Nakahama Manjirō

Nakahama Manjirō

Map of his travels drawn up by Manjiro

Nakahama Manjirō , also Nakanohama Manjirō, John Manjirō and John Mung ( Japanese 中 濱 萬 次郎 ; born January 27, 1827 in Nakanohama (part of today's Tosashimizu ); † November 12, 1898 ) was a Japanese translator and civil servant during the Edo period ( Bakumatsu ) and the Meiji Restoration .

Life

Born the son of a fisherman, he followed his father's profession. He and four other fishermen were blown to a desert island by a typhoon in 1841 . After half a year he was rescued by an American whaler and brought to the USA, where he learned English , mathematics , navigation and surveying . He worked as a whaler and prospector in California . These new experiences and knowledge became very useful to him because of the closure of Japan and the limited spread of Western knowledge and language that resulted from it.

In 1850 he returned to Japan via the Kingdom of Hawaii and the Ryūkyū Islands and in 1851 reached Kagoshima in Satsuma . There he was interviewed by Daimyo Shimazu Nariakira , who was very interested in the West. Returning to his homeland fief Tosa in 1852 , he was raised to the lower samurai class and chose the family name Nakahama after his home village.

In 1853, at the instigation of Abe Masahiro, he was appointed a Bakufu official. In this use he translated books on navigation and documents pertaining to foreign embassies. He wrote a work on English conversation and taught navigation at the naval school established by the shogunate . It was the year in which the American Commodore Matthew Perry, on the orders of the American President Millard Fillmore, visited Japan with his fleet of 4 ships and forced the country to "open up", which triggered far-reaching political changes in Japan.

In 1860, Nakahama traveled to the United States on board the Kanrin Maru as a member of the Japanese legation .

He later directed whaling around the Bonin Islands and taught English in Satsuma and Tosa. After the start of the Meiji Restoration , he became Professor of English at the Tōkyō Kaisei Gakkō , the forerunner of the University of Tokyo .

In 1870 he accompanied Ōyama Iwao on a trip to Europe, the purpose of which was to gain new knowledge from the course of the Franco-German War .

His son Nakahama Tōichirō became a well-known doctor.

reception

The asteroid (4841) Manjiro , discovered by Tsutomu Seki on October 28, 1989 , was named after Nakahama.

literature

• Ardath W. Burks (Ed.) The Modernizers. Overseas Students, Foreign Employees, and Meiji Japan . Westview Press, Boulder and London 1985. ISBN 0-86531-826-3
• Kaneko Hisakazu: Manjiro, the man that discovered America . Houghton-Mifflin, Boston 1956.
• Iwao Seiichi (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of Japanese History . Kondansha International, Tokyo 1978. ISBN 0-87011-274-0
• Shintaro Takagi (Ed.): The Japan biographical encyclopedia & who's who . Rengo Press, Tokyo 1958.

Web links

Commons : Nakahama Manjirō  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Nakahama is the family name, Manjirō the first name.