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

costumes of the region’s annual lion dance. Posing as a troupe of performers, his men paraded intothe castle in broad daylight. The daimyo, impressed, promptly put Hiroshi in charge of defense for the duration of the siege.
    Besieged inside the castle walls along with three thousand of their men, fifteen hundred women and children broke into work brigades—some to wash and cook rice, some to clean the crowded and increasingly filthy interior spaces, some to nurse the wounded, and some to make gun cartridges. Sutematsu, a sturdy child of eight with wide-set eyes that missed little, trotted back and forth, bringing lead shot from one storehouse and stacking finished cartridges in another.
    Her sister was among the cartridge makers. Yearning for a more active role, the teenager scavenged pieces of discarded armor, chopped off her hair, pulled down the corners of her mouth in a classic samurai grimace, and announced that she was off to join the fighting. Obedience, however, was as deeply ingrained in her as the warrior spirit, and when her mother forbade her to leave the castle, she grudgingly stayed put.
    During the last days of the month-long siege, as the sixty cannon of the imperial forces continued to pound the castle, Toi sent Sutematsu with the other girls to fly kites high above the walls, as if it were a holiday. We are still here , the kites declared. We do not fear you. As shells rained down, it fell to the women to smother them with wet quilts before they exploded. Hiroshi’s wife, Tose, was running toward one when it burst. The shrapnel just grazed Sutematsu’s neck, but it caught her sister-in-law in the chest. Tose’s wounds festered, and she begged Toi to fulfill her duty as a warrior: to give Tose a good death.
    “Mother, mother, kill me!” she cried. “Where is your courage? Remember you are the wife of a samurai!”
    But though Toi wore on her belt the razor-sharp dagger carried by all women of her rank, she could not bring herself to kill her daughter-in-law. She had, after all, elected to seek shelter in the castle when the shelling began, rather than committing ritual suicide. Tose died in agony.
    On September 22, the daimyo of Aizu reluctantly surrendered. Over the castle flew a white flag sewn by the women besieged within. The sudden silence, after a month of constant shelling, was eerie. Every housewithin the outer moat of the castle had burned to the ground. The elegant rooms and exquisite gardens of Sutematsu’s childhood lay in ruins. The white walls of the castle itself were scarred and blistered, its tiled roofs pocked with holes.
    Casualties on both sides in the Boshin War numbered nearly six thousand, with Aizu alone accounting for almost half of that total. Despite their decisive victory, the imperial forces took no chances, for the determination of Katamori Matsudaira, Aizu’s daimyo, was undisputed. The night of his surrender they placed him under guard in a temple, with six cannon carefully aimed at his door.
    Along with her mother and sisters, Sutematsu left the wreckage of Wakamatsu for a prison camp a few miles away. She was filthy, hungry, and crawling with lice. The world she had known was gone.
    A YEAR WENT by before the new Meiji government decided the fate of the defeated Aizu: exile to the newly created province of Tonami, a barren and nearly uninhabited region at the northern tip of Honshu. The Meiji government chartered American ships to ferry them, and in the spring of 1870 the Yamakawa women boarded the paddle wheel steamer Yancy at Niigata—their first glimpse of the sea. The American sailors gave them biscuits, and they nibbled the strange new food while standing at the rail and watching the coast unfurl. But the novelty faded quickly; as the ship slowly threaded its way north, there was ample time for doubt and depression to take hold, compounded, miserably, by seasickness.
    Hiroshi, the oldest Yamakawa brother, was now one of Aizu’s leaders, chief of the domain