Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura (W.W. Norton and Company)

The wife of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito, Empress Hiroko, was by all accounts a child prodigy. When she was three she could read, she wrote poetry by the time she was five and was a student of calligraphy at seven. Now at 22 in 1871, she was “a modern consort” who joined her husband in welcoming the opening of Japan to Western industry and education.  Under her patronage, five Japanese girls were chosen to live in the U.S for ten years, all expenses paid by Japan, with the goal of receiving Western educations and returning to teach women in their country. 

Of the five, only one had any familiarity with English; six-year-old Ume was able to say “Yes. No. Thank you.” None of them were able to communicate with the American woman chosen as their chaperone during the voyage nor with the stewardess who was meant to bring them food and clean their cabin. Until finally one of the Japanese diplomats came to check on them, the girls lived on the boxes of desserts that were given to them as gifts when they boarded the ship.

In America the girls were treated as exotic curiosities in San Francisco and on the train journey that took them to Washington DC. On the train, they were so entranced by the vast outstretches of snow that the oldest became snowblind, damaging her eyesight so badly that she was sent back to Japan along with the girl closest to her in age. Now the remaining three were headed by eleven-year-old Sutematsu, followed by Shige who was just ten and Ume who turned seven soon after arriving in the states. The 24-year-old diplomat who had traveled and lived abroad for years and was described as “a Westerner born of Japan” was horrified when the girls were presented to him, especially taken aback by Ume. “They have sent me a baby,” he said with an undiplomatic display of horror.

It became obvious that the girls needed to be placed in separate homes if they were ever to learn English and become acculturated to Western  ways. Ume remained in Washington with a childless couple who immediately welcomed her as their daughter. Sutematsu was placed with the family of a Yale professor and Shige in the home of one of the professor’s friends. All three quickly adapted to the freedom and comfort of Western clothing and and the unaccustomed softness of pillows that weren’t made of wood. Although their hosts received money for their upkeep, the arrangements made for each girl were “more familial than financial” and within a year of their arrival in America, they had become part of their American families.

They flourished, becoming adept at croquet, chess, and lawn tennis. Ume, alone without Japanese friends, began to forget her language. Sutematsu had a brother attending Yale who was adamant that she remain Japanese, keeping her “moral code,” which he ensured by giving his sister lessons in Japanese culture, history, and language. Shige’s family welcomed a young Japanese student into their household who was smart, handsome and four years older than Shige. He provided an incentive for her to practice her native language as well as giving her a reason to look forward to returning home.

After several years at Vassar, she was the first one to go back to Japan at the end of her ten year commitment,  engaged to the handsome student. Not as driven as the other two girls, Shige happily became a piano teacher in Tokyo. 

Sutematsu however was an academic star. Both she and Ume applied for an additional year in the U.S. in order for them to graduate, Ume from high school and Sutematsu with a bachelor’s degree from Vassar. On the voyage home, they were both apprehensive. Ume, high-spirited and indulged, found herself wishing that the missionary passengers aboard ship were “not quite so quiet or good.” Sutematsu, when considering her imminent homecoming, said, “I cannot tell you how I feel but I should like to give one good scream.” 

Japanese public opinion had changed in the decade the girls had spent in America. Western ideas and education were viewed by many as a threat and the idea of educating Japanese daughters was being challenged. Shige, happily married and with limited ambition, repatriated with little difficulty. Sutematsu quickly discovered that marriage was the way to repay her debt to her family and her government. When a highly placed nobleman proposed, she put aside her idea of having her American sister join her in Tokyo, with the two of them forming an independent household and launching a Western school together, and married a man much older than she.  “What must be done is a change in the existing state of society, and this can only be accomplished by married women,” she wrote to her “sister” in America.

Ume had become thoroughly American and she refused to give that up. Her value as she perceived it was in her mastery of the English language--no matter that she was without any real fluency in Japanese. Her ambition was to be a spinster, independent with a teaching career, but she soon discovered that in Japan there was no word for spinster and old maids were pitied and disdained. Her stubborn willfulness paid off however. While Sutematsu’s brilliance was turned to the service of enhancing her husband’s career and Shige became blissfully domestic, it was Ume who used her charm and her determination to become an educator whose name is still known in Japan, with her family name emblazoned on Tsuda College for women and her accomplishments taught in elementary school social studies classes.

Janice Nimura has constructed a framework for the lives of these girls, delving deep into the tradition and history of the samurai class from which they came. Sutematsu was the one most steeped in this background of rigid discipline, having lived through the war between royalist progressives and feudalist warlords when she was old enough to help make the bullets that may have wounded her future husband. It was her iron-bound training that made her diverge from the career she trained for into the life of nobility, where her influence extended to establishing charity bazaars and hospital volunteers among the aristocracy. Ume, who had little discipline imposed upon her before her American life, was the one to break through traditional barriers, the ones that Shige welcomed. The stories of three displaced girls and how they prevailed and succeeded is one that deserves greater attention than it’s been given, and through Nimura’s skill and scholarship, this has finally taken place~Janet Brown