Niijima Yae — The Woman Who Could Not Wait

Even When Told to Stop

"It is not right for a woman to join the soldiers. Please stop."

Inside the castle, the people around her warned her in just this way, it is said.

Even so, whenever the soldiers rushed out of the castle to attack, she slipped out with them, quietly, without fail.

A history of the Aizu war, put together in 1933, says it more shortly. They warned her, but she would not listen.

She had already cut off her hair on the day she entered the castle. Dressed in men's Western-style clothes, she took a gun and fired at the enemy from the loopholes in the walls and from the high watchtowers, it is said.

Her brother was a famous gunner, so she had learned the work without anyone noticing, and that was how she could fight like this. So adds a history of Aizu, put together in 1904.

Yamamoto Yae. The woman who would later be called Niijima Yae. She was twenty-two years old. She was inside Wakamatsu Castle in Aizu (the western part of today's Fukushima).

In 1868, the Aizu han, a domain ruled by a lord, was fighting on the side of the Tokugawa against the army of the new government. On the 23rd day of the eighth month of the old lunar calendar, the government army broke into the castle town. The people of the han shut themselves up in the castle. The siege lasted about a month.

The women who came into the castle worked very hard, tending the wounded, cooking meals, and doing all kinds of chores. So said Yamakawa Kenjiro, also from Aizu, in a talk given decades later.

What Yae did was something else.

Yae's family was a family of gunners. Her brother Kakuma was known for Western-style gunnery. Yae had practiced with him all the time, ready for the day she would be needed, they say. She had even taught the han's unit of young boys, the Byakkotai (the White Tiger Unit), how to handle a gun, it is said.

Her husband was in the castle too. Kawasaki Shonosuke, a gunner who, they say, came from the Tajima area (northern Hyogo today).

Only a few of the cannons in the castle were any use. With those, they fired back at the enemy who had set up camp on the mountain. Kawasaki was in charge of that job, and his helper was a woman, Yae, Yamakawa said.

That year, Yae's family was torn apart.

Early in the year, her younger brother was wounded in the battle of Fushimi, near Kyoto, and died in Edo. Her brother Kakuma was in Kyoto, locked up in the residence of the enemy side, the Satsuma han.

During the siege, a rumor reached the castle: her brother had been executed on a riverbank in Kyoto. Her mother, Saku, is said to have said she did not believe it. Soon the news came, through a farm family who visited the castle, that her brother was alive.

Inside the castle was not safe either.

On the 14th day of the ninth month of the old calendar, the government army launched an all-out attack. They pounded the castle with dozens of cannons, and the roar of the guns did not stop from morning till night. Many people inside the castle were killed by shells, Yamakawa said. Yamakawa's brother's wife was shot and killed that day.

Her father, Gonpachi, died fighting alongside his comrades about 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the castle. He was sixty-one.

On the 22nd day of the ninth month, the Aizu han surrendered.

The lord of the han was to leave the castle, so Yae would leave with the others. At that moment, it is said, she composed a poem.

"Asu yori wa / izuko no tare ka / nagamuran / nareshi ooshiro ni / nokosu tsukikage"

From tomorrow on, who will be looking at it? The light of the moon I leave behind over this castle I knew so well.

When she finished, Yae cried aloud, that same history of Aizu says.

Everyone left the castle with the same feeling, so this poem touched the heart in a special way. So the writer of the history added.

She was a person who cut her hair, took a gun, and went out even when told to stop. And on the day she left the castle, she wrote a poem about the moon and cried.

Three years later. Kyoto.

Her brother, who had gone blind, woke up night after night and begged his sister, it is said:

"Hey, Yae. What happened next? Tell me."

The Bride Who Was Five Minutes Early

Her brother had heard that Aizu was under attack, and he had not been able to rush to help.

Kakuma was deeply grieved, it is said, as his homeland was falling. That is why he wanted to hear the story of the siege again and again.

In 1871, her mother took Yae and her brother's daughter and moved to Kyoto, to be with him. Her father and her younger brother were gone.

The name of her first husband, Kawasaki Shonosuke, is not among those who moved to Kyoto. When and why the two parted is not clear.

Her brother worked as an adviser to the Kyoto government, though he could not see. He knew the law well and was known across the capital.

Through her brother's influence, Yae began to learn English. She did her hair in the Western style and wore Western shoes. At the Nyokoba, a school for girls in Kyoto, she also served as the dormitory supervisor. She taught the pupils even how to raise silkworms. She was a typical "new woman" of the day, a later biography says.

In 1872, her brother was asked to make an English guidebook for an exposition in Kyoto. It would be printed on a press from Germany, and for that, someone had to pick out the small pieces of metal type one by one and set them in rows.

It was Yae who picked the type, they say. What came off the press was a 48-page English guidebook, with pictures of the city of Kyoto and its surroundings. The author was her brother. A guidebook that came out under her brother's name was shaped by his sister, one letter at a time.

The next year, 1873, Makimura Masanao, an official of the Kyoto government, was locked up in Tokyo. The government of Kyoto asked her brother to get him back, so he went to Tokyo, and Yae went with him. They rode in a rickshaw all the way from Kyoto to Yokohama. From Yokohama, she rode the brand-new steam train for the first time.

In Tokyo, she carried her blind brother on her back and visited the homes of three men who held heavy posts in the government, it is said. In the end, Makimura was brought back to Kyoto.

There was a rumor about Makimura: he walked around Gion, Kyoto's entertainment district, leading a maiko (a young apprentice geisha) by the hand. When Yae told her brother, he scolded her instead, it is said.

Her brother, being blind, did not even know how beautiful that maiko was, the biography adds.

And who was it, now, who carried Brother on her back all over Tokyo to get that man back?

In 1875, Yae became engaged to a man.

Niijima Jo. A man who was trying to open a Christian school in Kyoto. By then Yae already believed in Christianity. She had even handed out books about Christ's teachings to the girls at the Nyokoba, it is said.

Jo wrote about his fiancée in a letter to a friend in America:

"She is a little like her blind brother. Once she believes something is her duty, she fears no one."

When the other officials at the school were too scared to act, she went before the governor of the prefecture again and again for the sake of the school, the letter goes on.

When the engagement became known, Yae was dismissed from her post at the Nyokoba right away. According to the same letter, the governor was afraid that Christianity would spread among the students.

The letter also said: "I do not know when we will be married. I plan to let my fellow missionaries decide."

In the first days of the new year, 1876, Yae was baptized. It was the first Christian baptism in Kyoto. The person baptized with her was a small child of the missionary Davis.

The wedding was held around the same time, at Davis's house near the Imperial Palace.

On the day of the wedding, the two had promised to go to the hall together.

Yae went to Jo's house in a rickshaw to pick him up. She arrived about five minutes before the promised time.

Jo is said to have said:

"You're early! I washed the neckcloth I'm going to wear today, and I'm ironing it right now."

The neckcloth was a necktie. The iron he was using, a hinoshi, was an old kind of iron: a pan filled with hot charcoal that smooths out the wrinkles in cloth.

The bride had arrived five minutes early. The groom was still ironing his necktie.

Thirty or forty people gathered: relatives, teachers at the school, friends. It was a very plain ceremony.

"After the ceremony, a light meal was brought in, and everyone seemed happy. It was the first wedding of Japanese Christians in this land," Jo wrote to a friend.

In the same letter, Jo also apologized to his friend. He should have told him beforehand, he wrote, but he had been busier than he could handle. The news of his own wedding had come late.

Still, some people did not like this marriage. The sister of an adviser to the government, and a man opening a Christian school. It was a marriage of political convenience, some said, and there were people still saying so decades later, it is said.

Before long, a boy would arrive at her husband's school, a boy who would run this bride down in public, not just once but more than once.

Western Head, Japanese Body

It was the night the boy first arrived at Doshisha, Jo's school.

There was a prayer meeting at a missionary's house. Among the people there was one woman wearing, over a Japanese kimono, something like the hat that Western ladies wear.

It looked like a parade of ghosts, a later essay wrote. The boy stared at her with a sour face, they say. That woman was Niijima Jo's wife.

The boy's name was Tokutomi Iichiro. Later, under the pen name Soho, he would write many books.

This is how Yae's look in those days has been handed down: her hair tied up, with a bonnet (a Western lady's hat). Something like a collar around her neck. From shoulders to feet, a Japanese kimono, without the hakama (the wide, skirt-like trousers). And on her feet, Western shoes.

At the end of 1876, at Davis's house, Yae began teaching a few girls from a beginner's English reader. The missionary women taught songs, and Yae taught the reader. It was a very small beginning. Among the pupils, they say, was even a nine-year-old boy. This later became Doshisha Girls' School.

On the day of the students' speech meeting, Jo and his wife went together to listen to the students speak and to teach them how to speak.

In front of that couple, Tokutomi gave a speech. He began by saying there was a woman here who looked like a crane, and went on to say, it is said:

"Her head is Western, her body is Japanese."

It was an insult to Mrs. Niijima. And it was not only once.

Tokutomi later confessed in his own book. He did not like the way Mrs. Niijima said "Jo, Jo" when she talked about her teacher. Carried away by a sense of righteous anger, he attacked her harshly at speech meetings, more than once, he wrote. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time.

The man the students called "Sensei" (teacher), his wife called by his first name.

Jo said not one word, it is said. He did not change how he treated the boy, either.

And Yae?

In her heart she may have been angry, but she did not change her manner toward him at all. She is truly a woman Aizu produced. That is what Tokutomi wrote, the one who had attacked her. What Yae herself said has not been found.

Her "newness" was not only in her clothes.

At Doshisha, every afternoon, the students split into two teams, the Genji and the Heike (two clans from a famous old war), and fought a battle by throwing a ball at each other. Yae is said to have come up with the ball.

It was old cloth wrapped around cotton from a futon (a Japanese floor bed), packed hard as a stone. When it tore, a real stone was usually stuffed inside.

The ball whistled through the air, and every day someone got hurt. Ebina Danjo, the leader of one side, had several front teeth broken by this ball, the school's history records. He later became president of Doshisha.

A story from the cold season also remains.

In Kyoto, it was the custom to put on padded winter clothes after November 3, the holiday for the Emperor's birthday. But a student, Kanamori Michitomo, still went to the prayer meeting in a single thin summer kimono in the middle of November, shivering.

Yae could not bear to watch. Not wanting to be rude by measuring his body, she guessed the size on her own and sewed padded clothes. On Friday night she stopped only Kanamori and handed them over.

On the way back to school, Kanamori could not stand the joy and the cold, and put the padded clothes on right there under the gate of the Imperial Palace, the story goes.

One day, Jo came home from school after hitting his own hand over and over with a wooden stick.

Some time later, the couple went out to buy beef, and Yae happened to touch her husband's hand. Jo said "Ouch!" it is said. She looked, and the hand had turned purple. Surprised, she asked what had happened. The rickshaw driver is here, Jo answered; I will tell you when we get home.

Yae is said to have said:

"Then please tell me in English."

And so she learned why her husband had hit his own hand, without waiting until they got home. That a husband and wife rode in one rickshaw together, that she could speak English on the spot: quite a few of the students found these things irritating, it is said.

There were days when the two rejoiced together, too. At the end of 1879, reading a letter that said a request for funds for the school had been granted, Jo cried out that the Lord had done it, and wept for joy. Then he and his wife knelt down together before God and gave thanks from the heart, he wrote to his benefactor in America.

Even so, Tokutomi writes:

Though he had said such rude things, he walked in and out of the Niijima house as if nothing had happened, and sometimes ate the five-ingredient rice that Mrs. Niijima cooked for him. Even now, when he thinks about it, he finds it a mystery himself.

That same Tokutomi, more than ten years later, would be the one to write down Jo's last words.

Wait a Little

"It was a truly happy day for us."

At the end of 1885, Niijima Jo wrote this in a letter to the wife of his benefactor in America. It was the day he came home to Kyoto from a trip of a year and a half through America and Europe.

His aged parents were waiting for him. His wife Yae had prepared a proper Japanese dinner. They all sat down Japanese-style and ate together, he wrote.

In a letter two years later, that wife has become a police officer.

"My wife is always watching me. Like a policeman, she takes away my pen and paper, and asks visitors to stop talking."

His chest was burning like a volcano with plans for the future. Yet his wife stopped him. He had told her that he could no longer hide anywhere in Japan, but he was grateful for it, he wrote.

Jo's health was failing by then.

Summer 1888, Tokyo. The doctor told him that his heart had grown large and would never return to normal, and that his life could end at any time.

Jo listened calmly, he wrote himself. But his wife seemed unable to bear it.

The doctor had told Yae to keep it secret from him.

"But, poor thing, she could not keep the secret."

At the end of the same letter, Jo added:

"My wife has come back, and she says to stop now. I have not let her know what I have written here."

A wife who could not keep a secret, and a husband who wrote a letter behind his wife's back.

July 19, 1889. Yae wrote about this day in her own hand.

The statesman Inoue Kaoru put Jo, just up from his illness, into his own carriage and took him to the residence of the Foreign Minister, Okuma Shigenobu. There he asked powerful people to give money to build a university. That night, 32,000 yen was collected.

They came home at about eleven at night. Yae's notes say:

"In extraordinary joy, together we gave thanks to God, and at twelve we went to bed."

They were so happy. The two of them thanked God together and went to bed at midnight.

At the end of that year, Jo went to rest his sick body at an inn in Oiso, in Kanagawa.

When Yae heard, she worried and wanted to be at his side. But Jo asked her to stay with his mother, who was eighty-four. And he told her, it is said:

"In the old days, samurai did not take their wives to war."

And I went out to that war carrying a gun, you know.

Yae stayed in Kyoto.

A letter addressed to "Dear Yae" arrived from Jo in Oiso, dated January 5, 1890.

He asked her to have a poem about his thoughts for the new year corrected by a man named Ikebukuro Kiyokaze. He was a person who had never given any thought to the way of poetry, he said, so please somehow make it into a poem.

Yae took the letter to the Doshisha library. The man there corrected the poem on the spot and handed it back, he wrote, and then Yae took out another sheet.

"This one was written by Jo too. Please correct it while you are at it."

Soon after, Jo's illness grew serious.

He was urged to send for his wife. The record says he answered:

"No. Wait a little."

A telegram was sent to Yae on January 19. Together with friends from Kyoto and Tokyo, Yae hurried to her husband's bedside.

The one who could not wait had been made to wait, and only then, at last, was she sent for.

On the 21st, an American biography built from Jo's letters records that Jo said this to Yae:

"When my friends come from Kyoto, encourage them, and tell them not to cry for me. I am a man with feelings, too. I might be moved by everyone's sadness and make it bigger with my own."

Early the same morning, Jo called Yae, his colleague Kozaki Hiromichi, and Tokutomi Iichiro, and spoke his will aloud. The one who wrote it down was that same Tokutomi.

He also left this for Yae, the same biography says:

"Even if I die, do not put up a monument. One wooden stake with the words 'Grave of Joseph Niijima' is enough."

The 23rd. In great pain, Jo raised his left hand, smiled, and said "Enough, enough," it is said.

That day, with Yae's left hand under his head, Jo drew his last breath.

As soon as he died, Tokutomi wrote in his autobiography, he said this to Yae:

"Since the days at Doshisha, I have done you a great wrong. But now that Sensei Niijima has died, from now on I will treat you as Sensei's keepsake. Please deal with me with that in mind."

How Yae answered was not written down.

Keepsake

The night was stormy, and the road was thick with mud and half-melted snow.

January 24, 1890. The train carrying Jo's body reached Kyoto near midnight. A thousand people were waiting at the station, more than 600 of them students. The students would not let anyone else touch the coffin. They took turns carrying it all the way to the house, it is said.

More than two months later, April 1.

A letter reached Okuma Shigenobu. It was a farewell message to Okuma that Jo had left as his will at Oiso.

The cover letter had three names lined up. First, Niijima Yaeko. Then Tokutomi Iichiro and Kozaki Hiromichi.

It was a joint signature, her name set beside the boy who had once run Yae down.

Jo's letter ended with a wish: that even after he died, Okuma would keep caring, for a long time to come.

After her husband's death, a student asked Yae about a scholarship.

Fukai Eigo. A man who later became governor of the Bank of Japan. He was a student to whom Jo had handed his scholarship money directly, every month. But Jo always spoke in such a calm, flat way that Fukai had even wondered whether Jo had no special interest in him, they say.

Yae said this, Fukai wrote in his autobiography:

"Jo often talked about you."

That was the first time Fukai learned of it.

The husband Yae saw seems to have been a little different from the husband others saw. A story about a photograph of her husband has also been passed down. It was taken at a photographer's to mark a summer school, and because of how it came out, Jo looked a bit like a monkey. Yet his wife reportedly said that photograph was closer to the real husband. That is probably Mrs. Niijima's mistake, said Yoshida Seitaro, who heard the story.

In 1892, her brother Kakuma died.

In 1894, a war began between Japan and China, then ruled by the Qing.

November 4. The Kyoto branch of the Japanese Red Cross Society asked one of its members to serve as head of the nurses, and sent her to Hiroshima. The job was to lead the nurses and watch over how they behaved. Niijima Yaeko, forty-eight years old.

Twenty-six years before, she had been told to stop, and had slipped out in secret. This time, she went out because she was asked.

In the relief team sent from Kyoto were the chief doctor, Inoko Shikanosuke, and the deputy head, Takagi Haruko. Their destination was the Third Branch of the reserve hospital in Hiroshima, which took in soldiers from the battlefield. Yae worked there from then on.

A woman who once fired at enemy soldiers from the loopholes of a castle was now in a hospital full of wounded soldiers. What Yae thought about that, we do not know. What did she say, and what did she do, in the wards? Yae's own words have not been found.

What remains is a comment in the Japanese Red Cross records: the good discipline of the nurses in Hiroshima owed much to the strength of the supervisors, including Niijima Yaeko. Another record describes the supervisors, Yae among them, as proper in word and manner, and kind to the nurses, like true mothers or older sisters.

After the war, Yae was given a medal, along with the chief doctor Inoko and the deputy head Takagi.

In 1896, her mother, Saku, died too. In 1907, Yae gave the house her husband had left, all of it, to Doshisha. In the last years of the Meiji era (which ended in 1912), she told people about the hardships of the siege. A handwritten copy titled "The Hardships of the Time I Entered Aizu Castle Dressed as a Man" remains in an old catalog of an Aizu library. Judging from the title, perhaps it was that same story of the siege, the one her blind brother asked for night after night in Kyoto.

Tokutomi wrote that he kept the "keepsake" promise from the day of her husband's death ever after. One line in a travel record notes that he visited Yae in Kyoto when she was seventy-five.

1. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Doshisha church, a two-week meeting was held in Kyoto. A man named Hori Teiichi, invited as a speaker, spoke there about the Jo he had seen and heard.

Yae, eighty-one, was very glad to hear that talk. And she shared three of her husband's keepsakes with Hori, just a little of each.

Hair that Jo had cut in Shanghai in his young days. A scrap of the kimono Jo wore as a small child on the day of his first shrine visit. A scrap of the undershirt he wore when he worked on a ship.

In 1932, Yae died at the age of eighty-six. Forty-two years had passed since she saw her husband off.

Let us return, once more, to the castle in Aizu.

Told to stop, she slipped out anyway. On the day she entered the castle, she had cut off her own hair.

There was always someone beside her. A blind brother who begged, night after night, to hear what happened next. A husband who wrote in a letter that "she fears no one," and who on his deathbed said, "Wait a little." Tokutomi, who had once run her down in public, and who on the day her husband died said he would treat her "as Sensei's keepsake."

The hair her husband cut in Shanghai passed from Yae's hand into other people's hands.

What became of the hair she cut herself on the day at the castle, no record has been found.