Tsuda Umeko — Her Own Country's Language

Hands and Feet Tied Up

My hands and feet are tied. I cannot hear, and I cannot speak.

A seventeen-year-old girl wrote this in English to her foster mother in America. It was December 1882.

The girl was not in a foreign country. She was in the country where she was born, in her own family's house.

The letter says other things too. Japanese food is delicious, and the taste feels strangely natural. Oh, if only the language would come back as easily! To say just one thing, there are six or seven ways. When they teach her all of them, she gets completely mixed up.

Her name was Tsuda Umeko. At that time she was called Ume. Years later she would change it to Umeko herself. And she had almost forgotten Japanese.

She'd had plenty of time to forget.

The story goes back eleven years.

On December 23, 1871, a ship left the port of Yokohama for America. It carried a government mission led by Iwakura Tomomi. Five girls were on board. They were the first girl students the Japanese government ever sent abroad. The two oldest were fourteen. The youngest was Umeko, only six.

Before they left, the five were handed a written note from the Empress. When schools for girls were built one day, they were to come home from their studies and be models for women.

While the ship crossed the Pacific, Umeko turned seven.

Her parents had packed some things in her luggage. There were two large books, an illustrated Japanese encyclopedia. Something was written inside:

"To my beloved daughter Ume, from your father. Edo, December 19, 1871"

There was also paper for writing letters, a pencil, and an ink stick.

There were family pictures too. One showed the whole family together on the veranda of her father's house. Another showed her mother holding little Umeko's hand.

In Washington, an American named Charles Lanman took care of the five girls. In a book he published the next year, he wrote this about her:

"She shows no sign of homesickness at all. The girls with her say she has never once looked sad since leaving Japan."

At least to the people around her, she did not look lonely.

Umeko was placed with the Lanmans, in Georgetown, near Washington. The couple had no children. Her English came very fast. In November of the year she arrived, Mrs. Lanman, now her American mother, was already writing to Umeko's mother in Japan to say so.

In the spring when she was eight, Umeko told the Lanmans herself that she wanted to be baptized as a Christian.

July 13, 1873, at a church near Philadelphia. At first the priest meant to give her the baptism given to small children. But eight-year-old Umeko was so steady that he baptized her as an adult. So the record says.

Through her years in America, her Japanese slipped away little by little.

Yamakawa Sutematsu and Nagai Shigeko, who had crossed with her, lived nearby. They saw each other often and spoke in Japanese. Umeko had no one like that. At first she had written to her parents in Japanese, but even that did not last.

In 1882, Umeko finished girls' school. More than ten years of study abroad were over, and she and Sutematsu boarded a ship for home.

In her diary on the voyage, she wrote something she had noticed. No one in her family knew what kind of person she was now.

On November 19, just before they reached Japan, she wrote to Mrs. Lanman.

That morning, she and Sutematsu had woken up and said the same thing to each other. Just think, only one more day. Only twenty-four more hours.

She was so happy she could not sit still. And in the next moment she was full of a strange uneasiness. How much easier it would be if she could only speak the language of her own country.

The language of her own country. That was how Umeko wrote about Japanese in her letter.

November 1882, Yokohama. Her family, whom she had not seen for eleven years, welcomed the two girls warmly.

Even after she got home, Umeko could do nothing at all unless her father, Sen, or her older sister Kotoko, translated for her.

To talk with her own family, Umeko needed an interpreter.

Just for Not Being Married

I am quiet and neat and regular, and I keep to the time. Mrs. Lanman will not believe it.

In a letter dated December 17, 1882, about a month after she came home, Umeko wrote this. The Umeko her American mother knew well was, it seems, not that kind of girl.

At least in her Japanese home, it seems, she behaved that way.

In a letter about ten days later, she admitted that she often wished she could go back to America and see everyone again.

Still, she did not think any other way would have been better. She had to be useful. Not because she knew so much, but because she was an educated Japanese woman. That is how she went on.

But when the new year came, her tone changed.

On January 6, 1883, her Japanese lessons were not going well. It was as hard as it is for a foreigner. She had no talent for languages.

Oh, poor me. No one has such a hard time learning the language of their own country. She went as far as writing that.

She would finally learn a sentence and say it out loud. Then she would be told it was a way of speaking used only to children and servants, and it would be very rude to say it to anyone else. What she should say instead was a long, slippery sentence that made no sense.

Just for "I" and "you," she wrote, there were more than eight ways.

Language was not the only trouble.

The government had prepared no job at all for the two girls, who had come home after studying more than ten years at the nation's expense. Umeko and Sutematsu went around to greet important officials, so that they would be remembered. Nothing moved forward.

In the same letter of January 6, Umeko wrote that sometimes she wondered what they had gone to America for. She did not believe they could do any good. The government seemed uninterested in their work, and it felt as if they had been forgotten.

Only nine days had passed since she wrote that she had to be useful.

The three of them had a place to meet.

It was Shigeko's house. Shigeko had come home first. The month after the others returned, she married a naval officer she had met in America. Umeko, Sutematsu and Shigeko called themselves "the Trio."

Umeko wrote about a day when the three were together again after a long time. They talked about the same things as always. Their great responsibility, and how they did not know how to carry it out.

"We have no friends. No real friends except each other. Our way of thinking is quite different from the Japanese, and different from the foreigners here too. So only the three of us can talk things over and help one another."

One topic came up among the three again and again. Marriage.

In Japan at that time, girls of fourteen to sixteen were already thought old enough to marry. Umeko was eighteen.

In a letter on January 16, she wrote this.

She would not marry unless she wanted to, even if it meant living like a hermit. The ordinary Japanese marriage, where everything but love counted, she would never accept, whatever happened.

On June 6, it went like this.

Still, she wanted a school of her own. Without marrying. She would not say never. Because to go on alone was very, very hard.

How hard it was, she wrote, to feel different and to be looked down on. She wished she could do things her own way, without everyone thinking her strange just because she was not married. After lamenting this, Umeko added one more thing. But even that was a trial. And trials, she wrote, are things that come.

A school of her own.

That was not a dream for Umeko alone.

Since their days in America, Umeko and Sutematsu had talked about building a girls' school in Japan. The plan was for Sutematsu, who had graduated from an American college, to lead, and for Umeko, who had only gone through high school, to help.

In November 1883, Sutematsu married. Her husband was Oyama Iwao, the Army Minister, the man at the very top of the army. His first wife had died.

It seems to have been a great shock to Umeko. A minister's wife could no longer be imagined standing at a teacher's desk herself.

On January 4 of the next year, Umeko wrote to Mrs. Lanman about Sutematsu. Sutematsu had stopped going to church, to fit in with her husband.

She could not stand that kind of quiet, wifely obedience. That is what Umeko wrote.

Of the two who were going to build the school, the one left was the one who could not speak Japanese.