KEYWORDS
Although Tsuda (the little girl on the left)'s view of education as fostering “gentle, submissive and courteous women” was not quite Bryn Mawr’s — graduates liked to quote Dean Thomas’s bracing maxim, “Our failures only marry” — the English-language college Tsuda founded in Tokyo, now named in her honor, has thrived for more than a century. (see below)
Daughters of the Samurai
comes this book
inviting us to take a look
at the transcultural problems of being girly
in Meiji era Japan.
It comes as refreshingly
and as direct
as a cup of good green tea,
if without as much ceremony
inviting us to reflect
on women's destiny.
HZL
8/25/15
DAUGHTERS OF THE SAMURAI
A Journey from East to West and Back
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Through her fascinating tapestry of history and biography, New York scholar Nimura weaves the strange, vibrant tale of an insular nation coming to terms with currents of modernism it could no longer keep out.
With the shogunate abolished and the “restoration” of 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito to the Meiji throne in 1868, Japan recognized that it would need to embrace Western ideas and technology in order to compete in the civilized world, and that would include a Western education for both men and women. Japan required educated mothers to raise standards, and thus the first batch of girls to be sent to study in America for an allotted period of 10 years was recruited from high-ranking samurai families who had fallen out of favor and could spare some mouths to feed at home. Of these five young women sent across the seas in 1871, the two eldest, at 14, did not fare well and were sent back within a few months. The remaining three experienced transformative home-sharing and education opportunities in America and became fluent speakers of English. Nimura concentrates on the stories of these three singular young women: Sutematsu Yamakawa, at 11, lived with the prominent Bacon family in New Haven and eventually attended Vassar; Shige Nagai, who had arrived at age 10, also attended Vassar and ended up marrying a fellow Japanese who had studied at Annapolis Naval Academy; Ume Tsuda, at barely 7, grew up in Georgetown and graduated from Bryn Mawr. All returned to Japan to marry, yet they carried on teaching and even founded an English school for girls. From clothing to manners to speech to aspirations, Nimura shows how the meeting of East and West transformed these select young women.
An extraordinary, elegantly told story of the beginning of Japan’s education and emancipation of its women.
The ‘Daughters of the Samurai’ who changed the face of Meiji Era Japan
BY JAMES HADFIELD
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
Tsuda College, occupying a leafy campus in the western suburbs of Tokyo, is a private college where female students are educated in languages and the liberal arts. In one corner of the site, overshadowed by the stately trees that surround it, lies the final resting place of Umeko Tsuda, an early pioneer of women’s education in Japan who founded the college in 1900.
Daughters of the Samurai, by Janice P. Nimura
336 pages.
W. W. Norton & Company, Nonfiction.
336 pages.
W. W. Norton & Company, Nonfiction.
Most Japanese schoolchildren will be familiar with the story of Tsuda, who was dispatched to the U.S. for a decade-long immersion in Western culture at the tender age of six. Less well known are the tales of the other girls who accompanied her on the Iwakura Mission that began in 1871 — a high point in Japan’s early diplomatic forays overseas during the Meiji Era (1868-1912).
While two of the girls were soon sent back, the other three — Tsuda, Sutematsu Yamakawa and Shige Nagai — would spend a full decade in the U.S., eventually returning to find themselves strangers in their own country. In her engrossing new book, “Daughters of the Samurai,” Janice P. Nimura uses their stories as a window into the growing pains of a nation that rushed to embrace, then later wrinkled its nose at, Western-style modernization.
“They were chosen, basically, at random,” Nimura says, speaking from her home in New York, where she works as a literary critic and sometime history teacher. “There was no aptitude test to see whether they were fit — by pure chance they happened to have the intellect, the grit and the charm to be successful.”
Tsuda may have left the most enduring legacy, but her fellow “Iwakura girls” also played their part in advancing the cause of women in Japan. Sutematsu excelled at school and college in the States, then became an influential figure in Meiji high society when she married Iwao Oyama, the country’s minister of war.
Shige may have been less ambitious, yet she managed to raise a brood of six children while continuing her career as a music teacher — the prototypical working mother.
In retelling the women’s stories, Nimura had plenty of source material to draw on. During her years in the U.S., Sutematsu maintained a regular correspondence with the youngest daughter of her foster parents, Alice Mabel Bacon, and also penned numerous essays about her life in Japan. Meanwhile, the adult Tsuda chronicled her Japan experiences in a stream of letters to her foster mother, Adeline Lanman, which would continue for three decades.
“They all found incredible release in writing letters in English back to their friends in America,” says Nimura, describing these missives as being almost like “therapeutic journals.”
“You get these letters that, for Victorian letters, are remarkably frank and have real voices in them.”
There were, however, gaps in the record. Much of Sutematsu’s correspondence was lost when her family home was destroyed in bombings during World War II; Shige’s family holds an archive of material that it has yet to make available to the public; and at Tsuda College, where the founder is revered almost as a patron saint, Nimura found that she had to tread carefully.
“The archivists there are devoted to her legacy — and who am I?” she says. “I’m some gaijin chick who walks in and says, ‘I want to know everything about Ume!’ They’re not sure that I’m going to be respectful.”
While admitting that it’s an enormous generalization, she says that Japanese biographers tend to be more deferential in their treatment of historical figures.
“Americans like their narrative nonfiction and biographies more warts and all,” she says. “There’s more, like, ‘I want to know Lincoln on a bad day.’ ”
Nimura’s first introduction to the tale of the “Iwakura girls” came via a chance encounter in a New York library with Alice Mabel Bacon’s 1893 memoir, “A Japanese Interior.”
“(The story) just sort of crept up on me and then overtook me,” she says.
Her interest wasn’t purely academic. Married to a Japanese man who had been raised in the U.S. since the age of 3 — she jokingly describes him as a “changeling child” — Nimura could empathize with the challenges faced by these Meiji Era returnees. She also saw parallels with her own experience of moving to Japan in the mid-1990s shortly after graduating from Yale University, and struggling to find a place for herself in a community where she recalls feeling as though she were “living in the 1950s.”
“My husband used to joke when we first moved back that I should just print my resume on my shirt,” she says with a laugh.
“I would get frustrated that I was being dismissed as, you know, an expat wife.”
It’s hard to read “Daughters of the Samurai” without wondering what the architects of the Iwakura Mission would have thought of today’s Japan, currently languishing at 104th place in the Global Gender Gap Report.
Nimura describes the struggles faced by some of her female Japanese friends, who are trying to pursue professional careers while raising families, as “kind of horrifying.”
What of Shinzo Abe’s much-touted “womenomics” plan?
“I keep noticing that parallel,” she says. “In Abe’s hands right now, it’s sort of like, ‘Women are the key to Japan’s health in the future.’ Well, that’s sort of why they sent girls with the Iwakura Mission — this idea that maybe women are part of the solution. It’s not a new idea, but it’s new all over again, and that’s dismaying that it is still a new idea.”
For college students today, junior year is considered the optimal occasion for study abroad, a time when they have “transitioned” from the comforts of home, declared a major and acquired a smattering of a foreign language. For three Japanese girls in 1871 — Sutematsu Yamakawa, age 11; Shige Nagai, 10; and Ume Tsuda, 6 — study abroad began much earlier and lasted for 10 long years. They were transformed in the process, as was the country they left behind. “Though they were, each of them, purebred daughters of the samurai,” Janice P. Nimura remarks in this beautifully written book, “they became hybrid by nurture,” at home neither in their adopted country nor in their homeland.
“Daughters of the Samurai” begins like a fairy tale, with three clueless children charged with an impossible task by an empress: They must go to the United States and return with the knowledge needed to educate the women of Japan in the ways of the modern world. “Considering that you are girls, your intention of studying abroad is to be commended,” intoned a lady-in-waiting, reading out the words of the empress of Japan, who sat behind a screen, her face powdered white and her teeth blackened with iron filings dipped in tea and sake, as befitted a married woman of the time.
The three girls seemed, intuitively, to have understood their mission better than the distracted men who imposed it upon them. While Japanese officials spoke blithely of how educated mothers would spread enlightenment “as a little leaven leavens the whole lump,” these brave girls had to figure out the recipe from scratch. All three were in a sense expendable. Not only were women historically subjugated in Japan — “the words of women should be totally disregarded,” as one samurai code put it — but the families of these girls had been on the losing side of a civil war.
After the traumatic arrival of Commodore Perry’s heavily armored “black ships” near Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1853, accompanied by a meteor “bathing the bay in an eerie blue light and adding a shiver of divine portent to the feeling of dread that gripped the city,” Japan, sealed off from the West for more than 200 years, embarked on a zigzag path of modernization. This was the dizzying moment when, as Nimura puts it, “the Land of the Gods wrenched its gaze from the past and turned toward the shiny idols of Western industrial progress.”
Strife between the hereditary warlords loyal to the Tokugawa shogun, who had long ruled in Edo, and modernizing forces claiming loyalty to the emperor, based in the ancient capital of Kyoto, led to the “restoration” of the emperor in 1868 and the beginning of the Meiji era. Samurai were stripped of their special status in 1871; many of those who fought against the emperor were banished to far-flung locales, where they lived in abject poverty.
When the historic Iwakura Mission, sent to Washington in 1871 to lobby for revision of Perry’s harsh treaty terms, decided, in an afterthought, to give some attention to women’s education, a call went out for a few girls willing to tag along. Sutematsu — still bearing a scar on her neck from a shrapnel wound suffered in the imperial siege of her family’s castle — and the others (along with two older girls who soon withdrew from the program) “volunteered” for the promised decade abroad at government expense.
Wretched with seasickness on the rough voyage across the Pacific, they recovered in San Francisco, then boarded the recently completed transcontinental railroad only to find themselves snowbound for nearly three weeks in Salt Lake City. “What am I to do?” exclaimed the dashing Japanese chargé d’affaires, Arinori Mori, when he saw tiny Ume, swaddled in a shawl, finally embark from the train in Washington on an icy cold day in late February 1872. “They have sent me a baby!”
In Nimura’s deftly interwoven account, the three girls emerge as contrasting types, like Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” Sutematsu was the brilliant older sister, the overachiever. She moved in with the family of a civic-minded Yale professor in New Haven, learned perfect English in the local schools and was admitted to Vassar, where — as the first Japanese woman to get an American college degree — she was elected president of her class. Shige, the less reserved “arty” one, also attended Vassar as a special student in music. Ume, the spoiled baby, was essentially adopted by a doting, childless couple in Washington. Her Japanese almost entirely forgotten, she was only 17 when the girls returned to a very changed Japan.
During their absence, a conservative reaction had set in, with the tea ceremony replacing industrial gadgetry as the latest craze. The dream they had nurtured, of encouraging education for Japanese women based on Western principles, seemed dashed. An estranged “country of three,” they found themselves part of a small coterie of internationally minded Japanese — primarily male graduates of Amherst and Cornell and Yale, young men who “also understood the language of Western scholarship.”
Among the most arresting scenes in Nimura’s book is a Japanese social gathering featuring a performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” with Sutematsu, as Portia, wearing her Vassar commencement dress. “In terms of beauty, bearing and brilliance,” Nimura remarks, “surely there was no woman in Japan more qualified for the part.” Just as suitors vie for Portia’s hand, eligible bachelors in the audience, enthralled by Sutematsu’s demeanor, sought her hand in marriage. She surprised her “sisters” by marrying a portly military officer, “jowly and grave” and many years her senior, the Meiji government’s minister of war. Thanks to the high social position afforded by her marriage, Sutematsu became an influential patron of women’s education and promoted Shige’s career as a music teacher.
But perhaps the most interesting trajectory was Ume Tsuda’s. Having maintained her ambition to found a women’s college, she found backers in Philadelphia and returned to the United States to get a degree at Bryn Mawr, in biology rather than English. She co-authored an article on “The Orientation of the Frog’s Egg” and was invited by the formidable dean, Martha Carey Thomas, to remain on campus after graduation as a laboratory assistant. Although Tsuda’s view of education as fostering “gentle, submissive and courteous women” was not quite Bryn Mawr’s — graduates liked to quote Dean Thomas’s bracing maxim, “Our failures only marry” — the English-language college Tsuda founded in Tokyo, now named in her honor, has thrived for more than a century.
Janice Nimura has wisely gotten out of the way of her modern-day fairy tale, telling us what we need to know about Japanese history without obscuring the emotional nuances of the lives of her three heroines. How many frustrations and hurdles they had to endure! More than once the reader may respond as Sutematsu did on her return to Japan. “I cannot tell you how I feel,” she remarked, “but I should like to give one good scream.”
DAUGHTERS OF THE SAMURAI
A Journey From East to West and Back
By Janice P. Nimura
Illustrated. 336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
Correction: June 2, 2015
An earlier version of this review misstated the middle name of the Bryn Mawr dean who invited Ume Tsuda to remain on campus as a laboratory assistant after her graduation. She was Martha Carey Thomas, not Cary.
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