John Manjiro

A statue of John Manjiro at the John Manjiro Landing Place Monument in Itoman City, Okinawa

I was first introduced to the historical figure John Manjiro through a presentation by a student nearly 20 years ago. Who knows why certain people and places remain in your mind? I honestly can’t tell you what any of the other students presented on that day or why he made such an impression. Perhaps it was because he was an unintentional immigrant and I could see parts of my own immigration journey reflected in his experiences? Or maybe it is much simpler. There is a sign for his landing spot in Okinawa, and it could be that I drive by just frequently enough to keep his name fresh in my mind. Whatever the reason, I had an interest in Manjiro. Not enough to actually take the time to research him or visit his landing point, but a thought that I should, someday, at some point, learn more about Manjiro. Thankfully during a visit to a secondhand book shop on a trip home, I came across a translated copy of Manjiro’s report to the Japanese government about his time abroad called Drifting Toward the Southeast (Hyoson Kiryaku in Japanese). The time to learn more about Manjiro and visit his landing point had finally come.

In my memory of Manjiro’s story, Manjiro was a fisherman who was shipwrecked and was rescued by an American whaling ship. At the time of his rescue, Japan was still in its sakoku period, a government seclusion policy, which prevented most Japanese from knowing about the world outside of Japan. Japanese were banned from traveling abroad and, in turn, most foreigners were prohibited from entering Japan (although the historian in me likes to remember that Japan still had limited relations with the Dutch, Chinese, Koreans, Ryukyuans and Ainu). Therefore, even after his rescue, Manjiro could not return to Japan and instead went to the U.S. After many years abroad he finally returned to Japan, where despite rules that stated all Japanese who returned to Japan after living abroad would be executed, he was allowed to live and later provided his services to the Japanese government interpreting American culture and introducing new ideas to Japan.

While this was generally correct, there was much more to Manjiro’s story that I learned through both a visit to the spot where he landed in Okinawa and reading Drifting Toward the Southeast. Manjiro was born in 1827 in modern day Kochi Prefecture. In January of 1841, when Manjiro was 14 (or 15 by Japanese counting standards of the time), he joined a fishing trip with four other men from a nearby village, three brothers, Fudenojo (later known as Denzo), 37, Jusuke, 24, Goemon, 15, and their neighbor Toraemon 25. After three days at sea, the fishermen were blown off course and on the ninth day of their trip they landed on a Tori Shima, an uninhabited island about 600 km (373 miles) south of Tokyo. After months of a rough existence on the island, they were rescued by a whaleship from New Bedford, Massachusetts captained by William H. Whitfield. After their rescue, the five men rode on the boat for another six months while whaleship finished their whale hunting mission. Finally in November of 1841, the boat entered port on Oahu, an island in the Hawaiian Kingdom (and my home!). The men were not the first Japanese castaways to visit Oahu and were permitted to stay. However, Captain Whitfield saw something in Manjiro, he thought the boy showed great promise and wanted to take Manjiro to America to educate him. Manjiro agreed and became part of Whitfield’s crew sailing away from Oahu in December of 1841. It was on this journey that it received his English name, John Mung.

This was the beginning of Manjiro’s life as a whaler. Captain Whitfield, Manjiro and the rest of the whaling crew traveled throughout the Pacific searching for whales, then to on the way home to Massachusetts around Cape Horn, where Manjiro saw icebergs and walruses for the first time. Finally in June of 1943 the ship reached New Bedford. After a three year stop in Massachusetts where Manjiro studied not only reading, writing, arithmetic and surveying at a local school but also worked as an apprentice at a cooper shop, to learn how to make wooden casks, barrels, buckets and other similar containers, Manjiro went back to the sea. In 1846 Manjiro joined a second whaling voyage which took him to a wide variety of locations around the world including Boston, the Azore Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope, Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Guam, Ogasawara Island, and the Ryukyu Islands. After pulling into port on Oahu for supplies, Manjiro was reunited with his fellow Japanese castaways (although poor Jusuke had died). Manjiro left Oahu and his Japanese compatriots in November of 1847, and the boat continued its pursuit of whales throughout the Pacific. The boat finally returned to New Bedford in August of 1849. Manjiro had been gone for over three years.

At this point, Manjiro decided he was ready for a new adventure, so in October of 1849 he traveled to California (via Cape Horn) to try his hand in the gold rush. After arriving in San Francisco in May of 1850, he traveled to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada using both steamboats and railroads, both modes of transportation he had no knowledge of prior to his time in the U.S. After working as a miner for an agency for a month, he and a friend went out on their own as independent miners and Manjiro earned more than $600 in 70 days. Manjiro decided this was more than enough money, so he decided it was time to go home to Japan. He paid for passage to Oahu to find his friends, so they could return to Japan together.

A drawing of what John Manjiro's landing in the Ryukyu Kingdom is thought to have looked like.

This is what the landing area looks like today.

In the end Toraemon decided to stay on Oahu, so it was only Manjiro, Denzo (formerly known as Fudenojo, apparently no one could remember his name, so he changed it) and Goemon who returned to Japan. After numerous negotiations they were able to gain passage to the Ryukyu Kingdom, where they landed in on the Odohama Coast in Mabuni-magiri (modern day Itoman City, Okinawa) in February of 1851. While the Ryukyuans were surprised by the men who wore different clothes from them and spoke a different language (at this time most Okinawans did not speak Japanese), the Okinawans welcomed them warmly and gave Manjiro and his friends sweet potatoes. However, all their belongings were confiscated by the government officials of the area as Ryukyu, while still an independent country, was under the sakoku rules of mainland Japan because Ryukyu was vassal state under the Satsuma Domain of Japan. At first the men were to be moved to Naha, but at this time there was a meddlesome British Protestant missionary named Bernard Jean Bettelheim living in Naha (definitely a character for another post) and the government did not want Manjiro to meet him, so they kept the three men in the village of Tomigusuku. While the three men were technically under arrest, they were able to freely interact with the villagers and participated in local events such as the tug-of-war and moashibi, where young people gather to sing, dance and socialize at night, and had more than enough food and supplies.

However, the men eventually had to leave Okinawa. In July of 1851 the three men were moved to Satsuma (modern day Kagoshima Prefecture), where they were again put under arrest. Then in September the men were moved to Nagasaki. Here they were again interrogated and were required to do fumie, the practice of stepping on a medallion with the Christian iconography, such as the Madonna and Child or the Crucifixion, to prove they had not become Christian. Finally in July of 1852, the three men returned back to Kochi. However, they were questioned once again and results of this interrogation were the book that I purchased, Drifting Toward the Southeast (Hyoson Kiryaku in Japanese). The three men were finally able to return to their homes on October 1, 1952, after nearly 12 years of being abroad. Manjiro’s mother was still alive, and he also was able to meet his five siblings again.

However, unlike Denzo and Goemon who returned to life in their hometown, the government had different plans for Manjiro. After only three days of being at home, he was called by the Lord of Tosa to return to Kochi to teach English and foreign affairs to young samurai leaders. Due to this job, Manjiro who came from a long line of fishermen, was given the lowest samurai rank, sadame-komono. Then, less than a year later, the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s military ships in Edo (Tokyo) Bay (the result of Perry’s visits was the Treaty of Amity and Friendship, which provided for the opening of two ports to foreigners among other points) further changed Manjiro’s life. Since no one in Japan had working knowledge of the English language except Manjiro, he suddenly became very important. In the Fall of 1853 Manjiro met with the key policy makers of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the government of the time, to provide first-hand information about America. Due to his knowledge, Manjiro was appointed as a samurai directly in service to the Shogunate, a jikisan (and was finally allowed to have a last name in Japan. His last name decided to be Nakahama, after the name of his village, so his name became Nakahama Manjiro). However, some did not trust that his loyalties laid with Japan instead of America, so he was not used in the negotiations with Commodore Perry.

In later years, Manjiro experienced a variety of roles in Japan. He introduced the first modern scientific navigation methods through the translation of Nathaniel Bowditch’s book The New American Practical Navigator. He wrote the first English textbook in Japan and also taught English to many samurai, inspiring progressive thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, who later founded Keio University and has his picture on the (old) 10,000-yen bills. He tried to introduce American-style whaling to Japan, but this never took off. After the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868 (the Meiji Restoration), Manjiro lost his position as the Shogun’s samurai and instead was appointed as a professor at Kaisei School (the precursor of the University of Tokyo) and participated in government missions. A stroke in 1871 led Manjiro to retire from public life and died on November 12, 1898.

As a cultural historian I would have loved for the book Drifting Toward the Southeast to have more information about the personal thoughts of Manjiro. What Manjiro truly think when he decided to travel to Massachusetts with Captain Whitfield or how did he adapt to working on a whaling ship? What did he like about American culture and what did he prefer from Japanese culture? How did he feel after he came back to Japan and his life changed from a whaler and gold miner to that of a samurai, government advisor and teacher? The questions go on and on. However, this book was originally written as a government report explaining what Manjiro did in his time outside of Japan, so that was not its purpose, and I shouldn’t have expected these types of details. (Perhaps my next read should be The Life and Times of John Manjiro, a biography by Donald R. Bernard or one of the other books that has been written about him to see if I can learn more about the man himself.)

However, I enjoyed reading Manjiro’s discussions of places that are also important to me. I grew up on Oahu, so I found it fascinating to read his description and see drawings of what the island looked like in the 1840s and 1850s. While some places have changed so much, I could not recognize them at all, there were still aspects of Oahu that are visible today. Additionally, Okinawa has been my home for most of my adult life, so learning about the approximately six months that Manjiro spent in the Ryukyu Kingdom and visiting the spot where he first landed, made me realize how the kindness I see from Okinawans every day has long been a part of their culture. While both visitors to the island, both Manjiro and I have been blessed with warm welcomes and inclusions into local culture.

Finally, I also have a greater appreciation for Manjiro’s experiences and bravery. I’m sure that when Manjiro set off on that fishing boat at the age of 14 he had no idea of what it would lead to, but I am confident that his experiences went beyond his wildest dreams. Through his encounters and exploits, he must have faced daily challenges. Yet, he kept an open heart to learn more and it took him around the world. While I don’t want to work on a ship or mine for gold, I do hope that like Manjiro I can take chances and be open to opportunities even when they are different from the norm. A life containing one percent of Manjiro’s adventures, would be a life well lived.