In Praise of Wandering, Part I

Spring is a season of renewal in both the natural world and in Japanese society, and in keeping with that spirit I wanted to reflect in the coming months upon some of the best aspects of life in this country. After a long, rather harsh winter, and with the plum and cherry blossoms now budding and the daytime temperatures rising, it only seems appropriate to accentuate the positive and look forward to a kind of rebirth.

I was reminded of this recently, when called upon to make a speech at my university department's farewell party for graduating seniors. It's always a tearful, poignant event, but one that is mixed with optimism, excitement, and not a little sense of relief (especially for the more, shall we say, "lackluster" students, who had been afraid that they might not graduate). The teachers are asked to provide some words of wisdom: some kind of advice for the graduates as they face the prospect of leaving the rather cloistered world of the university and contemplate entering the "real world."

It's an odd position to be in, since many of us have never really "left" the walls of the university - and it is even more curious for me to be giving advice, being that I am not Japanese and so really don't know exactly what they're going through. But as I searched for a theme on which to speak, I recalled the story of a man named "John Manjiro" that I had recently read (in an excellent book entitled "The Great Wave," by Christopher Benfey), which seemed to me to contain a great lesson for all of us.

"John Manjiro," also known as "John Mung," was born simply "Manjiro" in what is now Kochi prefecture on the island of Shikoku. Years later, after his amazing adventures and loyal service, he was granted the rank of Samurai and was allowed a "family name," which he chose to reflect the area where he was born ("Nakahama"). His story is fascinating, and though well known to most Japanese people, I must confess that without the help of Benfey's work I would probably never had heard of him. In the interests of space, let me just say that he was the first Japanese person to travel to the US; he was a translator and interpreter; he wrote what I suppose would be considered the first English-Japanese dictionary and phrasebook; and he acted as a crucial liaison between a then-closed Japan (soon to be "opened" by forces from both within and without) and the "outside world," in particular the United States.

But what is crucial about Manjiro, to me, is the fact that he was a wanderer. It's true that he was shipwrecked, and picked up by a whaling ship, quite by chance and certainly not by design. But it was his resourcefulness and amazing spirit, even in the face of utter hopelessness, that enabled him to accomplish all that he did. For he was a true explorer, a person who leaves home without the guarantee that he will ever return - someone unafraid to sail, as Herman Melville once phrased it, "on forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." Setting aside Melville's exoticist attitude toward the "barbarous," I think that we can easily agree that Manjiro truly ventured into the unknown, and the forbidden (by order of the Shogunate, under pain of death), and was certainly not afraid to befriend and learn from the "barbarians" that he encountered there.

As Benfey describes it, beautifully pairing these two "Pacific men," whose paths crossed (literally) at several points in their lives, Melville scolded the missionaries he had seen in Polynesia and rightly pointed out to the readers of his day that they could learn a great deal from the native people, the "barbarians" or the cultural "other," that they encountered in places like Japan and the Pacific. Unfortunately, his suggestion fell upon deaf ears, and it wouldn't be going too far to say that 19th century Americans and Europeans felt that they had little to gain from people like Manjiro. But, with the luxury of 150 years of hindsight, I certainly beg to differ.

Manjiro's spirit of openness, to new experiences and cultures, and his curiosity about the world around him make him an inspirational figure for not only Japanese people, but for people the world over. And Melville, himself, was a wanderer, an "Omoo" - a Polynesian word for "wanderer" which he employed as the title of his second novel - whose life, in reality and on the written page, also holds many lessons for us today.

Manjiro was a Japanese goodwill ambassador before there even was a "Japan" (in terms of a modern nation-state), and during his life he saw monumental changes in his homeland; Melville, for his part, never tired of imagining a "society of brothers" in his fiction, and if there is one undeniable fact held in common by the otherwise variegated crew of the doomed whaler Pequod, in his finest novel Moby-Dick, then it is surely that, though they were "mariners, castaways, and renegades" from the far reaches of the earth, they were all rendered with a sense of dignity, equality and humanity that was normally withheld such men in their day. Moby-Dick may mean many different things to many people, but it is hard to deny the radically democratic spirit and loving sense of fraternity that pervades it.

I want to ask, of present-day Japan (or of the US, or elsewhere), as I asked of my department's students the other night: where are today's "John Manjiros?" Where are today's wanderers and explorers, unafraid to inhabit a place between different "worlds," which might help us bring people, countries, religions and cultures together, into some sense of "fraternity" and equality?

In my next column, I will continue with this theme, and hopefully point toward some possible answers.