Nakahama Manjiro — The Man Who Became Japanese with Chopsticks

The Boat That Came Looking for Turtles

"We could not understand anything about them, except that they were hungry."

June 27, 1841. Captain Whitfield of the American whaling ship John Howland wrote this in his logbook.

That afternoon, the crew saw a small island from the ship. To check whether there were turtles, they sent two boats to the island. On the island were five people in terrible trouble. The captain had them brought out to the ship.

They went looking for turtles and found human beings.

The youngest of the five was a boy of fourteen.

His name was Manjiro. He was born into a fishing family in a village called Nakanohama, in Tosa (today's Kochi Prefecture).

The story goes back about half a year.

At the end of January 1841, a small fishing boat carrying five men left the bay at Usa. The boatman was Denzo. With him were his younger brothers Jusuke and Goemon, and a man named Toraemon. Manjiro, the youngest, is said to have been invited along.

He had gone out on fishing boats since he was small, a later biography says. By fourteen, they say, he was already trusted to take the fish he caught off the hook, and counted as one of the grown men.

During the fishing, the wind changed. The boat drifted away from land and was carried east.

They saw Cape Muroto and, far off, the mountains of Kii. For about a week, they say, they drifted. They burned planks from the boat to keep warm, cooked porridge with the rice that was left, and grilled fish. What they lacked was water.

They wanted only one thing: to reach land, drink all the water they could, and then die. A later biography says that is what the five were thinking.

They washed up on an island called Torishima, a small island of nothing but rock. From the sea, they say, it looked as if birds covered the mountain.

The cliffs were steep, and the boat could not get close. They spent a night offshore. The next day, even all five pulling together could not lift the anchor rope. Denzo said, so the story goes, that they had no use for an anchor any more, and had the rope cut.

When they landed, a big wave turned the boat over. Jusuke hurt his leg. Once he was on shore, it is said, he relaxed, fell down, and lost consciousness.

No one lived on the island.

The five slept in the one cave there. According to a local history, their days went like this: in the morning they licked the dew from the rocks, and in the daytime they searched for food. Albatrosses nested on the island, and the men could catch them by hand. They ate the eggs too.

They caught rainwater in a bucket and made rules about how to drink it. When a dead whale washed ashore, they ate it with joy, as if it were a feast, they say.

When the weather grew warm, the birds flew off with their chicks, it is said. Food ran short again. The five picked up seaweed and ate it. Jusuke's leg did not heal.

Nearly half a year had passed since they landed.

One day, a ship appeared offshore.

"A rescue ship! A rescue ship has come!"

Manjiro jumped up and shouted this, it is said. He and the others picked up a broken mast lying nearby and climbed to the top of a high cliff. They held up their clothes and waved them at the ship, the story goes.

The ship noticed them and lowered a boat. The other two men went down around the cliff. Meanwhile Manjiro tied his clothes around his waist, slid down the cliff, and jumped into the boat, it is said.

On the ship, the five are said to have eaten porridge to ease their hunger. Not a word got across. Asked what country they had come from, they could only repeat Nippon, Nippon (the Japanese name for Japan), it is said.

The ship went on whaling, and spent several months at sea. Manjiro helped with the fishing, the captain grew fond of him, and he came to be called "John Man," it is said.

When the ship reached Honolulu in Hawaii, four of the men left the ship and settled on the islands.

Only Manjiro stayed on board.

The captain liked this lively boy and wanted to take him along. Manjiro did not object and went aboard, a lecture on Tosa local history says. Some books say the boy himself asked to be left on the ship.

The ship left Honolulu with a fourteen-year-old boy on board.

It was sailing toward a country where no one spoke his language.

A Padded Robe and a Handkerchief

In 1843, the ship came back to the American port of New Bedford, on the east coast.

Manjiro began a new life in the town of Fairhaven, where the captain lived.

He was placed in the home of Allen, a barrel maker. Allen's daughter Jane ran a small school at home. She was over thirty and kind. She felt sorry for the boy and taught him handwriting every day, a later biography says.

On days when the snow was deep and the cold was harsh, he mostly read books and practiced his letters, they say. Before long he was studying mathematics, and he threw himself into the art of finding a ship's position at sea.

In 1846, Manjiro joined the crew of the whaling ship Franklin. He was nineteen.

From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. One day, a sea turtle as big as a mountain was seen floating on the water.

Manjiro grabbed a harpoon and jumped into the sea. He swam to the turtle, climbed onto its shell, easily tied a rope to it, and towed it to the ship. The foreign crew members who were watching were all amazed at his nerve, it is said.

The boy who had been picked up by a ship looking for turtles was now riding turtles himself.

In 1847, the ship was chasing whales in the sea near Japan. Off the northeast coast, it met a group of Japanese fishing boats.

At this time, Manjiro put on an old padded Japanese robe over his Western clothes, on purpose. He tied a handkerchief around his head like a headband. Then he lowered a small boat and rowed toward the fishing boats, a lecture on Tosa local history says.

Perhaps it was so the Japanese fishermen would see that he was Japanese too.

Near the fishing boat, the two sides are said to have talked like this:

"Where is this?"

"Off the coast of Sendai."

"Which way is Tosa?"

"I don't know."

Manjiro handed over a box of biscuits, and the other man gave him a bonito (a kind of fish) in return, it is said.

Japan was right there. But he could not leave the ship. Manjiro's ship turned to the southeast.

That same year, the ship stopped at Honolulu in Hawaii. His old friends were there.

Jusuke had died of illness. Denzo and the others had once reached a beach in northern Japan, but could not leave their ship and had come back. And there was Manjiro's story about the sea off Sendai. They talked it all over, and they wept like grown men, it is said, wondering if they could no longer hope to go home to Japan in this life.

When the time came to sail, Manjiro went back out to sea.

In 1849, the Franklin returned to America.

The voyage of a little over three years had taken him almost all the way around the world. The only places he had not seen were the capital of England and the capital of France. Manjiro was sorry about that, a later biography says.

To go home, he needed money. In those days, nothing was talked about more in America than the gold mines of California. Manjiro sailed around the tip of South America to San Francisco and worked in a mine in the mountains.

Years later he wrote in a letter that he stayed at the gold mines for four months and earned an average of eight dollars a day, over and above his costs. Then he made up his mind to go home. To see his dear mother.

In 1850, in Honolulu, Denzo and Goemon were delighted when Manjiro told them about going home. Toraemon alone was not, it is said.

With the help of Damon, a minister in Honolulu, Manjiro is said to have bought a whaling boat for 125 dollars. It was named the Adventurer.

Damon wrote about the young man in his own newspaper, The Friend.

"He is a bright, clever young man who has made good use of his chances. He speaks and writes English quite correctly."

The article also described the plan of the three men. If they were let off near the Ryukyu Islands (today's Okinawa), they might find a Japanese ship from there.

The article ends like this:

"Success to Captain Man, in command of the whaling boat Adventurer!"

In December 1850, the three left Honolulu on a merchant ship carrying the boat.

The new year came, and the ship reached the sea off the Ryukyus. In a later letter, he wrote:

"The captain asked me to stay with him and go on to China. But I refused. I wanted to see my mother."

It was bitterly cold, the letter also says, and a strong wind mixed with snow was blowing. According to a later account, the land was about five miles (8 kilometers) away. The three jumped into the boat and left the ship at four in the afternoon. They rowed for ten hours, dropped anchor in the shelter of an island, and waited for morning.

In the morning, Manjiro first sent Denzo ashore. Denzo came back with tears in his eyes, Manjiro said later. He had forgotten the language of the country where he was born, and could not talk with the people there.

Manjiro was the same.

"I went up to the Ryukyu people, but I could not understand what they said. We had all forgotten the Japanese language."

Manjiro went ashore carrying a loaded pistol.

The three men who had spent ten years getting home signaled with their hands that they wanted water.