Background
Manjiro Nakahama was born on the 27th of January, 1827 in Shikoku, Japan.
中濱 万次郎
Manjiro Nakahama was born on the 27th of January, 1827 in Shikoku, Japan.
In the United States, under the name of John Mung, Manjiro attended school, where he studied English, mathematics, navigation, and surveying.
Manjiro Nakahama was a fisherman of Tosa Province. In 1841, he and four other men met with a storm while fishing and drifted to an uninhabited island. They were rescued by an American whaler and taken to the United States, where he was educated and obtained employment. In 1850, he left the United States aboard an American ship and, traveling by way of Honolulu and the Ryukyu Islands, in 1851 succeeded in reaching Kagoshima in Satsuma. He was well treated by the lord of Satsuma, Shimazu Nariakira, but his native domain of Tosa, though it made use of his services, assigned him to the lowest samurai rank.
In 1853, the roju, senior counselor, Abe Masahiro arranged for him to become an official in the shogunate, and he was placed under the jurisdiction of the gunnery expert Egawa Tarozaemon. The knowledge and ability in English that he had acquired in America proved very useful, and he was put to work translating documents relating to foreign missions or works on navigation. He was in the suite of a Shogunate delegation which was sent to the United States in 1860.
Manjiro Nakahama also wrote a book on English conversation and taught navigation at the naval training center set up by the shogunate. He directed whaling activities in the area of the Bonin Islands. He later taught English in the domains of Satsuma and Tosa. In 1869, following the Meiji Restoration, he became a professor of English in the Kaisei Gakko, the forerunner of Tokyo University. In 1870 he accompanied the military leader Oyama Iwao on a trip to Europe for the purpose of observing the methods of warfare employed in the Franco-Prussian War. The following year he returned to Japan because of illness.