Ōyama Sutematsu

In 1868–1869, Yamakawa's family was on the losing side of the Boshin War. The Boshin War was a civil war at the end of Japan's bakumatsu ("end of military government"), in which pro-shogunate forces resisted the new imperial rule that began with the 1867 Meiji Restoration. The conflict reached Yamakawa's hometown with the Battle of Aizu in late 1868.[6] On October 8, 1868, when Yamakawa was eight, imperial forces invaded and burned her hometown of Wakamatsu.[7] Yamakawa took shelter within the walls of Tsuruga Castle with her mother and sisters.[3] Several hundred people from other samurai families instead committed ritual suicide, in what would become a famous instance of mass suicide.[8][4] This invasion marked the beginning of a monthlong siege,[9] which came to be a symbol of "heroic and desperate resistance."[6] It was during the Battle of Aizu that the Byakkotai (White Tiger Brigade), a group of teenage fighters, famously committed mass suicide under the mistaken belief that the castle had fallen.[6]

Battered Tsuruga Castle, Aizu, Fukushima (1868)[10]

The 600 women and children inside the castle, led by Matsudaira Teru,[9] formed workgroups to cook, clean, and make gun cartridges,[11] as well as nursing nearly 1,500 wounded soldiers.[12] One of Yamakawa's sisters attempted to join Nakano Takeko's Shōshitai (娘子隊, "Girls' Army"), but on her mother's orders remained inside the castle making gun cartridges. Yamakawa herself, age eight, carried supplies for the cartridge makers. Toward the end of the siege, Yamakawa's mother sent her and other girls to fly kites as a gesture of defiance while imperial cannons bombarded the castle and the women smothered the shells with wet quilts. One shell which was not smothered in time exploded near her, wounding Yamakawa's neck with shrapnel, and killing her sister-in-law Toseko.[11]

The siege ended with the castle's surrender on November 7, 1868.[13] Yamakawa was taken to a nearby prisoner camp with her mother and sisters, where they were held for a year. In the spring of 1870, they were exiled to the newly created Tonami District (an area that is now part of the Toyama Prefecture). The 17,000 refugees exiled there had no experience of farming, and the winter saw shortages of food, shelter, and firewood which threatened Yamakawa's family with starvation.[14] Yamakawa, turning eleven, spread night soil on the fields and scavenged for shellfish.[15]

In the spring of 1871, Yamakawa was sent to Hakodate, without her family,[16] where she was lodged with Takuma Sawabe and then with French missionaries.[17]

Kiyotaka Kuroda, who arranged to send the girls to study in America

In December 1871, when she was eleven years old, Yamakawa was sent to the United States for study, as part of the Iwakura Mission.[18] Yamakawa was one of five girls sent to spend ten years studying Western ways for the benefit of Japan, after which she was to return and pass on her knowledge to other Japanese women and to her children, in accordance with the Meiji philosophy of "Good Wife, Wise Mother". The other girls were Yoshimasu Ryo (age 14), Ueda Tei (14), Nagai Shige (10) and Tsuda Ume (6).[19] All five girls were from samurai families on the losing side of the Boshin War.[20] The initiative was a "pet project"[16] of Kiyotaka Kuroda, who initially received no applicants in response to his recruitment efforts, despite the generous funding offered: all the girls' living expenses would be paid for the decade, plus a generous stipend.[16] In response to Kuroda's second call for girls to be educated in America, Yamakawa's eldest brother Hiroshi, acting as head of the household, nominated her.[17] Hiroshi was familiar with Kuroda, since his and Yamakawa's brother Kenjiro had recently left for his own education in America in January 1871, with Kuroda's assistance.[21] Hiroshi may have nominated his sister due to her independent spirit and academic strengths, or out of simple financial need.[17] The five girls chosen were the only applicants.[16]

At this time, Yamakawa's mother changed her given name from Sakiko (咲子) ("little blossom") to Sutematsu (捨松).[19] The meaning of the new name could indicate disappointment that Yamakawa was being sent away from Japan, with the first character meaning discard (捨, sute), as if Yamakawa had been thrown away.[19][22] But the name could also indicate a positive hope: pine (松, matsu) is one of the Three Friends of Winter which flourish even in harsh conditions,[23] and it sounds like "to wait" (待つ, matsu), suggesting that her mother gave up (捨, sute) her youngest daughter to the government mission while awaiting her safe return.[19]

Nagai Shige (age 10), Ueda Tei (14), Yoshimasu Ryo (14), Tsuda Ume (6) and Yamakawa Sutematsu (11), in Chicago, their first time wearing Western clothes.

Before leaving Japan, Yamakawa and the others were the first samurai-class girls to be granted an audience with the Empress Haruko, on November 9, 1871.[24] They departed with the rest of the Iwakura Mission on December 23, 1871 aboard the steamship America, chaperoned by Elida DeLong[25] (wife of the American diplomat Charles E. DeLong), who spoke no Japanese).[18] After a stormy and difficult journey, they arrived in San Francisco on January 15, 1872. Yamakawa and the other girls spent two weeks in San Francisco, largely solitary in their hotel room but the subjects of intense newspaper coverage.[26] Americans typically spelled her name as Stemats Yamagawa,[27][28] and referred to her and the other girls as "Japanese princesses".[29] After two weeks in San Francisco, the Iwakura Mission embarked on a monthlong cross-country train tour, arriving in Washington, DC on February 29,[30] where Charles Lanman (secretary to Arinori Mori) took custody of the girls.[25] Yamakawa lived briefly with Mrs. Lanman's sister, a Mrs. Hepburn,[25] then in May 1872 all five girls were moved to their own house with a governess, to study English and piano.[31]

Leonard Bacon, who acted as an adoptive father to Yamakawa for her decade in America.

By October, however, they had separated: Yoshimasu and Ueda returned to Japan, Tsuda moved in with the Lanmans,[27] and on October 31, 1872 Nagai and Yamakawa were moved to New Haven, Connecticut.[32] In New Haven, Yamakawa's elder brother Kenjirō was studying at Yale University.[33] To ensure that Nagai and Yamakawa practiced their English, they were placed in separate households, Nagai living with the minister John S. C. Abbott and Yamakawa living with the minister Leonard Bacon.[34] Yamakawa would spend the next ten years as part of the Bacon family, growing particularly close with his youngest daughter of fourteen children, Alice Mabel Bacon.[28] Likely due to the Bacons' influence, Yamakawa converted to Christianity.[35]

Yamakawa attended Grove Hall Seminary, a primary school for girls, with Alice Bacon.[36] In 1875, Yamakawa passed the entrance exam for Hillhouse High School, a prestigious public school, and began her studies there.[37] She attended the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with both Nagai and Tsuda, a rare reunion.[38] In April 1877, Yamakawa graduated from Hillhouse High School.[39]

Yamakawa began her studies at Vassar College in September 1878, the fourteenth year of the still-new women's college.[40][41] To her regret, the Bacons couldn't afford to send Alice to college, but she was reunited with Nagai. The two of them were the first nonwhite students at the school, and the first Japanese women to enroll in any college. Nagai enrolled as a special student in the music department, while Yamakawa pursued a full four-year bachelor's degree.[40]

Yamakawa Sutematsu, Nagai Shige, and their friend from Vassar Martha Sharpe.

While at school, Yamakawa began styling her name as Stematz Yamakawa, using the American name order and a spelling which matched the pronunciation of her name.[42] Her teachers included Henry Van Ingen and Maria Mitchell.[43] During her time at Vassar, she studied Latin, German, Greek, math, natural history, composition, literature, drawing, chemistry, geology, history, and philosophy.[44][45] She also mastered chess and whist.[46] Yamakawa was a reserved and ambitious student, whose marks were among the highest in the class.[42] She was also well-liked by her classmates.[35] Around this time, Yamakawa's sister Misao moved from Japan to Russia; Misao wrote letters in French to Yamakawa, which Yamakawa's classmates translated and helped her reply to.[42] Yamakawa was elected class president for 1879, and invited to join the literary club of the Shakespeare Society, which was "reserved for students of formidable intellect."[35] In 1880, she was a marshal for the college's Founder's Day celebration.[47] In June 1881, Nagai returned to Japan. The ten-year period of the girls' educational mission had ended, but Yamakawa extended her stay to complete her degree.[48] In her senior year, she was named president of the Philalethean Society, the largest social organization at Vassar.[49] Whilst at Vassar she also became friends with actress and novelist Louise Jordan Miln who visited her in Tokyo on her travels to the Far East in the 1890s.

Yamakawa graduated from Vassar College with a B.A., magna cum laude,[41] on June 14, 1882.[50] Her thesis was on "British Foreign Policy Toward Japan,"[41] and she was chosen to give a commencement speech on the topic at her class's graduation.[51][lower-alpha 1] After graduation, Yamakawa studied nursing at the Connecticut Training School For Nurses in New Haven in July and August.[53] She and Tsuda (who had also extended her stay, to complete a high school degree) finally departed for Japan in October 1882.[54] They travelled by rail to San Francisco, whence they left aboard the steamship Arabic on October 31.[55] After a rough three-week journey across the Pacific, Yamakawa arrived in Yokohama on November 20, 1882.[56]

Beginning in 1898, a personal tragedy in Ōyama's household became the subject of a bestselling novel, in which Ōyama was depicted as a wicked stepmother. Author Kenjirō Tokutomi's novel The Cuckoo (不如帰, Hototogisu), or Nami-ko, written under the pen name Rōka Tokutomi, is based on the marriage and death of Ōyama Nobuko, one of Ōyama Iwao's daughters with his first wife. Ōyama Nobuko married Mishima Yatarō in 1893, a love match which also united two powerful families. The winter after their marriage, Nobuko became ill with tuberculosis. Mishima's mother insisted that he divorce her, although he felt it was wrong, on the grounds that Nobuko would no longer be healthy enough to bear the heir which was necessary for an only son. While Nobuko was being nursed in the countryside, her parents agreed to a divorce, and the marriage was dissolved in the fall of 1895. Nobuko was moved back to her parents' house in Tokyo, where they built a new wing of their house for her to prevent transmission of the illness. Ōyama Sutematsu was the subject of unsympathetic gossip for isolating her stepdaughter, which was seen as a punishing exile. Nobuko died in May 1896, age twenty.[82]

Tokutomi published his story based on these events in the newspaper Kokumin shinbun from November 1898 to May 1899. Tokutomi revised the story, and published it as a standalone book in 1900, which is when it became one of the most successful novels at the time, a major bestseller popular across many social groups for its elegant language and tear-jerking scenes. The novel is "most often remembered as a novel that protests the victimization of women, particularly the victimization of young brides,"[83] blaming the Meiji era family system known as ie for the tragedy. In presenting this moral, the novel depicts the young couple in idealized terms, and is moderately sympathetic toward the character based on Ōyama Iwao, but demonizes the characters based on Mishima's mother and on Ōyama Sutematsu. Ōyama Sutematsu's character is presented as jealous of her own stepdaughter, and a corrupting Western influence in her family.[84]

Ōyama assisted Tsuda and Hirobumi Ito in establishing the Peeresses' School in Tokyo for high-ranking ladies,[85] which opened on October 5, 1885.[86] It was overseen by the new minister of education, Arinori Mori, who had frequently met with the girls of the Iwakura Mission while in America.[87] In its first years, the school was a relatively conservative institution, where aristocratic students dressed in formal court dress and studied Japanese, Chinese literature, English or French, and history alongside the less academic subjects of morals, calligraphy, drawing, sewing, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, household management, and formal etiquette.[88] From 1888–1889, Alice Bacon joined the school as an English teacher.[89] At this point, the school began requiring Western dress for students.[90]

In 1900, she was a co-founder with Bacon and Tsuda Ume of the Women's Home School of English (or Joshi Eigaku Juku), to teach advanced studies and progressive Western ideals in English.[57][91] At that time, women's only option for advanced study was the Women's Higher Normal School in Tokyo, which taught in Japanese and provided a more conservative curriculum.[91] While Tsuda and Bacon worked as teachers, Ōyama served as a patron of the school.[92]

Countess Ōyama Sutematsu and her daughter Ōyama Hisako at the first fundraising bazaar for Takaki Kanehiro's Tokyo Jikei iin (東京慈恵医院), 1887. Yamakawa discussed with Takaki the founding of training course and increase female healthcare workers, which would become Jikei Kango semmon gakko (慈恵看護専門学校).[lower-alpha 4]

Ōyama also promoted the idea of philanthropy (not a typical part of aristocratic Japanese life) to high-ranking Japanese ladies. In 1884, she hosted the first charity bazaar in Japan, raising funds for Tokyo's new Charity Hospital.[93] Despite skepticism of the concept in the Japanese press, and suggestions that the activity was not ladylike, the bazaar was a financial success and became an annual event.[94]

In addition to promoting monetary charity, Ōyama was active in volunteer nursing. She was Director of the Ladies Relief Association and the Ladies Volunteer Nursing Association, President of the Ladies Patriotic Association, and Chairman of the Japanese Red Cross Society.[22] At the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, she formed a committee of sixty aristocratic ladies to raise funds and gather supplies for the troops.[68] Ōyama herself rolled bandages for the Red Cross during this war,[68] and worked again as a volunteer nurse during the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905.[35]