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16 - Imperial destinies on foreign shores

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Matt K. Matsuda
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

In 1848, a tiny boat capsized near the coast of Hokkaido, northern Japan. Its sole occupant was rescued by fishermen of the Ainu, the aboriginal people of the region, and reported to local samurai, who incarcerated the man and sent him far south to Nagasaki, where all foreigners were detained. Ranald MacDonald may have been among the most unusual of outsiders to be cast upon Japanese shores. He had, for one, not been shipwrecked or lost at sea, but had paid a whaling captain a considerable sum to set him adrift near Hokkaido with the singular hope of visiting Japan. Nor, as his name might suggest, was he a Scotsman, but the son of a Chinook Indian woman and an official of the Hudson's Bay company, who had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where the Chinook had thriving trade with Russian, American, British, Canadian, and Hawaiian sailors and agents. He was another typically international and intercultural Pacific actor.

In 1834, three Japanese sailors, Yamamoto Otokichi, and two others by the names of Iwakichi and Kyukichi, washed up in the Pacific Northwest, having drifted in a disabled boat from Japanese waters all the way to North America. Found and enslaved by Makah Indians, they were turned over to a Hudson's Bay sea captain and reports about them impressed a young MacDonald, who followed their stories as they traveled on to England, then China, and attempted to return to Japan. This would be no easy feat. Since the early years of the Tokugawa Shoguns, when the Portuguese had been expelled and the Dutch permitted only their tiny outpost on Deshima island in Nagasaki harbor, Japanese ports had remained closed to the outsiders – including Japanese abroad.

Type
Chapter
Information
Pacific Worlds
A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures
, pp. 233 - 255
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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