Read Online Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura - Free Book Online
Authors: Janice P. Nimura
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wake. Tiny Ume, in a flaming-red silk kimono embroidered with soaring cranes, chrysanthemums, and her namesake plum blossoms, made a bright spot that remained visible long after her boat had pulled away from the pier. Anchored farther out was the Pacific Mail steamship America , one of the largest paddle wheel steamers in the world: 363 feet from stem to stern, with more than an acre of deck. Today it flew the Japanese hinomaru , the red-on-white “Circle of the Sun,” alongside the American Stars and Stripes. The ship dwarfed the launches bearing the ambassadors as they drew alongside. A nineteen-gun salute rang out, thenanother fifteen salvos in honor of the departing American ambassador. Cannon smoke drifted over the water, and the echoes bounced back and forth across the harbor.
At last more than a hundred delegates and their mountain of luggage were safely aboard. At noon one final cannon exploded, and as the ship’s anchors rose out of the water, the towering paddle wheels began to turn. The America was under way. “Sailors on the decks of the many foreign warships in Yokohama Bay all manned the rigging and doffed their caps in salute as we passed,” wrote Kunitake Kume, the official scribe. “We were followed for several miles by a crowd of well-wishers in a flotilla of boats.”
It would be hard to overstate the high-minded sense of purpose with which these men set off, charged with opening a new era in the chronicle of Japan’s relations with the wider world. In the larger context of their mission, the five girls traveling with them were insignificant. In his account of their departure, Kume mistakenly noted only four.
Beyond the waves, Mount Fuji rose in snow-robed majesty, the view from the ship’s deck unobstructed and stunning. “It was a very beautiful day when the vessel started,” Ume would write in one of her first English compositions, barely two years later. “How my heart beat as I saw the land fading away! I tried not to think about it.” The sun sank behind the mountains, but the travelers remained on deck, gazing west until the sea gleamed in the moonlight, serene and exquisite. But during the night the wind rose, and the exaltation of the view faded as the ship began to roll.
T HE THREE-WEEK VOYAGE was difficult. The Pacific in midwinter was full of storms, and the five girls were crammed into a single cabin, Ryo sharing a berth with Ume (“as she was such a tiny little tot” ), while Shige made do with a luggage rack for her bed. Shige’s sister had given her an old zori , a rice-straw sandal, instructing her to keep it under her pillow as a charm against seasickness. Sandal or no sandal, all five girls were soon bedridden and miserable.
Just as Shige fell between Sutematsu and Ume in age, her life experienceto this point fell somewhere between theirs as well. Like Ume, she had spent most of her childhood in Tokyo among elders intrigued by Western ideas and loyal to the shogunate. Her father, Takanosuke Masuda, had been governor of Hakodate, the northern treaty port from which Sutematsu had just come; her much older brother, Takashi, had begun to study English at the age of eleven. The family had moved back to Edo in 1861, the year Shige was born. She could just remember her father and teenage brother embarking on an embassy to Europe two years later. They had traveled via Shanghai and India and up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Shige had seen a photograph of the group posing in blinding sunlight before a vast stone head: the Great Sphinx.
As with Sutematsu, the Boshin War had put an end to life as Shige knew it and separated her from her family. As the domains of the Northern Alliance had struggled to resist the emperor’s forces in July of 1868, gunfire had also shattered the leafy peacefulness of Koishikawa, Shige’s neighborhood just north of Edo Castle. Though the southern forces had already taken the castle and replaced the shogun with the young Emperor Meiji, pockets of
At last more than a hundred delegates and their mountain of luggage were safely aboard. At noon one final cannon exploded, and as the ship’s anchors rose out of the water, the towering paddle wheels began to turn. The America was under way. “Sailors on the decks of the many foreign warships in Yokohama Bay all manned the rigging and doffed their caps in salute as we passed,” wrote Kunitake Kume, the official scribe. “We were followed for several miles by a crowd of well-wishers in a flotilla of boats.”
It would be hard to overstate the high-minded sense of purpose with which these men set off, charged with opening a new era in the chronicle of Japan’s relations with the wider world. In the larger context of their mission, the five girls traveling with them were insignificant. In his account of their departure, Kume mistakenly noted only four.
Beyond the waves, Mount Fuji rose in snow-robed majesty, the view from the ship’s deck unobstructed and stunning. “It was a very beautiful day when the vessel started,” Ume would write in one of her first English compositions, barely two years later. “How my heart beat as I saw the land fading away! I tried not to think about it.” The sun sank behind the mountains, but the travelers remained on deck, gazing west until the sea gleamed in the moonlight, serene and exquisite. But during the night the wind rose, and the exaltation of the view faded as the ship began to roll.
T HE THREE-WEEK VOYAGE was difficult. The Pacific in midwinter was full of storms, and the five girls were crammed into a single cabin, Ryo sharing a berth with Ume (“as she was such a tiny little tot” ), while Shige made do with a luggage rack for her bed. Shige’s sister had given her an old zori , a rice-straw sandal, instructing her to keep it under her pillow as a charm against seasickness. Sandal or no sandal, all five girls were soon bedridden and miserable.
Just as Shige fell between Sutematsu and Ume in age, her life experienceto this point fell somewhere between theirs as well. Like Ume, she had spent most of her childhood in Tokyo among elders intrigued by Western ideas and loyal to the shogunate. Her father, Takanosuke Masuda, had been governor of Hakodate, the northern treaty port from which Sutematsu had just come; her much older brother, Takashi, had begun to study English at the age of eleven. The family had moved back to Edo in 1861, the year Shige was born. She could just remember her father and teenage brother embarking on an embassy to Europe two years later. They had traveled via Shanghai and India and up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Shige had seen a photograph of the group posing in blinding sunlight before a vast stone head: the Great Sphinx.
As with Sutematsu, the Boshin War had put an end to life as Shige knew it and separated her from her family. As the domains of the Northern Alliance had struggled to resist the emperor’s forces in July of 1868, gunfire had also shattered the leafy peacefulness of Koishikawa, Shige’s neighborhood just north of Edo Castle. Though the southern forces had already taken the castle and replaced the shogun with the young Emperor Meiji, pockets of
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