Reseña de Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back por Josh

Daughters of the Samurai tells the fascinating story of five girls who, in 1871, were sent to the United States by the Japanese government.

The youngest, Tsuda Ume, was just six years old when she left. She was accompanied by Masuda Shige (10), Yamakawa Sakiko (10), Ueda Tei (14), and Yoshimasu Ryo (14), along with a group of middle-aged men, mostly government ministers and their aides. Among them was the charmingly named Itō Hirobumi, who would later become one of the most important statesmen of the Meiji era and a key patron of the girls in later years.

The Iwakura Mission, as it was known, was Japan’s second official mission to the United States. The first had been sent eleven years earlier by the Tokugawa shogunate to attend the ratification of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce - one of the “unequal treaties” imposed on Japan under threat of force. The backlash against such treaties contributed significantly to the fall of the shogunate and the restoration of imperial rule. The new mission aimed both to secure diplomatic recognition for the new regime and to renegotiate these earlier agreements.

At the time of the mission’s departure, the number of Japanese people who had ever lived outside Asia could likely have been counted on one hand. Since the end of Japan’s isolationist policy in 1854, Europeans had begun to trickle into the country, though events like the Namamugi Incident (1862) - in which a British traveler was hacked to death by samurai for showing insufficient deference - likely dampened early tourism.

Despite tensions, Western books and ideas continued to enter Japan. Alongside growing resentment of unequal treaties was a rising curiosity about the West and a belief that Japan had much to learn from it. The girls were sent as part of this effort. The government recognized the need for individuals who had lived in the West and were comfortable with Western customs and social norms.

During the earlier mission, Japanese officials had noticed something striking about American society: women played a visible role in public and social life. Wives attended formal functions, and while political authority remained male-dominated, women’s opinions were sought and taken seriously. This, they believed, was made possible by women’s education. In the United States, girls were taught to read alongside boys, and some even attended women’s colleges. Educated wives, it was thought, gave American men a distinct advantage.

If Japan was to catch up with the West, its women would need to become more like Western women -and to do that, they would need to learn how Western girls were raised. Three of the girls would go on to attend American universities: Masuda and Yamakawa graduated from Vassar, while Ume attended Bryn Mawr. Ume later became a leading advocate for women’s education in Japan, founding Joshi Eigaku Juku (Women’s Institute for English Studies), later renamed Tsuda University in her honor.

While promoting women’s education was itself a radical position, Ume’s views were otherwise relatively conservative. She believed women should be educated primarily to become better wives and mothers, not to enter the workforce or compete with men.

Ume was assisted in founding her school by her fellow mission member Yamakawa Sakiko, later known as Ōyama Sutematsu after marrying a much older general and entering elite society. Sutematsu worked to introduce the kind of charitable women’s activities she had observed in the United States. She organized a bazaar to raise funds for a hospital, persuading upper-class women to sell handmade goods - something that would have been socially unthinkable under normal circumstances. Elite women were not expected to engage in commerce, but because the effort was charitable and associated with Western modernity, the event was a success and became an annual tradition.

Sutematsu also helped establish the Peeresses’ School to educate girls from aristocratic families. The institution resembled American and English finishing schools, placing as much emphasis on etiquette and social conduct as on formal academics.

Nimura does an excellent job capturing the complex social and cultural dynamics of the Meiji era. There was a persistent tension between embracing Western technologies, fashions, and ideas, and preserving a distinct Japanese identity. Efforts to define and protect Japanese culture were closely tied to emerging imperial ambitions, which would later manifest in the colonization of Korea and Taiwan.

One of the girls later recalled studying a world map in the United States that divided countries into “civilized,” “partially civilized,” and “barbarous” regions. Japan was categorized as “partially civilized”-more advanced than Africa, but not on par with Europe. This framework was central to the logic of colonialism, offering a moral justification for empire-building under the guise of uplifting less “civilized” societies.

For Japan, achieving recognition as a fully “civil