有意思的是，明治初期即想到：培養女性受西方教育，以便回國教育後一代.....
日中留學生開始以美國為學習地。蘭學等以歐洲為主。
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武士的女兒：少女們的明治維新之旅
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Ba
作者： Janice P. Nimura
譯者： 鄭佩嵐
出版社：麥田
出版日期：2018/01/06
語言：繁體中文
內容簡介
《紐約時報》年度選書、明治維新150週年必讀精采故事
透過歷史與傳記的迷人編織，作者講述一個島國面對現代化勢不可擋浪潮的生動故事⋯⋯關於日本女性教育和解放的啟蒙，獨特而優雅。──Kirkus Reviews
作者寫出一部精緻細膩的集體傳記⋯⋯傳記愛好者、對美國鍍金時代或明治末期日本感興趣的讀者，以及《藝伎回憶錄》的書迷，都會愛不釋卷。──Library Journal
作者細心地串起通訊信件與檔案文章，在這部關於內戰後三位武士之女被送到美國的傑出傳記中，講述巾幗英雄的真實故事。──Publishers Weekly
《武士的女兒》讀起來有如真實故事的小說：三名女孩在命運的捉弄下失了根，成為連結優雅舊日本和機會國度美國的橋梁。作者以電影的筆觸呈現歷史，生動難忘地再現一段被遺忘的故事。──Arthur Golden《藝伎回憶錄》作者
明治政府努力學習西洋文明的同時，決定派掌理家庭教育大權的女性出國留學。三位血統純正的武士後代，因此成為日本第一批出國接受教育的女孩。這是一個明治維新時代女性，如何在困苦的留學生活中、同時兼顧工作、友情與愛情中的成長故事。也詳述他們如何成為日本第一位獲得大學學位、建立女子學校，甚至成為兼顧教學工作的職業婦女先驅。
明治維新不只是國家改革運動，也是家庭、性別地位更新的關鍵時刻
武士家族所給與的訓練，是否能讓女孩們面對未來的一切挑戰？
一八七一年，五名女孩被日本政府送到美國。她們的任務是學習西方之道，歸國後幫助培育開明先進的新一代，領導日本走向富強。五位女孩中，最終只有三名留在美國。生於內戰時代傳統武士家庭的山川捨松、永井繁和津田梅，離開家鄉時，分別是十一歲、十歲和六歲，她們以典型美國女學生的身分度過了十年成長歲月。
自抵達舊金山起，這些女孩的旅程和傳統裝扮便受到媒體報導與關注，成了美國境內的某種名人。美國人畢竟是第一次看到日本女性，在此之前，日本女性連在自己的社會中都不輕易拋頭露面。在政府的安排下，她們各自被分派給一個美國家庭，學習英文和西方文化。三人性格各不相同，但學業表現都相當優異，幾乎是徹底融入美國社會。十年來，分住各地的女孩們不僅保持緊密聯繫，而且贏得許多美國友人的喜愛。
學成歸國，故鄉日本對她們而言已是全然陌生的國度，和十年前她們懵懂踏上的美國無異。不僅語言、文化需要重新適應，而且日本在她們留學期間拋棄了明治維新初期的徹底西化路線，轉而主張維護日本傳統，使她們貢獻所學的理想與作為顯得格格不入也格外艱辛。然而，這三個女孩不曾忘記國家的栽培，儘管有志難伸，仍意志堅定地為日本的女性教育注入活力與改革。
【永井繁 Shige Nagai】繁拿到音樂文憑後第一個回國，捨松和梅都申請延長留學一年，以便完成大學與高中學位。
三人當中，繁的歸國生活最為順遂，除了拜結婚所賜，她的專業領域也是一大助力。雖然剛回國日語還不流暢，但身為音樂老師的她並不需要良好日文能力。很快地，她便謀到官方職位，為日本國家課程引介西方音樂的元素，後來又擔任鋼琴老師，成為全日本收入最高的女性
【山川捨松 Sutematsu Yamakawa,】捨松以日本第一位女性大學畢業生的身分回國後，接受陸軍大臣大山巖的求婚。大山雖然既有地位又富有，但是對捨松而言，這樁婚姻不只是牽涉到金錢或是影響力，這也是一個能往下扎根的機會。捨松一直希望能為日本的教育盡一分心力，雖然最後捨松沒有建立學校，也沒有加入「單身貴族」的行列。她隱身於名門望族宅邸內，以政治家妻子的身分，為日本女性典範努力。
【津田梅 Ume Tsuda】在兩位摯友相繼結婚後，小梅接受曾在前往美國的船上相遇的伊藤博文之邀，成為他們家的家庭教師，進而成為皇后開辦華族女學校的英文教師。這讓當時單身的她，不再受限於社會異樣的眼光，能更心無旁騖的向教育家之路邁進。最後，她甚至辭去官方教師職務，成立了女子英學塾，深耕基礎教育。時至今日，若提到日本第一位女性教育家，非津田梅莫屬。
本書根據大量日本與美國的檔案寫成，包括女孩們和美國寄宿家庭及友人之間數十年的書信往返，故事流暢有如小說，呈現十九世紀二十世紀之交，日本與西方文化交流的衝擊與適應，更是日本女性走向現代化的歷史濫觴。
作者介紹
作者簡介
Janice P. Nimura
哥倫比亞大學東亞研究碩士。書評家、獨立學者，和先生住在紐約，育有二子，是日本家族的美國媳婦。《武士的女兒》是她第一本著作。
譯者簡介
鄭佩嵐
國立師範大學翻譯研究所畢業。譯有《灌溉，總是在深夜》、《理性選民的神話》（合譯），以及各類型文章。賜教信箱：joyce_rayla@yahoo.com.tw
目錄
作者的話
序章
第一部
第一章 武士的女兒
第二章 龍年之戰
第三章 酵母的力量
第四章 使節團遠征
第二部
第五章 有趣的陌生人
第六章 尋找寄宿家庭
第七章 在美國長大
第八章 瓦薩學院
第九章 返「鄉」之路
第三部
第十章 兩場婚禮
第十一章 獨自前行
第十二章 艾麗絲來訪東京
第十三章 前進與後退
第十四章 女子英學塾
第十五章 尾聲
謝詞
參考書目
注釋
參考書目
圖片出處
看大圖
!上頁
下頁
武士的女兒：少女們的明治維新之旅
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Ba
作者： Janice P. Nimura
譯者： 鄭佩嵐
出版社：麥田
出版日期：2018/01/06
語言：繁體中文
內容簡介
《紐約時報》年度選書、明治維新150週年必讀精采故事
透過歷史與傳記的迷人編織，作者講述一個島國面對現代化勢不可擋浪潮的生動故事⋯⋯關於日本女性教育和解放的啟蒙，獨特而優雅。──Kirkus Reviews
作者寫出一部精緻細膩的集體傳記⋯⋯傳記愛好者、對美國鍍金時代或明治末期日本感興趣的讀者，以及《藝伎回憶錄》的書迷，都會愛不釋卷。──Library Journal
作者細心地串起通訊信件與檔案文章，在這部關於內戰後三位武士之女被送到美國的傑出傳記中，講述巾幗英雄的真實故事。──Publishers Weekly
《武士的女兒》讀起來有如真實故事的小說：三名女孩在命運的捉弄下失了根，成為連結優雅舊日本和機會國度美國的橋梁。作者以電影的筆觸呈現歷史，生動難忘地再現一段被遺忘的故事。──Arthur Golden《藝伎回憶錄》作者
明治政府努力學習西洋文明的同時，決定派掌理家庭教育大權的女性出國留學。三位血統純正的武士後代，因此成為日本第一批出國接受教育的女孩。這是一個明治維新時代女性，如何在困苦的留學生活中、同時兼顧工作、友情與愛情中的成長故事。也詳述他們如何成為日本第一位獲得大學學位、建立女子學校，甚至成為兼顧教學工作的職業婦女先驅。
明治維新不只是國家改革運動，也是家庭、性別地位更新的關鍵時刻
武士家族所給與的訓練，是否能讓女孩們面對未來的一切挑戰？
一八七一年，五名女孩被日本政府送到美國。她們的任務是學習西方之道，歸國後幫助培育開明先進的新一代，領導日本走向富強。五位女孩中，最終只有三名留在美國。生於內戰時代傳統武士家庭的山川捨松、永井繁和津田梅，離開家鄉時，分別是十一歲、十歲和六歲，她們以典型美國女學生的身分度過了十年成長歲月。
自抵達舊金山起，這些女孩的旅程和傳統裝扮便受到媒體報導與關注，成了美國境內的某種名人。美國人畢竟是第一次看到日本女性，在此之前，日本女性連在自己的社會中都不輕易拋頭露面。在政府的安排下，她們各自被分派給一個美國家庭，學習英文和西方文化。三人性格各不相同，但學業表現都相當優異，幾乎是徹底融入美國社會。十年來，分住各地的女孩們不僅保持緊密聯繫，而且贏得許多美國友人的喜愛。
學成歸國，故鄉日本對她們而言已是全然陌生的國度，和十年前她們懵懂踏上的美國無異。不僅語言、文化需要重新適應，而且日本在她們留學期間拋棄了明治維新初期的徹底西化路線，轉而主張維護日本傳統，使她們貢獻所學的理想與作為顯得格格不入也格外艱辛。然而，這三個女孩不曾忘記國家的栽培，儘管有志難伸，仍意志堅定地為日本的女性教育注入活力與改革。
【永井繁 Shige Nagai】繁拿到音樂文憑後第一個回國，捨松和梅都申請延長留學一年，以便完成大學與高中學位。
三人當中，繁的歸國生活最為順遂，除了拜結婚所賜，她的專業領域也是一大助力。雖然剛回國日語還不流暢，但身為音樂老師的她並不需要良好日文能力。很快地，她便謀到官方職位，為日本國家課程引介西方音樂的元素，後來又擔任鋼琴老師，成為全日本收入最高的女性
【山川捨松 Sutematsu Yamakawa,】捨松以日本第一位女性大學畢業生的身分回國後，接受陸軍大臣大山巖的求婚。大山雖然既有地位又富有，但是對捨松而言，這樁婚姻不只是牽涉到金錢或是影響力，這也是一個能往下扎根的機會。捨松一直希望能為日本的教育盡一分心力，雖然最後捨松沒有建立學校，也沒有加入「單身貴族」的行列。她隱身於名門望族宅邸內，以政治家妻子的身分，為日本女性典範努力。
【津田梅 Ume Tsuda】在兩位摯友相繼結婚後，小梅接受曾在前往美國的船上相遇的伊藤博文之邀，成為他們家的家庭教師，進而成為皇后開辦華族女學校的英文教師。這讓當時單身的她，不再受限於社會異樣的眼光，能更心無旁騖的向教育家之路邁進。最後，她甚至辭去官方教師職務，成立了女子英學塾，深耕基礎教育。時至今日，若提到日本第一位女性教育家，非津田梅莫屬。
本書根據大量日本與美國的檔案寫成，包括女孩們和美國寄宿家庭及友人之間數十年的書信往返，故事流暢有如小說，呈現十九世紀二十世紀之交，日本與西方文化交流的衝擊與適應，更是日本女性走向現代化的歷史濫觴。
作者介紹
作者簡介
Janice P. Nimura
哥倫比亞大學東亞研究碩士。書評家、獨立學者，和先生住在紐約，育有二子，是日本家族的美國媳婦。《武士的女兒》是她第一本著作。
譯者簡介
鄭佩嵐
國立師範大學翻譯研究所畢業。譯有《灌溉，總是在深夜》、《理性選民的神話》（合譯），以及各類型文章。賜教信箱：joyce_rayla@yahoo.com.tw
目錄
作者的話
序章
第一部
第一章 武士的女兒
第二章 龍年之戰
第三章 酵母的力量
第四章 使節團遠征
第二部
第五章 有趣的陌生人
第六章 尋找寄宿家庭
第七章 在美國長大
第八章 瓦薩學院
第九章 返「鄉」之路
第三部
第十章 兩場婚禮
第十一章 獨自前行
第十二章 艾麗絲來訪東京
第十三章 前進與後退
第十四章 女子英學塾
第十五章 尾聲
謝詞
參考書目
注釋
參考書目
圖片出處
| Author | Janice P. Nimura |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, Ume Tsuda |
| Genre | Non-fiction; biography |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date
| May 4, 2015 |
| Media type | Print, digital |
| Pages | 336 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 978-0-393-07799-5 |
Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back is a 2015 non-fiction book by Janice P. Nimura, primarily about the lives of Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda. These three Japanese girls were sent to America as part of the Iwakura Mission in 1871, at the ages of 11, 10, and 6 respectively, to receive ten years of American education before returning to Japan in 1882. Nimura explores the personalities and emotional experiences of these girls as they grow into young women and attempt to reconcile conflicting national identities. The title of the book references Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto's autobiography, A Daughter of the Samurai. Unlike Etsu, who moved permanently to the United States in 1898, the earlier 'daughters of the samurai' in Nimura's book do not become Americans, but instead try to bring some part of America to Japan.[1]
Summary[edit]
Daughters of the Samurai begins with Sutematsu's traditional feudal childhood, disrupted by violent war, and then disrupted again by Japan's contact with America. Nimura describes the formulation of the Iwakura Mission, and the somewhat haphazard inclusion of five girls in the delegation. The two eldest girls, both aged 14, fell ill and returned to Japan within the first few months, but Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda remained to spend ten years struggling to fulfill their ill-defined mission to acquire an American education for the benefit of Japan. The book follows each girl around the country through many changes in foster families and schools. Ume, the youngest, returned to Japan having completed high school, but no secondary education. Shige received a certificate from Vassar's School of Music. Sutematsu, the oldest, graduated from Vassar College, the first Japanese woman to receive an American college degree.
By 1882, all three had returned to Japan, and now faced the challenge of re-integrating their American educations within a home country they had not seen since they were children, and which was no longer as welcoming of modern American ideas. Sutematsu married a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, Ōyama Iwao, who eventually became Minister of War; Sutematsu became a Countess and then a Princess. She advised the Empress on Western customs, and encouraged high-ranking Japanese women to support Japan's war efforts and volunteer as nurses. Shige married Baron Uryū Sotokichi and became a Baroness, while also teaching at the Tokyo Music School and Tokyo Women's Normal School. Ume, who never married, taught at the Peeresses' School and Tokyo Women's Normal School, returned to the United States to earn a degree from Bryn Mawr College, and eventually, with help from Sutematsu and Alice Bacon, founded the Joshi Eigaku Juku (Women's Institute for English Studies) in 1900.
**
紐約時報書評。本書似乎沒日文版，雖然 Japan Times 有訪談。
‘Daughters of the Samurai,’ by Janice P. Nimura
Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai and their friend Martha Sharpe at Vassar, circa 1880.Credit...Courtesy of Vassar College Library Special Collections
By Christopher Benfey
May 29, 2015
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.”
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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.
Christopher Benfey is Andrew W. Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke and the author of “The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.”
紐約時報書評。本書似乎沒日文版，雖然 Japan Times 有訪談。
‘Daughters of the Samurai,’ by Janice P. Nimura
Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai and their friend Martha Sharpe at Vassar, circa 1880.Credit...Courtesy of Vassar College Library Special Collections
By Christopher Benfey
May 29, 2015
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.”
Editors’ Picks
How Richard Pryor Changed the Way Comedy Sees Police Brutality
There’s No Reason for an Architect to Design a Death Chamber
Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENTContinue reading the main story
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.
Christopher Benfey is Andrew W. Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke and the author of “The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.”
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