Under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) the nation of Japan was essentially shut off from the rest of the world. With few exceptions, no one was allowed to leave or to enter, potentially upon pain of death. While this draconian punishment was seldom, if ever, carried out, those few who did manage to return were subjected to harsh interrogation. Still, a few Japanese did leave, though presumably unintentionally. These men (and they were as far as we know all men) were sailors whose small ships were blown out to sea, stripped of their rudders, and left to drift hopelessly in the treacherous Pacific Ocean.

Those fortunate enough to land in inhabited territory or to be rescued by passing ships were often struck by very different cultures from the one they were used to. The small minority who managed to return to Japan helped to bring knowledge of the “outside world” to their country. One of the many places the drifters ended up in and reported on was the Kingdom of Hawai’i. 

In 2018, the State of Hawai’i commemorated the 150th anniversary of the gannenmono or first year people, the nearly 150 Japanese laborers imported to work in the Kingdom’s sugar fields. It was the “first year” (1868) of the Meiji Emperor’s reign, ending over 250 years of relative peace and harmony imposed by the essentially hereditary military dictatorship of the Tokugawa family. Though these gannenmono are often regarded as the first Japanese in Hawai’i, many of their countrymen had already visited the islands for at least sixty years, and probably much longer than that. These occurrences had probably been going on for centuries, but not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did a few end up in places where literate inhabitants recorded their arrival rather than just incorporate them into oral records. A few by the nineteenth century luckily were rescued at sea by the increasing numbers of (primarily) American whaling and merchant ships.

Earlier pre-contact unrecorded encounters were likely. One scholar speculated, for example, that the Hawaiian feather kahili, a symbol of nobility and power unknown elsewhere in Polynesia, possibly derived from the somewhat similar Japanese keyari. Not everyone agrees, but the possibility is there. Or, perhaps, the Hawaiian game of konane is a derivative of the Japanese game of go. More ominously, some scholars suggest that Japanese drifters, not Captain Cook, may have introduced syphilis and other diseases to Hawai’i.

We are on firmer ground when the historical records document Japanese drifts. In 1793 a group of sixteen drifters managed to reach an island in the Aleutian chain and spent eight years living in several different Siberian settlements. Many died, but the survivors eventually were taken to St. Petersburg and presented to Czar Alexander I. Given a choice, six of the survivors opted to remain in Russia rather than risk the potential penalties of returning to Japan, but four of them boarded a Russian ship in July 1803, and after a lengthy trip the ship stopped at the Sandwich Islands (as they were then generally called) to resupply. There is no record of these Japanese leaving the ship, but if they did that should qualify them as the first known Japanese to set foot in the Hawaiian kingdom. The ship then sailed for Nagasaki and after some delicate and sometimes angry negotiations with local authorities, the four were returned to Japanese officials thirteen years after their shipwreck. The incident prompted the Shogun’s government to decree that no foreigners (in this case Russians) should ever be allowed to disembark on Japanese soil.

Three years later, in March 1806, eight survivors of the ill-fated ship Inawaka-maru were brought to Honolulu after being rescued by the American whaling ship Tabour, under the command of Captain Cornelius Sole. Their ordeal began on November 7, 1805, when they ran into a storm that severed their rudder; they cut down the junk’s mast to improve stability and for more than seventy days they drifted helplessly, surviving on a little rice at first but mostly on rainwater and fish.

Captain Sole took them aboard, and, realizing that they were starving, gave them only tea at first to not worsen their condition. A couple of days later they had their very first taste of bread and two months later they reached Honolulu. Nearly 500 men and women gathered to gawk at the strangers as they disembarked from the Tabour. King Kamehameha delegated responsibility for the Japanese to Kalanimoku, his prime minister. Kalanimoku, who often used the name Billy Pitt in deference to the late British Prime Minister, gathered fifty men to build a house for the Japanese. It took just four days, after which Kalanimoku assigned a cook and two guards to help the new arrivals. And when curious onlookers increasingly came to stare, Kalanimoku built a fence built around the house to keep strangers away. 

One of the sailors, thirty-four-year-old Hirahara Zenmatsu (generally known as simply Zenmatsu), eventually returned to Japan, where under lengthy interrogation, he related his story. It seemed to him that most Hawaiian men were more than seven feet tall and weighted between 240 to 320 pounds (in English equivalents). The women were almost as large. They wore no clothes except perhaps a small square of tapa as loan cloth. He reported that they did not have pots or pans but cooked in fire pits in the floors of their houses by covering red hot stones with mats soaked in sea water. Taro, sweet potatoes, meat and chicken were placed in the pits and essentially steamed. Despite the warm climate there were no mosquitoes, but there were many flies and fleas. Surprisingly, perhaps, Zenmatsu claimed the Hawaiians had no religion (no God or Buddha) and had no rituals to celebrate either holidays or weddings. They were apparently happy: every day they just ate, slept, and had sex! 

After three- and one-half months, on August 17, Zenmatsu and his companions left for Macau on a ship appropriately named Perseverance, whose Captain Amasa Delano offered to take them to China, hoping that from there they could make their way home. As they left, several hundred Hawaiians showed up to see them off, bringing taro, sweet potatoes, beef, pork, and chickens and one by one bade the Japanese goodbye. “We were so deeply touched,” Zenmatsu wrote, “that we all could not hold back our tears.” Despite the auspicious ship name, however, their return home was a sad journey. They got to Macau in mid-October but after two months they were sent to the Dutch settlement of Batavia (Jakarta), Java. They remained for four more months subjected to tropical diseases, which led to the deaths of three of them. Only three of the eight reached Nagasaki on a Dutch ship on June 17, 1807. One more died shortly after and still another committed suicide rather than submit to interrogation. Only Zenmatsu remained. After more than five months of interrogation, he was allowed to return home, but he also died within six months.

It was more than a quarter century before the next documented group appeared. In December 1832, a Japanese junk washed ashore off Waialua, Oahu, with four survivors. Transferred to Honolulu, they remained for eighteen months before securing passage on a ship bound for Kamchatka in Russian Alaska, apparently hoping to make their way down the Siberian coast and reach the northernmost islands of Japan. One of them died at the Russian American Company settlement, but the remaining three made it to Sitka and from there to an island north of Japan. Their fate is unknown as they left no records.

We know much more about the next group of castaways in Hawai’i because one of them, Jirokichi, managed to return to Japan where he was grilled for three years. His testimony, written down with illustrations, was hand copied multiple times in a three-volume work entitled Bandan (Stories of Barbaric Places). This story began in 1838, when the American whaling ship James Loper, under the command of Captain Obediah Cathcart, came across a drifting Japanese junk, the Cho ja-maru. Aboard were seven very weak men, who by that time had been drifting for five months.

The most formidable, by sheer talent, rather than rank or formal education, was Jirokichi. After a month of recuperation, Jirokichi and two of his fellow shipmates chose to remain on the James Loper to help with whaling. The others were transferred to two other nearby ships. Jirokichi meticulously observed all the operation of the huge (by Japanese standards) ship and the process involved in whaling. He also observed differences in Japanese and American sailing practices. Cathcart surprised the Japanese when he told them in the middle of the Pacific that the next morning they would arrive at an island. They were even more surprised when his prediction came true, and they reached Hilo on Hawai’i Island.

In Hilo, Cathcart handed the Japanese over to a community of Chinese settlers in town. The Japanese and Chinese could not understand each other’s spoken languages, but they could communicate through writing. While in Hilo, Jirokichi later related, they had been taken to see sex workers, but they found the girls unappealing. The three soon realized that despite the seeming hospitality of the Chinese, their real motive was to put the Japanese to work in the newly developing sugar cane fields. Cathcart, eager to help, took the Japanese from Hilo to Lahaina on Maui Island and put them into the custody of his friend the Reverend Dwight Baldwin. They even stayed in Baldwin’s house, the one essentially destroyed in the tragic 2023 fire that wiped out most of the town of Lahaina.

The Yale-educated Baldwin took great interest in the drifters and their country , never having seen any Japanese before. He wrote a lengthy article for the Polynesian newspaper on August 1, 1840 recounting what he learned. Jirokichi, he reported, though apparently illiterate, was much more intelligent than his two companions, and by this time was “catching up” with both the Hawaiian and English languages. The same edition of the paper reported that Queen Victoria had announced her intention to marry Prince Albert of Saxe Coberg and that the wealthy American John Jacob Astor had died. So, while Baldwin studied the Japanese, Jirokichi closely studied the strange customs, inventions, and beliefs of his Maui host. 

On meeting an American woman and child, Jirokichi noted that she was “very pretty and seemed gentle.” Her hair was reddish, her eyes almost white. The child, only four or five years old, had hair that “had already become completely white!” Baldwin’s house itself fascinated him: objects that were not found in Japanese houses such as ovens, and doorknobs intrigued him. Japanese houses did not have western style doors, let alone doorknobs. Japanese cooking did not lend itself to baking. 

After a few weeks on Maui, the three Japanese were sent to Honolulu, where hopefully they would have better luck finding a ship bound for China. They were there united with their four shipmates who had been staying in the home of a prosperous Chinese dry goods merchant. The three new arrivals, with a letter of introduction from Reverend Baldwin met Reverend Hiram Bingham, at that time in the process of designing Kawaiahao Church. 

In the following days and weeks, they explored the port city. Jirokichi continued to make extensive notes of how people lived, their plants and animals, military defenses, the houses he saw, and how to make adobe bricks. He saw windmills, a printing plant, poi making, sugarcane processing, and, most shockingly for the Buddhist Japanese, the slaughter of cattle. He described poi, cigars, craft making, and surgical procedures, all previously unknown to him. They even had an audience with King Kamehameha III. Jirokichi described the palace grounds, which included several buildings and a huge parade ground surrounded by a wall. The surrounding area was heavily fortified with big cannons every few steps. He unfortunately said little about the conversation with the king, but thought that he showed them more deference than he did his own subjects. They were offered poi, but found it tased sour and kept their mouths firmly shut. When they were then served watermelon, they were quite happy. 

During their stay, their Captain Heishiro became ill and died. Levi Chamberlain, missionary and extensive diarist, wrote that the captain’s four companions,“came to mingle their tears and perform superstitious ceremonies over the body” when they learned of his death. The king also called at the house to pay his respects. Reverend Bingham conducted a funeral service and had him buried in the church cemetery. “He left,” Chamberlain wrote, “a wife & children in Japan—three sons & two daughters.” Meanwhile no China bound ships appeared, so they returned to Lahaina and worked in the cane fields for a time, but the heat was too great for them, and they returned to Honolulu by canoe. They spent the next ten months there because the Opium War made Chinese ports unreachable. 

Hawaiian friends suggested they might have better luck trying to get home via Russian Alaska. They sailed for Alaska and spent the next ten months in soldiers’ barracks in Kamchatka. Jirokichi, despite his small size, amazed the Russians with his strength. He could carry three bags of rice at once (no Russian could) and he also defeated all comers at sumo wrestling. They hated the Russian food, but eventually a ship showed up and returned the six men to Japan via Sitka to the Kurile Islands.

Sent to Edo (Tokyo), they were subjected to extensive questioning. Two of them soon died, and Jirokichi himself was grilled for three years before finally being allowed to return home after eight years away. His interrogation included meeting with scholars, one of whom, Koga Kinichiro, wrote Bandan recounting their adventures. Many of the extensive drawings were apparently by Jirokichi himself.

The men and boys described above were not the only Japanese castaways to spend some time in Hawai’i. The most well-known did spend some time in Hawai’i, but their achievements elsewhere are better known. John Manjiro (as he came to be called) learned the whaling trade, spent time in New England, where he was educated, and after a few years worked in the California gold fields to earn money to return home. He went by way of Honolulu, where he met up with three friends who he had left there several years before. They convinced a sea captain to take them near (but not to) Japan and made their way ashore in a small whaling boat. 

The other, known as Joseph Heco, was rescued at sea with several shipmates and taken to San Francisco in 1851. As a precocious teenager over the next few years, he became the first Japanese to meet an American president (he definitely met two and probably three), the first Japanese to become a naturalized American citizen, and the first Japanese (along with his shipmates) to be photographed.

During this period, the United States Government, hoping to extend its influence across the Pacific, was in the process of preparing an expedition led by Admiral Matthew C. Perry to “open” Japan (by force, if necessary) for trade and re-coaling of naval ships. When Heco and his shipmates arrived in San Francisco, authorities, baffled by what to do with them, suggested, naively, that they should be returned immediately to Japan. The Japanese government, according to this line of thinking, would then be so grateful that they would gladly open their ports. Heco and a few of the shipmates and a couple of American friends, sailed to Hong Kong, hoping to meet up with the then formulating Perry expedition. Inevitably delays discouraged them and they returned to San Francisco.

Finally, in 1853, and again in 1854, Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay demanding that Japan end its isolation and sign a treaty with the United States. The resulting Convention of Kanagawa (1854) had a clause that specifically protected American castaway sailors who might end up in Japanese waters and perhaps by implication (though not explicitly) Japanese castaways as well. Only one of Heco’s fellow castaways was with Perry, but he was so frightened that he refused to come on deck the entire time Perry was in Edo. 

The story is not yet over. By 1860, Heco and Manjiro were both back in Edo, among the very few people fluent in both English and Japanese. The primary European language then known in Japan was Dutch. Heco, an American citizen, got a job in the new American consulate in Kanagawa. He also founded the first (though short-lived) Japanese newspaper, having seen in San Francisco, Honolulu, and elsewhere how this medium resulted in the rapid spread of news throughout the population. He also established an import/export business, primarily with San Francisco contacts. Manjiro, on the other hand, was appointed as interpreter in 1860 to the first official embassy of the Empire of Japan to the United States of America.

And we still have the gannenmono, impossible without Perry’s missions. The negotiations with the Japanese government to bring workers to Hawai’i were carried out by Heco’s good friend from San Francisco, Eugene Van Reed, who would go on to become Hawai’i’s first consul general to Japan. The two friends left San Francisco for Japan, stopping in Honolulu, where Heco, who had been seasick most of the trip, stayed behind for a time to recover before eventually returning to his homeland.

Further Reading:

Chamberlain, Levi, “Journals, 1822-1949” (typescript copy), Vol. XVI, November 5, – August 14, 1832. Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library.

Kawada, Ikaku, et al. Drifting toward the Southeast: The Story of Five Japanese Castaways: A Complete Translation of Hyoson Kiryaku (a Brief Account of Drifting toward the Southeast) as Told to the Court of Lord Yamauchi of Tosa in 1852 by John Manjiro (Spinner Publications, 2004).

Kono, Hideto and Kazuko Sinoto, “Observations of the First Japanese to Land in Hawai’i,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, 34 (2000), 49-63.

Oaks, Robert F., “Golden Gate Castaway: Joseph Heco and San Francisco, 1851-1859.” California History, 82, no. 2 (2004): 38–58, 63–65.

Plummer, Katherine. The Shogun’s Reluctant Ambassadors: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific (Portland: The Oregon Historical Society, 1991).

Plummer, Katherine, trans. A Japanese Glimpse at the Outside World 1839-1843, ed. Richard A. Pierce (Kingston, Ontario and Fairbanks, Alaska, The Limestone Press, 1991).

 

 

This article originally appeared in December 2024.

 

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With a PhD in Colonial American history from the University of Southern California, Robert F. Oaks taught for several years in Texas and California. Unable to attain a tenured position, he re-invented himself as a pseudo techie and worked for many years at Bank of America in the technology division. Upon retirement, he returned to his love of history, though now more interested in Asian and Hawaiian history. He now lives in Honolulu with his husband.