Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan by Clara A. N. Whitney (Kodansha)

Two decades after Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” came to Tokyo, William Whitney arrived in that city to establish its first national business college in 1875. His wife Anna saw this as an opportunity to advance Christianity in Japan and insisted on coming with her husband, along with their three children. Her daughter Clara was fourteen when she came to the country that would be her home and from the first day of her arrival she recorded the details of her new life with enthusiasm, humor, and careful observation.

It’s easy to be ensnared by Clara’s charm and her honesty that verges on the indiscreet. Within minutes of clearing Customs, she embarks on her first jinriksha ride which she finds “absolutely too ridiculous for anything,” particularly when her father, slower than the rest, is forced to race behind his wife’s conveyance, yelling “Stop!” After two weeks, she’s entrusted with the “keys and apron” of housekeeping, adapting to cooking stoves that are roughly the same size as a flowerpot, noticing the number of handsome Japanese men on the street, and struggling to describe beauty of the purple and gold sunsets that illuminate Fujiyama. Clara is obviously made for living in Japan, and she does that, eventually marrying the son of a highly placed Japanese statesman with whom she had five children, according to the lengthy introduction to this book.  (The Library of Congress brief biography says she had six.)

Her diary is as lively and fascinating as a good romance novel but Clara is too observant to lapse into that category. On her fifteenth birthday she’s taken to the Akusa Kannon Temple,  where she’s fascinated by a statue of the god of health whose face has been so smoothed by the hands of worshippers that it has “neither eyes, nor nose or mouth.” Her Christian viewpoint emerges in a ridicule that fades rapidly as her diary progresses--although Clara’s faith is palpable, her interest in rituals and ceremony becomes almost anthropological, without condescension or censure. An earthquake that lasts a full minute and a fire that consumes twenty thousand houses within a six-mile space does nothing to quench her enthusiasm for a place that, within two months, she knows she’ll be sad to leave. 

Political and economic matters are largely ignored by Clara, although a Christmas visit from a young prince of the powerful Tokugawa clan leads to her assessment of his appearance, “very dignified.” Months later she and her mother are invited to the prince’s mansion, where the prince, his attendants, and all of his servants are assembled to greet them. The unexpected reception throws Clara into an unusual speechlessness until everyone takes refuge in the informality of croquet. “Mr. Tokugawa won, of course. (I wonder why he always won?)”

The Whitneys fall under the protection of the Katsu family, whom Clara will later became part of by marriage. Her friendship with the family provides insights into the domestic lives of the Japanese nobility, as well as a bloodcurdling eyewitness account of the earthquake of 1855 that killed 10,000, told to Clara by a survivor. Clara herself is an eyewitness to the funeral procession of the Emperor’s aunt, a parade of foot-soldiers, cavalry, infantry, professional mourners, priests, maids-of-honor, and the nobility taking part in “perhaps the last funeral pageant which shall ever pass through the streets.” 

After three years in Tokyo, Clara is rather harsh in her assessments of the foreign visitors that she meets. Isabella Bird she characterizes as “a very disagreeable old maid,” and when former president U. S. Grant comes to town, she hopes “he will give up drinking so hard.” It’s thanks to the hard-drinking president that she’s witness to a jousting tournament : fencing, archery by mounted horsemen, and equestrian feats, concluded with daytime fireworks in the shape of “ladies, fans, umbrellas, fish, gourds and other amusing things.” A visit to Mrs. Grant takes Clara into the Summer Palace, a place that has the president’s wife in awe. Even Clara is impressed with the “doors and woodwork lacquered with gold molding” and “the walls covered with elegant Japanese screen paper.” She’s less impressed with Mrs. Grant, who “has very few ladylike traits,” when regarded by a young woman schooled in Japanese etiquette.

Although Clara describes several Japanese weddings, she fails to give a picture of her own, or of her life as a wife and mother. When she’s forty, Clara returns to the States with her children and without her husband. She begins to write articles about Japan to supplement the money her husband sends to her from Tokyo.

After almost twenty-five years in Japan, this must have been a difficult, painful transition for Clara and her children that deserves a whole other volume of its own. Her published diary is only ¼ of its original length, part of a “lifetime record” written in English and Japanese that one of her daughters has given to the Library of Congress. Her papers, 75 items in four containers taking up 1.6 linear feet, including speeches, short stories and an unpublished novel, are open to researchers.

However Clara at forty had learned the discretion that Clara at fourteen had yet to acquire. Her journals--at least the ones that have been passed down--end in 1887. Clara left Japan twelve years later, wrapped in the self-containment that she had learned in her adopted country.~Janet Brown