Background
Kōdayū Daikokuya was born in 1751 in a village called Minami Wakamatsu in the province of Ise, a seaport on the Ise coast, and became a seaman.
大黒屋 光太夫
Kōdayū Daikokuya was born in 1751 in a village called Minami Wakamatsu in the province of Ise, a seaport on the Ise coast, and became a seaman.
In 1782 he set sail for Edo with sixteen other men in a ship called the Shinsho Maru loaded with rice from the domain of Kishu, but midway they were blown off their course by violent winds, drifting for eight months until they were finally cast up on the island of Amchitka in the Aleutians. After remaining on the island for four years, they were rescued in 1787 by a Russian and taken to the port of Kamchatka on the Siberian mainland.
In 1788 they set out from there, making their way to Okhotsk and Yakutsk and in 1789 finally reaching Irkutsk in the Lake Baikal region. There they became acquainted with a teacher named Laxman, who assisted them to submit a petition for repatriation to the governor-general of Siberia, but their request, though several times submitted, was each time denied. Leaving the rest of the party behind, Laxman then took Kodayu to the Russian capital at St. Petersburg, and in 1791 he was granted audience with Catherine II and given permission to return to Japan. He was presented by the empress with a gold medal and was treated with great kindness by the members of the imperial family and the high officials, residing in the capital for half a year.
In 1792 he made his wray back to Irkutsk, and there he and the two other seamen remaining from the original party accompanied Adam Laxman, a Russian envoy to Japan, landing at Nemuro in Hokkaido. He was forty-one at the time of his return to Japan. The following year he was subjected to thorough cross-examination by the shogun and high shogunate officials, and for the remainder of his life was kept in mild confinement within the grounds of a garden for medicinal plants at Bancho in Edo.