*Starred Review* In the years after Japan was forcibly opened to the world for trade, a group of five girls, ages 6 to 14, was chosen to travel to America, attend school, and return in 10 years to share their enlightened attitudes about Western ways with their country's future leaders. This experiment was not only audacious and unprecedented, it also lacked planning and forethought. The two older girls returned home almost immediately, while the other three were taken in by kind New England families whose alien cultures and traditions slowly distanced them from their memories of home. When the girls returned, they were determined to be good Japanese women, but they were unable to truly fit back into their society. This makes their ultimate accomplishments, which led to nothing less than revolutionizing Japanese women's education, all the more staggering. With a solid record of letters, diaries, and news reports to draw from, Nimura brings the girls and their late nineteenth-century exploits to life in a narrative that feels like an international variation on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, so very appealing and delightful are their historic stories.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2015 Booklist

Independent scholar Nimura has written an exquisite collective biography of the five Japanese girls who were sent to the United States at the end of the 19th century during Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912), as the country tried to prepare citizens to cope with-and catch up to, they felt-the modern West. While two of the girls returned home shortly after arriving in America, the other three were able to stay in their adopted home for ten years, attending school and living with host families in Connecticut and Washington, DC, before attending colleges along the East Coast. Nimura has a clear eye for depicting the relationship between Japan and the United States during the time discussed here, and she avoids the easy pitfall of turning the Japanese girls into "others" who were simply exotic treats for the Americans. Instead, the author highlights how both cultures were strange, each to the other, and, when the girls returned to Japan after their sojourn in America, how much like a foreign country their home had become to them. VERDICT A captivating read for biography lovers, readers interested in America's Gilded Age or late Meiji Japan, and fans of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.-Hanna Clutterbuck, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Through the sensitive weaving of correspondence and archival papers, Nimura produces a story of real-life heroines in this masterful biography of three samurai daughters sent to the U.S. after the Civil War. They were the "first [Japanese] girls ever selected to receive a foreign education" and the first nonwhite students at Vassar College, and in 1882 they returned to their homeland determined to start a school for girls. Nimura contextualizes the vast changes in Japanese society that followed U.S. Admiral Perry's 1853 arrival in Yokohama and notes how, upon observing the contribution American women made to society, Kiyotaka Kuroda, a forward-thinking bureaucrat, proposed that a delegation of students to the U.S. (the Iwakura Mission) include girls. The girls-aged 7 to 11-faced culture shock after disembarking in San Francisco with the American ambassador, but formed strong bonds with their new American caregivers. The trio, as young women, repatriated with some discomfort to a nation where fascination with America was waning. While their personal struggles faded over time, their legacy carries on with Tsuda College in Tokyo, named for the youngest member of the trio. As Japan continues to grapple with the status and role of its educated women, Nimura offers a testimonial to their collective strength and determination. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.