Cast Adrift and Coming Home: Shipwrecks, Japanese Castaways, and the Maritime Networks of the Pacific

From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, a surprising number of Japanese ships drifted out into the Pacific Ocean, even as the isolationist government tried to keep sailors and fishermen close to shore. Attempts to restrict coastal movement paradoxically led to the use of large inshore-optimized cargo ships, which regularly lost steerage in winter storms. These wrecks were often carried far out to sea, from the Philippines to Mexico, from Hawaii to the North American coast. This paper considers how oceanic systems near Japan, including both regular storms in the winter monsoon season and major currents such as the the Kuroshio, redirected the movement of ships along the coast and into the open ocean. Records of castaways (hyōryūki) describe how Japanese and foreign sailors dealt with storms and how inclement weather and currents pulled them away from their intended paths out into the wider ocean. They provide a window into a dynamic environment: a seaborne culture of whalers and sailors from around the globe, a web of accidental encounters that tied together otherwise distant cultures and peoples around the Pacific. News about castaways and wrecks moved quickly through a network of whalers, for example, bringing stories of Japan and sometimes the wrecked Japanese fishermen and sailors themselves to North America and other destinations around the Pacific. Even in a period when Japanese society turned away from the open ocean and tried to minimize contact with foreigners, their local marine environment forced interactions with a broader Pacific world in ways that had a lasting impact on not just fishing and shipping, but also international exchange in the 19th century.