awanderingcoyote

Morgan O-Yuki was born in 1881 in Kyoto, where her father was a sword and knife merchant; her birth name was Kato Yuki. After her father’s early death she was initially raised by an older brother who was a barber, and then taken in by an older sister who was a geisha in order to follow in her footsteps at fourteen; she became well known for her playing of the kokyu. At seventeen she fell in love with a Kyoto University student called Kawakami Shunsuke, but his parents, adamantly opposed, insisted on his marrying another woman after his graduation.

It was at this point, still heartbroken, that O-Yuki met the rich young American George D. Morgan, part of the Morgan banking family. Also recovering from a lost love, Morgan fell in love with O-Yuki at first sight, returning several times to visit her during his Japan trip and studying Japanese for her sake. The next year he came back to Japan and asked her to marry him. O-Yuki, still pining for Kawakami and unwilling to go to America, told him that it would cost forty thousand yen (a figure previously suggested to her in jest by another patron as the cost of her virginity, equivalent to at least a million dollars today) to buy out her contract. She was expecting Morgan to be put off, but he paid the fee without turning a hair, and O-Yuki made up her mind to see America. (Another account has it that Morgan left a self-addressed envelope with O-Yuki in case she changed her mind about marrying him, and she mailed it to summon him after hearing that Kawakami was married.) They were married in 1904 at a hotel in Yokohama (O-Yuki refused to be married in Western dress, so Morgan wore Japanese hakama as well; the naturalized English Old Japan Hand Joseph de Becker, aka Kobayashi Beika, served as marriage broker), and set off to America by boat shortly afterward.

This marriage was not well received in conservative Japan, with some people throwing literal and metaphorical stones at O-Yuki as “a whore blinded by money” or “a traitor to her country.” Ironically, O-Yuki found herself similarly shut out of society in the States, because of her race and because, unlike many women who married Western men, she had not adopted Christianity. Her in-laws treated her coldly. After returning to Japan for a while, she and Morgan compromised on Europe and eventually settled down in the outskirts of Paris. Here O-Yuki was accepted, not to say feted, socially; their happiness was to be brief, however, as Morgan died of a heart attack in 1915 while traveling through Spain. O-Yuki tried to take American nationality according to his will, but was prevented by the anti-Japanese sentiment of the time (or, by some accounts, was stripped of the US citizenship she had acquired upon marriage).

She was still able to inherit about six hundred thousand dollars, and spent the next twenty-odd years living in Nice, including fifteen years with the linguist Sandulphe Tandart, author of a French-Cambodian dictionary (they did not marry because of the risk that O-Yuki’s former in-laws would strip her of her inheritance, some of which she used to support Tandart’s research). Tandart died in 1931.

In 1938 she returned to Japan for the first time in thirty-three years; here again she found a cold welcome, under suspicion as a spy in wartime because she had long since abandoned her Japanese nationality, not to mention forgetting how to write Japanese. She remained in Japan, however, adopting a daughter, Namie, after the war and living quietly in her hometown of Kyoto, where she became a Catholic in 1954, taking the baptismal name Thérèse. She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-two, having become the subject of several novels and a musical (as well as two posthumous plays and a Takarazuka performance). In 1965, the city of Paris commemorated her with the newly developed white rose “Yuki-san” given as a gift to the city of Kyoto.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.doujyuin.jp/yuki_morgan (Japanese) Site of a temple in Kyoto where some of O-Yuki’s ashes are buried; photos from various periods of her life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUw2JYFcXWI Play about O-Yuki performed in the mansion formerly owned by her in-laws