It’s interesting, looking at Japan through some of the “firsts” in its history.
Like John Kendrick, the ship’s captain who participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War then went on to be an explorer, eventually becoming the first American to visit Japan.
Or Horace Wilson, a teacher at the predecessor of Tokyo University, who thought it’d be fun to teach his students to play baseball back in 1873, which was the beginning of the long history of the sport here.
The first English teacher in Japan, if you’re curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country’s sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood.
He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki.
The Japanese had a long relationship with Dutch traders, but none of them could speak English, despite the recent rise in power of England and the United States, so the officials got the idea of having MacDonald teach English to a class of fourteen students. The studies paid off, and when Admiral Perry showed up in 1853, students trained by MacDonald were able to communicate.
Today there’s a commemorative statue in Nagasaki thanking Mr. MacDonald for his contribution, and if I know Japan, I’m pretty sure they sell little cakes or rice crackers with his face on them, too.
Great story, Peter. Thanks!
I wonder if they were just as geeky as the Americans that have any interest in Japan now.
He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country. . .
Sounds pretty geeky to me.
Yes, he would have been more famous in light of the events of later years, but he went to Australia to mine gold and did some other stuff, and didn’t write about his experiences until years later, after Perry was down in the history books. Bummer.
[…] پیتر پین در مورد تاریخ و داستان اولین معلم زبان انگلیسی در ژاپن نوشته است. نام این معلم رانالد مک دونالد بود و در سال 1853 وارد ژاپن شده است. در آن زمان خارجی ها حق وارد شدن به ژاپن را نداشتند و این معلم انگلیسی وانمود کرده که کشتی اش غرق شده است. اولین کلاس وی 14 شاگرد داشت […]
What? Did someone just declare a fatwah on Japundit?
It really seems as though people just had more balls in those days. I mean, ships to the East Indies would lose almost half their crews to disease, etc, yet there was never a shortage of volunteers. And imagine just packing up and moving to Jamestown, not knowing what you would find, but knowing that you were unlikely ever to return home again.
So, I suppose he was just carrying on tradition. “They behead foreigners, you say? Just drop me here, Capt.”
Good on him. Too bad about his name, though.
Machine translation of the Arabic comments courtesy of Google:
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I’d say there’s room for improvement in the translation. Anyway, welcome, Global Voices-san.
Thanks for the translation. You’ve just demonstrated why JP is not worried about losing translation jobs to machines just yet.,
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