Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back

Janice Nimura's Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back is the non-fiction account of three girls who were chosen by the Japanese government to travel to the United States in 1871 to study for 10 years. They were then to return to Japan, bringing their new cultural knowledge back to a rapidly-westernizing Japan.The girls, Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu, ranged in age from 6-11 when they were plucked from the bosom of their (recently defeated) samurai families, placed aboard a ship, and sent to America for 10 (and in the cases of Ume and Sutematsu, extended to 11) years.

The women's families, generally suffering the privations of having been on the losing side of the conflict between the shogun and the emperor, were only too glad of a tangible way to demonstrate their support for the new, government, and also to have one less mouth to feed. So it is that the girls (originally five in number but reduced to three by the premature, health-related return of two girls after less than a year) travel across the sea and then, perhaps even more remarkably to them, by train across the U.S., passing through the still-wild West, en route to the East Coast.

Shige and Sutematsu are placed in host families in Connecticut, while Ume becomes the beloved only daughter of an older, wealthy Georgetown couple. There they stay, Ume for 11 years until she graduate from high school, and Shige and Sutematsu until they enroll at Vassar and become the first Japanese women to earn a college degree, ever. And then they return to a home they hardly remember and where, until recently, it was a literal crime to leave - for whatever reason, including storm-induced shipwreck - and attempt to return.

In their absence, the feudal land of their youth had disappeared, replaced by a rapidly modernizing society still uncertain of how it felt about the changes - and the west. Into this environment, the three women must re-assimilate; none of them can read or write Japanese any longer, and Ume can no longer speak it. The oldest of them, Sutematsu, is twenty-two. Choosing wildly differing paths, the young women set out to do their duty and fulfill their debt to the government, slowly, quietly changing the Japanese view of education, and perhaps even women's place in society, definitively.

Nimura's work spans the Meiji era, from its bloody dawn, depicted in the early chapters (where life appears exactly as depicted in the hundreds-of-years-earlier Shogun), to its end on the eve of World War I. Briefly, Nimura reaches into the 1920s and the end of the women's lives. In covering the birth of modern Japan, Nimura focuses on many of the events that set the stage for World War II (I could not help but feel a bit of relief that all died before the build up to the war) - events which are central to the opening of James Bradley's Flyboys, which follows naturally for anyone interested in Japan's progression from pro-West to ambivalent-about-the-West to anti-West. It's certainly no stretch to see Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu as the forbears to Harry Fukuhara and his family.

Four stars.