- Born: 1834
Nishimiya Hide was a lady-in-waiting to Yoshiko, wife of Tokugawa Nariaki, lord of Mito han.
Nishimiya was born in 1834 inside the Mito han mansion in the Koishikawa neighborhood of Edo[1]. Her father was a low-ranking retainer in service to the domain, who had been granted a position in the personal retinue of the lord of Mito han, Tokugawa Nariaki, in recognition of his work as a Mito school scholar & researcher in Japanese history.
Her upbringing within the Mito domain's Edo mansion, perhaps indicative of that of other samurai women of similar circumstances, included training in reading and writing, tea ceremony, naginata (halberd), and a variety of aspects of formal etiquette. She began these lessons formally at age six. Records relating to her childhood also mention fine clothing given her as a gift by an aunt, and being required to wear only plainer clothes in public due to calls for austerity in the wake of serious famines. Her family, for a time, as an act of charity (similarly in the wake of these famines), hired three or four additional maids, providing these three or four women with housing and meals, though there was little extra work for them to do. Hide is also known as a child to have spent considerable time visiting temples and shrines and sightseeing and traveling otherwise within the city of Edo.
At age 14, she fell seriously ill with the flu, of which her mother then died. For a few years following her recovery, despite her young age, Hide had to suddenly take on much of the responsibilities of the woman of the house, caring for her younger brother and sister, entertaining guests, and so forth. She wrote in her memoirs, "what I did not do did not get done."[2] Before long, however, her father remarried, and his new wife took over much of these responsibilities, freeing Hide to apply to enter the service of Lord Nariaki's wife Yoshiko. The application included assessments of her skills at poetry and tea ceremony, and of her physical beauty.
She entered Lady Yoshiko's service in 1850, at the age of 16, being given her own maid, and her own room in a wing designated for the female attendants, at the clan's mansion in Komagome, where they had all relocated in 1844, after Nariaki fell out of favor with the shogun & his chief advisors. Hide would remain in Lady Yoshiko's service for nineteen years. At this Komagome mansion, Nariaki, having been ordered to refrain from manly pursuits, spent much of his time in the women's quarters, where Hide interacted with him on numerous occasions, exchanging poetry, playing incense games, and the like.
References
- Anne Walthall, "Nishimiya Hide: Turning Palace Arts into Marketable Skills," in Walthall (ed.), The Human Tradition in Modern Japan," Scholarly Resources, Inc. (2002), 45-60.