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

kago , a basketlike palanquin swinging queasily from bamboo poles borne on the shoulders of trotting bearers. The passenger might be cushioned by a folded futon, but the dusty and jolting journey was never comfortable. In Tokyo, however, the kago had been replaced by the smoother and more maneuverable jinrikisha . The two-wheeled, canopied buggies raced up and down Tokyo’s narrow streets, pulled by wiry runners wearing leggings and broad bowl-shaped hats to keep off the sun. By 1871, not two years after their invention, there were twenty-five thousand jinrikishas plying Tokyo’s narrow streets, their rattling wheels and shouting runners adding considerably to the urban din.
    Bowling along on wheels was novelty enough, but the girls also received an invitation to ride the new seventeen-mile railway from Tokyo to Yokohama, financed by the British and so recently completed it was not yet open to the public. The Japanese contractors who built the line (under close foreign supervision) had never seen a train. It had an English chief engineer and a foreign crew, and, to the girls’ astonishment, it pulled itself.
    There were formal functions to attend, hosted by high-ranking officials. There was no time to have Western-style clothes made, but unlike Western dresses, kimonos were sewn with straight seams from cloth ofstandard width and needed no fitting. The new finery, paid for by the government, was urgently required. These were the first girls ever selected to receive a foreign education, and in honor of that extraordinary circumstance, they would be the first girls of samurai rank ever granted an audience with the empress herself.
    T HE EMPRESS HARUKO had only recently undergone her own transformation into the first lady of the court. A pedigreed daughter of the Kyoto nobility—an ancient and inbred class distinct from the samurai—she was something of a prodigy: reading at the age of three, composing poetry at five, studying calligraphy at seven, and plucking the koto (a stringed instrument) at twelve. She was equally adept in the traditional arts of tea ceremony and flower arrangement. Her family was one of the five from which the imperial consort was traditionally chosen. Her suitability was unquestioned except for a single detail: she was older than her intended. This in itself was not insurmountable; there was precedent for imperial unions with older women. The problem was that the difference in their ages was three years—an inauspicious number. But no matter. The girl’s official birth date was quickly shifted later by one year, and in January 1869 the marriage went forward—the groom sixteen, his bride, officially, eighteen.
    Until her marriage, Haruko—along with all her foremothers—had lived a life confined strictly within the limits of etiquette, protocol, and the precincts of the imperial palace. Within the year, she and the Emperor Mutsuhito had relocated to Tokyo. Two more years had passed, and the cascade of changes had been dizzying. Most recently, the Meiji leaders had decided that the “delicate and effeminate old aristocrats” who had heretofore managed every aspect of daily life in the imperial household in Kyoto should be replaced by “manly and incorruptible samurai” as the emperor’s most intimate advisers. These advisers had a new responsibility: tutoring the young emperor in history and current affairs, both foreign and domestic. Japan’s emperors had always lived in seclusion, kept in ignorance of the wider world by the shoguns who held true power. All Mutsuhito’sfather had seen of Commodore Perry’s visit in 1853 were the demonic caricatures of Edo’s woodblock artists. Breaking the precedent of centuries, the young emperor would henceforth become a student of the times.
    More shocking yet, the empress and her ladies were expected to attend these lectures as well, and listen closely. Not only would the young empress be the highest-ranking woman in Japan; she would be the most