Review by New York Times Review
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." 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 Cary 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." The daughters of samurai families were 'volunteered' for a decade of study abroad. 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."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the years after Japan was forcibly opened to the world for trade, a group of five girls, ages 6 to 14, was chosen to travel to America, attend school, and return in 10 years to share their enlightened attitudes about Western ways with their country's future leaders. This experiment was not only audacious and unprecedented, it also lacked planning and forethought. The two older girls returned home almost immediately, while the other three were taken in by kind New England families whose alien cultures and traditions slowly distanced them from their memories of home. When the girls returned, they were determined to be good Japanese women, but they were unable to truly fit back into their society. This makes their ultimate accomplishments, which led to nothing less than revolutionizing Japanese women's education, all the more staggering. With a solid record of letters, diaries, and news reports to draw from, Nimura brings the girls and their late nineteenth-century exploits to life in a narrative that feels like an international variation on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, so very appealing and delightful are their historic stories.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Through the sensitive weaving of correspondence and archival papers, Nimura produces a story of real-life heroines in this masterful biography of three samurai daughters sent to the U.S. after the Civil War. They were the "first [Japanese] girls ever selected to receive a foreign education" and the first nonwhite students at Vassar College, and in 1882 they returned to their homeland determined to start a school for girls. Nimura contextualizes the vast changes in Japanese society that followed U.S. Admiral Perry's 1853 arrival in Yokohama and notes how, upon observing the contribution American women made to society, Kiyotaka Kuroda, a forward-thinking bureaucrat, proposed that a delegation of students to the U.S. (the Iwakura Mission) include girls. The girls-aged 7 to 11-faced culture shock after disembarking in San Francisco with the American ambassador, but formed strong bonds with their new American caregivers. The trio, as young women, repatriated with some discomfort to a nation where fascination with America was waning. While their personal struggles faded over time, their legacy carries on with Tsuda College in Tokyo, named for the youngest member of the trio. As Japan continues to grapple with the status and role of its educated women, Nimura offers a testimonial to their collective strength and determination. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Independent scholar Nimura has written an exquisite collective biography of the five Japanese girls who were sent to the United States at the end of the 19th century during Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912), as the country tried to prepare citizens to cope with-and catch up to, they felt-the modern West. While two of the girls returned home shortly after arriving in America, the other three were able to stay in their adopted home for ten years, attending school and living with host families in Connecticut and Washington, DC, before attending colleges along the East Coast. Nimura has a clear eye for depicting the relationship between Japan and the United States during the time discussed here, and she avoids the easy pitfall of turning the Japanese girls into "others" who were simply exotic treats for the Americans. Instead, the author highlights how both cultures were strange, each to the other, and, when the girls returned to Japan after their sojourn in America, how much like a foreign country their home had become to them. VERDICT A captivating read for biography lovers, readers interested in America's Gilded Age or late Meiji Japan, and fans of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.-Hanna Clutterbuck, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Through her fascinating tapestry of history and biography, New York scholar Nimura weaves the strange, vibrant tale of an insular nation coming to terms with currents of modernism it could no longer keep out.With the shogunate abolished and the "restoration" of 15-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito to the Meiji throne in 1868, Japan recognized that it would need to embrace Western ideas and technology in order to compete in the civilized world, and that would include a Western education for both men and women. Japan required educated mothers to raise standards, and thus the first batch of girls to be sent to study in America for an allotted period of 10 years was recruited from high-ranking samurai families who had fallen out of favor and could spare some mouths to feed at home. Of these five young women sent across the seas in 1871, the two eldest, at 14, did not fare well and were sent back within a few months. The remaining three experienced transformative home-sharing and education opportunities in America and became fluent speakers of English. Nimura concentrates on the stories of these three singular young women: Sutematsu Yamakawa, at 11, lived with the prominent Bacon family in New Haven and eventually attended Vassar; Shige Nagai, who had arrived at age 10, also attended Vassar and ended up marrying a fellow Japanese who had studied at Annapolis Naval Academy; Ume Tsuda, at barely 7, grew up in Georgetown and graduated from Bryn Mawr. All returned to Japan to marry, yet they carried on teaching and even founded an English school for girls. From clothing to manners to speech to aspirations, Nimura shows how the meeting of East and West transformed these select young women. An extraordinary, elegantly told story of the beginning of Japan's education and emancipation of its women. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
