Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80

Abstract

The first Japanese to arrive in the United States long preceded the latenineteenthcentury migrations commonly held to be the origins of Japanese American history, notes John E. Van Sant in this slender book. Included among the pioneers who settled in the United States and Hawaii were castaway sailors, students, diplomats, and political exiles. Van Sant's “transnational approach” focuses on Japan's nineteenthcentury “worldview,” the relations among Japan, Hawaii, and the United States, and the lives of the earliest Japanese arrivals from 1850 to 1880. Three connected themes emerge from this study: despite their divergent world views, these Japanese adapted successfully to life in America; their embrace of Western modernity mirrored Japan's political and social transformations of that period; and American benefactors provided crucial assistance in this process of education and religious conversion. Va n Sant traverses welltrod ground, for example, the stranded sailors Joseph Heco and Manjiro Nakahama, largely because of books written by or about them. Although without the thoroughness of Masao Miyoshi's As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (1979) about another group of early Japanese visitors, Van Sant offers a helpful reading of Heco's memoirs, showing how the author and his times conditioned the details and perspectives present in his texts. Van Sant's chapters on the 1868 Japanese migrant laborers to Hawaii and the 1869 settlers of the Wakamatsu Te a and Silk Farm Colony in California add details to familiar stories.