Read Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back for Free Online Page B

new statesmen of Japan as they emerged onto the global stage.
    Kuroda’s thoughts were well received, aligned as they were with the fundamental goals of the reform-minded Meiji leaders. One of their first acts upon seizing power had been to draft a statement of purpose: the Charter Oath, proclaimed by the emperor at his enthronement in 1868. The oath announced the radical intentions of the new government: to overhaul Japan’s political, economic, and social institutions and guide the countrytoward equal footing with the West. “Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature,” it read. “Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.” The restrictions on engagement with the wider world, enforced over the preceding two and a half centuries, were thus reversed at a stroke.
    Kuroda’s timing was excellent. In the fall of 1871, Tomomi Iwakura, a former courtier and newly minted Meiji minister, announced a plan to lead an embassy to the nations with whom Japan had signed treaties, starting with the United States. It was time to heed the call of the Charter Oath and seek knowledge throughout the world. The delegates would observe Western institutions and technology firsthand, introduce Japan’s new leadership to foreign governments, and broach the issue of renegotiating the unequal trade agreements forced on the doomed shogunate more than a decade earlier. Dozens of students would travel with the embassy. Why not add a few girls?
    I N THE YEARS following the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships, Japan had sent other official embassies abroad, with mixed success. The first, to the United States in 1860, was largely ceremonial: a chance for the shogunate to assert its dignity in the wake of the first humiliating unequal treaty signings, as much for the Japanese audience as for the Americans. A middle-ranking and rather motley group, the members of this first delegation had only the sketchiest concept of life outside Japan; many were selected merely for their willingness to consider going abroad. Inexperienced, nervous, and deeply wary of the West, they shuffled through their diplomatic obligations hurriedly, refusing many invitations and determined to get home as soon as possible.
    The Americans, flattered that Japan had chosen to visit their nation first, greeted the Japanese “princes” with ecstatic enthusiasm. In New York, hundreds of thousands of spectators watched the procession of ambassadors down Broadway on June 16, 1860, escorted by seven thousandwelcoming troops, a spectacle immortalized by Walt Whitman in “The Errand-Bearers” :
    Over sea, hither from Niphon,
    Courteous, the Princes of Asia, swart-cheek’d princes,
    First-comers, guests, two-sworded princes,
    Lesson-giving princes, leaning back in their open barouches,
    bare-headed, impassive,
    This day they ride through Manhattan.
    But those impassive faces belied bewilderment and discomfort. Yukichi Fukuzawa, the prolific author and educator whose works would one day enlighten Aizu’s exiled sons, was a twenty-five-year-old member of that first delegation. Despite years of study in Dutch and English, he found himself baffled by such novelties as horse-drawn carriages, ice cubes, and ballroom dancing. Even a smoke was a challenge: seeing nothing he recognized as an ashtray, Fukuzawa emptied the bowl of his pipe into a wad of paper that he stashed in his sleeve. Wisps of smoke began to emerge from his robe. “The light that I thought I had crushed out was quietly setting me afire!”
    Though the press coverage of the 1860 embassy was almost universally respectful, the behavior of the average American citizen did not always rise to that standard. When the envoys arrived in Washington, mobs surrounded their carriages and gaped. “One burly fellow swore that all [the Japanese men] wanted was to have a little more crinoline and be right out decent