Japanese Castaways and British Interpreters

Abstract

C OMMUNICATING with Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century was difficult in a number of ways for Europeans and Americans who wanted to establish relations with that country. For two hundred years foreign trade had been banned in Japan, except for that carried out by the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, or through continuing connections with Korea and Ryukyu. These outlets were limited in scale and kept under close official supervision. Nor was it easy to find pilots or interpreters through whom to make an approach. Korea and Ryukyu were not open or easy of access. The Dutch and Chinese merchants already engaged in the trade were reluctant to assist potential competitors. The Japanese themselves were forbidden to travel or live overseas; and although there was a handful of shipwrecked Japanese seamen who had found their way to ports on the China coast, they were not always competent to help, even when they were willing to do so. The problem, therefore, was not merely the political and diplomatic one of how to persuade the bakufu to open Japanese ports, but also a linguistic one: through what agents and in which language envoys could communicate with Japanese officials, whether to negotiate treaties, or to resolve the disputes arising from them; how ships calling at Japanese ports, and any merchants sailing in them, were to arrange harbor facilities, or to buy and sell goods. In other words, interpreting and the study of the language were practical matters that touched upon the whole range of the West's prospective relations with Japan. The Dutch had always used, as the bakufu required them to do, the official interpreters attached to the office of the Nagasaki bugyo. This was not an altogether satisfactory arrangement, since the Nagasaki interpreters, as Townsend Harris later recorded, spoke a seventeenth-century variety of Dutch, more suited to sailors than to those who had elaborate negotiations to undertake.1 Moreover, working through the Dutch connection was not necessarily seen by other Westerners as the best approach to the opening of Japan. In 1813