Ship’s Visit Points to Historical Japan Ties : Pacific voyage: Kamrin-Maru’s arrival at Golden Gate is a reminder of more than 130 years of relations.

SAN FRANCISCO —  On March 17, 1860, the Kamrin-Maru entered San Francisco Bay, the first known Japanese vessel to cross the Pacific and visit the United States.

The ship, navigated with the help of some American sailors, brought a Japanese delegation to this country to establish trade relations and sign the first bilateral friendship treaty.

On Saturday, 130 years later, a replica of the Kamrin-Maru sailed through the Golden Gate on another mission of goodwill--to remind the two nations of their historical cooperation, and to promote friendship between the countries.

The first Kamrin-Maru, like most Japanese ocean-going ships of that era, was built in the Netherlands. Although Japan is today the world’s largest shipbuilder, the new Kamrin-Maru was built in the same Dutch village as the original.

The replica cost the Japanese government and several private firms $8 million to build. It was built in eight months from an architectural drawing of the original found in a Dutch maritime museum.

The second Kamrin-Maru is on its way from the Netherlands to Japan via San Francisco and Hawaii.

The 219-foot clipper left Rotterdam Jan. 8 on the first leg--9,000 miles--of a 15,000-mile journey that will bring it to Yokohama in May. The ship will be on display near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf until Wednesday.

Like its namesake in 1860, the Kamrin-Maru was greeted Saturday by marching bands and public officials. Before the ship passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, it was met by a welcoming committee of Coast Guard vessels, fire boats and private craft.

Once ashore, the ship and its crew were welcomed with a lavish reception that included gifts from state Sen. Milton Marks (D-San Francisco), representatives of Mayor Art Agnos and members of Northern California’s Japanese-American community.

Business executives from several Japanese and Dutch companies involved in the project were flown in, as were the descendants of several of the original Japanese and American crew members.

Several speakers at Saturday’s press conference said the first Japanese delegation here was regarded at the time as a failure because the visit did not result in an immediate widening of trade between the two countries. But now the journey, which followed by seven years Commodore Matthew Perry’s famous expedition to Japan, is considered an important development in opening a society that had largely been closed to outside influence.

“Japan was still in the pre-modern era,” Kimio Mayoaka, a business executive whose shipping company helped finance the new Kamrin-Maru expedition, said though an interpreter. “Since then, Japan has devoted itself to learning from the Western world.”

“This was the first long-distance voyage for a Japanese ship,” said Mayasuki Kimura, whose great-grandfather was the commanding officer on the first Kamrin-Maru, speaking through an interpreter. “Without their (American) help it wouldn’t have been possible for them to make it here.”

Another speaker, George Mercer Brooke, told how his grandfather, American sailor John Mercer Brooke, accompanied the first voyage of the Kamrin-Maru. Capt. Brooke had been shipwrecked while surveying the coast near Yokohama several years earlier and had been rescued by the Japanese.

“His helping them sail here was his way of thanking them for saving his life,” said Brooke, a retired history professor at the Virginia Military Institute who wrote a biography of his grandfather.

“I have always dreamed of something like this,” Brooke added. “This would have meant a lot to my grandfather if he could have seen it. . . . This is a unique opportunity to further Japanese-American relations.”