Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back (13 page)

Iwakura and his men left for Philadelphia on the noon train the next day. Over the next fourteen months they would see England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland, Prussia, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland, returning to Japan via the four-year-old Suez Canal, Ceylon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They had a nation to build, and all the systems of the
Western world to learn. If anyone spared a thought for the girls left behind, it was presumably a fleeting one.

Without the delegates to look after, Mori could at last turn his attention to the students in his charge. He invited the five girls to dinner, accompanied by Charles Lanman and their teacher. “The ordinary dinner parties of Washington are noted for their sham dignity and stupidity,” Lanman wrote years later. This one he remembered for its simple elegance and earnestness—startling, really, when one considered the paths followed by each of the guests to this point. But there they sat, Lanman mused, remarkably at home in their unremarkable new clothes, with Ume in the place of honor to Mori’s right, her chin not much higher than her plate. “By implied consent, the conversation was monopolized by Mr. Mori, and the readiness with which he spoke the different languages at his command, was truly wonderful, and he was kept very busy, by the necessity of explaining questions that were put to him by his American and Japanese friends,” Lanman remembered fondly. “At one time he expatiated at considerable length upon the deplorable condition of the Japanese woman, and his revealings were made intensely interesting by the presence of the Japanese girls; he would then address a remark to one of the older girls, with a view to drawing her out on the fashions of the American women, when he would obtain, in return, a sentiment teeming with common sense or wit.”

When dusk ended an after-dinner game of croquet, the party moved inside to admire a collection of books and photographs newly arrived from Japan. Mori presented each girl with a fan, and Lanman gave them each a bouquet, “and thus ended one of the most unique dinner parties, in the spirit of its composition, which ever occurred in Washington.” But where Lanman was swept away by the picturesque novelty of the cross-cultural scene, Mori noticed something else: after more than five months in Washington, the girls were still chattering away in Japanese.

Mori knew all too well the bewilderment of arriving in an alien land. But as a young man in London, he had been expected to look after himself, and learning English had been a matter of survival. Safe and well tended with their governess on Connecticut Avenue, the girls felt no such imperative.
They were no closer to being able to study in an American classroom than they had been when they arrived. If they were to fulfill the empress’s mandate, something had to change.

K
IYOTAKA
K
URODA, THE
girls’ original recruiter, and Mori, their current guardian, may have believed wholeheartedly in the rightness of bringing girls to America, but even an imperial mandate wasn’t enough to convince Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro. After a year of study in Norwich, Connecticut, Kenjiro’s English was more than serviceable, his penmanship quite elegant. Though still not yet eighteen, he had no qualms about expressing his reservations to the men in Washington who controlled his sister’s fate.

How could it possibly be a good idea to send Japanese girls to America before they had finished learning what it meant to be Japanese? “If these girls are not taught about our moral science, they will do every thing as the Americans do, or of their own choice,” Kenjiro wrote to Charles Lanman in English, his indignation rising with every line. “If they do as the Americans do, that is, according to the bible, they will be punished by our Government. Although I do not know whether the Americans are sorry to find their sisters in punishment, or not; yet I, a Japanese, am very sorry for that.”

Shaped by the “moral science” of the Aizu samurai, Kenjiro’s priorities were fixed: Confucian obedience, hierarchy, honor. Loyalty to his defeated domain had been redirected as pride in his emerging nation and its new leadership. The word “government” warranted an initial capital; the Bible did not. As he crammed for the entrance exam to Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School that summer, Kenjiro had no doubts about his mission: learn English, study physics and engineering, return home, and use his new skills to help lead Japan forward. But what was Sutematsu’s mission? How could a half-grown girl, virtually alone in an alien land for ten years, not be irrevocably changed? How could such a woman ever reenter Japanese society, let alone become a role model?

Mori’s concern was more immediate: the girls must begin to make better progress in English, and for that, they must be separated. That one of them had an opinionated older brother in New Haven suddenly looked like an opportunity. Having passed his exams and won a place at Yale (his trigonometry was shaky, but he had promised to do extra work over the summer), Kenjiro would make his home for the next three years in New Haven. If Sutematsu went to live with a New Haven family, her brother would at least be able to keep an eye on her—a situation that would satisfy both Kenjiro and Mori.

Other factors were turning Mori’s attention toward Connecticut as well. That same summer of 1872, a group of thirty Chinese boys, ages ten to sixteen, had arrived in New England as the vanguard of the Chinese Educational Mission, the brainchild of Yung Wing, the first Chinese man to graduate from Yale, in 1854. The arrival of the Chinese boys on the heels of the Iwakura Mission was not a coincidence; though Yung had been advocating such a plan for years, his government was finally spurred to act by a dawning awareness of Japan’s modernization efforts. Yung’s Yale connections steered him toward Birdsey Grant Northrop, secretary of Connecticut’s Board of Education. Together, Yung and Northrop solicited “cultured families” in which the Chinese boys could begin their American educations. The response was overwhelming: 122 families in Connecticut and southern Massachusetts volunteered—far more than were needed.

Mori and Northrop were already good friends. Part of Mori’s job as Japanese chargé d’affaires in Washington was to keep track of the nearly two hundred Japanese students already in the United States, most of them sponsored by the Japanese government. Because of these young men, Mori had become a student of the American educational system, touring schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the establishment of public education was already well under way. When the question of what to do with the girls arose, Northrop was the obvious man to ask, and his work with Yung made it clear that appropriate host families would not be hard to find. Especially since Mori was no longer trying to place five girls, but three.

Ryo’s eyes had never recovered from the glare of the western snows.
Though she wore a green eyeshade to protect them, chronic inflammation made studying nearly impossible. Doctor after doctor examined her, and all agreed: if she continued to strain her eyes, she risked blindness. No longer physically able to carry out her role as foreign student, she would have to return home, Mori decided. Tei, closest to Ryo in age and temperament and showing signs of acute homesickness, would go with her.

Perhaps following Yung Wing’s example of placing pairs of students together, Mori set out to find a home for Sutematsu and Shige, now twelve and eleven. Consultation with Kenjiro, Northrop, and Addison Van Name, a scholar of the Far East who was Yale’s librarian, yielded a likely prospect: the family of Leonard Bacon, a prominent Congregational minister in New Haven. Letters discussing the terms of the arrangement were soon flying between New Haven and Washington.

“I went to see Mrs. Van Name today about the little Jap,” wrote Bacon’s eldest daughter, Rebecca, to her father that summer. “She was very glad to hear that perhaps we would like Miss Yamagawa [
sic
] and will write to her brother right away. In the mean time, some one may have snapped her up, but that is not likely. I told her that Mr. Van Name & B. G. Northrop might say what they thought would be a fair price for her, and you would see.”
*

Ume, having imprinted on the older girls like an orphaned chick, was horrified by the news that they would be leaving her behind. But her distress was soon mitigated by Mori’s next decision: Ume was to return to the Lanmans, at least for now. Still only seven, Ume needed a mother as much as a teacher, and Adeline Lanman had fallen in love with the child, her “sunbeam from the land of the rising sun.”

L
EONARD
B
ACON WAS
a pillar of New Haven’s intellectual elite: the pastor of First Church in the center of the town green for more than four
decades, a professor of theology at Yale, a prolific writer and editor. At seventy he had the craggy visage of a biblical patriarch: domed forehead, imposing eyebrows, white beard, and a mouth whose corners seemed pressed down by the weight of his thoughts. He had nine children from his first wife, and five more with his second; firstborn Rebecca was forty-six, and Alice, the youngest, fourteen.

New Haven was a stronghold of Congregationalism, which traced its ideology directly back to the Puritan settlers of New England, and Bacon’s pulpit was one of the most influential. He was a magisterial moderate, always eloquently seeking the middle ground, confident in the power of Protestant orthodoxy to promote both moral and social progress. Throughout his career he had been vocal in his support of the antislavery movement, while remaining a harsh critic of the extremist approach of the abolitionists. Blacks were not inherently inferior, he agreed, but as they could surely never shake off the crushing degradation of white racism, the solution was not to give them equal rights as Americans but rather to send them back to Africa. There they could prosper, and, not coincidentally, share the gospel with the rest of their unenlightened race.

The Japanese girls, too, would be able to spread enlightenment in another remote land struggling in darkness: when they returned to Japan in ten years, they would carry Christianity with them. Meanwhile, the years they spent in New Haven would bring a different, if no less significant, benefit. Though rich in ideas, the sprawling Bacon household was perennially short of cash. Here, then, was a doubly attractive prospect: an opportunity to enhance the family finances and uplift the distant heathen without ever leaving New Haven.

The question of race was peripheral. In 1872 the few Japanese in America—nearly all of them from the samurai class—had come to learn and return home, not to demand equality or take American jobs. Freed slaves were a problem and Chinese coolies were a plague, but Japanese students were a worthy project. They would study hard, and then leave. The presence of Kenjiro in New Haven offered convenient insurance: if something went awry, he would be right there.

Unmarried, middle-aged Rebecca, a teacher who had helped raise her own siblings and now served as her father’s right hand, sounded a note of caution, however. She had met one of the young Japanese men studying near New Haven and was not impressed, especially after a report that he was gravely ill. “They don’t stand this climate too well and there is that responsibility to be counted in about this child,” she wrote to Bacon, who had fled New Haven’s heat for the relative cool of the Litchfield Hills. “They are puny folks & can hardly lift the end of a trunk—the men. But they selected healthy ones to send over.”

As Kenjiro and Van Name batted the question of compensation back and forth, Rebecca rolled up her sleeves and did the due diligence, consulting other host families in the area on weekly stipends. “Mrs. Hotchkiss suggests $13.00,” she told her father, “but evidently doesn’t think $15.00 too much.” Catherine, Bacon’s second wife, was often bedridden; a boarding student might provide some welcome companionship, and the younger Bacon daughters could help with English and music instruction.

Following Rebecca’s advice, Bacon approved the deal: for fifteen dollars a week per girl, he would provide room, board, and laundry, along with instruction in English, arithmetic, and geometry. Clothing, books, piano lessons, and medical attention were extra. (Rebecca had done very well for the Bacons. Northrop’s original call for families to host the Chinese boys stipulated sixteen dollars per week for each
pair
of boys—though this disparity may also have had something to do with the prevailing American attitude toward Japan versus China, or the relatively greater Japanese enthusiasm, and hence budget, for sending students abroad.)

In contrast to his hardheaded daughter, Bacon framed the arrangement as more familial than financial. “What we propose,” he wrote to Van Name, “is to receive her not simply as a boarder and lodger, but as if she were the child of some relative or near friend, who would expect us to have a parental care over her and to treat her with all parental kindness. She will be in the family as if she were one of our grandchildren.”

Kenjiro approved, and even gave permission for his sister to attend church with Bacon and his family. “However I beseech him not to give
her any religious instructions, which I will give her,” Kenjiro wrote. The practice of Christianity was, after all, still illegal in Japan. His impressionable sister must be shielded from its influence.

A
S
W
ASHINGTON’S SWAMPY
humidity gave way to the drier breezes of fall, the odd little household on Connecticut Avenue prepared to disband. Ryo and Tei were the first to leave, retracing their journey across the continent and then the Pacific in the care of Mrs. Thomas Antisell, the wife of an Irish-American engineer employed by the same Hokkaido Colonization Board that had sponsored the girls. By the end of October they were back at the Grand Hotel in San Francisco. “During their stay in the East”—the East Coast this time, not the mysterious Orient—“the young ladies acquired a good knowledge of English, discarded their rich Oriental costumes, and assumed the garb of fashionable American girls, and now present a stylish appearance,” chirped the
San Francisco Bulletin
approvingly. The two teenagers were anything but cheerful, though. They had failed in their mission, and upon returning to Tokyo, would soon disappear into anonymity. The bond that had formed between them and the three younger girls was broken forever.