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

sight to Sutematsu, hanging on their rack in the guardroom of the Yamakawa compound, their slender shafts marching up the wall like the rungs of a ladder. She had only ever seen them used for practice. The boys stayed home now, their classes suspended—the Nisshinkan had become a field hospital. Aizu was bracing for the worst: a desperate last stand in defense of a world that had already ended.
    The graceful, winglike roof lines of Tsuruga Castle— tsuru means “crane”—belied its massive fortifications. Sheer walls twenty feet thick rose vertically from the moats, each massive block of stone bearing the chisel marks of the laborers who had wrestled it into place centuries earlier. In places, the drop from the top of the wall to the algae-green surface of the moat was fifty feet. On the inside, the walls were a maze of stone steps, some flights broad enough for fifteen men to run straight up toward the outer edge; others, barely wide enough for one, tracing diagonal paths up and down at intervals. The castle itself rested on a stone foundation two stories high.
    Atop one corner of the wall surrounding the castle stood a bell tower, a squat, square lookout of studded timbers rising from a base of stone, tapering slightly to a tiled roof. On August 23, 1868, the bell clanged urgently, summoning all who could hear it to take shelter within the castle walls. Imperial forces, as many as thirty thousand of them, had entered the town. Sutematsu’s mother, Toi, gathered her four youngest children and her daughter-in-law—two older sons were off fighting—and headed toward the sound of the bell.
    The scene was chaos: those who sought shelter struggled through driving rain and enemy fire. The rain-soaked wooden houses burned slowly, sending up choking clouds of dense smoke. Crowds jammed the streets. After a couple of hours, the castle gates were shut—there was no more room within. Desperate refugees milled outside the walls, enemy bullets whizzing overhead. The Yamakawa women were, for the moment, safe inside.
    Hundreds of others had not left their homes when the bell began itsclamor. Determined not to hinder their side, they opted for a ceremonial exit. Donning the white robes of the dead, the wives of absent warriors helped their elderly parents to commit ritual suicide before killing their children and finally themselves. In the home of one senior councillor alone, his mother, wife, two sisters, and five daughters died. Two of the teenage daughters composed their farewell poem together:
    Hand in hand, we will not lose our way,
    So let us set forth on the mountain path to death.
    Now the sounds of enemy cannon boomed within the ring of mountains that cradled Wakamatsu; the very air seemed to shake. The rhythmic pop of rifle fire sounded to the children like beans roasting in a pan.
    Sutematsu’s brother Kenjiro, a few weeks shy of fourteen, had joined the Byakkotai, or “White Tiger Brigade,” a reserve unit of teenagers. Not quite strong enough to manage a rifle, he was soon sent back with other younger boys to help guard the castle. He was lucky. On August 22, a unit of twenty White Tigers had lost their commander and become separated from the main force. At dawn the next day, gazing down from a hilltop at their castle wreathed in smoke, they assumed the worst: that their stronghold had been taken, their lord slain, their domain defeated. Kneeling together in despair, they killed themselves. Only one of the twenty survived. The tale is retold to this day in textbooks, tourist brochures, and manga as a paradigm of warrior honor.
    A T TWENTY-THREE , Sutematsu’s eldest brother, Hiroshi, was a respected commander in the Aizu hierarchy. When word of the siege at Wakamatsu reached him, it was clear that the enemy lines would be impenetrable by the time he could return with his unit to defend the castle. And so Hiroshi resorted to guile: dressing his men as peasants, he commandeered flutes and drums and the feathered