Just when you thought things couldn’t get any better now that winter is (mostly) behind us and spring is upon us, along comes a book about the American woman who spearheaded the effort to bring the Japanese cherry trees to Washington, written by a Falls Church resident, no less, and titled “Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees.”
All this during Women’s History Month! I tell you it’s time to celebrate!
Diana P. Parsell’s idea to write a book about “E.R. Scidmore’’ stemmed from her purchase, in the 1990s, of Scidmore’s book about Java — which Parsell found in Indonesia, where she and her husband Bruce Parsell were living while he was on a diplomatic assignment.
When she returned home to Falls Church, like many of us on travel, Parsell laid the book aside for a while (years) until one day she picked it up from her bookshelf to discover an impressive writing style — and that the writer was a woman!
“Who is this woman?” Parsell wondered, and she was shortly on Scidmore’s trail to find out.
Not only had Scidmore (pronounced SID-more) traveled to many of the same places in Indonesia that Parsell had visited, but Parsell soon learned that Scidmore was a critical piece in the cherry tree puzzle in Washington, D.C.
“I had never heard of her and had lived here 30 years, and no one else I knew had heard of her,” Parsell exclaimed in a telephone interview.
Parsell soon found out Scidmore (1856-1928) was a world explorer, journalist, and author of seven books and 800 magazine and newspaper articles about her travels to Alaska, Japan, Java, China and India — whose story lay untold — until… Parsell started digging.
With her writing and research skills, Parsell began putting together Scidmore’s biography, never anticipating the time, frustrations and rejections (30+ agents refused to take her book) which lay ahead over the next ten years.
At the New York Public Library Parsell found hundreds of original letters by Scidmore which had never been published. She uncovered more Scidmore letters at the National Geographic Society, where Scidmore was an active member , having first joined the organization in 1890 — two years after it was established, becoming its first female board member.
Parsell traveled to research institutions across the U.S., Alaska (the site of Scidmore’s first book), and Japan, where Scidmore lived off and on for 40 years with her mother and her brother, a consular officer.
“Today, Scidmore is treated as somewhat of a celebrity in Japan. There’s a big interest in her there,” said Parsell, who counts her as “an early friend.”
Scidmore defended the Japanese nation during the anti-Asian movement in the 1920s and received a medal from the Japanese emperor.
Scidmore became an expert on Japanese culture. Some Japanese still make biannual visits to her gravesite, where her ashes are buried alongside her family in Yokohama.
Parsell is working on having her book translated in Japanese, but, first she had to get it published in English, which almost didn’t happen.
After years spent on the project and after all her rejections, she was on the point of no return until one day, on a plane trip to Boston, she sat beside a science writer like herself, who urged her to contact his editor at Oxford University Press.
Four days later “Eliza Scidmore” took off in Oxford.
Besides writing and having a relative employed in foreign service, Scidmore and Parsell shared two other elements in their success stories: persistence and vision.
What “kept me going through all the rejections and the frustrations,” Parsell said, was “the vision of wanting to see a book with my name on it on the shelf at the Library of Congress.”
Today “Eliza Scidmore” is found in the Library of Congress and on shelves at the Mary Riley Styles and Fairfax County Public Libraries, on the publisher’s website, and on Amazon in hardback and Kindle formats. Parsell is exploring having an audiobook made.
Scidmore had a vision, too, no doubt of cherry trees blossoming in Washington for until she was able to sell her idea to First Lady Helen Taft in 1909, it took her 20 years for her idea to soar.
If you can see it, you can believe it and that’s what drove these two insistent women whose works we celebrate today.