Read Online Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Janice P. Nimura
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missions. The challenges of an ocean voyage were not new to him. He swept into the girls’ cabin, quickly taking in the five pale and clammy faces and the half-empty boxes of confectionary, and sprang into action. Opening the porthole, he seized the remaining cakes and flung them overboard. “All our entreaties and wails were in vain,” Shige recalled.
It was a week before any of the girls left their cabin. Ume recovered first, venturing up the metal steps that led to the deck and gazing, awestruck, at the tall American sailors and their smartly uniformed officers. Once all the girls were up, they had a proper tour: the luxurious saloons and dining rooms, the thunderous engines and the churning paddle wheels, whose sound was the only proof that the ship was moving on the featureless expanse of ocean. “Passengers are forbidden to approach the cages over the paddlewheels or wander outside the deck railings,” read the rules posted aboard ship. “Do not talk to officers on watch.” Each day the captain announced their degree of longitude, which the ambassadors dutifully recorded. Those who had acquired wristwatches carefully adjusted them to the new time.
Rain fell, and kept falling for nearly half the voyage. Once the ship itself had become familiar, there was nothing to look at. “We did not see so much as the silhouette of a single island,” the embassy’s scribe Kume noted. “Although it was the time of the full moon, the fact that we could hardly ever see it intensified our feelings of loneliness.” Hirobumi Ito, oneof the senior ambassadors and a close friend of the cake-flinging Fukuchi, came to check on the girls, who were still mourning the loss of their sweets. A small man with a large personality, lowborn but aiming high, Ito was something of a peacock, handsome and gallant and fond of life’s pleasures, his boyish smile verging on a smirk. At twenty-two he had smuggled himself out of Japan to study in London; now, at thirty, he was the minister of public works. “He told us to come to his room and he would give us something nice, if we behaved properly,” Shige later remembered. To each girl he gave a precious piece of misozuke pickle, a taste of home that settled both their stomachs and their nerves. It would not be the last time Ito changed the girls’ circumstances for the better.
The enforced idleness of shipboard life lay heavily on the delegates. The men of the Iwakura Mission were ambitious, determined, proud, and insecure. Samurai from the southern domains savored the triumph of their rise to power, but still felt more deeply loyal to their own domains than to each other. Those who had once served the toppled shogunate held deep-seated grudges. Enemies until just recently, they had not entirely finished becoming allies. Now they faced the daunting challenge of introducing their new leadership to the wider world.
Those with some experience abroad patronized those who had never left Japan. One delegate, an official with the judicial department, held tutorials on Western table manners: forks on the left, knives on the right, cut your meat into pieces first instead of picking up a whole chop and gnawing off a bite. Don’t slurp. The younger and more arrogant junior delegates, resenting such schoolmarmish meddling, only slurped and stabbed with greater abandon.
The presence of young girls in this idle and simmering group was provocative. The two oldest, Ryo and Tei, both fourteen, were nearly of marriageable age. They were the only Japanese females the men would see until the mission returned home, and not every delegate was as appropriately solicitous as Ito and Fukuchi. One day, Ryo was alone in the girls’ cabin when a man named Nagano, a secretary with the foreign department, stumbled in, drunk. Ryo was struggling to fend him off when herroommates returned. Sutematsu, shaking with outrage, ran for Ambassador Okubo.
Though there were two secretaries called Nagano with the embassy, it is
It was a week before any of the girls left their cabin. Ume recovered first, venturing up the metal steps that led to the deck and gazing, awestruck, at the tall American sailors and their smartly uniformed officers. Once all the girls were up, they had a proper tour: the luxurious saloons and dining rooms, the thunderous engines and the churning paddle wheels, whose sound was the only proof that the ship was moving on the featureless expanse of ocean. “Passengers are forbidden to approach the cages over the paddlewheels or wander outside the deck railings,” read the rules posted aboard ship. “Do not talk to officers on watch.” Each day the captain announced their degree of longitude, which the ambassadors dutifully recorded. Those who had acquired wristwatches carefully adjusted them to the new time.
Rain fell, and kept falling for nearly half the voyage. Once the ship itself had become familiar, there was nothing to look at. “We did not see so much as the silhouette of a single island,” the embassy’s scribe Kume noted. “Although it was the time of the full moon, the fact that we could hardly ever see it intensified our feelings of loneliness.” Hirobumi Ito, oneof the senior ambassadors and a close friend of the cake-flinging Fukuchi, came to check on the girls, who were still mourning the loss of their sweets. A small man with a large personality, lowborn but aiming high, Ito was something of a peacock, handsome and gallant and fond of life’s pleasures, his boyish smile verging on a smirk. At twenty-two he had smuggled himself out of Japan to study in London; now, at thirty, he was the minister of public works. “He told us to come to his room and he would give us something nice, if we behaved properly,” Shige later remembered. To each girl he gave a precious piece of misozuke pickle, a taste of home that settled both their stomachs and their nerves. It would not be the last time Ito changed the girls’ circumstances for the better.
The enforced idleness of shipboard life lay heavily on the delegates. The men of the Iwakura Mission were ambitious, determined, proud, and insecure. Samurai from the southern domains savored the triumph of their rise to power, but still felt more deeply loyal to their own domains than to each other. Those who had once served the toppled shogunate held deep-seated grudges. Enemies until just recently, they had not entirely finished becoming allies. Now they faced the daunting challenge of introducing their new leadership to the wider world.
Those with some experience abroad patronized those who had never left Japan. One delegate, an official with the judicial department, held tutorials on Western table manners: forks on the left, knives on the right, cut your meat into pieces first instead of picking up a whole chop and gnawing off a bite. Don’t slurp. The younger and more arrogant junior delegates, resenting such schoolmarmish meddling, only slurped and stabbed with greater abandon.
The presence of young girls in this idle and simmering group was provocative. The two oldest, Ryo and Tei, both fourteen, were nearly of marriageable age. They were the only Japanese females the men would see until the mission returned home, and not every delegate was as appropriately solicitous as Ito and Fukuchi. One day, Ryo was alone in the girls’ cabin when a man named Nagano, a secretary with the foreign department, stumbled in, drunk. Ryo was struggling to fend him off when herroommates returned. Sutematsu, shaking with outrage, ran for Ambassador Okubo.
Though there were two secretaries called Nagano with the embassy, it is
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