Free Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura

easier to suspect the lecherous one as having been Keijiro Nagano, a man with a colorful history. Back in 1860, at the tender age of sixteen, he had joined the first mission to America as an apprentice interpreter. His youthful high spirits, in contrast to his stiffly straight-faced countrymen, had instantly attracted the attention of the American press; dubbing him “Tommy,” reporters swarmed him, and everywhere he went the ladies swooned. The daily papers tracked his activities almost more assiduously than those of the ambassadors he served. He wrote love notes to American girls on pink stationery and inspired a polka composed in his honor, with a refrain that captured the odd ardor of his fans, at once admiring and condescending:
    Wives and maids by scores are flocking
    Round that charming, little man,
    Known as Tommy, witty Tommy,
    Yellow Tommy, from Japan.
    Now twenty-eight, still slight of stature if no longer quite so pretty, Nagano may yet have considered himself a ladies’ man. But flirting with anonymous foreign girls was not the same as groping the daughter of a samurai. Perplexed by this unprecedented situation, and painfully aware of the eyes of the American crew upon them, the mission’s leaders decided to hold a trial; wasn’t that what enlightened Westerners would do? It would be an edifying exercise in foreign legal protocol, it would hold the transgressor to account, and (to be honest) it would provide a little entertainment. The voyage was long, and the delegates were bored.
    The strutting Ito, having observed courtrooms in London during his sojourn there, would play the judge. Other delegates would take the roles of prosecutor and defense attorney. Takayuki Sasaki, the embassy’s senior official in charge of judicial affairs, was appalled. It was one thing, heargued, to hold a mock trial with a fictitious case, but the offense here was real. Whether it had been a serious crime or just a bit of minor mischief, making a show of bringing it to “court” risked yet more disgrace to the girl, her molester, and, by extension, the embassy itself. All this before their ship even reached shore. What would the foreigners think?
    Predictably, the trial was a farce, with no judgment reached. “Little irregularities might not affect big countries of the West,” wrote a fuming Sasaki in his journal, “but our country has just begun to take the path of progress and is, as it were, still a child without learning, having achieved nothing. It had better be cautious of doing anything amiss.” Nagano, for his part, was nonchalant. “To divert our boredom,” his journal entry reads, “a sham trial, inspired by a little happening, was held.” None of the delegates recorded a word about Ryo’s humiliation or the discomfort of the other girls.
    T HE A MERICA PLOWED steadily toward San Francisco, sighting nothing but an occasional albatross riding the wind like a kite. “Goonies,” the sailors called them. Two days from port, seagulls appeared, swooping so low they nearly touched the heads of the passengers. “Apparently, when crossing the ocean,” Kume wrote, “if you see goonies you are far from land, but if you see gulls you know you are nearing land.” The first leg of the journey, then, was almost over.
    Sent off by their families, largely ignored by the men of the mission, and unable to converse with their American chaperone, the five girls in their tiny cabin had nothing to do but wonder.

PART
    II

    The customs of all countries are strange to untrained eyes.
    — ETSU INAGAKI SUGIMOTO ,
A Daughter of the Samurai, 1926

Ume, Sutematsu, and Shige in Philadelphia,
1876. (Courtesy Tsuda College Archives.)

5    “INTERESTING STRANGERS”
    T HE SUN HAD RISEN hours since, but fog still lingered in San Francisco Bay as the steamer America made her slow and regal way through the Golden Gate. It was Monday, January 15, 1872. As Fort Alcatraz slid past, salvos of artillery rang out—a thirteen-gun