Pacific Encounters: Yankee Whalers, Manjiro, and the Opening of Japan Marks 150th Anniversary of Meeting of East and West

Whalers Were Vanguard of Contact with Isolated Japan

"If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold."
--Moby Dick, 1851

Beginning Friday, April 16, 2004, the New Bedford Whaling Museum will present Pacific Encounters:Yankee Whalers, Manjiro, and the Opening of Japan, an exhibition examining the influential legacy of the whaling industry on the opening of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange between Japan and Western nations. The exhibition, which includes more than 50 artifacts, uses the life of John Manjiro—the first Japanese person to live and work in the United States—as a focal point to present the intriguing narrative of contact between whalers and the Japanese at a time when such outside influence was forbidden in Japan. Manjiro, rescued at sea by a New Bedford whaling ship, spent 10 years studying and working in the New Bedford region and on two American whaling voyages, and ultimately played a role in the signing of the 1854 treaty that opened Japan.

Pacific Encounters will showcase objects from the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, the New Bedford Public Library, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, and from institutions and individuals throughout Japan, including Dr. Hiroshi Nakahama, the great grandson of John Manjiro. Objects on display will include artifacts gathered by whalers during pre-treaty contact, original documents from Japan and from whale-ships, and paintings and drawings of famous scenes from Manjiro’s life and of incidents of pre-treaty contact, among them the world famous Japanese painting of the Sag Harbor ship Manhattan, which visited Japan in 1845. The exhibition will be presented in a special gallery designed to evoke Japanese architecture, and all exhibition materials will be produced in both English and Japanese.

When U.S. Naval Commander Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay in 1853 and forced Japan’s government to enter relations with the United States, he was widely assumed to be the first American to see those shores. However, American and European whale ships had long been known to land in Japan and also to rescue Japanese sailors from storms and shipwrecks. Whalers’ dominant presence off the Japanese coast meant that a slow but steady exchange of knowledge and goods took place in the years before the official Treaty of Kanagawa opened Japan to the U.S. in 1854. Throughout the 1800s, New Bedford was the world capital of the whaling industry and, with the neighboring town of Fairhaven, played an important part in the whalers’ contact with Japan. The New Bedford Whaling Museum and surrounding institutions have extensive collections that chronicle this contact, from which the exhibition will be primarily drawn.

Manjiro was a 14-year-old castaway when he was rescued in 1841 from a remote Pacific Island by William Whitfield of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Captain of the whaleship John Howland. Aboard ship he was given the name John Mungero, known also as John Mung. Japan had been a closed society for nearly two and a half centuries and it was illegal for Japanese people to leave or for foreigners to enter. (The exceptions were the Dutch and Chinese, who were allowed trading only at Nagasaki.) Impressed by Manjiro’s natural intelligence, Whitfield asked Manjiro to return to New Bedford to live and study with his family in Fairhaven.

Manjiro spent 10 years living outside of Japan, learning English, whaling, navigation, and cooperage; he even made his way west to participate in the 1849 California Gold Rush. When he eventually returned to Japan, he was arrested and interrogated for nearly a year. During this time his feudal lord commissioned prominent samurai artist Kawada Shoryo to illustrate Manjiro’s remarkable story. The result was the book Hyoson Kiryaku (recently translated and published in English as Drifting Toward the Southeast), copies of which will be featured in the exhibition. This book illuminated the West for the Japanese people, providing insights into a culture about which they knew little. At the time of the publication, few in Japan had a working knowledge of the English language—an invaluable skill as isolation became less and less viable. Manjiro wrote an English primer and played an unofficial role as advisor in the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa between the United States and Japan. He was later a member of the first official diplomatic delegation to the United States.

In addition to artifacts from Manjiro’s life, the exhibition examines other examples of pre-treaty contact. Japanese watercolors of the 1845 Manhattan incident will be included, when the whaleship Manhattan was allowed to land 22 Japanese castaways at Uraga, Japan, and obtain provisions. Also explored will be an incident, in 1791, when Yankee fur trader and former whaler John Kendrick landed in Japan’s Wakayama prefecture. His attempt to trade furs with the Japanese failed though he was received on friendly terms. Additional items on view recovered by whalers from Japanese castaways include a color map of Japan, a sword, lacquerware, books, coins, and a Shamisen long-neck lute, extremely exotic at a time when so little was known about Japanese culture.

Pacific Encounters was curated by Dr. Stuart Frank, Director Emeritus of the Kendall Institute of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and Hayato Sakurai, Assistant Curator at the Museum, who is a maritime historian trained at Nagoya University, the Museum of the Sea (Mie Prefecture), and the former Kendall Whaling Museum. Junji Kitadai and Junya Nagakuni, leading Manjiro scholars, are project advisors. The exhibition also will be digitally reproduced online, in dual-language format, on the Museum’s website.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Kochi Prefectural Museum of History and in conjunction with the centennial celebration of the Japan Society of Boston. Official sponsors of the exhibition are Toyota, the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, New York, Inc., ANA—All Nippon Airways, and Toshiba.