Daughters of the Samurai

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back is a 2015 non-fiction book by Janice P. Nimura, primarily about the lives of Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda. These three Japanese girls were sent to America as part of the Iwakura Mission, at the ages of 11, 10, and 6 respectively, to receive ten years of American education before returning to Japan. Nimura explores the personalities and emotional experiences of these girls as they grow into young women and attempt to reconcile conflicting national identities.

Research

Nimura began the research which led her to this book when she came across the memoir of Alice Mabel Bacon, who plays a minor role in the resulting biography as an American friend of the girls who briefly lived with them in Japan. Of the origin of the book, she says:

I got lucky: I found a dusty memoir in the sub-basement of the New York Society Library on 79th Street. It was the work of Alice Mabel Bacon, a New Haven spinster who had traveled to Tokyo in 1888 to teach at a school for girls. This was unusual enough, but Alice wrote of living not among foreigners, but with “Japanese friends, known long and intimately in America.” Which didn’t make any sense at all. As far as I knew, there weren’t any Japanese women in New Haven at that time for her to have made friends with. Turns out that in 1872 her family had taken in an 11-year-old Japanese girl, who had grown up for a decade as Alice’s foster sister. Clearly, there was a larger story here, and I found it by following where Alice had led.

The book draws heavily on letters written by Sutematsu and Tsuda to their American friends and family, including from Sutematsu to Alice. In an interview with the Japan Times, Nimura described these letters as an unusually fertile resource for biography: "They all found incredible release in writing letters in English back to their friends in America... You get these letters that, for Victorian letters, are remarkably frank and have real voices in them.” However, Nimura's research on Shige was limited by the fact that the collection of her materials held by her family is not available to the public.

Reception

When the book was published, the New York Times Sunday Book Review praised the book for its ability to illuminate the different personalities of the three girls and to expand Americans' understanding of the Meiji era. The Christian Science Monitor praised the story as inspirational, and the Washington Post praised its ability to make the girls' struggles feel relatable. The book also received starred reviews in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist.

The book also received attention in some non-literary media outlets. Nimura was interviewed for the Japan Times, which also praised the book, drawing particular attention to the way it humanized Tsuda, a famous figure in Japan, "revered almost as a patron saint" for having founded Tsuda University. The book was also reviewed in Vassar: The Alumnae/i Quarterly , highlighting Sutematsu's role in Vassar's history as "the first student of color known to have graduated from Vassar", and the magazine published an excerpt of the book's chapter "At Vassar," describing Sutematsu's time at the school.