A Daughter of the Samurai A Memoir

A young Japanese woman leaves the only home she's ever known for married life in nineteenth-century Ohio in a delightful and charming memoir about learning your own strengths and finding your way between two cultures.

Born into a high-ranking samurai family at the onset of the Meiji period, Etsu Sugimoto is originally destined to be a Buddhist priestess. She grows up as a curly-haired tomboy in Echigo, a beloved daughter of a traditional family, certain of her future role in her community. But her life changes when, as a young teenager, she is instead engaged to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati. As a result, Etsu undertakes a new education--one focused on learning English as well as the traditional duties and ways of a Japanese wife, knowing that she will have to leave the only world she has ever known for life in the United States.

Keenly intelligent and observant, Etsu arrives in Ohio as a bright-eyed twenty-six-year-old, puzzled by the differences between the two cultures and alive to the contradictions, ironies, and beauties of both. Her memoir, reprinted for the first time in decades, is a tribute to the struggles of the first generation of Japanese immigrants and the unforgettable story of a strong and determined woman.

Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1872-1950) was born in Nagaoka, the daughter of a high-ranking advisor to a powerful territorial lord, a few years after the Meiji Restoration ended Japan's feudal system. Her father died when she was twelve; soon afterward, she became engaged to his friend Matsunosuke Sugimoto, a merchant living in the United States whom she had never met. Etsu arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1898, and lived in College Hill. Later she lived in New York City, where she turned to literature and taught Japanese language, culture, and history at Columbia University.