3 　Joseph Heco Story


A Life-Changing Shipwre
Thanks to the Auckland, the men were saved. But they couldn’t return to Japan—they would be executed if they did. So Hikotaro and his shipmates traveled on the ship to San Francisco, not knowing if they’d ever see Japan again.

How strange it must have been for Hikotaro, whose country had been isolated from the rest of the world for two centuries, to suddenly be exposed to people of such a different culture.
He and his shipmates, whose Buddhist beliefs forbade the eating of meat, were horrified to witness a hog being butchered on board the Auckland. They were worried the Americans were cannibals and were fattening them up for slaughter. But Hikotaro bravely adjusted to his surroundings, and with his eyes and mind wide open, he tried to understand the strange new things he saw.

The Beginning of an International Life
Over the 45-day journey to San Francisco, Hikotaro was already becoming an international man. Curious about the operation of the ship and the men aboard it, he was eager to learn to speak English, despite the fact that learning a foreign language was against Japanese law. This adventurous spirit would sustain Heco his entire adult life, leading him to shake the hands of presidents and influence the policies of nations.

If you want to know more about Joseph Heco’s story, come to the Honolulu Festival!

Joseph Heco Story　4

{ HONOLULU in 1858}

Joseph Heco, the Japanese boy who was shipwrecked and rescued in 1850 by an American merchant ship, though remarkable, was by no means the lone example of a Japanese castaway who came to the United States or the Hawaiian Kingdom during the Edo period. Other famous castaways include John Manjiro, Jirokichi, and the three Kichis: Otokichi, Iwakichi and Kyūkichi, each of whom spent considerable time in the West, to later attempt to return to Japan (in the case of the three Kichis, unsuccessfully).

Ships played a crucial part in these stories, serving not only as the means of rescue, but as the means of international communication. Mail delivery was the only means of sending news over the ocean, as the only high speed communication in existence before 1879 was the telegraph, which was limited to use on land. The Hawaiian Kingdom, with its location in the center of the Pacific Ocean, became an important hub for news in the trade between the United States and Asia even before the 1820s. By the 1840s and 50s, at the height of the whaling industry, Honolulu and Lahaina were the most heavily frequented by American ships of all the ports in the world.