Otokichi

That's what I was thinking. Even after reaching London, it was two years before someone offered to take them to japan

> one of those random Japanese words that people pretend have deep philosophical meanings

...you mean, the Japanese terms for philosophical concepts relevant to / embedded in their culture?

this would be like complaining if Japanese people latched onto "amen" as a statement of completion and finality. uh yeah, the concept is applicable across various different cultural configurations

According to a source posted elsewhere in the discussion here (https://www.historylink.org/File/9065), communication might not have been such a difficulty as they had started learning English years before that.

> In Macao, the British government handed the sailors over to Karl Gutzlaff, a German missionary and linguist. Gutzlaff continued their training in English and also enlisted their help in translating parts of the bible into Japanese.

Who have you met that thinks tsundoku has a philosophical meaning? It's buying too many books...

Ship building technology development is an important factor you didn't factor in. You'd need a ship that can survive crossing the pacific and also enough rations of food to survive the trip.

In this case they also used some desalination tech to survive those 14 months, per the article.

Edit: More details:

https://www.historylink.org/File/9065

> The crew had an adequate food supply (rice from the cargo, supplemented with fish and an occasional seagull). They could collect rainwater for drinking. They probably had on board a device called a ranbiki, normally used to brew sake, which they could have used to desalinate water from the sea. They also could have distilled saltwater simply by boiling it. But they had no source of vitamin C. By the time the ship washed ashore near Cape Flattery on a wintery day in 1834, there were only three survivors. Most of their crewmates had died of scurvy.

(That essay seems to have a lot of other interesting details, by the way.)

> Hence, folks from East Asia drifted away and landed on west coast of North America all the time, from time immemorial to 1492, and all of them were designated native/indigenous.

Most of them would be designated "dead" at the very best. Odds were they wouldn't be designated anything because the ship would sink long before it got through the pacific: aside from polynesian navigators (which likely had at least some pre-columbian contact with the americas) navigation was coast-hugging and ships were simply not designed to survive through the Pacific. And then the crew would still need to survive through a journey they were completely unprepared for.

Not to mention the pacific doesn't really work that way: usually the ship would get caught in the gyres and never make it out, without wilful navigation it'd have incredibly low odds of catching the Alaska current or the equatorial counter-current.

For a direct answer to your question, the Polynesians populated much of the vast Pacific ocean and founded many island native lineages. There is some strong evidence they came into contact with West Coast American natives within the last couple thousand years [0].

> We find conclusive evidence for prehistoric contact of Polynesian individuals with Native American individuals (around AD 1200) contemporaneous with the settlement of remote Oceania. Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf

> Has there been any investigation of similarities between west coast indigenous languages and Asian languages, esp. Japanese?

Yes, plenty, and no similarities have been found in reputable scholarship. (Note that when Gavin Menzies, the crackpot historian whose claim is that the Chinese explored the whole world pre-Columbus, stated that West Coast indigenous languages bear a resemblance to Chinese, he had to base himself on 19th-century conjectures that were pre-scientific and now totally discredited. Nancy Yaw Davis’s theory that the Zuni people of North America are related to the Japanese, is also not taken seriously by any historical linguist).

The Japanese language itself only entered Japan in the last centuries BC/first centuries AD. Japanese is originally from the Asian continent and displaced whatever languages were spoken on the Japanese isles before. So, that’s only a few centuries when Japanese speakers could have somehow come into contact with Native Americans, and there doesn’t seem to be any firm evidence for it.

You need to also take into account the likelihood of them surviving the trip and reaching a shore. It has likely been an extremely minute amount of people who would have done this, almost certainly too insignificant to influence the culture or genes in any way.

I'm not familiar with boat technology through the ages but it seems like it would be pretty uncommon for someone to survive an accidental journey across the Pacific considering people die doing so in modern times when attempting it intentionally.

I think this is almost trivially true due to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples

Check out Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon Tiki expedition. I believe that his theory was about religions and this pacific drift phenomena. There’s a very cool museum outside of Oslo.

I think that their findings have eventually been proven less meaningful than they thought, but still cool.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition

That's an interesting question, though I wonder if many such people would have survived the journey all the way across the ocean without access to fresh water or an understanding (and the necessary materials) for desalinating seawater. Some may have, but there are lots of filters working against survival, of increasing efficiency the further back in time we look.

I feel like people often leave the numerous Inuit and pre-inuit migration across the Bering straight on canoes and kayaks.

Follow up questions: Is there any research on how much of pre-inuit culture spread southwards to Indian cultures? How much Asian culture did the Inuit and pre-inuit cultures take with them to America?

Glad I am not the only one who thought this.

To be fair, average life expectancy of people around that period (early to mid 1800s) was at best ~40, so "18" would have been basically middle-aged ;-)

Is it any good? What's with all the dislikes?

My understanding is that during the period (1600 to 1868) leaving the country, even by accident was punishable by death. better treatment of shipwrecked American sailors was part of the demands of Perry's expedition in the Convention of Kanagawa.

>For the Japanese the punishment for leaving the country (and coming back) was death. The Japanese view at the time was that their world was complete and their was no place in it for crude, materialistic and barbaric Westerners. It was one of the few times in modern history that a nation rejected "progress." Punishments were equally harsh for foreigner that arrived in Japan. Thirteen members of a group of Portuguese merchants that arrived in 1640 were executed. The rest returned home with the message: "Think of us no more."[1]

[1]http://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat16/sub107/item504.html

[2]https://unseenjapan.com/edo-era-castaways-in-russia/

If they wanted to get them to shore, they could have thrown anchor at any spot other than next to a fortress armed with guns. Then you row them to the shore and leave. It's not like there was mass surveillance or ability to identify anyone.

It's likely the captain had no big incentive to go out of his way for these Japanese so when he wasn't allowed in port, he just left.

Leaving Japan was punishable by death

Yes, this was a well-known part of the Sakoku policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku

Having heard what had happened in much of the rest of Asia, the shoguns were extremely concerned about Christian proselytizing, and this was their extreme but effective way of making it impossible. All local Christian converts were also put to death.

There was another castaway who eventually did return to Japan and was made a samurai because of his English skills and potential utility to the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakahama_Manjir%C5%8D

Otokichi's Wikipedia article also indicates that he was given permission to live in Japan again.

Presumably it would have been assumed they were lying to avoid death.

Cruelty is the second name of humanity, with Japan creating many such events such as the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Rape of Nanjing) where they killed over 200.000 Chinese people and raped over 80.000 women, and I quote "many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls, Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched[...] So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery"

Scorsese put out a film called 'Silence' a few years ago. It's set in that period, stars Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver. It's a heavily skewed religious film but very good.

The article mentions that there's a film from 1983 starring Johnny Cash. It's not even on Netflix DVD but I found it hosted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLOFpfjW_So

Starts with Japanese audio and has Japanese subtitles, but the film itself is in English.