Setting the Stage

Before I comment on the play itself, I think it’s helpful to discuss the historical context around Rokumeikan. The play is set in 1886, in the middle of the Meiji era (1868–1912), one of the most tumultuous and consequential eras in the history of Japan. The historical setting of Rokumeikan would be as familiar to modern Japanese schoolgirls like those at Fujigaya and Matsuoka as the Civil War period is to us in the US.

This chapter is in the service of my commentary on Sweet Blue Flowers and the girls who populate its pages. I therefore thought it appropriate to discuss the history of Meiji-era Japan and the Rokumeikan from the point of view of Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda,¹ three ordinary girls whose extraordinary lives were documented by Janice Nimura² and by Akiko Kuno, one of their great-grandchildren.³ Yamakawa, the oldest of them, was born in 1860, only a few years after Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” showed up in Tokyo harbor in 1853, demanding that Japan open its ports to the US.

With no navy and no national military, the Tokugawa shogunate struggled to resist pressures from the US and other countries. In 1858 it signed a series of “unequal treaties” that favored Western powers and impinged upon Japanese sovereignty. Resentment of Western influence and long-standing grievances with the Tokugawas then led to a prolonged period of civil strife, ending in 1867–68 with a civil war in which forces fighting in the name of the emperor decisively defeated pro-government forces. Sutematsu Yamakawa, daughter of a mid-rank samurai on the losing side, was slightly wounded by shrapnel in one of the final battles, and her sister-in-law was killed.⁴

Fourteen-year-old Prince Mutsuhito became emperor in 1867, with the new “Meiji” (“enlightened rule”) era proclaimed in 1868 with the fall of Edo (now Tokyo) and the formation of a new government populated by many energetic and relatively young mid-rank samurai. They embarked upon a crash course of importing Western knowledge, technology, and experts to make Japan a modern power as fast as possible.

One of those men, Kiyotaka Kuroda, had been impressed with American women while visiting the US. He conceived the fantastical scheme of sending a group of Japanese girls to the US for a ten-year stay to learn American ways and come back to educate a new generation of Japanese girls. After an initial recruitment effort failed, the government succeeded in finding five low- to mid-rank samurai families who had been on the losing side, were living in relative poverty, and were therefore willing to let their girls leave home so as not to have to support them.⁵

The five girls left Japan in 1871 as part of the famous Iwakura mission along with a group of high-ranking government officials, scholars, and male students charged to visit foreign nations and bring back information of use to Japan. The oldest two girls soon returned to Japan due to ill health and homesickness. However, Sutematsu Yamakawa (eleven years old), Shige Nogai (ten), and Ume Tsuda (six) found places with American families. They soon learned English, made close American friends, and became socialized in a manner typical of upper-middle-class American girls of the period.⁶

While the girls were away, Japan saw a blooming of intellectual discourse, the formation of grass-roots political movements, and the creation of nascent political parties, as elements within society and government contended over what political and cultural ideas and institutions were most appropriate for Japan.

The three girls returned in the early 1880s, Sutematsu Yamakawa having graduated from Vassar College (the first Japanese woman to receive an American college degree) and Shige Nogai having earned a certificate in music from Vassar. All three girls experienced severe culture shock, with Ume Tsuda having completely forgotten how to speak Japanese. They also found that foreign ideas were not as popular as when they left for America, as a conservative backlash was building.⁷

Shige Nogai soon entered into a love match with a fellow Japanese student who had attended the US Naval Academy. She went to work as a music teacher, continuing her career while bearing and raising six children. At one point, she was the highest-paid female employee in Japan. Some scholars contend that she’s depicted in a woodblock print showing a dance at the Rokumeikan—the pianist on the right to whom the other pianist seems to be looking for cues.⁸ Her husband eventually became a baron and an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and she a baroness.⁹

Sutematsu Yamakawa struggled to find work suitable to her upbringing and education and ended up accepting an offer of marriage from Iwao Ōyama, minister of war and a former general in the Imperial Japanese Army. Ōyama, twenty years her senior, was looking for a wife familiar with Western ways to assist him in his political and diplomatic activities. In time, Sutematsu became a pillar of the Japanese aristocracy, advising the empress herself on Western culture and fashion.¹⁰

As Countess (later Princess) Ōyama, she became known as the “Lady of the Rokumeikan” for her role in hosting events there after its construction in 1883. (In fact, she appears as a minor character in the play Rokumeikan.) Ōyama also introduced American-style philanthropy to Japan, including a charity bazaar held at the Rokumeikan.¹¹ This event was also memorialized in a woodblock print, depicting Countess Ōyama and her daughter Hisako in the center of the image.¹²

One of the primary beneficiaries of Sutematsu’s philanthropy was Ume Tsuda, who had the worst time adjusting to life in Japan. She first obtained employment as a private tutor to the children of Hirobumi Itō, soon to become Japan’s first prime minister. She then taught at the Peeresses’ School, which Itō set up (with assistance from Countess Ōyama) to educate the daughters of the Imperial family and Japanese nobility.¹³ (Prestigious girls’ schools like Fujigaya Women’s Academy would later offer an equivalent experience for the daughters of Japan’s upper and upper-middle classes.)

Ume Tsuda became frustrated by the conservatism of the Peeresses’ School and the expectations of her family and others that she marry. Due to her youth, she had not been able to attend college while in America, and hence she applied for and was granted permission and funding to go back to the US to complete her education. Tsuda enrolled at the recently-opened Bryn Mawr College for women and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. She then returned to Japan, having also found time to (anonymously) assist an American friend, Alice Mabel Bacon, in writing a book critical of Japanese laws and educational policies relating to girls and women.¹⁴

After some time and assistance from Countess Ōyama, Ume Tsuda realized her dream of opening her own school, the Women’s Institute for English Studies (Joshi Eigaku Juku). Its mission was to train teachers for Japan’s newly-mandated middle schools for girls. Tsuda was soon joined by Anna Cope Hartshorne, her close friend from Bryn Mawr, who became her partner in both work and life. (Like Nobuko Yoshiya and her partner Chiyo Monma, Tsuda and Hartshorne bought a cottage together in Kamakura.)¹⁵

In 1905 the Women’s Institute for English Studies enrolled nearly a hundred and fifty students. It was so highly regarded that its graduates received a government exemption from taking the teaching certification exam.¹⁶ Those women, in turn, taught the schoolgirls of the late Meiji and Taishō eras who created shōjo culture, and introduced them to Western literature and ideas. In Nobuko Yoshiya’s 1923 Class S story “Yellow Rose,” Misao Katsuragi, the protagonist, is an English teacher newly-graduated from Tsuda’s institute.¹⁷

Ume Tsuda spent her last years in ill health, living in Kamakura with Anna Hartshorne. After she died in 1929, the Women’s Institute for English Studies was renamed in her honor, eventually becoming Tsuda College and then (more recently) Tsuda University. Hartshorne herself left Japan in 1940, on the brink of war, never to return. She died in 1957, a year after the first production of Rokumeikan and almost a century after the beginning of the Meiji era.¹⁸

The Rokumeikan itself was long gone by then. Its use had declined with the rise of conservative sentiment and anti-Western feeling, and it was sold in 1890 to become a private club for the aristocracy. The building fell into disuse and was eventually demolished in 1941, as Japan went to war with the Western powers whose diplomats it had once invited to dance at the Rokumeikan.

There’s an intriguing parallel between the three twenty-first-century girls who are the main characters in Sweet Blue Flowers and the three nineteenth-century girls of Daughters of the Samurai. Kyoko resembles Sutematsu Yamakawa, thwarted in her original desire and falling back on marriage with an older man of higher social status. We can only hope that Kyoko will find happiness in such a marriage, as Yamakawa did in hers.

Fumi resembles Ume Tsuda. She will remain unmarried, as Tsuda did (unless marriage equality comes to Japan). Our hope for Fumi is that, like Tsuda, she will also find a woman, whether Akira or another, who will be her lifelong companion.

As for Akira, her fate is not yet clear—though I doubt she’ll have six children, like Shige Nogai. We can only hope that Akira also finds someone to love, just as Shige did.