Samurai Daughters

 

 

A Daughter of the Samurai was published in America in 1925 by Etsuko Sugimoto. In this autobiography, Mrs. Sugimoto recalls her younger years in Japan, and talks about how the collapse of the Tokugawa system, which occured shortly before her birth, impacted her family.
"Her father was a Samurai, with high ideals of what was expected of a Samurai's family. His hopes were concentrated in his son until the son refused to marry the girl for whom he was destined and ran off to America. After that all that was meant for him fell to the lot of the little wavy-haired Etsu who writes here so delightfully of the things that happened in their childhood days in Japan."

 

 

 

 Daughters of the Samurai is a non-fiction book written in 2015 by Janice P. Nimura. It tells the story of Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai and Ume Tsuda, three Japanese girls aged 11, 10 and 6, who were sent with the Iwakura Mission in 1871 to America where they remained for 10 years. Before being chosen to accompany the Mission, Sutematsu had survived the monthlong siege during the Battle of Aizu in 1868 and lived briefly as a refugee. Shige was the daughter of a Tokugawa supporter, and after the Battle of Ueno (in which her father and brother fought against imperialists) she was adopted by her brother's friend. Ume was the daughter of Tsuda Sen, a Rangaku (Dutch studies) scholar and politician who had himself been sent to America by the Bakufu to purchase warships in 1867.