Niijima Yae

In the winter of Kōka 2, a girl was born in Aizu. Her name was Yae. Her father was Yamamoto Gonpachi, head of a house that served the Aizu domain as instructors in gunnery. Ages here follow the reckoning of the day: a child counts as one year old at birth, and gains a year at each New Year.

For the daughter of a warrior house, training meant the naginata: a curved blade on a long shaft, held at a distance and swept. It was a weapon of defense, an implement of the household, and it was taken for granted that a woman would carry one. The daughters of Aizu learned the naginata as a matter of course.

In Bunkyū 2, Matsudaira Katamori, lord of Aizu, was appointed Protector of Kyoto—charged with keeping order in a city that had lost it. To refuse would cost the domain its standing; to accept was to put a hand into fire. Katamori accepted. The principal men of Aizu went up to Kyoto together.

Among them was Yamamoto Kakuma. The brother who carried the domain's Western learning and its guns was taken along as a matter of course. What remained in the Yamamoto house in Aizu was a mother, a younger brother, an eighteen-year-old Yae—and the books in the brother's room.

In the tenth month of Keiō 3, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu returned the government to the imperial court. An arrangement that had stood for some two hundred and sixty years ended on paper. In the twelfth month the restoration of imperial rule was proclaimed, and a government to replace the Tokugawa was set up. To Aizu these things arrived a month late, two months late.

What reached the houses of Aizu was not the reasoning of the change but its consequence. If the shogunal house they were to protect had let go of the government, then what was Aizu—who had protected it—now for? No one had an answer, and only the seasons moved on.

On the morning of the twenty-third day of the eighth month of Keiō 4, the new government's army entered the castle town of Wakamatsu. Fire spread through the streets and the families of retainers ran for the castle. In the Yamamoto house too, preparations began. The mother, the sister-in-law, the niece. And Yae.

Yae cut off her hair. Then she put on the clothes her brother Saburō had left—the kimono and the hakama. Hemp sandals. A long and a short sword thrust through her sash, and over her shoulder a breech-loading seven-shot repeater. A hundred rounds. She went into the castle through the covered gate of the third bailey.

Those who came out of the castle were separated on the spot. The men were taken into custody and sent to places of confinement. The women and children were left in the town. It was here that Yae was parted from her husband. Neither of them had the leisure to fix a day when they would meet again.

Kawasaki Shōnosuke was sent to Tokyo and held there in confinement as a former retainer of Aizu. He never returned to Yae in Aizu. They were parted alive. Because he had not died there was nothing to mourn; he was simply alive somewhere, and where was not known.

Kyoto had its own memory of fire. But unlike Aizu, the city was already getting back on its feet, and its people were at work. Yae arrived there with her mother and her niece. Her brother Kakuma, still blind, was working as an adviser to the new prefectural government. Nine years had passed since he left Aizu in the train of the Protector of Kyoto.

The next year Yae found a post. It was at the nyokōba, a school opened by the prefecture where girls were taught reading, writing, and handwork. Yae was appointed acting head of the dormitory and assistant instructor in weaving. She had charge of the boarding house, and she taught the loom.

She buried her husband in January. She had said she would put down the world's business and keep quiet. Three months later she was a member of the Japanese Red Cross. It was the twenty-sixth of April, Meiji 23.

The Japanese Red Cross had changed its name from the Hakuaisha only three years before. It existed to relieve the sick and wounded in wartime, and in peacetime it gathered people and made ready. What Yae entered was the peacetime side of it.

Having entered the Urasenke house, Yae was granted a tea name: Niijima Sōchiku. It meant she was qualified to teach, and from then on she kept a tea school for women in Kyoto.

This was not a pastime. It was a living. Her husband had long been dead and there were no children. There was a road on which she was maintained as the widow of Dōshisha's founder. Yae chose the road of eating by her own skill: teach, take the fees, and live on them.