Unexpected Destinations

Unexpected Destinations: The Poignant Story of Japan's First Vassar Graduate is a biography of Ōyama Sutematsu, written by her great-granddaughter Akiko Kuno. Ōyama was one of the first Japanese women to study abroad after the end of Japan's closed borders, and the first Japanese woman to earn a university degree. After a horizon-expanding adolescence in New Haven, Connecticut in the 1870s, Ōyama returned to Japan and struggled to reconcile her intellectual ambitions with Japan's social expectations for women. She married a high-ranking military officer and used her social position to quietly promote women's education and positive international relations after the end of Japan's isolationist sakoku period.

Kuno's biography is based on a research trip across America in 1982, and includes information from forty letters written by Ōyama to her foster-sister Alice Bacon. Kuno highlights both the value and the personal costs of studying abroad, making connections between her great-grandmother's experience and her own formative years in the United States. Kuno also lightly criticizes the constraints placed on women by Japanese society. The biography was first published in Japan in 1988, with an English translation in 1993. The Japanese edition was a bestseller.