(Voice actor) Mr.David Radtke

International exchange was severely restricted at the end of the Tokugawa regime, not allowing the people of Japan to travel abroad. Leaving Japan without permission was a felony that could have resulted in the death penalty. But there were a few exceptions. There were cases of people who ended up in foreign countries from being rescued by a foreign ship after suffering a shipwreck while traveling along the coast of Japan. A well-known example is John Manjiro. He was born as the son of a fisherman in 1827 in Tosa (current Kochi prefecture). In 1841 when he was 14 years old, his fishing boat was caught in a storm and swept away to a deserted island. He was then rescued by a whaling boat passing nearby, and crossed the ocean to the United States. That was his first experience being outside of Japan. There were railroads running and factories producing massive products. The leaders of the country were elected by the people. None of these had existed in Japan yet. He was also surprised to see that people were informed about political, social and international situations through newspapers, and freely criticized politics. By then, political criticism was a punishable offence in Japan. He encountered big differences between Japan and the United States. Furthermore, the U.S. and other Western nations had been colonizing foreign lands. He learned those nations were interested in Japan also. He felt a sense of danger that Japan would be colonized sooner or later if no measures were taken. So he started studying in the United States. He studied not only English but math, surveying, shipbuilding and navigation. He had an urge to teach the Western culture to the people of Japan who knew nothing of it. After he graduated from school, he headed to San Francisco in the midst of the gold rush fever and mined gold to earn travel expenses. With that money, he got on a ship to China and then took a boat to come back to Japan. Manjiro was interrogated severely by the Tokugawa administration after he got back. They held him for a long time while he explained he had not left Japan by his own will, proved he had not become a Christian and reported what he had learned overseas. Finally he was released without any charge. Eleven years had passed since his boat had shipwrecked. And John Manjiro became a greatly influential figure in Japan. Read on about his remarkable achievements in this story.