Pre-Perry Peripatetic

MANJIRO, THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA (149 pp.)--Hisakazu Kaneko--Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

Books that are really nothing more than footnotes to history are sometimes more engaging than narratives of great events. Such a book is Manjiro, the Man Who Discovered America, the story of a young Japanese who found his way to America several years before Commodore Matthew Perry opened up Japan to the world in 1854. Japanese Author Hisakazu Kaneko has turned up in Manjiro an engaging subject, and has written his story in a style that has the warmth and charm of genuine naivete.

Chasing Whales. Manjiro was the fisherman son of an impoverished Japanese widow. In the feudal Japan of his day, a boy of such low caste could hope for nothing except a life of toil and a full belly each day if he was lucky. But Manjiro was luckier than that. In 1841, when he was 14, the small fishing boat on which he worked was carried out to sea by a storm and drifted to an uncharted island.

A New Bedford whaler, the John Howland, spotted the five starving Japanese who had given up all hope after nearly seven months. Having taken the castaways aboard, Captain William H. Whitfield went right on chasing whales. To Manjiro, whose usual catch was bass, whaling was a mighty experience. Quick, curious and alert, the young lad picked up English rapidly, learned the whaler's tasks and pitched in with a will. Captain Whitfield, a widower, took such a fancy to him that he brought him home (Fairhaven, Mass.), changed his name to John Mung, put him in school and took him to church.*

Manjiro worked as a farm hand, went whaling again, and in 1849 worked his way around the Horn to California, where he prospected for gold. He did not strike it rich, but he saved enough to realize his aim of getting back to Japan and his mother. Foreign ships were not permitted to enter Japanese harbors, but a U.S. captain agreed to drop Manjiro and two of his friends in a small boat which Manjiro had bought and taken aboard. Seventeen days out of Hawaii, the Japanese went over the side, four miles off Ryukyu. Manjiro was home, but it took "months of interrogation" before suspicious officials were satisfied that he had not picked up dangerous ideas.

Good Sense. Actually he had; Manjiro was convinced that Japan must open her doors and adopt Western civilization. He rose rapidly to a position where he could help push open the door--he became a teacher of navigation and English, designed whaling ships built on American lines, became the government's best authority on things American. His book, A Short Cut to English Conversation, became Japan's standard work on the subject. When missions were sent to Europe and to the U.S., Manjiro went along as interpreter and authority on the West. When he retired, he was financially comfortable (one of his sons became an eminent physician) and was frequently seen in Tokyo's best restaurants wearing the traditional kimono and a derby He died in 1898.

Author Kaneko has found a pleasant minor subject and has had the good sense to allot it only the significance it deserves. As far as the people of Japan are concerned, Manjiro was indeed The Man Who Discovered America.

* An influential fellow Unitarian was a Mr. Warren Delano Sr., great-grandfather of F.D.R. Stories about Manjiro were handed down in the family; the late President wrote to Manjiro's son in Japan in 1933 recalling tales his grandfather had told him "about the little Japanese boy who went to school in Fairhaven."

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