rescue those still laboring in the dark. Charles Lanman’s work at the Japanese legation kept him ever mindful of his responsibility to foster a sense of civic duty in Ume. Eager to show off his precocious charge, he assigned her essay topics and shared the results with both his colleagues and Ume’s family in Tokyo. Her responses combined the Lanmans’ sense of civilizing mission with a hazy impulse to defend her heritage. “Dear Mr. Lanman,” she wrote for one assignment: