By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

A delegation from the island of Shikoku, Japan, is coming to Our Honolulu this weekend for the annual Pan-Pacific Festival. This one will honor the nine crew members lost on the Ehime Maru, the fisheries training vessel that was accidentally sunk by a U.S. submarine off O'ahu.

Maybe this is a good time to remember that it wasn't diplomats who first established contact between Hawai'i and Japan; it was shipwrecked fishermen. Their stories are among the epic tales of survival at sea.

In July of 1838 the Hawaiian Spectator reported the landing at Waialua of four Japanese in a junk after being at sea 10 or 11 months. They had sailed from "the island of Jeddo" with a cargo of fish and had been caught in a typhoon. Three of them were near death from scurvy.

Two years before, a group of Japanese survivors had come back through Hawai'i after drifting in their fishing boat all the way to the Northwest Coast of America where they were attacked by Indians.

In 1839 The Friend, a missionary journal in Honolulu, told of some Japanese fishermen picked up at sea from a boat that had been en route from one Japanese island to another when they were blown out to sea in a storm. They were befriended by the missionaries in Lahaina.

In 1840 four lost Japanese fishermen were picked up by a whaleship and brought to Honolulu. The missionary doctor Gerrit Judd took care of them.

The most stirring tale of a shipwrecked Japanese fisherman is that of Manjiro, a 14-year-old boy from Kouchi prefecture in Shikoku, who went to sea with four older fishermen in January 1841. A storm shipwrecked their sampan on a bird island, Torijima, far off Japan.

Six months later Capt. W.H. Whitfield on the whaleship John Howland picked them up and brought them to Honolulu, where they were befriended by missionary Samuel Damon and Gov. Kekuanaoa. The four older men stayed, but Whitfield adopted Manjiro and took him to Fairhaven, Mass., for education.

The boy learned navigation and went to sea in whaleships but longed to return to Japan. By 1850 Manjiro was back in Hawai'i renewing acquaintances with friends and preparing to go back home. Many people in Hawai'i helped him.

In Japan, it was against the law to leave or return. He was received with suspicion by the reclusive Tokugawa regime. Then U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry landed in force at Tokyo to open up Japan, and the Tokugawa government suddenly needed interpreters. Manjiro probably played a background role in the negotiations.

More important, he started a school of navigation in Japan and has been acknowledged as the father of the modern Japanese navy.

In 1860 he served as navigator on board the Kanjinmaru, one of the first Japanese-built steamships, that carried a delegation to Washington for ratification of a commercial treaty between Japan and the U.S.

Manjiro has always been one of my heroes.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-0873.