Oyama Sutematsu (1860-1919)
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senzenwomenOyama Sutematsu was born in 1860 in Aizu-Wakamatsu, youngest daughter of the samurai Yamakawa Shigekata and his wife En. Her birth name was Yamakawa Saki. She was given a sound education at home, which was roughly interrupted by the Boshin War when she was seven; she and her mother were among those besieged in the local castle, where she made and carried ammunition and saw warfare at first hand，spending a year in a prison camp after their defeat. Most of her family survived the war, but found themselves left in poverty; Saki spent some time fostered out with a French missionary’s family because her own family could not afford to care for her.
When she was eleven years old, the government recruited young Japanese girls to study in America, and Saki was volunteered (presumably with her consent) by her older brother. The last thing her mother did before she left was to change Saki’s name to Sutematsu, an oddity of a name punning on “abandoning, but still waiting,” suggesting En’s motherly feelings about sending her adolescent daughter unimaginably far away for ten years or more. Once in the US, Sutematsu sometimes spelled her name phonetically as Stematz; her intimates called her Steam.
The group of five also included two older girls, Ryo and Tei (both of whom returned to Japan within a year), Nagai Shige, close to Sutematsu’s own age, and Tsuda Ume, who was all of six years old. They traveled across the US and settled down with host families in the Northeast. Sutematsu converted to Christianity while living in New Haven with her host family, the Bacons, and became as close as sisters with their daughter Alice. After finishing high school, she attended Vassar College and became the first Japanese woman to receive a US bachelor’s degree. As well as mastering English, she studied French and German (she and her older sister Misao, then living in Russia, corresponded for a while in French as they had no other common written language). Her professors included Maria Mitchell. Sutematsu was elected class president her senior year and gave a speech at her graduation in 1881, after which she studied nursing for a year while waiting to return to Japan.
After her return in 1882, she found herself frustrated by the lack of professional scope—due partly to the restricted status of women in Japan, particularly in the upper classes, and partly to her illiteracy in Japanese, although she spoke it fluently—when she knew the original purpose of the girls’ mission to the US had been to train them to be of use to their country. With no other simple options, she became part of Japan’s upper-class social life, dancing at the Rokumeikan, where she met Oyama Iwao, the Minister of the Army, a widower eighteen years older than she who fell for her at first sight. He had fought on the opposite side from her family in the Boshin War, taking part in the siege of her castle, and liked to joke later that the wound he received there might have been from a bullet she had made. After a series of “dates” in which, after she found his southern dialect completely incomprehensible and he struggled with her awkward Aizu dialect, they resorted amicably to speaking French, they were married in 1883. (They continued to adopt various Western habits; she called him by his first name, shorn of honorifics, in public, which would raise some eyebrows in Japan even now.)
According to Sutematsu’s letters to Alice Bacon, not only did she believe that marriage to him would give her the opportunity to do good work for women in Japan, it was a love match on both sides (although Tsuda Ume’s letters record that Sutematsu “fretted herself nearly sick deciding”; Ume wrote wistfully that “Sutematsu can have lovely entertainments, dances, dinner parties, bring ladies and gentlemen together, show the great men what a woman can be and can do, and be Madam Oyama--no more our Steam, our Vassar graduate, or hospital nurse, or school teacher.”).
Becoming stepmother to his daughters as well as bearing him a daughter and two sons of her own, she threw herself into both motherhood and charity work, establishing a nursing school (funded at first by charity bazaars, based on her experience in New Haven) and also putting her own nursing training to use with the Red Cross during the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars. She became advisor to Empress Haruko on Western customs, inviting various prominent foreign women to visit Japan.
Sutematsu also worked with her “little sister” Ume and Shimoda Utako to establish the School for Noble Girls. However, Sutematsu and Ume had dreamed since their time in America, along with Sutematsu’s other unofficial sister Alice Bacon, of founding a more progressive girls’ school: this came to pass in 1900 as the Women’s School of English (later Tsuda University) founded by Ume and welcoming Alice as a teacher. Without Sutematsu’s practical and financial support behind the scenes, the school might well have neither gotten off the ground nor remained functional.
Oyama Iwao died in 1916 and Sutematsu followed him in 1919. There is now a Sutematsu Oyama Scholarship promoting study abroad for future women leaders, funded in part by Sutematsu’s great-granddaughter.
Sources
Ishii
Nakae
Yoshiko Furuki et al. ed, The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother
https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/sutematsu-oyama (English) Lively picture-book format with photos and illustrations
When she was eleven years old, the government recruited young Japanese girls to study in America, and Saki was volunteered (presumably with her consent) by her older brother. The last thing her mother did before she left was to change Saki’s name to Sutematsu, an oddity of a name punning on “abandoning, but still waiting,” suggesting En’s motherly feelings about sending her adolescent daughter unimaginably far away for ten years or more. Once in the US, Sutematsu sometimes spelled her name phonetically as Stematz; her intimates called her Steam.
The group of five also included two older girls, Ryo and Tei (both of whom returned to Japan within a year), Nagai Shige, close to Sutematsu’s own age, and Tsuda Ume, who was all of six years old. They traveled across the US and settled down with host families in the Northeast. Sutematsu converted to Christianity while living in New Haven with her host family, the Bacons, and became as close as sisters with their daughter Alice. After finishing high school, she attended Vassar College and became the first Japanese woman to receive a US bachelor’s degree. As well as mastering English, she studied French and German (she and her older sister Misao, then living in Russia, corresponded for a while in French as they had no other common written language). Her professors included Maria Mitchell. Sutematsu was elected class president her senior year and gave a speech at her graduation in 1881, after which she studied nursing for a year while waiting to return to Japan.
After her return in 1882, she found herself frustrated by the lack of professional scope—due partly to the restricted status of women in Japan, particularly in the upper classes, and partly to her illiteracy in Japanese, although she spoke it fluently—when she knew the original purpose of the girls’ mission to the US had been to train them to be of use to their country. With no other simple options, she became part of Japan’s upper-class social life, dancing at the Rokumeikan, where she met Oyama Iwao, the Minister of the Army, a widower eighteen years older than she who fell for her at first sight. He had fought on the opposite side from her family in the Boshin War, taking part in the siege of her castle, and liked to joke later that the wound he received there might have been from a bullet she had made. After a series of “dates” in which, after she found his southern dialect completely incomprehensible and he struggled with her awkward Aizu dialect, they resorted amicably to speaking French, they were married in 1883. (They continued to adopt various Western habits; she called him by his first name, shorn of honorifics, in public, which would raise some eyebrows in Japan even now.)
According to Sutematsu’s letters to Alice Bacon, not only did she believe that marriage to him would give her the opportunity to do good work for women in Japan, it was a love match on both sides (although Tsuda Ume’s letters record that Sutematsu “fretted herself nearly sick deciding”; Ume wrote wistfully that “Sutematsu can have lovely entertainments, dances, dinner parties, bring ladies and gentlemen together, show the great men what a woman can be and can do, and be Madam Oyama--no more our Steam, our Vassar graduate, or hospital nurse, or school teacher.”).
Becoming stepmother to his daughters as well as bearing him a daughter and two sons of her own, she threw herself into both motherhood and charity work, establishing a nursing school (funded at first by charity bazaars, based on her experience in New Haven) and also putting her own nursing training to use with the Red Cross during the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars. She became advisor to Empress Haruko on Western customs, inviting various prominent foreign women to visit Japan.
Sutematsu also worked with her “little sister” Ume and Shimoda Utako to establish the School for Noble Girls. However, Sutematsu and Ume had dreamed since their time in America, along with Sutematsu’s other unofficial sister Alice Bacon, of founding a more progressive girls’ school: this came to pass in 1900 as the Women’s School of English (later Tsuda University) founded by Ume and welcoming Alice as a teacher. Without Sutematsu’s practical and financial support behind the scenes, the school might well have neither gotten off the ground nor remained functional.
Oyama Iwao died in 1916 and Sutematsu followed him in 1919. There is now a Sutematsu Oyama Scholarship promoting study abroad for future women leaders, funded in part by Sutematsu’s great-granddaughter.
Sources
Ishii
Nakae
Yoshiko Furuki et al. ed, The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother
https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/sutematsu-oyama (English) Lively picture-book format with photos and illustrations
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Date: 2024-04-26 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-26 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-27 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-26 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-27 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-26 09:53 pm (UTC)she called him by his first name, shorn of honorifics, in public, which would raise some eyebrows in Japan even now
I can imagine!
I liked seeing the photos in the English picture book.
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Date: 2024-04-27 11:45 am (UTC)Children's brains! And she was clearly very bright and hard-working--she just never got as far as studying the written language when she was little, before going to the US, I guess. (Ume, as we'll find out in a few weeks, had it even harder--she was so young when they went to the US that she forgot all her spoken Japanese and never learned the written form, having to start from scratch when she got back to Japan at age nineteen.)
I liked seeing the photos in the English picture book.
That's quite a site!
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Date: 2024-04-28 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-28 09:59 am (UTC)