In the year 1850, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamada Hikozō left Edo Bay on a junk bound for the south of Japan. One night, his ship was caught in a storm and severely wrecked. After days of drifting on the sea, he and fellow survivors were saved by an American vessel which brought them to San Francisco. In 1852, the castaways were told that the American government was sending them to Hong Kong to join the expedition of a certain Commodore Perry who was supposed to take them home to Japan. Upon arriving in Hong Kong, however, Hamada decided to return to the United States. During his time there, he was baptised, met the American president, and went on becoming a citizen of the United States. Forty years after his shipwreck, Hamada, now known under his American name Joseph Heco, sat down and wrote his autobiography The Narrative of a Japanese: What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years.

Heco's description of his odyssey to the West offers us a rare glimpse into the life of a Japanese from the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) who was able to leave his country. There are several fascinating anecdotes in his work, but one seems particularly striking: on a torrid July evening in a cabin on board the Susquehanna (one of Perry's Black Ships), he and his friends decided to go on deck to escape the heat. They saw no harm in their actions, but when the officer on watch duty saw them, ‘he shouted out something in a loud voice. Then he kicked us with his shoes and pointed down for us to go below. Thus we were driven down to our quarters on the berth-deck like a herd of swine’.

This was no isolated incident: Heco complained that the crew of the Susquehanna frequently tormented him and his fellow Japanese. Upon enquiring into the reason for this treatment to an interpreter, the latter explained that the crew had long been stationed in China and had ‘become accustomed to deal with Chinamen’. ‘The Chinese are a greedy and cringing race’, Heco explained,