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Drifting Toward the Southeast: The Story of Five Japanese Castaways

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Although John Manjiro never came to Maui, an annual dance festival in his honor has been held in Lahaina several times. Now, for the first time in English, we have the man's story in his own words, as translated by Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai and accompanied by gorgeous reproductions of the illustrations that decorated his handwritten 1852 account -- words and pictures that helped revolutionize Japan, even though they circulated in a limited number of handwritten copies, each with a somewhat different set of illustrations.
Manjiro was a poor fisherman, too low in status even to have a family name, when he and four companions were shipwrecked on Hurricane Island (Tori Shima) in 1841. At the time, Japan was almost cut off from the rest of the world.
The quintet was rescued by an American whaling captain, and the older men were taken to Oahu, where one of them married an islander and disappeared from history. Manjiro, only 14, was taken to New Bedford and educated in English, Christianity, surveying and navigation and coopering.
He spent six of the next 10 years at sea, as he and his companions struggled to return to Japan. Whether they understood that, by law, returned exiles were subject to execution is uncertain, but according to the editors, there is no record that the Shogunate actually did kill any returnees.
However, on one attempt to land, the local Japanese were frightened enough to run away from the suspect exiles.
The American captain, then, refused to let his refugees land, carrying them back across the ocean.
The bitter disappointment of the yearning exiles must have been profound, but Manjiro, a stoic, relates his dismay in just a line.
In 1852, Manjiro, who also used the American name John Mung, and two of the others managed to get close to home on a whaler and then to sail a whaleboat into Okinawa, a somewhat more welcoming re-entry point than the home islands had been earlier. It was happily timed for Manjiro, because just one year later Commodore Matthew Perry came demanding trade and refuge for whaleships, whether the Japanese wanted it or not.
Other castaways had made it home earlier; in fact, footnotes to this edition of Manjiro's "Hyoson Kiryaku" ("Brief Account of Drifting toward the Southeast") suggest that Japanese waifs were thinly spread all over the Pacific in the mid-19th century.
The connection of Manjiro to Lahaina comes from this little diaspora. Four other shipwrecked Japanese sailors had landed in Lahaina in 1838 -- before Manjiro ever left home -- and were given succor by missionaries. Manjiro's later fame rubbed off on these men, who never played the role in introducing the two nations to each other that he did; and in legend Manjiro became a visitor to Maui, but his charts reproduced in "Hyoson Kiryaku" show that he landed on Oahu several times but never on Maui.
A few elite Japanese at home had learned something about the outside world before Perry showed up, including a samurai, Kawada Shoryo, who was assigned to write down Manjiro's story.
Shoryo, an accomplished painter, also elaborated Manjiro's sketches.
The book was a sensation, though not available to very many. The power elite of Meiji Japan saw it, though.
Only a few copies survive, with illustrations of variable quality.
Shoryo had European books and prints, supplied by the Dutch at Nagasaki, to help with street scenes as described and roughly sketched for him by Manjiro, but some things were utterly mystifying to stay-at-home Japanese.
One illustration of a "sea horse" looks like a deformed horse, and the editors speculate that perhaps it was an attempt to draw a walrus from no more than a verbal description.
Since Manjiro said he had seen it while sailing around Cape Horn, it could not have been a walrus. Was the sailor spinning a yarn, just once, in his otherwise very serious account of suffering and revelation?
Whichever, John Manjiro comes across as an attractive personality.
He went to California in the Gold Rush and struck it rich -- $600 for only 70 days work. According to Kuwada, "he thought it would be indecent to continue" and set off for Honolulu to collect other stray Japanese and go home.
Once there, he became an expert, though the Shogunate officials never quite trusted him, suspecting him of being a pawn in an American plot.
Manjiro did much better when the Meiji emperor took over, becoming a samurai, a university teacher, translator of Bowditch's "New American Practical Navigator," author of a primer for teaching English and acquiring the privilege of a patrynomic, Nakahama.
The editors comment, though, that "Manjiro must have struggled inwardly with his own identity and the clash of different cultures." When he died in 1898, they say, he "must have felt great satisfaction that his self-appointed mission to open Japan to the West was accomplished."
Their final assessment is that "Manjiro's real message was perhaps born out of his inner struggle between 'John Mung' and 'Nakahama Manjiro.' Out of this unique identity crisis came wisdom and character."

We owe a big debt to the sponsors of this wonderful little book for collecting the various versions and artwork and making this fascinating first-person account available. Manjiro, an illiterate farmer/fisherman, was ship-wrecked, rescued by a whaling captain, spent several years "becoming an American" in New England, returned to whaling, took part in the California gold rush, returned to Japan at risk of execution, was promoted to samurai status and became a valuable consultant to the Shogun as Japan was being pried open by the West. He ended his days a college professor and important influence of the revolutionaries of the early Meiji era. The story itself is almost too strange and full of twists for fiction, but this is the real deal--the man's own account.