Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura

Pacific, expanding the market for American products and American ideas. Iwakura was gracious but clear in reply. Japan was eager to trade, but his mission had a more specific mandate: to open the question of negotiating more equitable terms than the United States and the other treaty nations had hitherto allowed.
    The parade of dignitaries had worn on for more than five hours. For the delegates, unaccustomed to any form of salute more intimate than a bow—even from their own mothers—the endless clasping of hands was overwhelming. They retired to their rooms, followed by the eyes of hotel guests who gathered in knots near the entrances to the reception areas, hoping for a glimpse. The luxurious accommodations provided little relief, though—at least not until the tables and chairs and desks had been pushed aside, and the exhausted men could repose at last on the carpeted floor.
    Their rest was brief. The daily papers had announced that the Japanese embassy would be serenaded that evening, and by the appointed hour of ten o’clock, well-wishers and gawkers choked the streets surrounding the hotel. The Second Artillery Band was punctual. Making their first formal appearance, the five Japanese girls joined the delegates, necks craning all around them as they took their seats. “They were all attired in elegant costumes and appeared to know that they were attracting attention, and shrank from it as all well bred young ladies should do,” a reporter noted approvingly. Well-bred or not, the girls were genuinely uncomfortable; unlike the men of the delegation, they were powerless to secure the camouflage of Western clothing without assistance, and that, Mrs. DeLong so far refused to give. Attention was not something she shrank from.
    The stately chords of “Hail Columbia”—composed for George Washington’s first inaugural in 1789, and used as the national anthem for most of the nineteenth century—were soon blaring triumphantly from the parlor windows and out to the streets below. Earlier Japanese travelers hadreturned with reports of the headache-inducing unpleasantness of barbarian music. Sitting appreciatively in a crowded parlor just a few feet from a full military band must have been a strain.
    At the concert’s conclusion, lusty cheers and applause from outside were redoubled when Iwakura and DeLong emerged onto a balcony. The noisy enthusiasm, while gratifying, was somewhat startling to the delegates. “Western people are ever eager to promote trade and like to extend a warm welcome to foreign visitors,” Kume wrote. “Such gatherings, which are part and parcel of American customs, are unusual in Japan.” Iwakura drew a scroll from his sash and unrolled it to a length of several yards, though the speech he read from it in Japanese was brief. Both men withdrew. The crowd, however, was not ready to go home, shouting for the popular DeLong to say a few words. He demurred: it went against protocol for him to speak publicly; this wasn’t the setting for bending the rules; his heart was too full at this important moment for him to express his feelings . . . oh, very well, if you insist.
    Ambassador DeLong’s remarks instructed his audience to consider these visitors in a distinctly different light from the “Orientals” already among them. “Let the Chinese be not confounded with the Japanese,” he told the people of San Francisco. “California need never fear an influx of coolie labor from the Japanese Empire.” Depraved China had no choice but to export its impoverished masses; noble Japan, on the contrary, would shortly be forced to look abroad for labor to fuel its new and gleaming industries. “While the Chinese have been forced to wear the chain of slavery, the Japanese have never had a master; their intellects are as sharp as their weapons,” DeLong declaimed.
    His argument was not new. A dozen years earlier, when the first Japanese embassy had visited the United States, an up-and-coming new