Heart of a Samurai

by Margi Preus

  Manjiro’s boyhood home, by Masamichi Teraishi, circa 1900

  Below him lay his village—the same sleepy village he had left almost twelve years before. Smoke from cooking fires and from the smoking of bonito rose lazily into the sky. When the smell reached him, he almost wept. This was the smell of his village—this mix of salty ocean air, fish, and smoke as sweet as incense.

  Things seemed familiar and yet unfamiliar. There was the town—its cozy houses and narrow streets—nestled between the hills and the ocean. There was the hill on top of which stood the temple and the cemetery. But everything seemed so small compared to how Manjiro remembered it! Everything except the ocean, which, from his vantage point on the hill, seemed to stretch forever.

  As he walked down into the town, butterflies danced about him as if to welcome him home. Children he did not recognize swarmed around, asking, “Who are you? Are you the famous man from this village?”

  “No, I am not famous,” he said.

  Finally, he stood before the familiar thatched roof, wooden walls, and bamboo door of his family’s hut. On the hard-packed earth next to the house, a wooden bucket sat half-filled with water. A cotton yukata hung drying on a pole outside the house. It was as if he had been gone only a few days.

  But what would he find when he entered? Would his mother be there? What if the door opened and a completely different family greeted him?

  He had thought about this moment for such a long time. He had prepared himself for any possibility as he hiked the road home. But now, as he stood before the door of his family’s house, he could barely speak what he had longed to say for so long.

  “Tadaima,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I am home.”

  Several faces appeared at the door. Not the faces of his brother and sisters, but grown-up people. He could see that they did not recognize him. He hardly recognized them.

  But then an older woman stepped out from the shadow of the door and their eyes met. A moment passed between them and he was once again a young boy, standing at the door of this hut, saying good-bye before going to work for Imasu-san.

  Without her eyes ever leaving his, she walked to him and touched his face.

  “Manjiro,” she whispered.

  “Okachan,” Manjiro said. “Mama.”

  Later, after neighbors arrived, bringing red sea bream mixed with boiled rice, red beans, warmed sake, and other gifts of food, after his family had taken him to the cemetery to see the stone they had placed there when they thought he was dead, and after much laughter and many tears, Manjiro gave away the few gifts he had been allowed to keep.

  He had a mirror for his eldest sister, Seki; buttons for his younger sister, Ume; a pair of dice for Seki’s husband, Etsusuke; and a small bag of white sugar for his brother, Kumakichi. He brought needles and scissors and medicines, books and maps.

  Finally, Manjiro produced a small box. He took his mother’s hand and poured into it dozens of tiny but perfect shells. It was as if he poured out diamonds, the way the others clustered around, begging to see.

  “I wish they were precious stones, but they are only shells,” he sighed, “shells that I collected in places where I traveled.”

  His mother held out her hands to show the shells—small and curved, frilled and ruffled, or smooth as teardrops. They were pink as cats’ tongues, shiny brown and speckled, iridescent black, or creamy white.

  “Kirei!” she said. So beautiful!

  Nestled among them was the oyster shell from which he had drunk water on Bird Island. But most were just pretty shells that he liked because, like him, they had washed onto some far shore. No matter where they landed, whether on black sand or white, among pebbles, cobbled rocks, or tossed onto driftwood, still they sparkled and gleamed.

  “These shells are like the people of the world, Okachan,” Manjiro said, speaking not just to his mother, but to everyone. “They come from many different places. They come in many different colors and sizes. But they are all beautiful.”

  41

  THE SAMURAI

  ong after all the others had gone to bed, Manjiro stood at the door of the hut. The moon made a path of light leading to the ocean and beyond—perhaps all the way to America. It looked as if he could walk there on that path of light.

  It was so still, he could hear the rush of waves on the beach; the solemn hoot of an owl rolled down the mountainside. Beyond that was a deep and ancient silence, as old as these hills.

  It was hard to imagine anything changing this remote village, but the wind of change was blowing, and Japan would be swept along by it one way or another. She, his beloved country, had spent hundreds of years living from full moon to full moon while the West had sped ahead in science, invention, transportation, navigation, and, most ominously, military strength. There were hundreds of ways Japan would benefit from the coming changes. And hundreds of ways she would not.

  Perhaps one day even the quiet of this peaceful village would be pierced by the shrill screaming of steam whistles, the chugging of locomotives, the rattle of buggies, the clatter and hubbub of commerce.

  But impermanence was the nature of life. Wasn’t it funny, Manjiro thought, that his countrymen, who so admired the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms and the maple’s momentary burst of fall color, clung so fervently to the past? They were like the last fragile blossoms that tremble on the branch while the wind tears and tears at them.

  Manjiro sighed and went inside, lay down on his futon, and joined his family in sleep.

  Manjiro opened an eye to pale gray light and wondered what had awakened him. He heard an unfamiliar voice announce itself as a messenger’s.

  “The outsider, Manjiro, must go to Kochi without delay,” the messenger said.

  “Excuse me,” said Manjiro’s mother, “he is not an outsider; he is just as Japanese as you or I. Why must he go right away?”

  “The great lord of Tosa has decreed it, that is why,” the man said.

  “But what does he want with my Manjiro?” she insisted.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t tell me!” he said. “I am just a lowly messenger!”

  Manjiro’s sister offered the man tea and a rice ball, and he became more talkative. “Some people say he is a foreign spy,” he said, “so perhaps he will be imprisoned.”

  Manjiro heard his mother’s intake of breath.

  “But others say,” the messenger continued, “that Lord Yamauchi wants him to teach young samurai the barbarian’s language.” The man lowered his voice to a whisper. “They even say that he will be made a samurai himself.” He clucked his tongue. “Imagine—a simple fisherman becoming a samurai!”

  Manjiro smiled, remembering what he had told his companions in the fishing boat when they thought they were going to die—that he wanted to be a samurai. He didn’t know why he had said that—it just came out of him. But once he had said it, the idea had taken on a kind of life of its own. Somehow, this impossible idea had helped keep him alive.

  The messenger slurped his tea, then chortled. “Well, since he has neither the family nor the upbringing of a samurai, I hope he has the heart of one! He is going to need it.”

  Within him, Manjiro knew, beat a heart scoured by sand, pounded by waves, burned by sun, and polished by rain and wind. It would always be the simple heart of a fisherman, but perhaps it had also become the mighty heart of a samurai.

  EPILOGUE

  n July 1853, just months after Manjiro began his teaching career, a fleet of four American ships entered Edo Bay. Commodore Matthew C. Perry demanded to speak to the emperor and made it known that America wanted access to Japanese ports.

  Painting of Manjiro, or John Mung, circa 1877

  The country was thrown into chaos. “Black dragons belching fire!” the people cried, having never before seen steamships. “One hundred thousand devils” were coming, it was said, and people hid their valuables and locked themselves in their homes.

  Suddenly, Manjiro, with his unique firsthand knowledge of Americ
a, was needed in Edo, by order of the shogun. He was appointed as a samurai to the shogun, allowed to carry swords and to take a second name. It was unprecedented for a person not born of a samurai family and of such low rank to be elevated to such status.

  Although he wasn’t allowed to speak directly to the Americans, he argued for an end to Japan’s isolationist practices. He reminded the advisors to the shogun that “there are hardly any weapons that will frighten the Americans out of their wits” and that “America is working to develop its own country” and wasn’t interested in attacking Japan, but only wanted to get permission to resupply at Japanese ports.

  These arguments had an impact. On March 31, 1854, after Perry’s second visit, a treaty declared peace and friendship between the United States of America and Japan, ending Japan’s 250-year-old isolation policy.

  In spite of his service to the shogun (and also because of it), Manjiro lived under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of his life. He was considered by some to be a traitor and by some a foreign spy. His life was in enough danger that he found it necessary to hire a bodyguard to protect him against assassins.

  Nonetheless, he went on to achieve many things in his lifetime. He designed ships capable of crossing oceans. He translated Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator into Japanese and wrote the first English book for Japanese people: A Shortcut to English Conversation. He taught navigation and shipbuilding, English, and mathematics. He started the whaling industry in Japan and joined the first Japanese embassy to the United States as an interpreter. On the voyage to America, when during a storm the captain of the ship became too seasick to sail, Manjiro took charge. “Old Manjiro was up nearly all night,” an American officer wrote in his journal. “He enjoys the life, it reminds him of old times.” Nineteen years after leaving America, when he was forty-three years old, Manjiro finally visited Captain and Mrs. Whitfield again as part of a diplomatic delegation to New York.

  Manjiro was married three times and was father to three children. In his later life, he could be seen strolling the streets of Tokyo wearing a kimono, Western-style shoes, and a derby hat. Until his death in 1898 at age seventy-one, he began each day with a breakfast of bread and jam and hot, black coffee.

  The friendship between Manjiro and the Whitfields lives on in their descendents, who meet at the Japan-America Grassroots Summit held alternatively each year in Japan and the United States. The relationship is also continued by the sister cities of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and Tosashimizu, Japan, a city near Manjiro’s hometown. These relationships continue the work Manjiro began: promoting friendship and understanding between the two nations.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  THE BOY WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA

  he Heart of a Samurai is based on the life of a real person, real events, and a real time in history. Fourteen-year-old Manjiro really was shipwrecked along with four fishing companions on Bird Island (Torishima). They were rescued by an American whaling ship, the John Howland, and the captain befriended young Manjiro, eventually bringing him back to America with him. Manjiro is believed to be the first Japanese person to set foot in America and has been called “the boy who discovered America.”

  While living in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Manjiro attended both the Stone House School and the Bartlett School of Navigation. He was apprenticed for a while to a cooper and also helped out at the Whitfields’ farm, where he had his own horse to ride. The Whitfields did, indeed, have to change churches twice before they found a church that fully accepted Manjiro.

  Manjiro told his story to the court of Lord Yamauchi of Tosa in 1852. It was collected by Kawada Shoryo in four volumes called the Hyoson Kiryaku.

  After studying in the United States for three years, Manjiro shipped out on the whaling bark the Franklin. While aboard the Franklin, Manjiro jumped into the sea and killed a sea turtle, earning the respect of the crew. When the captain, Ira Davis, became violent and irrational, he was relieved of his duties by the crew, and Manjiro was promoted to harpooner. On the way home from this voyage, he purchased a parrot in Suriname.

  In 1850, Manjiro traveled to California along with hosts of other gold seekers. He managed to find enough gold to finance a trip back to Japan with two of his original companions. No sooner had they landed than they were arrested and held for one and a half years. Finally, they were released to go home to their families. Three days into his visit with his family, Manjiro was called back to the city and given the lowest samurai rank of sadame-komono, extraordinary at that time in Japan’s history. Shortly thereafter, the American naval commander Commodore Perry arrived in Edo harbor, demanding that Japan open its doors to the West. As an English speaker with firsthand knowledge of America, Manjiro became an advisor to the shogun, who elevated him to an even higher samurai rank. When presented with the daisho, the two swords of the samurai, he felt so awkward wearing them that instead he carried them wrapped in a towel.

  The things he wishes he could tell his mother in Chapter 17, the letter he refers to in Chapter 36, and the things he says to the daimyo in Chapter 38 are all his words. Many of the characters are based on real people, including Captain Whitfield and his wife, baby William Henry, Manjiro’s friends Job and Terry, and his four fishing companions. The real Catherine so treasured the little May basket and message Manjiro gave her (Chapter 24) that she kept them into her eighties.

  Some incidents and characters are fictional. The characters of Jolly and Tom and their confrontations with Manjiro were invented to provide conflict and advance the story as well as to acknowledge the prejudice and ill will that Manjiro faced in a time and place where animosity toward Japan and its isolationist policies was in full flower.

  By the time Manjiro returned home, Japan (known at the time as Nippon) had been living in isolation for 250 years.

  CALENDAR METHOD

  The old Japanese calendar used two methods. One was a complicated system involving the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, hen, dog, and boar) and the five natural elements (earth, water, fire, wood, and metal). The other system was based on eras, which changed depending on the emperor in power, major events, and natural disasters. In the era system, a year is identified by the combination of the Japanese era name and the year number within the era. Our story starts in the twelfth year of Temp, the Year of the ox. The Temp era lasted from 1830 until 1844. The book concludes in the fifth year of Kaei, the Year of the Rat. The Kaei Era was from 1848 until 1854.

  ENVIRONMENTAL NOTE

  Like others of his generation, Manjiro probably could not have perceived that the whales he chased were being hunted to the brink of extinction. Even american author Herman Melville, who sailed on a whaling ship toward Japan at the same time Manjiro was sailing toward America, rejected the notion that whales could ever face extinction. He writes in his book Moby-Dick that although “whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them,” they were just going to “some other and remoter strand.” Or, he said, they could always go to the polar ice cap, where they could dive “under the glassy barriers, and, in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to the pursuit of man.”

  Whales have not been able to defy the pursuit of man, who has hunted them to whatever “cape or promontory” they go to. Even after a moratorium on commercial hunting, whales continue to face many perils, including pollution, fishing nets and lines, military sonar, climate change, “scientific” whaling, and the possible renewal of commercial whaling.

  Manjiro probably also could not have foreseen the near extinction of the bird that saved his life when he was ship-wrecked on Torishima: the short-tailed albatross. Primarily to satiate the appetite for exotic feathers (with which to decorate ladies’ hats), the short-tailed albatross was hunted so recklessly that the population plummeted from millions to so few that they were considered extinct by the 1940s. A handful remained, probably only because some immature birds stay at sea all year
, and so were unavailable for slaughter. Since the birds do not breed until at least ten years of age and lay only one egg per year, they have been slow to rebound. Now nesting on only two islands (one of which is the actively volcanic Torishima), the population has slowly increased to an extremely vulnerable twelve hundred birds.

  GLOSSARY

  JAPANESE WORDS/TERMS/PLACES

  ahodori albatross, a large seabird, what Goemon calls a “fool bird,” a short-tailed albatross, which once nested by the thousands on Torishima (Bird Island). Their numbers were once so greatly reduced by feather hunters that they were considered extinct. A small population now struggles to make a recovery.

  Bushido the way of the samurai; a code of honor.

  daimyo a powerful territorial lord. Each daimyo had a great many samurai in his service who swore allegiance to him according to the rules of Bushido.

  Edo the former name of Tokyo during the Edo period.

  fumi-e a likeness of Jesus or Mary upon which suspected Christians were made to step in order to prove they were not members of that religion.

  geisha a professional female entertainer who performs traditional Japanese arts; typically dressed elegantly in a kimono.

  Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (“Hidden Leaves”) a practical and spiritual guide for a warrior, from commentaries by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (eighteenth century).