THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS: Japanese Sea Drifters...

THE SHOGUN’S RELUCTANT AMBASSADORS: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific by Katherine Plummer (Oregon Historical Society Press: $19.95). In an effort to enforce its xenophobic policies, the Tokugawa Shoguns placed severe limits on shipbuilding technology and navigational techniques, and forbade anyone who left Japan to return under penalty of death. But the seas surrounding the Japanese archipelago are wracked by storms and unpredictable currents: Ships were often carried across the Pacific to the Kamchatka peninsula, Alaska and even Baja, California. The survivors of these arduous journeys established contacts between Japan and the United States, Britain and Russia long before Commodore Perry “opened” the country in 1853. Drawing on suppressed accounts, Plummer traces the curious routes that took some of the Japanese sailors as far as St. Petersburg and Washington, D. C., where they met Catherine the Great and Abraham Lincoln. She also examines the American and Russian attempts to use the repatriation of the sailors as a means of gaining trading concessions from the Japanese government. The overtures were rebuffed and the returnees were often imprisoned; but their reports of Western technological marvels stimulated interest in the outside world among the liberals who later overthrew the Shogunate and instituted the Meiji Restoration. An intriguing look at the origins of many of the misunderstandings that continue to plague relations between Japan and the West.