[HN Gopher] Otokichi
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Otokichi
Author : Thevet
Score : 173 points
Date : 2021-01-25 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| yudlejoza wrote:
| It just occurred to me, boats have been around way before 1492,
| and they would drift away by accident, just like in this case,
| more often than not.
|
| 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.
|
| Conclusion: Asia to America migration didn't only happen through
| Bering/Beringia land bridge pre-10000 BC?
|
| Question: Has there been any investigation of similarities
| between west coast indigenous languages and Asian languages, esp.
| Japanese?
| runarberg wrote:
| 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?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| tpmx wrote:
| 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.)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| From the essay you linked:
|
| "Traces of Japan were not entirely unknown in the Northwest.
| More than 1,000 Japanese ships are estimated to have
| disappeared during the Exclusion Era (1633-1854). Most
| presumably sank in storms, but iron fittings and other
| remnants of some of those ships washed up on the Northwest
| coast over time. A few drifted to coastal areas farther south
| with survivors on board. According to historian Frederik L.
| Schodt, at least 34 Japanese sailors reached the shores of
| North America or Mexico on disabled ships between 1806 and
| 1852. One of the best known cases involved the Tokujomaru,
| which ran aground near Santa Barbara, California, in 1813,
| with three survivors out of a crew of 14. But until the
| Hojunmaru, there is no record of the presence of any
| Japanese, sailors or otherwise, in what is now the state of
| Washington."
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| And the iron was being reused to make tools, on a fairly
| large scale apparently[1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-
| Columbian_Am...
| [deleted]
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| 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
| deaddodo wrote:
| It's probably a good idea to point out that the evidence for
| Polynesian/S. American contact is extremely scant and mostly
| conjectural. This is a _very_ controversial topic among
| archeologists and historians and there are biased
| interpretations on both sides.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Isn't there some speculation about Chumash dugout making
| techniques too around Santa Barbara?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > 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.
| dyeje wrote:
| 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.
| opportune wrote:
| I think this is almost trivially true due to
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_peoples
| tpmx wrote:
| That crossing was from North Asia (Siberia), not East Asia
| though? Crossing the Bering strait (88 km) seems a _lot_ less
| demanding than crossing the pacific from East Asia to North
| America (~7000 km or so).
| nnf wrote:
| 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.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| 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
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| FactCore wrote:
| A very interesting little story. I wasn't surprised when I saw
| that a movie about this had been made in the 80s. Although, I was
| also not surprised to see a healthy amount of [citation needed].
| Oh well, no good story comes without a bit of embellishment,
| right?
| keiferski wrote:
| Fascinating story. I had to dig a bit but I found the Johnny Cash
| film mentioned in the article:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=bLOFpfjW_So&t=18s
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| Now I'm not sure if the poster was influenced by this Omnibus
| episode:
|
| https://www.omnibusproject.com/324
|
| or I've been influenced by these episodes:
|
| https://www.omnibusproject.com/310
|
| https://www.omnibusproject.com/311
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Is there anybody who could confirm that even castaways were
| subject to death penalty upon return to the shogunate? That
| sounds really cruel.
| beering wrote:
| 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.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Presumably it would have been assumed they were lying to avoid
| death.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| I think it's hilarious that the head of the British colony found
| 3 random Japanese people (2 of which were not even 18) and sent
| them to England to attempt to use them as trade diplomats
| jabbany wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| That's expectancy at birth. If you made it to 20, you were
| likely to make it to 60, even in the mid 1800s.
|
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde.
| ..
| setr wrote:
| _average_ life expectancy is a trap -- the distribution is
| binomial. People tended to either die early, as infants, or
| live to an average 60.[0] Specifically, if you were age 0,
| you have an expected lifespan of 40, but by age 10, you have
| an expected lifespan of 60. Today expected lifespan after
| reaching age 10 is better, but not as extreme as the average
| tells you: you 'd expect to hit to live to 77. [1]
|
| So most people who were actually wandering out of their cribs
| would have found 60 to be a perfectly normal age; and 40
| would still be middle aged -- the past wasn't _that_ much
| different from the present :)
|
| you just wouldn't expect to see _great-grandfathers_ as often
| (but at the same time, you don 't see many today because the
| average first child-birth age has shifted upwards as well[2])
|
| [0] https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-
| expecta...
|
| [1] https://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/life-expectancy-
| in-...
|
| [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Average-maternal-
| age-a...
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Fool. You thought you could just tap into a community of
| chronic mansplainers and pedants to mention historic life
| expectancy without the "infant mortality rate" caveat?
| setr wrote:
| I mean, the derived conclusion is entirely wrong because of
| it. It's kind of 100% relevant.
| ksm1717 wrote:
| It was a joke...
| jcpenny1 wrote:
| Glad I am not the only one who thought this.
| baxtr wrote:
| I would love to see that life story in a film (any Netflix people
| around?!). One of the most captivating Wikipedia entries I've
| ever read.
| illwrks wrote:
| 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.
| nnf wrote:
| It is endlessly fascinating to me to contemplate how much the
| world has changed in a relatively short period of time, and
| specifically with regards to how much time was required for
| communication between people separated by great distances.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Fascinating. Something that made me curious:
|
| > There the ship was fired on repeatedly, and King was not able
| to accomplish his objective to establish diplomatic contact
|
| So...why not place a brief message into a few bottles and drop
| them in the waters around the populated zones? "We have here your
| citizens named so-and-so, and will return around this date, and
| then this date + about 12M, to try again. Please don't shoot."
| Include handwritten notes from the survivors to the families /
| friends.
|
| Surely this method (among others) would stand at least a
| chance...as compared to ~20 years of unfortunate delay in
| connection.
| kipchak wrote:
| 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/
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's curious. So did the survivors not know about the
| perishable by death factor? Otherwise I'd expect that they'd
| also fight the return in any way possible...
| Taniwha wrote:
| I suspect the goal would have been to sneak back home
| (rather than arrive on a big western sailing ship)
| kipchak wrote:
| I would guess they knew what awaited them, but hoped
| efforts to open the country would be successful and they
| would be allowed to return. The Manhattan was able to
| return some sailors to Japan in 1845[1] that shipwrecked in
| Japanese waters, making the rule seem somewhat flexible.
|
| I think an earlier version of the Perry expedition helmed
| by John Aulick intended to try and return 17 Japanese
| sailors as a sign of good faith/bargaining tool.[2]
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(1843_ship)
|
| [2]https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2015/07/commodore-
| perry-o...
| saberdancer wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Good points, I took a deeper look and found this article with
| more details:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrison_incident
|
| > King anchored at a safe distance, out of range of the shore
| batteries. Men from several small fishing ships boarded the
| SS Morrison, and sake and cookies were shared until late in
| the night. By daybreak, however, cannons had been brought
| closer to the seaside, and they were again fired at the ship.
| Hundreds of small boats, each with a small cannon at the
| front, also started to surround and attack the ship. The
| Morrison sailed away, with little damage.
|
| > King then sailed to Kagoshima in Kyushu.[2] The first day
| he met some officials there, who took two of the castaways
| into custody. The following day, a fisherman came alongside
| and warned the sailors to leave immediately. As the ship was
| setting its sails, the Japanese opened fire from cannons they
| had moved to the proximity of the ship during the night. King
| decided to abandon the mission and returned to Canton with
| the remaining castaways.
|
| ...and eventually:
|
| > The nature of the ship's mission became known one year
| after the event, and this resulted in increased criticism of
| the Edict.
|
| So it sounds like a lot of ignorance collided with the Big
| Foreign Ship phenomenon and the castaway got caught in the
| middle. Some lucky, some not so lucky (for now)
| miohtama wrote:
| Leaving Japan was punishable by death
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Was this really the case for castaways caught in storms, who
| expected to come back?
| Tarsul wrote:
| in the wiki article it's stated twice that they feared
| coming back due to this (once going back only disguised as
| a Chinese person. Although the second time he came back it
| appears he did not hide his identity). I'd bet it's a
| question of credibility. E.g. would you risk that the
| Japanese do not believe you and hence kill you? It's tough.
| SECProto wrote:
| > Although the second time he came back it appears he did
| not hide his identity
|
| The second time he went back, it was apparently as part
| of the group negotiating the Anglo-Japanese Friendship
| Treaty[1], so it makes sense he wouldn't necessarily fear
| being killed
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-
| Japanese_Friendship_Trea...
| [deleted]
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