Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura Read Free Book Online

looking nigger wenches,” noted a reporter.
    The group led by Tomomi Iwakura in 1871 would be far more impressive. Eleven years after the journey of Whitman’s inscrutable princes, Japan had not just a new government but a new attitude on the part of its young statesmen: active, curious, determined, embracing the future rather than protecting the past. Many of Iwakura’s men had already studied abroad, and several spoke competent English. The average age of the forty-six ambassadors was thirty-two.
    Among them were most of the rising stars of Japan’s new leadership, including the very men who had written the Charter Oath. Many of them would become household names in the decades to come: Takayoshi Kido, a senior councillor; Hirobumi Ito, minister of public works; and Toshimichi Okubo, minister of finance. Kunitake Kume, a Confucian scholar, was the embassy’s official scribe; his monumental True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe would fill five volumes and sell thousands of copies.
    The addition of a few girls to the sizable contingent of young male students joining the delegation would not be a problem. The American ambassador, Charles DeLong, would be traveling with the group, and his wife, Elida Vineyard DeLong, would make a convenient chaperone. In his position as deputy chair of the Hokkaido Colonization Board, Kuroda began recruiting for his pet project. The offer was generous: ten years in America, all expenses paid, with a stipend of eight hundred dollars per year—a stunning sum to spend on anyone, let alone untested girls.
    Yet there were no applicants. Who would send a small daughter away while she was still useful at home, only to get her back too late to marry, assuming anyone would want to marry a girl untutored in the duties of a Japanese wife? And to America, of all places, where the loud, smelly, yellow-haired, blue-eyed barbarians wore their filthy shoes right into the house and gorged on animal flesh at every meal? For most families high placed enough to see the recruiting notices, it was unthinkable. As the Iwakura Mission’s departure date approached, Kuroda was forced to launch a second round of recruiting. This time he received responses from a handful of applicants, all of whom were accepted at once.
    S UTEMATSU KNEW NOTHING of this. In the spring of 1871, after the Aizu exiles’ first hungry winter in snowbound Tonami, her brother Hiroshi had sent her to Hakodate, just across the Tsugaru Straits in Hokkaido. Already far from her homeland, she would now be isolated from her familyas well—but at least she would be fed. Compared to barren Tonami, Hakodate was a bustling oasis; one of the first ports opened to foreign trade as a result of Commodore Perry’s negotiations in 1854, it was now a regular destination for diplomats and missionaries, as well as traders. Sent to lodge with Takuma Sawabe, one of Japan’s first Russian Orthodox converts, Sutematsu later moved to the home of a French missionary family and spent six months in a town whose harbor buzzed with international shipping. Western-style buildings had sprung up to house the consular staffs of nine different countries—with sash windows that slid up instead of sideways, white clapboard siding instead of unpainted wood, shingled roofs instead of tile or thatch, wrought-iron fences instead of plastered walls. Sutematsu had never seen homes built without tatami floors and shoji screens. Hakodate was a first taste of the West.
    By the time Kuroda issued his recruitment notices, Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro had already left for America. Hiroshi, leader of the exiled Aizu domain, had no trouble imagining his youngest sister there as well. She had acquitted herself admirably, during both the siege of Wakamatsu and the longer trials of prison camp and exile. She showed promise as a student, and Hiroshi had confidence she could rise to the