Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe. Frederik L. Schodt
almost all trade and communication with the outside world. It was a draconian social experiment that lasted nearly 250 years. At its most extreme, it meant that foreigners landing in Japan could potentially be executed, and that Japanese were prohibited from leaving (or if they left, of ever returning, on penalty of death). It also meant that, up until the middle of the nineteenth century, to most Europeans and Americans, Japan remained one of the last great unknown places in the world—a distant, isolated, mysterious island nation, once exoticized by Marco Polo for its presumed riches and sought after by Christopher Columbus.
Yet even in the early nineteenth century, San Francisco had a special connection to Japan. Information on Japan flowed into San Francisco via Hawaii, and from sailing ships returning from Japan’s coast. In the 1840s, after the American whaling fleet began fishing in the Sea of Japan, more and more stories of Japan began to trickle back home, from shipwrecked sailors and from failed official or unofficial attempts made to communicate with the Japanese. In addition, since the Japanese government had banned construction of ocean-going ships, more and more hapless Japanese vessels were being blown off course and disabled. Sometimes they were intercepted and helped by American ships. And sometimes Japanese crews—in ships dismasted and made rudderless by violent storms—drifted helplessly, borne by the winds and tides of the Pacific, all the way to the shores of Hawaii, North America, and Mexico.
In 1850, in the midst of the Gold Rush, the city was visited by the most famous Japanese castaway of all—Nakahama Manjirō. Marooned in 1839 as a fifteen-year-old fisherman on a Pacific island, Manjirō had been rescued by an American ship, taken by the captain to Massachusetts, and given a modern education. An adult by 1850 and fluent in English, he had joined in the California Gold Rush. Only one of tens of thousands of people from over the globe who then swarmed through San Francisco, he attracted little local notice, possibly because he went by the name of John Mung and most people assumed he was Chinese. He later made it back to Japan and contributed to Japan’s eventual modernization.
On March 4, 1851, seventeen Japanese castaways arrived directly in San Francisco. Their ship, the Eiriki-maru, had foundered at sea, and the lucky men had been rescued by an American ship. The men, regarded as visitors from one of the world’s most exotic and mysterious civilizations, were wined and dined at a fancy ball at the California Exchange, which was then controlled by a local impresario named Edward Cole (and showcased a “celebrated fire eater, necromancer, and optic magician” named “Professor Courtier”). They stimulated a flurry of articles in the local press on Japan and stayed in San Francisco over a year. Locals were particularly taken with a young man of around thirteen named Hamada Hikozō who, like Manjirō, was eventually educated in the United States. He later became the first naturalized Japanese American, took the name of Joseph Heco, met Abraham Lincoln, and eventually returned to live in Yokohama where he certainly knew Professor Risley. In San Francisco, where he sojourned twice in 1850 and 1858, he was a well-known figure.
On March 25, 1851, the impresario Cole wrote to the Alta, offering to arrange a ship and captain to take the Japanese back to Japan, providing the local merchants could donate enough money. “Everyone is satisfied of the immense advantage,” he concluded, “that must accrue to the government who shall first open a trade with Japan.” Unfortunately, the next day the Alta paper slapped down his San Francisco–centered proposal with its own editorial, suggesting that it would be better to have the national government take the lead, using military force. China, the Alta pointed out, had recently been intimidated into opening her ports, and so would Japan.15
Around this same time, American interest in Japan began to reach a fever pitch. Newspapers ran more and more articles on the isolated nation, vociferously advocating its opening, if not by diplomacy, then by force. And the result was exactly as the Alta had advocated. In 1853 and 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry and a group of United States warships sailed to Japan and—without firing a shot—managed to force Japan to finally end its isolation policy and to sign a treaty of friendship; this paved the way in 1858 for a treaty allowing rudimentary trade and the openings of ports such as Yokohama. California had been granted statehood in 1849, making United States a Pacific nation. Perry’s visit to Japan in 1853–54 marked his country as a new power to be dealt with, in a region until then dominated by the colonial empires of Europe. It was a source of enormous pride to Americans at the time, and especially to San Franciscans.
As a result of Perry’s mission, in 1860 San Francisco had already been graced by a visit from the first official Japanese embassy to the United States, en route to Washington, D.C. After a nearly disastrous voyage, the group of elite samurai officials arrived in the Kanrin-maru, the first Japanese-owned ship to cross the Pacific. Accompanied by former castaway Manjirō, who helped them with navigation and interpretation, they wore two swords and top-knots, and stayed for an entire month. They were of course feted far more than the shipwrecked sailors had been in San Francisco, and by the time they arrived on the East Coast of America they were a national sensation—celebrated with parades down Broadway and a poem by Walt Whitman, swooned over by women, and treated like royalty at the highest levels of government, including at the White House. Compared to the rest of the nation, San Franciscans were thus already a bit jaded. As Bret Harte wrote of the city on November 3, 1866, only two months before Risley’s Imperial Japanese would arrive:
Men and women pass for what they are worth from a California standard, which I need not say is remarkably elevated. Our conceit consequently is more apt to make us patronizing than obsequious. Recall the difference between the reception of the Japanese quasi-mercantile ambassadors in New York and San Francisco. Here, these two-sworded, brocade-legged, amber tinted diplomats . . . passed and repassed through the streets hardly eliciting more remark than well dressed Chinamen. We have had lords and bishops, Indian Chiefs and foreign dignitaries among us.16
The Imperials at Last
On New Year’s Eve, 1866, Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe finally arrived in San Francisco harbor on the British sailing bark Archibald. A nearby Sacramento newspaper reported that it was a record crossing of the Pacific, lasting only nineteen days, and that the captain got so drunk in a disreputable bar after his victory that he was imprisoned and then ejected in the morning, “minus his money, watch, jewelry, and everything but his undershirt and drawers.” Some less generous San Francisco newspapers put the crossing at twenty-five days.17
Today we know with considerable precision how long the Archibald actually took, and that the first reports were indeed a bit of an exaggeration. Fairly good information comes from a member of Risley’s Imperial Troupe named Takano Hirohachi. Although he could play the banjo-like Japanese samisen, Hirohachi was not a performer. Probably a man with a gambling instinct, who lived on the fringes of respectable society, for the Imperials Hirohachi served as a type of overseer, or supervisor, of the troupe’s jugglers and acrobats. He kept a simple diary, or daily record, a copy of which survives in Japan today. Written in a highly informal and cryptic style, it is sprinkled with the unique dialect of the semi-literate author and his now-archaic language. Rough, often disappointingly skeletal, with dates that are sometimes off, in this case the diary shows a voyage of around twenty-seven days. Allowing for the international dateline, and different ways of recording departure and arrival times, it appears quite accurate, for “Shipping Intelligence” columns in newspapers in both Japan and San Francisco show that the 393-ton Archibald left Yokohama on December 5, 1866, and arrived in San Francisco on December 31.
The Archibald docked on the evening of what had been a fine sunny day, but the voyage had hardly been pleasant. For the Japanese, who had not been allowed beyond their immediate coastal waters for over two centuries (and who had been raised to believe that they might be executed if caught leaving the homeland), it was terrifying. They of course immediately experienced the then-usual bouts of violent seasickness in heavy swells. On December 13, a dog on the trip began biting people, so the American interpreter on board, Edward Banks, shot and threw it overboard. There is no mention of what Risley thought of this, but he must have been heartbroken, because he loved animals. In the first part of the journey, the ship sailed through huge westerly gales and sleet and rocked violently, the passengers sometimes unable to stand. The sails were torn, and one of the masts, another troupe member would later recall, was also struck by lightning and had to be repaired. The Japanese feared they were