Sixth Issue: Japanese Castaways

Okay, so they're not all castaways or even all Japanese, but I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole when I was researching castaways last week, so here are some cool people I learned about on the way.


Let’s start with Otokichi. Otokichi was fourteen years old when he was on a rice transport ship heading for Edo in the 19^th century. The ship was caught in a storm and blown off course, and the crew began to starve after they ate all the rice that they had. Mostly from scurvy. By the time they made landfall, on the westernmonst point of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, only three were alive – Iwakichi, who was 29, Otokichi, who by now was 15, and Kyukichi who was 16. The Makah Indian tribe took them in and cared for them and also enslaved them (?) but they were handed over to John McLoughlin, who was in charge of the Columbia District of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Here's a picture of Otokichi.
John saw Otokichi as a good opportunity to open trade with Japan, which was closed to outsiders, and sent the three men to London to convince England of this plan. The British did not care and sent the Japanese men back to Macau so they could be returned to Japan. When they got to Macau, Karl Gutzlaff, who was German missionary, learned Japanese from them and translated the Gospel of John into Japanese. He wanted to bring Christianity to Japan. Four other castaways from Japan who were shipwrecked in the Philippines joined Otokichi and his two buddies in Macau.

Anyway, finally this American trader called Charles W. King offered to take the seven castaways back to Japan because he wanted to establish trade connections with Japan. The ship approached, but was fired upon, and Charles gave up. The castaways basically gave up at this point, because in Japan at this time leaving the country meant you could be punished by death. They started new lives in Macau, working as translators. Otokichi in particular worked helping Japanese castaways return to Japan on board Chinese or Dutch ships which were the only two kinds allowed to visit Japan.

Otokichi married a Scottish woman in Macau, who died, and then married again, a half-German and half-Malay woman in Singapore, with whom he had four kids. He became a naturalized British subject (Macau and Singapore were British back then) and renamed himself to John Matthew Ottoson. Ottoson is kind of a transliteration of Oto-san which is from his name, Otokichi.

Otokichi actually did get to return to Japan twice, first as a translator on board a ship where he disguised himself as Chinese and said he learned Japanese from his dad. The second time he went under his british name as a member of a British fleet that signed the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty in 1854. He was offered permission to live in Japan after that, but he turned it down. His family lived in Shanghai. He eventually moved back to Singapore, since that’s where his wife was from, and he did well financially. He was compensated for his help with the treaty, and he also did his own business deals. He died at the age of 49, and half his remains are in Singapore but half are in Japan.

A fun footnote to Otokichi’s fascinating life story is that it was made into a movie! In 1983 the movie was released, called Kairei, and this quote from Wikipedia made me laugh: “Despite starring country singer Johnny Cash as John McLoughlin, and having a reported budget of US$4,000,000, the film was not a commercial success.” Nakahama Manjiro is the second person I’m going to talk about today. When Nakahama was fourteen years old, in 1841, he and four of his friends were fishing when they wrecked their boat on a random island, where an American whaler ship picked them up. The four friends were dropped off in Honolulu, but Nakahama wanted to stay on the ship. He was nicknamed John Mung and the captain of the ship took him to the United States, where he stayed with James Akin. He was enrolled in the Oxford School in Massachusetts, where he learned English and navigation. Then he joined a whaling ship and met his four friends again in Honolulu. As mentioned earlier, none of the boys could go home because leaving Japan, even by accident, was punishable by death.

The captain of the whaling ship became mentally ill and was left in Manila, the crew elected a new captain, and Nakahama got to be Haropooner. When the ship returned to Massachussetts, Nakahama was financially self-sufficient from his work on the ship. He headed off to California, where he joined in on the Gold Rush, made some more money, and decided he was going to figure out a way to get back to Japan. He went back to Honolulu, and two of his old buddies said they’d go with him (one of them had died of a heart attack, and the other thought it was too dangerous). Nakahama bought a whaleboat and sailed to Japan. They reached Okinawa in 1851 where they were taken into custody. After a few months of questioning, they got to go home! They were awarded pensions and Nakahama became a useful source of information for the Japanese government. Two years later he got made into a samurai!! He got to wear two swords and worked in direct service to the shogun.

In his new position, when Commodore Matthew Perry’s ships arrived to force Japan to open, Nakahama became an interpreter and helped negotiate. In 1860, he travelled to the United States, put in charge of the ship when the Captain and much of the crew fell ill in a storm. In 1870 Nakahama went to Europe and studied military science, and then stopped off in the United States where he visited his friends and family from when he was a teenager in a Massachussetts. He went back home to Japan and became a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. He helped modernize the navy! He had seven children and was married three times. He has a planet named after him! Several books and statues and such also. No movies though.
 
Moving on, I found a man named Ranald MacDonald. Not that one. This one was also alive in the 19^th century, and was the first native English speaker to teach the English language in Japan. He educated Einosuke Moriyama, who was one of the OTHER translators during the negotiation with Matthew Perry (I keep thinking this is the guy from Friends but it’s not, obviously). Anyway, my favorite thing about his parents are that his dad’s name was Archibald McDonald and his mom’s name was RAVEN ALSO KNOWN AS PRINCESS SUNDAY. That’s so Goth I love it. But she wasn’t Goth. She was Metis, specifically Chinook from a place called Cape Disappointment. Oh my god that’s even Gother. I mean, oh my Goth. Okay, I’m done, sorry.

Anyway, MacDonald worked as a bank clerk, which is what his dad Archie wanted, but eventually he quit to go visit Japan. He knew that Japanese policy meant that if he set foot on Japanese soil, as a foreigner he’d be killed, but he didn’t care. He went off to Hokkaido and came ashore and said he was shipwrecked. He was taken in by the local Ainu people and they gave him to Nagasaki, which was the only port that traded with the Dutch. Nobody in Japan really spoke English, and since lots of American and British ships had been approaching Japan, fourteen samurai who knew Dutch were sent to learn English from MacDonald.


MacDonald hung out in confinement in a temple before a passing American ship picked him up. When he got back to the United States, he wrote to Congress saying that Japanese society and Japanese people were great. He journeyed on as a sailor and eventually came back to Canada. He worked in the gold fields and participated in the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition. He died kind of poor in Washington State, but his grave marker is pretty cool. It says:
I wanted to talk a little bit about Hasekura Tsunenaga too, but he doesn't really fit with the other three men above as he was two centuries before then, and his life was way too long and interesting to fit here. I'll link his Wikipedia page here if you're interested. Thank you so much for reading! No more castaways...next week will be about some of my favorite historical animals!